Heinrich Lummer, West Berlin’s interior senator from 1981 to 1986, has largely been forgotten. At most, a scandal or two from the conservative politician’s time in office has remained in the city’s collective memory. For years, the staunch anti-communist had an affair with an agent from East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (Stasi), making himself vulnerable to blackmail. In 1981, Lummer ordered the eviction of eight squats, during which the 19-year-old squatter Klaus-Jürgen Rattay was pushed under the wheels of a bus and died. A handmade memorial plaque in the sidewalk at Potsdamer Straße 125 still commemorates his death. Lummer’s career came to an end in 1986 due to a realty scandal. It was later revealed that the right-wing hardliner had allegedly donated thousands of marks to right-wing extremists in 1971.
Today, one influential Berlin politician thinks this resume deserves admiration. After Lummer’s death in 2019, Kai Wegner wrote: “He was a strong personality in the Berlin CDU.” Wegner said Lummer was “unforgotten”: “Many will remember him as someone who consistently enforced internal security and order,” the Facebook post reads. “This didn’t just win him friends, but it showed his clear stance.” Today, the writer of that obituary is mayor of Berlin.
Lummer stood out with one topic in particular since the end of the 1990s: his hatred of Jews. In 1997, Lummer spoke out against Jewish immigration to the Federal Republic of Germany in the Ostpreußenblatt, today called the Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung. The country already had too many foreigners — and its foreign policy on questions relating to Israel was largely “determined by others.”
Lummer’s antisemitism was so clear that he was denied entry to Israel in 1998. The following year, in an interview with the right-wing newspaper Junge Freiheit, he said the Berlin Holocaust memorial had only been built due to pressure from the “American East Coast.” In another interview, he wondered if forced labor under the Nazis had really been “so terrible and low-paid.” After all, “there has always been forced labor in the context of war.” When CDU politician Martin Hohmann (now AfD) gave an antisemitic speech in 2003, Lummer was one of the initiators of a solidarity declaration.
Further right-wing bugaboos completed Lummer’s world view. In 1999, again in the Ostpreußenblatt, he wrote that the German people were in danger of disappearing due to mass immigration, encouraged by foreign powers. Today, this far-right conspiracy theory is known as the “Great Replacement.” In 2001, Lummer signed a petition in support of Götz Kubitschek, today an ideologue of the neo-fascist Right, and in 2006, he signed another petition for Junge Freiheit.
None of this is a secret. Lummer’s Wikipedia page in German contains an entire section on his antisemitism. How does Wegner respond?
A spokesperson said that the mayor had paid tribute to Lummer due to his folksy style and his commitment to internal security and order. Wegner did not share Lummer’s “views on Israel” then or now. “We do not tolerate antisemitism, racism, or other hateful ideologies in Berlin — neither on the streets nor at universities and other parts of the city.” The question of whether Wegner had ever criticized his mentor’s antisemitism went unanswered.
Wegner has never been hesitant to level accusations of antisemitism. When the Israeli film maker Yuval Abraham gave a speech at the Berlinale calling for equal treatment for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, using the term “apartheid,” Wegner called this an “unacceptable relativization.” When students, including Jewish students, occupied a building a Humboldt University, Wegner warned of “lawless spaces for antisemites and terrorists.” Wegner’s cultural senator, Joe Chialo of the CDU, is currently trying to close a cultural center because it provided space for the association Jewish Voice — which is also “antisemitic”.
In March, Wegner had himself photographed with Telsa boss Elon Musk, who has been criticized widely for antisemitic conspiracy theories. Further in the past, we find controversial statements by Wegner himself. According to the taz newspaper, in 2000, Wegner, then the Berlin chairman of the CDU’s youth organization Junge Union, called for young people to finally develop a “healthy relationship with the nation.” The newspaper report quotes indirectly from the then 28-year-old Wegner: “If too much is taught about the ‘12 years’, this could also generate a backlash.” Some might call this an unacceptable relativization.
This is no exception for the CDU. The author of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws, Hans Globke, became the right-hand man of CDU boss Konrad Adenauer in 1953 — his portrait still hangs in the Federal Chancellory. The heirs of Nazi war criminals give large donations to the CDU. Horst Seehofer, a former interior minister from the CDU’s sister party CSU, supported a historical institute that denied the facts of the Holocaust for years, as the newspaper SZ reported. It would seem that the CDU has a great tolerance for antisemitism — as long as it is from right-wing Germans.
This story was first published in German in the newspaper nd on August 26. Translation by the author. The last paragraph was added.