Endangering the welfare of the Federal Republic of Germany
Süddeutsche Zeitung in English: The German Spy Inside Eichmann’s Defense Team - free access, a translation of Eichmann-Prozess: Der Mann, der Eichmann an den BND verraten hat.
In 1961, West German intelligence planted an agent in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. His marching orders? Preventing Andenauer’s Chancellery chief Hans Globke and other former Nazis from being mentioned in the proceedings.
On the evening before the Eichmann trial was set to begin in Jerusalem, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer sought to reassure the people of Germany in a televised address: “In the German body politic, in the moral fabric of German society, there are today no remnants of National Socialism, no National Socialist sentiment. We have become a state governed by the rule of law.” At the same time, he expressed the desire “that the entire truth comes out in this trial and that justice is done.”
Until now, however, under every government since the Adenauer years, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence service, has prevented the full truth about the Eichmann trial from coming to light. Just a few weeks ago, the Federal Administrative Court once again rejected a lawsuit seeking the release of files relating to the Eichmann case, on the grounds that “there is reason to believe that their use would endanger the welfare of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
The fact that full exposure is now possible, 65 years later, is thanks in part to Angela Merkel's Chancellery, which established the Independent Historical Commission in 2011 to research the BND's early history. The commission concluded its work in 2022. Its chairman, the historian Klaus-Dietmar Henke, has now written a comprehensive study – titled "Vergangenheitsabwehr" ["Warding Off the Past"] (Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin, 672 pages) – of the machinations by which the Eichmann trial was manipulated on the Chancellery's orders. For his research, Henke was granted access to the BND's otherwise highly classified archive free of the previously imposed restrictions. He has used that access to show the methods by which West Germany's foreign intelligence service once went about its work of obscuring the past.
There was no doubt about the crimes of which Eichmann, as the official in charge of Jewish affairs at the Reich Security Main Office, stood accused, but from the very outset, there was plenty of room for criticizing the proceedings. Was it legitimate to abduct a man from Argentina in order to put him on trial in Israel? Did Israel even have the jurisdiction to pass judgment on crimes committed before it was even founded? And shouldn’t Eichmann have been tried in West Germany, a direct successor to the?
🤦♂️ To the what, bro?! 🤷♂️
But read it again: RELEASING THE FILES RELATING TO THE EICHMANN CASE WOULD ENDANGER THE WELFARE OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY. IN 2026.