In 1950, 47 percent of the senior officials in West Germany's own Justice Ministry were former Nazi party members. By the late 1950s, that number had climbed to 77 percent. The Interior Ministry wasn't better: 54 percent of its staff between 1949 and 1970 were former Nazi party members, 8 percent of them holdovers from the actual Nazi-era Interior Ministry once run by Heinrich Himmler. These are not activist claims. These are the findings of historical commissions the German government itself commissioned. Keep that number in your head for the rest of this piece, because it's the fact every "who's really the threat here" conversation in modern Germany is built to make you forget.
The Cover Story: How States Launder Fascist Continuity Behind a Manufactured Enemy
The Claim, and Why It Holds Up
Beginning in the early 2000s, German institutions — ministries, foundations, university centers, the domestic intelligence service itself — began funding a specific research and education agenda: identifying antisemitism as a problem "imported" by Muslim and Arab immigrants, distinct from and more dangerous than the homegrown variety. The theory, as scholars like Ezra Nadelman have described it, argues that German antisemitism was exported to the Middle East by 19th-century missionaries and then Nazi propaganda, and later "reimported" to Germany by the descendants of the people it was exported to. By 2011, Germany's own Ministry of the Interior published a report on antisemitism that admitted, in its own text, that no systematic study had shown Muslim-background Germans were more antisemitic than non-Muslim Germans, and that "imported" antisemitism as a distinct phenomenon did not hold up empirically. The funding priorities shifted anyway — away from general antisemitism education and toward programs targeted specifically at Muslim youth.
The scholars who've documented this — Esra Özyürek's Subcontractors of Guilt, historian A. Dirk Moses's essay describing German Holocaust memory as a "civil religion," the Jewish Currents essay on German philosemitism — aren't fringe voices; they're working academics publishing through university presses and peer-reviewed venues. Their case is specific and checkable: government reports on "postcolonial antisemitism" that classify statements like "the Middle East conflict involves a colonial dimension" as antisemitic; a prominent Holocaust researcher, Wolfgang Benz, drawing institutional backlash simply for asking whether the mechanisms of anti-Muslim conspiracy theory resembled the mechanisms of classic antisemitic conspiracy theory; the postcolonial historian Achille Mbembe disinvited from a German festival in 2020 for comparing Israeli policy to apartheid. The pattern isn't subtle once you see it: the accusation of antisemitism became most severely enforced against exactly the population — Muslim and Arab Germans — with the least institutional power to push back, while the ministries doing the enforcing had spent the prior three decades quietly staffed by the actual perpetrators' generation.
Why This Serves a Purpose Beyond Germany
Here's the part worth sitting with: none of this required Germany to actually finish denazifying anything. It required Germany to find a new population to point at. A country that had not, by its own commissioned research, expelled its Nazi-era officials from the judiciary and interior ministry until the 1970s could nonetheless present itself, by the 2000s, as the world's foremost moral authority on antisemitism — as long as the antisemitism being discussed was framed as something arriving from outside, carried by Syrian refugees and Palestinian families, rather than something that had simply never fully left.
This is not really a story about Germany's uniqueness. It's a story about a mechanism: when a state's security and legal apparatus retains the personnel and instincts of a prior authoritarian order, the fastest way to avoid a reckoning with that continuity is to manufacture a more urgent, more visible enemy elsewhere — ideally a marginalized population with the least power to contest the framing.
The Other Version of the Same Trick: Operation Gladio
Italy ran the identical mechanism with a different target. In August 1990, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed to the Italian Senate what investigators had suspected for two decades: since 1956, Italy had maintained a secret NATO-linked "stay-behind" paramilitary network, codenamed Gladio, built and funded with CIA support under the official pretext of resisting a Soviet invasion that never came. The invasion never arrived. What did arrive, across the "Years of Lead" from 1969 to 1980, was a wave of bombings and assassinations — the Piazza Fontana bombing, the 1980 Bologna train station massacre that killed 85 people — carried out largely by neo-fascist networks with documented ties to Gladio operatives, in what Italian investigators and journalists came to call the "strategy of tension": manufacture enough right-wing terror, blame it convincingly enough on the left, and the public begs for exactly the authoritarian order Gladio's fascist-linked personnel were already primed to deliver.
Andreotti's admission triggered a continent-wide reckoning: Belgium, France, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, and Turkey all turned out to have their own versions of the same network, run under different names, all coordinated through a NATO committee, all staffed disproportionately by personnel with far-right and, in several cases, literal wartime fascist backgrounds. The manufactured enemy here wasn't a religious or ethnic minority. It was "communism" — but the function was identical: launder a security state's actual ideological continuity by aiming the public's fear at a population that hadn't actually planted the bombs.
How They Do It Elsewhere
Swap the specific enemy and the mechanism travels easily. In apartheid-adjacent and post-colonial states across the world, security services staffed by the personnel of a prior repressive order have repeatedly found it easier to survive by identifying a new internal enemy — communists, Islamists, "foreign agents," ethnic minorities — than to actually reform themselves. In every case, the tell is the same one visible in both Germany and Italy: the institution doing the accusing has more to hide than the population being accused. The question worth asking of any state's declared internal enemy, whether it's Muslim immigrants in Berlin or communists in Cold War Rome, is not just "is this claim true" but "who inside this state benefits from you looking there instead of here."
What This Means for the Working Class
None of this is abstract for the people actually living inside these mechanisms. Every euro Germany spent building "anti-Muslim-antisemitism" education programs in the 2000s was a euro not spent addressing documented, majority-source right-wing antisemitic violence, or the housing and labor discrimination faced by the same Muslim and Arab populations being lectured about their supposed imported hatred. Every bombing blamed on the Italian left during the Years of Lead was a bombing that helped justify wage suppression, union crackdowns, and the political marginalization of the very Communist Party that had been Western Europe's largest, precisely at the moment it was winning real economic ground for Italian workers. A manufactured enemy is never just a distraction. It is a mechanism for redirecting resources, blame, and repression away from the people who actually hold power and onto the people with the least capacity to defend themselves against the accusation.
The Honest Complication
None of this should be read as minimizing antisemitism itself, which is real, historically catastrophic, and still active — including, at times, within parts of the political left, where anti-Zionist rhetoric has occasionally curdled into genuine antisemitic tropes worth naming and rejecting on their own terms. The scholars cited in this piece are not arguing that antisemitism among any population, including Muslim-majority ones, cannot exist or does not matter. Their argument, and this piece's argument, is narrower and more specific: that a state with a documented, self-acknowledged continuity of unreformed fascist personnel has an obvious institutional incentive to relocate the antisemitism conversation onto a population it already had other reasons to police, and that incentive should make us more skeptical of official enemy-identification, not less — whether that enemy is a religious minority in Berlin or a political party in Rome.
Conclusion
The through-line from a 1970s Bologna train station to a 2020s German antisemitism-education budget is not that these are the same event. It's that they're run on the same logic: an institution with something to hide finds it cheaper to point outward than to look inward, and the population it points at is chosen for its powerlessness, not its guilt. Ask that question of every state that hands you an enemy pre-packaged and urgent. Ask who staffs the ministry doing the pointing. The answer is usually the whole story.
Sidoc Haytu is an Ethiopian writer and researcher focused on political economy, class dynamics, and anti-imperialist movements in the Horn of Africa. If you are ready to build, not just read, follow Sidoc Haytu on Instagram at @sirapressnews.
