Children of Nazis

by Tania Crasnianski; Molly Grogan

  In 1971, in an interview he granted to Eric Norden for Playboy, Speer recognized his tacit approval of the mass killings, explaining that, “I saw nothing because I didn’t want to see anything.”47 In the article, the journalist does not hide the unease he felt during the interview, listening to an impassive Speer accuse himself of terrible crimes and then offer the journalist a piece of apple pie without missing a beat.48 Some years later, Speer admitted to Gitta Sereny: “I sensed … that dreadful things were happening with the Jews.”49

  His books were enormous successes. Inside the Third Reich provided a unique perspective by a high-ranking Nazi official. Inside the Walls of Spandau is a collection of more than twenty thousand notes Speer recorded in prison using any paper at hand, including toilet paper, which he found particularly invaluable for his purposes.50 Inside the Third Reich sold more than two hundred thousand copies in Germany and became a bestseller in the United States.

  In his last years, Speer lived quietly in his house in the Allgäu. His marriage had withered, and he had taken a mistress, which did nothing to improve his relations with his children. He received fewer and fewer visitors but he did accept to be interviewed by Matthias Schmidt, who was writing his doctoral thesis on National Socialism. Speer put him in contact with his old friend, Rudolf Wolters, but Wolters had not approved of the way Speer had moved the blame for his actions onto Hitler, nor did he appreciate the fact that Speer never mentioned him in his books. Wolters provided Schmidt with the draft of his own Chronicles, in which Wolters reported on Speer’s activities between 1941 and 1945, arguing that Speer was actively involved in the Reich’s worst crimes. He included documents, signed by Speer, ordering the removal of Jews from Berlin. All of it was proof of Speer’s deliberate misleading of the court at Nuremberg.

  Speer died in 1981 from a heart attack in a hotel in London where he had traveled—accompanied by his mistress—to record an interview for the BBC with Henry T. King Jr., one of the American prosecutors at Nuremberg, and Norman Stone, a professor of history at Oxford.

  Some of Speer’s children maintain they have suppressed any memory of Adolf Hitler; they cannot allow themselves to admit they were in such close contact with a man who, Hilde Speer says, “revolts” her. As for photos showing her holding Hitler’s hand, dressed in a little white skirt with flowers in her hair, she says she does not remember the incident. Or, perhaps she chooses not to, as a way of leaving the past behind. It is impossible to say which.

  Hilde Schramm became a sociologist and has been active in politics. She was the leader of the Green Party in Germany and became vice president of the Berlin city council. In 2004, she was awarded the Moses Mendelssohn Award for her work promoting interfaith tolerance and reconciliation. The award ceremony was scheduled to take place in a synagogue in Berlin but had to be moved to a Catholic church, under pressure from the Jewish community, despite the support of Albert Meyer, the community’s spokesperson. It was inconceivable that the daughter of Albert Speer, one of the war’s principal criminals, could receive such a distinction in a Jewish temple. Hilde Schramm understood their objections and respected their decision.51

  The Nazis systematically impounded the property of Europe’s Jews, which was then shipped to Germany and sold at auction. Hilde Schramm has made a point of asking Germans to question where their own property and artwork, even their jobs, came from and how they were obtained, paying particular attention to the years between 1933 and 1945. “We who survived the war are not guilty,” she told The Guardian in 2005. “We did not inherit the guilt, but the consequences of the wrong-doing of the past. To that we have to try and act with responsibility.”52 By that she means returning wrongfully acquired property to its rightful owners.

  Hilde initially refused accepting the paintings that she inherited from her father, because he had purchased them at very advantageous prices from Jews, who were probably forced to sell them. She changed her mind, however, when an opportunity arose to turn them into good: she sold them and donated the profits, which came to seventy thousand pounds, to the foundation she created, Zurückgeben (Give Back), which supports Jewish women working in the arts and sciences.53 She explained in that same interview that she thinks guilt does not accurately express her feelings, but rather shame: “I’ve reached the conclusion that you can only be guilty of things you’ve done yourself, or not done, for that matter…. I feel ashamed of what happened in the past, and of course I feel ashamed that it happened so close to me, in my own family. For that I still feel shame.”54 Speer saw clearly that his legacy would always be his children’s biggest challenge in life.55 Like her siblings, Hilde declines to speak anymore of her father, to avoid further questions by the press and to focus on the present. She would rather not be associated any longer with a man whose legacy is an embarrassment, but the politician she is knows that if his story can turn attention to her foundation, she will take it. She is clear-eyed about her situation and thinks the time has come to write her own biography.56

  Margret, the youngest daughter, is a photographer and the mother of four children. She married young and has been living under her husband’s name, Nissen, for many years. In her book, Sind Sie die Tochter Speer? (Are You Speer’s Daughter?), she describes what it was like to live in the shadow of Hitler’s architect.57 The title was inspired by a question one of her colleagues asked her—point-blank—upon learning her maiden name. At the time, she was working as a photographer in Berlin, as part of an exposition, “The Topography of Terror,” and recognized herself in one of the photos: a smiling little girl, standing confidently next to Hitler. Margret wonders how her father could have placed his skills in the service of the Nazi regime. She describes Speer in his many manifestations: father, architect, Nazi, prisoner, writer. She resents this man who abandoned his family and left his devoted wife for a mistress. She is uncomfortable admitting she is Speer’s daughter, but she wants to preserve her memories and refuses to feel any guilt. As a girl, she could never believe her father was a criminal, since he had never committed a murder himself. Later, she could not accept the scope of his involvement in the activities of the Reich. Her denial is similar to Speer’s, when, in reference to the genocide of the Jews, he confessed in the Playboy interview that he chose to look the other way. She explains her father’s choices by his opportunism and his ruthless ambition.

  She also describes a man wholly absorbed by his work and driven to create an oeuvre that would outlast the context in which it was created. Her analysis is echoed by Speer: “I felt myself to be Hitler’s architect. Political events did not concern me. My job was merely to provide impressive backdrops for such events.”58

  During his final years, Speer was preoccupied by his reputation, to the detriment of his relationships with his children. Yet they would spend their lives asking themselves about him, whose name the sons at least continue to bear. They were never able to confront him personally about his actions; he may have accepted responsibility for these but he always denied any knowledge of the Nazis’ crimes.

  Other Nazi children did have the opportunity to confront their fathers. One was the son of Josef Mengele, even though this Nazi criminal never regretted what he did.

  ROLF MENGELE

  The Son of “The Angel of Death”

  Sale 45 held on July 21, 2011, at Alexander Autographs, an auctioneer specializing in historical autographs and militia in Stamford, Connecticut, included a one-of-a-kind item, a collection of journals, whose historic value was summed up as follows: “Taken as a whole and carefully read and analyzed, this archive, the vast majority of which has never been published or perhaps even viewed, offers an in-depth view into the cruelest mind of the twentieth century.”1 The expected sale price of Lot 4? Between three hundred thousand and four hundred thousand dollars.

  Sold! The auctioneer’s hammer falls. The winning bid has been phoned in to the sale, and these 3,380 pages, handwritten in blue ink, now belong to an ultra-Orthodox Jew and son of a Holocaust survivor for the
sum of $245,000. The buyer, who wishes to remain anonymous, intends to make these journals accessible to the public, to discredit negationist arguments, and to warn against any form of doctrine that could lead to discrimination.

  The lot consists of thirty-one spiral school notebooks, with variously colored covers—black, khaki, green, and checkered—marked, in Spanish, Cuaderno (notebook), Cultura General or Agenda Classica. The pages are covered with uniform, angular handwriting that leans to the right. Drawings and sketches are interspersed with autobiographical anecdotes, poems, and philosophical and political musings. The entries date from 1960 to 1975.

  The sale caused a stir: some observers objected to a commercial value being placed on documents such as these; others denounced the entire transaction as simply obscene.

  The journals’ author writes under a pseudonym, Andreas, and speaks of himself in the third person: precautions taken by one of the most wanted criminals of the twentieth century to remain anonymous and undiscovered. He describes how he traveled through a Europe devastated by war—all the way to South America—and then traveled more, through Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. He provides details about the experiments he conducted and their contributions (in his opinion) to humanity. The author is still committed to the ideology of National Socialism and he explains his theories concerning overpopulation, eugenics, and euthanasia.

  “When you start mixing the races, civilization declines,” he writes in the diary he kept between 1960 and 1962.2 “There’s no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in nature. There’s only ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ … Things that are ‘inappropriate’ fall through since they lose in the struggle for survival…. Biology doesn’t support equal rights. Women shouldn’t be working in higher positions. Women’s work must depend on filling a biological quota. Birth control can be done by sterilizing those with deficient genes. Those with good genes will be sterilized after the fifth child.”3

  The notebooks were discovered in 2004 in São Paulo in the home of a couple who had lodged the author of these lines. They were returned to his only biological son, who may or may not be the person who sold them through a third party to Alexander Autographs.

  Bent with age, Josef Mengele sits every day at his writing table, reliving his glory days and his interminable journey to escape capture. Fifteen years separate his departure from Germany and his first journal entries, but his convictions have never wavered during the thirty-four years he has spent on the run. Convinced of his innocence, he has become a compulsive writer in exile, and he spends most of his time in his home on the outskirts of São Paulo hunched over his notebooks, which he also fills with drawings of Bavarian-style furniture, houses, animals, and plants. His other activities are gardening, woodworking, and walking.

  The year is 1977, and he is anxiously waiting to be reunited with his son, Rolf; they have not seen each other for twenty-one years. That was in 1956, and Rolf did not even recognize his father then, who was introduced to the boy under an assumed identity. This time, his son will know him, Josef Mengele, one of the most wanted Nazis in the world, the one who earned the nickname “The Angel of Death” because of the macabre experiments he conducted at Auschwitz.

  It has taken five years to prepare Rolf’s visit without tipping off the Nazi hunters who are always on the lookout for him. Josef’s lawyer, Hans Sedlmeier, first met with Rolf in Germany, and then arranged a meeting between Rolf and his cousin, Karl-Heinz, who had lived several years with Josef in Argentina. Hans Sedlmeier wanted to make sure that Rolf understood that people of his father’s generation who had lived during the war could have vastly different analyses of the Third Reich than those of the newer generation of Germans who only read about the period in history books. He also needed to send money to his client via Rolf. The Sedlmeiers have always been staunch supporters of Josef Mengele.

  Following his father’s advice, Rolf would be travelling to Brazil using the passport of a friend, which he had managed to purloin while the two were on vacation together. Nothing could stop him from seeing his father again, even though the old man is no longer his childhood hero. In fact, Rolf is sure they have nothing in common, a sentiment he would later explain as follows: “On the contrary, my opinions were diametrically opposed. I didn’t even bother to listen to him or think of his ideas. I simply rejected everything that he presented. My personal attitude to national and international politics was never in doubt. My liberal political views, partly even ‘to the left,’ were known. As a result of my many critical remarks, sometimes I was even suspected of being a communist.”4

  When night falls and he hears the old bus come down the dusty street outside his window, Josef starts, and begins to tremble. He waits, willing himself motionless, with his bony hands clenched into fists in his pants pockets, his face like a mask. He who always took such care with his appearance is oblivious to what he looks like tonight: tonight, his son is arriving, and with him, perhaps, Nazi hunters. The obsessive fear of being captured always haunts him, even at this point in his miserable life. He is a man eaten by anxiety, a mere shadow of the cold and calculating doctor who reigned at Auschwitz. He has nervous ticks now: he sucks on his mustache continuously, so that he has hairballs in his guts like a cat. These disrupt his digestion and cause him terrible pain, even threaten his life. Still, he can never let his guard down.

  Josef has lived alone for years. His yellow stucco house has a pointed roof and white windows and sits on a wooded lot, so that it reminds him of an alpine chalet. Its only furnishings are a table, some chairs, a bed, and an armoire.

  When he sees his son enter the yard through the wooden gate, Josef is overcome with emotion. Tears flood his eyes and he feels weak at the knees but he manages to greet him on the front steps, this son who has dared to come all the way to Brazil to see him. He tells Rolf that he thinks of him as a brave soldier, whose courage has taken him across enemy lines.5 But this was not always the case.

  Today however, Rolf is Josef’s hero. He has taken numerous risks to meet the man who never bothered much to know him. When Rolf was a child, his father was too busy with his deadly work for the Nazis. By the time Rolf was an adolescent, his father was on the run from the Allies and Nazi hunters both. Letters were their only means of communication, and a superficial one at that.

  It was Rolf’s wish to see this father he barely knew, in the flesh, face-to-face. He has only ever seen him on two other occasions. Nevertheless, he is surprised to find that the master of disguise who has eluded capture for so long is a frail old man, ravaged by time. He knows how important this meeting is to his father. As for himself, he has not come all this way at great risk to prosecute the Allies’ most wanted criminal, but rather to try to understand how this man, his own father, could have actively participated in the vast Nazi death machine.

  Rolf is an attorney practicing law in Fribourg, Germany. In his family’s opinion, he is a radical leftist, the clan’s black sheep. For his part, he refuses to see any similarities between himself and the Mengeles except for the bloodline they share through his father, the most hated man in the world. Rolf is thirty-three, the same age as his father when he was the camp doctor at Auschwitz, deciding the fates of millions of people with the wave of a hand.

  Survivors of the camp never forgot the Mediterranean-looking man in an impeccable uniform and spit-shined boots, who always carried a horsewhip and who selected the victims of his experiments with a gesture of a single finger. If he pointed to the right, you lived but were sent to his hospital. If he pointed to the left, you died. He never showed any emotion as he sent men, women, children, and infants either to the gas chambers or to his somber experiments, humming an opera by Wagner or Puccini all the while. He was the central cog of the death machine.

  Rolf can only manage a weak, “Hello, Father.” The two men exchange a brief, stiff embrace, as is their nature; neither is used to showing much emotion. Rolf has decided he will be polite no matter what, telling himself: “When all is said and done, he is st
ill my father.” Still, he does not soften to him until he feels his father’s tears running down his cheeks.

  This is their second meeting since Josef fled Europe. It will also be their last. When they first met, Rolf’s mother introduced Josef to him as his “Uncle Fritz” who lived in South America. Much later, he would discover that his so-called uncle was in fact his father and he would learn of the role his father played in Germany’s darkest years. Seeing him now, Rolf is torn between filial piety and an instinctive rejection of this man who was capable of such barbarity. The rest of the world may label him a war criminal, but for the Mengele family, he is still an honorable and brilliant doctor. They are a family of wealthy industrialists from Bavaria composed of three sons, Josef being the eldest; their sole concern is keeping the family name out of the mud.

  The family business was manufacturing farm machinery, and the factory was one of the largest employers in the Bavarian city of Günzburg. The family astutely parlayed its support of National Socialism into becoming the third largest company in its sector under the Third Reich. Hitler himself gave a speech at “Karl Mengele & Söhne.” The firm still operates today and its headquarters in the city center still proudly bears the family name. There is even a Karl Mengele street, named after Josef’s father. But of Günzburg’s most infamous son, all traces have been erased.