How much of Europe was supportive of the Nazi's during WWII?

musicismylife78

so heres a question that i know that no one here can definitively answer but im interested in your views nonetheless.

say you were now living in Europe, Germany, Poland, at the height of Nazism. How much of the population of those key countries like Poland, or Germany, was actually ProNazi?

I guess first we need to know the population of Germany and of Europe during WWII, then we also have to take into account obviously the fact some people out of necessity had to be publicly pro nazi, but were privately helping Jewish families, or felt that if they spoke out they'd be killed, so they had to be publicly Pro Nazi.

So taking those things into account, as much as you can, how much, percentage wise, or millions of people wise, how much of the population of Europe, of Germany, of France, of Poland, of wherever, were ProNazi during WWII?

Was the majority of the European population as a whole at least publically pro-nazi?

Go Beavers

It would be too hard to come up with numbers on who was pro-nazi, but worthy of discussion. Also to add, consider the level of anti-semitism before, during, and after the war. I remember a survey of current attitudes in Europe, and France scored the highest on negative attitudes toward Jews.

JOEJOEJOE

Go Beavers wrote:

It would be too hard to come up with numbers on who was pro-nazi, but worthy of discussion. Also to add, consider the level of anti-semitism before, during, and after the war. I remember a survey of current attitudes in Europe, and France scored the highest on negative attitudes toward Jews.

You'd think a country that was "hilter's bitch" during the war would be a bit more enlightened!

musicismylife78

to stir the pot even more, you mentioned antisemitism after the war. how about Europe and Germany now? Is the level of antisemitism still at a high level but just hidden, or worse swept under the rug like racism in this country, and basically accepted as daily reality? Has antisemitism in Germany just gone underground, but is still there essentially?

JOEJOEJOE

musicismylife78 wrote:

to stir the pot even more, you mentioned antisemitism after the war. how about Europe and Germany now? Is the level of antisemitism still at a high level but just hidden, or worse swept under the rug like racism in this country, and basically accepted as daily reality? Has antisemitism in Germany just gone underground, but is still there essentially?

It still exists in Germany, however, younger people are generally enightened and do what they can to distance themselves from the past.

Go Beavers

JOEJOEJOE wrote:

musicismylife78 wrote:

to stir the pot even more, you mentioned antisemitism after the war. how about Europe and Germany now? Is the level of antisemitism still at a high level but just hidden, or worse swept under the rug like racism in this country, and basically accepted as daily reality? Has antisemitism in Germany just gone underground, but is still there essentially?

It still exists in Germany, however, younger people are generally enightened and do what they can to distance themselves from the past.

I'm always curious about Germany and the younger generations thoughts toward the Holocaust. Can anyone give some generalizations about how it's dealt with, discussed, general feelings about, talked about in schools, etc.

he still stands

well, if you weren't supportive (publicy anyway) you were sent to the death camps... and if you voiced your disdain in private your friends, or even your children, were likely to report you to the SS. So, it's hard to know what people's private thoughts were on the matter... or how many who voiced their dissent for Nazi's AFTER the fact were being truthful.

he still stands

Go Beavers wrote:

JOEJOEJOE wrote:

musicismylife78 wrote:

to stir the pot even more, you mentioned antisemitism after the war. how about Europe and Germany now? Is the level of antisemitism still at a high level but just hidden, or worse swept under the rug like racism in this country, and basically accepted as daily reality? Has antisemitism in Germany just gone underground, but is still there essentially?

It still exists in Germany, however, younger people are generally enightened and do what they can to distance themselves from the past.

I'm always curious about Germany and the younger generations thoughts toward the Holocaust. Can anyone give some generalizations about how it's dealt with, discussed, general feelings about, talked about in schools, etc.

interestingly, there is a lot of guilt from the youngest generation. I had several German dudes in my MBA classes and one night over drinks I brought up this touchy subject. I couldn't believe how guilty they felt for their grandparents' decisions.

Granted, this is the opinion of about four German kids in 2003 whilst drunk, so take it with a grain of salt.

Who Princess

Go Beavers wrote:

JOEJOEJOE wrote:

musicismylife78 wrote:

to stir the pot even more, you mentioned antisemitism after the war. how about Europe and Germany now? Is the level of antisemitism still at a high level but just hidden, or worse swept under the rug like racism in this country, and basically accepted as daily reality? Has antisemitism in Germany just gone underground, but is still there essentially?

It still exists in Germany, however, younger people are generally enightened and do what they can to distance themselves from the past.

I'm always curious about Germany and the younger generations thoughts toward the Holocaust. Can anyone give some generalizations about how it's dealt with, discussed, general feelings about, talked about in schools, etc.

I asked a German friend how it is taught in school and he said that the emphasis is all on "never again."

redrock

You may be confusing pro Hitler (ie the NSDAP party) with pro Nazi (as most would understand Nazi).

brandon10

I believe much of the population in places like Great Britain and even America were a little bit pro Nazi before everything escalated.

On another note. Has anyone ever wondered what the world would be like had the Nazi's won the war? It's hard to even fathom.

FinsburyParkCarrots

The place was crawling with Nazi sympathisers from the early thirties onwards. Britain had its own Blackshirt movement. Google Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, and Diana and Unity Mitford. Ireland had its Blueshirts, or National Guard, who eventually merged with two other parties, Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Centre Party, to form Fine Gael. W.B. Yeats flirted with fascism for a time in his typically ambivalent and silly fashion.

The right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail is well-known for its headline "Hurrah For The Blackshirts", but what is not often mentioned is that the supposedly left-of-centre Daily Mirror also published this article:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_m-F6RNSjdyU/T ... irror2.jpg

The fascists, even more controversially, had support from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor:

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/113232

And don't forget Lord Haw Haw:

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/lord%20haw_haw.htm

There was also that priest in Father Ted, but I don't know if we can count him.

whygohome

Just my 2 cents on antisemitism in Germany. My girlfriend is form Germany and we visit her family often. Amongst her generation, they have greatly distanced themselves from the ideologies of Nazism and the remnants that lingered throughout the 20th century. As for her family, there are embarrassed when it comes to Hitler and the Nazis, and it is never mentioned.
I guess this is a situation when an extreme will cause a flourish of enlightened philosophies. Hopefully.

Byrnzie

musicismylife78 wrote:

so heres a question that i know that no one here can definitively answer but im interested in your views nonetheless.

say you were now living in Europe, Germany, Poland, at the height of Nazism. How much of the population of those key countries like Poland, or Germany, was actually ProNazi?

I guess first we need to know the population of Germany and of Europe during WWII, then we also have to take into account obviously the fact some people out of necessity had to be publicly pro nazi, but were privately helping Jewish families, or felt that if they spoke out they'd be killed, so they had to be publicly Pro Nazi.

So taking those things into account, as much as you can, how much, percentage wise, or millions of people wise, how much of the population of Europe, of Germany, of France, of Poland, of wherever, were ProNazi during WWII?

Was the majority of the European population as a whole at least publically pro-nazi?

Why limit your question to Europe? Why not include America, George Lincoln Rockwell, and the American Nazi Party?

But in answer to your question, no, most of Europe wasn't pro-nazi, hence why the majority of European countries spent 6 years waging war against Nazism.

satansbed

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

The place was crawling with Nazi sympathisers from the early thirties onwards. Britain had its own Blackshirt movement. Google Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, and Diana and Unity Mitford. Ireland had its Blueshirts, or National Guard, who eventually merged with two other parties, Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Centre Party, to form Fine Gael. W.B. Yeats flirted with fascism for a time in his typically ambivalent and silly fashion.

The right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail is well-known for its headline "Hurrah For The Blackshirts", but what is not often mentioned is that the supposedly left-of-centre Daily Mirror also published this article:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_m-F6RNSjdyU/T ... irror2.jpg

The fascists, even more controversially, had support from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor:

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/113232

And don't forget Lord Haw Haw:

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/lord%20haw_haw.htm

There was also that priest in Father Ted, but I don't know if we can count him.

i would like to point out that the blueshirts where only quasi facist, and while there was an element of anti semitism it was more to do with the cultural norm and there was no policy of rounding up jewish people...

but anyway carry on

dimitrispearljam

proud that my country fight against Nazi's..

FinsburyParkCarrots

satansbed wrote:

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

The place was crawling with Nazi sympathisers from the early thirties onwards. Britain had its own Blackshirt movement. Google Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, and Diana and Unity Mitford. Ireland had its Blueshirts, or National Guard, who eventually merged with two other parties, Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Centre Party, to form Fine Gael. W.B. Yeats flirted with fascism for a time in his typically ambivalent and silly fashion.

The right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail is well-known for its headline "Hurrah For The Blackshirts", but what is not often mentioned is that the supposedly left-of-centre Daily Mirror also published this article:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_m-F6RNSjdyU/T ... irror2.jpg

The fascists, even more controversially, had support from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor:

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/113232

And don't forget Lord Haw Haw:

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/lord%20haw_haw.htm

There was also that priest in Father Ted, but I don't know if we can count him.

i would like to point out that the blueshirts where only quasi facist, and while there was an element of anti semitism it was more to do with the cultural norm and there was no policy of rounding up jewish people...

but anyway carry on

Ah, it's true that the blueshirts weren't overtly anti-semitic, and the reason for this might have something to do with what the fictional (and anti-Jewish) Mr Deasy says in Ulysses about Jews never having been "let in" to the country in the first place to precipitate such evident prejudice. But let's quibble a bit about semantics here, because your description of the blueshirts as quasi-fascist perplexes me a bit. Fascism does not necessarily and by definition incorporate anti-semitism but is instead rather more to do with supporting an anti-liberal totalitarianism, and so, fascism without overt anti-semitism is not quasi-fascism. Fascism also evolved over the 1930s and while it involved different beliefs, anti-liberal, one-state absolutism was its core obsession. The blueshirts were minor fascists though, and they evolved over time to become more obviously fascistic in many key respects under Eoin O' Duffy. Under O' Duffy, their support for the Nazis under was most clearly obvious in their involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Franco, interestingly enough, thought Eoin O' Duffy was a drunken arsehole and a pussy for not wanting to fight the Basques.

O' Duffy was a cranky Catholic clericalist in the mould of Fr Denis Fahey. Defenders of Fahey try to argue that this priest wasn't strictly an anti-semite but more of a conspiracy theorist, but his belief in the veracity of the Zionist Protocols pretty much gives the game away for him. Fahey wrote a diatribe called The Kingship of Christ, which basically said that Catholic civilisation was being attacked by communists, liberals, freemasons and Zionists.

Speculating, I think, however, it's a safe bet that privately, O' Duffy and his followers would have been influenced by this horrendously paranoid, anti-semitic thinking without publicly stating any final solution as one of its objectives for Irish fascists.

kenny olav

About 37% of German voters during the Weimar Republic supported the Nazi Party at it's height...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_fed ... tion,_1930 Nazi's 18.3%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_election,_July_1932 Nazi's 37.8%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_ele ... ember_1932 Nazi's 33.1%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_fed ... March_1933 (after Nazi suppression of the SPD and Communist vote and their pinning the Reichstag fire on the Communists) Nazi's 43.9%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_ele ... ember_1933 (after all opposition parties were banned) Nazi's 92.2%

It should be noted that two of the opposition parties were also nationalist parties: the German National People's Party and the Bavarian People's Party. But the total nationalist vote was never higher than 46%. A message of nationalism combined with socialism was apparently what got the Nazi's to where there were electorally, but after Hitler decided elections weren't working out the way he wanted them to, we saw the rise of fascism in Germany.

kenny olav

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wels

Otto Wels (September 15, 1873 – September 16, 1939) was the chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) from 1919 and a member of parliament from 1920 to 1933.

On March 23, 1933 the Berlin-born Wels was the only member of the Reichstag to speak against Adolf Hitler's Enabling Act (the "Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich"). The vote took place during the last session of a multi-party Reichstag, on March 23, 1933. Because the Reichstag building itself had suffered heavy burning damage in February, the March session was held in Berlin's Kroll Opera House. Despite the incipient persecution of leftist and oppositional politicians and the presence of the SA, he made a clear speech opposing the Enabling Act, which formally took the power of legislation away from the Reichstag and handed it over to the Reich cabinet for a period of four years.

He declared:

"At this historic hour, we German Social Democrats pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and Socialism. No Enabling Law can give you the power to destroy ideas which are eternal and indestructible ... From this new persecution too German Social Democracy can draw new strength. We send greetings to the persecuted and oppressed. We greet our friends in the Reich. Their steadfastness and loyalty deserve admiration. The courage with which they maintain their convictions and their unbroken confidence guarantee a brighter future."

Looking directly at Hitler, Wels proclaimed,

"You can take our lives and our freedom, but you cannot take our honour. We are defenseless but not honourless."

All 96 SPD members of parliament voted against the act; the rest of the Reichstag (besides the Communists, who were disabled of voting) voted in favour. The passage of the Enabling Act marked the end of parliamentary democracy in Germany and formed the legal authority for Hitler's dictatorship. Within weeks of the passage of the Enabling Act, the Hitler government banned the SPD while the other German political parties chose to dissolve themselves to avoid prosecution, making the Nazi party the only legal political party in Germany.

In August 1933 he was deprived of his citizenship, and after the banning of the SPD by the Nazis in June 1933, Wels went into exile to the Territory of the Saar Basin, which at the time was under League of Nations control. He then moved to build up the expatriate SPD, first in Prague and then in Paris, where he died in 1939.

satansbed

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

satansbed wrote:

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

The place was crawling with Nazi sympathisers from the early thirties onwards. Britain had its own Blackshirt movement. Google Oswald Mosley, the head of the British Union of Fascists, and Diana and Unity Mitford. Ireland had its Blueshirts, or National Guard, who eventually merged with two other parties, Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Centre Party, to form Fine Gael. W.B. Yeats flirted with fascism for a time in his typically ambivalent and silly fashion.

The right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail is well-known for its headline "Hurrah For The Blackshirts", but what is not often mentioned is that the supposedly left-of-centre Daily Mirror also published this article:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_m-F6RNSjdyU/T ... irror2.jpg

The fascists, even more controversially, had support from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor:

http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/113232

And don't forget Lord Haw Haw:

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/lord%20haw_haw.htm

There was also that priest in Father Ted, but I don't know if we can count him.

i would like to point out that the blueshirts where only quasi facist, and while there was an element of anti semitism it was more to do with the cultural norm and there was no policy of rounding up jewish people...

but anyway carry on

Ah, it's true that the blueshirts weren't overtly anti-semitic, and the reason for this might have something to do with what the fictional (and anti-Jewish) Mr Deasy says in Ulysses about Jews never having been "let in" to the country in the first place to precipitate such evident prejudice. But let's quibble a bit about semantics here, because your description of the blueshirts as quasi-fascist perplexes me a bit. Fascism does not necessarily and by definition incorporate anti-semitism but is instead rather more to do with supporting an anti-liberal totalitarianism, and so, fascism without overt anti-semitism is not quasi-fascism. Fascism also evolved over the 1930s and while it involved different beliefs, anti-liberal, one-state absolutism was its core obsession. The blueshirts were minor fascists though, and they evolved over time to become more obviously fascistic in many key respects under Eoin O' Duffy. Under O' Duffy, their support for the Nazis under was most clearly obvious in their involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Franco, interestingly enough, thought Eoin O' Duffy was a drunken arsehole and a pussy for not wanting to fight the Basques.

O' Duffy was a cranky Catholic clericalist in the mould of Fr Denis Fahey. Defenders of Fahey try to argue that this priest wasn't strictly an anti-semite but more of a conspiracy theorist, but his belief in the veracity of the Zionist Protocols pretty much gives the game away for him. Fahey wrote a diatribe called The Kingship of Christ, which basically said that Catholic civilisation was being attacked by communists, liberals, freemasons and Zionists.

Speculating, I think, however, it's a safe bet that privately, O' Duffy and his followers would have been influenced by this horrendously paranoid, anti-semitic thinking without publicly stating any final solution as one of its objectives for Irish fascists.

i have a book on it at home but this is just from wikipedia

The Blueshirts are sometimes described as "quasi-fascist",[1] and the extent to which they can be seen as the Irish equivalent of Hitler's Brownshirts and Mussolini's Blackshirts continues to be debated. They employed paramilitary-style uniforms, greeted each other with the Roman salute, and participated in street fights against the IRA.[2] On the other hand, fascist ideology was not widespread among rank-and-file members, many of whom simply shared an opposition to the IRA, the governing Fianna Fáil party, and contemporary economic policies.[3] The organisation was defensive rather than offensive in outlook, and unlike their European counterparts, members were not known to engage in political terrorism. The historian R. M. Douglas has written: "[M]ost scholars... accept that those who have sought to find in the Blueshirts an Irish manifestation of fascism have been looking in the wrong place

jethrojam420

Go Beavers wrote:

JOEJOEJOE wrote:

musicismylife78 wrote:

to stir the pot even more, you mentioned antisemitism after the war. how about Europe and Germany now? Is the level of antisemitism still at a high level but just hidden, or worse swept under the rug like racism in this country, and basically accepted as daily reality? Has antisemitism in Germany just gone underground, but is still there essentially?

It still exists in Germany, however, younger people are generally enightened and do what they can to distance themselves from the past.

I'm always curious about Germany and the younger generations thoughts toward the Holocaust. Can anyone give some generalizations about how it's dealt with, discussed, general feelings about, talked about in schools, etc.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110514/ap_ ... he_fathers


German grandchildren of Nazis delve into past
AP

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Hanns Elard Luding, Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler AP – This 1936 photo made by Gottfried Gilbert and provided by Alexandra Senfft shows her grandfather Hanns …
By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER, Associated Press – 1 hr 44 mins ago

BERLIN – Rainer Hoess was 12 years old when he found out his grandfather was one of the worst mass murderers in history.

The gardener at his boarding school, an Auschwitz survivor, beat him black and blue after hearing he was the grandson of Rudolf Hoess, commandant of the death camp synonymous with the Holocaust.

"He beat me, because he projected on me all the horror he went through," Rainer Hoess said, with a shrug and a helpless smile. "Once a Hoess, always a Hoess. Whether you're the grandfather or the grandson — guilty is guilty."

Germans have for decades confronted the Nazi era head-on, paying billions in compensation, meticulously teaching Third Reich history in school, and building memorials to victims. The conviction Thursday in Munich of retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk on charges he was a guard at the Sobibor Nazi death camp drives home how the Holocaust is still very much at the forefront of the German psyche.

But most Germans have skirted their own possible family involvement in Nazi atrocities. Now, more than 65 years after the end of Hitler's regime, an increasing number of Germans are trying to pierce the family secrets.

Some, like Hoess, have launched an obsessive solitary search. Others seek help from seminars and workshops that have sprung up across Germany to provide research guidance and psychological support.

"From the outside, the third generation has had it all — prosperity, access to education, peace and stability," said Sabine Bode, who has written books on how the Holocaust weighs on German families today. "Yet they grew up with a lot of unspoken secrets, felt the silent burdens in their families that were often paired with a lack of emotional warmth and vague anxieties."

Like others, Hoess had to overcome fierce resistance within his own family, who preferred that he "not poke around in the past." Undeterred, he spent lonely hours at archives and on the Internet researching his grandfather.

Rudolf Hoess was in charge of Auschwitz from May 1940 to November 1943. He came back to Auschwitz for a short stint in 1944, to oversee the murder of some 400,000 Hungarian Jews in the camp's gas chambers within less than two months.

The commandant lived in a luxurious mansion at Auschwitz with his wife and five children — among them Hans-Rudolf, the father of Rainer. Only 150 meters (yards) away the crematories' chimneys were blowing out the ashes of the dead day and night.

After the war, Hoess went into hiding on a farm in northern Germany; he was eventually captured and hanged in 1947, in front of his former home on the grounds of Auschwitz.

"When I investigate and read about my grandfather's crimes, it tears me apart every single time," Hoess said during a recent interview at his home in a little Black Forest village.

As a young man, he said, he tried twice to kill himself. He has suffered three heart attacks in recent years as well as asthma, which he says gets worse when he digs into his family's Nazi past.

Today, Hoess says, he no longer feels guilty, but the burden of the past weighs on him at all times.

"My grandfather was a mass murderer — something that I can only be ashamed and sad about," said the 45-year-old chef and father of two boys and two girls. "However, I do not want to close my eyes and pretend nothing ever happened, like the rest of my family still does ... I want to stop the curse that's been haunting my family ever since, for the sake of myself and that of my own children."

Hoess is no longer in contact with his father, brother, aunts and cousins, who all call him a traitor. Strangers often look at him with distrust when he tells them about his grandfather — "as if I could have inherited his evil."

Despite such reactions, descendants of Nazis — from high-ranking officials to lowly foot soldiers — are increasingly trying to find out what their families did between 1933 to 1945.

"The Nazis — the first generation — were too ashamed to talk about the crimes they committed and covered everything up. The second generation often had trouble personally confronting their Nazi parents. So now it is up to the grandchildren to lift the curses off their families," said Bode.

It was only during her university years — reading books about the Holocaust — that Ursula Boger found out her grandfather was the most dreaded torturer at Auschwitz.

"I felt numb for days after I read about what he did," recalled Boger, a shy, soft-spoken woman who lives near Freiburg in southwestern Germany. "For many years I was ashamed to tell anybody about him, but then I realized that my own silence was eating me up from inside."

Her grandfather, Wilhelm Boger, invented the so-called Boger swing at Auschwitz — an iron bar that hung on chains from the ceiling. Boger would force naked inmates to bend over the bar and beat their genitals until they fainted or died.

Boger, 41, said it took her several years of therapy and group seminars to begin to come to terms with the fact her grandfather was a monster.

"I felt guilty, even though I hadn't committed a crime myself, felt like I had to do only good things at all times to make up for his evil," she said.

Like Hoess, Boger never personally met her grandfather, who died in prison in 1977. After her father died five years ago, she found old letters from her grandfather begging to see his grandchildren in prison — something that never happened.

"It all just doesn't go together," Boger said. "He is the man who killed a little boy with an apple who came in on a transport to Auschwitz, by smashing his head against a wall until he was dead, and then picked up and ate that apple.

"At the same time, he put a picture of myself as a little girl over his bed in prison. How am I supposed to come to terms with this?"

Tanja Hetzer, a therapist in Berlin, helps clients dealing with issues related to their family's Nazi past. While there are no studies or statistics, she said, many cases indicate that descendants of families who have never dealt with their Nazi family history suffer more from depression, burnout and addiction, in particular alcoholism.

In one prominent case, Bettina Goering, the grandniece of Hermann Goering, one of the country's leading Nazis and the head of the Luftwaffe air force, said in an Israeli TV documentary that she decided to be sterilized at age 30 "because I was afraid to bear another such monster."

Some grandchildren of Nazis find a measure of catharsis in confronting the past.

Alexandra Senfft is the granddaughter of Hanns Elard Ludin, Hitler's Slovakia envoy who was involved in the deportation of almost 70,000 Jews. After Ludin was hanged in 1947, his widow raised the children in the belief their father was "a good Nazi."

In her book, "The Pain of Silence," Senfft describes how a web of lies burdened her family over decades, especially her mother, who was 14 years old when her beloved father was hanged.

"It was unbearable at times to work on this book, it brought up fears and pain, but at the same time I got a lot out of writing it all down," Senfft, a lively 49-year-old, explained during an interview at a Berlin coffee shop.

"If I had continued to remain oblivious and silent about my grandfather's crimes, I would have become complicit myself, perhaps without even being aware of it."

Senfft said she also wrote the book so her children could be free of guilt and shame, and that confronting family pasts is essential for the health of German society as a whole so that history does not repeat itself.

These days Rainer Hoess lectures schoolchildren about the Nazi era and anti-Semitism. A few months ago, he visited Auschwitz for the first time and met a group of Israeli students.

That day was "probably the most difficult and intense day in my life," Hoess said, but it was also liberating because he realized that the third generation of Jews after the Holocaust did not hold him responsible. One Israeli girl even gave him a little shell with a blue Star of David painted on it, which he now wears around his neck on a black leather necklace at all times.

Hoess was embroiled in controversy in 2009 when Israeli media reported he tried to sell some of his grandfather's possessions to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial. But email correspondence seen by the AP backs up Hoess' assertion that he would have been just as willing to donate the items. Hoess eventually donated everything he owned from his grandfather — including a trunk, letters and a cigar cutter — to the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich.

Hoess acknowledges that his grandfather will probably never stop haunting him. After his visit to Auschwitz, he met Jozef Paczynski, a Polish camp survivor and the former barber of Commandant Hoess.

"Somehow, subconsciously, I was hoping that maybe he would tell me one positive story about my grandfather, something that shows that he wasn't all evil after all, that there was some goodness in him," Hoess confided.

Paczynski asked Hoess to get up and walk across the room — then told him: "You look exactly like your grandfather."