an investigation opened after the discovery of swastikas on the grave of ex-chancellor Helmut Schmidt

The police currently have no information on the vandals and their motivations.

The grave of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and his wife Loki was desecrated with swastikas, Hamburg police told AFP on Saturday, December 23. These tags “could have been immediately deleted”, specified the police, who currently have no information on the identity of the perpetrators, nor on their motivations. The investigation continues.

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, a member of the Social Democratic Party like Helmut Schmidt, strongly condemned this act. “odious, who forgets History”. “Helmut and Loki Schmidt have always opposed contempt for man, racism and anti-Semitism, conscious of our History”, she declared on X.

Born in Hamburg on December 23, 1918, the social democrat Helmut Schmidt would have been 105 years old this Saturday. Died on November 10, 2015, he led West Germany from 1974 to 1982, when the country became a global economic power.

A convinced European who embodied “realpolitik” during the Cold War, he initiated a new economic liberalism within German social democracy.