The Devil is in the Details: The Vetting of East German Police in Post-Unified Germany.

Fifteen years after unification, the many efforts to address the East German past are over presenting scholars with an opportunity to review and analyze what happened. The criminal trials of former high-ranking East German elites are complete and two parliamentary commissions of inquiry have written an official history of the GDR. An important lingering issue concerns the appropriateness of permitting individuals who may have collaborated with the secret police and/or committed acts of political repression to be employed in the public sector. Since the process of vetting began in the early 1990s, significant differences have emerged. Some states (Laender) were more unyielding (e.g. Saxony), others more lenient (e.g. Brandenburg), and some exhibited a mixture of both (e.g. Berlin). This paper is a deeper exploration of vetting as one possible course of action under the more general rubric of transitional justice. In the specific case of post-unified Germany two questions are paramount: First, why were vetting policies across the Laender so markedly different? Second, why were there differences across professions both within and between states? For example, police in Berlin faced greater scrutiny when examined by vetting commissions compared to their colleagues in the neighboring state of Brandenburg. Is it simply because more East Berlin police were more compromised by their pasts than those in Brandenburg? Or do other variables explain the discrepancies? To account for these differences, I suggest that Germany’s federal system of government may have, a priori, established a structural dynamic that inadvertently generated these varied outcomes. By decentralizing the process, the particular social and political contexts of implementation became paramount. The agents responsible for executing the policies acted on the basis of cues and support from state level political leaders and administrative authorities about how stringently or how leniently the measures should be drafted and implemented. Geography coupled with political agendas at the state level mattered. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]