Opening the celebration event, current Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said that today, 70 years after it was founded, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community was a large and extremely important ministry and that he was proud of the performance, the spirit and the camaraderie of its employees. "This ministry is founded on quality, liberalism and the notion of the strong state," said Mr Seehofer. "This is one of the reasons why today, we live in the strongest democracy with the most solid rule of law that Germany has ever known."

On 2 December 2019, the Federal Ministry of the Interior celebrated its 70th birthday in Berlin with some 300 guests. Two former interior ministers, Otto Schily and Dr Wolfgang Schäuble, now president of the Bundestag, discussed topics including German reunification, the rule of law, and security and immigration policy with Mr Seehofer.

"Ministers shaped the office, and the office shaped ministers"

On its founding in 1949, the ministry, headed by Gustav Heinemann as the first Federal Minister of the Interior, had just 60 employees. Today it has nearly 2,000, with 80,000 in its remit as a whole, explained State Secretary Hans-Georg Engelke in a short overview of the ministry’s seven decades.

Mr Engelke listed events like the terrorist activity of the Red Army Faction during the "German Autumn" of 1977, the Schengen Agreement of 1985, the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, the move of the seat of government and parliament to Berlin and the fight against international terrorism as critical in defining the history and the actions of the ministry and the person at its head. "Ministers shaped the office, and the office shaped ministers," was how he summarized the events of the last seven decades.

Schäuble, Schily and Seehofer: a total of 15 years at the helm of the Interior Ministry

In the panel discussion that followed, the two former ministers of the interior, Dr Schäuble and Mr Schily, looked back on some of the experiences that had most marked their time in office. Dr Schäuble said that the initial years of German unity had been a particularly demanding time for him, with a constant state of political emergency beginning in 1990, compounded by a state of personal emergency following injuries sustained in an attempt on his life in 1991. But he also added that the change in asylum law in the early 1990s stood out for him as a particularly "tough battle".

Mr Schily spoke of the increasing encroachment of the law into many policy areas, something which he had not experienced and which made it difficult for today’s politicians. He cited migration policy and humanitarian aid as examples. "We shouldn’t always need a legal obligation to do what is morally right," said Mr Schily. For him, the most "painful experience" of his time in office had been the failure to apprehend the right-wing NSU terrorist cell in time.

The topic of security and the fight against right-wing extremism and right-wing terrorism were also mentioned by Mr Seehofer as shaping his policy decisions: he said that the threat situation was critical and that the attack in Halle had shown that Jewish life in Germany in particular must be better protected. Mr Seehofer said that his ministry was supporting the security authorities by adding several hundred new officers, to make sure the authorities were equipped to take action against the threat of right-wing extremism. "Antisemitism has many ugly faces," he emphasized, "but the most important common factors remain right-wing extremism and right-wing terrorism."

All three ministers, current and former, agreed: their trust in their state secretaries and the ministerial staff had never been misplaced. They described the employees of the Federal Ministry of the Interior as simultaneously critical and loyal, and wholly dedicated to their work – another factor that makes the ministry so special.