Twenty-five cabinet members, one president and one chancellor of postwar Germany were former members of the Nazi Party, according to government papers released last year and recently analyzed by Spiegel Online.

The list includes politicians from all of Germany’s major parties. Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger (1966-1969) from the Christian Democratic Union joined the Nazi Party when Adolf Hitler seized power. German President Walter Scheel (1974-1979) from the Free Democratic Party joined the Nazi Party in 1941 or 1942.

Minister of Justice Richard Jaeger and Finance Minister Karl Schiller were even part of Hitler’s storm troopers.

“None of this information is new,” notes Spiegel Online. “For years, the notion that partisans of the Nazi regimes were able to manipulate their way into the top levels of government in the young federal republic, and that former Nazi Party members set the tone in a country governed by the postwar constitution in the 1950s and ’60s has been a subject for historians.”

This search for ex-Nazis, it notes, is deeper than any carried out before, and it is not over. “Historians from the western city of Bochum are now poring over old files from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), which stretch for about 500 meters (1,640 feet), to determine how many of the Nazi dictatorship’s helpers hid under the coattails of the domestic intelligence service in the early years of the Federal Republic—and how this could have happened,” it writes.

It notes that historian Michael Wildt believes “it will become clear that all government institutions, provided they existed at the time, were involved ‘in the mass crimes of the Nazis.’”

“And the institutions that were newly formed under the postwar constitution, namely the police and the intelligence services, were largely staffed with civil servants from the old, criminal organizations,” it writes. “Ministries and government agencies have ‘covered up, denied and repressed’ their dark history, says Wildt.”

It warns that “[h]ardly anyone in law enforcement was not tainted with a Nazi past.”

The whole article is well worth reading. It proves that the founder of the Trumpet’s predecessor, the Plain Truth, Herbert Armstrong, was right when he wrote in 1945: “We don’t understand German thoroughness. From the very start of World War ii, they have considered the possibility of losing this second round, as they did the first—and they have carefully, methodically planned, in such eventuality, the third round—World War iii! Hitler has lost. This round of war, in Europe, is over. And the Nazis have now gone underground …. They plan to come back and to win on the third try.”