Germany has recently taken a chilling new step, signalling its willingness to use political views as grounds to curb migration. Authorities are now moving to deport foreign nationals for participating in pro-Palestine actions. As I reported this week in the Intercept, four people in Berlin – three EU citizens and one US citizen – are set to be deported over their involvement in demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza. None of the four have been convicted of a crime, and yet the authorities are seeking to simply throw them out of the country.
The accusations against them include aggravated breach of the peace and obstruction of a police arrest. Reports from last year suggest that one of the actions they were alleged to have been involved in included breaking into a university building and threatening people with objects that could have been used as potential weapons.
But the deportation orders go further. They cite a broader list of alleged behaviours: chanting slogans such as “Free Gaza” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, joining road blockades (a tactic frequently used by climate activists), and calling a police officer a “fascist”. Read closely, the real charge appears to be something more basic: protest itself.
Germany’s post-World War II government was riddled with former Nazis
For a more than 20 years fter World War II, nearly 100 former members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party held high-ranking positions in the West German Justice Ministry, according to a German government report.
From 1949 to 1973, 90 of the 170 leading lawyers and judges in the then-West German Justice Ministry had been members of the Nazi Party.
Of those 90 officials, 34 had been members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), Nazi Party paramilitaries who aided Hitler’s rise and took part in Kristallnacht, a night of violence that is believed to have left 91 Jewish people dead.
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The prevalence of former Nazi officials in the ministry allowed them to shield one another from post-war justice and to carry over some Nazi policies, like discrimination against gays, into the West German government.
One lawyer who helped craft discriminatory laws barring marriages between Jews and non-Jews during the Nazi regime held a top family-law position in the post-World War II Justice Ministry, according to The Local.
“The Nazi-era lawyers went on to cover up old injustice rather than to uncover it and thereby created new injustice,” said Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister who presented the report Monday, according to AFP.
The infiltration of the post-war West German government by former Nazis was not limited to the Justice Ministry. A report released late last year found that between 1949 and 1970, 54% of Interior Ministry staffers were former Nazi Party members, and that 8% of them had served in the Nazi Interior Ministry, which at one point was run by SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
Surprise?
I mean, who else would have been able to run the government, when most people with the required skills were also associated with the Former system.
Americans deliberately counted on the expertise of former Nazis. Thats not news and actually not very shocking.
And discrimination against gays was more of a Zeitgeist thing. E.g. Being gay was a Crime in france until 1982.
Holocaust survivors and refugees, for starters. Germany was fully occupied by the US and USSR, so all the big decisions were going through DC/Moscow anyway. Turning the government over to survivors and any resisters you could find would have made far more sense than simply handing the country back to the Fascists.
I agree from a moral standpoint but from the perspective of efficient rebuilding I disagree.
Is your premise that people cannot see the errors of their ways and therefore cannot change? Or are you presenting facts in an attempt to imply that all this time there’s been a shadow Nazi government? Or…? I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but during the war years, everyone had to be a member of the Nazi party. All youth groups that weren’t official Nazi organizations were banned.
In the years between WWII and German reunification, there was an active effort to stamp out Nazi ideals in the West. Children learned in graphic detail what atrocities were committed, and many of them took those learnings to heart. To this day, spending on military in Germany, surveillance by the state, are fraught topics. German politics couldn’t be further from a 1 or 2 party system.
What was informs but doesn’t dictate what is. I have spent a lot of time in Germany, and I’m certain that in spite of the rise of AfD, Germany is the European country furthest from Nazi ideals.
Not when they are immersed in a roiling pot of fascist propaganda, no. You can’t see error when you are surrounded by media justifying your decisions. You can’t find the will to change when you’ve been told again and again that circumstances are beyond your control.
Right now, German media is as bad as anything the MAGA Americans are churning out, with migrant hysteria and xenophobia hitting a fevered pitch. Combined with the energy crisis in Europe and the economic downturn globally, it’s a recipe for a new wave of Fascist dictatorship that Germans as rapidly buying into once again.
The fact that it hasn’t even been a century and they’re already reverting is proof enough for me that they didn’t change.