64 Facts About Hans Globke

Hans Globke is the most prominent example of the continuity of the administrative elites between Nazi Germany and the early West Germany.

In 1936, Globke wrote a legal annotation on the antisemitic Nuremberg Race Laws that did not express any objection to the discrimination against Jews, placing the Nazi Party on a firmer legal ground and setting the path to the Holocaust during World War II.

Hans Globke later had a controversial career as Secretary of State and Chief of Staff of the West German Chancellery.

Hans Globke had a major role in shaping the course and structure of the state and West Germany's alignment with the United States.

Hans Globke was an important figure in West Germany's anti-communist policies at the domestic and international level and in the Western intelligence community, and was the German government's main liaison with NATO and other Western intelligence services, especially the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hans Globke was born in Dusseldorf, Rhine Province, the son of the cloth wholesaler Josef Hans Globke and his wife Sophie, both Roman Catholics and supporters of the Centre Party.

In 1921, Hans Globke became a legal trainee when he passed the state examination at the Higher Regional Court of Cologne.

Hans Globke finished his Assessorexamen in 1924 and briefly served as a judge in the Aachen district court.

Hans Globke became vice police-chief of Aachen in 1925 and governmental civil servant with a rank of Regierungsassessor in 1926.

Hans Globke was not affected by the personnel purges of the Prussian ministerial bureaucracy by the Franz von Papen government, which removed republican-oriented officials after the coup d'etat in Prussia on 20 July 1932.

Hans Globke helped to formulate the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933, which effectively gave Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers.

Hans Globke was the author of the law of 10 July 1933 concerning the dissolution of the existing Prussian State Council and the formation of the revised Council, as well as of further legislation that co-ordinated all Prussian parliamentary bodies.

In December 1933 Hans Globke was promoted to Oberregierungsrat, which Hans Globke later said had been postponed due to his doubts over the legality of the so-called Prussian coup of 1932, which was well known in the Ministry.

On 1 November 1934, following the unification of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior with the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Hans Globke took a position as a Referent in the newly formed Reich and Prussian Ministry of the Interior under Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, where he worked until 1945.

In July 1938, Hans Globke received his final promotion of the Nazi period, to Ministerialrat.

From 1934 onwards, Hans Globke continued to be responsible mainly for name changes and civil status issues; from 1937, international issues in the field of citizenship and option contracts were added to his brief.

Hans Globke co-authored the official legal commentary on the new Reich Citizenship Law, one of the Nuremberg Laws introduced at the Nazi Party Congress in September 1935, which revoked the citizenship of German Jews, as well as various legal regulations.

Hans Globke's work included the elaboration of templates and drafts for laws and ordinances.

Hans Globke was responsible for preparing legal commentaries and explanations for his areas of responsibility.

Originally, Hans Globke was only supposed to comment on matrimonial issues as Stuckart wanted to do the rest of the work himself, but Stuckart became ill for a long time, so Hans Globke wrote the commentary on his own.

Hans Globke authored the Law on Changing Surnames and First Names, the Name Change Ordinance, and the associated implementing ordinances.

Hans Globke served as chief legal adviser to the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of Interior, headed by Adolf Eichmann, that performed the bureaucratic implementation of the Holocaust.

In 1938, Hans Globke was appointed Ministerialrat for his "extraordinary efforts in drafting the law for the Protection of the German Blood".

On 25 April 1938, Hans Globke was praised by the Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick as "the most capable and efficient official in my ministry" when it came to drafting anti-Semitic laws.

At the beginning of the war, Hans Globke was responsible for the new German imperial borders in the West that were the responsibility of the Reich Ministry of the Interior.

The historian Peter Schottler suspected that Hans Globke was probably the author of a memorandum to Hitler in June 1940 discussing the idea of State Secretary Stuckart proposing a far-reaching annexation of the East French and Belgian territories, which would have involved the deportation of about 5 million people.

Hans Globke applied for membership of the Nazi Party for career reasons in 1940, but the application was rejected on 24 October 1940 by Martin Bormann, reportedly because of his former membership of the Centre Party, which had represented Roman Catholic voters in Weimar Germany.

Hans Globke was ultimately rejected for membership by Bormann in 1943.

At the beginning of September 1941, Hans Globke accompanied Interior Minister Frick and State Secretary Stuckart on an official visit to Slovakia, which at that time was a client state of the German Reich.

In 1961, Hans Globke denied there was any connection between the two events and the allegation that he had participated in the creation of the Code.

Hans Globke submitted a final application for Nazi Party membership, but the application was rejected in 1943, again due to his former affiliation to the Centre Party.

Hans Globke was the informant of the Berlin Bishop Konrad von Preysing and had knowledge of the coup preparations by the opponents of Hitler Carl Friedrich Goerdeler and Ludwig Beck.

Hans Globke submitted an affidavit to the International Military Tribunal on the annexation of the French territories after the German victory in 1940.

Hans Globke had known at that time that "the extermination of the Jews was systematic", but, he said, restricting his statement, "not that it referred to all Jews".

On 26 September 1949, Konrad Adenauer "had no reservations whatsoever" in appointing Hans Globke to be one of his closest aides, with his appointment to the position of undersecretary at the German Chancellery, despite protests from the opposition parties in the Bundestag and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hans Globke served as Secretary of State of the Chancellery from 1953 to 1963.

Hans Globke advised Adenauer on political decisions during joint walks in the garden of the Chancellor's office, such as the reparations agreement with Israel.

Hans Globke was the German government's main liaison with NATO and other western intelligence services, especially the CIA.

Hans Globke maintained contact with the party apparatus and became "a kind of hidden secretary general" to the Christian Democratic Union, and contact with the Chancellor usually had to go through him.

Hans Globke threatened Brandt with a new campaign against him, initiated by the communists.

However, Hans Globke believed that it was in the national interest to stop the campaigns and the continual aspersions about the past would stop the population finding peace.

Hans Globke left office together with the Adenauer administration in 1963, and was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany by President Heinrich Lubke.

Hans Globke remained active as an adviser for Adenauer and the CDU during the 1960s.

In 1950, Hans Globke began working with Reinhard Gehlen, who Hans Globke considered a close friend with complementary views.

The fact that a man like Hans Globke played a leading role in German politics again shortly after the founding of the Federal Republic triggered a bitter parliamentary debate on 12 July 1950 when Adolf Arndt, then the legal spokesman for the Social Democratic Party, read an excerpt from the commentaries on the Nuremberg Laws in which Hans Globke discusses whether or not "racial defilement" committed abroad could be punished.

Federal Interior Minister Gustav Heinemann referred in his answer to the exonerating testimony of the Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Kempner, that Hans Globke had served with his willingness to testify.

Many people, including some from the ranks of the Catholic Church, certified that Hans Globke had repeatedly campaigned on behalf of persecuted people.

The former administrative officer of Army Group E in Thessaloniki, Max Merten, had accused Hans Globke of being heavily responsible for the Holocaust in Greece, as he could have prevented the deaths of 20,000 Jews in Thessaloniki when Eichmann contacted the Reich Interior Ministry and asked for Hans Globke's permission to kill them.

Norden's goal was to prove that Hans Globke was in contact with Eichmann.

On 23 July 1963, Hans Globke was sentenced in absentia, to life imprisonment "for continued war crimes committed with complicity and crimes against humanity in partial combination with murder".

The fact that much of the criticism of Hans Globke came from the Soviet bloc, and that it mixed genuine information with false accusations, made it easier for the West Germans and the Americans to dismiss it as communist propaganda.

Hans Globke died after a serious illness at his home on 13 February 1973.

Hans Globke was buried in the central cemetery of Bad Godesberg in Plittersdorf in Bonn.

The collection proved that Hans Globke had helped to draft several anti-semitic laws during the early 1930s, years before Adolf Hitler had come to power and had later become one of Eichmann's most important functionaries.

Hans Globke attempted to block further publication of the book in court with an interim injunction.

Ben-Gurion informed Vogel that of the hundred names that Eichmann was queried on, Hans Globke's was not mentioned.

Vogel immediately returned to Germany and contacted Adenauer to confirm that Hans Globke was in the clear.

Hans Globke's family wanted to use the royalties from the articles to fund his defence in court.

However the federal government, already worried about the campaign in East Berlin, contacted the CIA to ensure that any material regarding Hans Globke was removed from the Life coverage.

The Der Spiegel research examined a memorandum issued on 16 March 1962, that described Gehlen requesting that measures be taken to stop Hans Globke being called as a witness.

An Israeli government memo from 26 April 1961 states that Gideon Hausner, at the time the Attorney General, had informed ministers of the request and Servatius was asked if Hans Globke was really needed and he thought about it and decided not to call him.

The background of the Stasi campaign against Hans Globke remains largely unknown; however, this aspect of Lommatzsch's biography was in any case only intended as a digression, since it requires separate treatment.

However, Lommatzsch mentions a number of examples of Hans Globke campaigning for the persecuted, his commentary on the Nuremberg Laws was aimed at defusing the regulations, and he had not played the dominant role in the postwar period the Adenauer opponents had assumed.

The historian Wolfgang Benz judges that Hans Globke was "not a National Socialist and not an anti-Semite", but "functioned in the interests of the Nazi regime and made himself complicit in the system of persecution of the Jews through competent participation".