On March 18-20, Russian-language Facebook accounts (1,2,3,4,5) shared a photo depicting Adolf Hitler shaking hands with an unknown woman. According to the attached description, the woman shown in the photo is the grandmother of Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission. The posts also claim that von der Leyen’s grandfather, Carl Albrecht Oberg, was an SS general and “chief of the SS and police” and sent 100,000 people to concentration camps.
The claim that the woman depicted in the photo is Ursula von der Leyen’s grandmother was voiced by American researcher Norman Finkelstein as a joke. Information about the true identity of the woman depicted in the photo cannot be found in open sources. The claim that von der Leyen’s grandfather Carl Albrecht Oberg was an SS general is false. The great-grandfather of the President of the European Commission was Friedrich Karl Albrecht and he was a businessman.
The photo disseminated on Facebook is a screenshot of a post published on the X (former Twitter) page of American researcher and activist Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein published the post on November 23, 2023, with the humorous caption: “A Photo from Ursula von der Leyne’s Family Album ‘My Sweet Granny Didn’t Wash Her Hand for a Month after This Precious Occasion.’
The real identity of the woman shown in the photo cannot be found in open sources. According to the description of the American photo agency Getty Images, the photo was taken in 1937 in the city of Buckeburg and Hitler shakes hands with a “traditionally dressed peasant girl.”
It is also false to claim that Ursula von der Leyen’s grandfather was SS (Schutzstaffel – an independent paramilitary organization within the German Nazi Party) General Carl Albrecht Oberg. The latter has nothing to do with the President of the European Commission. In the published posts, his name is confused with that of von der Leyen’s real great-grandfather – Friedrich Karl Albrecht, who was not a high-ranking SS officer, but a merchant from Bremen. “Albrecht” is a middle name for Karl Oberg and a maiden name for Ursula von der Leyen.
The claims mentioned in the posts about Karl Albrecht Oberg, a senior German Nazi Party official who spent much of his career in Poland and France fighting local resistance movements, are largely true. Oberg’s activities included the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. The emigration of up to 75,000 Jews from France alone is associated with his name. After the end of the war, Oberg was sentenced to death twice, which was later changed to life imprisonment. In 1965, Oberg was pardoned by the French President Charles de Gaulle (1,2).
Claims about Ursula von der Leyen’s great-grandfather’s ties to the Nazi Party have been investigated by several fact-checking organizations (1,2,3). AFP found information about von der Leyen in the genealogy book of German families (Deutsches Geschlechterbuch) preserved in the Austrian National Library. The book confirms that von der Leyen’s grandfather, Karl Eduard Albrecht, was a doctor and psychologist, and his great-grandfather, Friedrich Karl Albrecht, was a merchant and owner of the company “Friedrich Karl Albrecht.”
Ursula von der Leyen’s association with the Nazi Party is intended to tarnish her reputation. A similar method was used against a number of German public figures, “Myth Detector” verified several such claims in the past. For more, see:
- WERE THE GRANDFATHERS OF THE GERMAN MINISTERS OF HEALTH AND FINANCE HIGH-RANKING NAZI OFFICIALS? (in Georgian)
- KLAUS SCHWAB’S FATHER OR A GENERAL OF NAZI GERMANY – WHO DOES THE PHOTO DEPICT?
- WHO IS SPREADING DISINFORMATION ABOUT THE ANCESTORS OF EUROPEAN POLITICIANS? (in Georgian)
About the Sources
Russian-language Facebook accounts Andrey Uriy Kuzin, Szvetlana Kobra and Иван Косинов have disseminated disinformation a number of times in the past. Their target is mainly the political leaders of Ukraine and other Western countries.
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