Foreign ministry of Germany
The
Federal Foreign Office
(
German
:
Auswartiges Amt
,
pronounced
[?a??s?v??t???s
?amt]
ⓘ
), abbreviated
AA
, is the
foreign ministry
of the
Federal Republic of Germany
, a
federal agency
responsible for both the country's foreign policy and its relationship with the
European Union
. It is a
cabinet-level ministry
. Since December 2021,
Annalena Baerbock
has served as
Foreign Minister
, succeeding
Heiko Maas
. The primary seat of the ministry is at the
Werderscher Markt
[
de
]
square in the
Mitte
district, the historic centre of
Berlin
.
The term
Auswartiges Amt
was the name of the Foreign Office established in 1870 by the
North German Confederation
, which then became the
German Empire
's Foreign Office in 1871. It is still the name of the German foreign ministry today. From 1871 to 1919, the Foreign Office was led by a Foreign Secretary, and since 1919, it has been led by the Foreign Minister of Germany.
History
[
edit
]
Early years
[
edit
]
Foundation
[
edit
]
The
Auswartiges Amt
was established in 1870 to form the
foreign policy
of the
North German Confederation
, and from 1871 of the
German Empire
. The Foreign Office was originally led by a
state secretary
(therefore not called a ministry), while the
Chancellor
, who usually also held the office of
Prussian
Minister of Foreign Affairs, remained in charge of foreign affairs.
Bismarck
[
edit
]
In the first years of the German nation-state under
Otto von Bismarck
, the Foreign Office on
Wilhelmstrasse
No. 76 next to the
Reich Chancellery
had two departments: one for political affairs and the other for economic, legal and consular matters. After Bismarck's dismissal in 1890, another department for colonial policy was established, spun off as the separate
Reichskolonialamt
in 1907. Bismarck in order to maintain his control of the
Auswartiges Amt
appointed his son
Herbert von Bismarck
as State Secretary.
That Bismarck appointed his son as State Secretary reflected his determination to be his own foreign minister, and his need for an utterly loyal man to run the
Auswartiges Amt
when he was not around. Bismarck would not accept opinions contrary to his own, and only those diplomats who were devoted to him rose to high rank.
Bismarck greatly valued accurate information, and as such diplomats tended to report what they believed to be the truth back to Berlin.
An exclusive club
[
edit
]
Right from the start, the
Auswartiges Amt
was very socially exclusive. To join, one needed a university degree, preferably in
jurisprudence
and needed to prove that one had a considerable private income.
In 1880, a candidate had to prove that he had a private income of at least 6,000
marks
/annum in order to join; by 1900, the requirement was 10,000 marks/annum and by 1912, a candidate needed at least 15,000 marks/annum to join.
This requirement explains why so many German diplomats married richer women because without the wealth of their wives they would never had been able to join the
Auswartiges Amt
.
The income requirement to enter the AA was only dropped in 1918.
Aristocrats were very much overrepresented in the
Auswartiges Amt
. During the Imperial period, 69% of the 548 men who served in the
Auswartiges Amt
were
noblemen
, and every single ambassador during the
German Reich
was an
aristocrat
.
The most important department by far was the Political Department which between 1871 and 1918 was 61% aristocratic; middle-class men tended to serve in the less important Legal, Trade and
Colonial
Departments.
In the 19th century, it was believed that only aristocrats had the proper social standing and graces to correctly represent the
Reich
abroad as ambassadors, which explains why no commoner was ever appointed ambassador during the Imperial era.
Additionally, during the entire duration of the "old"
Auswartiges Amt
from 1871 to 1945, Catholics were underrepresented in the
Auswartiges Amt
, comprising between 15 and 20% of the AA's personnel.
The
Auswartiges Amt
was largely a
Protestant
institution with Protestant candidates favored over Catholic candidates when it came to recruitment.
Even more underrepresented were the Jews. During the Imperial period from 1871 to 1918, the
Auswartiges Amt
had only three Jewish members, plus four Jews who had converted to Lutheranism in order to improve their career prospects.
If Jews were not formally excluded, Jewish candidates were rarely accepted because of a climate of snobbish
anti-Semitism
, where Jews were considered to be too pushy, vulgar and lacking in social graces to be diplomats. There were also meritocratic elements within the AA. Besides for the income requirement, to enter the AA during the Imperial period, only candidates with the best grades at university and who knew two foreign languages were considered, and to join one had to pass what was widely considered to be one of the toughest diplomatic entrance exams in the world.
Wilhelm II
[
edit
]
The reign of Emperor Wilhelm II was from 1888 to 1918.
In the years preceding
World War I
, the
Auswartiges Amt
was responsible for the country's foreign policy under Emperor
Wilhelm II
, and played a key role in the
Reich'
s pursuit of
Weltpolitik
(World Politics), under which Germany sought to become the world's dominant power.
The
Auswartiges Amt
was split into three factions competing against one another, namely one faction of men loyal to Bismarck, another faction loyal to
Friedrich von Holstein
, and yet another faction led by
Prince Philipp von Eulenburg
and Prince
Bernhard von Bulow
, who would later become chancellor.
This constant plotting and scheming between these factions weakened the execution of German foreign policy.
As a whole, the Wilhelmstrasse was never entirely in charge of foreign policy in the
German Empire
, but was instead just one out of several agencies, albeit a very important one that made and executed foreign policy.
In the years 1904?1907, the
Reich
attempted to form an alliance with the United States on the basis of the supposedly shared fear of the "
Yellow Peril
" with Wilhelm writing to the American President
Theodore Roosevelt
a series of letters telling him that Germany and the United States must join forces to stop the "yellow peril", especially Japan from conquering the world.
It took the diplomats a long time to tell Wilhelm that Roosevelt was a
Japanophile
who was not impressed with Wilhelm's call for an alliance based on anti-Asian racism.
Ottomans and the Armenians
[
edit
]
A nation with whom the
Auswartiges Amt
was much concerned during the Imperial period was the
Ottoman empire
, especially during the
Armenian genocide
. In 1915, the German ambassador to the
Sublime Porte
, Baron
Hans von Wangenheim
told the American ambassador to the Sublime Porte,
Henry Morgenthau Sr.
: "I do not blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians... They are entirely justified".
[13]
On September 28, 1915 Count
Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff
, the ambassador in Washington, D.C., stated to American journalists that reports of a systematic campaign of extermination against the Armenian minority in the Ottoman empire were all "pure inventions", that these reports were all the work of British propaganda and no such campaign of extermination was taking place.
[13]
Wangenheim's successor as ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Count
Paul Wolff Metternich
, was appalled by the Armenian genocide, and, unlike Wangenheim, Metternich was prepared to speak out against the genocide. In August 1916, the triumvirate known as the
Three Pashas
, which ruled the Ottoman empire, informed the German government that if Count Metternich was not recalled, he would be declared
persona non grata
. Metternich was promptly recalled from Constantinople rather risk a public relations disaster which potentially could damage
German-Ottoman relations
in the middle of the war. As the Ottoman empire today would be considered a third world country with almost no modern industry, the Ottoman government was entirely dependent upon weapons from Germany to fight World War I, giving the
Reich
a powerful form of leverage to apply against the Ottomans on behalf of the Armenians if only the political will in Berlin had been present. In a 2015 speech, the German president
Joachim Gauck
apologized for his country's inaction, stating that those diplomats who protested against the Armenian genocide were "ignored" by the leadership of
Auswartiges Amt
, who valued good relations with the Ottoman empire more than they did the lives of the Armenians.
[14]
Post-imperial period
[
edit
]
In 1919, the Foreign Office was reorganised as the
Auswartiges Amt
and a modern structure was established. It was now under the authority of a
foreign minister
, though still called
Amt
for traditional reasons. In 1922, the Foreign Minister
Walther Rathenau
was assassinated by members of the
Organisation Consul
, which reviled him both as a Jew and a supposed contributor to "creeping communism" for having negotiated the
Treaty of Rapallo
with
Soviet Russia
.
[15]
The most notable head of the Foreign Office during the
Weimar Republic
was
Gustav Stresemann
, foreign minister from 1923 to 1929, who strived for a reconciliation with the
French Third Republic
, which earned him?together with
Aristide Briand
?the 1926
Nobel Peace Prize
. In an important sign of changed emphasis within the
Auswartiges Amt
, in July 1930
Carl von Schubert
[
de
]
, the State Secretary (the number #2 man in the
Auswartiges Amt
) and Stresemann's right-hand man was fired and replaced with the "crudely nationalist" Prince
Bernhard Wilhelm von Bulow
[
de
]
(who is not to be confused with his uncle, Chancellor
Bernhard von Bulow
).
[16]
The replacement of Schubert with Bulow marked the ascendency of the more nationalistic fraction within the
Auswartiges Amt
who favored a more confrontational foreign policy with regards to France.
[16]
In May 1932 Baron
Konstantin von Neurath
was appointed foreign minister in the "Cabinet of the President's Friends" headed by
Franz von Papen
. Neurath continued on as Foreign Minister under the governments of General
Kurt von Schleicher
and
Adolf Hitler
. During the Nazi period, Neurath found himself exposed to increasing competition from Nazi politicians like
Alfred Rosenberg
and
Joachim von Ribbentrop
. In February 1938, Hitler fired Neurath and replaced him with Ribbentrop.
Nazi Germany
[
edit
]
In 1933, the vast majority of the diplomats serving in the
Auswartiges Amt
came from upper-class families with a disproportionate number coming from the aristocracy.
The overrepresentation of aristocrats together with its overwhelming upper-class character gave the
Auswartiges Amt
an elitist cachet, and made the
Auswartiges Amt
into one of the most prestigious institutions in Germany. Because of its upper-class composition, the diplomats could afford extremely expensive clothes, and the men of
Auswartiges Amt
were generally considered to the best dressed officials in the entire German government, contributing to the
Auswartiges Amt
'
s glamorous, stylist image. There were no female diplomats, and besides for the women employed as secretaries, clerks and cleaners, the
Auswartiges Amt
had no female employees. That the men of the
Auswartiges Amt
formed an elitist group can be seen that every single diplomat had a university degree (before the 1950s, most Germans did not go to university).
The requirement that one had to have a university degree to enter the
Auswartiges Amt
effectively guaranteed upper-class dominance of the
Auswartiges Amt
.
All of the senior diplomats in the 1930s were veterans of the struggle to win Germany "world power status" in the first years of the 20th century. Hitler's goal of making Germany into the world's greatest power was thus a foreign policy goal that the diplomats embraced quite headily. The German historian Eckart Conze stated about the overlap in viewpoints between the diplomats and the Nazis: "...the top diplomats in the Weimar Republic were opposed to a liberal political order and parliamentarianism. And then the Nazis built political and ideological bridges for them. They announced their intention to reverse the Treaty of Versailles and make the German
Reich
into a world power. The majority of the diplomats were able to sign their names on to such a program."
[18]
In March 1933, Baron
Friedrich Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron
, the Ambassador to the United States, resigned on the grounds that he could not in good conscience serve the Nazi government; he was the only member of the entire
Auswartiges Amt
who resigned in protest at the Nazi regime.
Officially, the men of the
Auswartiges Amt
were supposed to be non-political, but in practice the diplomats formed a "quite exclusive group" with extremely conservative views and values.
For these men, unconditional loyalty to the state was the highest possible value, and though the majority of the diplomats were not ideological National Socialists, they served the Nazi regime loyally until the very end.
The dominance of the traditional "insiders" at the
Auswartiges Amt
can be seen that every State Secretary during the Nazi era was a professional diplomat. The State Secretaries of Nazi Germany were Prince Bernhard von Bulow (State Secretary 1930?36), Count Hans Georg von Mackensen (State Secretary 1936?1938 and ambassador to Italy 1938?1942), Baron
Ernst von Weizsacker
(State Secretary 1938?1943 and ambassador to the Holy See 1943?1945) and Baron
Gustav Adolf Steengracht von Moyland
(State Secretary 1943?1945). The overlap in goals between the professional diplomats and the Nazis were well illustrated by the memo on what should be the foreign policy of the Hitler government written by Bulow in March 1933 calling for Germany to recover the borders of 1914 and all of the lost colonies, annexation of Austria, and German domination of Eastern Europe.
[20]
During the Neurath years (1932?1938), there were very few "outsiders" allowed into the
Auswartiges Amt
.
Aside from Ribbentrop, who served as variously as Commissioner of Disarmament (1934?35), Extraordinary Ambassador-at-Large (1935?36), and Ambassador to Great Britain (1936?1938), the most notable of the "outsiders" were
Franz von Papen
(Ambassador to Austria 1934?1938 and to Turkey 1939?1944),
Hans Luther
(Ambassador to the United States 1933?1937), Colonel
Hermann Kriebel
(Consul in Shanghai 1934?1939), and General Wilhelm Faupel (Ambassador to Spain 1936?37).
Most diplomats were not believers in National Socialism, but during Nazi rule, many diplomats such as Neurath himself joined the NSDAP and/or the SS as an opportunistic way of improving their career prospects; such self-interested careerism was rampant amongst the German civil service in the Nazi period.
Those diplomats involved in the attempts to overthrow Hitler such as Count
Ulrich von Hassell
,
Adam von Trott zu Solz
, Count
Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg
, Richard Kuenzer,
Hans Bernd von Haeften
, and Edmund Brucklmeir comprised a small minority of the
Auswartiges Amt
.
The German historian
Hans-Adolf Jacobsen
[
de
]
wrote that for those diplomats who chose to become involved in
Widerstand
, given that they were steeped in Prussian traditions where loyalty to the state was the highest virtue, it required "extraordinary strength of character" for them to go against everything that they had been taught to believe in.
Post-WWII
[
edit
]
Founding of the Federal Republic
[
edit
]
After Germany's defeat in May 1945, the country was occupied and the German state was abolished by the Allies. The country was administered as four zones controlled respectively by the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. In August 1949, a German government was reestablished in the western zones, the Federal Republic of Germany, which in its first years had very limited powers. In October 1949, the German Democratic Republic was founded in what had been the Soviet zone. Whereas
Georg Dertinger
had already been appointed the first minister of foreign affairs of
East Germany
in 1949, due to the Allied
occupation statute
the
Auswartiges Amt
of
West Germany
was not reestablished until 15 March 1951.
Adenauer
[
edit
]
Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer
took office as the first Foreign Minister in
Bonn
until he was succeeded by
Heinrich von Brentano
in 1955. By and large, the men who had served in the new
Auswartiges Amt
were the same men who had served in the old
Auswartiges Amt
. In a
Bundestag
debate on 23 October 1952, Adenauer admitted that 66% of the diplomats of the
Auswartiges Amt
had belonged to the NSDAP, but justified their employment as: "I could not build up a Foreign Office without relying upon such skilled men".
[24]
Upon
Willy Brandt
's taking office as Foreign Minister in the
Grand coalition
under
Kurt Georg Kiesinger
starting in 1966, the office was usually connected with the position of the
Vice-Chancellor
. From 1974 until 1992?with a short pause in 1982?
Hans-Dietrich Genscher
served as Foreign Minister and continued to champion Brandt's
Ostpolitik
while also playing a crucial role in the preparation of
German reunification
.
Berlin
[
edit
]
In 2000 the Foreign Office returned to Berlin where it took up quarters in the
former Reichsbank building
, which from 1959 to 1990 had served as the seat of the Central Committee of the
Socialist Unity Party of Germany
and was enlarged by a newly built annex. The former ministry in Bonn was retained as a secondary seat. The Foreign Office has always stressed its continuity and traditions going back to 1870.
Further historiography and analysis
[
edit
]
2010 report by the historical commission
[
edit
]
A report entitled
The Ministry and the Past
written by historians and released by the German government in October 2010 shows that wartime-era diplomats played an important role in assisting the Nazis in carrying out the Holocaust, and disproved the claim often made after 1945 that German diplomats were "sand in the machine" who acted to moderate the actions of the Nazi regime.
[25]
[26]
[27]
[28]
[29]
[30]
[31]
In a 2010 interview, the German historian
Eckart Conze
, who had been in charge of the committee to investigate the war-time actions of the
Auswartiges Amt
, stated that the
Auswartiges Amt
was a "criminal organization" that was as every bit involved in the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" as the SS were.
[32]
In another interview, Conze stated: "This document makes it clear that all officials in the Foreign Ministry?including low-level office clerks?knew about the mass persecution of Jews and were actively involved in the Holocaust. It was an open secret."
[33]
In October 1941, when
Franz Rademacher
visited Belgrade to meet officials of the
Government of National Salvation
of General
Milan Nedi?
of Serbia, he submitted an expense claim for his trip to his superiors at the
Auswartiges Amt
after his return to Berlin; on his expenses claim, Rademacher described the purpose of his trip to Belgrade as the "liquidation of Jews".
[34]
At the
Wannsee Conference
in January 1942, the
Auswartiges Amt
was represented by
Martin Luther
, who agreed that the
Auswartiges Amt
would do everything within its power to persuade the governments of neutral and allied states to hand over their Jewish populations to be exterminated. Later on in 1942, Ambassador
Otto Abetz
arranged for the deportation of 25,000 French Jews to the death camps in Poland while Ambassador
Hanns Ludin
arranged for the deportation of 50,000 Slovak Jews to the death camps.
[35]
In the spring of 1944, Ambassador
Edmund Veesenmayer
played a key role in having 400,000 Hungarian Jews deported to
Auschwitz
.
[36]
Kolbe
[
edit
]
In 2003, the French historian Lucas Delattre published a biography of
Fritz Kolbe
, a mid-ranking diplomat who become a spy for the American
Office of Strategic Services
because he believed his country deserved to lose the war on the account of the genocide it was waging against the Jews. Delattre stated that Kolbe really was a case of a diplomat being "sand in the machine" as Kolbe provided intelligence to help his country lose the war, but added sarcastically that if every German civil servant really were "sand in the machine" as almost all of them claimed to be after 1945 that Hitler would never had managed to get anything done.
[37]
Diplomats like Kolbe were very much the exception, not the rule.
[37]
German representation overseas
[
edit
]
In addition to the ministry's headquarters in Berlin, Germany has established
embassies
and
consulates
around the world.
See also
[
edit
]
Sources
[
edit
]
- Fiebig-von Hase, Ragnhild (17 November 2003).
"6 The Uses of 'friendship': The 'personal regime' of Wilhelm II and Theodore Roosevelt 1901?1909"
. In Mombauer, Annika; Deist, Wilhelm (eds.).
The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II's Role in Imperial Germany
. Cambridge University Press.
ISBN
978-1-139-44060-8
.
OCLC
57567237
. Retrieved
29 March
2017
.
- Jacobsen, Hans-Adolf
[in German]
(1999). "The Structure of Nazi Foreign Policy 1933-1945". In Leitz, Christian; James, Harold (eds.).
The Third Reich: The Essential Readings
. London: Blackwell.
ISBN
978-0-631-20700-9
.
OCLC
851117719
.
- Rohl, John C. G.
(1994) [1st pub. 1987 [Kaiser, Hof und Staat : Wilhelm II. und die deutsche Politik]].
The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany
. Translated by Cole, Terence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN
978-0-521-56504-2
.
OCLC
868562991
. Retrieved
29 March
2017
.
- Hurter, Johannes; Mayer, Michael, eds. (2014).
Das Auswartige Amt in der NS-Diktatur
[
The German Foreign Office under National Socialism
]. Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte, 109 (in German). De Gruyter Oldenbourg.
ISBN
978-3-11-034543-8
.
References
[
edit
]
- ^
"Staff"
.
www.auswaertiges-amt.de
.
- ^
"Bundeshaushalt"
.
www.bundeshaushalt.de
. Retrieved
10 May
2021
.
- ^
a
b
Balakian, Peter
.
The Burning Tigris
, New York: HarperCollins, 2003 page 285.
- ^
"Germany bears a 'responsibility' for Armenia 'genocide': president"
.
i24news
. April 23, 2015. Archived from
the original
on June 19, 2015
. Retrieved
2015-06-18
.
.
- ^
"Walther Rathenau"
.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. 3 April 2024
. Retrieved
9 June
2024
.
- ^
a
b
Rothwell, Victor
The Origins of the Second World War
, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001 page 30.
- ^
Conze, Eckart
(October 27, 2010).
"Hitler's Diplomats Historian Calls Wartime Ministry A 'Criminal Organization'
"
.
Der Spiegel
. Retrieved
2011-07-07
.
- ^
Kershaw, Ian (1998).
Hitler Hubris
, New York: Norton, pages 490?491
- ^
Tetens, T.H.
The New Germany and the Old Nazis
, New York: Random House, 1961 page 48
- ^
"Germany?Speech by Federal Minister Westerwelle on the presentation of the study by the Independent Commission of Historians Federal Foreign Office"
.
- ^
"Telegraph-Journal | TJ.news"
.
tj.news
.
- ^
"Report Confirms German Foreign Ministry Role in Holocaust - TIME"
. October 29, 2010. Archived from
the original
on 29 October 2010.
- ^
"German foreign minister 'ashamed' of diplomats' role in Holocaust - Winnipeg Free Press"
.
Winnipeg Free Press
.
- ^
"Niemcy: Szokuj?cy raport. "To nas zawstydza"
"
.
Onet Wiadomo?ci
. October 28, 2010.
- ^
"Moshe Zimmermann.
Secrets and Revelations: The German Foreign Ministry and the Final Solution
, in: Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Vol. V, No. 1 (2011)"
(PDF)
. Archived from
the original
(PDF)
on March 11, 2012.
- ^
"The Machine's Accomplices"
.
The Economist
. October 28, 2010
. Retrieved
2011-07-07
.
.
- ^
Conze, Eckart
(October 27, 2010).
"Hitler's Diplomats Historian Calls Wartime Ministry A 'Criminal Organization'
"
.
Der Spiegel
. Retrieved
2011-07-07
.
- ^
Moore, Tristana (October 27, 2010).
"Were German Diplomats Complicit in the Holocaust?"
.
Time
. Retrieved
2011-07-07
.
- ^
"The Machine's Accomplices"
.
The Economist
. October 28, 2010
. Retrieved
2011-07-07
.
- ^
Bloch, Michael (1992).
Ribbentrop
. New York: Crown Publishing, p. 356.
- ^
Bloch, Michael (1992).
Ribbentrop
. New York: Crown Publishing, pp. 400?401.
- ^
a
b
Delattre, Lucas (1 December 2007) [1st pub. 2003:
Editions Denoel
].
A Spy at the Heart of the Third Reich: The Extraordinary Story of Fritz Kolbe, America's Most Important Spy in World War II
. Translated by Holoch, George A. Grove/Atlantic. p. 2.
ISBN
978-0-8021-9649-1
.
OCLC
948034826
.
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[
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]
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