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

5. The Foreign Office’s “Childhood Illnesses,”1949–55

5 The Foreign Office’s “childhood Illnesses,” 1949–55 DeSPITe vARIOuS AnnOunceMenTS that the Auswärtiges Amt had completed its initial organization, the ministry during the early 1950s was clearly a work in progress.1 The first generation of West German diplomats vividly remembered the difficult circumstances they faced. According to the Federal Republic’s first mission chief in New York and Washington, Heinz L. Krekeler, “In the beginning the most primitive material prerequisites were lacking. . . . In short, it was a beginning from the ground up as it could not be more radically conceived.”2 Josef Löns, leader of Division I (Personnel and Administration) from 1953 to 1958, compared the early 1950s Foreign Office to a giant travel bureau. Officials came for orientation and almost immediately went off again to their postings in an ever-growing chain of foreign missions, while offices in Bonn were regularly occupied until nine or ten in the evening because of the massive workload and insufficient staff.3 Until a new office building opened for business in 1955, the ministry lay scattered across the city of Bonn, and several of its important divisions had only recently been established. In August 1953 Konrad Adenauer admitted to the German press that “the complaints about the condition of the Foreign Ministry are justified to a great extent.”4 As the West German daily Die Welt put it, the Auswärtiges Amt during the early 1950s suffered from various “childhood illnesses.”5 The term was apt. The Foreign Office would take a number of years to acquire the necessary personnel, facilities, and experience to effectively represent the Federal 120 A D e n A u e R ’ S F O R e I G n O F F I c e Republic’s interests abroad at a time when foreign ministries all over the world found their tasks increasing dramatically. Due to its late creation, some eighteen months after the rest of the central government, it also found itself involved in serious competency conflicts with other federal ministries, which demonstrated that the Federal Republic’s foreign policy would be inter-ministerial in the truest sense of the word. However, the term “childhood illnesses” was also appropriate because the Foreign Office would grow into a stable adolescence by the middle of the decade after many of its organizational shortcomings had been addressed. The Working groups in the chancellery, 1949–51 One important cause of the Auswärtiges Amt’s early problems was the fact that it arose from several predecessors in the Federal Chancellery that themselves had come together in a piecemeal fashion in response to changes in Allied policy. Herbert Blankenhorn played a central role in creating this initial apparatus. Beginning in September 1949 he started to set up a small staff in Bonn to deal with foreign affairs.6 It consisted of a protocol staff under Hans von Herwarth (which also served the Federal President’s Office), a translation service, and advisors for “special tasks” like Peter Pfeiffer, Herbert Dittmann, Wilhelm Haas, the Kordt brothers, Hasso von Etzdorf, and Gustav Strohm.7 By early October, both Erich Kaufmann from the University of Munich and Gustav von Schmoller from the Institut für Besatzungsprobleme [Institute for Occupation Problems] in Tübingen had been called in to help with legal questions concerning the Occupation Statute.8 Blankenhorn used these informal circles for expert advice on various foreign policy problems.9 There can be little doubt that he intended to have Adenauer formally engage these men, most of whom were his former foreign service colleagues, as soon as possible. By the next spring, Adenauer had indeed appointed Kaufmann as the Chancellery ’s advisor for international law questions.10 Adenauer moved to expand this apparatus over the last months of 1949. On November 4 he appointed Blankenhorn to head the new Liaison Office to the Allied High Commission (Division III of the Chancellery). This office served as the chief conduit between the federal government and HICOM, and its tasks swiftly ballooned to include a whole range of activities that had little to do with the main issues in German-Allied relations. By the fall of 1950 it had no less than ten desks on questions including occupation costs, food, agriculture The Foreign Office’s “childhood Illnesses,” 1949–55 121 and forestry, prisoners of war, foreign cultural relations, and passports.11 The Liaison Office dominated the foreign policy apparatus in...