Donald Trump has long claimed to be proud of his German ancestry. But the American president might be wise to reconsider.
Christ was one of the Nazi party’s Alter Kämpfer – loyalists who had joined in the party’s pariah years
At the end of last month, the US National Archives published the files of millions of Nazi party members online. The documents had been saved from the Nazi party’s headquarters in Munich in April 1945 by the owner of a local paper mill, who had disobeyed orders to destroy them ahead of the American advance on the city. Instead, he hid them, handing them over to US troops who, in turn, used the files to prosecute former Nazis in the aftermath of the second world war. The US handed the original files to the Federal Archives in Berlin following German reunification in 1989, but kept hold of digital copies.
A dig through the archives has thrown up the Nazi party membership card for a Philipp Christ, born 21 June 1893 in Kallstadt, the Bavarian Palatinate. Philipp Christ was a winemaker and joined the party aged 35 on 1 May 1929 as its 133,667th member. This made him one of the Nazi party’s Alter Kämpfer – ‘old fighters’ – loyalists who had joined in the party’s pariah years.
Here is where it gets interesting. Crosschecking available genealogical records suggests that Christ belonged to a large family that had lived in Kallstadt for multiple generations. The records indicate that he had an older sister, Elizabeth, who in 1905 married a man called Friedrich Trump. Does the name sound familiar?
Friedrich Trump had first emigrated from Kallstadt to America aged 16 to avoid being conscripted into the Bavarian army. It was on his return to the town in 1901 as a wealthy man that he met and married Elizabeth Christ, the daughter of a poorer neighbour whose family also owned a small vineyard. Friedrich’s snobby mother was appalled, but the pair defied her, living between New York and Kallstadt for several years before the Bavarian authorities caught up with Friedrich for his draft-dodging in 1905. At that point, the pair, along with their first child Elizabeth, returned to America permanently. Their first son Fred was born a few months later.
Through Fred, Elizabeth and Friedreich went on to become the grandparents of Donald J. Trump, president of the United States of America. The genealogy records are, admittedly, a little patchy but they indicate that Philipp Christ, Nazi party member 133,667, was Trump’s great uncle.
There is, of course, no indication of what Philipp Christ got up to in the second world war in the files that have been released. Neither is there any suggestion that Trump ever met him or knew about his past.
Christ’s membership card actually states that he temporarily left the party in June 1930 before rejoining for good in November 1931. There is no information in the files on why he did so, but his return coincided with the point at which the Nazis began to gain mainstream popularity. Nonetheless, his Nazi party membership card may still be able to shed a little more light.
Germany was, at the time, in the grip of the Great Depression; Hitler’s message blaming the economic crisis on Jews and the Bolsheviks resonated with an increasingly large portion of the German population. Two months before Christ rejoined the Nazis, the party had come second in that September’s Reichstag elections, with 18 per cent of the vote.
At the end of the war, the Americans helpfully scanned the back as well as the front of Christ’s membership card. Pasted on the reverse is an overexposed black and white photograph of the man himself. Sporting a toothbrush moustache, Christ is posing outdoors, dressed in what looks like a dark button-up shirt and pale, baggy breeches. He’s wearing a soft military-style kepi cap and a thick black belt complete with a big shining buckle and a cross-shaped medal pinned to his chest.
Though the photograph is too low-quality to say for certain, Christ’s outfit bears a striking resemblance to the uniforms worn by the Sturmabteilung – better known as the SA or Nazi ‘brownshirts’. A paramilitary organisation, the SA was instrumental in Hitler’s rise to power, providing protection at party rallies and responsible for the increasingly violent attacks on German Jews throughout the 1930s.
Donald Trump has spoken proudly of his German heritage on several occasions. Last June, German chancellor Friedrich Merz attempted to capitalise on that pride to win favour with him. On his first official trip to Washington, Merz arrived at the White House armed with a gilded, framed copy of his paternal grandfather Friedrich Trump’s birth certificate from 1869. Trump called the gift ‘beautiful’ and said he would hang it in a ‘place of honour’. Ahead of his visit, Merz revealed how he further intended to woo Trump. ‘I’ve invited him to Germany, to visit his ancestral town,’ Merz said at the time. ‘I’ll go there with him.’
Nearly a year on, the pair have yet to visit Kallstadt, now part of the west German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, where Trump’s paternal grandparents were both born. Indeed, if he doesn’t already, Merz may well come to regret issuing the American president such an invitation.
So was Philipp Christ a member of the SA? The US National Archives files suggest, at any rate, that he wasn’t the only member of the Christ family to have joined the Nazi party in the late 1920s and early 30s. To say for certain if Christ had joined the ranks of Hitler’s paramilitary troops, a trip to the archives in Berlin and Kallstadt would be in order. My guess is that Merz won’t be volunteering to escort Trump there any time soon.
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