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.

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