SAY THIS about John Kerry: At least his grandfather wasn’t a Nazi. For all the oppo research that will be done on him, having a Fascist relative is something that probably won’t come up. Which is not the case for some politicians in Germany, where 60 years later, questions about a family’s past still linger. Take the plight of Friedrich Merz.
Besides representing his district of Hochsauerland in the Bundestag, Merz serves as the deputy chairman of the Christian Democratic and Social unions. He was heavily involved in the budget negotiations opposite Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. One of Merz’s major issues is tax reform. His plan, according to the Economist, “would have put Germany ahead of other countries in simplicity” by applying three basic tax rates. And while the plan has its flaws, it’s also gotten the 48-year-old father of three some good publicity.
In fact, Merz has lately been stumping for other Christian Democrats running in this year’s communal elections. In one particular assembly on January 6 in his hometown of Brilon, Merz challenged the CDU mayoral candidates to “storm the red town hall” and take it back from the Social Democrats (“ein rotes Rathaus zu stürmen“). Merz referred to his own grandfather, Paul Sauvigny, as a role model for the kind of mayor Brilon needs. Sauvigny served more than 20 years as the mayor of the small medieval town.
IT SO HAPPENS those 20 years spanned from 1917 to 1937–a curious period to say the least. A few weeks after Merz’s “storm the red town hall” speech, editors at the newspaper Die Tageszeitung got hold of state archival documents revealing that Paul Sauvigny was not only a member of the Nazi party but also the SA–the notorious Brownshirts. Merz himself came out with a three-page clarification of his grandfather’s past, admitting to the unsavory affiliations. The discovery has since sparked a controversy over whether Merz simply committed a political gaffe or deliberately brought up his grandfather’s past to rouse anti-Semitic emotions. (The non-governmental organization School Without Racism estimates that in Germany there are 40,000 nonimmigrant youths who are neo-Nazis and another 40,000 Muslims who are radical Islamists.)
According to local historians, and as reported in Die Tageszeitung, Sauvigny was part of the Catholic Zentrum (center) party before Hitler came to power. Afterwards, he remained in office as a National Socialist and member of the SA reserves. “It sounds harmless,” writes Christian Semler in Die Tageszeitung, “but before the purge of Ernst Röhm, the entire SA was the spearhead of the ‘national Revolution.'”
Merz’s take is quite different: After 1933, while other Catholic politicians were fast becoming political prisoners, Sauvigny joined the SA-Reserve, being only minimally involved in the Reich machinery and simply fulfilling a duty without knowing the horrors that actually took place. Some Germans aren’t buying. Says Caroline Fetscher, a journalist with Tagesspiegel: “This is typical for a legitimating discourse in present-day Germany as it was directly after the war” in 1946 and ’47 when Germans said, in interviews, that they hadn’t known what was going on “and certainly were rather against it if they did.” Fetscher’s assessment is still a controversy–as can be read in books like Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” and “Opa war kein Nazi” (“Granddad was no Nazi”) by Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall.
SAUVIGNY retired in 1937 and lived on a pension, supporting five children (one of whom was Merz’s mother). During his time in office he received high ratings from the Nazi party and even named one street after Adolf Hitler and another after Hermann Göring. But what did his grandson know of him when he urged the CDU audience to “storm the red Rathaus”? (Merz’s office didn’t return requests for comment.)
Mind you, Merz isn’t exactly a poster-boy for neo-Nazis. He recently sponsored an essay contest which asked about the causes of right-wing extremism and how to defeat it. (The results can be found on his website under the heading “Wettbewerb.”) Prizes included class trips to Berlin and 2,000 euros for selected high schools.
Examining Merz’s motives is a complex task–not that such an undertaking is ever easy. Take Arnold Schwarzenegger: In addition to the groping allegations, Schwarzenegger was accused of having Nazi sympathies because of earlier statements he made praising the speaking abilities of Hitler and Kurt Waldheim.
By themselves, such remarks are detestable. But complicating the situation was Schwarzenegger’s longstanding relationship with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which came to his defense. (Schwarzenegger turned to the Center’s experts to learn more about his father’s Nazi past and donated a substantial sum to them. He even accompanied Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit there.) The governor later said he regretted his remarks.
A more intriguing example is Kurt Waldheim. Despite having served in the nefarious Prinz Eugen division of the Waffen SS, Waldheim managed to thrive in the postwar, as both president of Austria and secretary general of the United Nations. (If extraterrestrials ever get hold of the Voyager 2 probe now outside our solar system, one of the first voices they will hear will be Waldheim’s.)
Then there’s Richard von Weizsäcker, former president of Germany and himself a Wehrmacht veteran who defended his father during the Nuremberg trials. Ernst von Weizsäcker, Reich ambassador to the Vatican, was charged with war crimes and sentenced to five years. But with a record of having saved many from the concentration camps, Weizsäcker was released a year later (in what Winston Churchill called a “deadly error”). There is also the case of retired U.S. general John Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs. During his 1993 confirmation hearing it was publicized that, like Waldheim, his father Dmitri served in the Waffen SS as part of the Georgian Legion. The news didn’t stop Shalikashvili from being confirmed. This probably wouldn’t have been the case had Shalikashvili been seeking a job as German defense minister.
(Indeed, the legacy of the Führer can color one’s views even on minor matters: When I asked one German newspaper reporter what he thought of Bush’s last State of the Union address, he said, “Rhetorically it was very good. But the media in the U.S. still haven’t learned how to be unbiased. For example, whenever Bush mentioned the soldiers in Iraq, the camera would focus immediately on a soldier in the audience. That was exactly the same technique Leni Riefenstahl used when she filmed Hitler at his rallies.” This reporter must not have noticed the shots of Ted Kennedy shaking his head.)
In Germany it still matters what your relatives did during the war. But would a politician have the audacity to use a dead relative’s Nazi past as a political ploy to win votes? Caroline Fetscher of Tagesspiegel thinks so: “I am afraid this newly discovered traumatic history is now rather instrumentalized in order to rival and outdo the trauma of Germany’s victims. In that case, why not try and gain votes by hailing a Nazi-granddad who was ‘a great mayor in his time?’ It might work.” (It hasn’t worked yet, though. Fetscher points out that other German politicians, including the late Jürgen Möllemann and Martin Hohmann, have attempted similar turns with little success.)
In his memoir, Richard von Weizsäcker asks, “Was it possible, was it even conceivable, to abhor and struggle against the nature and crimes of the regime and still work in its ministries? Did some particular circumstance even make such a situation necessary? Or was their no occasion that could justify such a life? What price must a man pay for deciding not to abandon his post–and thus collaborate–in order to exert some influence from his position so as to change policy into something more acceptable and bring about change, or at least to prevent worse? But what could the phrase ‘to prevent worse’ mean, since the unthinkable worst had happened?”
Does Friedrich Merz think his grandfather did enough to prevent worse? The voters will want to know.
Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
