Witness for the Defense

Witness for the Defense

It was the most unusual court appearance in Germany's postwar history. On the witness stand in Bonn's criminal court sat the Chancellor of West Germany, Kurt Georg Kiesinger. He had been subpoenaed to testify in the war crimes trial of a former diplomat who was charged with arranging transportation for 11,343 Bulgarian Jews to German death camps. The defense plea was a familiar one for postwar Germany: the defendant had not known what was happening in those camps. Defense lawyers summoned Kiesinger on the grounds that if he, as acting chief of the Foreign Ministry's radio-propaganda section at the time, did not know about the camps, then Nazi diplomats who did not have similar access to foreign broadcasts would know even less.

Kiesinger made a satisfactory witness for the defense. He conceded that he had heard Allied reports about German death camps but had dismissed the charges as "nothing but atrocity propaganda.""It was simply inconceivable to me," he said, "that such terrible things were happening. I knew Jews were being taken off. In my own house, a Jewish family was picked up and taken away, but I thought they must be put to work somewhere." Only in the final years of the war did he get the feeling that, in his words, "something terrible was happening."

Critics' Charges. The Chancellor's testimony was certain to have considerable psychological and political significance at home and abroad. In Germany, it will buttress the argument that the great mass of Germans, including even those in relatively high places, were innocent of any knowledge that 6,000,000 Jews and at least 1,000,000 other persons, including many Germans, were dying unspeakable deaths in extermination centers. Abroad, it will only further provoke Germany's critics, who contend that many Germans knew what was happening but refused to admit that they knew.

To those critics, it seems inconceivable that the clues could not have been recognized. Everyone in Germany knew that the German Jews were being rounded up and herded away in a brutal fashion. German civilian firms supplied the ovens and other equipment for the camps. By 1943, Germans were widely cautioning one another not to complain about the Nazi regime, because otherwise "you might go up in smoke." Adolf Hitler, in fact, told the German people: "The end of the war will see the end of the Jewish race." On the other hand, it must be remembered the six extermination camps where most victims met their deaths were not located in Germany but in Poland and the administration of the camps was in the hands of the SS, which kept its activities a closely guarded secret.

A handful of Germans, notably Philosopher Karl Jaspers, has declared that they knew what was happening. But the great majority of Germans still maintain their innocence of any knowledge about the Nazi crimes. Even when testimony to that effect comes from so distinguished a person as Chancellor Kiesinger, many non-Germans will find it difficult to accept.

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