Adenauer's Foreign Office: West German Diplomacy in the Shadow of the Third Reich

3. The Return of theGerman Diplomats

3 The Return of the German Diplomats One evenInG In LATe SuMMeR 1945 Hans von Herwarth sat in an American officer’s mess in Wiesbaden with US Army captain Peter Harnden and discussed whether his family should resettle in the United States. “My thoughts had been occupied with this idea for a long time already, because I feared that the division of Germany into four zones could be permanent.” Herwarth also could not imagine that there would ever be a German foreign service again. At that moment, news arrived that Anton Pfeiffer, brother of Herwarth’s former Moscow Embassy colleague Peter and an old acquaintance of Harnden, wanted Herwarth to work for him in the office of the Bavarian minister president. Herwarth moved with his family to Munich and reentered government service in the fall of 1945.1 Four years later, he was managing protocol functions for the West German government. Herwarth’s story sheds light on the experience of many mid- and lowerrank German diplomats between 1945 and the early 1950s. From a family with a long tradition of state service, he entered the Auswärtiges Amt as an attaché in 1929. He had a complicated relationship with the Nazi state. His paternal grandmother was Jewish, and Herwarth believed that only his patrons at the embassy and in the Wilhelmstraße’s personnel office protected him from dismissal after 1933. While in Moscow, where he served from 1931 to 1939, Herwarth participated in two attempts to mobilize the Western powers against Nazi Germany. In the fall of 1938 he informed colleagues at the British and French embassies about Hitler’s aggressive intentions toward Czechoslovakia. The Return of the German Diplomats 65 The next year, he provided British, French, and American diplomats with details of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. In August 1939 he joined the army and, despite being highly critical of German occupation policy in Eastern Europe and having contact with the military resistance against Hitler, served loyally until the end of the war.After the attack on the Soviet Union he helped to interrogate prisoners from the Red Army. For most of the war Herwarth served as an officer on the staff of General Ernst Köstring, who organized military units out of Soviet volunteers to fight for Germany. These “Eastern Legions” included members of collaborationist militias that had committed atrocities in Eastern Europe. In 1944 Köstring and Herwarth accompanied General Helmuth von Pannwitz’s Cossacks on anti-partisan campaigns in Croatia, which were marked by the execution of thousands of civilians and the burning and looting of villages.2 Despite his presence in Croatia, however, Herwarth later asserted that as Köstring’s adjutant and advisor he personally had no opportunity to commit “bloody crimes in the occupied territories.”3 After the German capitulation, US diplomat Charles Thayer, a friend from his Moscow years, discovered Herwarth in captivity in Austria and immediately helped him get demobilized. Although he knew about Herwarth’s activities in Yugoslavia, Thayer believed he had been opposed to National Socialism and accepted his claim that he had played an important role in the assassination attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944. Most importantly, he thought Herwarth could provide valuable information about the war in the East and especially about German attempts to conduct “political warfare” against the Soviet Union. Herwarth joined a research group at the US Political Advisor’s Office in Wiesbaden consisting of other German diplomats with experience with the Soviet Union as well as Harnden.4 Herwarth’s fate in the immediate postwar years shares certain common patterns with that of other Wilhelmstraße veterans. When the war ended he did not see much of a future for himself and even contemplated emigration, yet by the early 1950s he had attained a prominent position in government service in the very ministry he once thought an impossibility. His rapid climb was aided by his background as a diplomat and administrator and his foreign language skills (including English, French, and Russian), all of which were in high demand with German offices that had to deal with the occupation authorities. His expertise on the Soviet Union proved of special interest to the Americans. Herwarth had an exceptional network of contacts, including foreign diplomats such as Thayer and former colleagues such as Peter Pfeiffer. He also could demonstrate active ties to the German resistance against Hitler. However, 66 A D e...