The father of the ultra-right candidate for the presidency of Chile, José Antonio Kast, was affiliated with the Nazi Party of Germany during World War II, indicates a document obtained by the Associated Press (AP) agency.
The Kast family’s relations with the Nazis were already speculated, but the Chilean candidate always maintained that his father had been forced to defend the Adolf Hitler regime in the conflict, like every young German at the time, and that this did not make him a supporter of the dictator.
But a document obtained by the AP from the German Federal Archives shows that Michael Kast, who was born in Germany and migrated to Chile after the war, joined the Nazi Party in 1942 at the age of 18. Although military conscription was compulsory, as the son maintains, party affiliation was voluntary.
The news agency claims that the Federal Archive has not confirmed that the young man affiliated with the Nazi Party is the father of the Chilean candidate, but the name, date and place of birth match the records of José Antonio Kast’s father. A copy of the same document to which the AP had access had already been posted on Twitter earlier this month by Chilean journalist Mauricio Weibel Barahona.
“We don’t even have an example of someone who was forced to join the party,” German historian Armin Nolzen told the agency. According to the researcher, Kast senior was probably a member of the Hitler Youth in his teens and was instructed to join the Nazi Party by a local leader of the group. At the time, in 1942, the legend had 7.1 million members, about 10% of the German population.
The AP says there is no evidence that Michael Kast played a role in atrocities committed by the Nazis, such as the extermination of Jews. Michael Buddrus of the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History in Berlin told the agency that such a young person’s participation in the party cannot be overestimated, but agreed that Kast must have joined willingly.
“Being an affiliate binds you to the party and its ideology, even if many have joined for purely opportunistic reasons,” such as in an attempt to gain prestige in society, he said.
A 2015 book written by journalist Javier Rebolledo about collaborators of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet had already traced the German’s Nazi past, based on testimonies by Michael’s wife, José Antonio’s mother. In the work, it is said that Kast senior was reluctant to join the Nazis, but was persuaded by a sergeant. At the end of the war, with the defeat of Germany, he obtained a false identity while serving in Italy, where he claimed to be a member of the Red Cross.
With the document, he escaped from prison twice and managed to return to Germany. There, he was discovered and confessed to being a Nazi soldier, but was spared by a prosecutor, who burned his files in the army, according to excerpts from the book retrieved by the AP. José Antonio Kast denies the version of the book and says the author took his mother’s memories out of context and distorted facts.
In 1950, Michael Kast migrated from Germany to Chile and settled in the rural community of Paine, south of the capital Santiago. There, he became an entrepreneur and set up a national network of restaurants and food factories. He died in 2014, at the age of 90.
José Antonio Kast, 55, of the Republican Party, led the first round of the Chilean presidential election, in a close vote, and will run in the second round against Gabriel Boric, from the left, on the coming 19th.
An admirer of Pinochet, Kast has already stated that he would like to have tea with the general and said that he would receive the dictator’s vote if he were still alive. His brother Miguel Kast was minister and president of the Central Bank of Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, one of the bloodiest in Latin America.
Asked whether the candidate knew of his father’s Nazi Party affiliation, Kast’s campaign did not respond. On other occasions, he rejected the association. “When there is a war and enlistment is mandatory, an 18-year-old has no option to say ‘I won’t’ because he will be shot,” he said.
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