Pastor Horst Kasner was not present at the birth of his firstborn child. On that day, July 17, 1954, he was transporting the family’s furniture by van to a remote village in East Germany. There he would begin his life as the new priest. "Only communists or fools go east willingly," West German transporters had told Kasner at the time. Standing over 1.80 m tall, the 28-year-old with rugged features was one of the few who responded to the call of the Bishop of Hamburg, Hans Otto Wulber, to serve in the Soviet zone, where there were few clergymen. "I would travel anywhere to preach the word of our Lord," Kasner later said. He had married just the previous year to Herlind, a 26-year-old English teacher. Horst had warned the slender blue-eyed Herlind Jentz, who was born in Danzig, that duty to the Church would always come first. And he kept his word.

Kasner – who was named Kazmierczak at birth by his Polish father and had grown up in Berlin – was seven years old when Hitler rose to power in 1933. A member of the Hitler Youth during high school and conscripted into the Wehrmacht armed forces at the age of eighteen, he is said to have been captured the following year by the Allies, although the details of this chapter are not available to researchers – if they even exist after so many decades. After his release, he studied Theology at the prestigious University of Heidelberg and then in Hamburg. These are all the publicly known facts about the past of Angela Merkel’s father.