Book Reveals Postwar Germany’s Nazi Party Ties Cover-Up

[Jan Klimkowski]

For years, rumors had circulated that Daniel P. Simon, the American director of the BDC in Berlin in the 1970s and 80s, had a safe in which he kept the most compromising, potentially incendiary recordsrecords that showed the past Nazi affiliation of contemporary German political figures. In Washington, Herwig learned that this sensitive file had in fact existed. He held its pages in his hands. "It's the opposite of Schindler's List," he said. "I call it Simon's List." On ordinary sheets of paper, he saw typed lists of Nazi Party members, and penciled onto the margins, dozens of names that the Americans had added: German politicians of the 1970s and 1980s. "Every German cabinet, every federal government cabinet, from Adenauer to Kohl, contained former NP members right up to 1992," Herwig said. Looking at those long-protected files, he realized, "I had hit the jackpot."

A blackmail list perhaps?

There is absolutely no legitimate reason for keeping such a list of politicians and the powerful locked in a safe.