West Germany: A President’s Defense

Heinrich Lübke, 73, the President of West Germany, has always cut a less than imposing figure in the country’s highest, though largely ceremonial post as head of state. A conservative Catholic politician who served in postwar cabinets as Agriculture Minister, he was thrust into the presidency as a last-minute compromise candidate in 1959. Even many of his own Christian Democrats tried to keep him from running for a second five-year term in 1964. Benign but somewhat bungling, he won a reputation as West Germany’s unexcelled master of the malapropism, has been long regarded by his countrymen as the butt of much good-humored ridicule. Students wore “I like Lübke” buttons, and satirists produced an LP parody of his stumbling speeches.

Suddenly, the mood of amiable derision turned sour. Reason: Lübke was accused of putting his signature of approval on blueprints for barracks in Hitler’s death camps during World War II. Lübke came under such heavy attack that last week, in an extraordinary move for a head of state, he bowed to public pressure and appeared on nationwide German TV to answer charges about his wartime activities. In a brief, four-minute telecast, he traced his wartime career as an auditor in a Berlin architect’s office that designed plants and workers’ barracks, firmly denied that he had anything to do with extermination camps. “Those who vilify me have long been aware of that,” said Lübke. “It is to prevent them from succeeding in falsifying the truth that I have put my case before you.”

Lübke’s denial climaxed two months of sharply rising clamor against him. The affair had actually begun four years ago, when East Germany’s Communist propagandists handed out barrack blueprints that allegedly carried Lübke’s signature. Almost no one took the charges very seriously until last January, when Der Stern, West Germany’s largest weekly magazine, published the testimony of a U.S. handwriting specialist that the signature was indeed Lübke’s. The country’s restless students seized on the white-haired old man as a symbol of all that they find wrong with West Germany. University professors called on him to explain, and Der Stern’s Editor in Chief Henri Nannen hounded him to resign. The irony was that Nannen himself was accused of having been a strong follower of Hitler during the Nazi period.

Difficult to Escape. Even though they had earlier insisted that Lübke remain silent, Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and his Cabinet now decided that Lübke should take his case to the people. All three parties in the Bundestag issued strong statements of support for him. German political leaders knew, after all, that Lübke had been no Nazi and that he had even spent 20 months in Nazi prisons during the 1930s. The barrack plans that he signed were probably for forced laborers at such installations as the German rocket facility of Peenemünde. Those places were no vacation spots, but they were a far cry from the death camps of Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann.

Germans of 40 and older, who remember how difficult it was to escape the taint of at least some minor involvement with the Nazi regime, will probably accept Lübke’s explanation of his wartime activities. But the younger Germans, who see in him the failure of the older generation to stand up to the Nazis, are unlikely to be very understanding. These days, they are not very interested in explanations.