Historian on Nazi ancestors: “Robert Habeck is transparent about family history”

interview

The “Bunte” newspaper described it as what the Federal Minister of Economics, Robert Habeck, told them in an interview: His ancestors were leading National Socialists, and his great-grandfather was considered a friend of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. After the publication, there was criticism: Habeck should have spoken about his ancestors earlier. We spoke about this with Jens-Christian Wagner, the director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora Memorials Foundation.

Mr Wagner, Robert Habeck recently revealed that his great-grandfather and grandfather were leading Nazis. Surprised?
Why? He apparently brought it up in an interview of his own accord. If some people are now talking about a scandal, I think that is completely exaggerated. Robert Habeck is transparent about his family history – and, in my opinion, has drawn the right conclusions from it. Otherwise, you can’t hold anyone responsible for the actions of their ancestors. But you can hold everyone responsible for how they react to it.

The accusations are mainly aimed at the fact that Habeck has only now spoken out. Isn’t there something to that?
I can understand this part of the criticism. From the outside, one might think that he should have made his ancestors a topic earlier. But such a decision is a very personal process that is different for everyone. For example, I have mentioned the fact that both of my grandfathers were Nazis in passing at conferences and have not brought it up openly.

After all, you said it. And you are not the Vice Chancellor.
But I run a Nazi memorial. Ultimately, we are all called upon to critically examine German history – and our own family history as well. For me, the excitement about a Vice Chancellor having ancestors with Nazi ties shows one thing above all: there is a skew in our culture of remembrance.

What imbalance?
The majority of people no longer deny the Nazi crimes. But they still believe that their own families were primarily victims and not perpetrators. This distorted self-image has been confirmed by many studies.

But the majority does not have an SS brigade leader as a great-grandfather like Habeck.
That’s right. Walter Granzow, that was the name of his great-grandfather, was definitely a high-ranking Nazi official as a brigade leader of the SS, NSDAP Prime Minister in Mecklenburg-Schwerin and member of the Reichstag…

… and was a friend of Goebbels to Hitler’s inner circle of leadership?
I cannot judge that. His friendship with Goebbels, which was evidently also based on family ties, is certainly remarkable. And Habeck’s grandfather Kurt Granzow, as a Obersturmführer in the SA, was certainly not just a follower.

Do you think that the debate about Nazi past receives a new boost one year before the 80th anniversary of the end of the war?
I would like to see this, especially with regard to the politically charged question of what the Nazi era has to do with us. The former AfD chairman Alexander Gauland described the Nazi crimes as “bird shit” in 1,000 years of German history. And the EU’s top candidate Maximilian Krah released a video last summer in which he said something like: Find out what great things grandma, grandpa, great-grandma and great-grandpa did, because they weren’t criminals…

Which is true if you don’t define membership in the SS as something criminal.
Correct. As is well known, Krah does not automatically consider every SS man a criminal. This naked historical revisionism of the AfD, which relativizes Nazi crimes: that remains the real scandal.