Opinion
The Christian liar
On the occasion of Konrad Adenauer’s 150th birthday, the prevailing foundational narrative of the Federal Republic is seldom called into question. Werner Rügemer‘s sketch, however, does precisely that. It portrays Adenauer not as the architect of a democratic new beginning, but as a consistent power politician in the service of capital—from the Empire to Weimar, from the Nazi state to the yoke of the United States. A necessary act of demystification.
German Chancellor and CDU Chairman Friedrich Merz has bowed to the world’s most powerful far-right figure, US President Donald Trump. This submission entails further militarization, accompanied by the impoverishment of the majority of the population and the peril of nuclear annihilation. This has a history, and that history began with the first Chancellor and CDU Chairman, Konrad Adenauer. His current successor, Friedrich Merz, has confirmed that Adenauer “set the decisive course for the Federal Republic.”
I. Catholic Ascent in a Protestant Empire
The rise of the Catholic Adenauer began within the Protestant German Empire.
Following the end of Napoleon’s brief dominion, the Kingdom of Prussia succeeded in annexing the Ruhr and the Rhineland, including its largest city, Cologne. Prussia and rising capitalism had discarded old feudal Catholicism as an ideology: Protestantism became the state religion. After the feudal lords with their Catholic blessings, it was now the turn of the new holders of private power—the capitalists—and their profits, blessed by Protestantism.
Protestant Prussians Complete the Catholic Cologne Cathedral
Consequently, the Prussians were extremely flexible in their use of religion: Since the Rhineland and Cologne were Catholic, replete with an Archbishopric and Romanesque churches, the Prussian Protestants promoted the Catholicism of their new subjects there as well.
Thus, the Prussian kings showed benevolence and, from 1842 onwards, financed the completion of the 157-meter-high cathedral towers. What the wealthy Catholic Archbishopric of Cologne had failed to achieve in 600 years, the Protestant Prussians accomplished in a few. And the Catholics were now obliged to be grateful to the Prussians.
Incidentally, the Prussians did not achieve this alone. The Jewish owners of the Sal. Oppenheim bank, rising in tandem with Prussia, also performed political groundwork; some converted to Catholicism, but mostly to Protestantism. They became the second-largest donors for the completion of the “Catholic” cathedral. This bank, ideologically highly flexible, would play a significant role in Adenauer’s ascent as Lord Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Cologne and subsequently as Chancellor of the Federal Republic.
Rise in a Catholic Milieu under Prussian Patronage
Konrad, the third son of a father who had risen from a craftsman via military service to a Prussian judicial officer, was permitted to attend the Gymnasium—specifically, the Royal Catholic Apostel Gymnasium. The school was financed by the Kingdom of Prussia and built directly adjacent to the Catholic Church of the Apostles. The aim here was to support aspiring individuals from the Catholic milieu to serve in the Prussian administration, corporations, and banks. Indeed, in 1894, former Chancellor Bismarck personally congratulated the high school graduate: The 18-year-old Konrad was now “one of us.”
After high school, Konrad remained within the Catholic milieu; during his law studies in Bonn, Munich, and Freiburg, he joined the relevant Catholic student fraternities. He later began working at Hermann Kausen’s law firm in Cologne; his boss was simultaneously a Royal Prussian Notary and the chairman of the Catholic Centre Party (Zentrum) in the City Council. Konrad joined the Centre Party to become a Council Member in 1906 and, as early as 1909, First Deputy Mayor. This rising star was elected with the approval of the Liberal Party—that is, the entrepreneurs, bankers, and, for instance, the bosses of the dominant media clan DuMont Schauberg, whose Kölnische Zeitung was distributed throughout Prussia. Thus, at the unusually young age of 33, this ascending man took charge of the city administration; the Catholic Lord Mayor Max Wallraf, also of the Centre Party, held the office only in an honorary capacity.
Under Prussia’s three-class franchise system, only wealthy men could vote in Cologne. Rich capitalists were in the Liberal Party; artisans and civil servants were in the Centre Party. The SPD [Social Democratic Party] could not be elected at the local level; it held only a seat in the Reichstag in Berlin.
Adenauer also ensured the proliferation of his own wealth. He joined the Pudelnaß Tennis Club—not because he could, or wanted to, play tennis. Rather: The youth of Catholic high society met there. It was there he met his first wife, Emma Weyer, the daughter of the director of the Cologne Reinsurance Company. Thus, the rising Adenauer, with a suitable loan, was soon able to purchase a large plot of land in the developing Catholic villa district of Cologne-Lindenthal and have a 14-room villa with a wine cellar constructed.
Administrative Chief of the Frontline City of Cologne in WWI
As administrative chief, Adenauer had fostered the rise of Cologne’s industry, financed by the Oppenheim, Levy, Seligmann, and J.H. Stein banks. These were also the financiers of industry and railways in the Ruhr area and neighboring cities like Wuppertal.
The Lord Mayor of Cologne was subordinate to the Prussian military governor and the Prussian-appointed district president of Cologne. With the outbreak of war in 1914, martial law was declared. Thus, in World War I, Cologne became the German Empire’s frontline city against the nearby enemy states of Belgium, France, and England.
Prior to the war, Adenauer had constructed the Butzweiler Hof airfield as well as another airfield for Zeppelins, and had brought Zeppelin production to Cologne. As soon as the war began, Zeppelins rained bombs on cities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Lithuania, and London—the first instance in human history of the aerial bombardment of enemy cities and civilians.
Stinnes and Krupp shifted munitions production to Cologne, while Bayer in Wuppertal produced poison gas: deadly weapons had to reach the front as quickly as possible. Cologne was also a transit station for soldiers, supplies, and prisoners of war moving to and from the front. Occupied Belgium was also administered from Cologne. Adenauer cultivated close friendships with leading industrialists and took over the war economy management of the frontline city; the municipal department tasked with this had 4,500 employees.
Cologne: Execution of Christian Sailors
It was no coincidence that Cologne was chosen for the execution of sailors Albin Köbis and Max Reichpietsch, who were sentenced to death for “mutiny” in 1917 for protesting the war. Both were Christians, but members of the New Apostolic Church: This church had been founded because Pope Leo XIII had openly embraced capitalism. The “mutineers” followed early Christianity; Adenauer, the capitalist Christian, had no objection to the execution of such Christians.
When the incumbent Lord Mayor of Cologne, Wallraf, was called to the stumbling imperial government in Berlin as a (penultimate) last resort, Adenauer became his successor; no one else was even considered. Precisely because a “politician of endurance” was needed for the frontline city of Cologne in a war that could no longer be won, Adenauer, upon his demand, immediately received the highest salary of any mayor in the Empire. He concluded his inaugural speech in October 1917 with an “oath of loyalty to the Kaiser and the Empire, with the call glowing with warm gratitude: His Majesty, our all-highest Kaiser and King, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!”
“They Died for Germany”
Together with his corporate friends, Adenauer rejected peace negotiations in 1917. Millions of dead soldiers and civilians were, for the well-ensconced Christian civil servant-politician, merely collateral damage, ruthlessly factored in.
In the final year of the war, he declared in the city council that just as “the people of Cologne have endured these hardships to this day,” Germans must “endure all the hardships of war with patience and patriotism.” He justified the 41 deaths in a British air raid on Cologne in May 1918 by stating: “They too died for Germany.”
“Germany”; this would remain a core value for Adenauer: Dependent laborers are exploited and, for the sake of capitalists masquerading as “Germany” and their privileged accomplices, are expendable even in war.
End of War: Flattering and Destroying Revolutionaries
Fighting rising democratic resistance, saving capitalism: This was Adenauer’s mission at the end of the war.
Therefore, although the SPD was banned from standing for election under Prussian electoral law, from 1916 onwards he gave compliant SPD politicians positions in the administration and the city council. The SPD politician Wilhelm Sollmann became his special adjutant.
When a Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council was formed in Cologne as well, Adenauer allocated them rooms, telephones, and typewriters in the city hall. At the same time, he ensured that Sollmann became the chairman of this council and could denounce capitalism as a warmonger at large rallies.
The Christian liar Adenauer walked around with a revolutionary armband on his sleeve, but simultaneously established the “Welfare Committee”: Here, he gathered his banker friends and entrepreneurs; Sollmann was also present. In the final year of the war, the Kaiser awarded Adenauer the Order of the Red Eagle and membership in the Prussian House of Lords, the upper house of the Reichstag.
Saving the State and City from “Bolshevism”!
When Kaiser Wilhelm II fled abroad shortly before the war ended in November 1918, Adenauer remained true to his oath and sharply condemned the Kaiser’s “shameful, ominous flight.” Now, “the country could be dragged into the embrace of Bolshevism.”
But Adenauer’s Welfare Committee outmaneuvered the penniless activists of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, who lacked political experience. Thus, Adenauer had averted the “Bolshevik danger” on behalf of the fled Kaiser. Later, he boasted of having tricked the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council together with Sollmann, thereby “saving the city from revolution.”
It was here that he learned ruthless ideological opportunism and the merciless defense of capitalism. With this, he would continue to rise as a politician—and very soon, as a multimillionaire.
II. Continued Rise in the Hated Republic
Demagoguery regarding the “Bolshevik danger” remained Adenauer’s leitmotif. He carried as much of the monarchy as possible into the Weimar Republic: Relations with the peaks of private capital, and the continuation of the Free State of Prussia within the German Reich. In this way, he would contribute to the NSDAP [Nazi Party] coming to government by 1933.
Against the “Dictate of Versailles”
Adenauer railed against the “Dictate of Versailles”: He argued that this “intolerable slavery and bondage” destroyed “national and state existence,” ruined the German economy, caused “our children to wither,” and abandoned millions of Germans to “a slow death.” Adenauer said this as President of the German Catholics’ Day in Munich in 1922; yet he never mentioned the architect of the dictate, US President Wilson, who, by designating Germany as the sole guilty party, secured Wall Street’s war loans and the profits of US arms companies.
However, Adenauer tore into the spreading socialism that sought to “alienate the German people from Christianity.” He condemned the “lack of morality and authority” appearing in the “tortured people,” equating it with “materialism and Mammonism.”
What distinguished Adenauer from the far-right and the NSDAP was initially his concept of a solution: Catholic Christianity and the Catholic Centre Party. But since he shared the fundamental critique of the Versailles Dictate, his solution, polished with a Christian veneer, would step by step converge with the far-right solution. And as in the monarchy, he would bind himself not even to his own party, but to leading capitalists.
Thus, Adenauer expanded his personal and institutional relationships with leading capitalists to the entire German Reich and the USA.
In the Cologne Rotary Club
In 1928, Adenauer was a founding partner in the small men’s circle of the Cologne Rotary Club, established on the US model, alongside bankers Hagen (Bank Levy), the Oppenheims, Pferdmenges (Schaafhausen, later Oppenheim), and Baron von Schröder (J.H. Stein), industrialists Silverberg (Rheinbraun), Stollwerck (Chocolate), Clouth (Rubber), Tietz (Department Stores), and publisher Neven DuMont (Kölnische Zeitung). The president was Pferdmenges.
Pferdmenges’ influence had long since transcended the Rhine and Ruhr: In 1929, the Schaafhausen Bank Association merged with Deutsche Bank. During the nationalization of the bankrupt Dresdner Bank and Commerzbank in 1931, he advised the government of Chancellor Brüning (Centre Party) and in the process joined the Supervisory Board of Dresdner Bank and the Board of the Reichsbank [Central Bank].
A Favorite in the Circle of Ruhr Industrialists
The bosses of the four Cologne investment banks sat on dozens of supervisory boards of Ruhr conglomerates such as Flick, Klöckner, Thyssen, Stinnes, and IG Farben.
Consequently, Adenauer became a sought-after member of their lobbying associations:
- League for the Renewal of the Empire: With slogans like “People without Space,” “Strengthening the Führer idea,” the necessity of a “Third Reich,” and “overcoming conflicts” through a uniform “healthily structured nation,” this league formed a programmatic cross-front with Hitler’s NSDAP.
- Reich Economic Council: Coordinated industrialists and large landowners throughout the Reich with the Reich Association of German Industry (RDI).
- Ruhrlade: This secret organization financed the “conservative” parties DVP, DNVP, and Adenauer’s Centre Party, and ultimately the NSDAP.
Adenauer became the politically desired candidate here. In 1925, steel baron August Thyssen wrote to him: “I hope the hour will soon come when you, with capable people, will stand at the head of the government and understand our needs.”
“Germany’s Right to Colonies”
The German Colonial Society (DKG) had been founded in 1885. However, at Versailles, Germany had been stripped of its colonies, which were given to US allies. The DKG subsequently fought for the return of the colonies. This was also in the NSDAP’s program. Only the KPD [Communist Party] and USPD explicitly rejected it.
In 1931, Adenauer became Vice President of the DKG. The President was Heinrich Schnee, the former Governor of German East Africa. In Cologne’s great banqueting hall, the Gürzenich, Adenauer criticized the “inconsistency of the colonial guilt lie” propagated by the victorious powers.
Separatism: Prussian State, Rhenish State
Within the Weimar Republic, the Free State of Prussia was preserved as a semi-monarchical extension with its own parliament (Landtag) and government. It covered two-thirds of the German Reich and was a counterweight to the newfangled democracy of the Weimar Constitution.
President of the Prussian State Council
The Prussian State Council existed as the upper house of the Prussian Landtag from 1920 onwards. Adenauer served as its President from 1921 to 1933, attending 222 sessions. In return, he received a free residence in Berlin. The expense allowance was 12,000 Reichsmark annually, plus daily allowances.
In Berlin, he met with ambassadors of other states, the Vatican representative and later Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht, and members of the Deutsche Bank board, on whose supervisory board he sat. He also met with Wall Street banker Thomas McKittrick of the Lee Higginson investment bank, the leading lender to the German Reich.
From this perspective, too, the attitude cultivated by Adenauer and his spin doctors—that he was anti-Prussian and disliked the Prussian capital—is revealed as a lie.
Western Separatist State: Direct Capital
Adenauer and his friends felt their existing freedoms were violated not only by Versailles but also by the fashionable democracy of the Weimar Republic: Now all adults, regardless of wealth—even women!—could vote. The influence of trade unions, the SPD, and even more dangerous leftists was too great! A capital-friendly separatist state, in addition to the Prussian state, seemed like a solution to them.
The spokesman was the billionaire Ruhr baron Hugo Stinnes. Adenauer experimented with concepts named “Rhenish Republic,” “Rhenish State,” or “Rhenish-Westphalian Republic,” or sometimes “West German Republic”: In one variant, it would remain part of the German Reich; in another, it would not.
Such a separatist state was to include the predominantly German-speaking French region of Alsace, conquered by the German Empire in 1870 and forced back to France by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1923, bypassing the German Foreign Office, Stinnes took Adenauer to Paris to ask if the government there was interested in a Western European economic union. The French government and the Bank of England refused: That was the end of the project.
Secret Tax Advantages for Prestige Projects
Furthermore, after the war, the USA had established itself in Western Europe. They organized the Dawes Plan for the German Reich, named after Charles Dawes of the National City Bank in New York. US companies opened branches in Germany and opened the country to their products.
US Bonds and Ford to Cologne!
Adenauer utilized this more than any other mayor. Through Wall Street banks, he had Cologne municipal bonds sold to US investors with a 7.5 percent yield to finance his major projects: the Niehl industrial estate, the airport, the Nürburgring, the stadium, the Rhine bridge, the university, and the first section of autobahn in Germany.
Automotive giant Ford had opened its first branch in Berlin in 1926. In 1930, Adenauer brought the second Ford branch and the US company’s German headquarters to Cologne. To achieve this, he granted secret tax advantages, bypassing the city council.
Adenauer saw no harm in flattering Adolf Hitler’s most influential financier and the world’s leading antisemite. The German edition of his book “The International Jew” had reached its 26th printing by 1926.
The New Albertus Magnus University!
The University of Cologne had been founded in the 14th century but was closed by Napoleon in 1798 due to “bigotry”: The Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”), the theological justification for the torture and public burning of thousands of women (“witches”) until the 18th century, had originated here.
Adenauer had the university rebuilt, referring to its great past at the opening in 1919, but mentioning nothing of its diabolical aberrations. He named the university once again after its founder, the medieval theologian Albertus Magnus. Funding was provided by Adenauer’s capital friends with their Christian veneer: Bayer boss Carl Duisberg, for example, donated 200,000 RM. Banker Pferdmenges collected two million. He would remain the most important collector of legal and illegal donations for Adenauer after 1945 as well.
Courting Hitler’s Future Crown Jurist
In 1932, Adenauer secured the appointment of constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt to the old-new university. Adenauer had been gravitating toward this intellectual father of the authoritarian “Führer State” since 1925.
Both admired Mussolini. To be close to Hitler, Schmitt was appointed to the University of Berlin as early as the summer semester of 1933, becoming the “Crown Jurist of Hitler.”
Multifaceted Self-Enrichment
Adenauer’s income and wealth were the highest of any politician in the German Reich.
Salary, Perks, Supervisory Board Memberships, Interest-Free Loans
The highest mayoral salary—twice that of the Reich President—was accompanied by the highest overt and covert perks. As of 1930: Annual salary 41,250 RM, plus pensionable housing allowance of 37,000, and 6,000 for electricity and heating. (For comparison: A worker’s annual wage: 1,680 RM; a civil servant: 2,520 RM).
Added to this were profits from stock transactions, interest-free loans from the city treasury and banker friends, and above all: income from 11 supervisory board memberships (Deutsche Bank, Lufthansa, RWE, Rheinische Braunkohle, etc.).
Millions in Loans for Stock Speculation: Never Repaid
In the spring of 1928, Glanzstoff AG, which had a branch in the Cologne industrial estate of Niehl, listed new shares of its newly founded US artificial silk subsidiary, American Glanzstoff Corporation, on the New York Stock Exchange.
Adenauer bought a package of shares with a loan of millions from Deutsche Bank. In 1928, the market value was 1.33 million Marks; by October 1929, due to the financial crisis in the US, it had fallen to just 110,000 Marks. Deutsche Bank demanded repayment of the loan.
Adenauer never repaid the loan; he did not want to, nor was he compelled to under any regime. Thus, in 1949, Adenauer would begin his duties as CDU Chairman and founding Chancellor of the Federal Republic as a speculator indebted to Deutsche Bank.
On the Road to Fascism
In 1929, Dictator Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty with the Vatican: Catholicism became the state religion. Mussolini-admirer Adenauer sent congratulations: “The name Mussolini will be written in golden letters in the history of the Catholic Church!” Mussolini thanked “dottor h.c. adenauer primo borgomastro Koeln” on behalf of all Catholics and all Italians.
Cultural Institute with Mussolini
Thus, in 1931, the Lord Mayor of Cologne signed an agreement between Cologne and Italy with the leading ideologue of Italian fascism, Minister of Culture Giovanni Gentile (“The Foundations of Fascism”): The establishment of an Italian Cultural Institute, against the will of the Reich government and with a fascism-friendly administration.
Permission to Hoist Swastika Flags
Adenauer later successfully spread the lie that he had resisted the hoisting of swastika flags in the city in February 1933. The reality was this: The NSDAP had secretly hung flags on the Mülheim Bridge to advertise a Hitler event in the Cologne exhibition halls. Adenauer had the flags removed because the bridge was municipal property! However, the Mayor permitted the NSDAP to hang flags on the exhibition halls, which also belonged to the municipality: This is how Adenauer lied using partial truths.
NSDAP into the Prussian and Reich Government!
As early as August 1932, the Centre Party demanded that the National Socialists take “open and full responsibility” in both the Prussian government and the Reich government.
On the same day in Cologne, Adenauer visited his Rotary brother Baron von Schröder, who was mediating between the Centre Party and the NSDAP. In the banker’s neighboring villa in Cologne-Lindenthal, Adenauer gave a written guarantee on his host’s letterhead: The Centre Party would “judge Hitler without prejudice solely by his actions and tolerate him as Reich Chancellor.”
On behalf of the Prussian State Council, Adenauer declared in February 1933 that in Prussia, “the formation of a government between the NSDAP and the Centre Party under the Premiership of Hermann Göring is immediately possible.” Two months later, Göring became Prussian Prime Minister. Hitler was already Reich Chancellor.
III. During the Nazi Era: Luxury Living with a State Pension
During the Nazi regime, Adenauer was able to lead a luxurious, privileged, and free life, including trips abroad, thanks to a high state pension and his status as a multimillionaire. He observed the injustice with immense knowledge and mercilessness. Yet nothing in life is as far from innocence as allowing visible injustice to persist. He had helped the Nazis into government and offered no resistance despite—or rather, because of—his highly privileged position. He made himself permanently complicit.
Defeat of a Politically Bankrupt Man
Adenauer’s Centre Party fell from power in the local elections of March 1933 because its reputation had already been ruined by high municipal debts. However, the majority for the NSDAP candidate could only be achieved because the 10 seats of the Communists were declared invalid; Adenauer and the Centre Party did not protest this.
Refuge with Enthusiastic Nazi Christians: Maria Laach Abbey
Adenauer was expelled from Cologne by the Nazi regional administration. He quickly found accommodation with his friend Ildefons Herwegen, Abbot of the Benedictine Abbey of Maria Laach in the Eifel.
In the weeks that Herwegen hosted Adenauer, the Abbot was enthusiastically greeting the Hitler government: “People and state have become one again through the action of Führer Adolf Hitler.” At a memorial service for the NSDAP martyr Albert Leo Schlageter in the Cologne Gürzenich hall on May 26, 1933, the Abbot invoked God’s blessing upon the Führer.
The Centre Party supported the Concordat Hitler concluded with the Vatican. Pope Pius XI had praised Hitler as a “reliable pioneer against Bolshevism.” Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, who had been in the Centre Party until shortly before, came to Maria Laach on July 21, 1933: The Concordat was celebrated. The rule now was: With the blessing of God and Hitler, one could be a member of the Catholic Church and the NSDAP simultaneously!
June 1933: “It Makes No Difference to Me, Hitler Will Do”
In June 1933, Adenauer wrote from the monastery to his friend, the banker’s wife Dora Pferdmenges: My party, the Centre Party, has failed because “in recent years it did not fill itself with a new spirit in time,” and: “In my conviction, our only salvation is a monarch, a Hohenzollern, or for all I care, Hitler will do; first Reich President for life, then comes the next stage. Thus the movement enters a calmer channel.”
Adenauer determined that the other bourgeois parties were also incapable of saving the existing “order” against the power of the labor movement and mass democracy. Thus, he approved of war and fascism as necessary collateral damage; incidentally, a significant side benefit emerged for Adenauer’s clientele, just as it did for Adenauer himself.
Pferdmenges: “We Follow the Will of the People’s Chancellor”
In 1933, right at the beginning of the Hitler government, Pferdmenges—Adenauer’s most important advisor and financier, who at that time sat on the supervisory boards of both Dresdner Bank and Bank Oppenheim—declared: “We follow the will of the People’s Chancellor to create work and bread for the unemployed.”
From 1932 onwards, Pferdmenges was a presbyter and treasurer on the board of the Protestant congregation in Cologne’s millionaire district of Marienburg: This congregation had adopted the newly founded Nazi church, the “German Christians.” Therefore, a new, much larger community center had to be built, with rooms for the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Women’s League.
Carved in stone at the entrance, immortalized in colossal size, was not only Martin Luther with a Christian cross, but also an SA soldier with a swastika and imperial eagle. In 1934, Pferdmenges inaugurated the community center. Thus, in Cologne, not only the Catholic but also the Protestant church entered into a demonstrative, public alliance with Hitler within the milieu of bankers and industrialists.
Free, Luxurious Mobility Under the Nazi Regime
Adenauer was not removed from office as Lord Mayor of Cologne in 1933, as he later lied; on the contrary, he was retired with a high pension.
High Pension, Compensation, Preservation of Wealth
Initially, he received an annual pension of 12,165 Reichsmark, then 15,000 RM permanently from 1937 onwards, plus compensation at market value for the villa in Cologne. His wealth remained completely intact. As part of the arrangement, Adenauer joined the NS-People’s Welfare, a Nazi organization, in 1936.
Villa Residence in Berlin
Thus, in 1934, after his stay in Maria Laach, Adenauer was able to rent the villa of an emigrated Jewish owner in the celebrity district of Griebnitzsee/Neubabelsberg in Berlin. He was able to bring his family to live with him and wanted to become a bank director.
On June 20, 1934, during Hitler’s murderous purge of the SA leadership (the Röhm Putsch), Adenauer was placed under house arrest, but this ended two days later. He was able to vacation comfortably with his wife in the Black Forest.
Land Purchase and New Villa Construction in Rhöndorf
With the compensation for his villa in Cologne, he was able to buy a large plot of 6,000 square meters in the spa and villa resort of Rhöndorf, south of Cologne. He had a residence built like his previous 14-room villa: four living levels, private and representative rooms, a wine cellar, a pantry built into the mountain, an air-raid shelter, several terraces and entrances, a farmyard for animals, and a large garden. Domestic staff were employed during the Nazi era as well. Later, as Chancellor of the Federal Republic, he would reside here.
In Intense Contact with the Organizers of the Nazi Regime
He continued to move within the wealthy milieu.
Visits to Ruhr Industrialists
In 1939, Adenauer and his wife were invited by steel industrialist and Hitler financier Peter Klöckner. A large gathering met at the Villa Hartenfels near Duisburg. The Pferdmenges couple was also present.
Long discussions were held with General Hans Günther Kluge on the comparison of German and US armament capacities; the General was knowledgeable: In 1941, he became Commander of Army Group South in the Wehrmacht’s war of annihilation against the Soviet Union.
The group stayed overnight in the spacious villa and spent the weekend together. For the return journey, Klöckner provided the Adenauers with a car and, as the host noted in a thank-you letter, sent a batch of “those exquisite wines you tasted with us” after them. In the same year, Adenauer also attended a family reception of another friend, Hitler financier Fritz Thyssen.
Baron Kurt von Schröder
The Cologne banker and Rotary brother had engineered Hitler’s chancellorship on January 4, 1933. He joined the SS and the NSDAP, and in May 1933 became President of the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Commerce. Adenauer sent him a “letter of heartfelt congratulations.” Far beyond Cologne, the banker became an ultimate actor in the Nazi system: organizer of the Circle of Friends of the Reichsführer SS (comprising 30 industrialists), spokesman for the Reich Group of Private Banks, member of the Administrative Council of the Reichsbank, and member of the Administrative Council of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, led by Thomas McKittrick—whom Adenauer had met in Berlin before 1933.
Robert Pferdmenges
Adenauer’s fundraiser Pferdmenges was also a key banker in the Nazi financial system. Adenauer asked him, for instance, whether their mutual friend Friedrich Flick (“decent and honest as a man and businessman”) had sold his RWE shares and bought a new company. Bank Oppenheim, managed by Pferdmenges and renamed Bank Pferdmenges in 1938, was a “war-essential” bank until 1945.
Goebbels and Abs Protect Adenauer’s Speculation Losses
Hermann Josef Abs had started at the Bankhaus Delbrück in Cologne in 1923. During the Nazi era, he rose to the board of Deutsche Bank: Until 1945, he organized war loans, sat on the supervisory boards of three dozen systemically important banks and companies, and organized Aryanizations (the confiscation of Jewish property). As a devout Catholic, he welcomed the attack on the Soviet Union enthusiastically, for to him, it was “the greatest enemy of freedom and humanity.”
At shareholder meetings, a small shareholder repeatedly demanded: Adenauer must repay his million-mark loan, otherwise it is a loss for Deutsche Bank and its shareholders! But Abs imposed his will: The motion will not be processed! Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels instructed the media not to report on the matter.
Adenauer: Best Informed on War and Jewish Extermination
Franz-Rudolph von Weiss, who had worked at the Swiss Consulate General in Cologne since 1920 and became Consul in 1936, became Switzerland’s Consul General for the Rhineland in 1943. Weiss had been a close friend of Adenauer since his time as mayor and would become a key advisor for Adenauer’s Swiss relations after 1945.
During the Nazi era, the two met regularly and socially. Adenauer’s wife called Weiss “dear good uncle.” The good uncle sent his reports regularly to his boss, the Swiss Ambassador in Berlin, Hans Frölicher—an enthusiastic Nazi sympathizer who secured arms deliveries from Swiss companies and financial transactions of German companies via Switzerland. At the same time, Weiss held an internationally crucial position from the start of the war: He took over the consular representation of the USA and England, which had severed diplomatic relations with Germany upon their military entry into the war.
Von Weiss maintained a “fine network with politicians, bankers, economic leaders, and high representatives of the Catholic Church.” From 1941 onwards, he reported to his government on, for example, the Warsaw Ghetto, the deportation of Cologne’s Jews, the extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe, and forced laborers in Rhineland factories.
Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, documented that Weiss was “one of the best sources of news for foreign countries” due to his “excellent connections to various circles of society and the economy”: Adenauer sat at the source of one of the best intelligence networks in the Nazi state.
Good Relations with the USA
US companies equipped Hitler’s army; Ford Cologne was now producing war vehicles. Adenauer’s second wife came from a Wall Street banking family. He hosted US visitors in Rhöndorf. His son Max won a scholarship to the elite US university Georgetown in Washington in 1937/38.
Adenauer’s longest-standing friend since 1920 was the US entrepreneur Daniel Heineman. Since 1905, he had managed the electrical holding company SOFINA, with its European headquarters in Brussels. In Europe, and in Cologne while Adenauer was mayor, he had built tramways. Due to his Jewish origins, he managed SOFINA from New York following the German occupation of Belgium in 1940; collaboration with the Nazi occupation continued smoothly thereafter.
From 1933 to 1937 alone, Heineman gifted Adenauer a total of 20,000 RM in 1,000-mark notes; in today’s purchasing power, over 100,000 euros. This also provided Adenauer with foreign currency for Swiss vacations without running afoul of the Nazi state’s otherwise strict foreign exchange controls. Heineman would remain an important permanent advisor on US matters for the subsequent Federal Chancellor.
On Principle: No Resistance with Anyone!
Adenauer was able to receive countless visitors undisturbed. However, he rejected all attempts to win him over for any form of resistance. In 1934, Karl Mewis of the Cologne KPD tried via a Catholic industrialist. The industrialist returned with Adenauer’s answer: “Resistance, absolute nonsense!”
In 1936, the Christian trade unionist Jakob Kaiser returned from a three-hour conversation: “He cannot be counted on.” Adenauer likewise rejected contact with the conservative Mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, who was building a resistance circle against Hitler with military officers.
In 1944, the Christian trade unionist Heinrich Körner tried. Adenauer refused again: “I want nothing to do with it.” He mocked any resistance with his visitor Franz Thedieck, a Senior War Administration Councillor in the military command in occupied Belgium.
Luxury Detention 1944
In 1944, on the occasion of the assassination attempt on Hitler by conservative officers, he was temporarily arrested. It was a luxury detention: In the exhibition camp of the city of Cologne, Russian prisoners of war had to clean a bathtub so he could bathe. A fellow prisoner had to iron his trousers.
His daughter and wife brought him socks, shirts, and better food, and were able to chat with him for hours. Unlike his fellow prisoners from the SPD, KPD, and Centre Party, he was not drafted into labor duties or sent to a concentration camp. With a doctor’s note, he was finally transferred to the hospital in Cologne-Lindenthal, as he wished: After the war, he told the lie, “I was in a concentration camp.” (The Adenauer Foundation, Wikipedia, etc., and artificial intelligence continue to propagate such lies today.)
Without Remorse and Repentance: Forever Guilty
After the Nazi regime, as an indebted millionaire, in the capacity of CDU Chairman and Federal Chancellor, he would continue his guilt in a new form.
He would help persecute people who had offered resistance to the unjust system, even having them imprisoned, while protecting his accomplices. He would present himself as the “antithesis of the Nazi system.” He would preach Christianity and the Christian West but never fulfill Christianity’s demand for remorse and repentance.
On the contrary: He would lie. He would lie to himself and to the people he governed and administered, exposing them to new injustices and even the danger of a new war.
IV. After Hitler and the World War: “Politics of Humility”
After the war, the Western military administrations led by the USA reorganized the separated West Germany. They helped Adenauer, who had been selected long beforehand, to the chairmanship of the CDU, sidelining competitors and anti-fascists. Many decisions were made in Switzerland, where the chosen one often went disguised as a tourist and also underwent expensive cell revitalization therapy at a private clinic on the shores of Lake Geneva.
In the separatist state of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), founded with Adenauer in 1949, occupation law remained in force. This authority initially lay with the leading US banker John McCloy as US High Commissioner: His apartment in Frankfurt/Main had more staff than the Adenauer government—which was initially not allowed to have its own foreign ministry—and the secret service remained a department of the CIA. Through the Marshall Plan and the NATO clamp, the Adenauer state became a forward US bastion and a “showcase” toward the “East.”
Kissinger: Adenauer’s “Politics of Humility”
Henry Kissinger, the most important advisor to US presidents in the 20th century, published his life’s balance sheet shortly before his death: “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy” (New York and Munich 2022). Kissinger had also advised Federal Chancellor Adenauer: The first chapter in the book was dedicated to him, under the title “The Politics of Humility.”
The meaning was this: German capitalists were allowed to keep their war profits and also the profits from the Aryanization of thousands of Jewish banks, companies, and shares; not only those in Germany but also those in occupied Austria, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Poland, Denmark, Norway, as well as the Soviet Union, Slovakia, Yugoslavia, and North Africa. 98 percent of their legal, media, and scientific accomplices also went unpunished; however, they now had to place their proven anti-communist, anti-Russian, economic, and technical potentials humbly at the service of a higher power—the USA.
Practices of Federal German Humility Before the Master
To mask this humility, this submission, with lies of “new self-confidence” and “we are somebody again”: This kind of humility was embodied and practiced at the highest level by the trained Christian liar and political actor Konrad Adenauer, and it remains decisive for his successors and the Federal Republic to this day; just as today Adenauer’s successor, Chancellor and CDU Chairman Merz, continues to stage the role—fulfilling all fundamental demands of the US government while feigning that he is increasing Europe’s sovereignty with lies.
- The Basic Law, approved by the Western military administrations led by the USA, precisely does not contain the rights decided by the UN as a result of the World War: No reference to international law, e.g., the UN Charter; no reference to the labor and social rights of the UN or its sub-organization the ILO; instead, vague, non-binding verbiage about “human dignity,” which is concretely violated millions of times.
- Parties selected, deemed suitable for government, and continuously financed by corporations and banks—primarily the CDU and CSU—were and are open to the far right, including internationally via party foundations.
- No other European state “hosts” as many US military bases as the Federal Republic: Nuclear bombs are stored here, global drone murders are committed from here, supplies for wars in other states are routed from here without the participation of the German government, and military personnel are not subject to German law.
- Adenauer approved: If the USA decides, nuclear war with Russia will be fought in Europe; this applies again now, should the exhausted US proxy warrior Ukraine be replaced by the arming European NATO states as a much larger US proxy warrior, by order of the current US President Trump.
- From Adenauer to the present day, the following applies: The Federal Republic is not a sovereign state—neither militarily, economically, nor digitally—but a provisional entity subordinate to the USA, especially in foreign and geopolitical affairs; this also applies to the construct of the European Union.
- The Western military administrations and then, from 1949, the US High Commissioner licensed the leading mainstream media (Spiegel, ZEIT, Süddeutsche, Springer, FAZ, as well as regional ones like Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger) with Nazi executive staff to this day; this includes decisive public opinion “research” (= opinion forming: The Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy, founded by Goebbels’ student Noelle-Neumann, which receives permanent commissions from federal governments to this day).
- Labor Injustice: The Federal Republic is the only Western state where political strikes are effectively banned (already banned for civil servants and in church enterprises); while millions of mostly illegal migrant low-wage women work in prostitution (Germany: “The Brothel of Europe”), construction, home care, security, gastronomy, etc., civil servants since Adenauer have become increasingly numerous and highly privileged in the public service, ministries, outsourced agencies, the military, secret services, and diplomacy.
- Since the old Nazi bankers and Nazi entrepreneurs were allowed to continue with their old privileges under Adenauer/McCloy, the “Economic Miracle” also turned out to be a lie: As early as 1967 there were 670,000 unemployed, over a million from 1975, over two million from 1983, three million in 1989; under Adenauer’s successor Helmut Kohl, East Germany was impoverished in favor of Western banks and entrepreneurs from 1990 onwards with US advisors in the Treuhand agency; then all of Germany became the “sick man of Europe” again, further deindustrialized from 2000 onwards with the help of US “locust” investors, especially in medium-sized businesses; and then came Adenauer’s successors Merkel and Merz and the very large US investors like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, who are now leading shareholder groups in Germany’s most important companies, such as the DAX, and are reducing employment here with high profits while investing in the USA and China. And now the accomplice Merz, Adenauer’s successor, plays the role of the great economic savior for the “new sick man of Europe” with lies.
Fulfillment of the Adenauer Legacy: Humility Before Donald Trump!
To this day, the Federal Republic has no valid constitution, only a provisional and constantly amended “Basic Law”; and under US leadership, with the technocratically named “2+4 Treaty” of 1991, there is still no peace treaty in Europe, no reparation regulations: Thus, the further advance of NATO led by the USA against Russia remains valid: Germany remains a provisional entity.
This is how Adenauer’s legacy is fulfilled today: His current successor as CDU Chairman and Federal Chancellor fulfills all key demands of the most powerful and dangerous far-right figure of the “free world”—in humility before Donald Trump.
Therefore: The demolition of the Adenauer legends is also part of the construction of a democratic, peaceful, secure, prosperous Germany and Europe within the context of a multipolar world order, in which labor and social rights are also included in human rights.
Note by author Werner Rügemer:
In autumn 2026, the comprehensive Adenauer biography with numerous new sources, many from the USA, will be published by Papyrossa Verlag, Cologne.
First appearing on the NachDenkSeiten portal on January 5, 2026, this article was translated from German to English by the Harici team, following a request from Rügemer.
Some who are thoroughly excited by the Mecca Defence Agreement, and certain people who believe Türkiye should take sides in the clashes between the Iranian-backed Houthis and Saudi Arabia, are once again dreaming dreams of conquest with reference to our Ottoman past. Whenever history is discussed, especially Turkish and Ottoman history, they invoke this widely repeated saying: “After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East and the Balkans never knew peace again.”
We know that there are always those who, proceeding from this premise, seek to re-establish the Ottoman Empire. And we do not forget that eminent historians immediately respond to these ignorant figures: “Whoever does not grieve over the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has no heart, and whoever wishes to re-establish it has no mind.”
For the world we live in is neither the world in which the Ottoman Empire rose, nor the world in which it fell. Both times and conditions have changed. More than 40 states now exist across the lands once ruled by the Sublime Porte; when taking into account the countries it temporarily ruled, seized, or held sway over, that number exceeds 50 according to some historians, and 60 or even 70 according to others.
It must be asked dispassionately:
Which of these states, and how many of their citizens, actually want the Ottoman Empire to rise again, or wish for the Turks who would lead this revived, re-established Ottoman Empire to come and govern them as well? For this purpose, how many of these states have come together and said to Türkiye, “Take the lead, revive the Ottoman Empire”?
Is it objectively possible in today’s world to establish such a multilingual, multireligious, multiconfessional, multinational, and multi-identity empire? As the former prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu once suggested, is it objectively plausible for Türkiye to establish and lead an Ottoman Commonwealth of Nations, just as the British established and led the Commonwealth of Nations? Does Türkiye possess such political and economic power, state capacity, and scale?
Do the states that emerged from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire have any such goal, desire, or expectation? Are regional and global conditions, or the balance of power, conducive to such an initiative? Long after the age of empires has drawn to a close, is it a realistic objective to bring the countries born of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse together under the umbrella of a federation or confederation?
How do those who claim such a desire exists in the Islamic world, the Arab world, and the Turkic world explain the rapprochement between the Central Asian Turkic states and the Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus; the Sunni-Shia and Arab-Persian tensions across the Islamic world; the Abraham Accords; the indifference of Arab states to the Palestinian issue; and the fact that the TRNC is not recognized by a single Muslim country or a single Turkic state other than Türkiye?
Were Türkiye to put forward such an ambition, let alone Greece, Bulgaria, or Serbia, how would Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran react?
These questions could certainly be multiplied.
Yet history books contain ample evidence of how dreams conceived, and commentary made, in ignorance of history, geography, and economics ultimately turn out.
What matters in foreign policy is not indulging in fantasies, but remaining realistic.
Thomas Karat, behavioral analyst
The Mavi Marmara had sailed from Istanbul’s Sarayburnu port on 22 May 2010, bound for Gaza with aid. On 31 May, after Israeli commandos had taken the ship in international waters and nine of the people aboard lay dead, a Turkish reporter named Kürşat Bayhan tried to save his work by hiding his camera’s memory card under his tongue. It was found during a medical examination and taken from him. Around sixty journalists came off the flotilla at Ashdod that week, and all of their recorded media was confiscated, never to be returned. In the days that followed, the Israeli military released short, edited clips drawn in part from the material it had seized, and its account of the raid dominated coverage while the survivors were held without contact. For about forty-eight hours, while survivors were held incommunicado, the clips released by Israel, edited from the ship’s security cameras and from equipment taken off journalists, were most of what the world saw. On 3 June the Committee to Protect Journalists accused Israel of confiscating journalistic material and then manipulating it to serve its own interests. A United Nations fact-finding mission later recorded that a large quantity of video and photographs from the vessels, including much of the assault on the Mavi Marmara itself, had been taken by the Israeli authorities and not returned. The seized material stayed useful to its holders long after the raid. Months later, while the Israeli chief of staff was giving testimony about the operation, army radio released a further short clip from the confiscated videos, a timing one Israeli outlet read as a domestic political move. The Turkish photojournalist Cevdet Kılıçlar was among those killed on the ship, and a Canadian aid worker, Kevin Neish, who hid the memory card from his own camera and later smuggled it out, published photographs of the dead that the official clips had left out. What survived reached the public because individuals beat the search, among them two Turkish journalists, Adem Özköse and Şefik Dinç, who smuggled their work home or recovered it from damaged cards.
Readers in Türkiye know that method from their own history. The state seizes the cameras, holds the witnesses until the story has set and then releases whatever selection supports the official version. It is the maritime equivalent of the colonial bonfires described in the first part of this series, where Britain burned or sank the files that might embarrass it and later locked away the rest. Both methods rest on one condition. The state has to hold the only copies. In Gaza since October 2023 that condition has failed, because a large part of the evidence was recorded by Israeli soldiers on their own phones and published by them, under their own names, before anyone in authority could decide what the public would be allowed to see.
The most common scene in that material is a demolition. Engineers thread explosives through the houses of an entire street, a countdown runs, and a block of homes drops at once into a single rolling cloud, while the men who set the charges cheer and the man holding the phone keeps it steady on the collapse. The same footage recurs across Gaza in thousands of clips filmed by unit after unit, some dedicating a detonation to a fallen comrade or to a holiday at home. One soldier captioned the levelling of houses in Rafah “renovations in Gaza.” The Fourth Geneva Convention bars an occupying power from destroying civilian property unless military operations make it absolutely necessary, and it lists extensive destruction of property, carried out unlawfully and wantonly and without military necessity, among the grave breaches that constitute war crimes. Footage of soldiers celebrating the collapse of a residential block is poor evidence of necessity. Demolition compelled by an operational requirement gives no occasion for a victory song, and the soundtrack records the attitude in which the decision was carried out.
The second recurring scene shows detainees. Across the Strip soldiers filmed men they had rounded up, who had been stripped to their underwear and blindfolded before being made to kneel in long rows, and they filmed themselves standing over them. In December 2023 a soldier named Yossi Gamzoo posted footage of a Palestinian stripped and bound, bleeding, under interrogation at Gaza College and then marched barefoot through the street, along with a second clip from Yarmouk stadium in which hundreds of men kneel in rows, many in their underwear and some blindfolded, with three women on their knees behind a goal. Another soldier, later identified as Ilya Blank, set a montage of blindfolded detainees packed into a pickup truck, with a comrade grinning and raising his thumb beside them, to an Israeli rap track. The Geneva Conventions require that people in custody be treated humanely and protected against insults and public curiosity. Legal scholars who examined this footage for the BBC concluded that it breached those protections. Two named soldiers stand here for a practice that was widespread and openly displayed, posted by men who expected their audience to approve.
The same practice reached the occupied West Bank. In December 2023, during a three-day military operation in the Jenin refugee camp, reservists filmed themselves inside a mosque reciting the Shema Yisrael and singing Hanukkah songs over the loudspeaker normally used for the call to prayer, one of them standing on the minbar. Graffiti left in the building read, among other things, greetings from the Gaza envelope. The army said the conduct contradicted its values and removed the soldiers from operational duty. Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, meanwhile posted the video on his own Telegram channel, presenting it as a prayer performed by heroic soldiers. Türkiye’s Foreign Ministry condemned the incident as a provocation. The episode compressed the whole problem into a single week. The military moved to discipline the men who had filmed the act, while a cabinet minister circulated the same footage to his followers as something to admire, which left the state disowning and promoting one recording at the same moment.
Some of the gravest material emerged by a different route, through a leak rather than a boast. On 6 August 2024 Israel’s Channel 12 broadcast surveillance footage from Sde Teiman, a military detention camp in southern Israel holding Palestinians taken from Gaza. It showed soldiers leading a detainee aside and surrounding him with riot shields, so that what was done to him took place just outside the camera’s view. The military’s own indictment later described what the shields concealed. Soldiers had attacked the man with severe violence and inserted a sharp object that penetrated near his rectum and tore the rectal wall, leaving him with fractured ribs and a punctured lung. The broadcast characterised the attack as a rape, while the charges filed stopped at aggravated assault. What followed belongs at the centre of this account. Israel arrested a senior military lawyer on suspicion of having leaked the video, and the military advocate general’s office later withdrew the indictments against the reservists. The legal jeopardy moved from the men in the footage to the official accused of letting the public see it.
Once the soldiers’ own posts were public, others began to organise them into evidence. The Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi spent months identifying soldiers and units from what they had published, including a sniper team he traced after one of its members uploaded a video recounting the unit’s operations in Gaza City that showed unarmed people being shot. He collected post after post of soldiers posing with the lingerie and the mannequins of women whose homes they had occupied, and Al Jazeera’s investigative unit compiled a database of more than two and a half thousand accounts belonging to serving soldiers. A Belgian organisation, the Hind Rajab Foundation, began converting that material into criminal complaints, identifying individual soldiers from their own publications and filing cases in the countries they visited. Within a year it had lodged around fifty complaints and submitted the names of a thousand soldiers to the International Criminal Court, supported by thousands of items of footage and posts. A judge in Brazil issued an arrest warrant against one soldier, who avoided it by crossing into Argentina. A complaint in Portugal relied on a sniper’s own online boast of four bullets fired without a miss. In Belgium the foundation filed a further complaint against a dual national from the same sniper team, built around the siege of a Gaza hospital. The Israeli military responded by warning its personnel to stop publishing details of their service and by advising some of them to leave the countries they were visiting before they could be detained.
The footage reached the highest court available to states. When South Africa brought its case under the Genocide Convention to the International Court of Justice, its counsel played the soldiers’ videos in the courtroom and read out statements soldiers had made on camera as evidence of intent. The court found that the Palestinians’ claimed right to protection from genocide was plausible and issued binding provisional measures, among them an order that Israel prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to the allegations. A later order required Israel to admit United Nations investigators to Gaza. Türkiye, a party to the Genocide Convention, submitted its own declaration of intervention in the case on 7 August 2024 under Article 63 of the Court’s Statute, and the Court invited South Africa and Israel to submit written observations on the request, months after Ankara had suspended trade with Israel over the war. In November 2025 the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office announced arrest warrants on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against 37 Israeli officials, among them the prime minister, the defence minister and the chief of the general staff. Israel’s foreign minister rejected the warrants with contempt and called them a PR stunt, arguing that the Turkish judiciary had become a political instrument and citing the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor earlier that year. The warrants have no force outside Türkiye, and their weight lies in the record they help assemble. The International Criminal Court had already issued warrants for the prime minister and his former defence minister a year earlier. Across these proceedings the soldiers’ own recordings form part of the evidentiary base, which means the state now faces courts in The Hague and prosecutors abroad with material its own personnel produced and published.
From that point the work of erasure ran in reverse. A government that in 2010 had held the cameras now had to recover material already copied onto other people’s devices. In February 2024 the chief of the general staff, Herzi Halevi, wrote to commanders instructing soldiers not to loot and not to film revenge videos, and soldiers who had posted demolition footage were told to remove it. The concern, as described by the military’s own people, was that the clips could feed the cases building at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. By mid-2025 the chief military censor had issued an order restricting what could be posted about strikes altogether, an order Haaretz described as legally invalid. By 2026 the army’s chief of staff had asked military lawyers to examine legal action against the makers of a prize-winning documentary in which soldiers described the deliberate killing of civilians in Gaza. The effort that had begun with deleting a conscript’s post extended, within two years, to pursuing those who assembled such material into a public account.
The removal of evidence also operated on the platforms, and it fell unevenly. In October and November 2023 Human Rights Watch documented more than a thousand takedowns and suppressions of Palestinian content on Instagram and Facebook. Of the 1,050 cases it reviewed, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestinians, and a single case involved content supporting Israel. The organisation identified six recurring patterns of suppression, ranging from removal and account suspension to shadow-banning and restrictions on live video, affecting posts of evident news value, including footage of Palestinian dead. It attributed the pattern to automated moderation and to government pressure over what the company removed, including referrals from Israel’s state cyber unit. Users responded by misspelling the word Gaza or substituting a watermelon for the Palestinian flag to evade the filters. A human-rights review commissioned by Meta itself had already found, before the war, that its moderation harmed Palestinian rights. The two bodies of material differ in kind. The soldiers’ footage documents alleged crimes, while most of the suppressed Palestinian content documented what was being done to civilians. In both cases the record most damaging to the stronger party proved the harder one to keep in view.
Older forms of erasure continued alongside the new. Early in the war an airstrike destroyed the Central Archives of Gaza City, which held some 150 years of the territory’s history in roughly 110,000 documents and photographs. The library of the Islamic University of Gaza had been levelled in the second week of fighting, and the Gaza City public library, holding about ten thousand volumes, followed. United Nations experts used the term scholasticide for the systematic destruction of the territory’s education system, reporting that more than eighty per cent of Gaza’s schools had been damaged or destroyed. One count put the dead at 5,479 students, 261 teachers and 95 university professors. The last functioning university was demolished in January 2024, after the army had used it for seventy days as a base and detention site. The Committee to Protect Journalists recorded 2024 as the deadliest year for the press since it began keeping records in 1992, with 124 journalists killed worldwide and around sixty per cent of the toll attributed to Israel. The dead included the journalist Hamza Dahdouh, son of the Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh, killed in a strike on his car, and Ismail al-Ghoul with his cameraman Rami al-Rifi, killed in a vehicle with press markings while both wore press vests. Many of those killed were freelancers working after their newsrooms had been destroyed, filling a gap left by Israel’s refusal to admit foreign reporters except on escorted military visits, a restriction that more than fifty foreign correspondents protested in an open letter.
The oldest layer of the practice reaches back to the state’s founding. For two decades a security department of the Israeli defence ministry known by its Hebrew acronym, Malmab, has removed documents from Israeli archives, often without legal authority and in some cases resealing papers the military censor had already cleared, including material on the expulsions of 1948 that historians had published and cited. The largest archive in the country, that of the military itself, remains almost entirely sealed. One historian discovered that files he had quoted fifteen years earlier were no longer available to him. Among the documents withdrawn was an internal report on how Palestinian villages were emptied in the first months of the 1948 war, a record that complicates the official account of a population that left of its own accord. That is the British method in its Israeli form, the quiet withdrawal of evidence that had once been open.
The motive is consistent across both parts of this series. A state that claims to conduct its wars within the law draws standing from that claim both at home and in the international forums where it seeks support. Documented abuse, examined by courts it does not control, undermines the claim and attaches it to named individuals. Britain protected that standing with fire, with retention orders and with closed courts, and the effort succeeded for half a century because the state held the only copies of the evidence. Israel controlled the record of the Mavi Marmara in 2010 by the same means, through possession of the cameras. In Gaza it has held neither the cameras nor the copies. The decisive evidence was produced by its own soldiers, distributed before any censor intervened, archived by investigators within hours and entered into proceedings at The Hague before any deletion order took effect. The first part of this series ended at Akrotiri, where Britain still withholds its surveillance footage of Gaza on grounds of national security. The contrast with the footage Israel’s own soldiers chose to publish defines the present moment. A state can seal what it alone possesses. It has far fewer means to recall a confession its personnel have already made to the world, and the scale of the effort it devotes to trying remains the clearest indication of what that confession contains.
Settle, deny, seal: Britain’s formula for colonial torture, from Kenya to Cyprus — 1
Thomas Karat, behavioral analyst
In January 2019 the British government announced that it would pay one million pounds to thirty-three Cypriots who said they had been tortured in British custody during the uprising of 1955 to 1959. The statement that accompanied the money contained a sentence that readers in Nairobi would have recognised. The settlement, London said, did not constitute any admission of liability and set no precedent for any future claim against the government. Five and a half years earlier, announcing compensation for Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau Emergency, the same government had kept its denial of liability intact and declared that the payment set no precedent for any other former colony. Two territories, two populations of torture survivors, and one formula, carried from one continent to another with its wording barely altered. A sentence that travels like that belongs to a method. The method has a history that runs from colonial bonfires in the 1950s through statutes still in force today, and it ends, for the moment, at a British air base on Cyprus that is still in operation.
The Cyprus Emergency began in 1955, when EOKA, a Greek Cypriot organisation seeking union with Greece, opened an armed campaign against British rule, a campaign London classified as terrorism. The violence ran in more than one direction. According to figures published by a Turkish Cypriot outlet, EOKA killed 371 British servicemen between 1955 and 1959, and its victims included Turkish Cypriots, the first of them a police sergeant, Abdullah Alparslan, killed in Paphos in 1956. None of this alters the legal position of a prisoner. The prohibition on torturing people in custody protects every detainee regardless of the cause he served, and it was the treatment of detainees that the British administration worked hardest to keep from view. Allegations of abuse circulated widely at the time, and the colonial authorities dismissed them as EOKA propaganda. No British soldier or policeman was prosecuted for torture during the uprising, although two officers of the Gordon Highlanders were court-martialled and convicted of causing actual bodily harm. The EOKA veterans’ association says that fourteen Greek Cypriots died under British interrogation, two of them aged seventeen. In 2022 new evidence on those deaths was published, drawing on testimony from British veterans and Cypriot fighters, post-mortem and morgue records, and photographs from the Cyprus State Archives that appear to show mutilation of the genitals; it was the first time British forces, intelligence services included, had been accused of a campaign of extrajudicial killing during the uprising. Among the thirty-three claimants who settled in 2019 was a woman who said that, at sixteen, she had been repeatedly raped by soldiers.
For half a century the documents that could have tested those accounts were officially said not to exist. They surfaced because of a lawsuit on another continent. In the course of the Kenyan litigation the Foreign Office conceded that it held thousands of files from former colonial administrations, around 9,000 from thirty-seven of them by one early count, long thought to have been destroyed. Among them were Cyprus papers in which British police and military officers themselves described the brutal treatment of suspected EOKA fighters and of civilians. Foreign Office documents released in July 2012 set out claims of torture and abuse from the Emergency years, and in July 2015 thirty-five Cypriots filed suit. Reporting on the newly available material, the Cyprus Mail found that the top-secret files showed suspected EOKA fighters and ordinary civilians alike had been brutally tortured in the course of the Emergency. Their lawyer had to persuade the government to let him see classified material, which meant repeated visits to Hanslope Park, the secretive Foreign Office site in Buckinghamshire where the colonial archive had been held. A Labour member of parliament of Cypriot descent observed that, in a matter where torture was certainly involved, the government would rather the case never saw the light of day. When the settlement came, the minister for Europe described the period before independence as a matter of regret, and pointed to the passage of time as a reason the claims could no longer be fairly tried. The passage of time in question included the fifty years during which the government had kept the relevant files out of reach. Even the settlement did not close the archive. During a later visit by the claimants’ lawyer to Cyprus it was announced that thousands of further classified documents bearing on torture allegations from the Emergency were due for release, which meant that, years after London had paid to end the case, part of the record it concerned had still not been opened. The pace at which that material reaches the public is still set by the department that withheld it in the first place.
The disappearance of those files had been planned with the same care as any other branch of colonial administration. From 1961 the colonial secretary, Iain Macleod, directed officers across the remaining territories to identify and remove any document that might embarrass the British government or its officials, together with anything open to reading as evidence of racial prejudice or religious bias. The criterion applied was reputational: a paper went to the fire according to the harm it could do to Britain’s name, whatever its military value. Files fit to pass to an incoming government were marked legacy. Files destined for destruction or for secret shipment to London were marked watch, and the instructions required that successor governments never learn such files had existed, so that where one was withdrawn from a series a dummy file took its place. The work was reserved for officers who were British subjects of European descent. Paper was burned and the ash broken up, or packed into weighted crates and sunk in deep water far from the coast. In Belize the files went up with help from the Royal Navy and several gallons of petrol. In British Guiana two secretaries fed papers into an oil drum on the grounds of Government House until the army lent a hand. In Aden a committee of three began burning in 1966, a full year before the British withdrew. In Malaya five lorry loads were driven to the naval base in a single purge, a destruction so conspicuous that officers in Kenya were later warned against repeating it. Each completed destruction produced a signed certificate for London. The programme was called Operation Legacy.
Kenya was where the concealment finally broke. Three elderly survivors of the detention camps of the Mau Mau Emergency, who had been beaten and sexually mutilated in British custody, sued the Foreign Office. One of them described in his witness statement a period before independence in which men were castrated and women raped. The department fought the claim for three years, arguing first that liability for colonial conduct had passed to the independent Kenyan state in 1963, a position the High Court rejected. It was during that litigation, more than a decade after the case began, that the hidden archive came to light. Historians who had argued for years that the records had been removed and concealed were vindicated, after a long period in which the government had been content to let them appear mistaken rather than acknowledge what it held. The files became catalogue series FCO 141 at the National Archives, some twenty thousand files from around forty former territories. On 6 June 2013 the foreign secretary told the House of Commons that the government would pay £19.9 million) to 5,228 claimants and that it sincerely regretted the abuses, in a statement that preserved the denial of liability and the refusal of precedent that Cyprus would hear in 2019.
The formula performs a precise legal function. A payment made without admission of liability produces no finding against the state, and no court ever pronounces on what the files show. A payment declared to set no precedent obliges every other group of victims, in every other former territory, to begin from nothing, against a defendant that holds the documents and controls the pace at which they emerge. The Cypriot claimants learned from the Kenyan case that settlement was possible, and their lawyer said publicly that the government’s resistance in Cyprus had been ill advised because the Mau Mau case had already shown where such litigation led. The government nonetheless repeated the full sequence, resisting the claims, contesting access to the files and finally settling without admission. Kenya also received a memorial in Nairobi, unveiled as a symbol of reconciliation, while no comparable memorial has been offered to Cyprus. Each case is handled as an exception, which is the outcome the formula is designed to secure.
An incomplete record does not leave a neutral space behind it. It leaves room for partisan shorthand, and the shorthand settles on whichever community has the least access to the documents. When the BBC reported the 2019 settlement, its story described Turkish Cypriots as thugs, wording the broadcaster later apologised for and removed. The Emergency years shaped relations between the island’s communities, and a full account of them, drawn from the files rather than from competing memories, serves Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots alike. The party that has kept that account incomplete is the former colonial power, whose officers wrote the reports and whose ministries still decide which of them may be read.
The fire was the crude instrument. The durable one is statutory and still operates. The Public Records Act provides that records selected for permanent preservation pass into public view within twenty years, a period reduced from thirty in 2010. The same section allows a department to keep records back if they are required for administrative purposes or ought to be retained for any other special reason, and in its broadest application it permits a blanket retention covering an entire class of files, reviewed once every ten years. In 2013 the Foreign Office was found to be holding a further body of material it called its special collections, estimated at the time at 1.2 million files and occupying roughly fifteen miles of shelving, held for years in breach of the Act. The justice secretary responded by signing a blanket authorisation that converted the breach into lawful retention, and a group of historians considered a legal challenge under both the Public Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act. The colonial files of Hong Kong remain closed under an order set to run until 2047. In 2015 the power to approve retention moved from the Lord Chancellor to a Secretary of State, and the authorising document was renamed from a Lord Chancellor’s Instrument to a plain Retention Instrument. The Lord Chancellor’s role had carried a measure of independent oversight of the public records system, and the change moved the decision closer to the departments that hold the records and have reasons of their own to keep them closed. Between 2017 and 2019 the British army’s headquarters in Kenya destroyed most of its physical files created before 2015, years after ministers had expressed regret in Parliament for precisely this kind of loss.
Destruction and retention govern what reaches the record. A third instrument governs what reaches the courtroom. English law has held since Lord Hewart’s judgment of 1924 that justice must manifestly be seen to be done, and the principle has long been treated as part of the rule of law itself. The Justice and Security Act of 2013 introduced closed material procedures into ordinary civil litigation for the first time. Where the government is sued over the conduct of its own agencies, it may now rely on evidence that the claimant and the claimant’s own lawyer never see. A security-cleared special advocate reads the material in their place and is then barred from discussing it with the person whose interests he represents. Special advocates themselves told Parliament the procedures were inherently unfair and contrary to the common-law tradition. The Law Society warned that the Act damaged the equality of arms on which a fair trial depends. A recently retired Law Lord described the legislation as so radical a departure from open justice that every available safeguard should be built in against its use, and the government’s own equality and human-rights watchdog judged the Bill incompatible with European human-rights requirements. Parliament passed the Act regardless of these objections. In 2014 prosecutors applied to hold an entire terrorism trial in secret, with the defendants kept anonymous. The Court of Appeal refused a complete blackout, holding that criminal trials must be public and defendants named, and recorded its grave concern at what had been attempted. The core of the trial still proceeded in private, with a small group of journalists admitted on terms that kept almost everything they heard out of print and their notebooks in the court’s custody.
The two efforts were assembled side by side. The Justice and Security Act received royal assent on 25 April 2013. Six weeks later, on 6 June, the same government expressed in the Commons its regret for colonial torture whose evidence it had withheld for fifty years and surrendered only under compulsion of a court. An apology for an old concealment and the legal machinery for future concealment came from one administration within a single parliamentary season. Six years after that, the Cyprus settlement repeated the words of the apology while the machinery remained in place.
The motive is legible in the record itself. A state that presents itself abroad as a custodian of the rule of law, and that sits as one of the guarantors of an independent Cyprus, draws much of its standing from the claim that its own conduct can withstand scrutiny. Documented torture, examined in open court, falsifies that claim and attaches names to it. The instruments differ in where they intervene, and they protect the same asset. Destruction prevents evidence from ever reaching a court. Retention keeps surviving files from historians for decades at a time, and closed procedures keep evidence from the public even after it reaches a judge. The Court of Appeal named the stakes in its 2014 judgment, describing open justice as a hallmark of the rule of law, a guarantee that the conduct of the state in its own courts can be watched by the people in whose name it acts. Each instrument described here is a way of declining that watch. Sustained over half a century, the expense involved gives some measure of the value placed on that asset. A government does not maintain a secret archive for fifty years, legalise its retention when exposed and redesign its own civil procedure in order to protect material it regards as harmless.
On Cyprus the British state retains more than archives. Under the 1960 Treaty of Establishment the island became independent with the exception of two areas at Akrotiri and at Dhekelia, which remained under British sovereignty, and under the accompanying Treaty of Guarantee, Türkiye and Greece, together with the United Kingdom, undertook to guarantee the independence of the Republic together with its territorial integrity and its security. From Akrotiri, beginning in December 2023, Royal Air Force Shadow R1 surveillance aircraft flew hundreds of missions over and around Gaza, at least 518 according to an investigation by Action on Armed Violence for Declassified UK, a figure the charity later put at 606. The Ministry of Defence has said the flights served only to help locate hostages, and has refused to say whether it shared live surveillance footage with Israel. It has confirmed, in answer to a freedom-of-information request, that it holds video of Gaza from a flight on 1 April 2024, the day Israeli strikes killed seven international aid workers, three of them British military veterans, and it has declined to release that footage on national-security grounds.
The island on which British officers once kept colonial files out of reach now hosts a British base whose record of a present war is withheld on familiar grounds. The reflex traced here through Kenya and Cyprus belongs to no single state. The second part of this series follows it to Israel, whose conduct in Gaza and the West Bank has been recorded on a scale no archive was built to contain, much of it by Israeli soldiers themselves, and whose authorities have since worked to remove that record from the platforms where it first appeared. Britain’s method assumed that evidence could be held in one place and managed over decades. What becomes of that method when the evidence exists everywhere at once is the question the second part examines.
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