Random House published Posner's fourth book, HITLER'S CHILDREN: Sons and Daughters of Leaders of the Third Reich Talk About Themselves and their Fathers, in 1991. It was the first book to obtain interviews with a dozen adult children of top Nazis, providing another perspective on Nazi war crimes. The book was covered by 60 Minutes, and The Los Angeles Times heralded it as a "mesmerizing, blood-chilling book...enough to make you weep." It was translated into seven languages.
Hitler’s Children
Chapter I
Breaking the Wall of Silence
On a blistering June afternoon in 1985, dozens of journalists gathered around a small, dusty graveyard in Embu, Brazil. They were attracted by persistent mid-morning rumors that the federal police had discovered the gravesite of the elusive Nazi fugitive, Auschwitz's Dr. Josef Mengele. Lumbering around the tombstones was a stocky man in his mid-fifties, police chief Romeu Tuma. Dressed in a well-worn black suit, he barked orders in Portuguese and nervously ran his hands through his oily hair as he vainly tried to direct the disorganized police and coroner's officials. Suddenly one of the three gravediggers hit the top of a wooden coffin with his pick, and Tuma rushed to the edge of the grave. The crowd hustled to attention. The police chief ordered the casket smashed open, and as journalists and onlookers crowded around in a ghoulish ring, they saw mud-colored bones and remnants of clothing inside the simple wooden box. A forensic pathologist leaned into the grave and pulled a decaying skull from the casket. As he held it high so reporters could take pictures for the evening news feeds, Tuma seemed confidant. "That's the 'Angel of Death,'" he muttered as he watched the cameras follow the swiveling skull.
Only days later, five thousand miles away in Munich, a tall, good-looking man, recently turned forty, approached the modern office complex of Bunte magazine. The young man was dressed in a dark gray double-breasted suit, and he carried a thick black attache' case. Inside were some five thousand pages of diaries and personal letters written by the world's most wanted Nazi, Josef Mengele. The man carrying the fugitive's papers had no doubt about their authenticity and no apprehension about providing them to a national magazine for publication. He was Mengele's only son, Rolf, ready to close the file on his missing parent. The time had come to let his father go public.
Bunte knew it had a great scoop in the Mengele papers, if they were authentic. However, after the Hitler diaries scandal, in which Bunte's competitor Stern paid millions of dollars for forgeries purporting to be the Fuhrer's missing wartime papers, Bunte was not taking any chances. Its editors selected a five-member panel to judge the historical accuracy of the Mengele writings, while the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and its West German counterpart subjected the paper, ink, and handwriting to a barrage of scientific tests. Bunte sent a representative to Brazil, where I was serving as consultant to ABC News on the Mengele case, and asked me to join the panel. I abandoned my South American investigation and flew to Munich. Four internationally recognized historians on the Third Reich were already there. Although I was the panel's only non Ph.D., I compensated for that by bringing the largest known private archive of Mengele documentation, some twenty-five thousand pages. For two weeks we scrutinized each page of the fugitive's writings; more important, we had access to a member of the Mengele family: his son, Rolf. He sat across a table from the historical panel and patiently answered hundreds of questions about his father. It was my first contact with the child of a Nazi murderer.
At first, convinced his "feelings are no different than any child to any parent," Rolf thought he had nothing to say about his father. He soon realized he had underestimated the depth of his emotion for the man who abandoned him at the age of four, then taunted him for years from South American hideouts. After several frank discussions, Rolf Mengele's complex feelings ranged from criticism and condemnation to a family loyalty that compelled him to protect his father from many hunters.
I was surprised to discover a young professional who was tormented by his father's past. Rolf’s attempts to cope with a heritage over which he had no choice, and his efforts to understand what drove his father to such acts of savagery and cruelty, consumed large parts of his life. Once, during a series of questions about his family relationship, he paused and wearily said "You know, I would have preferred another father." As I witnessed Rolf Mengele's conflict, I realized it was not easy to be sentenced to a life as the child of a Nazi war criminal. In postwar West Germany, with its economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s, Nazis were considered a dark, past shadow better forgotten. Children like Rolf Mengele had to cope with their fathers' deeds on their own, without the help of German society.
The conversations that June sparked my curiosity about whether other children of prominent Nazis felt the same as Mengele's son. Or was Rolf's outlook colored by the fact that his father deserted him and was a fugitive? Would some of the children reject criticism and instead mimic their parents' hateful beliefs? I knew that several books had studied the children of concentration-camp survivors, but at that time I was not aware of any attempt to study the children of the perpetrators. How had these children dealt with the crimes against humanity and their fathers' roles in those crimes? I knew the answers could only be found by locating a group of surviving children of prominent Nazi's and then persuading them to talk openly.
My first task was locating the children. Information requests to German government archives and prosecutors' offices were rejected under their privacy laws. The U.S. government and Interpol provided no help. Nazi-hunters like Simon Wiesenthal had information on the criminals, especially the remaining fugitives, but virtually no information on the children. I went to the Berlin Document Center; the world's largest repository of Nazi archives, it maintains more than fifty million pages, including all the original Nazi party and SS personnel files. These files only revealed whether someone had a child at the time he or she joined the party, not whether the children were still alive, much less where they might live or under what name. Almost all requests to reporters at magazines, newspapers, and television stations either went unanswered or were politely answered with an "I'm sorry we can't help you" form letter.
Most frustrating was that people who might have useful information were not willing to help. Wolfgang Loehde, an adventurer who discovered the Third Reich's millions of counterfeit British pounds in Austria's Lake Toplitz, had traveled around the world meeting old Nazis. He never answered my letters. Jochen von Lang, a famous Stern reporter who had written books on prominent Nazis and led the 1965 Berlin hunt for Martin Bormann's remains, ignored my letters until they became so persistent that he finally replied, claiming total ignorance and offering no assistance. I even tried enlisting the help of Gerd Heidemann, the ex-Stern reporter who was jailed for complicity in the Hitler diaries fraud. Although he was discredited as a reputable journalist, there was no doubt his fascination with Nazis had led him to a select group of ex-officers and their offspring. He had even purchased Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goring’s yacht, the Carin II; prior to Heidemann's unmasking in the diaries fiasco, the yacht was the scene of splendid parties for former Nazi officials. He finally answered, through his son, that he had had "enough of Nazi shit," and also refused to help.
In the end I resorted to slow research at the National Archives. Many wives of war criminals were detained in Allied camps for several months after the war. When released they had to register their new residences with the occupying forces. The files were not well organized but they eventually revealed leads to some of the children I wanted to locate. The only problem was that the information was almost forty-five years old. But when I returned to West Germany, the information from the archives proved invaluable. In some cases the children were still in the same city, and I found them by dialing every listing of the family name in the phone book. Sometimes a neighbor remembered the family and knew where they had next moved. By then going to that town, I was one step closer to the child. More often than not the information stopped short of final success, but methodical research eventually yielded an address list of almost thirty children of prominent Nazis, scattered mostly in Germany, with a few in Austria and one in Brazil. As can be imagined, I guarded that list as though it was gold.
Now I had to convince some of these thirty to discuss their parents. I feared that many of them might have developed a standard no to interv4ew requests, and somehow had to persuade them my project was different from and more deserving than those they had rejected in the past.
One hurdle I quickly encountered was a cultural one. In the United States, tell-all programs and books are common. It is not unusual to turn on an afternoon of "Donahue" and see the children of serial killers or alcoholics talking about their childhood and their parents. But this candor is frowned upon in many European countries. Over forty years had passed since the war. All the children had new lives, some had different names, and many preferred to forget the past. Now an American, a co-citizen of those responsible for judging and in some cases executing their parents, was tracking them down and asking them to discuss intimate personal details about their fathers, all for publication. This scenario guaranteed I would get some doors slammed in my face.
A second obstacle that reduced the number of children who might be interviewed was my own decision that none of the participants could remain anonymous. Those who spoke to me had to do so under their real names, with their fathers clearly identified and discussed. By this time I had discovered that two other books on the children of Nazis were under way, and in both cases the authors guaranteed anonymity to induce the children to speak. In my view, that was a fundamental problem. Without knowing the parent's identity, or what he did during the war, it was difficult to fully understand what the child had endured. To be the daughter of SS chieftain Heinrich Himmler must be quite different from being the son of Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the officer who planted the bomb that almost killed Hitler. I also thought it important to understand how the child knew his parent. Mengele's son, for instance, was born in 1944; his father left Germany when the boy was barely five. Rolf did not even know his father was alive until he was sixteen, and only met him once as an adult. Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz’s daughter, on the other hand, was in her thirties during the war and was extremely close to him, visiting him regularly. Would a son who never really knew his father find it easier to condemn him than a daughter who knew her father into her middle age?
Unfortunately, because of my insistence on real names, many of those I contacted refused any cooperation. Heinrich Himmler's daughter was typical of a small group that completely ignored all my letters and telephone calls. Reportedly involved in neo-Nazi activities, she even rebuffed the efforts of a German professor who was on friendly terms with her husband. "She will probably take her memories with her to her grave," the professor told me after his last appeal failed.
Some curtly dismissed me, in blunt and unequivocal language. Others declined to be interviewed but nevertheless provided tantalizing, brief glimpses of their feelings toward their fathers.
The daughter of Artur Seyss-Inquart, Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands, who was executed at Nuremberg, wrote a series of revealing letters about "[o]ur beloved father . . . an idealist often misunderstood. He was a German patriot who only wanted his country's best.... We loved our father with his idealistic ideals. . . . To us his past life is sacrosanct. Our father's life is ours and nobody else's concern."
Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon," currently in a French prison, has one daughter, Ute.1 Raised with her father in his Bolivian hideout, she never knew about his SS past until the early 1970s, when he was unmasked as a fugitive. She did not like the idea that I was seeking children of prominent Nazis like Goring, Hess and Doenitz. "My father was a low-ranking officer, with no decision-making authority," she told me. "If I allow you to put him in a book with such important officials, people will think my father had similar authority. I can't do that." After she told me her relationship to her father was a "normal" one, she added: "My father, through unlucky circumstances, was chosen from thousands of SS-Obersturmfuehrer [first lieutenants] to be used as a symbol of the 'Third Reich' and of National Socialism. He drew, as Der Spiegel once correctly wrote, the black lot. I have, though, been equipped with enough reason to see through the hypocrisy of this absurd theater which was camouflaged as legal proceedings."
Similarly, Irmgard, one of Martin Bormann's children, refused to be interviewed but described her relationship to her father as "very normal, nothing different than any other family." In an earlier public statement she insisted he was "good and very caring" and that she had unsuccessfully searched for a husband like her father. She is convinced that her father "simply tried to put into practice what he believed Hitler wanted. I don't judge him, because judgment is always relative."
Understandably, those who were interested in the project wanted to meet me before making a final decision. I decided to approach each child with candor-what was it like for them to grow up in a Nazi family? Even at this stage some decided at the last moment not to participate. One was Dr. Karl Adolf Brandt, the only son of Hitler's personal physician, executed at the "doctors' trial" after the war.2 Dr. Brandt actually allowed me to stay at his house for two days, with his wife and two of his three adult children. He shared with me unpublished diaries and letters from his father, written in prison, as well as private wartime photographs of his father with Hitler. Although Dr. Brandt is articulate and proud of his father, he finally refused to be interviewed for a reason that had not occurred to me. "I don't want to be part of your book where my only connection to the other people who are interviewed is that our fathers had some close relationship to Hitler," he told me when we parted.
One of those who cooperated did so reluctantly. As a result, the information from Edda, the only daughter of Hermann Goring, is limited. In her first letter she said she had only a "loving memory" of her father, and would therefore grant an interview. But she also wanted more details from me, including the amount of her fee. When I informed her that I never paid for information, she answered saying that an accident prevented her from seeing me during my next trip to Munich. I implored her for a meeting. She grudgingly set a time. Although hesitant at first, she finally talked to me for several hours about her feelings for her father. Then, she told me that to obtain more information I would have to agree to a fee and give her the right to reject what I wrote. I declined and as a result she refused to meet me again or to have acquaintances provide further information.
Wolf Hess, the only son of Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, who flew to England in 1939 only to spend the next forty-eight years of his life in prison, met me three times before deciding to participate. One of his early objections was the opposite of that raised by Klaus Barbie's daughter. Whereas she was concerned her father would seem too important if mixed into a book with officials like Hess, Goring, and Frank, Wolf Hess was concerned that his father would be tarnished in a book that associated him with people like Mengele and Eichmann. "You should keep your book only to the highest-ranking officers," he urged me. I was surprised to discover that a generation after the war, the sons and daughters still tried to maintain some distinctions based upon rank and conduct. Despite his objections he eventually met me in Munich for a complete and far-ranging interview.
The daughter of Hjalmar Schacht (the former president of the Reichsbank, who was one of three defendants acquitted at the main Nuremberg trial) was reluctant to speak about her father and undecided until the last moment. She had rejected all earlier interview requests, and even after meeting me she wavered. She decided to discuss her parent openly only during the last days of my final German research trip.
Besides Hess, Mengele, Schacht, and Goring, the others who finally agreed to speak included two sons of the Governor General of Poland, Hans Frank; the daughter of Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz; the two sons of Karl Saur, the first assistant to Albert Speer and the technical director of the Armaments Ministry; and the son of Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the young officer who planted the briefcase bomb that almost killed Hitler on July 20, 1944. In addition to these children of prominent wartime figures, there are also two cases in which the parents are virtually unknown but the stories told by their daughters are particularly compelling.
Obviously, this is not a selected group, but merely those children who decided to speak on the record. Yet they constitute an interesting cross section of the Third Reich. Among their parents are five principal architects of Nazism, all of whom were defendants at the main Nuremberg trial. Two of those (Goring and Frank) were convicted and sentenced to death; one (Hess) was given a life sentence and died in 1987 in Spandau Prison; another (Doenitz) was sentenced to ten years and was released in 1956; and one (Schacht) was acquitted. As for the parents of the other children, one (Stauffenberg) was executed by Hitler during the war, one (Mengele) was a fugitive until his 1979 death in Brazil, one (Drexel) was convicted in 1975 of murder, and two (Saur and Mochar), although fervent Nazis, were never charged with crimes.
The often haunting wartime recollections of the sons and daughters of prominent Nazis are powerful reminders that Hitler's crimes have claimed many victims. Together their stories provide a rare view of how children of Nazi 55 troops and noncriminal German soldiers react to the Final Solution and their fathers' roles in the "Thousand-Year Reich."
Footnotes
1. A son, Klaus Jr., died in a 1981 hang-gliding accident in Bolivia.
2 In December 1946, U.S. authorities brought twenty-three leading 55 physicians and scientists to trial at Nuremberg. On August 20, 1947, fifteen of the defendants in the so-called doctors' trial were convicted.
Copyright, 1991, by Gerald Posner
Home | Books | Articles | Gerald Posner | News and Updates | Contact Us