Carolin Hohnecker never liked her grandfather Hugo much. He was a cold, distant man, whom her own father despised, and during her childhood, she barely saw him. But when her church group in Germany held a Holocaust discussion event in 2014, she decided to ask him what he did during
How I found out my grandfather was a Nazi
By Colin Freeman
Daily Telegraph UK·
8 mins to read
Adolf Hitler leaving Nuremberg Stadium after taking part in a Hitler Youth Demonstration in 1938.
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"He even had the same moustache as Hitler, to look just like him," says Hohnecker, 32, from Tübingen in south-west Germany. "He was utterly devoted to the cause, educating others in Nazi ideology. I was shocked to the bone – this book told me my whole family were prominent Nazis."
With the war still a sensitive topic for many Germans – particularly the role of family members – many might have chosen to keep the book's contents quiet. Hohnecker, however, wants the world to know. This week she will be airing her family's past before an audience of Peers, MPs and community leaders at the UK's House of Lords, at an event to discuss how remembrance of the Holocaust is passed on to future generations.
Joining her will be two other speakers, who will pass on memories from very different perspectives. Eitan Neishlos, 42, an Australian tech entrepreneur and philanthropist, will tell how his Jewish grandmother narrowly survived the Nazi death squads, courtesy of a Christian couple who sheltered her. Nobuki Sugihara will tell how his father, Chiune, issued transit visas that helped at least 2000 Jews escape while working as Japan's vice-consul to Lithuania, earning comparisons to Oskar Schindler.
The three speakers have been brought together ahead of next month's March of the Living, an international education programme that brings thousands of people from all over the world to Poland each year to walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the two adjacent camps where 1.1 million Jews died. This year's march – the first in three years because of the pandemic – comes with added symbolism.
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Firstly, it is likely to be the last march featuring death camp survivors, many of whom are now frail, and wish to make this their final journey. Secondly, it comes at a time when Europe's eastern flank is one again ablaze, courtesy of Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, where many of the Holocaust's worst crimes took place.
More than a millions Jews perished there in the Second World War, including at the Babyn Yar massacre in Kyiv, when 34,000 were killed between 29 and 30 September 1941. Earlier this month, the Babyn Yar memorial garden in Kyiv was hit by shrapnel from a Russian missile, making a mockery of Putin's claims to be "de-Nazifying" Ukraine. The Kremlin's leader, if nobody else, could perhaps do with refreshing his memory about what Nazism really is.
"It makes these messages far more important, to stand up against any form of hatred, or antisemitism," Hohnecker says. "We see hate everywhere, and how easy it is for one nation to attack another."
Yet the young also need reminding, says Neishlos, whose Courage to Care organisation in Australia teaches high school students about the importance of being "upstanders" against prejudice. It is only because people did that for his grandmother, Tamara Ziserman, he points out, that he is here to pass the message on today.
Unlike Hohnecker, Neishlos grew up knowing something of his grandmother's story. But he only got the full details after her death in 2011, when his mother gave him a shoebox full of his grandmother's own notes, penned in flawless handwriting.
They told how she was saved from the Nazi death squads who killed her parents by Janina and Piotr Chodosevitch, who took the weeping, terrified 11-year-old into their own home. Much of her time was spent hidden in a dark, dank basement, or amid the soot and insects of the chimney.
The Chodosevitch family's courage was remarkable – and unrewarded. They themselves were later arrested and executed, along with one of their toddlers. Despite that, Tamara was then given shelter by Piotr's mother. At Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial site, the Chodosevitch family are now among 27,000 names listed as "the Righteous Among The Nations" – a roll-call of non-Jews who risked their lives to Holocaust victims.
"I can't think of a more powerful example of the righteous," says Neishlos. "When the Nazis discovered what the Chodosevitch family was doing, they took them to the same location where my late grandmother's family were murdered, and shot them dead with one of their babies."
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He adds: "I don't think we will lose the moral message [of the Holocaust], as long as my generation carries on the torch. That's what this campaign is all about."
For Hohnecker, it is not so much a question of passing a torch on, as rekindling it altogether. Her own father never spoke much about her grandfather Hugo, beyond saying that he was excessively fond of corporal punishment. So after reading Hugo's memoir, she resolved to find out more, delving into German historical records.
The Nazi ancestry, it turned out, ran on both sides of her family, with her maternal grandfather, Rolf Weigele, serving in the SS. Then, in 2017, an aunt told her that Hugo's wife, her grandmother Isolde, had been a guard at a children's concentration camp at Lodz in Poland.
"During the war, they had about 20,000 children in that camp, and afterwards there were only about 800 left," said Hohnecker, who visited the camp the following year. "When I went there it was horrible, I knelt down in there and begged forgiveness."
A photo shows a young Isolde in uniform at the time, her hair tied back and a swastika badge on her arm. It helped Hohnecker, a psychologist by training, understand why her grandmother was as forbidding a figure as her grandfather.
"I'd always been afraid of her, as she expected very high standards of me and never seemed pleased with me," she said. "It made me realise how important it was for me to speak about this – as a psychotherapist, I know that trauma can be transmitted from one generation to another, for both victims and perpetrators."
Hohnecker has never been able to find out whether any of her four Nazi relatives committed specific atrocities. The historical records simply show which units they served in. She is sure, though, that her great-grandfather Gustav was aware of synagogue burnings and deportations. Her grandfather Hugo's memoir, meanwhile, spoke of battlefields littered with corpses on the Russian front. Like the rest, he is now dead, although she suspects he felt some guilt. "He was ashamed, for sure, I think that is perhaps why he became a Christian after the war," she says.
Hohnecker has no personal guilt over her family's past, but does feel a duty not to remain silent. In recent years she has visited Israel to meet with Holocaust survivors and joined other descendants of perpetrators at discussion events in Germany.
They are, however, a small band, she says. While Germans are taught rigorously about Nazi history in school, relatively few are open about having Nazis in their own family. This is despite studies showing that up to one in five Germans are aware of active Nazis in their past.
"It is a big lie when Germans say they knew nothing about [the Holocaust]," Hohnecker says. "People either don't know because they haven't asked, or they do know and just leave it like that. Even some of my own family don't want me talking about it – they say we don't want us associated with the Nazis."
Her attitude is lauded by Neishlos, who describes Hohnecker as "a great example of an upstander". Yet with war in Europe again, might others now deserve that accolade too, I ask him? The Ukrainian civilians now fighting Putin's invasion force, for example? Or the thousands of Russians who have publicly protested the war, despite the risk of jail?
Neishlos hopes to keep their message "apolitical". But he commends anyone who can help end the conflict, and urges everyone to examine their own family pasts. "I hope, metaphorically, that we can open a lot more shoeboxes," he says.
Hohnecker agrees it is crucial for younger generations to bridge the gap. "World War Two may sound like an old story from 80 years ago," she says. "But when it's your own family taking part in the cruelties and horrors, that makes it very different."
