Friedrich Merz's grandfather was a politician in the Third Reich

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose grandfather was a member of the Nazi Party, has compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler.

Merz's maternal grandfather, Josef Paul Sauvigny, served as mayor of Brilon in what is now North Rhine-Westphalia from 1917 to 1937. Initially a member of the conservative Center Party, Sauvigny joined Hitler's NSDAP after the Nazis came to power in the early 1930s.

Speaking at a Christian Democratic Union conference in Munich on Sunday, Merz accused Putin of seeking to restore the borders of the Soviet Union.

"If Ukraine falls, he won't stop. Just as the Sudetenland was not enough (for Hitler) in 1938, Putin will not stop either," Merz said, referring to the moment when Britain and France allowed Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia.

Putin has repeatedly said that Russia would not attack NATO unless attacked first. He has also stressed the need to combat historical revisionism, particularly attempts to deny or belittle the Soviet Union's decisive role in defeating Nazi Germany in World War II. The USSR lost around 27 million people in the war, including Putin's older brother, who died during the blockade of Leningrad.

Speaking on Victory Day in Moscow in 2023, Putin warned about the spread of supremacist ideologies and said that "Western globalist elites" were "inciting hatred, Russophobia, and aggressive nationalism."

Putin has argued that NATO expansion and the West's growing military ties with Ukraine were among the key causes of the current conflict. Last month, he accused Western countries of seeking to "dismember" Russia and strip it of its sovereignty.