Thursday, April 7, 2011

German police are confronted with the shadow of his Nazi past

The German Federal Criminal Office (BKA) has introduced on Wednesday a study investigating the shadow of Nazi past continued to weigh on the institution once the World War II. The historian Patrick Wagner of the University of Halle, the study focused on analyzing the impact it had on the work of BKA's presence in the ranks of old officers who had been under the orders of the Nazi regime.

Even before it was known that the police between 1933 and 1945 had been one of the tools of repression of the Hitler regime. It was also known that 47 people admitted to senior officials in the BKA in the fifties had fought earlier in the dreaded SS. From this, Wagner was focused on the consequences that had for policing the presence of these elements in the ranks of the BKA.

The historian said that some officials tried to continue using forensic criteria of the Nazis, organizing actions against alleged Jewish conspiracy or Communist, or discriminatory action against minorities such as Sinti and Roma. Wagner gave the example of former SS member Theo Saevecke who joined the BKA as commissioner in 1952.

He was also an informant, after the war, U.S. intelligence services whose reports reveal that the commissioner "would stop at nothing to suppress the communist movement, which I hated from the 20's." In 1962, Saevecke was in charge of coordinating police action in the "Spiegel case" in which the director of the magazine "Der Spiegel, Rudolf Augstein, was arrested on charges of revealing state secrets publications.

Another former Nazi who finished curated by Josef Ochs, who, after a failed assassination attempt on Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1952, raised the theory of an "international organization" would operate against Germany and beyond which would be Europe's Jews. According to Wagner, but the political leadership from the beginning put a brake on these trends, at no time was there an active discussion about it within the institution.

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