Lower Saxony

Minister-President of Lower Saxony from 1976 to 1999 Ernst Albrecht with daughter Ursula von der Leyen who became European Commission president in 2019. Albrecht pardoned convicted Nazi war criminal Erich Gustav Scharfetter who was seerving 18 life sentences for murders committed in Nazi concentration camps in territories of Nazi-occupied Soviet Union.

Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) is one of the sixteen federal states (Bundesländer) of Germany. It is situated in the north-east of the federal republic and shares borders the North Sea and The Netherlands to the west the neighboring federal state of Sleswick-Holsatia and Hamburg to the north and by the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to the northeast, Saxony-Anhalt to the east, Thuringia and Hessen to the south, and North Rhine-Westphalia to the southwest. The state of Bremen, formed by the cities of Bremerhaven (at the mouth of the Weser) and Bremen (40 miles [64 km] up the river), is an enclave within Lower Saxony.

The capital of Lower Saxony is Hannover.