East Berlin Analysts Link Kiesinger Government to Neo-Nazism
By Vera Kessler ·
GDR diplomats secretly tracked the political vocabulary of their enemy to paint the Kiesinger government as neo-Nazi and bypass Bonn's hold on European security.
Berlin, February 26, 1968. The atmosphere within the West European Department of the East German foreign ministry was one of calculated frustration. According to an English translation provided by the Cold War International History Project, the department was weighing the results of Bonn's diplomatic efforts and concluding that they had not achieved the expected success.
At the time, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was governed by a Grand Coalition. The document specifically identifies this as the "Kiesinger/Strauss government," a phrasing that the archive's notes suggest reflected a communist stereotype of right-wing dominance in West German politics. To the analysts in Berlin, the FRG's attempts at normalization were failing to shift the fundamental realities of the divided continent.
Sovereign Recognition
The memorandum suggests that the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was gaining a psychological foothold in the West. It claims the GDR was becoming "ever more present in the minds of people in Western Germany and in the Western European countries," noting an increase in demands for its formal recognition. This was not merely a matter of prestige; it was a matter of law. The document points to the GDR's socialist constitution as a mirror of its international legal position, asserting that "the realisation of a single German state is only possible under the conditions of socialism."
However, the reality of diplomatic recognition remained stubborn. The record notes a contradiction in the attitudes of Western European states. While most of these governments worked on the assumption of the territorial status quo and the "effective existence of the GDR," they continued to reject the GDR's recognition as a sovereign German state. Any such recognition was viewed as being "dependent on steps taken by Bonn."
Kiesinger and Strauss
The document takes a sharp turn toward the internal politics of the FRG. The analysts in Berlin observed that while neo-Nazism in West Germany was officially rejected, there was a persistent denial that such elements were "part of the political system in Western Germany" or connected to the policies of the government. This tension served as a convenient lever for East Berlin, allowing them to paint the Kiesinger administration as an extension of a darker past even as they sought a pragmatic security arrangement.
This internal assessment coincides with the broader era of Ostpolitik—the normalization of relations between the FRG and Eastern Europe. Public records describe this policy as "change through rapprochement," a strategy later championed by Willy Brandt to ease the frictions of the Cold War. But in February 1968, the GDR viewed this rapprochement through a lens of suspicion and strategic opportunity. They saw a West Germany attempting to expand its influence while the East sought to lock in the borders of the post-war settlement.
Paris and the Middle Ground
The memorandum highlights France as a particular point of interest. The analysts believed that France was searching for plans to settle European problems, attempting to find a "compromise between Bonn's Ostpolitik of expansion and status quo!" This suggested that the GDR saw a potential crack in the Western alliance—a way to bypass Bonn by dealing with other European powers who were more inclined to accept the map of Europe as it existed.
Security and weaponry also featured in the department's analysis. The record notes that the majority of Western European states supported the "nuclear limitation treaty," referred to in the notes as the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The GDR diplomats used the term Kernwaffensperrvertrag, a phrase that mirrored campaign slogans used by Franz Josef Strauss in West Germany to complain about the exclusion of Germans from nuclear power. By adopting this language, the GDR was not just tracking policy; it was tracking the domestic political vocabulary of its enemy.
These proposals were written against the backdrop of the 1966 Bucharest Declaration, in which Warsaw Pact members demanded a European Security Conference. The goal was to pressure Bonn into accepting the territorial status quo and to reduce the commitment of the United States to the European theater. While the GDR viewed the FRG's Ostpolitik with skepticism, they recognized that the West European states were increasingly operating on the assumption that the GDR was a permanent fixture of the landscape.
Related files on the Soviet approach to the south and the naval history of the era exist in the National Security Archive, though they do not overlap with this specific departmental memo. The 1968 document leaves the question of the GDR's legitimacy unresolved, hanging on the willingness of France and other neighbors to break with Bonn's insistence on German unity. This diplomatic friction would continue for years, eventually feeding into the framework of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe and the 1975 Helsinki Accords.