How West Germany armed the 1965 Indonesian genocide

The Indonesian army took the country on 1 October 1965. On the night of 30 September, a group of officers calling itself the 30 September Movement, led by Lieutenant Colonel Untung of the presidential guard, kidnapped and killed six generals of the army high command. Within hours General Suharto, commander of the army’s strategic reserve, Kostrad, had crushed the movement and blamed the Communist Party for all of it. Suharto (1921–2008) took command, and the president of the day, Sukarno (1901–1970), never saw it coming. Sukarno kept his title. He kept nothing else, and in March 1967 they took that from him too. Within weeks the army began banning the Communist Party of Indonesia, the PKI, province by province; in March 1966 it was banned nationwide. At that time it was the third largest communist party in the world, and after it came every organisation connected to the party, directly or indirectly.

It is worth remembering who these people were. By 1965 the PKI had some three million members, and through its trade unions, its peasants’ front, its women’s and its youth organisations it reached some twenty million more, one Indonesian in five. In 1955, in the only free elections the country would see for more than forty years, it had won 16 per cent of the vote. Its peasants’ front, the BTI, was occupying the landlords’ fields to force through a land reform that had been law since 1960 and had barely been carried out. The party wanted the foreign oil companies and plantations out, and it stood against the British in Malaysia and the Americans in Vietnam. That is what made it the enemy, in Jakarta, in Washington and in Bonn.1

What followed ran from October 1965 into the early 1970s. Leaders, members and sympathisers went into the camps, and from the camps into the ground. Sarwo Edhie (1925–1989), who commanded the army’s RPKAD para-commandos, later put the number executed at “two or three million”.2 This is a genocide, and it was committed against communists. Outside Indonesia almost nobody knows that it happened.

The word is not ours alone. In July 2016 the International People’s Tribunal on 1965 in The Hague, a tribunal of judges and jurists without the power to punish, concluded that the killings by the army and the militias it trained and supported were genocide, the partial destruction of a national group, and it named the United States, Britain and Australia as complicit. Four years earlier Indonesia’s own National Human Rights Commission had found crimes against humanity and spoke of a state policy to exterminate the members and sympathisers of the PKI. Asked in 2014 whether the massacres were crimes against humanity, the German government recalled that the offence had been known since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials and saw “no current reason” to examine whether it applied to events almost half a century old. Asked in 2023 whether they were genocide, it replied that it was not for it to anticipate the judgement of research. Its own files had described the intent sixty years earlier: “systematically annihilating the Communist Party”.3

The files of the Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office have even preserved one of Bonn’s first reactions to the coup. Bonn was the capital of West Germany until reunification in 1990, when Berlin became the capital again. On 4 October 1965, the embassy in Jakarta sent an encrypted telex marked “citissime” to the Foreign Office for the Federal Minister of Defence. The “left-oriented coup attempt” had failed, it reported; Sukarno and General Nasution, the coordinating minister for defence and security, who had escaped the kidnappers, were in control with government troops; six generals had been kidnapped by the rebels, and according to an as yet unconfirmed report General Pandjaitan had been shot resisting and the others murdered afterwards. The message was signed by the military attaché, Meyer. Beside his name, an official in Bonn wrote a single word by hand, in French: “ENFIN!” In English: at last. What had come at last was not the death of six officers. It was the opening against the communists, and the man in Bonn had been waiting for it.4

This reaction did not come out of nowhere. As early as 18 June 1965, three and a half months before the coup, the German military attaché in Jakarta reported that senior Indonesian officers had told him the armed forces were “only waiting for this moment, to be able to strike” against the PKI.5 On 7 October 1965, six days after the coup, the same attaché complained in a cable to the Federal Ministry of Defence that the armed forces had “so far not exploited the opportunity to strike against the PKI”.6 Two days earlier, the embassy’s own written report on the putsch had already complained that in the first days of October the army, “instead of using the opportunity for an annihilating blow against the communists”, had decided on strict legality, and had let “its historic hour” go by.7

Bonn had been told long before what the army was being kept for. On 8 March 1965 Luitpold Werz, West Germany’s ambassador in Jakarta, sent home a six-page report on the armed forces in the struggle inside the country, and it ends with a conclusion: the army and the navy had come through intact “as a reservoir of force for a later open confrontation with the communists”. Nobody in Bonn asked what such a confrontation would cost. The report went up to the Minister. In the office of the State Secretary, the highest civil servant in the ministry below the minister, a hand wrote in the margin: “A very instructive report.” Werz was to be told that it had met with great interest and was regarded as accurate.8

What such a blow would look like had been tried out months before. On 8 January 1965 the attaché Meyer wrote to the Defence Ministry in Bonn, in the tone of a man passing on office gossip, about Major General Ibrahim Adjie, the army commander in West Java. A few weeks earlier, he noted, Adjie had had about 1,400 communist plantation workers arrested “as a precaution and on a trial basis”, to see how the Communist Party would react. The party did not react. According to rumours, Meyer went on, 400 of them could therefore be let go. “The rest were buried.”9 Bonn took note of that too, and said nothing.

The entire justification for the extermination was the claim that the PKI had organised the coup. In the first weeks the German files do not believe it, and say so in writing. Then, once the killing was well under way, they change their minds, and the file shows what changed them.

In its own analysis of the putsch, written in early October 1965, the embassy concluded: “One can therefore assume that the putsch was inspired and supported by the communists. Directed it, however, they probably did not; its execution was too amateurish for that.” Of Untung, the officer who fronted the coup, the same report says there is no indication that he was a supporter of the communists. The same page records what a senior Indonesian officer had told an embassy staffer: the army leadership was “completely clear” that the putsch of the 30 September Movement was “in reality a showdown between the army and the communists”.10 A few weeks later, the embassy noted that the “communist uprising” of 1 October had been put down by the army “narrowly and relatively bloodlessly”.11 The blood came afterwards, and it was not shed in battle.

The embassy also understood exactly how the pretext worked. Its key report of 18 October 1965 states that the army leadership had used Sukarno’s mandate to restore order for a “thorough action” aimed at removing the communists step by step from all positions in state and society, and then puts it in one sentence: “By identifying the PKI with the Gestapu, the army preserves the appearance of legality for its anti-communist reform programme.”12 Gestapu was the acronym the army’s propagandists invented for the 30 September Movement, chosen because it sounded like the Gestapo. Further on, the same report observes that the intensified wave of arrests “obviously no longer has anything to do with the putsch” and is aimed at smashing the cadres of the communist sub-organisations.13 A week earlier, on 11 October, the embassy had already described how it was done. Without formally breaking with Sukarno, it reported, the army had “staged a popular movement against the communists” under the protection of the state of emergency it had declared itself, while the media it controlled hammered the crimes of the communists into the people, the murder of the generals “in all its gruesome detail”. So the German embassy knew in the second week that the “people’s anger” was being organised by the army.14

Nor could anyone in Bonn claim that the PKI was fighting back. The embassy’s November summary of the coup records the communists’ restraint after the failed putsch and concludes that “the systematic decimation of the top communist cadres by the army at present rules out the coordination of communist actions on any wider scale”.15 In plain words: the victims were not resisting, they were being decimated according to plan. The Federal Government knew that the coup was the pretext, that the killing was one-sided, and that the party being annihilated was largely defenceless. It supported the annihilation anyway.

And then, on 6 December 1965, the same embassy sent Bonn a different conclusion. Forwarding the translated protocol of the interrogation of the Politburo member Njono, obtained “from a special source”, it wrote: “The following conclusions can be drawn from the protocol: 1. The PKI leadership planned and organised the coup attempt of the ‘30 September Movement’.” That is what the embassy was saying nine weeks on, having come to accept the army’s account of events. It had not taken much. The Njono protocol sealed it: a confession obtained by the men doing the killing from one of their prisoners. The protocol has Njono being asked whether he is acting under any compulsion or pressure; he says he is not. One would expect such documents to begin in that fashion.16

What the German embassy was doing in those weeks is on record in the files of both Bonn and Washington. Ambassador Werz himself was away. From 6 October he was in Hong Kong and only got back to Jakarta on 14 October; beside the telex announcing his arrival an official in Bonn wrote: “About time!” The embassy was run by the chargé d’affaires, Heimsoeth. On 12 October 1965, in a telegram marked secret to the US Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, the American ambassador in Jakarta, Marshall Green, reported that the German ambassador (in Werz’s absence this can only mean the head of the German mission) had passed on that the “Indo Army is now considering possibility of overthrowing Sukarno himself and is approaching several Western Embassies to let them know that such a move is possible.”17 The German embassy, in other words, was one of the Western missions the Indonesian army kept informed while it prepared to remove the president. The document is not in the German files. It is in the American ones, declassified in 2017.

Five days after his return, in two telegrams marked secret, Werz described the machine he had found at work. The army was pressing on “resolutely with its programme of step-by-step suppression of the PKI”. Once it had a central power “cleansed of communists”, it meant to move on to “the cleansing of the individual provinces”, and nobody could yet see how the communists might stop “the military steamroller that has started rolling”. And Bonn? Werz’s advice fits in one line: hold back for now and let things come, “so as not to make the position of our friends in the army more difficult”.18 Unserer freunde in der armee: our friends in the army. That is how the ambassador of the Federal Republic spoke of the men running the extermination.

On 25 October he put it on paper again, this time in a personal letter to Ministerialdirektor Meyer-Lindenberg, head of the political department in Bonn. There was fear on every side, he wrote, and then: “All the same, I hope that the army, which despite the President’s contrary instruction is systematically clearing out the communists, will prevail, and that better times will then dawn for us.”19

The correspondence from the Foreign Office to its embassy makes plain what was on both their minds once the extermination got under way. On 26 October 1965, the same day on which Bonn approved the export of pistol grips to the Indonesian army, Ministerialdirigent Alexander Böker of the Foreign Office wrote to Ambassador Luitpold Werz in Jakarta:

One should keep in mind what this “experiment” was at that moment: the mass murder of communists. Werz answered on 8 November 1965, in a letter marked “Personal and Confidential”. What troubled him, he wrote, was that people in Germany apparently wanted to let Indonesian matters rest entirely: the Hermes guarantees, the state insurance on export credits, for smaller amounts had been stopped and were not being dealt with for the time being, and a trip by the Goethe-Institut, West Germany’s cultural institute abroad, had been called off against his own recommendation. Then:

The word he chose is worth holding on to. “Bereinigung” is what a German official writes when an account is settled or a discrepancy cleared up. It is the vocabulary of bookkeeping. Werz used it for the purge that was under way in the country, making his case that the credit lines ought to remain open.

As we can see, the ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany called the slaughter of tens of thousands, soon hundreds of thousands, “a cleansing entirely in our interest”, and in the same breath demanded that the money keep flowing. Three weeks later, in telegram No. 593 of 29 November 1965, Werz reported that after West Java the military governors of South and South-East Celebes (Sulawesi) and of the Moluccas had now also ordered the definitive dissolution of the PKI, and he added a calculation: “possibly this procedure is not at all unwelcome to Sukarno at the moment, since it relieves him of the promised, unpleasant ‘political final solution’ and he can distance himself from these military measures later”.22

The phrase in quotation marks is not Werz’s coinage. It stands for the political settlement of the affair of 30 September that Sukarno had promised, and the embassy had already put that promise into those German words a fortnight earlier, in its report of 15 November. That is what makes it worth reading twice. Twenty years after the word had acquired the meaning it has in German, the diplomats of the Federal Republic used “Endlösung” twice in a month, in quotation marks and without a word of comment, for the disposal of a political party.

The Federal Republic did not confine itself to watching. On 15 October 1965, two weeks after the coup, Hilmar Bassler, senior counsellor in the Foreign Office and head of the desk responsible for Indonesia, recorded in a memo classified confidential that two state media institutions had been enlisted for the campaign:

The BPA is the Bundespresseamt, the Federal Press Office, which answers directly to the Chancellor. Deutsche Welle is the Federal Republic’s state foreign broadcaster, and it broadcast to Indonesia. Both were “asked”, within days of the coup, to push the story of communist guilt into the world. Bassler was not satisfied even with that. “In my view,” his memo continues, “the approach of the communists has not been given sufficient attention in the German press. In particular, large newspapers such as the ‘Züricher’ should also be prompted to occupy themselves with this theme.” The “Züricher” is presumably the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

One should recall what material this campaign worked with. Through the embassy’s own telex channel, Bonn received the reports of the correspondent of dpa, West Germany’s main news agency, on the army’s propaganda: a television film showing “the recovery of the horribly mutilated corpses of the army generals”, broadcast over and over; and the report that the communist youth organisation Pemuda Rakjat and the girls’ organisation Gerwani “appear to have been involved” in the murder of the wife and children of a regimental commander loyal to the government.24 One could say the atrocity tales were what fed the pogroms. Bassler wanted the BPA and Deutsche Welle to put out exactly this narrative of the PKI as the bestial slayer of the generals, even though the Foreign Office’s own embassy had written that the PKI had probably not directed the putsch. By the time the killing reached its height, the West German state media had already done their part.

Even the channel was no accident. The dpa office in Jakarta had been opened “at the express and urgent wish of the Foreign Office”, the Foreign Office’s own press desk noted on 6 October 1965, to counter the East German and the communist news agencies.25 And the embassy knew what kind of story it was helping along. On 22 November it wrote to Bonn that the murder of the six generals had been “skilfully played up for propaganda by the army”, that it had turned the people against the communists, and that in this lay “a tremendous opportunity for the army”.26 Five weeks later, on 30 December, Werz sent a telegram that was also addressed to the Federal Press Office. The army’s own daily, Harian Angkatan Bersendjata, had asked for material on a new German book about Sukarno, and he proposed that the “Dienst aus Deutschland” send the army paper an exclusive feature with photographs.27 Bonn was not only repeating the army’s propaganda. It was offering the army’s newspaper its own copy.

The files in the Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office show that Bonn was fully in the picture from the first week and that the slaughter ran in step with Washington.28 The Foreign Office in Bonn knew that “the Indonesian armed forces are systematically annihilating the Communist Party”, as the senior counsellor Hilmar Bassler recorded on 3 December 1965. He wrote it down not as a protest but as an argument for exporting three customs boats to the regime.29 Seven months earlier the same boats had been kept out of the aid package. At an interministerial meeting on 13 May 1965 all sides agreed that they should not be included “because of the possibility of military use”.30 Nothing about the boats had changed by December. What had changed was that the army was now killing communists.

The financial underpinnings for this sort of support predated the coup; the motive is laid bare in the documents. On 14 January 1965, Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder, the Christian Democrat who ran West German diplomacy from 1961 to 1966, not to be confused with the Social Democratic chancellor of 1998 to 2005, wrote to the Federal Minister of Economics, Kurt Schmücker, to push for a DM 100 million special ceiling on federal export guarantees for Indonesia. He did so “on purely political considerations”, dismissing any economic qualms because the only objective was to stop Sukarno from recognising the GDR.31 This was the Hallstein Doctrine: from 1955 Bonn threatened to break off relations with any state that recognised the GDR, the German Democratic Republic, and it had done so with Yugoslavia in 1957 and with Cuba in 1963. Why that mattered so much, the historian Baskara T. Wardaya of Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta explains in a few words: “If you remember the history, there were two Germanys: West Germany and East Germany. West Germany was very capitalistic and pro-America. So they didn’t like Sukarno, and they didn’t like the PKI.”32

An internal note of the Economics Ministry from 17 March 1965 recalls that the cabinet had taken that decision eight weeks earlier “under the threat of admitting a Soviet-zone consulate-general”. “Soviet zone” was Bonn’s name for the GDR, which it refused to recognise as a state. At that point Bonn’s guarantee exposure to Indonesia was some DM 500 million and the country was devoting 40 to 45 per cent of its budget to defence. Put simply, the Germans knew they were freeing up resources for the military with every mark.33

Once the coup was over, the financial lever was turned on the new masters. In November the Foreign Office prepared a briefing for the Minister’s talks with Achmad Sukendro, the state minister and brigadier general who served as chief of staff of the Supreme Economic Operations Command, and whom they regarded as one of the army’s sharpest political thinkers. Under the rubric of “the most recent political development in Indonesia” the paper makes its opening statement in a single line: “The army has largely smashed the communist party in recent weeks.” The Foreign Office intended to press for an increase in federal export guarantees for Indonesia “as soon as a normalisation of conditions in Indonesia begins to appear”.

Then the paper tells the Minister what to say. It is proposed that he explain that the Federal Government has followed developments in Indonesia in recent weeks with the greatest attention, and that “it hopes the armed forces will succeed, with their vigorous measures against the putschists of 30 September, in restoring calm and order throughout the country”.34 The vigorous measures were the ones the same ministry was writing down in its own files, week by week. State Secretary Karl Carstens received Sukendro on 26 November 1965 and reported it to Jakarta the next day in a classified telegram. Then came the sentence that matters: “We would nevertheless do what is in our power to support Indonesia in view of the present direction of its political development.”35 What the “present direction” of Indonesian politics was in November 1965, the reader already knows. A “capital aid agreement” followed in May 1968.36

A closer look at the weapons files reveals a fact that has so far been overlooked: the Federal Republic did not merely license the suppliers of the killers. Through a company it owned, it was one of the suppliers itself.

In a memo of 27 January 1965 on a meeting with Indonesia’s Third Deputy Prime Minister Chairul Saleh, a German official boasts that the Federal Republic’s aid “is not limited to the purely economic sector. For example, the federally-owned company Fritz Werner, Berlin, has concluded supply contracts for Indonesia’s armaments and munitions factories worth around 63 million DM in recent years.”37 The words “federally-owned company” deserve to be read twice. The arms business with Jakarta was conducted by the German state itself.

On 26 November 1965, in the middle of the massacres, the Foreign Office minuted that the chairman of Fritz Werner had just been called on by a special envoy from General Nasution, sent to say that the general remained interested in the explosives factory, order value DM 80 million, and that the plant was intended for military as well as civilian requirements. Western support in this form, Nasution had the envoy add, was particularly useful and indispensable to the army leadership if it was to achieve independence from the Eastern bloc; a Czech firm was also after the contract.38 In 1968, the same company signed a contract with the Indonesian government, represented by the “Minister Commander in Chief of the Indonesian Army”, for the delivery of spare parts and weapons, among them 250 BM 59 rapid-fire rifles, 9,750 breeches and 5,000 barrels. The weapons were to be manufactured and shipped by Pietro Beretta in Brescia, Italy, “on our behalf”, and routed from Brescia via Hamburg to Jakarta.39

The concern to hide the German origin of these goods runs through the whole file. On 26 October 1965, while the massacre was well underway, the Foreign Office set aside the objections that stood against the “export of pistol grips”. Two reasons are given. The order is small. And: “It would be indefensible for us to refuse this indirect aid to the Indonesian army, which is currently proceeding against the Communist Party with armed force.” Then comes the instruction: care should be taken “that the pistol grips carry no marking as a German product”.40 Two weeks later, on 11 November, Bassler’s desk argued the same way about life jackets for the army and the navy. Precisely at this moment, it wrote, applications like this one, which could not be turned into accusations against Bonn, should be used “to demonstrate our openness towards the Indonesian army and navy”.41 In November 1968, Industriewerke Karlsruhe AG received clearance to export 20,000,000 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition to the Indonesian army, explicitly “without NATO marking”.42

The argument was ready before Christmas. On 20 December 1965 Dr. Fröwis of Bassler’s desk put a memo on “arms deliveries to Indonesia” to Bassler, the head of his desk. The German government, it said, found itself in the extraordinarily difficult position of not even being able to support the Indonesian armed forces, “which have largely smashed the Communist Party” and were about to give the country a new political direction, indirectly, by approving the export of weapons and military equipment. If the West kept up its de facto embargo, the army would have no way out but to turn to Moscow. The ban, Fröwis concluded, might have to be reviewed in the foreseeable future because of the upheaval in Indonesia.43 The smashing of the party was no reason to hold back. It was the reason to deliver.

One document states outright why the business was now to go ahead, and it deserves to be read slowly. On 28 January 1966 the head of Division III of the Foreign Office set down a minute on the export of explosives plants to Indonesia. The industrial group Ferrostaal had asked as early as June 1965, three months before the coup, whether it could count on an export licence for “15 complete facilities for the manufacture of explosives”, with a monthly capacity of “almost 2,000 tonnes of explosives, powder and intermediate products, 1,100 km of fuses and 1.1 million detonators”. The works priced the plant at about DM 40 million. The client, the minute states, is the Indonesian army.

Then comes the first argument for approval, and it is the killing: because the army “has largely prevailed against the communists in Indonesia”, it can be expected that some of the previous foreign policy aims of the government there will no longer be pursued with the same emphasis. Above all the Confrontation with Malaysia, Konfrontasi, Sukarno’s undeclared war against the creation of the Malaysian federation from 1963 to 1966. That was the main obstacle to the Indonesian army making use of German explosives; with Britain on hand to defend Malaysia, Bonn had no desire to be seen as arming the opposition. But the Communist Party’s destruction put an end to that obstacle, and one German official made a note of it as grounds for a sale.

The rest of the minute follows from it. Refusing the Indonesian army’s orders would mean “weakening those forces which we seek to support, thereby indirectly playing into the hands of the communist elements that still exist”. And meeting its wishes “would substantially strengthen our position precisely among the politically decisive right-wing circles”.44 Whether the plants were ever shipped, the files do not show. On 22 February 1966 Bassler’s desk wrote that export licences “cannot be granted at present” and proposed taking the matter up again in about two months.45 Then the file falls silent. What remains is the argument, and the argument was the killing.

From here the file becomes a list. On 1 February 1966 Rheinstahl Hanomag asked the Defence Ministry for permission to advertise armoured vehicles in Indonesia, “first and foremost” the Kanonenjagdpanzer tank destroyer. It took the Foreign Office until 8 July 1966 to drop its objections. It then stated that the circumstances between Indonesia and Malaysia had become sufficiently settled for it to have “keine Bedenken mehr”, or no further objections.46 A few days earlier, on 30 June, the Economics Ministry had passed on Fritz Werner’s request to purchase 255,800 kilogrammes of nitroglycerine powder from the explosives maker Dynamit Nobel for despatch to Indonesia. Bassler’s desk recommended approval on 4 July, because a government had now come to power in Indonesia “that is ready to cooperate with the free world”, because a refusal “would burden German-Indonesian relations and would practically favour only the subversive forces”, and because the formerly good cooperation between Fritz Werner and the Indonesian army should be restored as soon as possible. The answer went out on 7 July: “keine Bedenken”.47 On 1 April 1968 the licensing office notified the Foreign Office that Fritz Werner had applied to export 42,000 assorted component parts for the BM 59 rifle, worth DM 3,791,730, buyer and final recipient the Minister Commander in Chief of the Indonesian Army. Against the line for proof of final whereabouts there is a dash. A hand has written in the margin: “Keine Bedenken”.48 On 24 June 1968 the Economics Ministry asked about 10,000 Heckler & Koch G3 rifles, the standard assault rifle of the Bundeswehr, West Germany’s armed forces, for the Indonesian army. A desk officer wrote “keine Bedenken” on the letter within two days; the clearance followed on 27 June. In November another 20,000 rifles were cleared, worth around DM 7 million. Once again: “keine Bedenken”.49 A handwritten note in the Heckler & Koch file adds that Rheinmetall had been supplying rifles to Indonesia as far back as 1960/61. The trade was older than the massacre.50

Added together, the German files alone document the following deliveries, approvals and applications for the Indonesian military between 1960 and 1968: at least 40,250 rifles (10,000 from Rheinmetall in 1960/61, 10,000 plus 20,000 G3 rifles from Heckler & Koch in 1968, 250 BM 59 rifles in 1968), plus 9,750 rifle breeches, 5,000 barrels and 42,000 spare parts; 20,000,000 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition; 255,800 kilogrammes of nitroglycerine powder; an application, backed by the Foreign Office, for 15 complete explosives production plants with a monthly capacity of almost 2,000 tonnes of explosives, 1,100 kilometres of fuses and 1.1 million detonators; and, through the federally-owned Fritz Werner alone, contracts for Indonesia’s armament and munitions factories worth DM 63 million before the coup and a further explosives factory worth DM 80 million negotiated during the massacres. That is the arithmetic of “no objection”.

The German contribution was not limited to hardware. On 15 November 1965, the embassy sent Bonn character sketches of the new Indonesian army staff. About Brigadier General Sumitro it reported:

A German embassy, in an official report, listed the liquidation of communists and a Bundeswehr training year side by side, as qualifications. Nor did the connection end with the genocide. Consultation papers of January 1969 record that two to three Indonesian officers were being trained at the Bundeswehr’s staff college every year, and that the Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, Ulrich de Maizière, had promised in Jakarta to support Indonesian requests for German equipment and training aid, should they be made. Speaking to the French in Paris on 7 January 1969, the Foreign Office’s political director put Bonn’s aim in one sentence: “Politically, the Federal Republic has every interest in propping up the present Indonesian government”.52 Bonn had paid for Indonesian officers before. In March 1965 it agreed to cover the travel costs of three officers of Sukarno’s guard regiment, the Tjakrabirawa, the regiment in which Lieutenant Colonel Untung commanded a battalion.53

A telegram from the embassy in Jakarta to the Foreign Office, dated 11 October 1967, handed in and received on 12 October, marked secret, clearly reveals the level of the anti-communist cooperation. The military attaché, it reports, has endorsed “training of Indonesian intelligence officers by the BND”, the Federal Intelligence Service, “and cooperation, as well as exchanges of intelligence about communism”.54 A day earlier, on 10 October 1967, the Federal Ministry of the Interior ruled that contacts of the Indonesian intelligence service should be handled by the BfV, the domestic security service, because the Indonesian service “seems to be interested in its compatriots in the Federal Republic”. The ministry advised restraint, in view of the public scandal over the Indonesian embassy’s screening of Indonesian students in Germany. But Bonn knew exactly what the Indonesian service was after on German soil.55

Nor did the intelligence flow in one direction only. The embassy obtained the Indonesian army’s interrogation protocol of the Politburo member Njono “from a special source”, vouched for its authenticity, and forwarded the translation to Bonn.56

What the German files describe in the dry language of the diplomatic cable, the survivors describe in their own words. For our documentary we interviewed them in Indonesia, more than half a century after the events.

One of them returned with us to the mass grave where his family ended: “Early that morning, we entered through this water tunnel to find that my family, my uncles, my father’s older and younger brothers, had all been taken… It turned out they had become corpses. Here, in this burial ground. There we saw blood, bodies, legs, heads. Many of them were beheaded bodies.”57

Bedjo Untung was a schoolboy from Pemalang in Central Java. His father was taken away in early October 1965 and never came back. He himself was caught five years later: “I had to take off my clothes and trousers. The end of my index finger was tied to a wire connected to electricity. I was electrocuted and beaten several times.” What he witnessed in detention he summarised in one sentence: “They were given electric shocks, beaten, hanged, then cut into pieces with razors. Some were even beheaded.”58

The violence was also sexual, and it did not spare children. One woman told us what happened when a squad came for her father: “They tied my mother’s hands and she was taken to the bedroom. Meanwhile, they grabbed me, taking hold of both of my feet. I was raped by five men. Imagine, I was only 14 and five men did that to me. I couldn’t breathe and I even thought I was going to die.” Another woman, Mrs. Saenah, was a young woman in 1965 when the men came night after night for her father and her brother. The accusation, as always, was membership in the PKI: “I was raped. In that office… I was… three times, I know. They took turns! Oh God, I… God, I was crying… I was probably unconscious…”59

Others were forced to service the machinery of death. Martono, a welder, was seized by the para-commando regiment RPKAD in November 1965, beaten and nearly scalded, and then put to work: “When they electrocuted people to death and as time went by, they told me to take care of it. Every time they had a lot of bodies, they would call me: ‘Martono!’ Then I had to take them. I would drag away the bodies. I was actually a prisoner. I had no choice, I was forced to. If I had refused, I would be dead by now.” Another man had to throw the corpses into the river: “We threw bodies here into the river. At the time, they would just roll down. What I remember is that every time I threw the corpses, I said a prayer: ‘Oh Lord, these are your beings.’”60

The arbitrariness of the terror is captured in a single detail from another interview. The speaker’s uncle was suspected of belonging to the BTI, the Peasants’ Front of Indonesia, the farmers’ organisation close to the PKI, “because they found a hat in his house, a farmer’s hat with the letters ‘BTI’. So he was executed too.” That was the whole evidence. In the botanical gardens, the same witness recalled, the victims were beheaded with swords: “They were mutilated, hacked and slaughtered.”61

The perpetrators confirmed all of it, without remorse. One militiaman described how he armed himself: “The idea was Jihad. So I thought, I will search for a weapon. I went to the market, looking for iron. It was made into an admirable axe. Sharp.” He became known as Burhan Kampak, Burhan the Axe. Then the state took him in hand: “Then, we coordinated with the Armed Forces. They trained us, students and young people, to be more skilful.” And immediately after that, without being asked, he settles the question of who was attacking whom: “We did not retaliate, no, but we had to kill them.” There was nothing to retaliate against. They killed anyway.

The rest of what the perpetrators told us has the same flatness. On the length of the job: “It was unbelievable, from 1965 to 1968, I mean, the extermination. We needed three years here, to complete the cleansing.” Asked how many people he had killed: “Well, I don’t remember. If I met them, I just had to do it… at any rate.” Asked whether there had been any trial: “Well, no, there was no need for a court, we were at war. The situation was a war. So there was no court. It was a war, brother.” And asked whether there was no remorse at all: “Remorse? … Oh no… I was excited! I have no remorse, because they were our enemies.”62

Those who survived the massacres disappeared into the camps. One former prisoner of the Salemba prison in Jakarta described a block so packed “that even the toilets were used as detention rooms”, where prisoners caught and ate sewer rats because there was no food. He was arrested in 1970 and released in 1979: nine years of detention without any kind of legal process.63 In total, between 500,000 and three million Indonesians were killed, and hundreds of thousands more were maimed, raped or imprisoned for decades.

The reader should keep these voices in mind when reading what follows. For everything they describe, the torture, the beheadings, the mass graves, the rivers full of corpses, stands in the files of the Federal Government in its own bureaucratic language: “inhuman cruelty”, “short shrift”, “murder wave”, “horrific bloodbath”, “completely exterminated”.

Bonn was told almost daily, from the first week of the killing to the last, how many had died, in which province, and when. The chain does not break anywhere: the test arrests and rumoured burials reported in January 1965, the officers announcing in June that they were waiting for their moment, the leaflets of October calling for a holy war, the tallies of December, the secret figure of almost 800,000 in February 1966. A few examples.

On 25 October 1965 the attaché Meyer reported that the armed forces had opened the campaign against the PKI through the Muslim party and its followers, “though with the benevolent encouragement of the armed forces”. Allegedly discovered PKI documents, he added, had supplied the grounds for intensifying and continuing the measures.64 On 29 October a telex with wide distribution in Bonn passed on the account of the dpa correspondent, cabled under the cover name “the well-known informant”, which Werz forwarded “without comment of his own”: on the island of Madura, off East Java, “no active communist is left alive”, paratroopers were giving prisoners “short shrift”, and rebel groups had been driven into barren country “to literally starve them out there”.65

On 29 November 1965, Ambassador Werz passed the following information on to Bonn: “According to confidential information from the army, on 21 November the PKI leader Aidit was taken prisoner by the army near Solo (Surakarta), in central Java, and shot the next day.”66 Werz opened his report of 14 December 1965, headed “Losses of the Indonesian Population since 1 October of this Year”, with one sentence about what was happening outside the capital: “The battle of the army and the Muslims against the communists is being waged outside Jakarta with dogged severity and in part with inhuman cruelty.” The state news agency Antara, he wrote, published daily reports of the capture and killing of communists, but its figures “fall far short of reality. The true casualty figures exceed the official ones many times over.” His own figures, from witnesses in the provinces, confidential Indonesian reports and friendly missions, were in his words probably too low, and more losses were inevitable. Then the table: East Java approx. 50,000 dead, mostly communists; Central Java approx. 40,000, communists and non-communists; West Java including Jakarta approx. 10,000, by far predominantly communists; North Sumatra approx. 20,000, by far predominantly communists; Aceh approx. 3,000, exclusively communists; Madura approx. 2,000, exclusively communists; Bali approx. 3,000, predominantly communists.67 Added up: some 128,000 dead by mid-December 1965.

There is no basis in this report for any subsequent claim that Bonn failed to understand the nature of the violence. Werz noted on Madura and in Aceh that fanatical Muslims had made short work of a communist presence that was never very strong to begin with. The military governor of Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra, informed the provincial parliament that the PKI ban in his domain was of only theoretical import, “as a result of the physical extinction of the communists there”.

In North Sumatra some 2,000 were being killed each week, almost all of them communists. The embassy recorded the methodical way it was done: “In a virtually stereotyped procedure the army loads people suspected of being communists onto trucks during raids, and the trucks are stopped some distance away by an agitated crowd. After a few symbolic warning shots by the army the prisoners are then handed over to the population and killed by it.”

Then there is Java. The American embassy put the dead there at 100,000, a figure the German embassy found to be in accord with its own independent information. On Bali the “murder wave” had been running only about two weeks. A first wave of excesses in mid-November had set fire to numerous communists’ houses; then, around 1 December, the army moved six tanks across from Probolinggo in East Java, and these, meeting resistance, “caused a horrific bloodbath” in the provincial town of Negara. A local Balinese newspaper reported that 1,506 people had lost their lives in Negara alone. The comparatively low figures for West Java the embassy put down to the moderating efforts of the military governor in Bandung, Major General Ibrahim Adjie, the same Adjie whose test arrests the German attaché had reported eleven months earlier. Adjie now said he feared worse from the fanaticised Muslims than from the communists.

Then, at the end of the report, one line about the living. No precise information could yet be obtained on the number held in prisons and camps, Werz wrote, but the newspapers were filling with complaints that nobody knew any longer where the constantly growing stream of those arrested was to be housed. It was likely, he added, to run to several hundred thousand.68 Days later, the embassy reported that in Medan, the largest city on Sumatra, around sixty Chinese had been murdered “with the tacit toleration of the army”.69 None of this was hidden from the Federal Government. It is all in the Federal Government’s own files.

On 17 December 1965, the office of the State Secretary of the Foreign Office recorded the assessment of the embassy’s political officer. General Sukendro had presented the official casualty figures during his visit to Bonn; these, the note states drily, “are however incorrect”. The US embassy estimated 100,000 dead on Java alone, on both sides. An Indonesian source put the killed in East Java alone at 14,000 and in North Sumatra so far at 15,000 to 20,000, “and exclusively communists”. In Aceh and Madura the Communist Party had been “completely exterminated”, with 3,000 dead in Aceh. Of the 2,000 members of the communist youth organisation who, the note says flatly, had been substantially involved in the abduction and murder of the six generals, “hardly one is still alive”. The military tribunal, the note continues, “will have difficulty finding enough defendants to put on trial.” And then comes the sentence in which the Federal Government’s knowledge is summed up:

But that is not yet the end of the story. On 21 February 1966 the embassy cabled to Bonn, classified secret, what it had been told about the findings of Sukarno’s own fact-finding commission:

A figure of almost 800,000 dead was on file in the Foreign Office in February 1966, stamped secret. On the next page the ambassador passes on a still higher figure: “From another quarter too I hear that the number killed is far higher than Sukarno admits. A member of the Indonesian intelligence service in Surabaya puts it at one and a half million.” The weapons approvals of 1966 and 1968 described above all came afterwards. Yet when the Bundestag asked the Federal Government in 2014 how many people had died, the answer was that it had “no precise information on the actual number of crimes committed in connection with the events in Indonesia in the years 1965 to 1966 and their victims”.72 The government’s own files prove the opposite.

A closer look at the Federal Republic’s ambassadors in Jakarta reveals a pattern. Seven men led the mission between 1952 and 1970, and six of them had been members of the NSDAP, the Nazi party. Every one of them had built his career in the foreign service between 1933 and 1945. Which is to say: they served under Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister.

The party numbers are on the record. Dietrich von Mirbach, ambassador from 1959 to 1963, joined on 1 May 1933 with the number 2,781,465 and served in the SA, the Nazi party’s stormtroopers, until 1935; during the war he was personal aide to State Secretary Gustav Adolf von Steengracht, who was convicted at Nuremberg in the Wilhelmstraße trial, the case against the senior officials of the Reich Foreign Office, named after the Berlin street where it had its seat. Gerhart Weiz, 1963 to 1964, was in the SA from 1933 and in the party from 1937. Luitpold Werz, 1964 to 1966, joined on 1 October 1934 with the number 2,873,248, and from late 1944 headed Referat Inland II B in the Abteilung Deutschland, the branch of the Foreign Office that dealt with the apparatus of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the police. Kurt Luedde-Neurath, ambassador from 1966 to 1968 and therefore in office while the killing went on, joined on 1 May 1937 with the number 4,745,122 and had been in the SA from 1933 to 1939. Helmut Allardt, 1954 to 1958, applied in March 1939 and was admitted that August with the number 7,055,168. Hilmar Bassler, the last of them, from 1968 to 1970, had been responsible for Nazi propaganda in East Asia during the war, according to the East German Braunbuch (“Brown Book”), of which more below.73

One man on the list does not belong in it, and it is worth saying so plainly. Werner Otto von Hentig, the Federal Republic’s first ambassador to Indonesia in 1952, was not a party member. He was a critic of the regime who stayed in the service and used it. As liaison officer to the 11th Army in Ukraine in 1941 and 1942 he protested against the massacres of Einsatzgruppe D, the SS unit that murdered tens of thousands of Jews in southern Ukraine and Crimea, and called them murder. Bonn had a man like that on its books. For the sixteen years that followed it sent the others.74

So Bonn staffed its mission in the largest Muslim country on earth with men who had the relevant experience. According to the same source, Bassler had spent the war producing German propaganda for East Asia and then ran the East Asia desk in Bonn before being posted to Jakarta himself. He was still there when the killing had moved from the villages to the courts. In November 1968, now in charge of the embassy, he reported on the protest of East German lawyers against the execution of the communist leaders Njono and Sudisman, and summed up: the Federal Republic “can only be grateful to the ‘democratic lawyers’ from Pankow for this excellent propaganda against the Soviet Zone”.75 Pankow was the East Berlin district where the GDR leadership lived. In Bonn the name was a sneer for the East German government, which Bonn called the “Soviet Zone” because it refused to recognise it as a state. These were not passive careerists with an awkward past. Werz, an NSDAP member, reported the death tolls, hoped the army would go on “systematically clearing out the communists”76 and called the massacre “a cleansing entirely in our interest”. Bassler enlisted the Federal Press Office and Deutsche Welle for the atrocity propaganda in October 1965. Three years later the Federal Republic made him its ambassador in Jakarta.

When the embassy wrote of an “Endlösung”, or its political officer reported that the Communist Party had been “completely exterminated”, these were not careless words. They were making use of a vocabulary they had once employed for their former employer, and they understood the import of such words as those who had served the state that put them there some twenty years before.

This continuity was not questioned. It was defended in writing. The Foreign Office has its own file on the matter. In June 1965, the Indonesian embassy in Bonn put forward word from Jakarta that Sukarno and others were hearing rumours about Ambassador Werz’s Nazi background. The file concedes what is true: Werz was a member of the NSDAP from 1934 and worked for the Nazi-era Foreign Office until 1945, with a stint in the Abteilung Inland in February and March of that last year, though the document makes little of it. Yet the reply drafted for the State Secretary would have his past described as “impeccable”. Any accusations were to be written off as “unproven insinuations” and “pure calumny” from “well-poisoners from Pankow”, and counter-narratives were to be supplied to the Indonesians.77 This is the same ambassador who, a few months down the line, would be on record reporting a “political final solution”, counting the dead in six figures and hailing the massacre as a cleansing for our benefit.

Bonn saw the charges as calumny, but in East Berlin they were in print. Within weeks the GDR published its Braunbuch, a catalogue of ex-Nazis in office in the Federal Republic drawn up by the state archive from captured records. But to call it a fabrication was something else when one’s own file, from those same weeks, admitted the ambassador’s service in the party and the Abteilung Inland. The charge was made by an interested party, to be sure, but it was also accurate. Three of the Jakarta ambassadors are listed in the book: Werz as ambassador in Indonesia; Mirbach as von Steengracht’s old aide; and Bassler as head of the East Asia desk in the political department at the Bonn Foreign Office, with his prior work in Nazi propaganda and his ties to the SD, the SS intelligence service, and the Gestapo noted.78

Then there was the BND. The Federal Intelligence Service was no exception in sending its Nazis to Jakarta. Reinhard Gehlen, the former Wehrmacht general who had managed Hitler’s intelligence on the Eastern Front, built and ran the organisation, filling it with his old comrades from the war. It was Gehlen who later declared that the success of the Indonesian army, which “pursued the elimination of the entire Communist Party with consistency and severity”, could not be rated highly enough. Among his men in Indonesia was Rudolf Oebsger-Röder, a former SA and SS man who had worked in intelligence under the Nazi regime and joined the Gehlen Organisation after the war, the spy network built under American supervision from which the BND emerged in 1956. By the government’s own account to the Bundestag in 2023, he worked in Indonesia for Gehlen’s service from December 1959 to December 1962 and again from July 1964 to March 1966, which is to say: during the coup and at the height of the massacres. His cover was journalism. Under the name O. G. Roeder he later wrote the biography of General Suharto, The Smiling General.79 The circle could hardly close more neatly: a veteran of the SS gathering intelligence for Bonn while the killing ran its course, and then writing the life of the man who ordered it.

None of this was commerce. Twenty years after the Second World War the credits and the weapons carried a political purpose, and the Foreign Office wrote that purpose down. On 22 December 1964 Böker chaired an in-house meeting in Bonn under the heading “Action Programme Indonesia”, with the ambassador Werz and ten desks present. The minute, taken down on 7 January 1965, sets out his argument in reported speech. Indonesia, he said, was regarded as a barrier or a springboard for communism on its way to Australia. The national interest in maintaining a German presence there required sacrifices of a financial nature, to which, however, limits were set. Indonesia was a decisive test case. At the same meeting Werz reported what he had told the Indonesian deputy foreign minister would follow if the East German consulate-general were raised to an embassy: the rupture of diplomatic relations and the end of economic aid.80

The minute is franker still where it records who said what. Asked by Böker whether substantial aid would keep Sukarno from recognising East Germany, Werz replied that Sukarno’s authority held for now, and added: “If we keep helping, we also strengthen the circles well disposed towards us (such as the army)”. Bassler remarked that “the dry stretch until a new regime in Indonesia after Sukarno’s demise” had to be endured.81 At the second session, on 11 January 1965, Böker set the line for everything that followed: German policy was “to be directed towards the final phase of the Sukarno regime”, and Werz and the Indonesia desk agreed that this phase had begun.82 It was not long before the coup, some nine months in fact, that Bonn had put its money on the army and was content to wait for Sukarno’s downfall.

The Foreign Office would concede as much two years down the line, though only in a document of the sort not intended to get out of the building. In February 1967 the Indian magazine Link printed what it presented as a secret report of the German embassy. The Foreign Office decided it was a forgery, and in the same memo conceded that it described “exactly our position at the time”: the embassy and the Foreign Office had indeed put plans for further aid on hold “in view of the ending Sukarno era”. Böker advised against a denial. A denial would be turned against Bonn at once, because as long as Sukarno was still formally head of state, Bonn could not declare that it had held back its aid in view of his “ending regime”.83

The subject was of sufficient consequence to warrant a summit. So on 27 September 1966, US President Lyndon B. Johnson and Chancellor Ludwig Erhard made time to sit down in Washington; their exchange on Indonesia is a matter of public record. Johnson stated that communism had suffered a great loss during their time in office which had not been sufficiently exploited: Indonesia, where “a hundred million people had been lost to communism”. He hoped, he said, that the Chancellor could support the current leaders in Indonesia with German industrialists and with government aid, and that such cooperation would show the Germans standing “shoulder to shoulder” with the Americans. Indonesia had been a great victory for the free world, he added, one that had not received the attention due to it, though it should not be trumpeted too loudly, because the victory was not yet quite certain. In the course of it, Erhard noted that “the ground had now been prepared for greater activity,” adding that the German position had naturally shifted “since Sukarno is no longer the all-powerful leader.”84

But what such talk translated to in practice was the annihilation of the communists and those in their orbit, a process set in motion in Indonesia in 1965 and extending into the early 1970s. Germany was aware of it. The enterprise was underwritten by German credits, carried by German propaganda and supplied with rifles, ammunition and powder cleared in Bonn, while officials put their approval in writing: keine Bedenken.

The historian Baskara T. Wardaya of Sanata Dharma University in Yogyakarta puts the difference in a few sentences: “Then, there were the Nuremberg trials. That could happen, because in Germany’s case, the perpetrators lost the war. Indonesia in 1965 was different. The perpetrators won, so they took power.”85 Until Suharto fell in 1998, the memory of the massacre was silenced and the survivors lived in fear of speaking out. Most of the killers are still celebrated as heroes. The winners had their friends in Bonn.

Berlin has been asked. In 2014 the government told parliament that it no longer held any data on arms, money or goods supplied to the Indonesian military between 1964 and 1970, and that it and the BND had, “according to current knowledge”, supported the killings “neither directly nor indirectly”. The approvals quoted in this article sit in the Foreign Office’s own archive, open to anyone who asks. The government had said as much itself: an analysis of Bonn’s reaction at the time, it told the Bundestag, was a matter for historians, and “the relevant files in the Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office are accessible”. Asked what contacts Bonn had kept with Indonesia’s government during the massacres, it named a single visit, General Sukendro’s in November 1965, and said nothing of the support Carstens had promised him. Three of its nineteen answers, and the part of a fourth that concerned the BND, it would not give in public: what it knew of foreign support for the massacres, which German federal staff had been in Indonesia to train or advise, and whether the BND had run a “legal residency” inside the embassy in Jakarta. It classified them and lodged them with the Bundestag’s secrecy office. It had found no evidence of BND support, it said, “in the files of the Federal Intelligence Service indexed so far”. In 2023, asked again, it found no sign of any “purposeful entanglement” of German governments with those responsible, commissioned no research, and declared that it did not share “the hypothesis of support”. No apology, no historians’ commission, no reparations. The same answer of 2014 records that 122 Indonesian soldiers were trained by the Bundeswehr between 1960 and 1998, and that in 1981 a young captain named Prabowo Subianto trained with the border guard’s counter-terror unit GSG 9. Suharto’s former son-in-law is today Indonesia’s president. In November 2025 he declared Suharto a national hero. And Berlin still speaks of “historical responsibility”.86