There is currently no clue, either on the author(s), or on their motivations. The investigation continues in Germany after the grave of former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and his wife Loki was vandalized with swastikas, Hamburg police say.
“The red-painted swastikas were discovered on Friday evening on their grave in a Hamburg cemetery and could be immediately erased,” say the authorities. The Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, a member of the Social Democratic Party like Helmut Schmidt, strongly condemned this “odious act, which forgets History”.
Representative of “Realpolitik”
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.