Germany has come to terms with the Nazi period relatively well. However, within families there is Silence, and often still, even 80 years after the beginning of the war. About the grandson, want to talk about it, that grandpa was a Nazi.
Defendants in the Nuremberg trials (1946)
Gabriele Palm spark can remember exactly at the Moment when the research begins. Twelve years ago. She and her young son are traveling with her mother in their place of birth in Poland. In the evening you sit together, talk about earlier, about the deceased grandpa. And then, the mother suddenly says: “many of The people with the yellow stars I will not forget.”
Palm-spark winces at that time on the inside. This evening she learns that her grandpa security guard was in a camp with Jewish prisoners. That was the concentration camp in Trzebinia, she finds out later. At the age of six her mother visited him there and the many people seen who had a star on their clothes, and signed it as a Jewish characteristic.
The grandfather of Gabriele Palm-spark was a security guard in a Polish concentration camp Trzebinia
Back in Germany, the theologian Palm-Funke, the name of your grandfather’s search engine to type in. It makes a request to the Federal archive, meets, finally, in a library on a book by a Holocaust Survivor who describes her grandfather, oberwachtmeister Luboeinski, as an animal. “For me, it went really bad,” says Palm-spark. Anger, shame, overcome you. And the pressing question: Why has never spoken to anyone in the family about it? Why was punished by the grandfather, even though he had shot and killed a 17-Year-old in the camp?
Only a fraction of the Nazi perpetrators was punished
Are to become estimated during the Nazi period 200,000 to 250,000 German, Austrian and “ethnic Germans” men and women perpetrators. Only a small part of it was condemned before the German courts.
Germany has a dark Chapter of national socialism, the period between 1933 and 1945, now well worked up. Internationally, the German “culture of remembrance is to be praised”. There are monuments, memorials, school teaching the atrocities of the Nazi era take up a lot of space. And still, In many families keep Silent about what grandpa or Grandma have to be in the skate, there is still 80 years after the beginning of the war.
“This has a lot to do with loyalty within the family”
Leonardo Conti, the Reich health leader of the Nazis was
Lena Ditte Nissen, now 32, know, since you are 14 is that the members of your family were involved in it. In their Cologne apartment, she clicks through images in black and white. Pictures of her great-grandmother, Nanna Conti, the top midwife in the German Reich, responsible for ensuring that newborn babies were killed with disabilities. And pictures of your great-uncle Leo Conti, who was involved in testing as Reich health leader of people.
In the autumn of nits will process the memoirs of her grandmother as an art project. Records, which show that they must be lovers before the end of the mother – and at the same time a convinced national socialist.
Products began to be more and more with your family history, as the right-wing populists in Germany, in the land parliaments moved in, in 2017, also in the Bundestag. Just now she finds it important to talk about the offender in your family, even if they “feel a very great inner Resistances”, says Nissen. “I think this has a lot to do with loyalty within the family. You don’t want to be the nest beschmutzerin.”
For some months now, needs to be part of a group of people whose family members, bystanders, perpetrators or victims during the Nazi-time. The family of Peter Pogany-Wnendt, the head of the group, belongs to the latter category: his parents survived the Holocaust, his grandparents, Hungarian Jews, were likely to be shot by the Nazis in Hungary. In his Cologne practice of the psychotherapist to be a wood-framed picture of you, “the wearer of the sadness, of the pain of the family,” says Pogany-Wnendt.
The grandparents of Peter Pogany-Wnendt, probably, were killed in Hungary by the Nazis
The Silence on what happened decades ago, to this dark spot of history, employs the psychotherapist for a long time. Many who were in the war, in the Holocaust were involved, had never talked about it. “Unconsciously, you have given this unprocessed guilt and shame feelings to the next Generation.” That right-wing slogans and anti-Semitism in Germany would just re-presentable, could also be a consequence of these repressed feelings of guilt, says Pogany-Wnendt.
Sometimes decades-long Silence
As Lena Ditte Nissen and Gabriele Palm-spark is also a Guy Hofmann on track, search for Nazi criminals in his family. A few years ago, he came across a Wikipedia article about his great-uncle, was during the Nazi dictatorship, the Director of an important office in Munich. And the shot just before the end of the Second world war, a resistance fighter. Hofmann grew up in the vicinity of the crime scene, walked past as a child and teenager often. A family member was there to become a criminal, in Silence but for decades in his family.
Lena Ditte Nissen would like to process the past in a art project
Hofmann has the feeling, at the beginning of his Research. “The more information I collect, the more facilitative it is for me,” he says. Nevertheless, Without wishing to be self-arrested to take, to be past this already stressful for him. Often, the bad idea gnawing at him that she could be his family through “Aryanization,” i.e. the expropriation of Jewish property, forced to a limited extent.
Meanwhile, Hofmann has taken the granddaughter of the man his great-uncle shot. Recently, he has started the past of his grandfather to crawl. It is important for him, the black hole in his family to illuminate history – and to look in every angle.