Ludwig Kasner was a German policeman of Polish ethnicity who worked with the Berlin Police. He was the paternal grandfather of German ChancellorAngela Merkel, whose birth nameKasner had been Germanized from Kaźmierczak by Ludwig Kasner in 1930. In 2013 Ludwig Kasner received media attention in Poland and Germany after a new book shed light on Angela Merkel's family background. This was not only due to Kasner's being of Polish origin, but also because Kasner's nephew had provided a photograph of him in the uniform of the Polish Blue Army which had fought for Poland's independence in the late stages of World War I.
Life
Ludwig Kasner was born out of wedlock to Ludwik Wojciechowski and Anna Kaźmierczak, ethnic Poles and citizens of the German Empire from Posen. His mother was the daughter of Bartłomiej Kaźmierczak and Apolonia Bielejewicz. The Kaźmierczak name derives from Jan Kaźmierczak, an 18th-century Pole from the Poznań area. In 1915, during World War I, Ludwig was drafted into the German Army and fought on the western front before being taken prisoner of war in France. He subsequently joined the Polish Blue Army, which fought for Polish independence on the side of the Entente Powers; it is not known whether he took part in fighting against Germany. With the Blue Army, he returned to Poland to fight in the Polish-Ukrainian War and the Polish-Soviet War. After returning from war, in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, Ludwig opted for German citizenship and relocated to Berlin, the hometown of his fiancée Margarethe. He worked in the Berlin Police, last in Berlin's Pankow district, and was promoted twice, reaching the rank of Hauptwachtmeister. In 1926 their son Horst Kaźmierczak was born. In 1930 the family Germanized their surname from Kaźmierczak to Kasner. They still kept in touch with the Polish side of the family, visiting them in Poznań several times in the 1930s and receiving visits in Berlin from Polish relatives. Despite the surname change, Ludwig Kasner's nephew Zygmunt Rychlicki said Kasner always stayed true to his Polish roots. Ludwig Kasner was raised a Catholic, but in the 1930s the family converted to Lutheranism, and his son became a Protestant pastor. Even before the 2013 media reports about Ludwig Kasner, Angela Merkel had said in 1995 that one of her grandfathers was originally from Poland; and in 2000 she had reiterated that she was one-quarter Polish.
