Hard Feelings

I am the son of an SS-Untersturmführer. My father died in 1990 at an SS veterans’ reunion. I was thirty-three years old and knew very little about his past. It increasingly embarrassed me that I could not say exactly how my father was involved in the crimes of National Socialism. This lack of knowledge seemed to me like a silent complicity. It took more than twenty years before I was able to piece together a nearly complete picture of his past. The historical knowledge that I acquired during this time culminated in a dissertation on the Waffen-SS in 2003. Looking back, I can say that I wrote about the subject with “external” distance, but in reality it touched my very core. The memories of my childhood and youth had not left me, but only my wife was aware of them. My father was erratic. His love and harshness, his closeness and distant withdrawal, the affection and the blows when I was disobedient, were not to be revealed to the public.

The turning point came in 2013 when Ofra Bloch interviewed me for her film Afterward. I traveled to Berlin assuming I would be asked about my research on the SS and was annoyed that Ofra wanted to talk to me about my feelings as the son of an SS officer. It was the first time in my life that I talked for hours about the emotional impact my father had on me. The conversation shook me to my core. Two years later, I published another book about the Waffen-SS. It included a biography of my father and the first hints of my feelings in dealing with his story. Without the interview initiated by Ofra in 2013, I would certainly not have dared to write my new book, or to ask Ofra to write the epilogue. The fact that she, as a Jew, agreed to do this for me as the son of an SS man, could not have been more unlikely. The book, Shadows—Our Fathers in the Waffen-SS was published in 2024. It is a personal examination of the traces of SS education, of the war traumas of various SS fathers, and of their children’s feelings. 

Nowadays every German is confronted with the Shoah at school. It was different at the beginning of the seventies when I was young. You would still hear anti-Semitic prejudices from older people, relatives, teachers, or simply from the “normal man” on the street. “That’s a Jew, after all,” was a common saying to express the clandestine agreement that Jews didn’t belong with us.  And at school, the confrontation with the Shoah had only just started. In class, when we were shown film footage of the Holocaust for the first time, we watched it without any thought of our fathers’ involvement. We all knew that our fathers had been soldiers, but the question of their involvement in the Holocaust was not addressed. In dealing with National Socialism, the Nazis were always “the others” and never our own family. The taboo of penetrating the conflict into the private sphere has consequences for German society to this day. Many Germans assume that their fathers would have opposed National Socialism, which contradicts historical evidence. For most Germans, coming to terms with the Nazi era stopped at the family threshold. You could say that the head condemned the crimes of the parent generation while the heart remained uninvolved. It was never about feeling the suffering of the victims. 

Contemporaries also complained about Jews in my youth. I remember a discussion during my studies in the 1980s when a German fellow student complained that Jews in Israel refused to greet him and refused to shake hands. I reprimanded him and expressed understanding for the fact that, as a victim, one does not have to welcome the descendants of the murderers. I recognized the right of the Jews to establish a state in Israel and also understood the Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation. Over the years, I was occasionally asked why I did not write about Israeli politics. My answer was that, as the son of an SS officer, I was not entitled to do so. How could the Holocaust survivors and their descendants see my criticism as anything other than the rebirth of my SS heritage? Today it seems to me that my public confrontation with my father was necessary for me to be able to write about Israel and Palestine.

When I look at the reactions of us Germans to the Hamas massacre, I think I recognize a repetition of the structure so familiar to me from the process of coming to terms with the Nazi era. Feelings are not wanted. On October 7, 2023, Hamas murdered, tortured, and raped women and children, and abducted over 240 Jews. Due to its past and the responsibility for the Shoah, Germany immediately declared its solidarity with the state of Israel. But the displayed solidarity remained strangely sober and unemotional. As if the official position were too superficial and fragile to allow open discussion, thoughtful and critical voices in relation to Israel’s policy in Germany came under pressure. When the philosopher Slavoj Žižek condemned the massacre at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair in October but at the same time wanted to embed it in the overall political situation in Israel and Palestine, his speech was made impossible by heckling and protests.

Israel’s response to October 7 was not long in coming. Since the devastating attacks on Gaza began, more than 52,000 Palestinians have been killed there, many of them women and children. In Germany, the mantra-like expression of solidarity with the state of Israel is accompanied by a shrug of regret at the many dead and the total destruction in Gaza, or at best with admonitions to the IDF to be more careful when killing. In many conversations, I noticed an emotional indifference to the suffering of the Palestinians. Some even went so far as to say that the Palestinians didn’t deserve better, that the deaths of children were regrettable, but that in the end they would have become nothing more than terrorists anyway.

This coldness of feeling is matched by the arrogance of German voices to label critical Jews as anti-Semitic. Philosopher Judith Butler soon got to the heart of the matter: every German could thus feed his anti-Semitism by calling them, as a Jew, anti-Semitic, while at the same time expressing his supposed solidarity with the Jews by unconditionally supporting the state of Israel under a Netanyahu government in which right-wing racists sit. Anti-Semitism is one form of racism; Islamophobia is another. Muslims have long been a thorn in the side of a large part of mainstream society in Germany. The German reaction to October 7, which I have described as lacking in emotion, is continued in the indifference to the suffering of the Palestinians and fits in with German Islamophobia.

To put it bluntly: the horror and bloodlust of the massacre of October 7 cannot be justified by anything, not even by the unlawful Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the illegal settlements. Likewise, the horror and bloodlust of the bombardment and destruction of Gaza and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, women and children cannot be justified by anything, not even with the murderous massacre of October 7.

Obviously, we Germans have not truly internalized the most important message of Auschwitz. The SS Sonderkommando under Hans Bothmann cleared the Litzmannstadt ghetto and murdered thousands of Jews. At the same time, it donated an abundance of supplies for orphaned ethnic German children, for which it received special praise from the SS leadership. The coldness of the murderers towards the “other” was matched by the care for their own. The foreign children were nothing, their own everything. “Never again Auschwitz” cannot only mean protection of Jewish life but of all life.

The image of a young Jewish demonstrator in Tel Aviv crying and holding up a sign calling for an end to genocide is etched in my mind. I read the names of the Jewish children murdered on October 7. I saw the pictures of the children killed in Gaza. I no longer want to distance myself from this. I read the names and see the dead children with the eyes of a grandfather who has four grandchildren of his own. I see my grandchildren in them.

The Algerian-born French writer Albert Camus said that all misery begins with the abstraction of the human. The frequent admissions of guilt expressed in Germany rarely touched the feelings of the Germans. So it is possible that we assuage our guilty conscience with a solidarity with Israel that has no emotional depth. It is this practiced, distanced attitude that also makes us look on, uninvolved, as thousands die in Gaza.

But let us not be too sure that our attitude makes us immune to history repeating itself, albeit in a different guise. As the Bulgarian-French philosopher Tzvetan Todorov writes of the Nazis in Facing the Extreme: “If we had been in their place, we could have become like them.”

What should be the lesson for us in relation to the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel? It is about giving space to the suffering of both sides. Immediately, the war in Gaza must end and the hostages must be set free. The Israeli occupation and the illegal settlements must end and the right of the Jewish population to exist must be guaranteed in a self-determined way. In this context, the boundary of each side’s freedom is where the curtailment of the other side’s freedom begins.