Germany should donate 30% of its available armored vehicles and military aircraft to Kiev, according to Andrey Melnik, Ukraine’s envoy to the UN. His appeal comes as the EU nations seek ways to boost support amid uncertainty over whether US President Donald Trump will continue to back Ukraine.

Melnik, who served as ambassador to Berlin from 2015 to 2022, addressed his plea in an open letter to Chancellor-designate Friedrich Merz, published in Welt am Sonntag on Saturday. “It is in your hands, as peacemakers, to stop this damn war by the end of 2025,” he wrote.

The diplomat outlined a series of steps he believes Merz must take to “cut the Gordian knot and force [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to make peace.”

According to Melnik, Germany should donate 30% of its Bundeswehr stock of armored vehicles and aircraft to Kiev, including around 45 Eurofighter Typhoon and 30 Tornado fighter jets, 100 Leopard 2 main battle tanks, and 115 Puma and 130 Marder infantry fighting vehicles. He also called on Berlin to defy “the expected resistance” from the Social Democrats (SPD) and send 150 Taurus cruise missiles.

The SPD has opposed the missile deliveries, citing concerns about further escalation with Russia. The Social Democrats and Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) are currently engaged in coalition talks.

Melnik urged Germany to commit 0.5% of its GDP, or €21.5 billion ($24.5 billion) annually, toward military aid to Ukraine through 2029. “These funds should be invested in the production of state-of-the-art weapons in both Germany and Ukraine,” he wrote. He also called for the 0.5% benchmark to be adopted across the EU as a “huge warning signal” to Russia.

Merz recently expressed an openness to delivering Taurus missiles, prompting criticism from SPD leader Matthias Miersch and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius. Meanwhile, Russian Ambassador to Germany Sergey Nechayev warned that such shipments would “bring no changes to the battlefield” but would further implicate Germany in the conflict.

https://www.rt.com/news/616035-ukraine-asks-germany-weapons/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

 

 

Did Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev Call a Nazi a Nazi?

Phil Butler

Russia’s Deputy Chairman of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, sparked controversy by comparing German politician Friedrich Merz to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and accusing Europe of reviving dangerous militarism.

He can even call Germany’s Friedrich Merz a goose-stepping clone of Hitler’s propaganda minister if he so choses. However, it is fair to question whether or not Russia’s former Prime Minister is justified in doing so.

 

Fascist Apples

Тhe myth that Germans no longer harbor the same views as Hitler and his minions is simply untrue  To begin with, Friedrich Merz’s grandfather, Josef Paul Sauvigny, was one of the Sturmabteilung (SA, or Brown Shirts) who helped Adolf Hitler come to power in the 1930s. Sauvigny was not just marching along with these early stormtroopers; his role and character are well documented. This PDF (in German) by Peter Bürger portrays a man who would do anything to cling to political power and who would ultimately manipulate his way into a full pension from the West German government even though he was an Oberscharführer of the SA in the Nazi era. The document also reveals a sort of de ja vu foreboding, given the proclivities of the new head of the CDU. But is Mr. Medvedev correct? Is Friederich Merz a new propaganda chief like Joseph Goebbels?

The short answer is, yes. The Nazi apples of today have not rolled too far from the same fascist trees that have always blanketed Europe. You see, Merz’s grandfather was only a mayor, albeit an important one, who hailed Nazism and Hitler from the square in Brilon. One key aspect of the rise of Hitler’s Reich was the bribery system that paid high-ranking senior Wehrmacht officers and officials with vast land grants, cash, cars, lifetime tax freedom, and ongoing payments. This fact reminds me of what a World War II German veteran told me in an interview some years ago. The artillery sergeant who finally fought at Normandy said,  “It was not Hitler that was so bad, but the little Hitlers who ran Nazisim on the local front.”

Friedrich Merz’s family on his mother’s side were all jurists, politicians, and/or aristocracy since the end of the Holy Roman Empire. Similar cases always arise when you investigate people like Merz, EU Presdent Ursula von der Leyen, and nearly all the rest of the key leadership. I lived in Germany for a decade and was a bit surprised to find a Nazi skeleton in every basement I was invited into. This is common knowledge, though. As for Merz’s father’s side of the family, not much is available, except that Joachim Merz was a judge. Some stories claim he served in Hitler’s  Wehrmacht, which would have been mandatory for men between 16 and 60 once the German dictator declared “Total War,” in January 1943. Merz the elder would have been 19 at the time. A meaningful, deeper dive into the incoming German chancellor’s ancestry is elusive, at best. What we do know is that Merz denied his maternal grandfather’s role in Hitler’s rise to power, and then later admitted the truth.

A Merz – Goebbels Comparison

Dmitry Medvedev also compared Friedrich Merz to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister. Looking at this idea, the question arises, “What are the similarities Medvedev is referring to?” To understand this comparison, we must look at the entire EU as a kind of new Reich, not just Germany. If we consider Ursula von der Leyen (or her successor) as the new leader of the bloc, then characterising Merz as a key underling makes more sense. Let’s look at a few apt comparisons between Goebbels and Merz.

Even though Goebbels and Merz come from divergent socioeconomic classes, the two have a great many things in common. For instance, Goebbels was the key person pressuring Hitler to introduce measures that would produce “total war.” As for Merz, his recent move to more than double Germany’s defence budget is a good sign of things to come. Also, his fearmongering and other propaganda speak mirror Goebbels. This excerpt from the New Voice of Ukraine illustrates how close the EU is to declaring “total war” on Russia.

“Merz is playing a high-stakes game of political chess—one with a trillion-euro prize that could reshape not only Germany, but the entire European Union. For the first time since the 1930s, Germany is embarking on a major military buildup, pledging to spend that staggering sum over the next decade to strengthen its national defense. The investment could ultimately surpass the combined cost of the Marshall Plan and German reunification in the 1990s.”

Like Goebbels, Friedrich Merz is an expert at using the latest media and information channels. The CDU politician has hundreds of thousands of followers on his personal Instagram and “X” profiles. According to some experts, Merz’s campaign hashtaged slogan #Wiedernachvorne (“Forward Again”) was a key to his winning the recent elections. Merz is also one of the most active German politicians on Facebook, posting an average of 2.4 posts per day. Analysis of Merz’s social media outreach reveals that he focuses on creating a movement and on motivation, much like Goebbels. Like the notorious Nazi he seems to have been cloned from, Merz has been described as a brilliant speaker. Whether or not Merz practices his speeches in front of a mirror like Hitler and Goebbels is so far unknown. The similarities go on and one, as would the likeness of any Machiavellian politician.

Interestingly, the differences between Goebbels and Merz are more interesting than the similarities. I am not sure if Russia’s Medvedev knows Goebbels was an intellectual. He may not realise that Merz was kicked out of high school for misbehaving. The two Germans, however, followed similar paths to further their education by attending various prestigious universities and receiving scholarships from the Albertus Magnus Society (Goebbels) and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (Merz). Though Goebbels was by far the more intelligent and academically accomplished of the two, Merz had backing second to none. For instance, from 2016 until 2020, Merz was on the supervisory board of BlackRock Asset Management in Germany.

Finding Hitler’s Frozen Brain

As is always the case when investigating leaders like Merz, the rabbit hole of their associations and ideologies is too vast to cover in any one report. Here we must leave off his association with Junge Union Deutschlands, and the fascinating Andean Pact group, comprised of all white male ultra-conservatives. As a side note, this so-called “Andenpakt” was created by a dozen CDU youth who had gone on an official visit to South America in 1979. During their trip from Caracas to Santiago, Chile, they flew over the vast Andes Mountain Range, which gave rise to the informal name of the group that vowed to help one another seek power in Germany and around the world. This group still holds highly secretive meetings. I am not sure why, but the story that Adolf Hitler had escaped to a villa across the Andes from Santiago in 1945 popped into my head.

The CIA stopped investigating the alledged escape of Hitler aided by his friends Eva and Juan Peron, among others, decades ago. What’s more, the myth that Germans no longer harbor the same views as Hitler and his minions is simply untrue. Read this storyabout West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, and let the truth set your mind free to wonder. Now, imagine Ursula von der Leyen creating a cohesive European economic and military bloc. This official release from the EU tap dances around the issue, but the result is clear. ReArm Europe has a familiar ring to it. Only this time the Brits may not backstab the Germans, and the Fourth Reich has already taken over two thirds of Ukraine.

Would you worry if you were Russian? I think Medvedev should start looking for Hitler’s frozen brain in Patagonia just to prove his point. This all seems too close to the original catastrophe to be a copycar crime.

https://journal-neo.su/2025/04/25/did-russias-dmitry-medvedev-call-a-nazi-a-nazi/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

 

Friedrich Merz's Grandpa
On Brilon Mayor Josef Paul Sauvigny (1875-1967), the "unification of all German blood" in 1933, and a precursor to the CDU party's history
By Peter Bürger

 

Friedrich Merz from Sauerland (possibly as the "preferred candidate" of both the opposition left and the nationalist CDU) has a good chance of becoming the next chairman of the Christian Democratic Party or – once the founding generation of the Greens have completely disappeared from the scene – even Chancellor.
Seventeen years ago, there was a public debate because Merz described his "right-wing Catholic" grandfather, Josef Paul Sauvigny (Mayor of Brilon until 1937), as an admirable role model, thereby demonstrating, not only in my view, his ignorant understanding of history. He had to backtrack somewhat after critical journalists (including taz, Die Zeit) reviewed relevant newspaper sources1 (1933/1937) and the denazification documents of his celebrated ancestor.2
Many millions of Germans have grandfathers who served the Nazis. This is not a personal flaw. The only decisive question remains the one posed by Patrik Schwarz in 2004: how one personally relates to these ancestors. This article, based on sources, aims to demonstrate why the potential next chairman of the CDU must be expected to provide an unequivocal clarification that goes well beyond a relativization of traditional family legends: The grandfather was not only "no role model," but his behavior as a politician offered one of the most repulsive examples in a dark precursor chapter of the CDU's party history.

 

Light and Shadow of a Catholic Landscape
Among the emails of the Catholic editor of a local magazine in the Sauerland region, I always find the sentence: "There stands the enemy, dripping his poison into the wounds of a people. There stands the enemy – and there's no doubt about it: This enemy is on the right!" This was said in parliament on June 25, 1922, by the left-wing Catholic Reich Chancellor Josef Wirth, a member of the CDU's predecessor party, the Center Party, after the assassination of the democrat Walter Rathenau.
The minority of Christians who were persecuted or even murdered from 1933 onwards for their persistent refusal to cooperate with the fascists was clearly more prominent in the Catholic part of the Sauerland than in the predominantly Protestant neighboring regions. I published the books "Sauerland Peace Messengers"3 and "Sauerland Witnesses"4 (with a foreword by a Christian Democratic government president) about these Catholic pacifists, critics of capitalism, and Center Party figures.

But these role models formed only a very small circle, while the majority of people either submitted to the course of the Third Reich or quickly howled with the wolves. Even in the Sauerland, the remaining Black homeland self-praise collective knows little about the shadow of the Catholic Center Party due to the history of repression:
From South Westphalia came not only honorable "Catholic anti-fascists," but also Hitler's henchman Franz von Papen from the right-wing center fringe (Werl), the two politician brothers Ferdinand5 and Hermann6 von Lüninck (from Ostwig near Brilon), who defected early to the German Nationalists and then to the NSDAP, and the notorious Catholic state injustice activist Carl Schmitt (joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933) from Plettenberg, who met with like-minded people7 in the old Brilon district. In 1932, the social democratic magazine "Der wahre Jakob" (The True Jacob) published: "National Socialism (see Hitler's 'Mein Kampf') desires war against Russia, war against France, and war against the border states. – Well, that won't be a war, but a hunt. – But you, Mr. von Papen, will then be asked who let the beast out of the cage!"8 Many Center Party politicians were still judging this clearly at the time.

Immediately after taking power, the declared Nazi arsonists faced a problem in Catholic regions like the Sauerland region of Cologne – particularly in local politics. In many places, at the beginning of 1933, there wasn't even a single NSDAP "cell." They first had to recruit local Nazi civil servants from the existing personnel, and they found a surprising number of turncoats who were immediately willing to collaborate.
A few examples9 are cited: On April 12, 1933, Heinrich Feldmann declared in the Meschede district council that the entire Center Party faction stood united behind the "national government" and was ready to cooperate "with all the resources at its disposal." Arnsberg city councilor Rörig made a similar statement on April 25, 1933: "For us Center Party members, it is a matter of course to serve the current order."
The Arnsberg provost dean Joseph Bömer10 (1881-1942), as a priest one of the most courageous Center Party politicians in the Sauerland and an uncompromising opponent of the swastika until his death, had campaigned in 1932 as district chairman of his party for the Center Party politician Rudolf Isphording, who came from Attendorn, to be the new mayor. In 1933, he bitterly realized how quickly Isphording had become a supporter of the Nazis overnight (and was now uttering Nazi slogans).
The former Center Party mayor of Letmath, Franz Pöggeler, served as mayor of Rüthen (Friedrich Merz's school from 1971 to 1975) from 1933 until his death in 1942 and was posthumously honored with a Pöggeler street in 1977. According to the research of Dr. Hans-Günther Bracht cannot help but attest to Pöggeler's appalling complicity in the Nazi persecution system.11

Brilon Mayor Josef Paul Sauvigny
According to the sources known so far, Friedrich Merz's grandfather was among this circle of individuals who betrayed both the Center Party and democracy and sold out to power in 1933. Josef Paul Sauvigny (1875-1967) came from a landowning family, five of whose sons had participated in the "senseless massacre" (Pope Benedict XV) of World War I. A trained lawyer (attorney from 1912), Sauvigny soon turned to politics (second alderman in Brilon in 1915, first alderman in 1916) and served as mayor of his hometown from November 17, 1917: He "is loyal to the king and politically belongs to the Center Party."12
Dr. Ottilie Knepper Babilon attributes the mayor, re-elected in 1929, to a municipal political list construction for the years 1925-1933, which represented the interests of the "upper" or propertied middle class and subsequently proved to be "politically very adaptable."13 This included Dr. Josef Gerlach, who ran for the bourgeois interest group at the district level in 1933 and locally for the Center Party, which was geared to the "little people," and then pursued a career as a district economic advisor during the Nazi era – responsible, among other things, for the plundering enterprise known as "Aryanization."
The so-called "Volksgemeinschaft" (People's Community) is formed
After the Hitler Party seized power, J.P. Sauvigny remained mayor of Brilon without further ado and chaired a mass meeting there on May 1, 1933, at which the so-called "Volksgemeinschaft" (People of German Blood) was formed. The loyal – formerly black, soon tanned – “Sauerländer Zeitung” only quotes his speech verbatim as follows (a full text of the entire report is also available online):
“The newly formed Germany celebrates its first national holiday today. [...] Young and vigorous as the hordes of its youthful supporters, so stands the new Reich before us. The storms of the national revolution still roar over it, these spring storms that swept away all the filth, that chased away the clouds that until now wanted to rob us of the sun. This storm, which may hit so hard for some, will subside after it has cleared the air of all the poisonous fumes that had accumulated over years of misunderstood freedom and powerless self-flagellation.
Only then will the most difficult time begin, the hard, most renunciatory work of the final resurgence. But while until now, German strength and German striving for reconstruction have been splitting and bleeding to death on the Party squabbles and the constant change of leadership, today there is one will that unites us, one force that guides us, one leader who calls us. Forgetting the party hatred of yesterday, the great gathering has begun, the unification of all Germans, of German blood, for common action, the symbol of which today's festival is. [...]
On behalf of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, I warmly welcome you all. I wish that, resting from all work, you will celebrate a class-reconciling, constructive festival in its honor. I call on all of you [...] to rise up for the great deed, united in lending a hand to the great work of liberation to which we are all called, so that the German will to work will once again find space, and German labor will once again find a foundation. I ask you to rise and join me in the cry: The working German people, their venerable Reich President, the embodiment of German loyalty, Chancellor Hitler, his will to rebuild, long live them, long live them, long live them, long live them!14
This German "blood unification speech" against the Weimar Republic truly cannot be justified or glossed over by anything. Early attempts by the grandson15 in 2004 to this effect are extremely irritating, even if the taz newspaper had not yet fully grasped some of the depths of the documented speech.

All too soon, what Mayor Sauvigny promised, according to the Sauerländer Zeitung, will come to pass: The Brilon district will be liberated from what the National Socialists understand as "filth" and "toxic fumes." It's about people: First, the communists and other leftists—who are hardly doctrinally oriented locally, some of them even Catholic—are to be eliminated.16

 

READ MORE: 

https://upgr.bv-opfer-ns-militaerjustiz.de/uploads/Dateien/Links/PB-Art-Sauvigny20210111.pdf