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First published in France in 2016 under the title Enfants de Nazis
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Crasnianski, Tania, author.
Title: The children of Nazis : the sons and daughter of Himmler, Göring, Höss, Mengele, and others : living with a father’s monstrous legacy / by Tania Crasnianski ; translated from the French by Molly Grogan.
Other titles: Enfants de Nazis. French | Sons and daughter of Himmler, Göring, Höss, Mengele, and others | Living with a father’s monstrous legacy
Description: New York : Arcade Publishing, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017035834 (print) | LCCN 2017036773 (ebook) | ISBN
9781628728088 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628728057 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Children of Nazis--Biography. | Nazis--Family relationships. | Nazis--Germany--Biography.
Classification: LCC DD243 (ebook) | LCC DD243 .C37 2016 (print) | DDC
943.086092/2--dc23
Cover design by Brian Peterson
Printed in the United States of America
For the children
For Satya, Aliocha, Ilya, and Arthur
CONTENTS
Preface
Regarding Translations
Introduction
Gudrun Himmler: Nazism’s “Poppet”
Edda Göring: The Little Princess of “The Nero of Nazi Germany”
Wolf R. Hess: A Life in the Shadow of the Last of the War Criminals
Niklas Frank: A Hunger for the Truth
Martin Adolf Bormann Jr.: The “Crown Prince”
The Höss Children: The Family of the Kommandant of Auschwitz
The Speer Children: Offspring of “The Devil’s Architect”
Rolf Mengele: The Son of “The Angel of Death”
Conclusion: A German Story?
Notes
Sources from Archives
Bibliography
Photos
PREFACE
This book presents the portraits of eight children and is the result of extensive research into the different existing archives, legal documents, letters, books, articles, and interviews touching on the personal lives of Nazi leaders and their descendants. None of these portraits is anonymous. Other books have preserved the anonymity of these individuals; I have chosen to name them, so that the weight of these legacies might be fully appreciated. It is also true that some of these sons and daughters feel it is easier to be the “child of” certain of these men rather than others.
My initial intention was to meet every one of my subjects. In the end, I interviewed only one: Niklas Frank. Some of these descendants are no longer alive; others would have had nothing to add to the content of earlier interviews. Then there are those who are no longer willing to revisit the past and still others, such as Gudrun Himmler and Edda Göring, who have almost always refused to speak of their fathers.
So that the reader might get an immediate sense of what these lives were like, each portrait opens with a significant episode, freely imagined.
REGARDING TRANSLATIONS
In the original French edition, translations from German were made into French by the author, and corrected by the translator Olivier Mannoni. In this edition, all content is translated from French, except in the case of English-language sources, which have been quoted in the original.
INTRODUCTION
Gudrun, Edda, Martin, Niklas, and the rest …
These children have a secret. They are the sons and daughters of Göring, Hess, Frank, Bormann, Höss, Speer, and Mengele: the criminals who orchestrated the darkest period of contemporary history.
Yet their story is not recorded in the history books.
Their fathers committed the greatest evil possible and then surrendered their humanity without the slightest hesitation when they pleaded “not guilty” to the charges brought against them at Nuremberg. Will history remember that these men were fathers as well? After the war, a collective movement was aimed at placing responsibility for Nazi Germany’s crimes and extermination policies solely on the Third Reich’s principal leaders and absolving lesser dignitaries and Nazis, who hid behind a convenient formula: “All that was Hitler.”
Who are these individuals whose lives are discussed in this book? They share a common heritage: the extermination of millions of innocent people by their fathers. Their names will forever live in infamy.
Must anyone feel responsible, or even guilty, for the crimes of his parents? Family life leaves an indelible mark on every child. An inheritance as sinister as theirs cannot come without consequences. “Like father, like son,” we say. “A father has two lives: his and his son’s.” What became of the offspring of Nazi leaders? How did they live with such macabre facts?
When one unrepentant Nazi was questioned along these lines by his granddaughter, an Israeli Jew, he gave her this answer: “The guilty one is the one who feels guilty!” Without batting an eye, he also made this suggestion: “Put all that behind you. Life is much simpler afterwards.”1
It is very difficult for children to judge their parents. We lack distance and objectivity when we look at the people who brought us into the world and raised us. The stronger the emotional ties, the more complicated such a judgment becomes. When a family’s history is so disturbing, what choices does it have while living with its knowledge? Embracing it? Rejecting it outright? The responses of these children are diametrically opposed at times. Some have adopted their fathers’ positions. Few are neutral. Some have strongly denounced their fathers’ actions, yet continue to feel love and affection for them. Still others refuse to love a “monster,” so they deny their fathers’ involvement, in order to preserve the unconditional love of a child for a parent. Finally, there are those who have moved into hatred and total rejection. They carry this past from day to day like a ball and chain; it is impossible to ignore. Some have denied nothing, some have turned to religion, some have even had themselves sterilized so they can never “transmit the evil” to their children, and some believed they could eliminate their “bad” genes by masturbating! Whether they have chosen to deny, suppress, or support their fathers, or feel guilty themselves, all of them have taken a position—consciously or unconsciously—on the past.
Most of these children live or lived in Germany. Some converted to Catholicism or Judaism, and some were even ordained as priests or rabbis. Is this a strategy to keep quiet their fate of having been born to a criminal? Aharon Shear-Yashuv became a rabbi in the Israel Defense Forces, even though his father was neither a Nazi official nor one of its principal underlings. While a theology student, Aharon, born Wolfgang Schmidt, decided against becoming a Catholic priest, since he was never a believer. His conversion to Judaism, he insists, is not directly tied to the Holocaus
t: “Though there is a particularism in Judaism on the one hand, on the other there is a lot of openness. It is a fact that converts are accepted—not only that—but a convert can even become a rabbi and serve as a major and chaplain in the Israeli Defense Force!”2
Dan Bar-On, a professor of psychology at Ben-Gurion University, interprets this type of conversion as a strategy: “If you become part of the victim community, you get rid of the burden of being part of the perpetrator community.”3 Is this an attempt to escape, rather than face, the past? The children who converted offer divergent responses, yet a spiritual calling has allowed some of them to put the past behind them.
In postwar Germany’s self-imposed silence as the country began to rebuild, the Nazis’ descendants had to struggle to put themselves back together.
My own grandfather was a career air force man who retired to a secluded hunting lodge in the Black Forest. Although I was very close to him, he never spoke about his time in the armed forces. He is not unusual; the war’s shadow hung over Germany and France for many long years, and still does, although tongues have loosened. When I was a child, we accepted this diktat of silence. Like my grandfather, the postwar generations avoided the subject. Some people finally adhered to the reigning mutism and never spoke of the war again, for fear of tarnishing the image they held of their parents. Would they have really wanted to know who their parents were during the war and the role they played in Germany’s most sinister period? Nothing is less certain. The transmission of knowledge never took place. To flee the past, my German mother chose, at the age of twenty, to live by herself in France. She always wanted to be French and could not understand my decision to write this book. Why this subject? Why keep talking about it? These are questions we don’t often ask.
I am German, French, and Russian, but of the three, my German side has shaped my personality the most. I could not escape Germany’s history. Anne Weber frames the problem this way: “Is this a burden we inherit at birth? It is there at the beginning and it never goes away. No Russian is the representation of the Gulag, no French person is the embodiment of the French Revolution or colonialism; they each have their national history.”4 Germany, however, is always identified with Nazism.
My interest in society’s marginalized led me to study prisons and then to become a criminal lawyer. I hope that this profession has taught me the necessary rigor to evoke historical facts and the perceptions held by the Nazi children featured in this book. It is my wish, through these examples, to understand the implications of the past for a world whose future we try desperately to direct.
Truth and reality can be heavy burdens to carry. There are those who prefer to keep their family secrets locked up, even if they have never learned precisely what they are. Not one of these Nazi officials had the courage or the strength to explain to his children the crimes he committed.
Most of these Nazi children chose not to change their names, perhaps because they are haunted by them. Some, as in the case of the sons of Albert Speer and Martin Bormann, even carry the same first name as their father. Matthias Göring, the great-nephew of Hermann Göring, has said he likes his name; others insist that a name is of no importance. As for Eichmann’s son, he does not see the point: “Change my name? What would have been the point? You cannot escape from yourself, from the past.”5 Still others, such as Gudrun Himmler and Edda Göring, are proud of their family names and venerate their fathers.
“Even when I was carrying out exterminations, I led a normal family life,” declared Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz.6 How is such a contradiction possible? In dissociative identity disorders, two contradictory impulses exist in a single personality, which may provide one explanation for how Hitler’s lieutenants could exterminate millions of people, all the while living a normal life at home. How could these monsters kiss their children goodbye before going to coldly kill or order the killing of men, women, and children? Is it even possible to imagine Himmler kissing his Püppi, his little doll, on his way to headquarters to sign an execution order for children, just because they were Jews?
It would be convenient and reassuring if these criminals could be labeled with specific pathologies that would explain their atrocities. Those who have looked closely into the question, however, have never demonstrated a common personality type in these men. During Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, one of his examining psychiatrists found his behavior toward his wife and children, parents, siblings, and friends “not only normal but most desirable.”7 It is tempting to believe that such people are bloodthirsty monsters; in fact, their “normalcy” is even more terrifying. “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men,” observed Primo Levi.8
In her controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt identified the “banality of evil,” a concept she illustrated using the example of a dolefully ordinary but zealous civil servant who never thought about what he was doing and who proved incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. Arendt does not exonerate him but she does insist how inhumanity can lodge deep within each of us and that it is imperative to continue to think, to never stop listening to reason, to always question oneself, so as to never sink into the same banality of evil.
The children who are the subject of this book only knew one aspect of their fathers’ personalities. The other would be reported to them after Germany’s surrender. They were too young during the war to understand or even perceive what was happening. Born between 1922 and 1944, the oldest were not even eighteen years old during the height of the war. Their childhood memories are often limited to the green pastures of Bavaria. Many lived in the secure perimeter around the Berghof, the Führer’s mountain chalet at Obersalzberg in the Bavarian Alps, south of Munich near the Austrian border. This isolated spot, reserved for the Führer’s use, was untouched by the war and its violence. After the war, and for many years, the Third Reich was not even mentioned in the curriculum taught in German schools.
Are their parents monsters? “If with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace,” Hannah Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem.9 The prosecution attempted to portray him as “the most abnormal monster the world had ever seen”;10 however, Arendt’s view was that he was a “mere functionary” who was “terrifyingly normal.”11 “More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,”12 one psychiatrist who examined Eichmann during his 1961 trial exclaimed. According to Arendt, “Nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’”13 Eichmann described himself as a gentle man who couldn’t bear the sight of blood. “His was … no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind,” Arendt concluded.14 What allowed him to become one of the greatest criminals of his time was his “sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical with stupidity.”15 This shortcoming manifested itself as well in his “almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view”16 and in his lapses of memory. “What he had done he had done, he did not want to deny it … By this he did not mean to say that he regretted anything,” Arendt reported, since he believed that “repentance is for little children.”17 For Arendt, mere thoughtlessness can suffice to create one of history’s greatest criminals. Eichmann was no less guilty for his lack of a moral conscience.
Nevertheless, all of these Nazis thought of themselves as moral beings. Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Final Solution, was convinced he was one.18 Harald Welzer observed that during the Third Reich, killing became a socially acceptable act. The morality of murder that was particular to National Socialism enabled its executors to remain within the bounds of propriety while killing. As absurd as that seems today, the Reich’s normative framework permitted killing on the argument that it was necessary to ensure Germany’s survival, based on the irreducible inequality of human bein
gs.19
The human beings with whom I am concerned here judge their fathers in a normative moral framework that has shifted since the time period in which they lived. Some legitimize or justify their fathers’ actions by arguing that under the standard framework that was theirs, these actions were legitimate. A son of Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was Hitler’s foreign minister, has said, “My father only did what he thought was right. Under the same circumstances, I would make the same decisions he did. He was only one of Hitler’s advisors but, in reality, Hitler did not take anyone’s advice. My father’s sole desire was to do his duty as a German. He foresaw the immense danger that was arriving from the East. History proved him right.”20 Like him, Gudrun Himmler delivered a “not guilty” verdict on her father, Heinrich Himmler, and she would stand by that opinion her entire life. Himmler would have made the same case for himself at the Nuremberg trials, even if he had not committed suicide before they opened.
Gustave M. Gilbert, an American psychologist who studied the principal Nazi criminals whose fates were decided at Nuremberg, concluded that the distinguishing feature of these men was their lack of empathy for others, and he showed that executioners are less likely to experience depression than their victims because they are convinced they are good men who have no choice but to follow orders.
This is not exactly the case of their children who learned about their fathers’ actions after the war, when the Nazis’ heresies had been exposed and the legitimacy of the solution to the “Jewish problem” had been vigorously condemned.
Often, they examine the past through the lens of their own childhoods. Some only remember how much they were loved; this is often the case of single children, frequently sons, but above all daughters: Gudrun Himmler (Himmler’s only legitimate daughter); Edda Göring, the daughter of the Reichsmarschall; or Irene Rosenberg, the daughter of the chief Nazi Party ideologist and the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg. All three were cosseted children who worshipped their fathers and remained sympathetic to Nazism. Many other descendants, demonstrating a curious belief that their common history is quantifiable, think their personal stories are easier to bear than those of other children of Nazi dignitaries.
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