SURPRISE, SURPRISE: THE GOOD CITIZENS OF NAZI GERMANY KNEW JEWS WERE BEING SLAUGHTERED

And I was always heard that each of them claimed to have hidden a Jew in their cellar.

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR GRANDAD? YOUNG GERMANS CALLED ON TO QUESTION THEIR FAMILIES ABOUT NAZI PAST
In Nazi Germany, up to 25 million German citizens and 10 million soldiers were aware of the Holocaust

By Allan Hall

Mail Online
April 15, 2012

A controversial new book encourages young Germans to quiz their grandparents about how much they knew about the horrors of Nazism in World War Two.

In his new work ‘My Grandfather in the War’ historian Moritz Pfeiffer claims that a staggering 20 to 25 million German citizens and 10 million soldiers were aware of the Nazi extermination programme.

According to the German magazine Der Spiegel Mr Pfeiffer said his goal was to smash the last taboo in society so families across the country acknowledge the guilt of grandparents who supported Hitler.

The historian who works at a museum on the S.S. at Wewelsburg Castle said times had changed significantly compared with the decades immediately after the war with eyewitnesses from the period now keen to share their memories and feelings as they approach the end of their lives.

He said: ‘Immediately after the war, conversations about it between parents and children appear to have been impossible because it was all too fresh.

‘Now the problem is that no one is listening to that generation anymore. As a source of information, one's relatives are largely being ignored. But one day it will be too late.’

The historian interviewed his own maternal grandparents about their role in the war before cross-referencing their recollections against historical documents including army records and archived material.

The result, according to the magazine, ‘is a book that has shed new light on the generation that unquestioningly followed Hitler, failed to own up to its guilt in the immediate aftermath of the war and, more than six decades on, remains unable to express personal remorse for the civilian casualties of Hitler's war of aggression, let alone for the Holocaust.

Mr Pfeiffer says his own blood relatives were morally ‘contaminated,’ like millions of ordinary Germans of that period. He describes his grandmother Edith as a 'committed, almost fanatical Nazi,' adding: ‘No One Can Say What They Would Have Done. But the project wasn't an attempt to pass judgment on them but to understand them.

‘I believe that people will learn a lot if they understand how their respected and loved parents or grandparents behaved in the face of a totalitarian dictatorship and murderous racial ideology.

‘Dealing with one's family history in the Nazi period in an open, factual and self-critical way is an important contribution to accepting democracy and avoiding a repeat of what happened between 1933 and 1945.’

His grandfather, identified only as Hans Hermann K., was a career soldier who, Pfeiffer discovered, gave evasive answers to his enquiries about his wartime service when massacres of civilians were carried out in Poland and Russia.

When asked by his grandson if he thought Nazi racial laws banning Jews from public life and systematically expropriating their property were unfair, he said: ‘No, we didn't regard that as injustice, we had to go with the times and the times were like that. The media didn't have the importance then that they do today.’

Mr Pfeffer said his grandfather's claims of ignorance of massacres in Russia were ‘hardly believable.’

He added: ‘Grandfather wasn't lying outright in his interviews, but merely doing what millions of Germans had done after the war -- engaging in denial, playing down their role to lessen their responsibility.

‘It led to the convenient myth in the immediate aftermath of the war that the entire nation had been duped by a small clique of criminals who bore sole responsibility for the Holocaust -- and that ordinary Germans had themselves been victims.

‘Why did the humanity of my grandparents not rebel against the mass murders and why didn't my grandfather concede guilt or shame or express any sympathy for the victims?'

He says the overriding aim of his book is to get other Germans to question their families before it is too late.

‘I think conversations like the ones I carried out will bring relatives together rather than drive a wedge between them,’ he added.