How Nazi descendants confront their families' dark pasts

Descendants of Nazi perpetrators break decades of silence on family crimes

For decades in the old Federal Republic, former Wehrmacht generals were able to publish their self-justifying memoirs, Nazi-era professors continued to teach undisturbed, and SS officers, Gestapo members, concentration camp guards, euthanasia doctors—and their widows—enjoyed generous pensions. Even the young rebels of 1968, who demanded answers about their parents' and grandparents' actions—or inaction—in Nazi Germany, could do little to change this. They did, however, give momentum to the study of the Nazi past and the commemoration of its victims—a shift that only gained broader societal interest in the late 1980s, eventually leading to the institutionalization of efforts to expose the crimes of the Nazi state and Germany's wars of conquest and annihilation. This process was not without fierce controversy, which persisted well into the late 1990s (as seen in debates over the Wehrmacht exhibition and the Holocaust Memorial).

Private, courageous confrontations with family members involved in Nazi crimes only began to emerge in public three decades after the 1968 movement's questions. One figure who set a benchmark was journalist Niklas Frank, born in 1939, son of the infamous Governor-General of occupied Poland, Hans Frank, who was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. After his scathing reckoning with his father, Frank went on to indict My German Mother and, ultimately, his elder Brother Norman. Another pioneer in this reckoning was journalist and Green Party co-founder Jutta Ditfurth, whose book The Baron, the Jews, and the Nazis examined her aristocratic family's role during the Nazi era. Among its subjects was a Baron von Münchhausen, a leading member of the German Academy of Poetry, whom Hitler included in the 1944 "God-Gifted List" of the Reich's most important artists.

In the 2000s, others followed Frank and Ditfurth's example, descendants of perpetrators grappling with their families' complicity. It is no easy task to trace the guilt—or shared responsibility—of parents, grandparents, uncles, or aunts. Emotional barriers, shame, and hesitation must be overcome, and there is often the risk of being branded a traitor within the family. The research itself is labor-intensive; private documents alone are rarely sufficient, and delving into archives—a prospect many amateurs find daunting—is often essential. Archivist Jens Löffler speaks of "archive anxiety."

Claudia Krieg and Johannes Spohr deserve credit for presenting examples of successful family biographical projects—examples that may encourage others to follow suit. Their anthology, Present Past, does not claim to be a step-by-step guide or manual; the motivations and approaches will always be deeply personal. Still, practical advice—such as how to navigate archives—can be invaluable.

Ten contributors share their experiences in this volume. Historian Friedrich Burschel, who has long specialized in research on fascism and neo-Nazism, examined his grandfather's field letters and his grandmother's replies. Lorenz Völker, a history teacher by profession, also benefited from his expertise when exploring his grandfather's past. As a public prosecutor at the Potsdam Regional Court, his grandfather was one of the few Nazi functionaries ever held accountable in court. While researching his book Was My Grandfather a Nazi?, Völker initiated the installation of Stolpersteine—stumbling stones—honoring victims of Nazi terror in Potsdam.

Tracing his father's footsteps, Andreas Reichel uncovered the murderous practices of so-called "medical experiments" in Dachau and other concentration camps—even though his father was not directly involved in them. Tilman Taube's grandfather, however, worked as an SS physician in Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, bearing direct guilt. What fascinates the grandson are the motives and psychological mechanisms that led people under the Nazi regime to carry out inhuman orders.

Natali Stegmann, a professor at the University of Regensburg, examines her grandmother's role after stumbling upon a childhood photo album belonging to her mother. The part women played in the machinery of the Nazi regime remains woefully under-scrutinized. Meanwhile, Christiane Perschke-Hartmann and Marlene Hartmann recount the all-too-common tragedy of families that included both perpetrators and victims.

Editor Claudia Krieg also has a personal connection to the subject. Her grandfather was one of the millions of so-called "ordinary soldiers" who, while not fanatically embracing Nazi ideology or participating in Wehrmacht atrocities, still raise difficult questions. She urges descendants to confront their ancestors' actions between 1933 and 1945 head-on—even at the risk of causing "intrafamilial offense." Co-editor Johannes Spohr, whose grandfather served in the Army High Command (OKH) as an orderly officer deployed on the Eastern Front, in Ukraine, and the Caucasus, offers support to descendants conducting archival research (contact: Gestern ist jetzt). In this volume, he outlines the more favorable conditions for family research available today.

Ultimately, however, Krieg and Spohr must acknowledge that, even 80 years after the end of World War II, "countless Nazi crimes remain insufficiently investigated, let alone widely recognized." And they note: "The lack of political and societal impact behind the mantra of 'learning from history' is evident in Germany's election results, where the far-right AfD—a party with significant extremist factions—has gained votes in ways that contradict the country's post-1945 self-image."