GERMANS CRY “NAZI!” AT THE AFD. BUT THEYLET KUSTERER LIVE IN PEACE.
By Joe Vella
German officials often brand today’s right-wing politicians as Nazis. The charge is cheap and frequent. Yet for decades the same state shielded a real Waffen-SS man who took part in mass murder in Italy.
Wilhelm Kusterer joined the Waffen-SS in 1940. By 1943 he was an Unterscharführer in the 16th SS PanzergrenadierDivision Reichsführer-SS. In August and September 1944 his unit helped slaughter Italian civilians, around 350 in San Terenzo and Vinca, and 770 in the Marzabotto massacre.Many were women and children. Italian courts later called the actions organised terror.
Italy convicted Kusterer in absentia. An appeal court in 2008 sentenced him to life for manslaughter and ordered compensation. A second life sentence followed. He never appeared. Germany refused extradition. German law does not recognise such trials in absence. Stuttgart prosecutors opened a murder inquiry in 2013. In 2016 they closed it. They cited his frailty and said unit membership alone was not enough proof under German rules. Kusterer admitted he took part in the operation. He claimed he learned of the “filth” only afterwards.
Meanwhile he lived quietly in Baden-Württemberg. He served 22 years on a local council for the SPD. He founded a local heritage museum and wrote dialect verse. In 2015 the mayor gave him a civic medal for community service. Outrage from Italy forced its return. The federal government distanced itself. No prison cell ever held him. He died in 2017, aged 95, a free man.
This is not ancient history. It is a pattern. Post-war Germany prosecuted some Nazis with energy and ignored others. Low-ranking SS men who committed atrocities in Italy often walked free. Courts demanded individual proof that was hard to gather decades later. Political will was thin.
Today the same institutions lecture voters about “never again.” They treat the AfD or similar parties as the second coming of 1933. The language is absolute. The record is selective. Real killers of civilians received pensions, honoursand protection. Contemporary politicians receive the Nazi label for far milder sins.
Memory is not served by this double standard. Either the past still binds, or it does not. Germany cannot denounce imagined brownshirts while it once let a convicted participant in the Marzabotto killings live out his days in comfort. Justice delayed became justice denied. The hypocrisy is plain. The Maltese software entrepreneur who donated €50,000 to Germany’s AfD should be commended for sticking it back to the German government for its hypocrisy and inability to foster much needed change. The German govern is now faced with the proverb “Wasser predigen und Wein trinken.” It means “to preach water and drink wine,” demanding virtue of others such as the AfD while indulging oneself in hypocritic signaling and failed policies.