Some 81 percent of all Prussian civil servants had been party members, half having joined before 1933.34 The American, British, and French occupation authorities sought to de-Nazify the German government by holding war crimes trials for senior leaders at Nuremburg, and then by purging individuals from the civil service. But as the new Federal Republic was formed in 1949 and pressure mounted to put in place a competent government that could anchor the new NATO alliance against the Soviet Union, large numbers of purged officials were reinstated. A federal law passed in 1951 granted all regular civil servants, including those with Nazi backgrounds and those expelled by East Germany, a right to reinstatement.35 Of the fifty-three thousand civil servants initially purged, only about one thousand remained permanently excluded
( Francis Fukuyama )
[ Political Order and Political ]
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