For many years, the United States refused to return the records of NSDAP members, which had fallen into American hands in 1945. This information, reported by “Spiegel”, is documented in files held at the Foreign Office’s Political Archive and the Federal Archives.
According to these documents, the government under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD) and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (FDP) decided in 1978 to pursue the return of the membership card index and other Nazi documents. These papers were being kept by Americans at the Berlin Document Center (BDC) in West Berlin. In 1980, diplomats from Bonn and Washington agreed upon a contractual draft, but the Americans never signed it. Later, a senior US diplomat confessed that the US State Department had hoped that an agreement regarding the return of the BDC would not materialize, and he appealed to the Germans to “forget the BDC as much as possible.”
At the time, US authorities were searching for Nazi war criminals in the United States and feared that they would only have limited, or no, access to the BDC documents if they were suddenly back in German possession.
When the Federal Government pressured for the handover again after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Charles Skinner, a Berlin correspondent at the US State Department, warned German diplomats. He stated that while his ministry truly wanted to help with German reunification, the Germans should “avoid raising complex topics in the American public that would be disruptive.”
It was not until 1994 that the BDC and the NSDAP records were finally transferred. Even at that point, suspicion remained high on the American side, driven by fears that the Germans might destroy the archives. Consequently, Dieter Kastrup, a State Secretary at the Foreign Office, assured the US Embassy in Bonn in a letter that “all documents would remain as they were at the time of the handover.”
