Children of Nazis

by Tania Crasnianski; Molly Grogan

  Rolf asks him another question: if he is so convinced that he acted justly, why doesn’t he surrender to the authorities to be judged? Mengele answers him tersely: “There are no judges, only avengers.”16

  Rolf never senses an ounce of humanity, compassion, or regret in his father. He leaves him at the end of two weeks knowing he will never see him again. As for Mengele, he feels he can finally die in peace. Perhaps he felt the need to justify himself to his sole descendent, to prove he was not the monster his son believed he was, but a man who simply followed orders.

  Nevertheless, Rolf never turned Josef in. The reason he gives: it was impossible for him to betray his father. Unlike Niklas Frank, who detested his father, Hans Frank, Rolf’s feeling was that he never knew his father well enough to hate him.

  Two years after that meeting, in 1979, Rolf received a letter from friends of his father in Brazil: “Our friend left us on a tropical beach.” Josef Mengele had died of a heart attack while swimming in the ocean, after thirty-four years of surviving on the run. The Mengele family decided against announcing the news in order to elude the question of their own complicity in helping him avoid being brought to justice.

  Nine months later, Rolf returned to Brazil to put his father’s affairs in order and recover his personal effects, traveling under his true identity. On his way back to Europe, he checked into the same hotel in Rio de Janeiro where he had stayed during his previous trip under an assumed identity. This time, the concierge commented on his name: “Ah, Mengele. Do you know you have a very famous name around here?”17 Terrified, Rolf hurried to his room to hide his father’s last possessions in the room’s dropped ceiling, even though he was sure they would be easily found there if the police ever ordered a search. He had recovered from his father’s belongings a gold watch, some letters, and his diaries. The authorities would never come looking for him however, and those same diaries would be offered for sale at the much decried auction that took place in 2011.

  In the meantime, Rolf kept a close eye on the hotel’s guests and tried to make himself invisible in case the concierge thought to alert the police. Even with Josef dead, the Mengeles had to keep their secret safe. Rolf justified his silence on the need to protect those who had helped his father over the years and on the absence of any evidence of his death.

  The news of Josef Mengele’s death finally broke six years later. His friends and sympathizers had known all along, but they never violated their unwritten code of silence. It was during a police raid of the home of Mengele’s confidence man, Hans Sedlmeier, in 1985 that correspondence between the two men was discovered, including a condolence card sent by Mengele’s friends in Brazil.

  Josef’s nephew, Dieter Mengele, saw no other choice—as the president of the family business—to announce the news of his uncle’s death and to submit to an interview with the press. His concern was to head off any possible repercussions on the family business, if the extent of the family’s help to Josef were to become known. Dieter denied the family had provided any financial assistance or even maintained any correspondence with him. Rolf was never consulted on the family’s decision, a fact for which he would reproach his cousin. As for proof of Mengele’s death, the body was ordered exhumed; however, on the day of the exhumation, the only person who could make a positive identification was unreachable. That was Rolf, who happened to be on vacation, and who only learned upon his return what the rest of the world by that time already knew when he turned on the television at home.

  Over the thirty years and more that Mengele lived in hiding, there were often rumors that he had been spotted in such and such a place. Even the Israeli Secret Service declared it had “periodically picked up his trace, while never succeeding in apprehending him.”18 Nevertheless, and in spite of his obsessive fears of being arrested or abducted by the Mossad or by Nazi hunters, he did not hesitate to travel back to Europe and live under his true identity. He was buried, however, under a false name, Wolfgang Gehrard, at Embu near São Paulo. Following the exhumation on June 6, 1985, carried out by the Brazilian police at the request of the German government, an analysis of the jawbone was sufficient to identify the body, but a DNA test would not confirm those results until 1992. The delay was caused by Rolf, who refused to provide a blood sample that would allow a match to be made.19

  With so many international organizations and Nazi hunters looking for him, it defies reason that Mengele eluded the authorities for over thirty-four years. In 1960, the Mossad located both Eichmann, the man who designed the Final Solution, and Mengele, but had to choose which one to capture; Auschwitz’s infamous doctor narrowly escaped arrest on that occasion, but how did he succeed so many times before and after?

  Rolf went public with his story in 1985, describing his meeting with his father and revealing some of Mengele’s writings. The family definitively cut off all relations with him from that moment forward.

  Unlike certain other Nazi children, Rolf is unconvinced that barbarity can be contained in a gene that can be handed down through the generations. He decided to change his name, however, to close the book on his past and in the interests of his own descendants. In the 1980s, he adopted his wife’s name and settled in Munich working as an attorney.

  He believes his children have the right to live free of their grandfather’s crimes. He owes them both the truth and that freedom. He thinks that the only lesson to be learned from his family is to know to distinguish good from evil and to reflect on what is important in life. His destiny was to become the son of Josef Mengele and to bear the struggles of that inheritance. He wanted to get into politics but certain people, whether Jewish businessmen or victims of the war, refused to work with him, although he will never know their reasons.

  In 2008, he wrote to an Israeli newspaper, asking the Jewish people not to hate him. He wanted to travel to Israel and visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, but, he wrote, “I am afraid that the survivors of the Shoah and their descendants will be upset if they learn who I am.”20

  Rolf Mengele is the only Nazi child examined in this book who for many years did not even know he was the child of a Nazi official and who was able to question his father later about his role in the Nazi death machine. Yet their discussions were fruitless in the sense that Mengele never stopped believing in the Nazi ideals, never assumed any responsibility for what he did, and even argued that he had helped save lives. Rolf felt he could never betray his father, however, and never wanted to, even after his father’s death and even despite his own conviction that his children should never have to live under the weight of the name of Mengele.

  CONCLUSION

  A German Story?

  A muffled thud rumbles through the auditorium at the annual convention of the Christian Democratic Union of the Federal Republic of Germany in Berlin. Amplified by a microphone, it is the sound of a hand delivering a vigorous slap across the face.

  It is a woman’s hand and it was aimed at someone who, like many Germans, thought he could cover up his involvement with the Nazis. But this man, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, is the German chancellor, and the slap is one way of throwing his past in his face. Up until this moment, evidently, that past has not concerned his fellow Germans, who elected him to the chancellery. In 1968, however, times are changing. Not only are the taboos and rigid morals of the Nazi era disintegrating, the far-left terrorist group known as the Red Army Faction is forming in a climate of spreading social unrest.

  By the late 1940s, a majority of West Germans had wanted to turn the page on the war and put an end to the denazification trials, which many resented as both a burden imposed by the Allies and an obstacle to the country’s democratization. Responding to those demands while hoping to curry favor, then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer ended the trials and instituted a rehabilitation program for certain Nazis who were not known criminals: a policy that would allow many Nazi officials to avoid indictment and arrest. Josef Mengele’s visit to Germany was a perfect example, but he was not the only criminal who eluded
justice.

  The hand that slapped the chancellor belonged to Beate Klarsfeld, who was determined to confront the Nazi past of her parents’ generation. She had already disrupted the German Bundestag by chanting: “Kiesinger, Nazi, Resign.” In Germany, intergenerational tension was exacerbated by the lingering burden of National Socialism,1 and the Adenauer era was an easy target. The student movement behind the social unrest of 1968 could no longer tolerate former Nazis holding government positions.

  The scene that day marked a turning point. It would give pause to anyone who thought the past could still be silenced. Germans born in 1950, who later became the students of 1968, were the first generation of Germans who had not experienced the war, and they had no qualms about digging up that era. The old habit of placing blame on Hitler alone no longer satisfied them.

  Beate Klarsfeld had looked forward to her confrontation with Kiesinger. She was a close friend of Günter Grass, who despised Kiesinger like he had despised Adenauer before him. The author of The Tin Drum, one of the most important works on the Third Reich, published in 1958, Grass was considered postwar Germany’s “moral conscience.” He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, however, on the eve of his eightieth birthday, Grass, who was promoting his memoirs, Peeling the Onion, was interviewed by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and he revealed that he had enlisted in the Waffen-SS in 1944 when he was seventeen. Grass told Le Monde in 2006: “It was tormenting me. My silence for so many years was one of the reasons why I wrote this book. I had to get it off my chest finally.”2

  In 1968, however, the year of Klarsfeld’s slap in the face to the “Nazi father,” Grass’s Nazi past was still unknown. No one could have imagined that the intellectual guide of postwar Germany had himself been a Nazi soldier, and that he had hidden his membership in the Waffen-SS for half a century. Grass had tirelessly examined Nazi collaboration and guilt, as if echoing his own life. How could the same person who insisted on Germany’s moral obligation to confront the past ever believe that time and his own fight could erase this indelible stain? His deliberate omission nearly cast a shadow over his entire life’s work. One of Germany’s most influential writers, Grass epitomizes both the country’s silence and its difficulties breaking it and accepting the unacceptable.

  The “Brandt years” would put an end to the idea that burying history was the only way to lay the foundations for German democracy. Chancellor Willy Brandt traveled to Poland on December 7, 1970, accompanied by Grass, who was one of his loyal supporters. There, on bended knee before the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, he asked for forgiveness, in the name of the German people, for the Nazis’ crimes, after which, he declared, famously: “I did what people do when words fail them.” The historian Norbert Frei surmised it would take several generations for Germans to be able to look history and the extent of the Holocaust in the face because “knowing” something, Frei emphasized, is not the same as “dealing with it.” In 1990, Frei argued that since the newest generations of Germans had no personal experience or memory of the war, and therefore were not guilty of its crimes, they should no longer be held morally and politically responsible.3

  The closer to home something is, the harder it is to judge it objectively, as if recognizing the crimes of a father could irremediably sully the bonds of filial love. How difficult it must be for a child to admit, “My father was a monster and yet I loved him.” Getting there is a long and fraught road.

  Love that is stretched thin is more porous to judgment. This may be one reason why the least-loved children in this study, the ones who received little affection from their fathers, or spent very little time with them, judge their fathers the most severely. In the same way, the more distant the relation, in the case of nieces, nephews, and grandchildren, the easier it is to admit guilt. For Matthias Göring and Katrin Himmler, for example, the “monster” was a man they never knew.

  Emotional intimacy is closely tied to temporal proximity. The passage of time and historical developments like the fall of the Berlin Wall have made it easier to face the past. The perception of Nazism, whether by the public or as developed by historians over the years, has evolved. As the truth came to light with time, children had no choice but to acknowledge Germany’s history, and through that lens, their individual family stories, with all of the intergenerational silence those could hold.4 The Nazi descendants whose lives are the focus of this book experienced Germany’s silencing of the Nazi era. After the war, they became “the son or daughter of …” and they learned the undeniable facts of the Nazis’ crimes, as seen through the eyes of the public. Their experiences at home, however, were much different. Their families could never deny their Nazi past, yet they hid the degree to which the fathers were involved in the Reich’s murderous designs.

  None of these children could ever say, “Papa wasn’t a Nazi,” to echo the title of the book by Harald Welzer, Sabine Möller, and Karoline Tschuggnall.5 During the war, they were the children of war heroes; after the war, they were suddenly Täter Kinder, the children of criminals, although nothing had prepared them for this new world order in which they played the pariahs. Even as children, they could never have completely ignored that their fathers moved in circles of power that included Hitler himself. When they learned that Hitler was one of the greatest criminals history would ever know, they also understood they were intrinsically linked to him by a blood tie. Moreover, with the exception of Wolf Rüdiger Hess, Albert Speer Jr., and Rolf Mengele, they would never see their fathers again after Nuremberg, never be able to confront them, never ask them fundamental questions. Those who did have that opportunity often recoiled from the challenge. Yet every one of them had to face the fact that he or she was the child of a Nazi.

  To move forward as adults, some chose to downplay their fathers’ voluntary participation in the Nazis’ war crimes. Others rejected outright their fathers and the love they felt for them. How a deep emotional bond can coexist with a profound sense of guilt is a complex and painful question. Whatever the nature of their relationship with their fathers, every one of them had to face society’s reaction every time they made that relationship known.

  For Germany to fully explore its past, the country would have to wait for the arrival of that first generation of Germans untouched by the war, as well as the leadership of Helmut Kohl as chancellor and the era of national reunification that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. With East and West Germany reunified, the entire country could shoulder the guilt that had previously been contained to the principal actors of the Nazis’ barbarism.

  It is crucial, however, that a complete memory of Nazism is passed on to future generations. Horror can take many guises, as the rise of new forms of extremism proves. There will never be another Hitler but the events that hastened his appearance could very well be seen again. Can the past protect us from extremism, whatever its origins? It must be hoped. The generation of the Hitler Youth is dying out; four generations have followed it. It is no longer unthinkable to try to understand how any of us might have reacted in that era’s social, economic, and legal context.

  More than seventy years later, there are fewer and fewer remaining Nazi criminals and their victims, and soon there will be none left at all. When they are gone, the subjective memories of the participants of that era will also disappear. The names of the Reich’s leaders must always serve as a warning for future generations, but all knowledge of the period must be preserved intact. Unfortunately, today’s youth, whether out of disinterest or ignorance, is forgetting its history. Nevertheless, generalizations must be avoided; as Alexandra Oeser has shown, reactions to Nazism can vary widely depending on age, class, gender, political orientation, and education.6

  The same holds true for these Nazi children. Whether they saw their fathers on a daily basis or only exchanged letters, they share a common history: they knew their fathers were National Socialists, but they only learned of their families’ roles in the Third Reich after th
e war from sources outside of their families. History left scant room to deny their fathers’ actions, even though some did their utmost to believe it could be done. In all other respects, these children reacted in ways that are complex and unique to them individually as each came to terms with his or her family’s history. Many factors contributed to these specific approaches, among them: gender, size of the family—whether the child had siblings or not—and intimacy with the parents—how affectionate or distant they were. Some of their stories share common characteristics, but each one is unique. The single common denominator is the impossibility of flouting one’s family history: the price to pay is very high. Many of these children have made that task their life’s work. Yet even Albert Speer Jr., whose professional achievements stand on their own, knows that the first question anyone ever asks him is in some way related to his father, Albert Speer.

  Just as their fathers’ destinies still haunt these children, the Nazi past lives on in our collective memory. Even when there are no more victims to bear witness and the Nazi hunts have receded into the past, their names will always be a reminder.

  And so their stories have become history.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1. Raimbault, Marie-Pierre and Michael Grynszpan, Descendants de nazis: L’héritage infernal, 2010, France: Bonne Pioche Télévision.