Posted on 12/02/2012 3:00:20 PM PST by nickcarraway
‘Hitler’s Children,’ a Documentary About Guilt by Blood
Quiet, simple and soaked in sorrow, “Hitler’s Children” takes a stripped-down approach to an emotionally sophisticated subject.
Tracking down five descendants of some of Hitler’s closest accomplices, the director, Chanoch Ze’evi, encourages them to talk about how their lineage has affected their lives. The coping mechanisms vary, but the shame and nagging guilt are shared. Monika Hertwig recalls the panic attack she suffered when a viewing of “Schindler’s List” revealed the full monstrosity of her father, Amon Goeth. For Bettina Goering, the great-niece of Hermann Goering, a kind of peace has been achieved by living off the grid in New Mexico and undergoing sterilization. “I cut the line,” she says with pained finality.
(Excerpt) Read more at movies.nytimes.com ...
Himmler...something similar.
No child is responsible for the sins of his or her parents. None. How can you be held accountable for that which someone else did at a time when you either didn’t exist or were too small and powerless to stop?
The kids are not responsible for who their parents were or what evil their parents did.
The kids are only responsible for what THEY do on this planet.
Hopefully, their parents’ murderous deeds will inspire the kids to do great things to help the survivors and their families and people in Israel or where-ever, but the kids are NOT to blame for their parents.
I agree. Navel-gazing (for a lifetime) is NEVER the answer.
My family [on my mother’s side] are Austrian - but the family had lived in Czechoslovakia since at least the 1700’s. In the 1800’s, they moved back to Austria [most of them] ...
After the Germans annexed the Sudetenland [where my remaining relatives lived], a VERY distant cousin was a judge working with the occupying Nazis ...
Whether he willingly collaborated, or was forced to work with them, I do not know ...
What I do know is that after the Russians liberated the region, a series of atrocities against German [Austrian] ethnics occurred. These included massacres, kangaroo “trials”, forced one-on-one barehanded fights [between relatives - winner getting to live], rapes, etc.
My cousin realized that he and his family would suffer from this because of his work [willing or not] with the Nazis. So, he took his entire family of 9 out into a field - killed them and then himself ...
But such is the nature of children, even adult children, to blame themselves.
It’s what molesters count on, for one thing. It’s a human tendency.
Well put.
For all their undeniable evil, the Nazis didn’t do a single thing that hasn’t been common down through human history. Only the scale of their evil was greater than routine, and you can make a good argument that even the scale has been considerably exaggerated in a historical context.
In any case, being ashamed of your ancestry is at least as idiotic as being arrogant about it. You are responsible for your own actions, not those of your ancestors.
I’ve always found the notion that the Germans as a people should be held eternally guilty for their crimes against the Jews pretty funny.
If taken literally, the same principle, although at a considerably greater time difference, would make the Jews of today bear the guilt for the death of Christ. Not the sole guilt, of course, but the NT account makes it clear a lot of Jews, particularly their leaders, were heavily involved.
The Nazi persecution of the Jews had little to do with their being “Christ-killers,” but the accusation was fertile soil for antipathy in Christendom for well over a thousand years.
This documentary was originally shown on British TV back in June. Fortunately it was posted to a UK torrent site. I found it extremely interesting...and moving.
Great niece had herself sterilized. Over-react much?
That’s still another casualty of Herman Goering and the Nazis, that his great-grandniece underwent sterilization. It’s obvious to this FReeper that there’s nothing wrong with her genetic code that she or her progeny will become monsters, given that she is so wracked with guilt that she denies herself children. Very sad.
I don’t think many people still holds Germans culpable, however much like every Frenchman was a member of the resistance after the war ended, most Germans after the war claimed to not know about the millions of people who were dragged kicking and screaming from their homes in the middle of the night, their businesses and property confiscated and were never seen again.
It is hard to believe no one seems to have noticed the incredible irony of Russian judges presiding over war crimes trials along side of American and British ones.
Goering’s father was a famous christian missionary in Angola Africa.
Virtues of the father are not passed on to the children.
“How can you be held accountable for that which someone else did at a time when you either didn’t exist or were too small and powerless to stop?”
Doctrine of inherited guilt. FWIW, I agree with you.
Too bad some of these souls take such tortured and pointless paths to expiate their percieved guilt. The grand-niece of Goering mentioned in the article sounds like a typical, emotional leftist. The poor fool even sterilized herself to help rid the world of her genetics.
Sorry, woman, it’s called sin. Yours will be more than enough to condemn you without borrowing guilt from the freaks in your family. BTW, everyone’s got somebody in the family tree that goes unmentioned in polite talk.
Her thinking is a common theme with lefties, though; Genetic causal arguments for aberent and cirminal behavior and the legal notion of collective guilt. Nice tools to marginalize and punish unpopular people who do not subscribe to the same kinds of nonsense.
Funny thing, this woman rejecting her great-uncle’s philosophies and then taking them in a new and self-destructive direction.
You have to embrace the guilt so you can write books and documentaries about how guilty you feel.
That is unbelievably sad. How horrible.
How horrible that he was driven to this point with no way out.
yes. my point was just that I do not consider the children to be guilty. nor would I recommend that they “embrace” their parents’ guilt, but if they can study and learn from it, I’m happy
many of the children have done so. others, not... but a lot have and that’s good.
(there sure is a lot of evil in today’s world... it is not centered in Germany this time but in Muslim world ... but the evil is horrible, and very very dangerous for us all. I guess each generation has to contend with such garbage...perhaps it is to test us...I can’t say...)
I went to school for several years with a grandson of Joachim von Ribbentrop. And, at the same, with a descendant (not quite as direct) of the man who hung him!
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