Two Genocides Buried Under Germany’s ‘Historical Responsibility’

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

In 2014 the German government told parliament that it had no precise information on how many people were killed in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966. In February 1966 a secret telegram from Jakarta had already reported that a commission appointed by Sukarno put the number of dead at nearly 800,000.

VIDEO: Germany’s Hidden Role in Indonesia’s 1965 Massacre – A remastered documentary drawing on German archives and survivor testimony to expose West Germany’s role in Indonesia’s 1965–66 mass killings. Source: Hüseyin Dogru, YouTube video.

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When Berlin is asked why it supports Israel’s war in Gaza, the answer is almost always “historical responsibility”. Hüseyin Dogru’s new investigation, How Germany financed a genocide, places that answer against a history Germany has never accepted. Barely twenty years after the Holocaust, West Germany welcomed the destruction of the Indonesian communist movement, helped broadcast the army’s justification for the killings, and authorised support for the regime that came out of them.

“Entirely in our interest”

On 4 October 1965 a telegram reached Bonn with news of a failed putsch in Jakarta. Beside the military attaché’s signature an official wrote “FINALLY!”

In January the same attaché had already passed on a rumour from West Java, where an army commander had arrested some 1,400 communist plantation workers as a test. They later said four hundred were released, and the rest, he reported, were buried. Bonn noted the account and did nothing with it.

The immediate trigger came on the night of 30 September, when a group of officers kidnapped and killed six generals. Suharto’s army crushed the movement within hours and blamed the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, for the whole operation. What followed was not confined to those who could have taken part in the kidnappings. Party members, trade unionists, peasants and supposed sympathisers were taken away. One witness later recalled that his uncle was executed after a hat bearing the initials of the party’s peasant organisation was found at his house.

German diplomats understood how the army was using the generals’ deaths. An embassy report noted that the widening arrests clearly no longer had anything to do with the coup. Another explained that the army kept an appearance of legality by treating the entire party as one with the September 30 Movement. Ambassador Luitpold Werz wanted that army to win. He referred to the officers carrying out the purge as “our friends,” described their work in November as “a cleanup entirely in our interest,” and urged Bonn not to leave them feeling abandoned.

Over six weeks, Werz’s embassy used the word “Endlösung”, “final solution”, three times, always in quotation marks, to describe a political settlement that meant the PKI’s elimination. Werz had joined the Nazi Party in 1934. Months before the massacres, when Jakarta raised that past, officials in Bonn called his record impeccable.

Reports of death, approvals for support

By mid-December 1965 the embassy estimated some 128,000 deaths and warned that even this figure was probably too low. Outside Jakarta, the reports said, suspects were loaded onto trucks, a few warning shots were fired, and the prisoners were then handed to a crowd. A note circulated in Bonn that month recorded that the murders were continuing in silence, with incredible ferocity and cruelty. In February the secret telegram followed with the commission’s figure of nearly 800,000.

Those reports were already in the files when the authorisations went through. On 26 October, with the killings under way, the Foreign Office lifted its objection to a shipment of pistol grips for the army. The instruction said it would be indefensible to refuse that indirect aid to the Indonesian army, which was currently using force of arms against the Communist Party. The grips were to carry no markings that would identify them as German. Later files approved powder, ammunition and rifles with the same formula of “keine Bedenken.” or “no concerns”. Loans, debt rescheduling and capital aid then helped stabilise the government the army was building. The records distinguish approvals from completed deliveries, and some proposed transfers were never confirmed. A later BND draft nevertheless spoke of advisers, equipment and money to help crush the party.

Bonn also helped shape the public account of what was happening. Officials asked the Federal Press Office and Deutsche Welle to give particular weight to communist tactics and to the murder of the generals, even though the embassy had already written that the PKI had probably not directed the putsch.

For Bedjo Untung, a schoolboy in Pemalang, Central Java, the violence began when his father was taken in October 1965 and did not come back. Five years later Bedjo himself was arrested, tortured and held until 1979 without a trial. He spent nine years in prison, long after the first wave of killing had passed.

Responsibility stops at the ally

When German governments were asked about this history decades later, they said they had no precise information on the death toll. They denied direct or indirect support for the killings, or reported that they had found no evidence of deliberate involvement. Some of the parliamentary answers remained classified. The investigation finds no apology, no historical commission and no reparations.

In 1981, a young Indonesian officer named Prabowo Subianto trained with West Germany’s GSG 9. He is now president of Indonesia, and in November 2025 he declared Suharto a national hero.

The files are in Berlin. They show that German officials knew the scale of the killing in Indonesia, recorded it and continued to support the forces responsible. Yet when Berlin is challenged over Gaza, it invokes historical responsibility while the names of Indonesia’s dead had already been counted in Germany’s own archives.

Read Hüseyin Dogru’s new investigation, including the archival documents and survivor testimony.

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21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.

Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2026/09/30/two-genocides-buried-under-germanys-historical-responsibility/