Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-fvjsw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T14:05:58.865Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Foreign Policy of State Terrorism: West Germany, the Military Juntas in Chile and Argentina and the Latin American Refugee Crisis of the 1970s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2018

FELIX A. JIMÉNEZ BOTTA
FELIX A. JIMÉNEZ BOTTA*
Affiliation:
Boston College History Department, 140 Commonwealth Ave., Chestnut Hill, MA, 02467, United States; jimenefa@bc.edu
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article analyses West German foreign policy towards state terrorism in Chile and Argentina and towards political refugees fleeing these regimes. Pressured by grassroots activists, Willy Brandt's government took a hard stance against the Chilean military junta and established an asylum programme for refugees from Chile. Under Helmut Schmidt, however, the official attitude towards state terrorism changed. West Germany welcomed the military coup in Buenos Aires, accepted the Argentinean junta's position that repressive measures were necessary to fight ‘subversion’, flatly refused to accept any Argentinean political prisoners and approved billions of Deutschmarks worth of weapons sales to the junta. This article argues that Bonn's ambivalence towards state terrorism and uneven interest in human rights was due to the different attitudes of both Social Democratic Chancellors towards economic strategising, grassroots activism and, most importantly, the threat of left-wing terrorism.

Information

Type
Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , November 2018, pp. 627 - 650
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

A heated debate about the dangers of humanitarianism recently broke out in the wake of German chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to open the borders to refugees from the Middle East in September 2015 and US president Donald Trump's attempts to ban citizens from several predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States via executive orders in 2017. Advocates of the right of Middle Eastern refugees to flee war and economic privation have been pitted against detractors who point to dangers to the security and economic well-being of Europeans and North Americans. In the 1970s Latin American refugees fleeing political persecution provoked similar apprehension when they sought refuge in the Global Northwest. Latin America was then the ungovernable continent par excellence: rife with inflation, trade unions that made unconscionable demands and political violence. Fears abounded about left-wing terrorism from Latin America. Writing in 1977 Walter Laqueur held ‘many Latin American terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s’ to be incarnations of a radicalised Zeitgeist, who ‘would almost certainly have been Fascist, had they been born twenty years earlier’.Footnote 1 Following this logic, states that fought terrorism with the most brutal of methods, or at least claimed to do so, could become champions of order and stability, while a cloud of suspicion fell on political refugees from these regimes.

This article examines the fundamentally different policies of two Social Democratic dominated West German governments towards state terrorists and their victims in the Southern Cone. While the Willy Brandt government accepted Chilean refugees, recognising the importance of catering to popular humanitarian sentiment and demonstrating solidarity towards politically persecuted refugees, his successor Helmut Schmidt dismissed activists’ concerns and sided with the Argentinean military regime in the name of combatting left-wing terrorism and securing markets. By focusing on the responses of Chancellors Brandt and Schmidt to the Chilean and Argentinean military regimes respectively, this article demonstrates that the policies of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) towards state terrorists in South America were highly dependent on domestic factors such as popular mobilisation, economic rationale, fears of migration and terrorism. The acceptance of human rights considerations by West German governments in the 1970s, a decade in which human rights allegedly ‘broke through’ in Western Europe and the Americas, was uneven and fitful.Footnote 2 West German officials not only did not consider human rights a major factor when crafting foreign policy but also opposed social activism to that effect.

Chile and Argentina became infamous for the ruthless persecution against dissidents that the military regimes unleashed in the 1970s and 1980s. Alongside Apartheid South Africa and the Communist Bloc, both countries attracted the most attention in domestic West German public debates about human rights violations.Footnote 3 In the case of Chile human rights activists lobbying for the acceptance of refugees achieved initial successes. The Social Democratic and Liberal government coalition headed by Chancellor Willy Brandt (1969–1974) took a hard stance against the Augusto Pinochet regime by cutting off foreign aid and issuing a weapons embargo. Faced with an even worse situation in Argentina, his successor and fellow Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt (1974–1982) rescinded many of Brandt's liberal policies towards asylum seekers from Latin America with his blanket rejection of Argentinean refugees. This article reveals that this about-face was due to the shift from Brandt's idealism to Schmidt's realist realignment towards internal security and economic growth at the expense of humanitarianism.

While several scholars have pointed out that West German governments remained ambivalent towards human rights well into the late 1970s – in marked contrast to the path that the Netherlands or the United States under President Jimmy Carter took – none have correlated it to the issue of terrorism.Footnote 4 The political wrangling regarding the acceptance of political refugees from South America offer insights into how terrorism and economic strategising threw a monkey wrench into the incipient machinery of human rights in the 1970s. As Bradley Simpson contends, historians have paid scant attention to the ways in which terrorism and human rights intersected during the Cold War. Karl J. Bade, for instance, pays little attention to the issue of terrorism in his masterful survey of migration in and outside of Europe.Footnote 5 Recent scholarship has helped clarify how the West German government dealt with foreigners suspected of engaging in terrorism. Alexander Clarkson has shown how myriad émigré groups from both right and left operated on West German soil, even enjoying support from the West German state if their goals aligned with Bonn's foreign policy. Mathilde von Bülow's inquiry into the West German National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale; FLN) sanctuary during the Algerian War shows how Algerian nationalists were able to operate thanks to the support of Arab embassies and sympathetic West German politicians, civil society groups and the media. Even as Algerian anti-colonial fighters or Croatian nationalists engaged in acts of violence against their political foes, the ‘response of the West German state was shaped by a combination of strategic ideological concerns and pragmatic tactical considerations’.Footnote 6 The political establishment did not feel targeted by their actions, and while seeking to curb the more extreme elements it also aimed at deriving political capital from the political activism of the émigré groups. This changed in the 1970s with the rise of radical left-wing terrorist groups, who aimed, quixotically as it turned out, to establish a Marxist government by force in the Federal Republic. Left-wing foreigners engaging in political activity, including relatively innocuous human rights advocates, now caused foreboding within a West German political establishment increasingly concerned with security. This article shows how these fears about terrorism, coupled with economic strategising, derailed a humanitarian policy of asylum for political refugees.

Chile

From the end of the Second World War to 1969 bilateral relations between West Germany and countries of the Global South were limited to trade and developmental aid and straitjacketed by the Hallstein Doctrine. This doctrine stipulated that West Germany could not have diplomatic ties with states that recognised communist East Germany.Footnote 7 However, Chancellor Brandt's policy of Ostpolitik, which was a political rapprochement with East Germany and the Eastern Bloc countries that significantly eased trade and travel restrictions, opened a new chapter in West German engagement with the Third World.Footnote 8 Recent scholarship has begun to explore this previously under-researched development.Footnote 9 Relations between West Germany and Chile were more developed thanks to the small but economically powerful German community in Chile.Footnote 10 Already in the 1950s West German Christian Democrats, Free Democrats and Social Democrats alike recognised the rapidly industrialising nation as pivotal for Latin America's future economic development because of its long history of parliamentary democracy and institutional stability. The Christian Democratic Union (CDU)’s ties with the Chilean Christian Democrats were the CDU's strongest outside of Europe.Footnote 11

Relations between Brandt's government and the Chilean socialist Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular (UP) coalition government were friendly in spite of Allende's close ties with East Germany, which dispatched numerous advisers and provided numerous industrial and military goods to Chile.Footnote 12 The West Germans supported Chile's nonviolent path to socialism by providing economic aid packages and purchasing Chilean copper at the same time that the United States was attempting to wreck the Chilean economy.Footnote 13 In West Germany, Social Democratic Party (SPD) voters and members of the Extraparliamentary Opposition (APO) also evinced enthusiasm for Chilean socialism, even though many were unsure whether the peaceful path towards socialism had any chance for success. Still, the dearth of substantive reports about Chile in print or audiovisual media made it difficult for the average West German to familiarise him- or herself with the polarised political condition that Chile found itself in by 1973.Footnote 14

Consequently, the violent military coup d’état against Allende's government on 11 September 1973 shocked the German public as it did the rest of the world. Following months of attempts by right-wing saboteurs to destabilise the government, left-wing seizures of land and property and political infighting within the government, the Chilean military dropped its traditional political neutrality and assumed the rightist cause.Footnote 15 The unbridled violence that the military unleashed upon UP supporters made headlines worldwide, and historians agree that the coup marked a caesura in grassroots human rights activism worldwide.Footnote 16 The massive arrests and roundups that left 1,200 people dead in the weeks after the coup and tens of thousands more tortured and banished to concentration camps in Chile's Atacama Desert in the north and the freezing Patagonian expanse in the south were evidence of the new regime's utter disregard for international opinion.Footnote 17 At a time when activists were increasingly using languages of human rights to criticise precisely this type of repression, this would cost the junta dearly.Footnote 18

Committees of solidarity with Chile mushroomed all over Western Europe and North America, centred in universities, labour unions and progressive civic groups. In the Communist Bloc, solidarity with Chile became state policy.Footnote 19 In West Germany, Chile under Pinochet became the ‘epitome of the absence of rule of law’.Footnote 20 The political persecution of Chilean dissidents resonated strongly with supporters of the Brandt government, who sympathised with the idea of a peaceful transition towards socialism: leftists, progressive Christians, labour unions, the youth organisations of SPD and Free Democratic Party (FDP) and participants in the nascent social movements of second-wave feminism and for human rights.Footnote 21 They voiced their demand that West Germany use its economic might as a bargaining chip for human rights. More concretely, the solidarity movement petitioned for an immediate halt of foreign aid to Chile, no renegotiation of Chilean debt and the freezing of bilateral trade, especially involving military goods, until the junta stayed its repression.Footnote 22 But West German activists’ most vocal demand was that West Germany institute an asylum programme for refugees from Chile. In the wake of the coup, thousands fearing persecution had flocked to the foreign embassies in Santiago. But the West German embassy, for lack of instructions, kept its doors shut.Footnote 23

Bonn sought to accommodate to the demands of grassroots activists by and large. The foreign ministry designated Chile an ‘area of tension’, which precluded any arms sales to the nation. The Ministry for Economic Cooperation (Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit; BMZ) froze economic aid, as West German diplomats at the United Nations supported resolutions criticising the Andean country's human rights record. At the same time, in the era of Ostpolitik – underpinned by the logic that engagement had better chances of achieving change than did isolation or confrontation – it was unlikely that West Germany would unilaterally suspend trade relations or reject the scheduled renegotiation of Chilean debt at the Club de Paris, which would ensure at least some debt repayment.Footnote 24

The West German ambassador to Chile, Kurt Luedde-Neurath, despite his earlier criticism of Allende's economic measures and his resentment of negative reporting from West Germany about Chile after the coup, was critical of the new regime. In his reports the ambassador detailed how the military had unleashed extreme violence onto the civilian population. He also thought it likely that the junta exaggerated reports of dissident activity to legitimise ‘the continued use of martial law’.Footnote 25 The embassy was diligent in pursuing cases of German citizens arrested in the aftermath of the coup and ensuring their release and return.Footnote 26 Luedde-Neurath coordinated a common policy towards the junta with fellow European Community ambassadors and minced no words in his recommendation that West Germany show strength: ‘there will only be success if European states take a hard stance in humanitarian matters towards the regime’.Footnote 27 It was not his dithering that prevented a more speedy admission of Chilean refugees, but Bonn's.

Faced with the prospect of admitting thousands of refugees from Chile, foreign ministry officials were concerned about potential terrorists slipping through. One report asserted that Latin American refugees might bring Germany in ‘too close contact with Latin American problems’.Footnote 28 Foreign ministry officials warned their peers at the interior ministry that prospective refugees were being accused of ‘guerrilla activities, political kidnappings and other violent activities’.Footnote 29 The FDP Deputy Foreign Minister, Karl Moersch, put it more bluntly to the press: no ‘professional revolutionaries’ or ‘political criminals’ were going to be allowed entry.Footnote 30

The foreign ministry was no stranger to political violence in Latin America. Barely three years earlier, in 1970, two of its ambassadors had been kidnapped at their Latin American posts, Karl von Spreti in Guatemala and Ehrenfried von Holleben in Brazil. Holleben was ransomed free but von Spreti did not survive his kidnapping.Footnote 31 These kidnappings had prompted West Germany to come out strongly for the creation of multilateral tools for states to collaborate against terrorists and kidnappers acting across national lines.Footnote 32 Moreover, extremist groups active in West Germany (Red Army Faction [RAF], Revolutionary Cells, Movement 2 June) claimed to be influenced by guerrilla theorists from Latin America such as Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and Carlos Marighella in their quixotic and bloody effort to battle the West German state by kidnapping prominent politicians and bombing US military bases.Footnote 33 Allowing entry to Latin American refugees, who the Chilean government claimed were terrorists, seemed to contradict the tough West German stance towards natives and foreigners suspected of abetting terrorism.Footnote 34

The issue of the refugees posed a dilemma to the SPD, the senior partner in the ruling coalition. Publicly, Social Democrats positioned themselves on the side of the solidarity movement and Chancellor Brandt claimed to be ‘deeply disturbed’ by the coup and proclaimed that West Germany would take ‘more refugees than any other European nation’.Footnote 35 The SPD's resolute stance against the junta reflected the belief of party leaders that Allende's regime had been a ‘democratic and human system’ that had been replaced by a brutally inhuman dictatorship.Footnote 36 At the same time, the decision to grant Chilean leftists asylum in West Germany was not a decision that the SPD could afford to take lightly.

Social Democrats worried about the possibility that Latin American radicals might enter through the asylum programme, possibly engage in terrorist attacks and also hand the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) opposition more rhetorical ammunition to blast the Brandt government.Footnote 37 Social Democrats interpreted Chile's fall into dictatorship through their own perspective of post-war German politics, which positioned the SPD as the guarantor of democracy, against the radical left and the far right. In an op-ed in the left-wing magazine konkret, the Federal Minister of Science and Technology and the Chilean junta's most committed foe in the West German government, Hans Matthöfer, argued that leftist extremism was a major reason for the military coup. The rhetoric of revolution from radicals such as the Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria; MIR) had played into the hands of reactionaries, he observed, but those same revolutionaries had rolled over without resistance after the military uprising.Footnote 38 His assessment was not entirely accurate. The MIR did advocate armed resistance against the junta but was powerless against the overwhelming force of the state. Matthöfer's argument was geared primarily towards a domestic audience. Those radicals had no place in West Germany.

The SPD also needed to keep the left close to Social Democracy. From 1964 until 1973 the SPD gained 700,000 new adherents, most of them young and politically left leaning. These new voters were crucial for Brandt's 1969 victory. This same voting bloc overwhelmingly opposed the coup. The youth organisation of the SPD, the Young Socialists, campaigned zealously for the acceptance of refugees from Chile.Footnote 39 In the months following the coup the foreign and interior ministries were flooded with requests and demands that refugees from Chile be admitted into the Federal Republic. Many made explicit comparisons between, on the one hand, the fate of German Jews and anti-fascists who sought political asylum in the 1930s and, on the other, the Chilean asylum seekers.Footnote 40 Bonn's tough stance on Pinochet cannot be explained, as Jan Eckel has posited, solely by West Germany's lack of economic or strategic interests in Chile.Footnote 41 The decision to accept refugees from Chile reflected Brandt's centre-left political commitments and the SPD's need to maintain the loyalties of its left-wing constituency.

After considerable hesitation, public pressure trumped security concerns. Bonn opened the doors of its embassy in Santiago to refugees and instituted an unprecedented asylum programme for non-European refugees. Initially limited to 100 people, it was later expanded to accommodate 2,500 refugees from Chile.Footnote 42 The asylum programme had neither a historical precedent nor a clear legal basis. Previously, West Germany had only granted asylum to refugees fleeing Eastern European communist countries. The fact that left-wing refugees from Chile were considered apt for admission was an important break with this previous policy.Footnote 43 Moreover, asylum seekers had been required to apply for asylum on West German soil, and never before had the state instituted an asylum programme that required transporting refugees en masse from a foreign country. Asylum law in West Germany was enshrined in article 16, paragraph 2, line 2 of the Basic Law, which simply states ‘politically persecuted individuals enjoy asylum’. The wording gave jurists a great deal of room for interpretation. Consequently, article 16 lost much of its original meaning. The interpretation by the 1970s was that the Basic Law offered a ‘subjective right’ to asylum, to be determined solely by the West German state and according to guidelines that reflected reason of state (Staatsräson) rather than the actual situation of asylum seekers. In 1973 the government wielded its control over the asylum process to ensure the acceptance of refugees from Chile.Footnote 44

The asylum programme was grist for the mill of the conservative Christian Democratic opposition. The government's intention to accept Latin American refugees fit within the conservative thesis, also hurled in the context of the RAF's terror campaign, that the SPD/FDP coalition was soft on terrorism and communism and therefore unfit to rule the country.Footnote 45 After four years in opposition, the CDU/CSU sought to burnish its credentials as an anti-socialist party of law and order to bind voters that opposed the SPD government.Footnote 46

For West German conservatives, admitting refugees from Chile was unacceptable because of their leftist political orientation. The CDU/CSU utilised the government-sponsored admission of leftist refugees to make glib comments that Bonn had twisted its true priorities away from German citizens and onto foreigners in order to obliquely critique Ostpolitik. For example, the chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group and future German president Karl Carstens complained to his peers that ‘the SPD adopted a flaming protest about the violation of human rights in Chile’ but that it was impossible to get a ‘critical word about the violation of human rights in the GDR [German Democratic Republic] and [East] Berlin’.Footnote 47 Moreover, conservatives believed that the refugees would add to domestic threats to inner security.Footnote 48 Christian Democrats reasoned that West Germany's only possible contribution to a reinstitution of democracy in Chile was working with the new regime and helping Chile become prosperous with an increase in bilateral trade, capital investments and the renegotiation of Chilean external debt.Footnote 49

The CDU/CSU resolutely opposed the asylum programme as a threat to domestic security. In the West German parliament, the Bundestag, conservatives denounced the decision to let thousands of ‘radical leftists’, ‘revolutionaries’, ‘agitators’ and ‘leading terrorists’ enter the country disguised as refugees.Footnote 50 Conservative voters across West Germany fell into a moral panic and wrote agitated letters warning the interior ministry not to accept Latin American communists and terrorists who would ‘wreck our system’.Footnote 51 Conservative and far right newspapers editorialised about how the military junta had put an end to roving bands of extremists, and they charged human rights activists with supporting left-wing extremism. The Bild-Zeitung warned that ‘Latin American terrorists [are] infiltrating Germany with forged passports’,Footnote 52 while the far-right Deutschland Magazin predicted an impending ‘terrorist-import from Chile’, warning its readers that Social Democrats were inviting ‘3,000 Tupamaros to bring down the Federal Republic’.Footnote 53 The arch-conservative minister president of Baden-Württemberg, Hans Filbinger (CDU), charged the Brandt administration with accepting ‘enemies of the free democratic order’ and rejected asylum for the foreign minister of UP, Clodomiro Almeyda.Footnote 54

Yet the opposition was ultimately unable to derail the asylum programme for Chile. Conservatives’ interpretation of Chilean affairs followed a Cold War mentality that was becoming increasingly sidelined in the era of détente. Even as the government coalition of Social Democrats and Free Democrats pursued rapprochement with the Communist Bloc, there cannot be any doubt that West Germany remained committed to countering communism. Moreover, conservative's arguments about internal security lost strength after government officials showed their commitment to safeguarding internal security by dispatching a delegation that included an officer of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz; BfV) to the embassy in Santiago. The delegation was tasked with identifying those ‘asylum seekers [who] might threaten or use violence on West German soil’ and denying them entry.Footnote 55 Members of the MIR, the organisation hardest hit by military repression in 1973–1974, were blacklisted.Footnote 56 Once in West Germany, refugees underwent further scrutiny by state officials and were warned to refrain from political activity.Footnote 57

Matters became trickier when human rights activists went a step further and lobbied precisely for the admittance of MIR members. The veteran Social Democrat Peter Blachstein, a former Bundestag member and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, petitioned for the admission of several particularly threatened MIR members. The MIR was particularly anathema to the foreign ministry and the CDU/CSU because it was committed to a revolutionary path towards socialism. Social Democrats, too, were less than willing to accept members of an organisation that had rejected the Allende government's peaceful path towards socialism and had instead engaged in extra-legal land seizures.Footnote 58 One of the asylum seekers was Gladys Díaz, who had been a leading MIR propagandist during the Allende years. By 1976 she had suffered imprisonment and torture at the Villa Grimaldi torture centre for three years. Human rights groups and church-based activists provided evidence that Díaz's activities were nonviolent. Blachstein personally guaranteed that Díaz would not engage in terrorist actions in the Federal Republic. The youth associations of the FDP and SPD also added their voices to those advocating the acceptance of MIR members.Footnote 59

The Lutheran priest Helmut Frenz, recently banished from Chile for his engagement in the human rights organisation Pro-Peace Committee (Comité por la Paz en Chile; COPACHI), argued that MIR members should not be likened to the RAF, but rather to ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the circle of active resistance fighters in the Third Reich’, and that ‘refugees from Chile are certainly not coming to West Germany to endanger inner security. They are coming to our country with a single desire, to return as soon as possible to their homeland’.Footnote 60 Chilean refugees in West Germany seconded these arguments. One of them, José Gonzales, told the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung that ‘internal conditions in Germany are none of our business. We only wish for Germans to not forget Chile’.Footnote 61

Remarkably, even though the struggle between the RAF and the German state was heating up, government officials were willing to back down on the blacklisting of MIR members. The Social Democratic parliamentary secretary of state Jürgen Schmude assured his party colleagues that there was no proof that Díaz had ‘advocated violence or engaged in violence’. Schmude recommended that MIR members not be judged collectively but asylum decisions made on a case-by-case basis.Footnote 62 Díaz was eventually admitted in December 1976 against the wishes of the foreign ministry and over the loud protests of the CDU/CSU.Footnote 63 The deputy chairman of the Social Democrats, Hans Koschnick, defended the decision by pointing to the fact that the MIR had been a legal entity until the coup, and that ‘not every MIR member in Chile was or is a revolutionary criminal’.Footnote 64 Even if the number of MIR members ultimately accepted was minuscule (a total of three), the state demonstrated a willingness to compromise on the question of security to safeguard the human rights of politically persecuted leftists from Chile that it would not demonstrate towards their Argentinean counterparts.Footnote 65

A confluence of factors would contribute to West Germany's about-face with respect to Argentina. The sympathy that the embassy in Buenos Aires and the foreign ministry displayed for the Argentinean junta, founded on anti-communism, the belief in the common foe of terrorism and the desire to forge better economic relations, clouded the government's assessment of Argentinean conditions. The result was not only the blanket refusal of asylum to Argentinean refugees by West Germany but also the deaths of West German citizens caught in the maelstrom of the Dirty War.

Argentina

If the Chilean junta's open violence had given the country the dubious honour of becoming a synecdoche for human rights violations, the Argentinean military's strategy of disappearance successfully delayed international awareness of its misdeeds. Since ousting the populist leader Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, the Argentine military had established itself as the political kingmaker in Argentina. By the mid-1970s, following decades of radicalisation and an unquestioned embrace of the National Security Doctrine, hardline ultranationalist officers had come to see the solution for the country's political cleavages in the intellectual and physical annihilation of the left.Footnote 66 On 24 March 1976 the armed forces of the Argentine Republic seized political power from the inept government of Isabel Perón and instituted a regime of terror.Footnote 67 The new regime was committed to an all-out war against ‘leftist subversion’. Death squads staffed by the intelligence services of the armed forces and the state intelligence service (SIDE) bore the brunt of the repressive work and were logistically supported by the uniformed armed forces and the police. These death squads, made up of five or six men dressed as civilians, would enter private dwellings and seize suspected militants and their collaborators under cover of night or dusk. Most of their victims were never seen again. The military government relied on disappearance to deny its involvement in the repression and to escape any prosecution once the country returned to democratic rule.Footnote 68

The West German reaction to the Argentinian coup was exactly the opposite of its reaction to Chile in 1973. Argentina had a long history of political turmoil, and this coup was the sixth time the military had taken power since the 1930s. In the months leading to the military seizure of power West German journalism had painted Argentina as a country sinking irremediably into anarchy. After years focusing largely on political street violence and assassinations, the kind that reminded West Germans of the darkest days of the Weimar Republic, journalistic reports about the coup were replete with hopes for the economic and political recovery of the South American nation.Footnote 69

The Eastern Bloc's excellent economic ties with the Argentine government – and its shared assessment with the Argentinean Communist Party that ‘democratic’ military generals such as the head of junta, Jorge Rafael Videla, were not to be criticised, lest the ‘fascist’ admiral Emilio Massera take over – ensured that Moscow loyalists continued to highlight the repression in Chile without mentioning the outrages going on in its neighbour to the east. The mouthpiece of the anti-authoritarian solidarity movement with Latin America, the Berlin-based monthly magazine Lateinamerika Nachrichten, explained the lack of a solidarity movement against the ‘most gruesome of Latin America's military dictatorships’.Footnote 70 The Argentinean military had unseated a corrupt and repressive government that had worked closely with the military. Even as the evidence about the existence of ‘prisons and secret concentration camps with over 20,000 inmates’ mounted, the Argentinean junta simply lacked the opprobrium that characterised its Chilean counterpart.Footnote 71

It was up to the national section of Amnesty International to raise the issue of Argentina. Helmut Frenz, who had accepted the job of general secretary of the West German section of Amnesty in November 1976, had been ‘shocked about how . . . the coup in Argentina is being reported in the German public sphere, as if nothing has happened, as if greater chaos has been prevented’.Footnote 72 Already in 1975 Amnesty had begun sending letters to the government emphasising the need to expand the asylum programme to refugees from Argentina. Moreover, Amnesty published brochures about the repression and organised events to inform the West German population. An Amnesty representative was even granted access to the Argentinean embassy in Bonn to inquire about the disquieting reports about disappearances. These efforts bore few results.Footnote 73

By 1976 a different chancellor inhabited Palais Schaumburg in Bonn. Willy Brandt had been forced to resign the chancellorship in 1974 after it was revealed that his close aide, Günter Guillaume, had been spying for East Germany. His successor, Helmut Schmidt, had made himself a name as an expert in grand strategy, economics and a competent manager. But Schmidt had few of Brandt's humanitarian impulses. The new chancellor's domestic priorities were internal security and economic growth. His global agenda, to safeguard détente through strength and predictability, overlapped significantly with US secretary of state Henry Kissinger's realist vision towards the Cold War and clashed with President Jimmy Carter's idealistic human rights oriented foreign policy. Even though he was committed to Ostpolitik, Schmidt left no doubt of his allegiance to the alliance with the United States, NATO and nuclear parity, which did not endear him to the SPD's left wing. Pleasing the left and its lofty goals of international solidarity and human rights was not his priority.Footnote 74

Schmidt's brand of foreign policy had many adherents in the foreign ministry. The ambassador in Buenos Aires, Jörg Kastl, was elated by the regime change. His first post-coup telex stated that military rule was ‘the only viable way’ for Argentina, and that the generals were counting on goodwill ‘from the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany’. If West Germany wanted to prevent Argentina from falling ‘into leftist authoritarian adventures’, Kastl underscored, ‘we will have to work with the new regime’.Footnote 75 Kastl's telex set the pattern by which the West German foreign ministry would deal with the new Argentinean military regime and its practice of state terrorism. Based on Kastl's reports, the foreign ministry decided that ‘doves’ such as General Videla were to be supported lest ‘hawks’ come to power, ensuring that any disagreements over human rights violations could only be settled by means of a ‘silent diplomacy’.Footnote 76 The head of Referat 330, the branch responsible for relations with Latin America's Southern Cone, Karl Alexander Hampe, agreed wholeheartedly with Kastl. He also believed that the Argentinean armed forces had stepped in to save ‘a situation marked by impending economic breakdown and political chaos’.Footnote 77 Interior Minister Werner Maihofer had few qualms in denying Amnesty International's requests for the inclusion of persecuted people from Argentina – including Chileans who had fled there after 1973 – into the programme for the resettlement of refugees from Chile. Schmidt himself ignored a similar request by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Prince Saddrudin Aga Khan, expressed during an official visit of the High Commissioner in Bonn in January 1976.Footnote 78 In April the Foreign Ministry catalogued potential Argentinean refugees as ‘economic migrants,’ which precluded their eligibility for political asylum.Footnote 79 Activists’ claims that such a decision represented a ‘political and moral scandal’ were ignored.Footnote 80

Bonn's stance towards the Argentinean junta, in contrast to its earlier approach towards Chile, was consistent with the Social and Free Democratic coalition's shift to the right on internal security during the RAF's escalating war against the state in the years 1975–1977 that culminated with the German Autumn.Footnote 81 Viewing Argentinean affairs through the lens of their battle with left-wing terrorism, West German officials accepted the perspective of the junta and agreed that the Argentinean military was waging a legitimate war against left-wing terrorism. Bonn failed to pay attention to ever-mounting evidence that the Argentine state was in fact the main terrorist. West Germany's stance was counterposed not only to the interests of Argentinean leftists who sought to escape the country but also to those of West German citizens, who found themselves in the sights of a repressive state.

In March 1976 two West German citizens living in Argentina, Klaus Zieschank and Peter Falk, disappeared. Zieschank, a dual citizen studying at the Technical University Munich, had only recently arrived in Buenos Aires to visit his mother and take up a two-week internship at a local firm. His arrest had all the trappings of a state-sanctioned death squad operation. A group of plainclothesmen driving Ford Falcons had arrested him outside his workplace and then driven him to his mother's house, which they ransacked of items of value before driving off with Zieschank.Footnote 82

Ambassador Kastl was initially ‘very worried’ and encouraged Chancellor Schmidt to stand ‘resolutely’ to ‘save them . . . and to prevent future German victims in the fight against terrorism’.Footnote 83 Schmidt wrote a stern letter to Videla warning the general to reveal Zieschank and Falk's whereabouts, lest the issue become ‘a strain on the friendly relations between our countries’.Footnote 84 But Kastl and Schmidt's tough stances were short lived. Videla accused both men of being left-wing terrorists, even while maintaining that neither was in the custody of the armed forces or the police. Kastl was convinced that ‘the Argentinean government has put all their cards on the table’, and advised the chancellor against pursuing the issue any further.Footnote 85 Even as Zieschank and Falk's cases gained national prominence, with even avowedly conservative newspapers encouraging the government to take a strong stance, both men failed to reappear.Footnote 86

They would not be the only West German victims. In March 1977 another West German citizen, Elisabeth Käsemann, daughter of the renowned Tübingen theologian Ernst Käsemann, also disappeared. Käsemann had been active in the West German student movement of the 1960s and had come to the home of Latin America's best-organised working-class movement ten years earlier because of her fascination with Latin America's prospects for social revolution. Her work in Buenos Aires's slums and Trotskyist loyalties made her a target for the military government, which ordered her execution in May 1976 after two months of systematic interrogations, torture and rape.Footnote 87 The Argentinean government claimed that Käsemann had been killed in a firefight between armed forces and left-wing insurgents, even though the evidence that she had been in the hands of the armed forces at the time and that her death had been the result of a state-ordered execution was overwhelming.Footnote 88

The sexist vitriol and derision hurled against female left-wing insurgents by mass media and terrorism experts prejudiced West German officials against Käsemann.Footnote 89 Even though Buenos Aires had failed to produce credible evidence for her involvement in acts of murder or kidnapping, the foreign ministry believed that proof for ‘Käsemann's activity in [Argentina's] guerrilla’ would soon surface. For foreign ministry officials, there was no doubt – even in the absence of facts – that Käsemann was a dangerous terrorist who had reaped what she had sewn by immersing herself in the internal affairs of a foreign country.Footnote 90 The official view was that her death needed to ‘be seen within the background of the civil war–like conditions in Argentina. The state has been waging a bitter battle against strong guerrilla groups . . . Even today barely a day goes by without reports of attacks, kidnappings, assaults, firefights’.Footnote 91

Chancellor Schmidt used similar arguments in a letter to his Hamburg constituents who were outraged by Käsemann's death and his administration's pusillanimous response. ‘No government can give an absolute guarantee for the protection of its own citizens [and] this is especially so in the case of Argentina, which is undergoing severe domestic troubles’, Schmidt wrote. ‘When Germans involve themselves in the domestic and perhaps armed hostilities of their host countries, [they are] tacitly accepting the risk’.Footnote 92 The Argentinean Ambassador in Bonn, Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú, gleefully reported, after meeting Schmidt at a dinner, that the chancellor had fully accepted the Argentine version of events because he was ‘well acquainted with [terrorist] tactics’.Footnote 93 By 1978 West German officials estimated that the number of ‘disappeared’ Germans had reached thirteen, while eight more were imprisoned. Even while acknowledging rather modest results, the foreign ministry maintained that ‘discreet pressure’ was the best way of influencing the Argentine government.Footnote 94

In the course of 1977 human rights violations in Argentina gained widespread global publicity. In March Amnesty International unveiled the report of its official visit to Argentina the previous November. Amnesty detailed that death squads acted in tandem with the armed forces, that ‘there are between 5,000–6,000 political prisoners, at least two-thirds of whom have not been charged but are detained indefinitely’, and claimed that torture was taking place ‘as an instrument of policy’.Footnote 95 After Amnesty's report, the regime in Buenos Aires faced ever-increasing pressure at the United Nations and launched a counteroffensive to discredit the efforts of Amnesty and the Carter administration as an ‘anti-Argentine’ conspiracy.Footnote 96

The report made Kastl squeamish about his support for the junta, and he recommended increased overtures to the Argentinean military to scale back the repression. But he also apologetically argued that torture, while unfortunate, was a customary practice throughout Latin America and not a reason for singling out Argentina for criticism.Footnote 97 Kastl stuck to the principle that West Germany should maintain its ‘silent diplomacy’ and keep its distance from ‘counterproductive’ human rights talk á la Carter, which he believed would only strengthen the hard-liners. He repeated his earlier calls for supporting the doves around Videla lest the hawks gained the upper hand. Underlying this argumentation was Kastl's view that human rights issues needed to be broached in a way consistent with Bonn's soft-spoken diplomacy towards the Communist Bloc.Footnote 98

The pro-Argentina attitude of the foreign ministry had an economic motive as well. The ‘Oil Shock’ and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system dealt major blows to a West German economy reliant on the export of consumer goods, heavy industry and technology.Footnote 99 Rising unemployment meant fewer scruples in selling weapons.Footnote 100 Whereas Chile had been designated an ‘area of tension’ with ease in 1973, the Schmidt government refused to do the same with Argentina. This ensured the steady supply of war goods at the same time that the Carter administration was decreasing its military support for the regime. The West German foreign ministry regularly approved the sale of and transit licenses for weapons, munitions, hand grenades and heavy war goods such as battle tanks and armoured cars, following the motto: ‘Argentina is one of our most important economic and political partners in Latin America’. Rejecting requests for the sale of military equipment ‘could damage our traditionally good relations’.Footnote 101

The economic motive became most evident when the Schmidt cabinet approved a state credit of 340 million Deutschmarks for the production of submarines destined for Argentina in December 1977 to secure workplaces at a shipyard in Emden, Lower Saxony.Footnote 102 The West German push to deliver nuclear technology to the junta in exchange for delivery of uranium, a move that angered the United States as well as domestic human rights and antinuclear activists, must be seen in a similar light.Footnote 103 Between the coup in 1976 and the outbreak of the Falklands War in 1982, when West German state officials were forced to curtail the sale of weapons to Argentina, more than 4.5 billion Deutschmarks worth of armaments had been sold to the military junta, in spite of a ‘very restrictive export policy for weaponry’.Footnote 104 Besides the lucrative sale of arms, the West German government ensured through its junta-friendly policies that companies such as Mercedes-Benz and Siemens would retain their privileged access to the Argentine market.Footnote 105

West Germany's policies were not grounded on ignorance of the brutal repression that gripped Argentina. Foreign ministry officials were sufficiently aware of the junta's brutality to reject attempts by Argentinean officials to draw uncomfortable parallels between Argentina's ‘war on terrorism’ and West Germany's campaign against the RAF. On at least one occasion, an embassy official in Buenos Aires was compelled to clarify in detail the differences between Argentinean and West German counterterrorism strategies.Footnote 106 Moreover, the West Germans denied repeated requests to allow Argentinean officers to train with West Germany's elite counterterrorism unit, GSG 9. After GSG 9’s successful rescue of the kidnapped Lufthansa flight 181 in Mogadishu, Argentinean officials were keen on acquiring training for their own intelligence services. The West German government, however, denied all four requests by the Argentinean military attaché. The foreign ministry found it particularly worrisome that the Argentineans demonstrated no interest in solving cases of kidnappings ‘without the application of violence’.Footnote 107

By late 1977 civil society activists made a renewed effort to change West German foreign policy towards the Argentinean junta. The Käsemann case had brought intense public scrutiny on the foreign ministry and the embassy in Buenos Aires. A religious commentator articulated the opinion of many, arguing that the foreign ministry had made itself an ‘accomplice to murder’.Footnote 108 With the FIFA World Cup 1978 about to take place in Argentina, human rights activists mounted a campaign with the motto ‘Yes to Football, No to Torture!’ that made the practice of state terrorism in Argentina, and the craven response of the West German state officials to it, once and for all a matter of public knowledge and debate.Footnote 109

The foreign ministry responded by scorning the human rights movement and defending the Argentinean regime. Karl Alexander Hampe believed that ‘the image, that has been propagated about developments in Argentina, is wrong’. Hampe trusted that Videla and the junta were being honest when they spoke of ‘restoring rule of law, [and] respecting human rights’, because ‘he [Videla] and most other generals see themselves as part of the West and Christian . . . ways of living’. West Germany's top official for South American and Caribbean affairs explained that this pro-Western attitude had become evident in the Argentinean asylum programme for refugees from the Third Reich in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 110 Hampe criticised ‘student circles and Latin American immigrants’ for the ‘one-sided’ way in which they informed the West German public about the situation in Argentina.Footnote 111 Critics of the Argentinean junta in West Germany were not ‘objective’ because they failed to take into account ‘the civil war–like situation in Argentina [and] the involvement of foreigners in Argentinean affairs’.Footnote 112 Using almost the same language as the Argentinean junta, Hampe believed in the existence of an ‘international campaign of Marxist circles supported by Amnesty International, student circles, World Church Council and Latin American immigrant groups’,Footnote 113 whose only purpose was to ‘damage our relations with the military government in Argentina’ rather than genuine ‘humanitarianism’.Footnote 114

The deputy foreign minister, Hildegard Hamm-Brücher, parried queries from concerned Social Democratic delegates with the worst sort of historical relativism. Using an inverse Holocaust metaphor, Hamm-Brücher argued that criticism of the Argentinean junta was exaggerated. Its crimes did ‘not match those of the Third Reich’ after all.Footnote 115 Ambassador Guiñazú reported to his superiors in Buenos Aires that in spite of the energetic ‘anti-Argentine campaign’ by Amnesty International and other groups, the ability of human rights advocates to influence the West German state's attitude was negligible.Footnote 116

Guiñazú’s conclusions were not completely accurate. The West German government was compelled to make some concessions on the question of admitting refugees from Argentina after the ‘Yes to Football, No to Torture!’ campaign gained steam.Footnote 117 Granting admission to 500 asylum seekers from Argentina was now seen as imperative to get a ‘positive public reaction’.Footnote 118 Foreign ministry officials assured their colleagues at the interior ministry that ‘the restrictive position of the Argentine government towards formerly active terrorists’ would make it impossible for terrorists to board a plane for West Germany. The interior ministry agreed under the condition that all asylum seekers undergo even more rigorous security checks.Footnote 119 Only seventy-four Argentineans passed the required security checks and were admitted by the time the programme was discontinued after the collapse of the military junta in 1983.Footnote 120

Conclusion

West German foreign policy towards state terrorism in the Southern Cone did not follow a consistent line. Bonn's tough policy towards Chile differed substantially from its conciliatory approach towards Argentina. This had direct repercussions on who could apply for and receive asylum in West Germany. As West German officials perceived Latin American refugees to be a threat to internal security, and crafted their policies towards them accordingly, their public assurances that human rights were a central tenet of Bonn's foreign policy rang increasingly hollow. This article complicates the narrative of a ‘breakthrough’ of human rights in the 1970s and demonstrates the utility of analysing the history of human rights from a national perspective. West German governments accepted human rights considerations in their foreign policy only fitfully and unevenly. Moreover, the strong reaction to the Chilean junta did not create a precedent by which other South American dictatorships were assessed. Grassroots activists faced an uphill battle in their advocacy for human rights in Argentina. If there was a human rights revolution in the 1970s at all, it was one that swelled from below. The eventual acceptance of South American refugees into the FRG was less a testament to the human rights convictions of West German politicians than to the resilience of grassroots activists.

This article has argued that the West German policy towards state terrorism in South America was heavily predicated on the different priorities of the two Social Democratic Chancellors that governed the FRG from 1969 to 1982. The Chilean solidarity movement, a global phenomenon in the wake of the 1973 military coup, gained widespread support amongst the traditional Social Democratic base. In setting up a humanitarian asylum policy that enabled persecuted Chileans to come to West Germany, the Brandt government overrode concerns that terrorists might be hiding amongst the refugees. Under his successor, Helmut Schmidt, these concerns trumped Brandt's earlier policy. Reversing its previous policy towards Chile, the West German government welcomed the new regime as an anti-communist and anti-terrorist bastion in South America and a market for West German industry. The Schmidt government worried exclusively about non-state actors engaging in terrorism, primarily those with left-wing motivations, at the expense of state terrorism. West German government officials sympathised with the ‘war’ against radical left terrorism in Argentina, with deleterious effects for both Argentinean political refugees and West German citizens who ran afoul of Argentinean authorities because the West German government refused to aid them.

For human rights activists, the SPD/FDP government's approach towards Argentina demonstrated an unconscionable abrogation of its duties to protect its own citizens and the constitutionally granted right of asylum of persecuted non-Germans. For them, the defence of human rights needed to be pursued even at the cost of straining bilateral relations and forfeiting economic gain.Footnote 121 Schmidt's disregard for grassroots activists would hurt his party dearly. Already disenchanted with the New Left's penchant for sectarianism (and in a few cases violence), many voters concerned with human rights also turned their back on Social Democracy and migrated towards alternate political directions such as environmentalism in the 1980s. The product of a myriad of single-issue activists who coa lesced in their rejection of politics-as-usual, the Green Party that entered parliament in 1983 championed human rights and international solidarity as vehemently as it pushed for environmental protection and fought nuclear power.Footnote 122 The eventual elevation of human rights in the late twentieth century to the ‘doxa of our time,’ to use Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann's words, must be seen as the product of an irregular process of defeats and political realignments than a mass turn to utopia.Footnote 123

Footnotes

The author wishes to thank Devin Pendas, David Florey, Fumi Inoue, the Graduate Workshop at the Clough Center for Constitutional Democracy, the editors at CEH and the two anonymous reviewers for their careful comments and helpful suggestions.

1 Laqueur, Walter, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001 [1977]), 147.

2 Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). Also see Moyn, ‘The 1970s as a Turning Point in Human Rights History’ and Jan Eckel, ‘The Rebirth of Politics from the Spirit of Morality: Explaining the Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s’, in Samuel Moyn and Jan Eckel, eds., The Breakthrough: Human Rights in the 1970s, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 1–14, 227–59; and Eckel, Jan, Die Ambivalenz des Guten: Menschenrechte in der Internationalen Politik seit den 1940ern (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2014), 637.

3 On anti-Apartheid activism in the FRG see Sebastian Justke and Sebastian Tripp, ‘Ökonomie und Ökumene: Westdeutsche und Südafrikanische Kirchen und das Apartheid-System in den 1970er- und 1980er-Jahren’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, 13, Online–Ausgabe (2016): 280–301. Anti-communist employment of human rights is discussed in Wildenthal, Lora, The Language of Human Rights in West Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), ch. 3.

4 Rock, Philipp, Macht, Märkte und Moral. Zur Rolle der Menschenrechte in der Außenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in den Sechziger und Siebziger Jahren (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2010); Szatkowski, Tim, ‘Von Sihanouk bis Pol Pot. Diplomatie und Menschenrechte in den Beziehungen der Bundesrepublik zu Kambodscha (1967–1979)’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 61, 1 (Jan. 2013), 1–34; Eckel, Jan, ‘Menschenrechte und der Wandel der Außenpolitik in den 1970er Jahren: Die Bundesrepublik im Vergleich’, in Levsen, Sonja and Torp, Cornelius, eds., Wo Liegt Die Bundesrepublik?: Vergleichende Perspektiven auf die Westdeutsche Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 185–204; Peter, Matthias, ‘Konferenzdiplomatie als Mittel der Entspannung: Die KSZE-Politik der Regierung Schmidt/Genscher 1975–1978’, in Altrichter, Helmut and Wentker, Hermann, eds., Der KSZE-Prozess: Vom Kalten Krieg zu einem Neuen Europa 1975 bis 1990 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011), 15–28.

5 Simpson, Bradley R., ‘Bringing the Non-State Back in: Human Rights and Terrorism since 1945’, in Costigliola, Frank and Hogan, Michael J., eds., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 260–83; Bade, Klaus J., Migration in European History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).

6 von Bülow, Mathilde, West Germany, Cold War Europe and the Algerian War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Clarkson, Alexander, Fragmented Fatherland: Immigration and Cold War Conflict in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1980, Monographs in German History, vol. 34 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 143.

7 See Gray, William, Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949–1969 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

8 See Sarotte, Mary E., Dealing with the Devil: East Germany, Détente and Ostpolitik (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

9 Hein, Bastian, Die Westdeutschen und die Dritte Welt– Entwicklungspolitik und Entwicklungsdienste zwischen Reform und Revolte, 1959–1974 (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2005); Slobodian, Quinn, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Hong, Young-Sun, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

10 See Barbian, Nikolaus, Auswartige Kulturpolitik und “Auslandsdeutsche” in Lateinamerika, 1949–1973 (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014) and Villarroel Heinrich, Tomas, Im Schatten des Ost-West-Konflikts: der Aufbau politisch-kultureller Beziehungen zwischen Westdeutschland und Chile 1952–1966 (Würzburg: Nomos Verlag, 2017).

11 Dufner, Georg, Partner im Kalten Krieg: Die Politischen Beziehungen zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und Chile (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014), 110–43; Thesing, Josef, ‘Die Konrad–Adenauer–Stiftung in der Welt. Der Beginn der Arbeit des Instituts für Internationale Solidarität’, Historisch–Politische Mitteilungen, 21 (2014), 305–18.

12 Inga Emmerling, Die DDR und Chile (1960–1989): Aussenpolitik, Aussenhandel und Solidarität (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2013), 300–40.

13 See Dufner, Partner im Kalten Krieg, 207–45; Harmer, Tanya, Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 54–9.

14 Müller–Plantenberg, Urs, Nachschläge: Ausgewählte politisch-soziologische Arbeiten 1997–2001 (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2002), 74–83.

15 See Haslam, Jonathan, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide (London and New York: Verso, 2005); Winn, Peter, La Revolución Chilena (Santiago de Chile: LOM, 2013); Guardiola-Rivera, Óscar, Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup against Salvador Allende, September 11, 1973 (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

16 Eckel, Jan, ‘Under a Magnifying Glass: The International Human Rights Campaign against Chile in the Seventies’, in Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 321–41; William Kelly, Patrick, ‘The 1973 Chilean Coup and the Origins of Transnational Human Rights Activism’, Journal of Global History 8, 1 (Mar. 2013), 166.

17 de Zárate, Verónica Valdivia Ortiz, ‘Terrorism and Political Violence during the Pinochet Years: Chile, 1973–1989’, Radical History Review, 85 (Winter 2003), 186–7.

18 See Cmiel, Kenneth, ‘The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States’, The Journal of American History 86, 3 (1999): 1231–50 and Patrick William Kelly, “Sovereignty and Salvation: Transnational Human Rights Activism in the Americas in the Long 1970s,” PhD Dissertation, (University of Chicago, 2015).

19 See Power, Margaret, ‘The U.S. Movement with Solidarity with Chile in the 1970s’, Latin American Perspectives 36, 6 (Nov. 2009), 46–66. For Canada see Shayne, Julie D., They Used to Call Us Witches: Chilean Exiles, Culture, and Feminism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009). For Western and Eastern Europe, see Christiaens, Kim, Goddeeris, Idesbald and Rodriguez Garcia, Magaly, eds., European Solidarity with Chile, 1970s–1980s (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2014). For Cuba see Harmer, Tanya, ‘The View from Havana: Chilean Exiles in Cuba and Early Resistance to Chile's Dictatorship, 1973–1977’, Hispanic American Historical Review 96, 1 (Feb. 2016): 109–46.

20 Citation in Stolle, Michael, ‘Inbegriff des Unrechtsstaates– Zur Wahrnehmung der Chilenischen Diktatur in der Deutschprachigen Presse zwischen 1973 und 1989’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 9 (2003): 793–813.

21 See Dufner, Partner im Kalten Krieg, chs. 4–5; Balsen, Werner and Rossel, Karl, Hoch die Internationale Solidarität: Zur Geschichte der Dritte Welt Bewegung in der Bundesrepublik (Cologne: Kölner Volksblatt Verlag, 1986), 301–73 and Seibert, Niels, Vergessene Proteste: Internationalismus und Antirassismus 1964–1983 (Münster: Unrast, 2008), 165–80.

22 See Georg Dufner, ‘West Germany: Professions of Political Faith, the Solidarity Movement and New Left Imaginaries’, in Christiaens, et al., eds., European Solidarity with Chile, 163–86.

23 ‘Chile Flüchtlinge: Am Rande der Verzweiflung’, Chile Nachrichten, 10, 1 (Dec. 1973); Camacho Padilla, Fernando, ‘Los Asilados de las Embajadas de Europa Occidental en Chile tras el Golpe Militar y sus Consecuencias Diplomáticas: El Caso de Suecia’, Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe / European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 81 (Oct. 2006), 21–41.

24 Embassy Santiago de Chile to Foreign Ministry, ‘Betr.: Länderaufzeichnung’, 16 Apr. 1974, (PA, AA), ZA, 100584, 4–7; Marré, ‘Ausfuhr von Waffen nach Chile’, 9 Nov. 1973, PA AA, ZA, 100592; Abteilung für Außenwirtschaftspolitik. . ., ‘Betr.: Umschuldsverhandlungen mit Chile’, 2 Apr. 1974, PA AA, ZA, 100607.

25 301-320.20 CHL ‘Sachstand’, 2 Oct. 1973, Politisches Archiv Auswärtiges Amt, (hereafter PA AA), Zwischenarchiv (ZA), 100.581; Santiago Embassy (Luedde Neurath) to Foreign Ministry, ‘Linksextremistische Aktivitäten’, 6 Mar. 1974, PA AA, ZA, Bd. 100583.

26 Santiago Embassy (Gerhardt Mikesch) to Foreign Ministry, ‘Verhaftung von zwei deutschen staatsangehoerigen in Santiago’, 17 Sept. 1973, PA AA, ZA, Bd. 100585.

27 Santiago Embassy (Luedde Neurath) to Foreign Ministry, ‘Lage in Chile, insbesondere frage politische Verfolgte. Besprechung der eg-Missionchefs am 2.11.1973’, 3 Nov. 1973, PA AA, ZA, Bd. 100605.

28 ‘Aufnahme von Ausländern, die sich in Chile aufhalten, durch die Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, 30 Oct. 1973, PA AA, ZA, 100604.

29 Foreign Ministry (Marré) to Minister of the Interior, 10 Oct. 1973, B 106/69037, Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BArch).

30 Horst Bieber, ‘Die Chilenen kommen: Nicht alle Vorwürfe gegen das Bonner Prüfungsverfahren stimmen’, Die Zeit, 7 Dec. 1973.

31 See Zedler, Jörg, Karl Graf von Spreti: Bilder einer Diplomatischen Karriere (Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2008), 135–; Edler Baumann, Carol, The Diplomatic Kidnappings: A Revolutionary Tactic of Urban Terrorism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 78–81.

32 See Blumenau, Bernhard, The United Nations and Terrorism: Germany, Multilateralism, and Antiterrorism Efforts in the 1970s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), ch.1.

33 Kraushaar, Wolfgang, ed., Die RAF und der Linke Terrorismus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006), 157–204.

34 See Slobodian, Quinn, ‘The Borders of the Rechtsstaat in the Arab Autumn: Deportation and Law in West Germany, 1972/73’, German History 31, 2 (1 June 2013): 204–24.

35 U.S. Embassy Bonn to State Department, ‘Brandt's September 12 Press Conference’, Electronic Telegrams, 1973, RG 59, National Archives and Records Administration, II; ‘Zusagen für Chile-Flüchtlinge. Brandt: Wir werden mehr aufnehmen als jedes europäische Land’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 10 Dec. 1973.

36 Bruno Friedrich, ‘Hilfe für die Verfolgten in Chile: Wird nach Allende auch die Demokratie beseitigt?’, SPD–Pressedienst, 24 Sept. 1973.

37 ‘Protokoll über die Sitzung des Parteivorstandes am 9 November 1973 in Bonn’, Bestand Bruno Friedrich, Folder 1/BFAA000327, AdSD.

38 Hans Matthöfer, ‘Die Lehren’, konkret, Feb. 1975.

39 Reichardt, Sven, Authentizität und Gemeinschaft: Linksalternatives Leben in den Siebziger und Frühen Achtziger Jahren (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014), 12–14; SPD, Unterbezirk Düsseldorf, Jugsozialisten–Projektgruppe Dritte Welt to MDB Matthoefer, et al., 11 Feb. 1974, SPD-Parteivorstand, Folder 7882, Archiv der Sozialdemokratie at Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (AdSD), Bonn–Bad–Godesberg.

40 See, for example, Maria Schlüter and Meta Röder (Bonn) to Ministry of the Interior, 24 Nov. 1973; Dorothea Steinhausen (Clausthal) to Minister of the Interior, 24 Nov.1973; Petra Rosengarten (AI, Baden Baden) to the Minister of the Interior, 25 Nov.1973; Wolfgang Cornely (Würselen) to Heinz Dietrich Genscher, 25 Nov. 1973, B106/ 69038 Folder 3, BArch.

41 Eckel, ‘Menschenrechte und der Wandel der Außenpolitik in den 1970er Jahren: Die Bundesrepublik Im Vergleich’, 199.

42 ‘Kabinettsitzung am 5 Dezember 1973: hier: Aufnahme von Personen aus Chile in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, 4 Dec. 1973, PA AA, ZA, 100606; ‘Preseerklärung’, 3 Jan. 1974, PA AA, ZA, 100603; Foreign Ministry to Jürgen Wefelmeier, 5 Sept. 1974, PA AA, ZA, 100.607; 301-383.26/1 ‘Chile’, 3 June 1975, PA AA, ZA, 101787; Deutscher Bundestag, 8 WP, 144 Sitzung, (15 Mar. 1979): Sten.Ber., 11530.

43 Poutros, Patrice G., ‘Asylum in Postwar Germany: Refugee Admission Policies and their Practical Implementation in the Federal Republic and the GDR Between the Late 1940s and the Mid-1970s’, Journal of Contemporary History 49, 1 (2014): 115–33.

44 Gusy, Christoph, Asylrecht und Asylverfahren in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Königstein: Athenäum, 1980), 51, 91–2; Heine, Regina and Marx, Reinhard, Ausländergesetz mit Neuem Asylverfahrensrecht (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1978), 273, 279.

45 Hanshew, Karrin, Terror and Democracy in West Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 141–.

46 Bösch, Frank, ‘Die Krise als Chance. Die Neuformierung der Christdemokraten in den Siebziger Jahren’, in Jarausch, Konrad, eds., Das Ende der Zuversicht? Die Siebziger Jahre als Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2008), 296–309.

47 ‘Sitzung am Montag 14. Oktober 1974’, in Kohl, ‘Wir haben alle Chancen’: Die Protokolle des CDU–Bundesvorstands 1973–1976. 1 Halbband: 1973–1974 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2015), 850.

48 ‘Fraktionsprotokoll der Fraktionssitzung vom 2. October 1973, Vorsitz: prof. Carstens. Beginn: 15.07–18.25’, 2 Oct. 1973, Archiv für Christlich Demokratische Politik (ACDP), Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Sankt Augustin.

49 ‘Fraktionsprotokoll der Fraktionssitzung vom 16. Okt. 1973’, 16 Oct. 1973, Folder 1034/1.

ACDP.

50 Deutscher Bundestag, 7. WP, 70 Sitzung, (12 Dec. 1973): Sten.Ber., 4308–4309. ‘Fragen des Abgeordneten Dr. Max Kunz (Weiden) (CDU/CSU)’, 15 Mar. 1974, PA AA, ZA, B33 100603.

51 Citation in Artur A. to Interior Minister Genscher, 9 Dec. 1973, B106/ 69037, Folder 2, BArch K.

52 ‘Großfahndung nach chilenischen Terroristen in Deutschland: Lebt der Entführer des deutschen Botschafters von Holleben unter uns?’ Bild–Zeitung, 14 Mar. 1974.

53 ‘Terroristen–Import aus Chile’, Deutschland Magazin, Dec./Jan. 1973–1974, 6, 47.

54 Hans Filbinger to Chancellor Willy Brandt, 19 Feb. 1974, Abteilung Bundeskanzleramt, B136–6243, BArch K.

55 ‘Unsere Asylpraxis in Chile’, 30 Nov. 1973, PA AA, ZA, 100.606.

56 ‘Sachstand’, undated, PA AA, ZA, 100603; Wojak, Irmtrud and Holz, Pedro, ‘Chilenische Exilanten in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (1972–1989)’, in Krohn, Claus–Dieter, Rothermund, Erwin, Winckler, Lutz, Koepke, Wulf, eds., Exil Im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Edition Text–Kritik, 2000), 175.

57 Deutscher Bundestag, 7. WP, 143 Sitzung, (23 Jan. 1975): Sten.Ber., 9944.

58 See Palieraki, Eugenia, ¡La Revolución ya viene! El MIR Chileno en los años sesenta (Santiago: Lom, 2014) and Vitale, Luis, et al., Para recuperar la memoria histórica: Frei, Allende y Pinochet (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones ChileAmerica, 1999), 153–4.

59 See Peter Blachstein to Jürgen Schmude, undated letter [ca. May 1976]; Constantin Thun to Jürgen Schmude, 13 May 1976 and Klaus Meschkat (Sozialwissenschaftliches Seminar Technische Universitaet Hannover), ‘Stellungsnahme zur Erteilung der Einreiseerlaubnis in die Bundesrepublik Deutschland für Gladys Díaz’, 6 Nov. 1976, all in Bestand Jürgen Schmude, 1/JSAJ000203, AdSD.

60 Helmut Frenz, ‘Projektentwurf: Patenschaftsprogram zur Betreuung und Befreiung politischer Häftlinge in Chile’, 1 May 1976, 2/93/7105, Evangelisches Zentralarchiv (EZA), Berlin.

61 Jürgen Tebrath, ‘Chile-Flüchtlinge im Wartestand: Wir wollen in Deutschland nur überleben. José denkt an zu Hause, nicht an Terror’, Westdeutsche Allgemeine, 21 May 1974.

62 See Jürgen Schmude to Werner Staak (Senator fuer Inneres der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg), 10 May 1976, and Jürgen Schmude to Staatsminister im AA Wischnewski, ‘Betr. Aufnahme von Chilenen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland’, 27 Jan. 1976, in Bestand Jürgen Schmude, 1/JSAJ000203, AdSD.

63 Marré to Dohnanyi, ‘Aufnahme zugunsten von Chileflüchtlinge’, 25 May 1977, PA AA B33 ZA 108046; Deutscher Bundestag, 8. WP, 49 Sitzung, (19 Oct.1977): Sten.Ber. 3743–44.

64 Hans Koschnick to Minister President of North–Rhine Westfalia, Minister President of Hessen, Mayor of Berlin, Mayor and President of the senate of Hamburg, Senator of interior of Berlin Neubauer, Interior Senator of Hamburg Werner Staak, Interior Senator of Bremen, and the Parliamentary state secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Jürgen Schmude, 18 Feb. 1976, B Rep. 002, Nr. 37 438, Landesarchiv Berlin.

65 Deutscher Bundestag, 8. WP, 49 Sitzung, (19 Oct. 1977): Sten.Ber. 3743–44.

66 See Michael Schmidli, William, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and U.S. Cold War Policy toward Argentina (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2013), 45–50. More broadly see Finchelstein, Federico, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

67 Novaro, Marcos and Palermo, Vicente, La Dictadura Militar (1976–1983): Del Golpe de Estado a La Restauración Democrática (Barcelona: Paidos, 2003), 17–.

68 Robben, Antonius C.G.M., ‘State Terror in the Netherworld: Disappearance and Reburial in Argentina’, in Sluka, Jeffrey A., ed., Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 94.

69 ‘Die argentinischen Streitkraefte übernehmen den Kampf gegen die Guerrilleros’, FAZ, 10 Oct. 1975; ‘Montoneros Drohen: Kein Soldat ist vor uns sicher’, Die Welt, 10 Oct. 1975; ‘27 Tote bei einem Rebellenüberfall in Argentinien’, Kölner Stadtanzeiger, 7 Oct. 1975; ‘Geheimdienst–Chef im Milchladen erschossen’, Bild–Zeitung, 18 Sept.1975; ‘Terror in Argentinien: Neun Tote’, Welt am Sonntag, 14 Sept. 1975; Martin Gerster, ‘Argentiniens Extremisten verlieren ihre Basis: Nach den Provinzen und Gewerkschaften sind nun auch die Universitäten gleichgeschaltet’, FAZ, 12 Mar. 1975; Romeo Rey, ‘Ende einer Legende’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 26 Mar. 1976; ‘Die Argentinische Junta festigt ihre Macht. Linksextreme Parteien verboten’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 Mar. 1976.

See Liezke, Dagmar, ‘Fußball, Terror, Menschenrechte’, in Baer, Willy, and Dellwo, Karl–Heinz, eds., Daß du Zwei Tage schweigst unter der Folter! (Hamburg: Laika Verlag, 2010), 106–110.

70 ‘Ein Jahr Militärdiktatur’, Argentinien: Sondernummer der Chile–Nachrichten, Berlin (West), 24 Mar. 1977, 4; ‘Argentinien’, Lateinamerika Nachrichten 63, 29 Sept. 1978, 39; ‘Lage in Argentinien: Gespräch des Genossen Hermann Axen, Mitglied des Politbüros und Sekretärs des ZK der SED, mit Genossen Hector P. Agosti et al’, 15 Oct. 1976, DY 30/ IV B 2/20 101, Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde, Berlin. Also see Gilbert, Isidoro, El Oro de Moscú: Historia Secreta de la Diplomacia, el Comercio, y la Inteligencia Soviética en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1994).

71 ‘Ein Jahr Militärdiktatur’, 4–5.

72 ‘Manche Kirchen scheuen sich vor der Chile–Solidarität: Interview mit Bischof Frenz in Westberlin’, Berliner Extradienst, 13 Apr. 1976.

73 Herbert Ladwig (ai), to Minister of the Interior Werner Maihofer, ‘Aufnahme Lateinamerikanischer Fluechtlinge aus Argentinien’, 10 Dec. 1975, PA AA, ZA, 103590; Federico Carlos Barttfield, ‘visita miembro organización Amnesty International’, 5 Feb. 1976, Bonn desde N0 2 hasta N0 102, 1976, (Desde Enero hasta Marzo), Parte 1, Reservado, Caja AH/0070, Serie 61, Embajada en Bonn, Archivo de Cancillería, Buenos Aires.

74 Spohr, Kristina, The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 54–62, 122–30.

75 Jörg Kastl, to Foreign Ministry, ‘Betr.: Argentinischer Staatsstreich vom 24.3.76; hier: Möglichkeiten und Gefahren’, 2 Apr. 1976, in 1. Juli Bis 31. Dezember 1976. Akten zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, hrsg. im Auftr. des Auswärtigen Amts vom Institut für Zeitgeschichte; 1976/II (München: Oldenbourg, 2007).

76 Weitbrecht, Dorothee, ‘Profite versus Menschenleben: Argentinien und das Schwierige Erbe der Deutschen Diplomatie’, Blätter für Deutsche und Internationale Politik 58, 7 (2013): 93–104.

77 Karl Alexander Hampe, ‘Gewalttätigkeit in Argentinien und ihre Auswirkungen auf das deutsch–argentinische Verhältnis’, 1 Aug. 1977 PA AA, ZA, Bd. 107921.

78 Werner Maihofer to Herbert Ladwig, ‘Aufnahme Lateinamerikanischer Flüchtlinge aus Argentinien’, 15 Jan. 1976, PA AA, ZA, B 33, 103590; Oldenkott, ‘Vermerk über das Gespräch des Bundeskanzlers mit dem Hohen Flüchtlingskomissar der Vereinten Nationen, Prinz Sadruddin Aga Khan, am 30. Januar von 9.05 bis 10.00 Uhr im Palais Schaumburg’, 30 Jan. 1976, FES, Bestand Helmut Schmidt, 1/HSAA007156.

79 Hampe to Ministry of the Interior (BMI), ‘Betr.: Lage der Chile Flüchtlinge in Argentinien’, 13 Apr. 1976, PA AA, ZA, B 33, 103590.

80 Bernhard S. to Hans Dietrich Genscher, 20 Nov. 1976, PA AA, ZA, B 33, 103590.

81 Conze, Eckart, Die Suche Nach Sicherheit: Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1949 bis in die Gegenwart (Munich: Siedler, 2009), 515–44.

82 Annemarie Zieschank, ‘Ergänzendes Memorandum zur Verhaftung Klaus Zieschanks, Buenos Aires’, 29 July 1976, Argentinien, 0/075, Press Archive Konrad Adenauer Stiftung.

83 Kastl to Foreign Ministry, ‘Verschwinden deutscher Staatsangehöriger; hier: 1. Klaus Manfred Zieschank 2. Peter Falk’, 22 Apr. 1976, PA AA, B 83, 1139.

84 Helmut Schmidt to Jorge Rafael Videla, 7 July 1976, 1 HSAA006576, Bestand Helmut Schmidt, FES, Bonn–Bad Godesberg.

85 Kastl to Foreign Ministry, ‘betr.: faelle falk und zieschank hier: bewertung der antwort Videlas’, 6 Aug. 1976, 1 HSAA006576, Bestand Helmut Schmidt, FES, Bonn–Bad Godesberg.

86 Heinz Schweden, ‘Nach Zieschank und Falk wird ein dritter Deutscher in Argentinien vermißt’, Rheinische Post, 21 Aug. 1976; ‘Neue Hinweise in Fall Zieschank’, FAZ, 18 Aug. 1976; Marie-Louise Bonner, ‘Amnesty widerlegt Argentinien’, Frankfurter Neue Presse, 12 Aug. 1976.

87 Amnesty International, ed., Der Fall Elisabeth Käsemann (Bonn: Amnesty International, 1977).

88 ‘Argentinische Note vom 21. Juni 1977 bezüglich Elisabeth Käsemann’, undated, PA AA, B 83, 2266; Dieter Meier, ‘Das Auswärtige Amt und die Ermordung Elisabeth Käsemanns in Argentinien 1977’, Nürnberger Menschenrechtszentrum (2014), 3–8, available at http://menschenrechte.org/wp-contents/uploads/2012/06/Zum-Artikel.pdf (last visited 15 Nov. 2015).

89 Rosenfeld, Alan, ‘“Anarchist Amazons”: The Gendering of Radicalism in 1970s West Germany’, Contemporary European History 19, 4 (Sept. 2010): 351–74.

90 ‘Auswirkungen der Informationspolitik im Fall Käsemann auf die Lateinamerika–Politik der Bundesregierung’, 8 Aug. 1977, PA AA, B83, 2251.

91 ‘Aufzeichnung des Vortragenden Legationsrats I. Klasse Verbeek’, 1 July 1977, in 1. Juli Bis 31. Dezember 1977 in Akten Zur Auswärtigen Politik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, hrsg. im Auftr. des Auswärtigen Amts vom Institut für Zeitgeschichte; 1977/II, (München: Oldenbourg, 2008).

92 Helmut Schmidt to SPD Landesorganisation Hamburg– Kreis Wandsbek, Distrikt Jenfeld, 21 Nov. 1977, B136, 17561, Barch K.

93 Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú al S.E. el Señor ministro de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto Vicealmirante Oscar Antonio Montes, 16 June 1977, N: 47 R#77, Carpeta Ealem/Sion partes informativos desde n 1 hasta 82, 217 (desde Enero hasta Octubre), 1977, Caja AH/0059, Serie 61– Embajada en Bonn, Archivo de Cancillería, Buenos Aires.

94 ‘Sachstand: Menschenrechtslage in Argentinien’, 18 Oct. 1978, PA AA, ZA, 111049; ‘Betr.: Verhaftete und vermißte deutsche Staatsangehörige in Argentinien’, 20 Oct.1978, PA AA, ZA, 111049.

95 Report of an Amnesty International Mission to Argentina, 4–15 November 1976 (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1977), 18. See further, Gutman, Daniel, Noviembre de 1976: Una Misión en Busca de la Verdad (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2015).

96 See Guest, Iain, Behind the Disappearances: Argentina's Dirty War against Human Rights and the United Nations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).

97 Kastl, ‘Argentinien und die Menschenrechte. Bericht Nr. 549 vom 28 April 1977 pol. 32020’, Buenos Aires, 3 May 1977, PA AA, ZA, 107922.

98 Kastl, ‘Innere lage Argentiniens’, 26 May 1977, PA AA, ZA, 107922.

99 See Tooze, Adam and Eich, Stefan, ‘The Great Inflation’, in Manteuffel, Anselm Döring, Raphael, Lutz and Schlemmer, Thomas, eds., Vorgeschichte der Gegenwart: Dimensionen des Strukturbruchs nach dem Boom (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2016), 173–96 and Abelshauser, Werner, Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte Seit 1945 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2011), 451–.

100 Gray, William, ‘Waffen aus Deutschland? Bundestag, Rüstungshilfe und Waffenexport 1961 bis 1975’, Viertelsjahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 64, 2 (Apr. 2016), 359–.

101 von Haeften, ‘Betr.: Erteilung einer Durchfuhrgenehmigung nach dem KWKG für eine Sendung von 1000 Maschinenpistolen (Steyr) Kal. 9mm von Österreich nach Argentinien’, 23 Nov. 1977, PA AA, ZA, 111049; Hoff, ‘Erteilung einer Ausfuhrgenehmigung nach dem KWKG nach Argentinien für die Lieferung von 4.900 Schuß Munition 20 mm’, 21 July 1978, PA AA, ZA, 111049; von Haeften, ‘Betr.: Erteilung einer Ausfuhrgenehmigung . . . fuer die Lieferung von 2000 Handgranaten mit Zündern’, 9 Nov. 1977, PA AA, ZA, 111049; ‘Betr.: Deutsche Rüstungsexporte nach Argentinien; hier: Entwicklung von Kampf–und Schützenpanzern für die argentinische Armee durch die Fa. Thyssen Henschel, Kassel’, 28 Dec. 1977, PA AA, B 130, 9336A.

102 ‘Bonn bürgt für einen U–Boot–Auftrag aus Argentinien’, FAZ, 1 Dec. 1977.

103 FDCL, Der Griff nach der Bombe: Das deutsch–argentinische Atomgeschäft (Berlin: MovimentoDruck, 1981).

104 Hans Jürgen Wischnewski to Ottfried Hennig (CDU/CSU), 10 Juni 1982, Bestand Helmut Schmidt, 1/HSAA006834.

105 See the discussion points for State Minister Moersch's 1976 trip to Argentina, ‘Vorschläge für eine Gesprächsmappe für den bevorstehenden Besuch des Staatsminister Moersch in Argentinien’, May 1976, PA AA, ZA, 103573.

106 See Johannes von Vacano to Foreign Ministry, ‘Terrorismusbekämpfung in Deutschland und Menschenrechtsverletzungen in Argentinien’, 26 Oct. 1977, PA AA, AV, 32513.

107 Foreign Ministry to Ministry of the Interior, ‘Betr.: Luftsicherheit; hier: Zusammenarbeit mit Argentinien’, 14 Aug. 1981, Akte BGS II 3– 654 217 ARG/0, BArch.

108 Volkmar Hoffmann, ‘Bonn will genauen Bericht über “Erschießung” Frau Käsemanns: Deutsche Botschaft in Buenos Aires soll Nachforschungen anstellen’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 June 1977; ‘Regierung soll die Deutschen rausholen: Politiker fordert Schritte gegen Argentinien’, Bonner Rundschau, 11 Aug. 1977; ‘Im Wortlaut: Auswärtiger Dienst überfordert’, Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 Aug. 1977; ‘Der Stille Tod in Argentinien’, Welt am Sonntag, 14 Aug. 1977; Karl–Heinrich Rudersdorf, ‘Sondersitzung erst nach dem Mord: Diakonisches Werk zum Tod von Elisabeth Käsemann’, Evangelischer Pressedienst, 25 July 1977.

109 Jiménez Botta, Felix A., ‘“Yes to Football, No to Torture!” The Politics of the 1978 Football World Cup in West Germany’, Sport in Society 20, 10 (22 Aug. 2016): 1440–56.

110 Karl Alexander Hampe (AA), ‘Gewalttätigkeit in Argentinien und ihre Auswirkungen auf das deutsch–argentinische Verhältnis’, 1 Aug. 1977, PA AA, ZA, 107921, 1, 3.

111 Footnote Ibid., 4.

112 Karl Alexander Hampe, ‘Auswirkungen der Informationspolitik im Fall Käsemann auf die Lateinamerika-Politik der Bundesregierung’, 8 Aug. 1977, PA AA, B83, 1151.

113 Hampe quoted in Bohr, Felix, Glüsing, Jens, and Wiegrefe, Klaus, ‘Leichen und Penguine’, Der Spiegel, 12 (2014), 44.

114 Hampe, ‘Betr.: Zieschank’, 20 Aug. 1976, PA AA, ZA, 103591.

115 ‘Frage des Abgeordneten Klaus Thüssing [und] Antwort’, Oct. 1977, PA AA, ZA, 107922.

116 Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú, Argentinean Embassy Bonn, Informe Secreto para S.E. el señor Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto, ‘Politica Interna y Externa de Alemania Occidental y Relaciones con la Argentina’, 20 July 1978, 9, Caja AH/0063, Archivo de Cancillería, Buenos Aires.

117 Jiménez Botta, ‘“Yes to Football, No to Torture!”’, 1448–53.

118 Foreign Ministry to Interior Ministry, 14 Apr. 1978, B 106 69049, BArch.

119 Referat VII 4, ‘Betr.: Aufnahmeaktion zugunsten politisch verfolgter Personen aus Chile und

Argentinien; hier: Verfahren Bezug: Fernmuendlicher Auftrag vom 26.05.1978’, 31 May 1978, B 106 69049, Barch.

120 Paul Verbeek, Buenos Aires Embassy to Foreign Ministry, ‘Betr.: Aufnahmeaktion Argentinien; hier: Abschluss der Aufnahmeaktion’, 20 Oct. 1983, PA AA, AV, 32470.

121 Thun, Tino, Menschenrechte und Aussenpolitik: Bundesrepublik Deutschland-Argentinien 1976–1983 (Bremen und Lüdinghausen: Periferia Verlag, 1985).

122 Milder, Stephen, ‘Between Grassroots Protest and Green Politics: The Democratic Potential of the 1970s Antinuclear Activism’, German Politics and Society 33, 4 (2015): 25–39; Die Grünen Bundesgeschäftsstelle ed., Diesmal DIE GRÜNEN – warum? Ein Aufruf zur Bundestagswahl 1983 (Bonn, 1983).

123 Cited from Brier, Robert, ‘Beyond the Quest for a ‘Breakthrough’: Reflections on the Recent Historiography on Human Rights’, in Jahrbuch Für Europäische Geschichte/Yearbook for European History, Vol. 16: Mobility and Biography (Oldenbourg: de Gruyter, 2016): 155–73; Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, ‘Introduction. Genealogies of Human Rights’, in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, 1–28 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Ibid