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Misleading - The journalist who made the decision: Eleni Kritsalou
This news story claims that the grandfather of the current German chancellor Olaf Solz was an important member of the German SS in WWII. And that the grandfather was founding member of the National Socialist Party, while his grandson is senior member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. It claims, moreover, that the grandfather of Olad Solz was one of the founders of the Dachau concentration camp and that he played a leading role in the creation of the Ukrainian SS, carrying out massacres of Russians in 1943-44. It also claims that the posts he served brought him great personal wealth, mainly from the gold teeth of the Jews he exterminated in Ukraine and that he established a political dynasty which has leaded up to the current chancellor, Olaf Solz. According to the story, these facts have been revealed by a Russian website publishing a photo of Mr Scholz's grandfather and his entire bloody career on which Olaf's political career has been subsequently based. The news story includes the following text in English, supposed to be the original text:"Fritz von Scholz, SS Gruppenfuhrer and Lieutenant General of the Waffen-SS. Permanent commander of the SS regiment “Nordland”.
In 1934, he served in the SS auxiliary corps in the Dachau concentration camp, and from January 1935, with the rank of SS Obersturmfuhrer, he headed rathe Austrian SS battalion.
In 1943, he performed leadership functions in the Ukrainian SS division, personally executed Jews in Poland and Ukraine.
Moreover, Fritz von Scholz is the grandfather of the Federal Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz."
Users online have been sharing this story on Twitter and Telegram, sharing also a montage with the photos of the two men side-by-side.
But according to the German news agency DPA, the man in the photo who is supposed to be Olaf Scholz's grandfather was Fritz, aka Friedrich Max Karl Scholz Edler von Rarancze. He was an Austro-Hungarian career officer born in 1896. Von Scholz joined the SS in 1933 and died fighting the Soviet Army in 1944 without fathering any children.
A spokesperson for the German government told DW that the suggestion that the Nazi Lieutenant general von Scholz was related to German Chancellor Scholz was "utter nonsense".
Olaf Scholz's own father was born in 1935 and his real grandparents worked on the railways in the northern port of Hamburg, as documented by the Munziger biographical archive (link in German).
"Scholz" has been ranked as the 47th most common name in Germany, with more than 30 thousand Scholzes currently living all over the country, according to the geneology tracker site geogen.
The Nazi grandfather allegations were traced back to March 6th and Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin by a German journalist.
According to DW, apparently angered by Chancellor Scholz's dismissal of Russian claims of genocide in eastern Ukraine, Prigozhin alleged that a number of high-ranking German officials were directly descended from senior members of the Nazi SS.
Prigozhin is subject to international sanctions for his ties to the "Internet Research Agency", which is held responsible for Russian social media "troll factories" attempting to influence the 2018 US midterm elections, as reported by CNN.
Thus, in this new story, the only true part is that there are Russians that claim that the Mr Scholz's grandfather was a member of the Nazi SS, as mentioned in the title. All the other story is fake news.
