Rarest of pleasures, I learn something from a Marsha Lederman column, in this case about German newspaper Die Zeit’s searchable historical database of Nazi party membership lists: “Find out if your kin were Nazis in seconds!” Family fun! Frank always wondered about Great Uncle Franz!
This resource will no doubt be of keen interest to countless Great German-Canadians™, like the nascent Bexte political dynasty: Conservative MP David Bexte and his pasty adult son, Keean.
Conservatives, how many times must we say it, don’t hate immigrants. Conservatives is immigrants. In his maiden tirade in the House of Commons last year, Bexte, the hon. member for Bow River, shared the inspiring, elliptical tale of his family’s escape from East Germany.
“I am the great-grandson of a pioneer who broke the untamed fields of what would become Alberta before there was power and pavement. I am also the son of a farmer who survived Communism with nothing but his hands, his family and the hope that Alberta would be a place where his children could speak freely, live safely and never bow to a state that hated them.
“My father did not come to Canada in 1953 for a handout He did not arrive on a student visa or as part of some bureaucratic temporary foreign worker program. No, Hubert Bexte came to Canada to build. He paid back his own passage from Europe by labouring in Alberta’s sugar beet fields, on the southern edge of the very riding I represent here today, with no welfare, no hotel rooms and no Liberal-sponsored welcome package. There was just sweat, sacrifice and a belief that what Canada could be was what we should aspire to be.”
Hubert Anton Bexte, born 1940 in Third-Reich Freischlag, was likely just following orders, having arrived in Alberta, after all, at age 13, with the rest of the expansive Bexte clan. Hubert expired in Vulcan, AB in 2013, survived by, among others, brother Adolph, back in der homeland.
In the interests of brevity, David’s grandfather, Bernhard Bexte (born August 1 1907 in Oelde) didn’t make the cut.
According to Die Zeit’s search tool, a man sharing that name, birthdate and birthplace joined the National Socialist Workers’ Party in May 1937, just ahead of his 30th birthday, and not exactly on the ground floor. His membership number was 5,597,811.
Any relation? Assuredly not, and Die Zeit provides an alternative explanation: ”We used AI to make the original data searchable. Results may be incomplete or contain errors.”
Shurely shome hallushination, then.
Frank emailed MP Bexte’s office Tuesday for comment, but answers came there none.
In the meantime, our thoughts are with young Keean, who may be experiencing complicated feelings.
Keean went by “Anton,” his grandfather’s middle name, when he worked at Fireforce Ventures, purveyors of fine Rhodesian and Apartheid South African memorabilia, insignia and assorted white nationalist tchotchkes for discerning flag hags.
And who could forget the translucent woman-botherer’s stint at Der Rebel, bullying and stalking female politicians like Catherine McKenna, Chrystia Freeland, Rachel Notley and Ilhan Omar, congresswoman from Minnesota?
Keean barged in on Britney Freeland while she was changing her shoes in the lobby outside a Liberal fundraiser, aimed a camera up her skirt and demanded, as the minister was hustled by staff away from him: “Will you be condemning your maternal grandfather?!”
Freeland’s grandpater, readers will recall, was Michael Chomiak, wartime editor of the Nazi propaganda rag, Krakivski Visti. (The paper’s original Jewish proprietor, Moshe Kanfer, had won a one-way trip to Belzec extermination camp.)
Accounts of Chomiak’s no-Jews-is-good-Jews cheerleading comprised an unwelcome coda to Chrystia’s previously established immigrant song, which had her patriotic grandpa fleeing the Soviet invasion of Ukraine, starting over in Canada after the war, and…er, that’s it!
Frank has obtained recommendations for two genealogists in the interest of sorting out this Bexte business and putting it all behind us.
Gosh, I wish I could claim just a few politically interesting forebears. God knows I’ve done enough legwork to find ’em…with nothing to show but chicken thieves, town drunks and failed organ-grinders as far as the mal’occhio can see.