BOOK:BROWN BOOK

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Braunbuch - about War and Nazi criminals in West Germany (English title: Brown Book - War and Nazi Criminals in West Germany: State, Economy, Administration, Army, Justice, Science) is the title of a propaganda publication written by Albert Norden on behalf of the Stalinist regime of the GDR in 1965.

In this book Albert Norden claims that 1800 politicians and other prominents in West Germany held prominent positions in Germany prior to 1945, became rich etc.

Considered a classical peace of cold war communist propaganda, created under control of the Stasi, several acts of forgery in the book have been proven.

For example it claimed that President Heinrich Lübke had been involved in the construction Concentration camps, that Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, an admitted former NSDAP member, had been an importantant collaborator of Goebbels, that employer president Hanns Martin Schleyer was member of the SS, that Minister-president Hans Filbinger as a naval judge had announced death sentences against deserters, that Refugee Minister Theodor Oberländer was a war criminal, or asserting a brown past of later President Richard von Weizsäcker.

Altogether 1800 West German persons and their past were covered: especially 15 Ministers and state secretaries, 100 admirals and generals, 828 judges or state lawyers and high law officers, 245 officials of the Foreign Office and of embassies and consulates in leading position, 297 high police officers and officers of the Verfassungsschutz. The first brown book was seized in West Germany - on Frankfurt Book Fair - by judicial resolution.

The contents of this book led to substantial attention in West Germany and other foreign countries. The federal government of Germany stated at that time, it would be "all falsification". Later on, however, it became clear that the data of the book were partly correct. Hanns Martin Schleyer, for example, really had been a member of the SS. The book was translated into 10 languages. Amongst the reactions to it was also a similar West-German book of the same name, covering the topic of Nazis re-emerging in high-level positions in the GDR.