Election posters in the German state of Bavaria promoting deputy premier Hubert Aiwanger, accused of writing an antisemitic leaflet demeaning the Holocaust while a schoolboy. Photo: Reuters/Frank Hoermann

The scandal around a violently antisemitic leaflet that the current deputy prime minister of Bavaria allegedly wrote as a schoolboy continued to roil the southern German state on Tuesday as the campaign for parliamentary elections on Oct. 8 heats up.

Following a meeting of the committee responsible for Bavaria’s coalition government, state Prime Minister Markus Söder demanded that his deputy, Hubert Aiwanger, submit written answers to 25 detailed questions concerning the scandal.

On Saturday, the Munich-based Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) news outlet reported that Aiwanger was behind a typewritten leaflet mocking the Holocaust that was discovered in the lavatory of his school in the town of Mallersdorf-Pfaffenberg in 1987, when he was 17. According to the SZ, members of staff and former students at the school confirmed that Aiwanger had been summoned before a school disciplinary committee over the leaflet and was sanctioned as a result.

The leaflet parodied national history competitions through demeaning references to the Holocaust. For example, the “prize” for the best answer to the question “Who is the greatest traitor to the fatherland?” was “a complimentary flight through the chimney at Auschwitz.”

Similar “prizes” were offered for answers to other questions, among them a “lifelong stay in a mass grave,” “a free shot in the back of the neck,” “a ticket … to the entertainment quarter Auschwitz,” and a “night’s stay in the Gestapo cellar, then a trip to Dachau.”

Now 52, Aiwanger — whose conservative Free Voters (Freie Wähler) Party is the junior partner in the Bavarian coalition government with Söder’s right-wing Christian Social Union (CSU) — flatly denied that he was the author of the leaflet following the publication of the SZ report.

“I did not write the paper in question and consider the content disgusting and inhumane,” he said. “The author of the paper is known to me; he will explain himself.”

Aiwanger’s brother, Helmut, who was also a student at the school, later claimed that he had been responsible.

“I am the author of the leaflet reproduced in the press,” Helmut Aiwanger wrote in a statement. “At the time I was completely furious, because I had failed in school and was being torn away from my group of classmates. I was still a minor at the time.”

Describing the leaflet as a “youthful sin,” he added: “I am ashamed of this act and above all I ask my brother’s forgiveness for the difficulties caused at the time, which are still having an effect 35 years later.”

His brother’s confession has not lessened the pressure on Hubert Aiwanger, however. While Söder has for the time being ruled out dismissing his deputy, he emphasized that clarity was needed over the “remaining doubts,” particularly over whether Aiwanger distributed the leaflet after his brother allegedly wrote it. He argued that the SZ report was not sufficient to prove Aiwanger’s guilt, but added, “this is not a license … There is no place for antisemitism in the Bavarian state government.”

Opposition politicians and Jewish leaders continued to push for Aiwanger’s removal, expressing disgust at the leaflet’s content. Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the Jewish community in Munich, said that the leaflet reminded her of “the most vile propaganda of the Nazi era in its tone,” while Josef Schuster — president of the Central Council of German Jews — urged that the leaflet “must not simply be dismissed as a youthful sin.”

Christoph Heubner — executive vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee — argued that Aiwanger should “retire at least for some time from the front row of politics. Wherever he appears in the future, the sentences of that shameful leaflet will always be in the room.” And in an interview with a Catholic news agency, the Jewish journalist Rafael Seligmann compared Aiwanger to a “squirming eel,” adding that he “couldn’t imagine that his brother did it alone, especially since Hubert Aiwanger had the leaflet in his pocket.”

Bavaria’s opposition parties — the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), the Greens, and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — are still pushing for a special session of the Bavarian parliament to debate Aiwanger’s dismissal.

“Even if Aiwanger didn’t write the leaflet himself, but carried it with him and distributed it, the disgusting and inhuman formulations allow conclusions to be drawn about the attitude on which it was based,” Saskia Esken, the chair of the SPD, said in a statement.

“Anyone who thinks, writes down, and spreads such thoughts must not bear any political responsibility in Germany,” she added.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also weighed in to the controversy. “From the Chancellor’s point of view, everything must be clarified comprehensively and immediately,” his office said in a statement on Monday.