6 - Professional Ethics and Moral Training

Summary

THE INTRODUCTION IN THE 1955 edition of Text and Reading Book for Political and Civics Education in the Federal Border Police, states: “The foundations of human morality and thus also of the state-political education are founded in the West on the Christian religion and its culti-vation by the Christian Churches.” On the face of it, the strong empha-sis of religion in a textbook intended to teach police officers about politics and civics seems unusual. The police in democratic states are supposed to be impartial and apolitical when enforcing the law. With no official state church, West Germany's Basic Law and Federal Constitutional Court pro-moted religious neutrality. Yet the Federal Republic's stance on religion did not adhere to the same strict separation of church and state found in American constitutional jurisprudence. According to the legal scholar Donald Kommers, “Because it provides for peoples spiritual needs, the church is crucially important to the life of the state and society.”

Whereas combat veterans trained border police officers like soldiers, teaching them to use infantry weapons and preparing them to fight wars, Protestant and Catholic chaplains tried to instill moral behaviors they thought would arm the men for policing a democracy. They did this through the medium of professional ethics courses, first during basic training and then in a series of ongoing seminars where attendance was mandatory. To be sure, this approach revived a Weimar-era practice, where the churches administered pastoral care and ethics training to Germany's state police forces. Although the National Socialists banned this practice during the 1930s, Germany's Christian churches and their clergy came with their own moral baggage from the Third Reich. Historians have shown that both the Protestant and Catholic churches supported National Socialism, even though the state persecuted some of its members for speaking out against its racist policies. During the postwar period, many of the Wehrmacht's chaplains returned to their pastoral work, and several of them later joined the BGS. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack have argued that the postwar clergy behaved as if it was “their self-proclaimed task to restore the moral order in German society.” This is precisely what BGS chaplains attempted to accomplish through professional ethics, and it allowed them to obfuscate the role of their institutions in the perpetration of Nazi crimes.