Even Nazis Had Children (12 cents)

Intuitively, I probably always knew this. It hit home, though, in 1962, when I visited my college roommate's high school exchange student's family in Bad Homburg Germany and saw the pictures of the relatives in SS uniforms on the wall. And, when I was still young, when I met other of my German contemporaries.

When I saw "Either/Or" at Theater J, I thought about the children of Kurt Gerstein, the Nazi hero/anti-hero of the play, and when I wrote a short play to be performed at the 5 x 5 after "Either/Or" closed, I chose to write about Gerstein's daughter, and about her schoolmates' reactions when she told them what her father had done during the war.

Coincidentally, at the McFriends store in Rockville, I saw a copy of a book called "Hitler's Children" by Gerald Posner, and brought it home. I finished it this morning.

The book was written in the mid-1980s, when the children ranged in age from mid-40s to mid-60s. Today, the children of Nazi leaders, to the extent they are still alive, would be 65+ for the most part.

Not surprisingly, the views of the children towards their parents varied greatly. And many such children refused to speak to the author. The book was interesting in that it showed how the children went on with their lives (generally relatively successfully), and how very few of those who spoke with the author seemed to harbor Nazi-like feelings, although many remained close with their parents (some of their parents had been hanged as war criminals after the war).

What was most interesting, though, were two things: one, that many of these children did have family members (generally older generation) who were still Nazis at heart, and two, that until the interviewees were in their teens, they had no idea about the Nazi atrocities, or about how the Jews were singled out and dealt with. To me this was a little surprising, since amongst the older generation ti was common knowledge, and there was no secrets from the children that there had been a war, and that Germany had lost and suffered great destruction.

Were the children kidding when they said that they did not know about the Jews until they were 13, or 15 or 18? Did the Germans of the previously generation lie when they said that they did not know the Jews were being killed. A lot of people quoted in this book found themselves surprised and revolted in the 1960s. For some, this knowledge cemented their negative feelings towards their parents. But are they being honest? Are they deluding us? Are they deluding themselves? Or is it easy not to see what is right before your eyes?