Sippenhaft

Like thousands of other German youngsters, Hilde Speer, a button-bright 16-year-old student at Heidelberg's Elisabeth von Thadden School, would like nothing better than a chance to go to an American school. She saw her chance last spring in a notice in the local paper: a number of German youngsters were going to be sent to the U.S. as exchange students. Hilde wrote a letter stating her reason for wanting to go: "I want to become acquainted with the people [of the U.S.], the poor as well as the rich, the land, the big cities, and the many problems of America." Last week, after two interviews, a U.S. cultural officer in Germany wrote Hilde the good news: she had been chosen as one of 27 students from her area to be given an all-expense-paid trip to the U.S. Breathlessly, Hilde began to prepare for the big adventure.

Then State Department officials in Washington made an embarrassing discovery: Hilde's father is Albert Speer, an architect and administrative genius who became head of Germany's economic mobilization in 1942; he is now serving 20 years as a convicted war criminal. Last week the department took Hilde's name off the list. Officials explained that they were not prejudiced against the girl on account of her father's past, but merely wanted to save her from painful embarrassment. It cited recent instances where social invitations to German exchange students in the Midwest were cancelled after newspapers carried unfavorable stories about them. Said a U.S. State Department man in Germany: "Can you imagine what would happen when those nasty New York reporters hollered, 'Hilde, how does it feel to have your old man a war criminal?' "

Hilde got the news that she had been turned down, not from the State Department, but from reporters. She said that she was "very surprised and a little mixed up," and wondered how she would tell her classmates.

Her classmates and everyone else in Germany know a word nastier than a possible question by a New York reporter. The word is Sippenhaft, and it means, roughly, "family liability." It was widely used in Hitler's day when men, women & children were punished because they had anti-Nazi relatives.

The U.S. State Department does not believe in Sippenhaft, but its position in the case of Hilde Speer will convince a lot of Germans that it does.

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