Germany’s Nazi family search app explains (some of) the guilt behind Berlin’s soft line on Israel

I went to a party in the ‘Belly of the Beast’ last week. For an EUobserver journalist, that means the HQ of Axel Springer, the German media giant that publishes, among other things, our (sort-of) rival, Politico, and Bild, one of the world’s best-selling tabloid newspapers, and Die Welt, Germany’s pro-market rightwing broadsheet.

It also recently purchased the UK’s increasingly hard-right and Nigel Farage-friendly Daily Telegraph, a venerable 171-year-old institution. For €660m, in cash.

Specifically, I was on the 19th floor of the Springer HQ in Berlin, offering panoramic 360-degree views of the capital, where it is easy – deliberately so, I thought – to feel like one of the oligarch rulers of the world.

Anachronistically, for a 1960s skyscraper, the top-floor club is fitted out like a 19th-century London gentleman’s club – oak panelling and leather sofas and, most anachronistically of all, you are allowed to smoke.

Springer journalists’ employment contracts, dating back to 1967, also stipulate support for Israel. That is an outlier, but not so unusual, in a country which regards Israel as part of its “reasons of state”, and acquiring German citizenship demands an affirmation of Israel’s right to exist.

None of which was a subject of conversation during my friend’s 50th birthday party. 

Instead, conversation was dominated by the release that day by Der Spiegel (not owned by Springer) of an app, allowing Germans to type in their grandfather’s birth date, or place of birth, and find out when (or if) he joined the NSDAP, the full name of the Nazi party. It’s called “Find Out What Your Family Did Under Hitler”.

Actually, the database behind the app is not new, but the ease by which any German can now tap details into their phone and have – potentially – a stomach-churning, life-changing shock, had made the app something of a viral buzz. Among the journalists there that night at least.

Which made the subsequent conversation with another leftwing journalist friend of more than 20 years possibly all the more unsurprising.

Pro-Hamas?

Despite being as leftwing as anyone I know, she told me she thought anyone who was “pro-Palestinian”, let alone “pro-Gaza” was “pro-Hamas”. Indeed, that anyone wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh head scarf was also “pro-Hamas.”

When I gently tried to persuade her that the two were not the same thing, she pointed out there were “only 15 million Jews in the world” against “two billion Muslims”, and I gently pointed out she was now talking about the Jewish people, not the actions of the state of Israel – a conflation of the two which genuine anti-semites, not to mention the Israeli government, find very helpful.

The conversation was going nowhere, round and round in circles, despite me pointing out that it was perfectly possible to support the creation of the state of Israel, the right of Israel to exist, without supporting the actions of the government of Israel.

That such a double-vision, or blind spot, exists in Germany is, of course, nothing new and fairly understandable in the context of German history, which led – within three years of the Holocaust – to the creation of Israel.

But it was profoundly depressing, and an anecdotal example of the sheer reluctance of most Germans, let alone the country’s politicians, to do or say anything that could be construed as criticism of the Israeli state.

A reluctance well-known in Brussels and a significant reason Israel has faced no meaningful European sanctions – bar those against a few settlers – despite facing charges of genocide at the International Criminal Court.