Transcript of the podcast:

Today we are talking to Professor Sylvia Veit, who heads the Department of Public Management at the University of Kassel and who has presented a highly interesting study on top political personnel in Germany. We want to talk to her about what this study says about the careers of these top politicians, of course, but also ultimately about Germany and its history. We are conducting the interview via the Internet, so I apologize for the somewhat unstable sound quality at one point or another, but by now I think we have all become somewhat accustomed to this sound of the Corona era. My name is Sebastian Mense. Welcome, dear listeners.

Ms. Veit, you have investigated the careers of top politicians and top civil servants across five political systems: from the German Empire to the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the GDR and the present day, and you told me before our interview that you have compiled no fewer than 3,500 biographies. That's a huge corpus. Why did you decide on this approach?

Sylvia Veit: We opted for this approach in order to complement the research of historians in a meaningful way. Historical research often goes into great detail. Research projects are carried out on individual organizations or even individuals. We are trying to facilitate quantitative evaluations. In other words, we want to show how the composition of the ministerial elites has changed and developed over the system breaks. This database can then be used to answer quite a few questions. For example: How has the proportion of women developed? How have administrative and political careers changed? Where do the new elites come from after a system break?

In other words, you can observe the course of events over time and have evaluated this and, on the other hand, taken a cross-section at certain points in time and looked at the composition of the elite and what kind of biographies these people brought with them. One evaluation that they recently published deals with the Adenauer era, i.e. the political restart in West Germany after the war. If I have understood correctly, one result of this evaluation is that the great new beginning after the war did not take place, at least in terms of personnel?

Sylvia Veit: That is correct. Of the 334 people who held top positions in the federal ministries under Chancellor Adenauer, only a small proportion were heavily involved in the Nazi system, but it was by no means the case that it was primarily resistance fighters who were appointed to these top positions. To name a few examples: Of the senior civil servants in the Adenauer period, as many as 8% were members of the SS or SD, some in leading positions, and around 10% were also members of the SA, and for 15% the files also show that they made explicitly positive statements about the SS system. This may have been in the context of public speeches, for example, or in private correspondence. We have made similar evaluations for the other side. In other words, how many percent made explicitly negative statements about the system or opposed the system? What can be gleaned from the files? And we found explicit statements of opposition in the files for 11% of the cases. In other words, the proportion of top officials who were more likely to be associated with resistance is somewhat smaller than those who made positive statements about the system. However, the largest proportion did not appear so strongly in the Nazi system. Among politicians, by the way, the proportion of resisters is somewhat higher, at around 30% in the Adenauer era.

So the vast majority of those in leading positions in West Germany had somehow come to terms without being particularly conspicuous in one direction or another.

Sylvia Veit: You could say that. It's also interesting to look at NSDAP membership, for example: in the first legislative period, it was 25% among civil servants, i.e. around a quarter, and this then rose again quite sharply during the Adenauer period to over 40% in the fourth legislative period of the German Bundestag. After that, it gradually declined.

Okay, how do you explain this increase? That you start at a rather low level and then it increases?

Sylvia Veit: I would explain it by saying that in the beginning, of course, they tried to show symbolically that this was a new system, a break with the old system. And there was simply a greater focus on who was now in this position and what did they actually do during the Nazi era and what was their relationship to the Nazi system? And I think this attention then gradually waned, so that more and more people were able to get into the top positions in the administration, in particular, who had perhaps also played a leading role in the Nazi system.

That was one method of evaluation, so to speak, to make a cut. And then you said that you also evaluated how certain characteristics or the composition changed over time. I suppose that's not particularly surprising: in the Adenauer era, it was almost exclusively men. But you also surveyed other characteristics. What did a typical top civil servant or federal politician of the Adenauer era look like?

Sylvia Veit: A typical top civil servant was male, as you said, had no migration background, was a lawyer, had a doctorate, often came from a family of civil servants and from a rather middle-class family.

70 percent doctorate rate, I read off a graph...

Sylvia Veit: Yes, that really was an enormously high proportion. It's also quite exciting, if you make international comparisons, you find an increase in the level of education among the administrative elite in almost all countries. In Germany, we have the opposite trend, i.e. a decline in the level of education. This is of course due to the very elitist tradition we had there.

I also find it interesting to look at the GDR. You also deal a lot with the GDR. But was it more difficult to get hold of files?

Sylvia Veit: It was definitely very difficult. In the GDR, the apparatus was very often restructured, new ministries were founded, departments were merged, abolished or renamed. These organizational changes are usually reflected in organizational plans. This is a very important basis for us to be able to understand who was actually in the top offices. In the GDR, these organization charts were destroyed after every reorganization. That means it's incredibly difficult to trace. That was also the intention, that it wasn't transparent. In this respect, it takes a lot of work to first identify who the relevant people are. And of course you need the names in order to be able to search for the files. No name, no file. Some publications by the CIA, the US secret service, were very helpful in this respect. They observed and documented the GDR relatively meticulously, at least as far as the political elite was concerned. Partly also the administrative elite, but it is very incomplete, which means that a lot of research is still needed to get a complete picture.

What can you say now based on the preliminary sources? Is the assessment that more resisters against the Third Reich took part in the reconstruction in the GDR and rose to high positions correct?

Sylvia Veit: For the time being, we can only compare this for the politicians, based on the current data situation. It is very interesting to look at the proportion of former NSDAP members. In the first legislative period of the GDR parliament, it was around 9% and then fell continuously. In the FRG, we have a different development: in the first legislative period, the proportion of former NSDAP members was lower than in the GDR, at around 5%, but then rose significantly to up to 32% in the Fourth German Bundestag among government politicians. After that, it also declined. In other words, on average you can say that there were actually fewer former NSDAP members in the GDR who reached these top positions. Another interesting point is perhaps the workers' and farmers' state. Were there actually many workers and farmers who ended up in these elite positions? There is a very interesting development in the GDR: in the beginning, that was indeed the case, we had fewer academics in the political elite. There were a lot of people who only had a secondary school leaving certificate as their highest educational qualification. But that changed enormously over the course of the GDR. Towards the end of the GDR, the proportion of academics was just as high as in the FRG. We also had almost only people with a university degree, including a lot of PhDs among the top politicians.

I also found it very interesting that there is a relatively small proportion of people born in East Germany who achieved top positions in West Germany or in reunified Germany. There were some before reunification, and the proportion didn't change that much after reunification.

Sylvia Veit: Yes, that's true. East Germans are not well represented in the civil service elite, there are hardly any East Germans who have made it into top positions in the federal administration.

Thank you very much, Ms. Veit, that was very interesting and we learned that the world is becoming more diverse, even in the German administrative elite. Only the East Germans are obviously not benefiting from this. Thank you for the interview. Dear listeners, you can read about other interesting results of the study in our upcoming publik magazine. The issue, which will be published in June, will also contain a detailed report on Professor Veit's research findings. Thank you for your time, Ms. Veit.

Sylvia Veit: Thank you very much, Mr. Mense.

https:// www.uni-kassel.de/uni/aktuelles/meldung/2021/05/4/hilfreich-waren-die-cia-dokumente?cHash=7b54212b238027d5e8242da13c4959c3