Review: Children of Nazis: The Sons and Daughters of Himmler, Göring, Höss, Mengele, and Others— Living with a Father’s Monstrous Legacy

Children of Nazis: The Sons and Daughters of Himmler, Göring, Höss, Mengele, and Others— Living with a Father’s Monstrous Legacy by Tania Crasnianski
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been fascinated by the second world war since I learned about it in eighth grade. My fascination centered around the Holocaust, the attempt to exterminate the Jews. It seemed so clear who the good people and the bad people were. The Germans, Italians, and Japanese were bad; the Americans, British, and French were good. The Soviet Union was also bad, but it did help beat the Germans.

Corrie Ten Boom wrote about hiding Jews in the Holland home she shared with her father and sister in The Hiding Place. Anne Frank wrote her diary about hiding in a similar place.

And then the Americans entered the war and it ended. At least that's what is seemed like in the history books I read in high school.

Later on I began to see the complexities, the complicity of the French. The British who were reluctant to go to war against the Germans. The French who collaborated with the Germans. The anti-Semitism in all the "good" countries. The racism and misogyny in all the countries, good and bad.

But still, it seemed like history, long past. From time to time I would hear about Nazi hunters, but that seemed remote. Nazis were mostly gone, weren't they?

This book challenges that viewpoint, which in retrospect, seems naive. The past isn't past. Nazi viewpoints didn't disappear with the end of the war. Anti-Semitism and ideals of racial purity didn't evaporate when Hitler committed suicide. How did such recent history get swept into the past while people still lived? The author offers this observation: "By the late 1940s, a majority of West Germans had wanted to turn the page on the war and put an end to the denazification trials, which many resented as both a burden imposed by the Allies and an obstacle to the country’s democratization."

In Germany, people blamed Hitler for everything. In the US, we felt moral superiority. We fought the Nazis and won. Greatest generation, and all that.

This book reviews the lives of the children of prominent Nazis. Some of them celebrated their fathers; some denied their fathers' complicity; some went to great lengths to separate themselves from their fathers, but found it nearly impossible.

The thing is, these children, were living only a few years ago. Some still live. And there are Nazi sympathizers who celebrate them, who celebrate the ideals of the party. These sympathizers never disappeared; they just went underground. And they live in Germany--and the United States. (I'm sure they are elsewhere too, but I really only know my country.)

The author asks, "Can the past protect us from extremism, whatever its origins? It must be hoped. The generation of the Hitler Youth is dying out; four generations have followed it. It is no longer unthinkable to try to understand how any of us might have reacted in that era’s social, economic, and legal context."

I don't think so. We see the rise of the far right all across the West. We see villification of people of color, of immigrants, of cultures other than our own. In the United States, we have never fully dealt with our past, filled with slavery, genocide, Jim Crow laws, discrimination. Instead, we condemned Germany--and South Africa, eventually.

As a white middle class woman raised in the US, it has been easy for me to pretend like the past is past, evil has been defeated, justice has been achieved. And yet, all around me, I see racist comments become more common, even from the president, and good people, people who would never actually say those things, overlook those things in the name of achieving their own political goals.

Can the past protect us from extremism? I wish that were true, but I am not hopeful.

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