This study about the compromised past of the German Foreign Office is the latest work to trigger an explosive historical controversy in Germany. Since its release in early 2011, it has generated headlines and media appearances for some of the authors. Though receiving tremendous acclaim, it has also reaped withering reviews that challenge both facts and interpretation. Some reviewers have challenged the authors' mastery of both the primary and secondary literature, claiming that the work fails to uphold minimum historical standards. Its more than seven-hundred pages of text notwithstanding, this book sold so many copies that a paperback edition appeared in print in February, 2012. This edition included a new forward not only outlining the ensuing imbroglios but also answering the most salient charges levied by critics.

In retrospect, this split reaction is hardly surprising. Coming on the heels of an internal dispute within the Foreign Office over changes in how officers with tainted pasts were to be commemorated, this work was formally commissioned in July 2005 by the German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer. It was turned over to a formal historical commission, which originally was to consist of the German historians, Klaus Hildebrand, Eckart Conze and Norbert Frei, the American historian, Henry Ashby Turner and the Israeli historian, Moshe Zimmermann. Turner's illness forced him to resign the commission before its work even began; he was replaced by Peter Hayes. Sudden illness also interrupted Hildebrand's work on the history of the Foreign Office from 1933 through 1939, leaving his section unfinished. As a result, this study bears the prints of many hands, including those of the four remaining commission members and of the many research assistants and German graduate students who scrambled to fill in the gaps left behind by Hildebrand's unexpected departure.

The lion's share of the criticism has been directed at the account of the Foreign Office during the Nazi years. This section develops the book's central argument: the Foreign Office not only knew about the extent of German crimes and genocide in the Second World War but actively participated in these crimes. In conquered regions, it helped coordinate the looting of art, plans to exploit slave labor and the deportation of Jews to death camps. Undersecretary Martin Luther was present at the Wannsee Conference. The copy we have today of this conference was found in the archives of the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office also considered developing future plans for an “international solution to the Jewish question,” which could include “physical annihilation.” These plans predated Hitler's notorious speech from January 30, 1939, in which he prophesied the destruction of the Jewish race, should Europe be plunged into war.

Many of the accusations presented here are, of course, hardly new. Similar allegations dogged the Foreign Office at various points in the postwar era, as this work duly notes. The American military government launched formal legal proceedings against eight leading diplomats from the Foreign Office, proceedings that ran from the late fall of 1947 through the spring of 1949. The presence of Foreign Service officials with tainted pasts also became the subject of propaganda onslaughts from the East German regime in the 1950s and 1960s. Attempts to dispatch abroad former Nazi party members as ambassadors or Foreign Service officials triggered outrage and even protests in the local populaces.

Yet even the harshest critics of this work have scarcely taken issue with the depiction of the Foreign Office during the postwar years—its rebirth, postwar expansion and incessant efforts at exculpation. Here, Peter Hayes and Norbert Frei convincingly demonstrate that the Foreign Office, in spite of Allied war crimes trials and denazification programs, evinced an astoundingly high degree of continuity in personnel. Of the 137 members of the upper echelons of the Foreign Office in 1950, 42.3 had been members of the Nazi party (493). Allowing them to pull off this feat of rehabilitation, they developed highly elaborate and refined strategies of exculpation. They claimed they had joined the party to prevent worse harm. They had supposedly sought to defend the traditional integrity of the diplomatic service against the encroachment of coarse parvenus who had been placed there by Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's Foreign Minister from 1938 to 1945. According to these yarns, the Foreign Office had served as a bastion of resistance to National Socialism.

And these efforts at exculpation largely succeeded. A man like Franz Nüßlein, who had confirmed countless death sentences in Bohemia and Moravia as a protégé of Heydrich and been sentenced to twenty years in prison in 1948, was allowed to rejoin the Foreign Office in 1955. Even as a “non-amnestied war criminal,” he served as the German General Consul in Barcelona from 1962 to 1974. A glowing obituary was bestowed upon him after his death in 2003. Such grotesque commemorations notwithstanding, the Foreign Office did undergo a profound change in the postwar era—and not just during this century. The authors make clear that its officials, particularly the younger cohorts already during the 1960s and 1970s, ultimately bought into the democratic ethos of the Federal Republic.

The controversies that this book has engendered will not be resolved any time soon. There is a simple reason for this: no single work, not even an immense seven-hundred paged work like this, can exhaustively cover the history of the German Foreign Office from 1933 to the present. This work focuses on the history of its personnel at the expense of other salient themes, including the role of the Foreign Office in shaping foreign policy.

Ultimately, this volume has succeeded marvelously in drawing public attention to a subject that has never received the comprehensive scholarly attention that it merits. This work may well serve a function similar to that of Rolf Hochhuth's play from 1963, The Deputy. Hochhuth commanded headlines for letting his leading protagonist accuse Pope Pius XII of being a “criminal” for not having spoken out against the Holocaust. Using remarkably similar words, the leading author of this volume, Eckart Conze, referred to the Foreign Office of the Third Reich as a “criminal” organization in an interview with Der Spiegel, Germany's leading newsmagazine. The Deputy opened the floodgates to a significant reassessment of the role of the papacy during the wartime years. This volume will do the same for the history of the Foreign Office.