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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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but after 1933 he tried to integrate his militant
Catholicism with Hitler's policies as a whole. His conscience as a Christian
fitted in with Hitler's anti-Semitism, which proposed to the new Germany the
exaltation of German grandeur.
In August 1940, Foreign Minister Joachim
von Ribbentrop assigned Kiesinger to the department of radio broadcasting as an
assistant scientific aide. In this capacity the thirty-six-year-old lawyer
first put his beliefs and his abilities at the service of the Third Reich.
Gradually he advanced to head of programming. His title of assistant
scientific aide merely identified him as an employee of the Foreign Ministry,
for bureaucratic practice in the Third Reich was so flexible that this
designation bore little relation to the actual nature of Kiesinger's work. He
rose from the grade of assistant to that of chief officer in the department. A
contractual arrangement with the ministry allowed for easy advancement,
provided it did not involve a change of title, for there was a quota.
Kiesinger's non-titular position in the Foreign Ministry also facilitated his
delicate role as intermediary between Ribbentrop's Foreign Ministry and
Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, which were in constant conflict.
Kiesinger owed his job to Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Martin
Luther, a confirmed Nazi, whom Ribbentrop had hired in order to introduce into
the Foreign Ministry the Hitlerian spirit that had been lacking there.
Ribbentrop thought he needed to "reconcile his ministry with Hitler's closest
disciplines and be the link between them." To accomplish this "all important"
end, Ribbentrop organized under Luther's supervision the "Germany Department."
Collaboration with Party members in matters of foreign policy actually
meant collaboration with Himmler, who had become the absolute authority on
putting Hitler's ideology into practice. Luther's department, therefore, was
organized to work in accordance with the demands the Party made on the Third
Reich's foreign policy. At the Nuremberg Trials, Secretary for Foreign Affairs
Ernst von Weizsäcker said that Luther's department "had tried to get
control of other departments. It created its own sub-divisions to handle
matters that were not at all the province of the Foreign Ministry, such as
racial policies, the Jewish problem, Police administration, and so on. Luther's
job was guaranteed by Ribbentrop, Reinhard Heydrich's Security Service (S.D.),
and the Gestapo."
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE
© 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
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Page 27 |
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