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The war in Europe was over in 1945. Since then a great deal has been written about the children of the Holocaust survivors. Writers, psychoanalysts, and journalists have studied various aspects of what it means to be a son or a daughter of a survivor. However, this book is the first written about the children of the perpetrators. The author, Peter Sichrovsky, is a distinguished Austrian journalist who was born and raised in Vienna after the Second World War. In his previous book, Strangers in Their Own Land, Sichrovsky portrayed the lives of the children of Jewish survivors living in Germany and Austria today. In Born Guilty, the author focuses his attention on children of Nazis—famous Nazis as well as policemen, railroad employees, majors, and teachers.
The author's goal was to find out how these young people grew up, what they consciously knew about the past, what questions they asked, and how they managed to live with what they knew. Sichrovsky presents the summaries of his interviews with 14 persons. He does not attempt deep psychological formulations or interpretations of the data. The reader is presented with the conscious experiences of these people. Each chapter describes one person—“The Guilty One,” “The Innocent One,” “The Proud One.”