Last September, German chancellor Friedrich Merz stood in a synagogue and wept.
He was speaking at the opening of a renovated Munich temple about the burdens of German history. Quoting from a memoir, he repeated a question that plagued a young girl, the child of Holocaust survivors, in postwar Germany: “Did nobody help the Jews?”
As he read that sentence, Merz’s voice broke. He sobbed, tears came, and it took a moment to gather himself.
Friedrich Merz is a talented speaker and a political professional, but this was new. Watching, gripped, I realised: this is real, but what is it?
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Just four months into office, I thought, perhaps the long days and endless crises – Russia, Gaza, Trump, the economy, the far right – were getting to him? But these looked, to me at least, less tears of exhaustion than sadness – and deep, personal conflict.
Did no one help the Jews? The sad answer to the question in Germany is: too few did. In Germany, historians say even the most generous calculation – of 200,000 people who resisted the Nazis and helped their victims – would amount to just 0.3 per cent of the 1940s population.
Yet when Germans are asked about their own families, some 18 per cent – nearly one in five – claim their families helped or hid potential victims.
That study from the University of Bielefeld showed that the same number – 18 per cent – admitted having perpetrators in their families, while 69 per cent denied.
By this subjective truth, Germany had as many perpetrators as helpers, yet the fascist death machine still claimed around six million Jewish lives around Europe, as well as Sinti people, homosexuals, communists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
It seems strange given how, for decades, Germans have toiled away at what they call Vergangenheitsbewältigung – or coming to terms with the past. Given all the effort and money spent on museums, institutions, memorials, books and films, why are things so skewed?
Historian Jens Wagner, director of the Buchenwald Nazi camp memorial near Hanover, eastern Germany, has one answer: “Germans like to celebrate themselves as world champions in memory work, even if that comes to a halt at their own front door.”
And so, still pondering the teary Friedrich Merz synagogue speech, I decide to visit his first front door.
Brilon is a pretty and prosperous small town of 35,000 people in the middle of western German nowhere. Local families built their fortunes here from iron and lead mining, then textile dyeing.
A century ago, one of the most prosperous men in town – with a patrician mansion that still stands off the main square – was Josef Paul Sauvigny. He was the maternal grandfather of Friedrich Merz, who grew up in the house with his family until he was 10. A year later, in 1967, Sauvigny died.
Nearly six decades on, eyewitnesses to the Sauvigny era are few. By chance, in a town cafe on my first morning, I strike up a conversation with Gertrud, an older woman who says she once worked as a maid to the retired mayor and his wife.
“He died just as I started,” she said. What does she remember about his politics, particularly in the 1930s: Catholic opposition? “They were strongly Catholic but ... ”
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Sauvigny was mayor of Brilon for 20 years until 1937, four years after the Nazi takeover. According to a recent Brilon town history, the former mayor showed a “high degree of adaption” to the new fascist order.
As the conversation with Gertrud peters out, I wonder if her “but” is one source of Friedrich Merz’s conflict?
Sauvigny was born into a Catholic family in 1875 in the nearby town of Bestwig. It was just four years after German unification and Sauvigny grew up in a climate of state-lead discrimination and attacks against Catholics.
Like his chancellor grandson, Sauvigny studied law and entered politics, becoming mayor of Brilon in 1917 aged 42. He was a member of the conservative Centre Party, the political home of German Catholics at the time. Though many Catholics then had a natural wariness of the state, a profile describes the new mayor nevertheless as having a “pro-monarchy disposition” and an ear for the “upper” echelons of Brilon.
Sauvigny served two terms as mayor, though the precarious interwar era of economic crises and political upheavals. He also witnessed how his Centre Party drifted rightward and eventually backed the Enabling Act of 1933, sealing the Nazi dictatorship.
(Months later, a bilateral agreement – or Concordat – agreed between Hitler’s Germany and the Holy See in July 1933 forced the withdrawal of clergy from daily politics and saw many Catholics yield to the new regime.)
How did Josef Paul Sauvigny react to the new political power in Germany? Surviving speeches, reprinted in the local newspaper, suggest an opportune adoption of NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or Nazi) rhetoric. It’s worth remembering the popularity of many Nazi promises at the time, in particular to end the political and economic dramas of the interwar Weimar era. Anti-Semitism was always part of the package, yet the Holocaust was still some way off.
In the Brilon town archive, housed in the smart mansion of a Jewish family terrorised out of town, the local Sauerlander Zeitung (SZ) newspaper, is available in bound editions. It carried many of Mayor Sauvigny’s speeches, such as his May 1933 praise for the Nazi revolution that had “wiped away the filth” and “poisonous fumes” in the recent years of “misunderstood freedom and impotent self-destruction”.
He concluded his speech with a toast to “the embodiment of German loyalty, Chancellor Hitler”. A week later he hoped a new school principal would “educate and inspire our local youth ... to participate in Germany’s struggle for its resurgence”.
August 1933 saw Sauvigny decry the “the physical effeminacy of our defenceless people [which] may have been one reason for our spiritual decline as a people”. He hoped “the spirit of the Führer becomes effective everywhere and the spirit we need to regain our former power”.
In September 1933, Sauvigny told a local NSDAP gathering that Briloners should “all stand with body and soul for the wellbeing of our new German fatherland, even more vigorously and openly”.
No records exist of anti-Semitic remarks by the mayor, though one telling incident arose in the run-up to Christmas 1933, long before the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that legalised discrimination and exclusion of Jews from German life.
Mayor Sauvigny received a written complaint from a resident asking why state vouchers to workers were “being accepted in non-Aryan stores”.
In response, the SZ reported Sauvigny’s order on December 18th, 1933 that “non-Aryan stores are not permitted to participate”.
Even as early as 1933, with four years to run in office, Sauvigny welcomes townsfolk to events “in the name of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party”.
Official records indicate Sauvigny joined the NSDAP party just as he left office, in 1937. But a yellowing file in Brilon’s town archive, held together by string, tells another story.
It suggests Sauvigny was so determined to join the party just after Hitler took office in 1933 that he fell victim to a scam.
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The file contains a ruling from December 1937 – “In the name of the Führer” – from a NSDAP party court in nearby Paderborn against Brilon man Willi Hartmann, a local Nazi leader and town councillor.
In May 1933 the Nazi party, swamped with new membership applications, imposed a moratorium until it could clear the backlog.
If more people dealt with their family histories I think we would do a better job in Germany with what is happening today
— Oliver von Wrochem
Hartmann told Sauvigny, anxious to join the NSDAP, to pay him directly the application fee and membership subscriptions, promising to get around the moratorium.
“Mayor Sauvigny paid the membership contributions until March 1936 of 10 Reichsmarks and six Reichsmarks, for himself and his wife as well as a [child] sponsorship,” according to the ruling. “The application was not passed on by the defendant.”
The ruling adds that Hartmann pocketed an additional 100 Reichsmarks from Sauvigny in exchange for a party membership card.
At some point Hartmann’s fraud was exposed. Sauvigny had him removed from his roles as a town councillor and as a secondary mayor. He was also suspended for a year from his local party and banned from wearing his group leader uniform.
Hartmann went on the attack, smearing Sauvigny in a January 1937 article in Der Stürmer, the NSDAP party newspaper, for “doing business with Jews”.
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The object of his outrage: a lease Sauvigny held on some land belonging to a Jewish resident of Brilon, Gustav Neuwahl.
“We wonder that such a man is still in office,” Hartmann wrote, pointing to a 1934 town council decision to exclude from city contracts anyone found doing business with Jews.
In its verdict, the party court did not find enough evidence for wilful deceit and gave Hartmann a caution for “disparaging the mayor’s reputation” and not settling the dispute with the mayor “among comrades”.
A month after that verdict, Sauvigny was retired prematurely and, in a farewell speech, praised for having “lead his office always in a Nationalist Socialist spirit”.
A decade later in 1947, with Hitler long dead, a postwar “denazification court” reviewed Sauvigny’s record and classified him as a grade 3 “lesser offender”, banned the 72-year-old from holding public office again and cut his pension to 60 per cent of the total.
Sauvigny protested, insisted he had always “internally” opposed the Nazis and had been forcibly retired. He said: “With me there is no question of personal guilt.”
In 1948 he was reclassified as a grade four “follower”, allowing the restoration of his full state pension for the remaining 19 years of his life.
There was no pension for Gustav Neuwahl, the Jewish cattle trader who leased land to Sauvigny. In 1937, a ban on his trade for Jews plunged his family into a financial crisis just as his wife died.
After the November pogrom of 1938, he was arrested, along with other Jewish men in Brilon, and imprisoned for days beneath the town hall – 130 paces from Sauvigny’s town house. Neuwahl was released after signing documents to sell his house and land and collapsed and died at work in 1943. A postwar note says that, in 1942 and 1943, his two daughters “moved to Poland”. No one helped those Jews.
In November 1938 Brilon’s synagogue – opened just seven years earlier – was set alight as part of the nationwide Nazi-backed pogrom. An eyewitness claimed “the fire brigade used old hoses so the water didn’t spurt properly”.
In 1956, a city report said: “Nothing is known about the destruction. Also, no persons are known who participated in the destruction.”
In the city archive reading room, I find retired teacher and hobby historian Hans-Günther Bracht.
Now 79, he remembers Germany’s postwar silence on the Nazi era but is wary, too, of recent decades of memorial work that over-identifies with the few resistance figures and many victims of the Nazi regime.
He sees Mayor Sauvigny as an ambivalent figure: not hugely pro-Nazi, for all his public rhetoric, yet reliable enough to be kept on by the NSDAP after the 1933 takeover.
“From my perspective he was a good little cog in an engine where lots of little cogs kept it all working,” said Bratsch. “All of this happened not because of too little resistance but because too many people fell into line or saw something in it for themselves.”
A short walk away, Brilon’s grand 12th century town hall stands on the main square. On the inside walls, portraits hang of previous Brilon mayors – but not Sauvigny.
Today’s mayor Christof Bartsch, a popular Social Democrat in his second term, says it is up to Friedrich Merz whether to discuss in public how Sauvigny acted in the circumstances of the time.
“It is an emotional subject,” he says, “and, as bystanders, we cannot judge if the time has come [to discuss].”
It’s important to point out that Friedrich Merz carries no guilt or responsibility for what his grandfather did or didn’t do in the Nazi era. And the Merz family story has a very different side.
The chancellor’s father Joachim, still alive at 101, spent four years in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. After the war, Joachim Merz served as a judge in a local denazification court. In interviews, Friedrich Merz has said he was inspired to study law from studying his father’s case files.
Prof Klaus Schubert, political scientist at the University of Münster, sees the two sides of the Merz-Sauvigny family as a unique way to tackle the rise and rise of the far right in Germany: the personal is political.
“His family reflects – and helped shape – German fortunes in an exemplary way, before, during and after the Nazi period,” Prof Schubert says.
But is it naive to expect a Merz speech on lessons in the present from his family past?
Yes, says historian Jens Wagner, director of the Buchenwald memorial.
Even eight decades on, most families look away for fear of what they might find – and from feelings of family loyalty.
“Internal family histories trump national historical narratives every time,” he says.
Equally pessimistic is historian Oliver von Wrochem, director of the Neuengamme camp memorial near Hamburg.
He perceived Merz’s tears as “very authentic”. Many people are emotional when they reflect on the Nazi era and its victims, he says, but he sees “only ever marginal energy to engage emotionally with perpetratorship at a personal level”.
For him, that is one of the dilemmas of modern Germany politics: “If more people dealt with their family histories I think we would do a better job in Germany with what is happening today.”
After a day at the archives, I head to an evening event attended by the great and good of Brilon where everyone nods their heads worriedly at Germany’s economic present and its political prospects.
Most here are proud of Friedrich Merz, the local boy made good. But there is doubt, too, that his centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) can deliver on its reform promises in the current coalition with the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).
At the gathering, a local CDU man tells me that an alliance – formal or informal – with far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is something the party will have to consider sooner rather than later.
Many think the line was already crossed last February, when the Merz CDU accepted AfD support in a Berlin Bundestag vote on migration policy.
Some say another line was crossed this week, when a leading German business association said it would now no longer shun the AfD, given its 25 per cent support in polls.
Some 90 years after his grandfather adapted to political extremism, Friedrich Merz warns that yielding to the AfD siren song would “destroy” his party.
He told a recent biographer that this position “is shaped by” his family background, including research into Josef Paul Sauvigny. He declined to respond to written questions from the Irish Times. Might sharing those answers – and encouraging others to engage with their family past – be Germany’s last, best vaccine against a slide into political extremism?
“A situation like this is no time for waffle,” said Prof Schubert of the University of Münster, “We need clarity from Friedrich Merz about what was, and what we can learn from that today.”
