He was Habeck's great-grandfather: Flowers from the concentration camp | Life & Knowledge

Vitamin C from gladiolus, a pepper substitute for the front. The SS experiments with medicinal plants at the Dachau concentration camp. Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck's great-grandfather also benefits.

The Green politician has come to terms with his family's past. Millions of Nazi descendants in Germany do not. No one can do anything about their ancestors. But we have to look. More than ever. A look at the criminal record of SS Brigadeführer Walter Granzow (1897–1952)

The British prisoner of war camp Fallingbostel in the Lüneburg Heath (60 kilometers north of Hanover). After the Second World War, 255 SS officers and 8,609 SS men were imprisoned here behind barbed wire. Mass murderers, Gestapo informers, Gauleiters and Nazi profiteers of the economy. They are awaiting trial. One of them is SS Brigadeführer Walter Granzow (then 58), great-grandfather of today's Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck (54, the Greens).

The British show them films – mountains of corpses in the liberated concentration camps. Shock therapy for the perpetrators. Three Nazis take their own lives. Out of fear of being extradited to Poland. Shower once a week with soap. A postcard to loved ones at home every 14 days. 25 words. No more is allowed.

Now the Federal Archives opens the Granzow trial file

The 180 pages show: Walter Granzow bought plants from Dachau for his nursery. The SS operated a plantation there. Himmler's organic shop for the Eastern Front. Medicinal herbs for elite soldiers. Vitamin C from gladiolas for the iron ration. Pepper substitute from basil, marjoram, tea from blackberry leaves. One bed for heart poisons (devil's eye), one for the nerves. Granzow knew that concentration camp prisoners had to work hard for this. Today it is clear: Hell blooms in red, yellow, purple. 1,600 slave workers (many clergymen!) drained 148 hectares of moorland, dug up fields (five priests in front of a plough), and planted 100,000 thyme seedlings alone. Beaten (speed! speed!), exhausted, soaked. Up to 800 died. They collapsed on the field and ran into the guns of SS guards to put an end to their torture. A survivor reports: “Behind the column of exhausted, staggering people there were always ten or more wheelbarrows full of dead and dying people.”

Prisoners had to pick peas and beans

Granzow also employed 60 concentration camp prisoners on his farm. They had to pick peas and beans in his fields, guarded by the SS. They came from the Wittenberge subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. Malnourished prisoners, harassed by the SS. Granzow told his judge: “These Jews seemed quite happy while they were working.”

He had forced laborers from Poland and Russia work on his fields. They were forbidden to have sex with Germans under penalty of death. He treated them decently, said Granzow. He claims he only found out about the mass murder of the Jews after the war.

Granzow knew how the SS mistreated concentration camp inmates and Himmler was responsible for it. In 1944, the German occupiers put almost 2,000 Danish police officers in the Buchenau concentration camp out of fear of defections. They had to make anti-tank weapons, grenades, and build a railway embankment. They were always hungry. A Danish envoy turned to Granzow and described the inhumane conditions. Granzow should speak to Himmler on behalf of the prisoners.

Granzow's contacts with the Nazi elite are excellent

In 1933, Heinrich Himmler personally accepted him into the SS. He was to transform the peasantry. The Germans, the peasant people. The new nobility. Blood and soil. For years, the SS chief congratulated him on his birthday. The architect of the Holocaust sent him gifts, a volume of reports on Tibet. Himmler believed in blue-eyed, original Aryans in the Tibetan highlands, and looked for hardy Mongolian horses and fast-ripening grain. For the war. Farmer Granzow (newly on the staff of the Reichsführer SS) delighted Himmler with his family chronicle, and in 1943 he still swears their unchanging camaraderie.

Granzow also met Hitler and was part of the “Führer Ring” of the economy. He sat on supervisory boards with Fritz Thyssen and Carl Bosch. His sister-in-law Magda married propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. In her first marriage she loved the industrialist Günther Quandt (BMW). Granzow called her a “romantic dreamer”. Günther Quandt gave her a million marks, plus 2,500 Reichsmarks a month. Despite the separation. Granzow: “He still loved her and wanted to win her back.”

Granzow was a high-ranking member of the SS

For the court it is clear: Walter Granzow was a high-ranking member of the SS. He knew about the terror organization's crimes. In May 1948 the court sentenced him to pay 6,000 Reichsmarks. He had already served two years and seven months of internment. Five of them in the notorious interrogation center of the British secret service MI 5 in Bad Nenndorf. 20 bathing cells in a former mud bath. A place to break the will of the inmates. Beatings instead of mud packs. To unmask spies. With bread and watery soup, cold showers every 30 minutes. Hitler's press chief Otto Dietrich analyzes the psyche of Nazi leaders for MI 5.

Himmler's grey eminence, Oswald Pohl, was still responsible for the deployment of concentration camp prisoners. The British want to know everything about the last days in the Führerbunker, Hitler's last instructions, from adjutant Nicolaus von Below. The British fear that the loyalists could return and stage a coup. On the dead Hitler's birthday in 1946.

And what does the Vice Chancellor say to his great-grandfather?

“Even as a teenager, I have been thinking intensively about my family's history,” Habeck told the magazine “Bunte.” He often talked about the topic with his grandmother and his mother. “It was a very personal confrontation with the guilt of my great-grandfather and my grandfather. This personal confrontation has shaped my political thinking, actions and speech and continues to hold me accountable to this day,” Habeck is quoted as saying.