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Dans la République fédérale d’Allemagne, les anciens policiers de carrière de la Gestapo ont tenté de refaire carrière dans les administrations publiques en faisant valoir leurs droits de fonctionnaires. Les requêtes individuelles adressées au ministère fédéral de l’Intérieur sont toutefois déboutées en raison de la qualification de la Gestapo comme organisation criminelle par le Tribunal militaire international de Nuremberg en 1946. L’article présente les sources administratives de ce contentieux pour les années 1950 en montrant qu’il s’agit d’un lieu d’élaboration, parmi d’autres, d’un discours de distanciation et de disculpation face aux crimes commis par les policiers du régime nazi.

The Litigation of Former Nazi Policemen in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s: A Source for Writing the History of Nazi CriminalsIn the Federal Republic of Germany, former career policemen who had worked for the Gestapo tried to re-enter public service by insisting on their rights as civil servants. These individual demands addressed to the Federal Ministry of Interior were mostly rejected, however, on account of the fact that the Gestapo had been labelled as a criminal organisation by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. This article presents the administrative sources of this litigation in the 1950s in order to show that these were the locus for the elaboration of a discourse wherein former policemen distanced and exonerated themselves from the crimes they had committed under the Nazi regime.