Category Archives: History

Energy, Food, History, Security

Not Cool: Russia Out for Blood, Thaws Europe’s Fridges in Ten Countries

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Russia is attacking Europe. If you balk at that phrase, instead of accepting it, the attack methods are working as designed. The infrastructure of refrigeration is in danger, which on the night of 1 to 2 November meant disruption directed at France’s blood supply.

Why blood? We could ask the same question of the “hospital trains” disrupted by Russia in the weeks after NATO announced they would roll from the Netherlands all the way to the Russian border as proof of wartime capabilities.

I think by now everyone knows about refrigeration controllers being warmed. Fridges and freezers at night, connected to networks, are being popped at supermarkets in Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Ireland, Portugal and Italy. Danfoss confirmed its equipment was involved, just like it was in France on 11 October. But let’s talk for a moment about the refrigeration contractor for the Établissement français du sang, which lost control of cold rooms holding blood products.

Le Canard enchaîné reported on 3 November that the setpoint on containers maintained by Coolworld, including sites in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, was changed from minus 30°C to 110°C. That’s a lot of Fahrenheit. A technician on night duty saw the temperature in the cold rooms rising. The Health Ministry says the simple detection prevented any operational consequence. The EFS first described the contents as donor samples kept for transfusion monitoring, then confirmed that frozen plasma for transfusion was among the products in the targeted units.

Again, that’s a specific target of Russia for a particular reason. Transfusion centers are one of the puzzle pieces of NATO defense capabilities.

The October post here had brought up ANSSI searching for other exposed companies before the attack spread, and it highlighted two gaps: scan history, and Danfoss sites outside France. I think we have answers now.

Country Company (stores)
Belgium, Luxembourg Delhaize (several dozen), Carrefour (15), Intermarché (10 to 15), Spar (5), IKEA Mons (1)
Netherlands 17 businesses including butchers
Germany Edeka Reisbach, stores in North Rhine-Westphalia
Sweden ICA (limited number), Coop (6 or 7 of about 800)
Finland Kesko (a few smaller stores)
Estonia Selver (1)
Ireland Musgrave SuperValu (13 of 223)
Portugal Intermarché (7)
Italy Coop, Radenza Group (at least 4, Sicily)

Answers? Let me be clear. Every country on that list supports Ukraine, and all but neutral Ireland send it weapons. The map of the second wave is the map of European support for Kyiv, minus France, hit three weeks earlier.

Reuters established in July 2025 that Elon Musk ordered Starlink coverage cut over part of Kherson in late September 2022, in the middle of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which left units without communications and let Russian positions escape encirclement. Every day Russia holds Ukrainian ground is a day of Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilians, and every one of those strikes is a demand on a transfusion service. See the connection?

The attack method in question here is the one from France. Sabcobel, which runs refrigeration for Delhaize, said units were simply switched into a defrost mode. An ICA store in Sjöbo found its fridges and freezers set to 50°C. A Selver freezer in Estonia was set to 50°C on an older Danfoss controller and caught within ten minutes. A butcher in Hove near Antwerp found his fridges at 18°C and lost about 15,000 euros of meat.

The door was the one from France too, and it was a cheap door. Flimsy, weak, to a point we shouldn’t even call it a door. ANSSI director Vincent Strubel told the French Senate on 21 October that the agency’s assessment of the October cases pointed to exposed administration interfaces and trivial passwords, and that the vulnerabilities Claroty published earlier in the year were absent from the path. The October post spoke to those vulnerabilities and the firmware that fixed them. The attackers needed a login page on the public internet and a bad password that nobody changed. Danfoss told NOS the Dutch systems that were hit sat on open networks with default passwords, that most targets had locked down after the French attack, and that the few who had not were the ones hit. Sabcobel said many but not all of its customers had secured their connections. Selver said the store that was hit was the last one it had yet to move to a new system. Three weeks of public warning had sorted targets into two groups, meaning the victim list is a discrete second group. The breach-of-duty argument from October has a clear control group.

The vendor was well aware of this attack for at least the past four years. A Danfoss application note from 2022 documents attacks on sixteen Russian supermarkets and forty Israeli stores, and records that the Israeli installations lacked firewall or VPN protection.

I’ll say that again. Russian supermarkets are on the 2022 list.

The Danfoss security advisories page listed nothing about either 2026 wave as of 3 November. CERT-FR alert CERTFR-2026-ALE-012 was last updated on 16 October. It covers the Danfoss AK-SM and AK-SC series and the Copeland and Dixell xweb lines, says the campaigns are probably still underway, and advises operators to check their insurance contract before cutting the data feed to their refrigeration contractor.

The blood case is interesting because it differs from the stores in two ways.

The first is a degree. Every store that reported a setpoint had reported 50°C. Hot! But the EFS containers were set to 110°C, and that figure is a programmed instruction rather than a measured temperature. A different temperature ceiling points at a different controller, and the controller vendor in the Coolworld case is still unnamed.

The second is a detection. Most stores found out late, from staff opening doors in the morning or from alarms. The EFS found out during the early moves, because someone on night shift had a job to observe the thermometer.

The identical attack already carries a Russian name on a US indictment. The US Justice Department announced on 9 December 2025 charges against CyberArmyofRussia_Reborn and NoName057(16), alleged Russian government backing for both, and attributed to CARR a November 2024 intrusion at a Los Angeles meat-processing plant that spoiled the meat and caused an ammonia leak. The joint advisory published the same day by the FBI, CISA, NSA and allied agencies describes these groups selecting operational-technology victims on availability and existing exposure. A refrigeration controller on a public address with a default password is such an obviously bad idea, do I even have to say it fits? Eleven months later the Russian TTP ran across ten European countries in one night. EU Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen called it a deliberate attempt to disrupt the food supply chain.

Food supplies, blood supplies. What do you think nations tell their citizens to have ready during a war? Not a coincidence that Britain has recently been telling people to stockpile food in case of… well, they haven’t said exactly.

The officials reading logs have chosen words carefully. Belgium’s Centre for Cybersecurity told reporters on 2 November that the identity of the attackers was unknown and “it may never be determined”, while the federal prosecutor opened a criminal investigation. Sweden’s National Cybersecurity Centre is sharing information with Nordic and European agencies. Danfoss said the Dutch attacks were the same kind as in France, Sabcobel said the same method was used in Belgium, and Kitman Coldtech said the method in Estonia was similar. A shared method across ten countries on one night, three weeks after a rehearsal in one country, is a campaign.

The lack of EU preparedness for integrity breaches is incredibly frustrating to me, as I’ve been banging the gong on this since at least 2012.

A Russian campaign of breaching integrity of control systems succeeds when the case stays open. The Belgian statement started out that way on day one. “May never be determined” is the Russian operational objective, as stated by the victim.

The same agencies attribute, so let’s think about the difference. The Dutch military intelligence service MIVD reported in April 2025 that a Russian hacker group had carried out a cyber sabotage attack on the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands, the first known case in the country, and that a second Russian operation against Dutch critical infrastructure looked like preparation for sabotage. Norway’s PST said in August 2025 that pro-Russian hackers had taken control of the Risevatnet dam in Bremanger in April through a weak password on a web-accessible control panel, opened a valve for four hours, and posted a video of the panel on Telegram the same day. A dam valve and a freezer setpoint belong to the same target class: an internet-facing industrial controller behind a weak credential, in a state that arms Ukraine.

The target class is Russian doctrine, to put it simply. Colonel Chekinov and Lieutenant General Bogdanov published a series in Military Thought from 2010 to 2017; their 2010 article on asymmetrical actions lists the civilian infrastructure where Russia should be able to inflict unacceptable damage in nonmilitary security areas, and their 2013 article on new-generation war names dams, nuclear plants and other infrastructure facilities as targets in the opening period of a conflict. UK Defence Intelligence read the strikes on Ukraine’s grid from October 2022 as the first attempt to run the Strategic Operation for the Destruction of Critically Important Targets, a doctrine built on hitting a state’s civilian infrastructure in place of its army to force its leaders to capitulate. The International Criminal Court issued warrants for Shoigu and Gerasimov in June 2024 for that same campaign, strikes on electric infrastructure from 10 October 2022 to at least 9 March 2023, as war crimes and the crime against humanity of inhumane acts. Food is absent from the target lists in the doctrine. Food is what spoils when the targets on the list go down, and a fridge controller is the shortest path to that result.

Food as the weapon itself was announced at the level of the Security Council. Medvedev wrote on 1 April 2022, five weeks into the invasion, that the food security of many countries depends on Russian supplies, that this is “a quiet but formidable weapon”, and that Russia would supply food and crops only to its friends. The Black Sea blockade followed, and the strikes on Ukrainian ports and grain storage after Russia left the grain deal in July 2023.

Logistics is where the Europeans get even more specific. Czech police concluded in April 2024 that officers of GRU Unit 29155 blew up the two ammunition depots at Vrbětice in October and December 2014, stock reported to be on its way to Ukraine. Polish prosecutors said in October 2024 that the parcels which ignited at the DHL hub in Leipzig on 20 July and the DHL warehouse near Birmingham on 22 July were sent to test a transfer channel for devices bound for the United States and Canada, and the head of MI5 described the GRU as on a sustained mission of arson and sabotage on British and European streets. That campaign ran on locally recruited disposable agents. A refrigeration campaign that needs a default password and a shopping list of exposed hosts runs on far less, and the December advisory says the groups pick targets exactly that way.

The threats we are talking about have a name in Russian military history. On 14 July 1943 the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement ordered Operation Rail War. It opened on the night of 3 August 1943 with tens of thousands of partisans striking the occupied rail network at once, which the Belarusian state war museum defines as simultaneous mass destruction of the enemy’s communications to disorganize his transport, timed to the Red Army offensive at the front. The second stage, Concert, began on 19 September and cut German rail transport in Belarus by 40 percent by the end of the year. The doctrine is one coordinated night, many cheap strikes, against supply, timed to something else. The night of 1 to 2 November has that shape across ten countries, and one of its strikes was aimed at a blood supply.

The evidence establishes a Russian state-aligned campaign against the civilian cold chain of states that are supporting survival of civilians in Ukraine.

The open question is the unit, and the agencies holding the logs will answer it when they decide the cost of saying so is lower than the cost of the next Russian victims. The October attack spoiled food. The November attack reached blood, although it was stopped by one technician who was awake. Or dare I say, woke.

History, Security

On this Day in History: 1917 Balfour Declaration

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Arthur Balfour spent 1905 keeping Jews out of Britain and 1917 finding them somewhere else to go. The two sides of his mouth worked as a single policy, and today we mourn how it worked.

The first part was the border. As Prime Minister, Balfour had carried the Aliens Act of 1905, the first peacetime immigration control in British law, written for Jews fleeing the Russian pogroms. In committee on 10 July 1905 he gave the Commons his reason, recorded in Hansard at col. 155:

He undoubtedly thought that a state of things could easily be imagined in which it would not be to the advantage of the civilisation of the country that there should be an immense body of persons who, however patriotic, able, and industrious, however much they threw themselves into the national life, still, by their own action, remained a people apart, and not merely held a religion differing from the vast majority of their fellow-countrymen, but only inter-married among themselves.

The same evening he named the alternative. His government had offered “the Jewish race a great tract of fertile land in one of our possessions” so that they might find “an asylum from their persecutors” there (Hansard, col. 178).

Where was that? The land was in East Africa. A closed port at home was coupled with a colony abroad: Jews go elsewhere.

The second part was selling a destination. By 1917 Balfour was Foreign Secretary and the colony had moved to Palestine. A famous Jew serving in the Cabinet said out loud what Balfour meant. Edwin Montagu circulated a memorandum on 23 August 1917 titled “The Anti-Semitism of the Present (British) Government“. He warned that once Jews were told Palestine was their national home, “every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens,” and that “Palestine will become the world’s ghetto” (UN study, Part I, sect. II).

Montagu, despite concern for Jews, himself being one too, lost the debate. A clause was added on “the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country” to mollify him. It was meant in words only.

The third part was militancy. The War Cabinet approved the text on 31 October 1917. The minute records Balfour’s argument that since Jews in Russia and America appeared to favour Zionism, a declaration in their favour would let Britain “carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America” (CAB 23/4, WC 261, minute 12). The premise was that Jews moved as a bloc and could be bought during war. That premise is antisemitic on the face of it. The Cabinet purchased Jewish wartime support with Arab land.

Balfour said so once the bill came due, in a memorandum to Curzon on 11 August 1919 (UN study, Part I, sect. IV):

For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.

The famous declaration by Balfour of 2 November 1917 reads as though he had sympathy for Jews. His own words show what the sympathy consisted of: from the London docks in 1905 to Curzon’s desk in 1919, at every point the Jews are a people spread apart, to be relocated into a single population that can be pulled as a single lever. The Arabs of Palestine appear twice in his papers: once as “existing non-Jewish communities“, and once as a number to be overridden.

…advocating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the British government would be reneging on a pact it had made with Arabs two years before. During World War I, the British strategized against the Ottomans, who were allied with Imperial Germany, by encouraging an Arab revolt led by the Sharif of Mecca: his people had long desired independence from the Turks. In return, the Sharif thought, the British would support a pan-Arabic kingdom. The Balfour Declaration compromised that communication…

History, Poetry, Security

Atlantic PHP Hero Worship Puts a Tip Jar on Open Source

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The Atlantic has published a hero story to frame open source software as about one man. Ondřej Surý packages PHP for Debian and Ubuntu as a volunteer, and when the PHP2Shell fix shipped this week the magazine headlined him as the one man standing between the internet and ruin.

Already you should be very skeptical. Anyone trying to describe the entire decentralized Internet as dependent on a single man, is obviously off their rocker.

Readers answered the article by acting like aristocrats who need to gift money to servants they approve. Surý told Charlie Warzel that a year of donations arrived in a single day. Imagine the anxiety of wondering how to make that happen again, how to appeal or request more.

Surý told Warzel exactly what is wrong:

I would like companies to realize that this is exploitation.

The interview has the indictment right there in it. The body says exploitation, the headline says tip jar.

I wrote about where the aristocratic jar comes from twelve years ago. Tipping arrived in America after the Civil War as an imitation of European aristocratic custom, and employers kept it because it let them hire freed Black workers and leave their pay to the goodwill of customers (e.g. racism to keep Blacks from earning parity and prosperity).

The Pullman Company built its porter wage system on tips. Washington became the first state to outlaw tipping in 1909 and repealed the ban in 1913, and every state ban was gone by 1926. The federal tipped minimum wage still sits at $2.13 an hour.

The porters knew the answer.

When the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organized in 1925, its demands to Pullman included a significant raise, rest breaks, pensions and an end to tipping. Pullman fought the union for a decade and signed its first contract in August 1937. The porters asked for a living wage from the company that profited from their work.

That demand maps onto open source exactly. The companies running PHP in production owe its maintainers a salary with health insurance and paid leave, set by contract and funded at the scale of the revenue PHP carries for them. A donation surge after a magazine profile repeats the Pullman arrangement, where the employer keeps the value and the passenger feels generous, even caring. Patreon carries this broken, exploitative old order in its name.

Patronage is how aristocrats trapped court artists.

The Atlantic also completely ignored the public money already flowing to PHP. Germany’s federal Sovereign Tech Agency invested €205,000 in the PHP Foundation across 2023 and 2024 for infrastructure and security work, and committed about €223,000 more for 2025 and 2026. That is what institutional support looks like: a public commission with a budget, a work plan and delivered results. The Atlantic desire to pump a single man into a hero narrative has to leave the community out, because a state agency paying for PHP security exposes the aristocratic tipping for what it is, an imbalanced gift standing in for a wage.

The hero story also costs security.

An engineer who finds a single point of failure records it as a defect to fix. The Atlantic frames one as a tribute, with a name, to a national audience, as if single points of failure were something to celebrate. The xz backdoor in 2024 was planted by pressuring one exhausted maintainer until he accepted a new co-maintainer. This journalist profiling a volunteer as the one guy the Internet supposedly depends on is painting a huge target for attackers.

It also misreports the week. PHP2Shell carried high attack complexity, and the public evidence of compromise stayed thin. The same week brought plenty more to patch in open source:

  • Pillow, the Python imaging library, shipped 13.0.0 on 16 October with fixes for 42 advisories. Four of them received CVE records on 19 October rated 9.2 under CVSS v4.0, the same version PHP uses, and three of those four rate attack complexity high. The worst lets a crafted FlashPix file run code on an upload service that has olefile installed.
  • Node.js shipped ten fixes on 21 October, the same day as PHP, four rated high, including bypasses of TLS hostname checks and an out-of-bounds write in its bundled Brotli decoder that Node says permits remote code execution. The upstream Brotli fix describes the same bug as low severity and hard to exploit.
  • GitLab fixed CVE-2026-110264 on 21 October, rated 10.0, an integer overflow in its regular expression engine that lets an attacker run code on a self-managed server without logging in. It reaches back to GitLab 7.0 from 2014.
  • LiteLLM, a Python gateway that holds the API keys for AI providers, had its release pipeline hijacked on 21 October. For about two hours PyPI and the official Docker images shipped a credential stealer in a package with roughly 23 million weekly downloads.
  • Qdrant, the vector database, published a critical advisory on 22 October, rated 9.8, because its internal gRPC API accepts unauthenticated calls by default in distributed mode, which I formally reported myself on 9 July.

GitLab and Qdrant both outscore PHP2Shell, and both rate attack complexity low. Hey Atlantic, where’s the profile of the people doing that work so they can get a tip too? It sounds nuts because it is. People doing work shouldn’t depend on the whims of tip jars.

Days earlier, a researcher found that eight eMudhra intermediate certificate authorities had private keys anyone could recover. A botched step in eMudhra’s 2025 key ceremony produced keys that were tiny numbers, one of them just 4, and two audits missed it. That flaw reached the trust behind every HTTPS connection. Google and Mozilla blocked the keys the day the report arrived, Apple followed two days later, and the Node.js release dropped trust in them too.

Salaried root program and release teams did their jobs, and the story ended as it should. That is what infrastructure looks like when it is run like infrastructure. Imagine a tip jar on everything and you would start to ask why can’t someone just build an economic model.

Surý closed his interview by telling people to rely on the experts who know what they are doing. That is an argument for institutions.

A magazine founded by abolitionists in 1857 should know the difference between a worker and a servant, and print the porters’ demand: end the tipping injustice and pay the workers.

Shove the tips all the way back to the European aristocracy that invented them.

History, Security

Opa war kein Nazi, sagt die Familie: Weber, Merz und die ungelesenen Akten

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Isabella Weber hat ein neues Buch. Der Guardian hat es am 16. Oktober vorgestellt: Anti-Fascist Economics: In Defence of Affordability, Dignity and Democracy (Allen Lane). Das Rezept passt in einen Satz, und der Artikel liefert ihn: make life’s necessities affordable.

“Fascism is rising from frustration, born out of a crisis of livelihoods,” says Weber. “So, we need to reclaim these essentials now.”

Die deutsche Aktenlage sagt das Gegenteil. Niedrige Preise waren ein Werkzeug des faschistischen Regimes. Gegen das Regime haben sie nichts ausgerichtet.

Die Preise fielen von 1929 bis 1932 in jedem Jahr. Heinrich Brüning regierte mit Notverordnungen, senkte Löhne, Gehälter und Sozialleistungen und erhöhte Steuern; die Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung nennt das radikale Deflationspolitik und verzeichnet den Beinamen, den sie ihm eintrug: „Hungerkanzler“. Seine vierte Notverordnung vom 8. Dezember 1931 ließ die Preise nicht nur fallen. Sie ordnete die Senkung an. Gebundene Preise, also Kartell- und Markenartikelpreise, waren ab Januar 1932 um mindestens zehn Prozent gegenüber dem Stand von Mitte 1931 zu senken, überwacht von einem Reichskommissar für Preisüberwachung mit Durchsetzungsbefugnissen, wie ein Bericht aus dem Büro des Kommissars 1933 darlegt. Die registrierte Arbeitslosigkeit überschritt im selben Winter sechs Millionen.

Der Stimmenanteil der NSDAP stieg in jedem dieser Jahre.

Reichstagswahl Anteil NSDAP
20. Mai 1928 2,6 %
14. September 1930 18,3 %
31. Juli 1932 37,3 %
6. November 1932 33,1 %

Quelle: Deutscher Bundestag. Sieben Monate nach einer Verordnung, die die Preise um zehn Prozent senkte, holte die NSDAP 37,3 Prozent und wurde stärkste Fraktion im Reichstag.

Webers Schule hat darauf eine Antwort, und sie hat Belege. Galofré-Vilà, Meissner, McKee und Stuckler, “Austerity and the Rise of the Nazi Party”, Journal of Economic History (2021), haben Wahldaten aus tausend Kreisen und hundert Städten für vier Wahlen zwischen 1930 und 1933 mit Ausgabenkürzungen und Steuererhöhungen abgeglichen und dort höhere NSDAP-Anteile gefunden, wo die Kürzungen am tiefsten gingen. Ich akzeptiere den Befund. Man lese, was er misst. Die Variable ist der Rückzug des Staates: gekürzte Leistungen, erhöhte Steuern. Die Preise liegen außerhalb, weil dieselbe Regierung sie zur selben Zeit nach unten drückte. Austerität und billige Waren kamen zusammen, und die Stimmen gingen an die Partei, die Arbeit und Rache versprach. Billiges Brot hat der Republik nichts eingebracht.

Dann das Ende, das ein Geschäft war. Die NSDAP verlor im November 1932 zwei Millionen Stimmen. Hindenburg ernannte Hitler am 30. Januar 1933 nach diesem Verlust zum Reichskanzler, in einem Kabinett, das Franz von Papen und die Konservativen um den Reichspräsidenten arrangiert hatten. Die Reichstagsbrandverordnung vom 28. Februar setzte die Grundrechte außer Kraft. Die Wahl vom 5. März fand unter dem Terror der SA statt. Der Reichstag nahm am 23. März das Ermächtigungsgesetz an, und das Gesetz vom 14. Juli 1933 machte die NSDAP zur einzigen zugelassenen Partei. Ernannt, dann verankert. Eine Mehrheit hat zu keinem Zeitpunkt dafür gestimmt.

Dann tat das Regime, was Weber empfiehlt. Am 26. November 1936 erließ der Reichskommissar für die Preisbildung die Verordnung über das Verbot von Preiserhöhungen, ein allgemeines Verbot von Preiserhöhungen für Waren, Dienstleistungen und Mieten, festgeschrieben auf den Stand vom 18. Oktober 1936; das Berliner Institut für Konjunkturforschung berichtete über die Verordnung in der Woche ihres Erlasses. Im März 1937 hielt dasselbe Institut fest, dass die Preise des Groß- und Einzelhandels noch immer ein Fünftel bis ein Viertel unter ihrem Höchststand von 1928/29 lagen. Der Preisstopp deckelte die Inflation, die die Aufrüstung über Mefo-Wechsel aufgebaut hatte. Adam Tooze legt den Mechanismus in The Wages of Destruction (2006) dar: Preise auf dem Papier gehalten, während die Qualität sank und die Waren knapp wurden, am wenigsten zu verbergen in der Fettlücke von 1935 und 1936. Das Regime lieferte den Anschein bezahlbarer Grundgüter, und der Anschein genügte.

Götz Aly ging in Hitlers Volksstaat (2005) weiter: Das Regime habe sich Loyalität mit Steuererleichterungen und Wohltaten erkauft, finanziert durch Raub und „Arisierung“. Die These ist umstritten. Tooze antwortete in der taz, Aly habe die Kosten des Krieges für die Deutschen grob unterschätzt, weil er nur die Steuern zähle und die Anleihen weglasse; Johannes Bähr nannte das Buch die Legende von der „Wohlfühldiktatur“. Dieser Streit geht um die Frage, wer bezahlt hat. In dem Punkt, auf den es hier ankommt, sind sich die Parteien einig: Billige Grundgüter, echt oder inszeniert, waren eine Technik des Regimes.

Eine Demokratie, die ihren Fall auf billige Grundgüter stützt, hat keine Antwort, wenn ein starker Mann sie billiger liefert. Das zeigt 1936.

Webers eigenes Beispiel im Artikel zeigt den Mechanismus im Betrieb. Mexikanische Händler deckeln den Gesamtpreis eines Korbs von zwei Dutzend Grundgütern, der canasta básica, und die Regierung belohnt sie mit Zoll- und Steuererleichterungen, “and at a weekly press conference lauds those who do a good job and calls out those who don’t”. Das Urteil des Artikels: “In Mexico’s 2024 presidential election, the governing Morena party increased its vote share from 55% to 61%.”

Dieselbe Regierungspartei hat das Mandat dann eingesetzt. Im September 2024 verabschiedete der Kongress die Justizreform, die jeden Richter des Landes zur Volkswahl stellt, und eine Mehrheit der Bundesstaaten ratifizierte sie. Acht der elf Richter des Obersten Gerichtshofs, die Präsidentin des Gerichts darunter, traten zurück, statt zu kandidieren. Bezahlbarkeit kaufte Stimmen für eine Regierung, die Macht konzentriert. Das Beispiel spricht gegen das Buch, das es anführt.

Der Demagoge kann versprechen, ohne zu liefern, und einen Feind beschuldigen, wenn das Versprechen scheitert. Donald Trump in Bozeman, Montana, am 9. August 2024:

Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.

Trump in einer Kabinettssitzung am 2. Dezember 2025:

Look, affordability’s a hoax that was started by Democrats who caused the problem of pricing.

Das ist der volle Zyklus in sechzehn Monaten. Eine Ökonomin, die den Fall der Demokratie auf Bezahlbarkeit baut, tritt zu den Bedingungen des Demagogen an, und der Demagoge darf lügen.

Der Artikel schließt mit der Familie.

Family legend is that her grandfather, a priest in the Ruhr Valley, refused to hang a swastika in his church.

Der Satz stammt vom Journalisten, und “family legend” ist seine Formulierung. Der Großvater bleibt ungenannt. Die Legende ist der gesamte Beleg.

Die Akten existieren, und sie sind zugänglich. Ein “priest” mit Enkeln im Ruhrgebiet ist aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach ein evangelischer Pfarrer. Die evangelische Kirche führte Personalakten über ihre Geistlichen, und diese Akten liegen je nach Gemeinde im Landeskirchlichen Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche von Westfalen in Bielefeld oder im Archiv der Evangelischen Kirche im Rheinland in Düsseldorf. Die NSDAP-Mitgliederkartei liegt im Bundesarchiv, das auf seiner eigenen Seite festhält, dass ein unterschriebener Aufnahmeantrag Bedingung der Aufnahme war. Die Entnazifizierungsakten für ganz Nordrhein-Westfalen liegen im Landesarchiv NRW in Duisburg, das im August 2023 rund 610.000 davon online gestellt hat, nach Namen durchsuchbar.

Das Hakenkreuz in der Kirche ist selbst eine dokumentierte Frage. Kirchen mit Hakenkreuzen zu schmücken war die Praxis der Deutschen Christen, der nationalsozialistischen Fraktion, die die Kirchenwahlen vom Juli 1933 gewann. Pfarrer, die sich weigerten, hinterließen Akten: Otto Mörike in Württemberg verlangte im März 1933, dass die Fahne von seinem Kirchturm abgenommen wird, und die Flaggenerlasse seiner Landeskirche aus jenem Frühjahr stehen in der Akte. Die Frage, die eine Akte beantwortet, lautet also, auf welcher Seite die Kirche des Großvaters stand, Deutsche Christen oder Bekennende Kirche. Eine Legende beantwortet nichts. Ich behaupte nichts darüber, wer er war oder was er tat. Der Punkt ist, dass sie Legende anbietet, wo Akten vorliegen.

Ihre Großvatergeschichte ist das nationale Muster, keine Ausnahme. Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller und Karoline Tschuggnall haben für „Opa war kein Nazi“. Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis (Fischer, 2002) vierzig deutsche Familien befragt. Die Familien behalten die offizielle Erzählung von der deutschen Schuld bei und verschieben die eigenen Großeltern auf die Seite der Zuschauer, der Opfer und der Widerständler, und mit jeder Generation wird der Großvater besser. Der Begriff der Autoren dafür ist kumulative Heroisierung.

Die andere Seite der deutschen Politik erzählt dieselbe Geschichte. Friedrich Merz über seinen Großvater Josef Paul Sauvigny, Bürgermeister von Brilon von 1917 bis 1937:

Datum Aussage oder Akte
2004, Merz schriftlich Großvater „ohne eigenes Zutun“ in die NSDAP eingetreten, habe sich „geweigert“ beizutreten, sei „kein Nationalsozialist“ gewesen
Januar 2025, Merz im Zeit-Podcast „Alles gesagt“ Großvater „in diese Abgründe des Nationalsozialismus hineingeraten“
März 1936, Vermerk des Landrats Sauvigny „von Anfang an als SA-Mann eifrig betätigt“
Personalakte, Landesarchiv NRW Mitgliedsantrag gestellt zwischen Mai 1933 und Februar 1936
NSDAP-Mitgliederkartei, Bundesarchiv Mitglied seit 1. Mai 1937

Kersten Augustin und Martin Teigeler haben die Akten am 8. Mai 2025 in der taz veröffentlicht. Merz hat der taz nicht geantwortet. Ein Detail aus ihrem Text: Der Wortlaut von Merz aus dem Jahr 2004 deckt sich fast wörtlich mit der Erklärung, mit der sich sein Großvater 1946 vor dem Entnazifizierungsausschuss selbst entlastete. Die Familienlegende war der Persilschein des Großvaters, unverändert weitergereicht.

Ein konservativer Bundeskanzler und eine antifaschistische Ökonomin erzählen dieselbe Familiengeschichte. Das Muster ist national, nicht parteilich.

Die Würde steht im Titel des Buches. In den Akten hat das Regime, das die Preise einfror, jedem die Würde genommen, den es dafür auswählte, und der Preisstopp half ihm, die übrigen zu halten. Eine Demokratie, die ihren Fall auf billige Grundgüter stützt, hat keine Antwort, wenn ein starker Mann sie billiger liefert. Das zeigt 1936.