About the Author:
I am a senior history major at UCSB who has recently been studying European 20th century history. I chose to write about the children of Nazi leaders because the social effects of historical events always interest me. I will also be taking a closer look at modern anti-Semitism in Europe next quarter and this research has given me a bit of background information on the subject.

Abstract:
In My Father’s Keeper, Stephan and Norbert Lebert interpret their interviews with the children of the most prominent Nazi leaders. Conducted in 1959 and again in the 1990s, these interviews allow a glimpse into the lives of people on the inside of Hitler’s regime, and offer an insight into the way this kind of childhood affected entire lives. The overwhelming theme of the book is that the children are never able to escape the burden of their fathers’ Nazi pasts. Through each child’s story, one can see the connection between the father/child relationship established prior to the end of World War II, and then the adult child’s loyalty to their convicted father. Those children who had established strong relationship with their fathers before their arrests retain a picture of their father as human and loving, despite his actions and beliefs. Those who did not know their father as well are more apt to think of their father as purely a murderer, with no sense of empathy or compassion. The book is extremely interesting and informative on the subject of the personal legacies of the Nazi regime.

Essay:
Stephan and Norbert Lebert’s My Father’s Keeper: Children of Nazi Leaders-An Intimate History of Damage and Denial was an excellent resource for information regarding the Nazi legacy in Germany and its effects on the children of the Nazis after World War II. The question I had in mind while reading this was one of the personal and local repercussions of the Nazi regime, and this interesting book offered a great deal of insight on that matter, while also managing to tie in the larger scope of the legacy and the time. Reading this book with the question of consequences in mind, one can easily see the punishments and burdens dealt to the children of the major Nazis and their society as a whole. Once this background was outlined the book provided the main author’s own opinions, the firsthand opinions of the Nazis’ immediate family members, and left enough evidence and room for interpretation for readers to contemplate the whole situation. The most prevalent theme of this work was that the Nazi fathers profoundly affected the lives of their children with their ideals, offices, and actions. One could argue that the lifelong effects of their fathers’ decisions on their own personal beliefs and happiness depended upon each child’s relationship with his or her father prior to the fall of the Nazi regime, as well as afterward. This common thread runs through the narratives of the Nazi children found in this book, even though they all react very differently.

Lebert offers the examples of the children themselves as evidence of their fathers’ lasting impressions on Germany. One of these was Gudrun Himmler who grew up to preserve her father’s ideals through an organization dedicated to taking care of the elderly Nazis. Another was Niklas Frank, who wrote the self-explanatory series entitled "My Father, The Nazi Murderer." Each individual can be a metaphor for the larger part of society that shares their postwar ideals. With each example Lebert examines the relationship the child had with their father at a young age, and then how that relationship had transformed, influenced by those early memories and also by the later realization that their father was a convicted mass murderer or accomplice. Through both the interviews and the personal writings of the adult children, Norbert Lebert has captured their unique and particular shared past and how it has shaped their futures into wildly different lives.

In the case of Wolf-Ruediger Hess, son of Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, one finds a complicated character. His father was argued to be "the darkest and most obscure of the leading Nazis" (Lebert p52) in My Father’s Keeper, but Wolf-Ruediger remained close to his father and corresponded with him regularly through his entire forty year prison sentence. His case is interesting because when the son was of age to be drafted into the German military, Wolf-Ruediger appealed his obligation to go. Based on the grounds that his father was imprisoned by the same organization of Allies that were associated with the German military, he felt that he could not serve while his father was still not free. He was eventually cleared of his duty to the armed forces, but had quite a fight to be recognized as a conscientious objector. This is obviously a story of a child with loyalty to his father, even when it was not easy. He states that his life revolved around his father, whose words and writings the son carefully contemplated and held dear. Wolf’s father was the only one in these examples to live long past the Nazi years. This fact alone would have allowed them the time to grow in the father/son relationship of earlier years, which would then allow Wolf to make more peace with his father’s past than those children whose relationships with their fathers were ended by their fathers’ early executions. With an actual human being sitting in front of him, Wolf had a far greater opportunity to humanize his convicted father than the children whose fathers were no longer alive. This must have allowed him to feel compassion or sympathy, perhaps lessening his more negative emotions, that he may not have felt if his father had been killed and was merely a memory.

But although he loved and respected his father, and although he was successful in his academics and career, Wolf-Ruediger looked "at the world so bitterly and filled with hate" (Lebert p75). It could be argued that here was a man who still suffers a great deal in other areas of his life despite having a close and positive relationship with his Nazi father. But perhaps we really just see a man who has had to live forty years with his dear father imprisoned, seeing him only on supervised visits, corresponding through letters once a month, and reading about him in the newspaper articles that spread rumors about him and denounced him as a murderer. These could arguably be the factors that resulted in Wolf’s sometimes bleak outlook on life.

Martin Bormann, whose godfather was Adolf Hitler, found himself alone and abandoned at a very young age, hiding out as a farm hand in the country. He was running from the new anti-Nazi campaign of Allied forces searching for Nazis and their families in order to put them on trial. When he was discovered, he was given up to a priest rather than a soldier, and quickly converted to Catholicism. He entered the priesthood and spent years as a missionary, though he later quit and married. One possibility for his religious devotion is that Martin was searching for something that could not only assuage his guilt about his father’s actions, but could grant him some kind of peace about his relationship with his father. He says he is the only one of his father’s seven children who cared to learn about or talk about Martin Bormann Sr., which probably stems from a positive relationship with him earlier in his life, and now allows him to remember his father as a real and loving person. Despite the physical difficulties of his childhood, ultimately caused by his father’s involvement with the Nazi regime, Martin does still have a present day psychological struggle. According to Lebert’s book , though today Martin readily admits his father’s actions and guilt, he holds that against his memories of a father who wrote to him in 1943, "My darling boy, I hope I’ll be able to see you again soon. Your Daddy." (Lebert p116-117) Bormann Jr. sustains this balance only through his spiritual beliefs, saying nothing else could explain it. Bormann has had to decide that his father and his father’s deeds were two different things in order to lessen the burden of his father’s legacy (Lebert p121). This idea ultimately seems to give him some peace, although Lebert points out how obviously the man still struggles with maintaining this separation in the face of what he knows his father had done. Clearly, if Martin’s relationship with his father had not been so positive, he would have definitely had more struggles to contend.

A different case entirely is that of Niklas Frank. Here is a man who was condemned for hating his father too much. Unlike some of the other children whose lives were made difficult because of the guilt by association with their fathers, Niklas’ life was made difficult by his own very vocal outbursts against his father’s beliefs and his father himself. Niklas’ writings were considered a disgrace by Germans of the 1980’s (Lebert p141), because they violently proclaim his hatred for his father. This hatred is in turn placed on himself, as he begins to see his father’s characteristics in his own feelings and actions. Here is one child who vehemently proclaims how horribly his father’s life has affected his own. Google marcuse 133c to find where this essay is published on the web. An insight of particular importance to this argument comes from the younger Lebert in regard to his father’s opinion of Niklas Frank’s behavior in 1959: "Maybe he [Lebert Sr.] knew all too well, after the research he’d carried out at the end of the 1950s, that anyone who wanted to overcome the Nazi past needed some sort of instrument of extreme force to do it." (Lebert 143) This could be one explanation of Niklas’ reaction, but the theory of the effect of his relationship with his father offers another.

Niklas talked in 1959 about researching his father’s life in order to get to know him, implying that they were not close before his father died. Being the only child in this book to feel so negatively towards his father as a person and not just his father’s actions, Niklas seems to demonstrate that the closer the relationship between father and child, the more understanding, compassion, and ultimately peace the child experiences. Perhaps had he known his father more, or had a closer relationship to his father in life, he would have been able to differentiate between the man and the actions, and let go of some of his rage.

Lastly, Gudrun Himmler. She was a girl who absolutely adored her father and revered his every word. She holds to conspiracy theories surrounding his death, and believes that when she is able to examine the documents from the time he was in office she will be able to correct his reputation and save his name, which she still holds so dear. She took very drastic measures to support her father, including imprisonment and a hunger strike. She refused to change her name despite the jobs, apartments, education, and other opportunities lost because of it. She refused to go to church, saying, "I want to stay the way my father was," and when asked about her father she simply stated, "My father was the Reichsfuehrer-SS" (Lebert p174-175). Gudrun Himmler has absolutely no shame and is apparently even very proud of her family and heritage. This is an example of a child of a Nazi who would not concede for a moment that her father had any negative effect on her life. Although Gudrun’s beliefs are held to be disgusting by most of the rest of the world, she still follows the argument that she is able to have some sort of stability in her beliefs because of her devotion to her father. She has taken a rather extreme route, but even she is not so unhappy as Niklas Frank, for example.

Lebert’s book was an incredibly compelling read that clearly and interestingly answered the question of the personal impact of the Nazi leaders. Through the case studies of their children and families, we can see how their relationships determined their families’ reactions and entire futures. How these people reacted to their fathers’ lives differed amazingly from one story to the next, but every one seems to have stemmed from something much more personal than their father’s involvement in the Nazi regime. In every case it is obvious that the children’s perceptions and experiences with their fathers dramatically shaped their future beliefs and ultimately their happiness. The children who were closer to their fathers seem to be able to come to terms with at least some part of the legacy and burden than those who were not. We can see that the children who were able to view their fathers as real people and not just abstract murderers were far better equipped to deal with the entire situation and the journey to understanding and overcoming their fathers’ Nazi past.

Sources:

Book reviews:

1. Publishers Weekly, July 30, 2001 v248 i31 p75
2. George Cohen, Booklist, August 2001 v97 i22 p2081

Books:

1. Dan Bar-on, Legacy of Silence (1991). Through individual stories, this book offers insight into the personal affects of Nazi leaders on their children. D804. 3 .B36 1989
2. Jean Steignberg and Peter Sichrovsky, Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families (1988). A book originally released in Germany about the struggle of children faced with a fascist heritage in a country now dedicated to democracy. DD256.5 .S34413 1988