Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, has some disturbing skeletons in her family wardrobe.

Her political roots in Nazi Germany account for the insane war-driven agenda of the European Union toward Russia under her stewardship and her total subservience to the U.S. imperialist objective to defeat Moscow.

Author Evan Reif explains how her politician-father Ernst Albrecht packed his regional government with unreconstructed Nazis and former Wehrmacht officers when he was governor of Lower Saxony in the 1980s.

Ursula von der Leyen’s family derived much of its industrial wealth from working closely with Hitler’s Third Reich. Her aristocratic family was also married into slave-owning cotton planters in the American South.

That legacy of inherited wealth not only benefited Ursula’s elite education but also her precocious rise in German politics. She became the German defense minister from 2013-2019 despite having no formal background in the military. Under her watch, the German army was massively rearmed and she also became mired in corruption scandals.

At the end of 2019, she was appointed President of the European Commission, the top political post in the European Union. This was done without a vote from the German parliament such was the lack of confidence in her eligibility.

She has spearheaded the US-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia with remarkably hawkish anti-Russian rhetoric. Her zeal for pursuing hostility toward Russia is consistent with the Nazi ideology her father indulged in.

Ursula von der Leyen has shown an astounding “ability” to “fail upwards”, as Evan Reif wryly points out. The only explanation for such undue political ascent despite her incompetence, plagiarism, and corruption, is the help of a powerful network – the transatlantic U.S.-led NATO alliance and its intelligence agencies.

The disturbing upshot is that Europe is being led into a disastrous war against Russia in the service of US-European imperialism – euphemistically called “Western values” – by a person who is a scion of Nazi legacy and politics and who does not have a democratic mandate.

Eight decades after the end of World War II and the defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich, the imperialist objective of conquering Russia is alive again. Should we be surprised though, when we look at the odious political background of the European Commission’s president?