Peter Abetz points to positive legacy of his high-ranking Nazi great-uncle
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Version 0 of 1. Western Australian MP Peter Abetz, brother of the more famous senator, said he had a “mixed reaction” to learning his great-uncle was a high-ranking Nazi, saying he did some “really positive things” as well as being involved in the deportation of French Jews to death camps. Abetz’s great-uncle, Otto Abetz, served as Adolf Hitler’s wartime ambassador to France. He was captured by Allied forces in 1945 and in 1949 was sentenced to 20 years in jail for war crimes. Discussing his infamous relative on SBS’s Insight program on Tuesday night, Abetz – the older brother of federal senator and Abbott government minister Eric Abetz – said he had no memory of meeting the man but had learned about him by reading history books. While he didn’t attempt to assuage his great-uncle’s contribution to the Holocaust, Abetz claimed he also left a positive legacy in protecting the collection of public and private art, particularly Jewish-owned art, he had seized at the order of the foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. “I think it was one of mixed reaction [to learn about Otto Abetz], in that he did some really positive things but he also did participate in, you know, the deportation of the Jews which is really ... there’s no excuse for that whatsoever, and yet he also did some very positive things,” Abetz said. “I was told that he, when the Americans were advancing on Paris, because he was so passionate about French culture, he actually negotiated with the Americans to, and the Wehrmacht, that the Germans would vacate Paris and not booby trap anything if the Americans gave them, I think, three or four days to withdraw. WWII German Ambassador to Vichy France Otto Abetz at Hotel Majestic Press Photo http://t.co/lm8LaNTeFp pic.twitter.com/hDnmToilom “And the French were incredibly grateful for that because that way Paris wasn’t actually destroyed.” Peter Abetz’s approach is different to that taken by Eric Abetz, who has publicly distanced himself from the SS Standartenführer. In 2008, the Tasmanian senator disclosed his family history in the Senate, in order to head off what he said was an “un-Australian” attempt by the Labor party to “slur me by association”. In March, Abetz said his German heritage made him an “easy target” for some critics. However Peter Abetz rejected the suggestion he was trying to “cling to the positive” in his account of the family history, which also includes Nazi war general Erwin Rommel, a cousin of his maternal grandfather. “One of the things that my parents were very strong in teaching us as we grew up is that each one of us is responsible for our own decisions, and that it doesn’t matter what your parents have done, or your grandparents have done, it’s what you do with your life that really matters,” he told Insight host Jenny Brockie. “I’ve been to the Holocaust memorial in Israel and I found that a very, very moving experience and the horror of thinking that, you know, I had a great-uncle who was actually involved in that horror.” Otto Abetz left France in 1944 and was captured in the Black Forest a year later. He is credited as one of the sources behind the theory that Hitler had escaped Germany and was living in Argentina, thanks to a quote given to French tabloid France Soir on 27 October 1945 – six months after Hitler had died – saying Hitler was “certainly not dead”. The newspaper extract, which is included in the FBI records, says Abetz went on to say that Hitler “was not a coward – I believe one day he will return”. He was released from Loos prison in northern France in 1954 and died in a car crash in the Rhineland on 5 May 1958, when Peter Abetz was six years old and Eric just four months old. A pastor with the Christian Reformed Churches of Australia, the older Abetz brother, who moved from Tasmania to Western Australia before being elected in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly as the Liberal member for Southern River in 2008, is no stranger to controversy In March the anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage campaigner claimed a leaflet designed to draw attention to the bullying of LGBTI teenagers and distributed in WA schools was an attempt by the “militant gay lesbian lobby” to “ to ‘normalise’ what they consider the LGBTI agenda”. And in June he attempted to stop a Perth primary school, which was not in his electorate, from allowing an eight-year-old trans girl to compete with other girls in a cross country race, stating the child would “lose those feelings and go on to fit into society” if they weren’t “reinforced”, advising the girl’s parents tell her, “‘look, buddy, you may feel this way but you are a boy, just look in the mirror, you are a boy’ and encourage him in that direction.” |