More than half of top posts in West Germany’s Justice Ministry were occupied by former members of the Nazi party (NSDAP), a new study presented this week reveals.
Out of 170 jurists that held senior positions in the Federal Ministry of Justice from 1949 to the 1970s were previously members of the NSDAP, and 34 of them also former members of the Nazi party’s paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA), Germany’s former Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who had commissioned the report a few years ago, told German radio ‘Deutschlandfunk’.
“There was a huge continuity,” the former minister said. Many of the top jurists in the ministry had served as judges during the Nazi era, from 1933 to 1945, and had pronounced many death sentences. Later, these men were employed as heads of division in the Federal Ministry of Justice of West Germany in Bonn.
An official who had helped to draft the Nazis’ infamous racial laws had been in charge of family law at the ministry after 1949, Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said.
According to the chair of the task force of historians that did the study, in 1957, more than three quarters of the leading officials in the Justice Ministry were former NSDAP members, making this department the most affected one of the entire administration of then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. He said that this figure had come as a surprise even to historians.
