McCarthyism and the German Civil Service

For the past five years a variant of America’s infamous McCarthyism has been unfolding in a country that recently has gained a measure of respectability on the world stage: West Germany. The linchpin in the repressive apparatus has been Berufsverbot or job ban, a policy that has resulted in the dismissal of 4,000 civil-service employees, investigations of up to 800,000 others who were applying for or holding civil-service jobs, and the political intimidation of a significant proportion of the West German population.

Berufsverbot began early in 1972, when the minister presidents of the II German states and the federal chancellor, then Willy Brandt, issued the so-called Hamburg decrees, which sought to purge ...