My great-uncle was a Nazi. I apologize for him. I regret it. I am sorry. Ernst Wilhelm Josef Kubart (1914 Graz Austria–2012 in Brazil) was my great-uncle, the brother of my beloved Omi. His membership in the NSDAP is documented. He applied in 1938 after Anschluss. He was a Austrian illegal Nazi as student in Graz. He was admitted retroactively from 1 May 1938 and received NSDAP membership number 6,368,372. The Bundesarchiv reference is R 9361-IX/23720917. He was a ideolgical Nazi to the core According to our family history, Ernst fought on the Eastern Front during Operation Barbarossa. Family lore has it, he as a tank commander and as a soldier involved in close-range anti-tank combat, a Panzerknacker destoying several Soviet tanks. The family story says that during one battle he fought Soviet tanks from a tank hole at very close range with explosive charges. Eventually a Soviet tank discovered his position and drove over it. Ernst was severely wounded but survived and was sent back from the front. I do not tell this story to glorify him. Operation Barbarossa was Nazi Germany’s war of aggression against the Soviet Union and brought enormous death, destruction and suffering. Ernst survived. Many of the people attacked by Nazi Germany did not. After the war in 1950, he sold the inherited family estate at Attersee Ernst left Austria and emigrated to Brazil, where he worked as a manager for BASF. According to our family, he returned to Austria only once. I never met him. He died in Brazil in 2012. I cannot ask him today why he joined the NSDAP, what exactly he did during the war, whom he fought or whether he regretted his choices. I can only research the surviving evidence, distinguish documented facts from family memory and refuse to hide this painful part of my family history. I am a Christian Democrat, a European and a committed Atlanticist. I believe in human dignity, democracy, European unity and NATO — the opposite of dictatorship, Nazism and wars of conquest. We cannot choose our ancestors, but we can choose how honestly we confront their history. I regret the choices Ernst Kubart made. I apologize for him and I am sorry for the victims of the regime and the war he served. No glorification. No excuses. No whitewashing of Nazi crimes. Never again Nazism. Never again dictatorship. Never again wars of conquest in Europe. This is only foto of Ernst Kubart I have in family archive taking during his only visit back to Austria. Gunther Fehlinger-Jahn

Wife said we needed more seating for this weekend. So in the matter of about an hour and a half i made my first picnic table with scrap wood from around the house.