According to literary and legal historian Sabine Pamperrien, he spent many years as a leader in the Hitler Youth movement, and in one 1942 commendation in the Wehrmacht archives he is praised for his “irreproachable National Socialist behaviour”.

In September 1943, a note describes his “perfect Nazi attitude.”
However, it emerged in 1984 that he also has Jewish ancestry as his father was the illegitimate son of a German Jewish businessman.
In 2013, a report in French magazine LePoint quotes him as saying: “We are responsible, and uniquely us, for the death of more than six million Jews.”