BERLIN — It’s eerily quiet in the depths of the German Foreign Ministry, where tens of thousands of documents are filed away in narrow drawers. The documents consist of telegrams and reports filed by German ambassadors from all over the world as well as from diplomats based in Berlin.

One document on display tells of the Wannsee Conference in 1942. There, in a villa in southern Berlin, a group of top Nazi officials drew up plans for the “final solution of the Jewish question.”

They involved the deportation of the Jewish population of Europe and the French colonies of North Africa, including Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, to German-occupied areas in Eastern Europe, where they were to be murdered. Jews were also forcibly conscripted into labor camps for building roads and other projects.

What is coming to light now — and causing a major debate in Germany over the past few weeks — is the active involvement by Nazi Germany’s civil servants in the annihilation of Jews. For decades, bodies like the Foreign Ministry and the Finance Ministry managed to make the public believe they had been relatively “clean” during the Nazi years. They pointed to their continuing efficiency as a source of pride.