This week I accompanied British author Derek Niemann to a meeting in London, where he talked to a Jewish audience about his grandfather, an SS officer in the concentration camps. It came as the most profound shock to Derek, who writes gentle books about nature, to discover a family secret which had been hidden from him for more than 50 years.
Years of research, delving through archives, visits to Germany and difficult conversations with family members, produced the complex story of an ordinary man, captured vividly in Derek's book A Nazi in the Family. A pen-pusher, is how Derek's father Rudi described him - but it turned out that he rose to the equivalent rank of an SS captain and organised slave labour in the concentration camps on a colossal scale.
Derek and Sarah were aided in their quest by one of Karl's hobbies - he was a keen photographer. They discovered a treasure trove of about 500 old negatives which had been left in the house in Berlin which he abandoned in haste towards the end of the war.
Incredibly the negatives had been saved by the Jewish family who were given the house in war reparations. They reveal the intimate minutiae of a loving SS family, and a man who led a contradictory double life. He travelled to all the concentration camps, doing the financial books and running an SS commercial enterprise producing furniture and war supplies - all made by slave labour. But in the evening he came home, tended the garden and helped raise four children. His oldest son, Dieter, was killed in the closing days of the war, fighting with the Panzer tank division.
Derek was asked by a member of the audience if the denazification process after the end of the war was effective? Derek told them he didn't think it had any effect at all.
"My grandfather, in common with other SS officers, went through a very intensive brainwashing exercise. If you look at about 300 Nazi criminals who were in Landsberg Prison awaiting the death sentence, not one of them - not one - showed contrition for what they had done. They would very happily find religion. They would happily find priests who would absolve them of their sins, but they would not show any contrition whatsoever. They were so brainwashed."
http://www.bbc.com/news/education-42833644
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