A Dark Legacy
HOHMAN, JENNIFER
REVIEWS Books, Music & Video A Dark Legacy My Father's Keeper—Children of Nazi Leaders—An Intimate History of Damage and Denial Stephan and Norbert Lebert, translated by Julian Evans. New York:...
...These people were transformed virtually overnight from children of privilege to children of criminals, fugitives, and condemned men...
...While some of the "children" have written books themselves and many have been the subjects of articles and books, My Father's Keeper stands out for its nuanced investigation into truth and denial, guilt and redemption...
...Defending National Socialism, blaming the Jews for their suffering, and, above all, proclaiming his father's moral greatness, "young" Hess has tried to live out his Nazi father's ideals...
...As a child I made your death my own," Niklas wrote of his father, then in prison...
...For Gudrun Himmler, the daughter of mass murderer Heinrich Himmler, there is no reconciliation—only denial...
...REVIEWS Books, Music & Video A Dark Legacy My Father's Keeper—Children of Nazi Leaders—An Intimate History of Damage and Denial Stephan and Norbert Lebert, translated by Julian Evans...
...At the other end of the spectrum are people like Martin Bormann Jr., son of Hitler's valued lieutenant...
...The same goes for Wolf- Riidigger Hess, son of Rudolf Hess, one of Hitler's deputy party leaders, who spent his entire adulthood defending his father and appealing for his release from prison...
...Bormann Jr., a priest, condemned National Socialism, and has spoken with children of Holocaust survivors in Israel...
...said, "You know, you never escape from your parents, whoever they are...
...If Stephan has one overwhelming question it is how tiiese aging "children," born into infamy through no fault of their own, have made sense of their fathers' dark legacies...
...She idolizes her father, and says that it is her "life's work to show [my father] to the world in a different light...
...Similarly, Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank, Hitler's governor-general in Poland who was hanged in Nuremberg, has spoken out against his father's actions...
...Stephan, born in 1961, re-interviewed the surviving children of Nazis including Himmler, Goring, and Hess, now in their 60s and 70s, and weaves together his father's material with his own...
...In his youth, he wrote an article called My Father, the Nazi Murderer, which earned him public scorn from a nation not yet ready to fully confront its Nazi past...
...The result is an ailing, embittered, immovable man who even now denies the scale of the Holocaust," writes Stephan...
...For the rest of their lives they would try to reconcile those identities...
...I willed your death...
...Author Stephan Lebert, a German journalist, decided to write the book after he discovered a 1959 article written by his late father, Norbert (also a journalist), based on interviews with children of notorious Nazis...
...Above all, it deftly captures another of the Nazi legacies...
...Hess eventually died in jail at 93...
...As Bormann Jr...
...New York: Lrttte...
...Brown and Company, 2001, 256 pp., hardcover $25.95 REVIEWED BY JENNIFER HOHMAN This book is a complex investigation o f Germany's Nazi past through the lens o f personal history: the lives, recollections, and psychic survival techniques o f five children of high-ranking Nazi leaders...
Vol. 26 • October 2001 • No. 5
