Out of the Mouths of Babes

“You never escape from your parents, whoever they are,” says Martin Bormann Jr., who has the spine-chilling misfortune of having had Adolf Hitler for a godfather. As becomes clear in the disturbing book, “My Father’s Keeper” by Stephan and Norbert Lebert, Uncle Adolf, who patted children’s heads between invasions and mass murder, was quite popular among his close circle of friends, especially among their children. These children, now folks in their early 60s who still have a soft spot for the grand old Fuhrer, are the subjects of Stephan Lebert’s interviews.

It is certainly interesting how the collaboration on “My Father’s Keeper” came about. Here, again, two pivotal German generations struggle in their own way to get a grip on the past. Stephan Lebert’s father, liberal journalist Norbert Lebert, a former Hitler Youth, started to interview children of the Nazi elite in 1959 but didn’t know what to do with the material. Interest in the Nazi past was nonexistent in the immediate postwar years. After Norbert Lebert’s death, his son, also a journalist, inherited the files and continued in 2000 with the interviews where his father had left off. Stephan Lebert looked up former Nazi children, including Wolf-Rudiger Hess, Niklas Frank and Bormann, and started his uncertain journey into dangerous territory. It turned out to be an utterly depressing and alarming experience for the author--and it could be for the reader as well.

The fathers of these unfortunate sons and daughters were the elite of the Third Reich, a cabinet of sinister figures that became the epitome of evil: Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary; Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy; Hermann Goering, Reichsmarshall and head of the Luftwaffe; Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth; Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer-SS; and Hans Frank, general governor of occupied Poland.

Having been a child or teenager in the last years of World War II, not to mention having the “Nazis’ finest” as fathers, is an unimaginable experience for most. The early childhood stories of the group (the best part of the book) are defined by tragedy and upheaval after the glorious Third Reich crumbled. They were shoved into displaced persons camps while their beloved fathers, suddenly infamous war criminals, awaited trial in Nuremberg. Later, as grown-ups, their offspring struggled in a new world where the familiar old values were buried under the shiny, newly rebuilt Germany, where prosperity and amnesia reigned.

Although Klaus von Schirach, a lawyer, says he isn’t happy because modern Germany is much too undisciplined and “Americanized,” Wolf-Rudiger Hess, an engineer, full-time Nazi and part-time crackpot “investigator” who thinks the Holocaust was invented (and even if it wasn’t, it was probably well-deserved), still has the dogged ambition to prove to the world his “innocent” father’s rectitude--an annoying obsession he shares with most other children of Nazis in this book. Hess Jr., whose own son was born on Hitler’s birthday (and is now old enough to have a home page about his grandfather on the Internet), even wrote a Rudolf Hess biography titled “I Have No Regrets,” which sums up all of the Nazi leaders’ sentiments and last words before they died.

Unfortunately, two of the formerly interviewed Nazi children didn’t want to talk with the author, and they are the only daughters in the book: Gudrun Himmler and Edda Goering, each once her Daddy’s favorite girl. Himmler, the still-proud daughter of one of the most vicious Nazi criminals, is another case of someone suffering from stubborn delusion. Still busy with clearing “the good name” of the Reichsfuhrer-SS, she is said to be a bitter, unpopular shrew who supports and meets with old SS officers and still talks about the “good old times.” And they must have been practically pastoral because, when the 15-year-old Gudrun in 1945 was asked whether she had ever been to a concentration camp, she said that she had been to a certain Dachau to visit Dad, who showed her a nice herb garden and explained the different kinds of plants. There is no greater chilling moment in this book.

Goering, a once fancy, rich and rather spoiled young woman (who as a child was showered with an original Lucas Cranach and other stolen paintings as presents), has no problem with the family name either. There is certainly no connection for her between the name of Goering and genocide. But Goering, now 62, doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. In 1986, she gave a lengthy interview and stated that she still felt “bound to my parents by a great love” and still marveled at her “wonderful childhood.” And while Jewish children were gassed and shoved into ovens, she just couldn’t get over that darling Uncle Adolf, who always had licorice stashed for her in his desk drawer (probably next to the order to invade another country). All of which could lead to the conclusion that either the Nazi criminals were schizophrenic or that bad people make good parents and uncles.

Luckily, there are two sons, Niklas Frank, a journalist, and Bormann, a pastor, who comprehend the scope of their fathers’ crimes and don’t try to whitewash them. In fact, only Frank stands out as a highly critical, understandably outraged and deeply ashamed German of that generation (of which there are many in Germany, though not in this book) who tore the burden of guilt and shame to shreds and confronted his father’s substantial sins. He wrote a violently angry book in the 1980s about his arrogant, murderous and completely unrepentant father and his hatred for him. It caused a sensation, appalling and incensing most German readers, who had little sympathy for a disrespectful, ranting “disobedient” son. The reasoning behind the reaction is that you have to love and honor your father, even if he had personally helped to wipe out the Warsaw Ghetto. It might be a noble notion to exempt your own kin from what otherwise would be contempt, but can it actually be done without fabricating excuses that might not really hold up under scrutiny? How does one come to terms with a caring, friendly Vati who teaches you soccer and math but finds the “final solution” a pretty decent idea? Can one?

It is hard to find sympathy for these not very likable characters but, before passing judgment and wondering about the postwar insights of the Germans, we shouldn’t forget: They were children. They had fathers whom they didn’t choose. However, where the guilt of the offspring and the anger of the reader set in is 50 years later, when Edda, Gudrun, Wolf-Rudiger et al. still hold up the Nazi ideology of their fathers as a brilliant but misunderstood humanitarian idea that is sorely missed today. Nowhere in the book do these sons and daughters mention carnage, Jews, the Holocaust and the horror of the war orchestrated and carried out by their fathers’ and their mothers’ stalwart support of the Nazi regime. So, near the end, when the weary author admits that he’s not heartbroken about Edda’s refusal to talk to him, many readers might also feel relieved.

In many ways “My Father’s Keeper” is rather uneventful because, as Robert von Schirach, son of the head of the Hitler Youth, had warned the author: “You should know that we Nazi children are completely uninteresting.” It doesn’t help that Lebert projects a certain lack of passion and has no original voice. He seems to want to do his duty and tries to be thoughtful, fair and not step on anybody’s toes. He certainly raises some important issues and often asks the right questions but there aren’t many daring observations or a provocative thesis behind all that carefulness. Maybe he was too much of a dutiful son by continuing his father’s worthwhile interviews, something that might have been limiting instead of liberating.

As irritating as the content of this book is, it’s nothing compared with the puzzling translation (by Julian Evans) that sounds as if Colonel Klink of “Hogan’s Heroes” has composed it in his spare time while drinking schnapps. There is ponderous embarrassment like, “The perpetrators. As though they had been swallowed up by the mist of horror that was sprayed collectively over the dark years.” There are “coffee mornings,” a teenager “puts on puppy fat,” someone gets “only kind of empty husks of words” or “replies in a couple of dusty lines.” What and especially why things got lost in translation is anybody’s guess, but maybe this is a deliberate attempt at a klutzy Germanic touch.

In the end, there is something profoundly sad and pathetic about these lost souls. But one dares to admit what others maybe feel only once in a great while. Frank rather courageously says, “I’m sure I’ve hated my father so very much because I kept on finding him in myself.” The search for absent fathers is probably the same everywhere--but nowhere else in the world do you have a generation of parents that left bloodied jackboot tracks like the original burghers, bystanders and perpetrators of the Third Reich. Again and again one is reminded that the sins of the fathers (and mothers) indeed keep crashing down on the innocent offspring, who are often maimed for life.