Hans Josef Maria Globke (10 September 1898 – 13 February 1973) was a high-ranking German civil servant and lawyer who played a central role in both the Nazi regime and the early West German government. While not himself a member of the Nazi party (his application was rejected), he was one of the regime's most influential civil servants.
Globke worked in the Prussian and Reich Ministry of the Interior in the Reich, under the Weimar Republic and Nazism. Later, he was the Under-Secretary of State and Chief of Staff of the German Chancellery in West Germany from 28 October 1953 to 15 October 1963 under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. He is the most prominent example of the continuity of the administrative elites between Nazi Germany and the early West Germany.
In 1936, Globke wrote a legal annotation on the antisemitic Nuremberg Race Laws that did not express any objection to the discrimination against Jews, placing the Nazi Party on a firmer legal ground and setting the path to the Holocaust during World War II. By 1938, Globke had been promoted to Ministerialdirigent in the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior, where he produced the Name Change Ordinance, a law that forced Jewish men to take the middle name Israel and Jewish women Sara for easier identification. In 1941, during the Nazi period, he issued another statute that stripped Jews in occupied territories of their statehood and possessions. Globke was identified as the author of an interior ministry report from France, written in racist language, that complained of "coloured blood into Europe" and called for the "elimination" of its "influences" on the gene pool.
Globke later had a controversial career as Secretary of State and Chief of Staff of the West German Chancellery. A strident anti-communist, Globke became a powerful éminence grise of the West German government, and was widely regarded as one of the most influential public officials in the government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Globke had a major role in shaping the course and structure of the state and West Germany's alignment with the United States. He was also an important figure in West Germany's anti-communist policies at the domestic and international level and in the Western intelligence community, and was the German government's main liaison with NATO and other Western intelligence services, especially the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Early life and education Globke was born in Düsseldorf, Rhine Province, the son of the cloth wholesaler Josef Globke and his wife Sophie (née Erberich), both Roman Catholics and supporters of the Centre Party (Deutsche Zentrumspartei). Shortly after Hans's birth, the family moved to Aachen, where his father opened a draper's shop. When he finished his secondary education at the elite Catholic Kaiser-Karl-Gymnasium and completing his Abitur in 1916, he was drafted, serving until the end of World War I in an artillery unit on the Western Front. After World War I, he studied law and political science at the University of Bonn, University of Cologne and the University of Giessen. In 1921, Globke became a legal trainee when he passed the state examination () at the Higher Regional Court of Cologne. For a year he worked as a trainee in Eschweiler, Cologne and Berlin. In 1922, Globke qualified as a doctor of law (Dr. jur.) at the University of Giessen, with a dissertation titled The immunity of the members of the Reichstag and the Landtag (). In the same year, his father died and Globke became the main wage-earner for the family.
While studying, Globke, a practising Catholic, joined the Bonn chapter of the Cartellverband (KdStV), the German Catholic Students' Federation. His close contacts with fellow KdStV members and his membership from 1922 in the Catholic Centre Party played a significant role in his later political life. Globke finished his Assessorexamen in 1924 and briefly served as a judge in the Aachen district court. He became vice police-chief of Aachen in 1925 and governmental civil servant with a rank of Regierungsassessor (District Assessor) in 1926.
In 1934, he married Augusta Vaillant, with whom he had two sons and one daughter.
Ministerial career
In December 1929, Globke entered the Higher Civil Service at the lowest rank of Government Counciller in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. There he worked in areas like Standesamt, , demilitarisation of the Rhineland and questions related to the Treaty of Versailles.
Globke was not affected by the personnel purges of the Prussian ministerial bureaucracy by the Franz von Papen government, which removed republican-oriented officials after the coup d'état in Prussia on 20 July 1932. On the contrary, on 12 August 1932, he was appointed head of the constitutional department in Department I. This department also included the civil status department, which was responsible for regulating name change matters. In October 1932, under Globke's leadership, a set of rules, known as the "Ordinance on the Responsibility for Changing Surnames and First Names of 21 November 1932" () were created. The rule made it harder for Germans of Jewish ancestry in Prussia to change their last names to less obviously Jewish names, followed by guidelines for their implementation in December 1932.
This ordinance tied in with the restrictive principles for the treatment of Jewish name changes formulated in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in 1909 and 1921, but now placed these changes openly in the context of an anti-Jewish attitude. In the circular issued by Globke on naming rights, it was said that every name change impairs "the recognisability of origin from a family", facilitates "the obscuration of marital status" and conceals "the blood descent".
This unequal treatment of the Jews in the final phase of the Weimar Republic, in which Globke played a major role, is considered by researchers and in the earlier case law of East Germany to be a precursor to name-related discrimination during the early Nazi era. For the historian and the criminal lawyer , Globke "was therefore one of the pioneers of later racial legislation as early as the Weimar Republic."
Career during Nazism After the seizure of power by the Nazi Party in early 1933, Globke was involved in the drafting of a series of laws aimed at the co-ordination () of the legal system of Prussia with the Reich. Globke helped to formulate the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933, which effectively gave Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers. He was also the author of the law of 10 July 1933 concerning the dissolution of the existing Prussian State Council and the formation of the revised Council, as well as of further legislation that co-ordinated all Prussian parliamentary bodies.
In December 1933 Globke was promoted to Oberregierungsrat (Senior Government Councilor), which Globke later said had been postponed due to his doubts over the legality of the so-called Prussian coup of 1932, which was well known in the Ministry. On 1 November 1934, following the unification of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior with the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Globke took a position as a Referent (Consultant) in the newly formed Reich and Prussian Ministry of the Interior under Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, where he worked until 1945. In July 1938, Globke received his final promotion of the Nazi period, to Ministerialrat (Ministerial Councilor).
Measures to exclude and persecute Jews
From 1934 onwards, Globke continued to be responsible mainly for name changes and civil status issues; from 1937, international issues in the field of citizenship and option contracts were added to his brief. As a co-supervisor, he also dealt with "general race issues", immigration and emigration, and matters related to the anti-Semitic "Blood Protection Act" () laws covering sexual relations between Aryans and non-Aryans. He co-authored the official legal commentary on the new Reich Citizenship Law, one of the Nuremberg Laws introduced at the Nazi Party Congress in September 1935, which revoked the citizenship of German Jews, as well as various legal regulations. Globke's work also included the elaboration of templates and drafts for laws and ordinances. In this context, he had a leading role in the preparation of the first Ordinance on the Reich's civil law (enacted on 14 November 1935), The Law for the Defense of German Blood and Honour (enacted 18 October 1935), and the (enacted on 3 November 1937). The "J" which was imprinted in the passports of Jews was designed by Globke.
Globke was responsible for preparing legal commentaries and explanations for his areas of responsibility. In 1936, together with his superior, State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart, he published the first commentary on the Nuremberg Laws and their implementing regulations. This proved to be particularly influential for the interpretation of the Nuremberg Laws because it was given an official character. Originally, Globke was only supposed to comment on matrimonial issues as Stuckart wanted to do the rest of the work himself, but Stuckart became ill for a long time, so Globke wrote the commentary on his own. Stuckart ended up only writing the extensive introduction. In this context, Globke's later defense lawyers pointed out that he was not to be held responsible for Stuckart's racist choice of words and that his commentary on the law interpreted the Nuremberg Laws narrowly in comparison to later comments. In individual cases, especially in the case of so-called mixed marriages, this has proven to be beneficial for those affected.
Globke also authored the (enacted 5 January 1938), the Name Change Ordinance (enacted 17 August 1938), and the associated implementing ordinances. According to the ordinances, Jews who did not bear any of the given names in an attached list were required to add a middle name to their own: "Sara" for women and "Israel" for men. The list of male first names began with Abel, Abiezer, Abimelech, Abner, Absalom, Ahab, Ahaziah, Ahasuerus, and so on. Some of the names on the list were fictitious or selected in a controversial manner. It is unclear whether this was due to an intention to further disparage Jews, or whether they were errors and inaccuracies. Insofar as they were particularly widespread among German Jews at the time, even the names of Christian saints were included on this list, e.g. B. "Isidor", the name of the theologian Isidor of Seville or Saint Isidor of Madrid, the patron of many southern German village churches. By registering the population regarded as Jewish, Globke created the administrative prerequisites that facilitated to a great extent the rounding up and deportation of Jews during the Holocaust that, began at the end of 1941.
Globke also served as chief legal adviser to the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of Interior, headed by Adolf Eichmann, that performed the bureaucratic implementation of the Holocaust.
In 1938, Globke was appointed Ministerialrat (Ministerial Councilor) for his "extraordinary efforts in drafting the law for the Protection of the German Blood". On 25 April 1938, Globke was praised by the Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick as "the most capable and efficient official in my ministry" when it came to drafting anti-Semitic laws.
During the war
At the beginning of the war, Globke was responsible for the new German imperial borders in the West that were the responsibility of the Reich Ministry of the Interior. He made several trips to the conquered territories. The historian Peter Schöttler suspected that Globke was probably the author of a memorandum to Hitler in June 1940 discussing the idea of State Secretary Stuckart proposing a far-reaching annexation of the East French and Belgian territories, which would have involved the deportation of about 5 million people.