I am going to tell more about the histories of my grandparents. I must point out that of course the perspective here is in a sense the perspective of people who to some degree participated in one of the worst crimes in human history. I think it is more difficult in Germany to come to terms with the history of the own grandparents than it would be for most people whose grandparents fought against the nazi regime.
I love my grandparents and I have been talking a lot with them about history. It is not my intention (or theirs) to justify or to trivialize what they were part of. Nor is there any intention to in any way "compensate" for the horrors caused by Germans in the world when, telling about the experiences of my grandparents, I will also describe the sufferings they went through during the years of World War 2.
I do hope that we may in the end have some stories here from people all around the world. Maybe some of you will ask their grandparents and learn about things you never knew before.
My grandpa Werner was born on January 20th 1920 and my grandma Ruth on February 15th 1924. So both of them were old enough to remember the entire time of nazi rule in Germany.
The most critical question many people in Germany can ask their grandparents is of course about what they did know about the Holocaust and the crimes that were committed in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Many elder people claimed that they did not know of anything at all, a claim which is extremely unlikely at best or more likely an excuse. For those who really wanted to know it was probably quite possible to learn about all that was going on and some people who wanted to found out and paid with their lives for trying to do what they could to stop the genocide (like Hans and Sophie Scholl who were roughly the same age as my grandpa).
My grandparents never pretended that they had not any idea at all of what was going on and they have been very open with me when it came to talking about those things which must be shameful for them to talk about. There were no heroes of the resistance against the nazi regime in my family that I am aware of, nor were there any high ranking functionaries of the regime. None of my grandparents was a member of the NSDAP while their parents were (refusing to join the NSDAP seriously decreased the chance of the own business to survive once the nazi rule was established). My grandparents did not outrightly promote the rule of the nazis, but they were among the huge majority of followers who by not protesting and not looking closely at what was going on bear their part of the responsibility of what they all by themselves could not have prevented but which they could have if they and some hundreds or thousands of others had not looked away. My grandparents have admitted that much and always made a strong point of hoping that the next generations, our generation that is, will learn from their mistakes.
My grandpa admitted that in the last years preceding Hitler's rise to power he was a lot more fascinated by the nazis martial militarist and "orderly" appearance when demonstrating in the streets than he was by the appearance of communist demonstrations which put a strong emphasis on appearing as part of the people (e.g. mothers with buggies participated in these demonstrations). He told me that his parents (though his father later joined the NSDAP) were not happy with his fascination. When at some point between 1930 and 1932 my grandpa had been beaten up after handing out nazi leaflets his father told him that it "served him right".
However, throughout the 1930s my grandpa said the fascination with the nazis did not decrease and it was commonly felt that Adolf Hitler had solved the problem of the extreme unemployment in the aftermath of the world economy crisis.
In this context I must point out that it is a rather persistent myth unfortunately that Hitler solved anything that others did not. While it is true that the number of unemployed did decrease in the 1930s this decrease was not as extreme as claimed by the nazi propaganda, it was not based so exclusively on policies pusued by the nazis only, and worst of all the new jobs that really were created by specific nazi policies were mainly such jobs that were connected to the preparation for the war.
Back to what my grandpa told about the time preceding WW2 he says that same as so many he was quite enthusiastic about the "re-union" with Austria and the occupation of the Sudettenland, the part of Czechoslovakia where there was a large percentage of German speaking people. He says that the very first time he doubted the politics of the nazis was when in March 1939, in outright violation of the Munich agreement, the rest of Czechoslovakia was occupied. He said that he felt that "we had no business there where they did not even speak our language". He did not come out with that thought though and it was not enough to turn him against the regime at that time.
Several months earlier on the 9th and 10th of November 1938 there had been the worst pogroms against Jews in Germany before the outbreak of WW2. In what became euphemized as the "Kristallnacht" (litterally "Crystal night", a reference to the broken glass that was lying everywhere on the streets the day after) Jewish shops, houses, and synagogues everywhere in Germany were systematically destroyed and sometimes torched. The belongings of Jews were destroyed and thrown onto the streets. The nazis claimed this to be a spontaneous outbreak of "Volkszorn" (literally "wrath of the people"), but it is proven by now that it was a long and systematically prepared pogrom.
My grandpa did not participate himself in any actions against Jews that night (and I am very relieved about that). But he admitted with some embarassment to me that the next day when he was walking through the streets with the destroyed belongings and pieces of broken glass everywhere all that he was thinking was that what a "waste of property" it was. He told me that at that time it did not even occur to him to think of the people, to think of those who were suffering from this. He told me that same as many he thought of it only "economically" and was "a bit repulsed" at the vandalism, but that it was not until much later that he ever thought about the Jews. From what he told most of those who did not chim in the nazi's anti-Jewish scape-goat propaganda apparently banished the Jews from their mind altogether speaking or thinking about them as little as possible
My grandma Ruth was born in Aplerbeck, the part of Dortmund where most of Dortmund's Jews lived. She can still give the names of many Jewish families she knew as a kid. Among them were some really wealthy business men of high social standing before 1933. My grandma remembers for example one very pious Jew who used to invite the children on Saturdays / Sabbaths. Because he was so pious he did not want to do any work on the Sabbath he gave the children chocolate and candy if they did the little works (turning on the heating, preparing a meal etc.) that had to be done.
Grandma said that nobody could possibly miss the fact that the Jews were disappearing. Prior to WW2 it was commonly assumed that they emigrated (which before WW2 was true for some) while later on it was a topic nobody mentioned anymore at all. She admits that even though she had known too many Jews in Aplerbeck to believe in the nazi propaganda against them she never stood up for anyone. First she said it was "unpleasant" to speak against what seemed to be the official position and later on she says one was really afraid of speaking about it at all.
She says that people generally knew that there were concentration camps and also that many Jews were imprisoned there along with (these words are what she told me she was told) "bad people". The direct mass murder, the gas chambers, and the genocide she said was not commonly known. She says that she as well as most people would know that bad things were happening there but she did not know about the dimensions. The main reason for not knowing about this however was probably not wanting to know. Grandma says she never tried to find out more about the "bad things" and avoided thinking about it or asking any questions.
I'm going to tell more also about the time of the second world war itself, but I am making a break now hoping that more of you will tell stories about their grandparents as well. If you have any questions that you would like to ask my grandparents please let me know and I will ask them if I can.
