Helpful were the CIA documents

Interview: Sebastian Mense. Photo: Peter Schubart.

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Transcript of the podcast:

We're talking today with 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 personnel, of course, but also ultimately about Germany and its history. We'll be talking over the Internet, so I apologize for the somewhat unstable sound quality at one point or another, but I think we've all gotten used to the 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 right up to the present day, and you have compiled no fewer than 3,500 biographies, as you told me before our talk. That's a huge corpus. Why did you decide on this approach?

Sylvia Veit: We decided on this approach in order to complement historians' research in a meaningful way. Research in the field of history often goes into great detail. Research projects are conducted on individual organizations or even individuals. We try rather to make quantitative evaluations possible. In other words, we want to show how the composition of the ministerial elites has changed and developed over the system breaks. On this data basis, one can then answer quite a few questions. For example: How has the proportion of women evolved? 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 time and have evaluated it, and on the other hand you have made a cross-section at certain points in time and looked at what the composition of the elite looks like and what kind of biographies these people have brought with them. One evaluation that they recently published deals with the Adenauer era, i.e. the political relaunch 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 very heavily involved in the Nazi system, but it was also by no means the case that primarily resisters were brought into these top positions. To give a few examples: Of the senior civil servants in the Adenauer period, as many as 8% were members of the SS or the SD, in some cases in leading positions, and around 10% were also members of the SA, and for 15%, the files also show that they explicitly expressed positive views on the SS system. This may have been in the context of public speeches, for example, or in the context of private correspondence. We have made similar evaluations for the other side. So for the question, what percentage explicitly expressed negative views of the system or opposed the system? What can be gleaned from the files? And we found explicit statements of resistance in the files for 11% of the cases. In other words, the proportion of top officials who could be assigned to resistance is somewhat smaller than the proportion of those who made positive statements about the system. Whereby the very largest proportion rather did not appear so strongly in the Nazi system. Among politicians, by the way, the proportion of resisters is somewhat larger, around 30% in the Adenauer era.

The great mass of those who were in leading positions in West Germany had therefore somehow come to terms with the system 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, 25% of civil servants were NSDAP members, i.e., about a quarter, and this rose 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, people tried to show symbolically that is now a new system, a break with the old system. And there was simply a greater focus on who is now in this position and what did they actually do during the Nazi period and what was their relationship to the Nazi system? And I think that this attention then gradually diminished, so that it was increasingly possible for people to reach the top offices of the administration, in particular, who had perhaps also played a leading role in the Nazi system.

That has now been one method of evaluation, so to speak, to make a cut. And then you said 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 collected data on 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 immigrant 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 percentage. That's also quite exciting, if you make international comparisons, you find an increase in the level of education among the administrative elites in almost all countries. In Germany, we have the opposite trend, i.e., a decline in the level of education. Of course, this is due to the very elitist tradition we had there.

I also find it fascinating 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: That 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 top positions. In the GDR, these organization charts were destroyed after each reorganization. This means that it is incredibly difficult to reconstruct them. That was also the intention, that it was not transparent. In this respect, it is a lot of work to first identify who the relevant people are. And of course you need the names to be able to search for the files. No name means no file. Some publications by the U.S. intelligence service CIA were quite helpful here; they observed and documented the GDR relatively meticulously, at least as far as the political elite was concerned. Partly also the administrative elite, but there it is very incomplete, which means that a lot of research is still necessary to get a complete picture.

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

Sylvia Veit: For the time being, we can only compare this for politicians, based on the current data. It is very interesting to look at the proportion of former NSDAP members. In the first legislative period of the GDR's parliament, it was around 9% and then fell continuously. In the first legislative period, the proportion of former NSDAP members was lower than in the GDR, at around 5%, but then rose sharply to as much as 32% in the Fourth German Bundestag among government politicians. After that, it also declined. This means that, on average, there were actually fewer former NSDAP members in the GDR who reached these top positions. Another interesting aspect is perhaps the workers' and farmers' state. Were there really a lot of workers and farmers who ended up in these elite positions? There is a very interesting development in the GDR: In the beginning, that was actually the case, we have fewer academics in the political elite. Very many people who only had a secondary school diploma as their highest level of education. But in the course of the GDR, that changed enormously. Toward the end of the GDR, the percentage of academics was just as high as in the FRG. There, too, we have almost only people with a university degree, including quite a few doctorates among the top politicians.

I also found it very exciting that there is a relatively small proportion of people born in East Germany who have reached top positions in West Germany or in reunified Germany. There were some again 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: 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. For more interesting results of the study, you, dear listeners, can turn to our upcoming publik magazine. The issue, which will be published in June, will also report in detail on Professor Veit's research findings. For now, I'd like to thank you, Ms. Veit.

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