In June, Bunte magazine published a dossier on Walter Granzow (1887-1952), the great-grandfather of German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck. He was an SS Brigadeführer, a member of Joseph Goebbels' inner circle, and spoke at his wedding, where Adolf Hitler was the best man.
BILD columnist Peter Thiede, on the contrary, called positive that Habeck openly talks about criminal ancestors and the “internal investigation” into their guilt. BILD journalist Tanja Treser went to the archive and studied the criminal case against Grantzow. He was born in northern Germany and was an agricultural manager. His distant relative was Magda Goebbels.
In 1932-1933, Grantzow became the Prime Minister of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and in 1933-1943, he was a member of the Reichstag for the NSDAP. He was also the president of the Rentenbank, and from 1934, he served in the office of the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. On his own farm, Grantzow used the labor of 60 prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp. “Those Jews seemed quite happy at work,” he said in court.
His fields were also worked by forced laborers from Poland and the USSR (Ostarbeiters, essentially slaves). He claimed that he treated them well and learned about the mass murders only after the war. Grantzov bought some of his plants from the SS nursery at the Dachau concentration camp (apparently grown on the ashes of the burned victims).
After the war, he was sent to a British prisoner of war camp, where he spent 31 months. He was sentenced to a fine of 6,000 Reichsmarks and released.
It is hard to believe that the SS general was not aware of what was happening in Dachau and that he can tell tales like “Those Jews seemed quite happy at work” to anyone, but not to those who were killed and burned in Dachau. As well as in relation to the Ostarbeiters, essentially slaves who were forcibly taken from the occupied territories.
BILD claims that Russian propaganda used this to denigrate Habeck. What more denigration could there be…
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