BERLIN – Attempts to portray the German foreign ministry under Nazi rule as disapproving of, or independent from, Adolf Hitler’s genocide against the Jews were blown apart Saturday by a new official report from historians to be published in full later this week.

A former Green party foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, commissioned historians in 2005 to investigate the exact role of the foreign ministry during the Nazi dictatorship of 1933-45.

That report is to confirm diplomats actively assisted the Nazi Holocaust, Speigel newsmagazine reported Saturday.

“The Foreign Ministry was a criminal organization,” Spiegel quoted the chairman of the panel, Eckart Conze, saying.

After five years of probing the diplomatic archives, the historian said the foreign ministry had supported Nazi violence at every point. The ministry played a key role in killing the Jews of Europe.

Conze said claims in the post-war period that officials had resisted the will of the Nazi Party were false: in fact, the ministry usually helped the Nazis even before it was asked to.

A similar account of the findings was to appear today in the newspaper Frankfurt Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. The panel of historians is expected to unveil the report publicly in the coming week.

The controversy is partly kept alive by the fact that many Nazi-era diplomats were given jobs again after the war — with many claiming they had secretly loathed the Nazis.