German foreign ministry found deeply involved in Nazi Holocaust
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German foreign ministry was found deeply involved in Nazi's Holocaust against Jews, according to a report issued on Monday.
The 900-page report was made by four historians on the Foreign ministry during the time of the Third Reich, commissioned by former Foreign minister Joschka Fishcer in 2005.
Foreign ministry was once believed to be immune to Nazi's criminal actions. In fact it actively participated in every aspect of Nazi's campaign against the Jews from deportation to mass murder of the Jews living in the eastern Europe, said Eckhart Conze, one of the historians.
The team of historians have recovered large amount of documents at that period of time in 32 different archives around the world and made dozens of interviews with eyewitnesses during more than four years of research.
The report also showed how foreign ministry tried to mask the cruel past and help those former Nazi officers and war suspects to keep their jobs in former Western Germany's foreign ministry and to escape the arrest of some countries, as more than 40 percent of the top positions in the ministry was taken by ex-Nazi party members in 1950 to 1951.
Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle praised the report as "an important work" that would contribute greatly to the ministry's knowledge of its own past and said he was considering making it mandatory reading material for all future diplomats.
The report also won praise from survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants, as "Germany has taken an honest and painful look at its past."
"Previous efforts to whitewash the role of the foreign ministry and its personnel in the crimes of the Holocaust are now categorically refuted," said Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.
The report will be published on Thursday as a book called "The Office and the Past: German diplomats in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic."
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