Adenauer's Foreign Office: West German Diplomacy in the Shadow of the Third Reich

摘要

After a bitter controversy as to the extent of the diplomats' involvement in the criminal policies of the Third Reich, in 2005 then Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer appointed a commission of independent historians with the task of digging into the Foreign Office's (Auswdrtiges Amt) past. The results of the research, published in October 2010, disclosed the substantial support given by the personnel of the Foreign Office to the Nazi regime, as well as a history of personnel continuity in the Office after the founding of the Federal Republic. Professor Thomas W. Maulucci Jr. contributed to the work of the commission as a research assistant. Unsurprisingly, the findings of the study have stirred a heated debate within the scholarly community - the dark past of the Foreign Office personnel has been the object of study (and controversy) since the early 1950s. A parliamentary investigation on the topic (although 'limited and incomplete' p.7) was requested by the Social Democrats and carried out as early as 1951-2. A number of scholarly works have been published on the topic since.2 From this perspective, it is hard to imagine the need for yet another monograph on the history of the German Foreign Office. And yet, Maulucci's work is a welcome, balanced contribution to a fraught topic. By broadening the scope of his analysis to the study of 'the ministry's role in international and domestic politics and how it was shaped by these same politics' (p.5) while focusing on the years in which Konrad Adenauer acted as both Chancellor and Foreign Minister (until 1955),3 this book provides an interesting assessment of the Foreign Office at a difficult, delicate moment in the history of German foreign policy.