In July 1963, the Supreme Court of East Germany convicted West German state secretary Hans Globke to life imprisonment for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Nazi rule in Germany. The verdict was returned in absentia in East Berlin. This public event was the end point of a longer history of various Cold War efforts aimed at compromising “Adenauer’s chief aide” by means of the historical record.

Hans Globke, born 1898 in Dusseldorf, who worked from 1929 in the Prussian, then Reich Ministry of Interior, wrote in 1936 together with State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart the first commentary on the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws (“Reichsburgergesetz” and “Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre,” 1935). Due to the need for expertise in the new postwar public administration, positive testimonies, and luck in the “denazification” process, Globke gradually returned to public service during the second half of the 1940s. From 1953 until his retirement in 1963, he served as federal secretary of state and chief of staff in the West German Chancellery.

Globke belonged to the West German political elite that propaganda by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) continuously referred to in the Adenauer era. In 1956, the Committee of German Unity (ADE) published the first brochure dedicated to Globke. Also in West Germany, Globke was a controversial figure. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) had been critical of Globke and his successful political career from the beginning. His past was no secret. Adolf Arndt, the Social Democrat expert on legal affairs, referred to Globke’s commentary on the Nuremberg Laws already in a parliamentary debate on July 12, 1950.

The international controversy around Hans Globke between 1960, when the anti-Globke press campaign intensified, and 1963, when the Globke case culminated in the East Berlin trial, was a complex public affair. The capture of Adolf Eichmann in May 1960 by the Mossad markedly influenced the Communist campaign that now aimed to implicate or at least discredit Globke by the criminal procedure in Jerusalem. Another turning point of the Globke affair dates to early 1963 when the final decision was made to organize a separate trial in East Berlin to incriminate Globke.