The Foreign Office is adding the names of those German diplomats who were removed from service and persecuted during the National Socialist era due to the racial laws of the time.

In front of the historic headquarters of the German Foreign Ministry at Wilhelmstrasse 92 in Berlin (formerly house number 76), 56 stumbling blocks have been lying since Friday, listing the names of those persecuted and those of the resistance fighters who have long been honored in the Foreign Ministry during the Nazi era.

Johannes Leithäuser

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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The impetus for expressly remembering the persecuted diplomats came from the archive of the office, whose employee Martin Kröger last year, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Foreign Office, also remembered the diplomats who came to power after the office's staff magazine the National Socialists lost their position.

Many of them emigrated or stayed abroad in the places where they were released.

One of them, Friedrich Levy, who changed his name to Friedrich Leyen, went to the Netherlands, from where he was deported to Theresienstadt in April 1943, where he perished a few months later.

The anniversary report of the archivist Kröger stated that at that time "the entire spectrum of agreement, opportunism and indifference was represented" in Wilhelmstrasse. It went on to say that "their cosmopolitanism has not prevented the diplomats from serving the dictatorship, cooperating with their crimes, and also from taking the initiative themselves". The fates of those removed from office and the degree of persecution were also very different.

In response to this contribution, a year ago employees of the Federal Foreign Office formed an initiative who contacted the initiator of the Stolperstein initiative, Gunter Demnig. They agreed to allow the stumbling blocks made of brass for the names of those 56 persecuted people who can still be identified from the files of the office in front of the historical address of the Foreign Office and to add a stumbling block, which contains the declaration that this one Employees of the office are thought "who were persecuted by the National Socialists because of their belief, their origin, descent, political attitude, sexual orientation, worldview".

The Foreign Office began 15 years ago to grapple with its own history during the Third Reich and its share in the crimes of the Nazi dictatorship. A historians' commission carried out an extensive study of the function of the office in Wilhelmstrasse during the National Socialist era. Later, 12 men and one woman were honored as resistance fighters with their names on a wall of inscriptions. The State Secretary in the Foreign Office, Miguel Berger, said on the occasion of the unveiling of the stumbling blocks that the authority itself had "needed many years" to deal with its own role in the era of National Socialism. Today the Federal Foreign Office is “actively committed to diversity”. Berger specifically mentioned the groups "Diplomats of Color" and "Rainbow",an amalgamation of homosexual or diversely oriented employees of the office. He said that these initiatives made "an important contribution to ensuring that the Federal Foreign Office is a modern and open agency that is in lively exchange with the society it represents abroad".