Quest for Nazi father shatters German myths

WHEN Beate Niemann went in search of her father she hoped to find a man she could be proud of, but instead uncovered a truth that lay hidden for nearly six decades under family lies and deceit.

While she went looking for Bruno Sattler, a father, First World War soldier, Berlin policeman and family man, she found only SS Major Bruno Sattler: mass murderer with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Jews on his hands.

At a time when Germans have begun to embrace victimhood about the Second World War, projecting themselves as having suffered equally under RAF bombs, from Red Army rapes and under their Nazi masters on a scale that somehow equates with the millions upon whom Germany inflicted its savagery, Niemann’s story shatters this cosy attempt to retreat into shared pain.

Now Jewish groups and schools are being given special showings of an extraordinary film which chronicles Niemann’s journey in search of her father. Her disturbing voyage into the past is told in The Good Father which has won documentary prizes in the US and Canada.

It is showing in select cinemas in Germany and being screened to schoolchildren and Jewish groups. The film is a journey that many of Niemann’s generation found too painful to take.

She said: "I went in search of father I never knew and I hoped that the nagging doubts I had had about him down the years would be dispelled and I would find a man that I could be truly proud of.

"Instead I found a man who was a mass murderer, whose life was glossed over by my mother; my mother who lied to me and who continued to lie up until the day she died. I found a man who, when I was being suckled on my mother’s breast, was ordering mobile gas wagons each day to a concentration camp outside of Belgrade to kill women and children.

"I found a man who gave the orders for tens of thousands of Jews to be shot in Smolensk and outside Moscow and who participated in the destruction of 500,000 partisans, Jews, gypsies and others in Yugoslavia.

"This is what I found. This is the truth. It is inescapable. And in my greatest rage I wonder why, why he didn’t even have the decency to kill himself, to do that small thing for me?"

Broke and desperate to avoid being one of the millions on the human scrapheap of the German great depression after World War One, Sattler took a job selling jewellery in the Wertheim department store in Berlin in the 1930s. The store owned by the Jewish Wertheim family.

Then he left, joined the Nazi party, became a policeman and took the fast track to promotion with the Gestapo. Then he went into the SS security service, the SD, and then into the ranks of the Einsatzgruppen, the Action Squads which killed 1.5 million civilians in the Soviet Union before the human abattoirs of Auschwitz and Treblinka came on-stream in Poland.

In 1997, 17 years after her mother died, Niemann, now 62, went in search of the truth in 100 different archives in three countries.

But it was in her mother’s possessions and in the local planning office in Berlin that she first began to piece together the fading paper mosaic that would illustrate the moral collapse of her parents.

She discovered that in 1942, before she was born, her father negotiated to buy the spacious family house in Dahlem from a Jewess named Gertrud Leon for the knock-down price of 14,617 Reichsmarks. Sattler was able to strong-arm the property from her by offering her protection from the transports that shunted Jews eastward to their deaths every day.

He did nothing of the sort: two weeks later she was shipped to the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia and then taken to Auschwitz for gassing.

By the time one defenceless Jewish lady was shipped to her doom, Sattler’s Einsatzgruppen B had blooded themselves in the fields around Minsk, Moscow, Smolensk and numerous other places where individuals were dispatched in ones and twos and then in their hundreds and their thousands.

The film shows Niemann travelling to Belgrade where she met Liliane Djorjevic, a Jewish woman whose father was murdered by Sattler. She was incarcerated in a concentration camp that Sattler oversaw and where he ordered mobile gas vans to dispatch more than 8,000 women and children to their doom.

Tears are never far away but they do not flow from Niemann’s eyes, not even when she walks into the killing fields where her father oversaw the execution of more than 500,000 Jews and hostages, 100 of whom died for every German soldier who was killed.

Russian agents kidnapped Sattler from the streets of Berlin in 1947 and he vanished into the East German prison gulag.

Niemann’s journey of painful discovery ended in the cellar of a Stasi jail in Leipzig, long abandoned, the tiny cells where men slept 20 at a time on wooden pallets. On October 10 1972 Sattler was killed with a shot in the head in the execution cell in the jail’s cellars, a lightless, airless place the inmates called the U-Boat.

"My sympathies are solely for his victims," Niemann said. "I came away from this project only wishing I had not been born a German and that I did not have parents such as these. It is my experience that Germans of this generation are all liars."

You are take ONE example out of all of the German population. I went to the HC museum in D.C. and I basically knew EVERYTHING there already from school and self-study. Does this mean all Germans know that much about the holocaust? Think about it.

For what it´s worth: When I lived in the US for a year, I had a highschool junior drawing swastikas in my yearbook, just because I was "German". He didn´t mean to insult me by this, he just connected the swastika to Germany because of the movies. He didn´t even KNOW what it STANDS for. I´d make a point for the US youth being much more ill-informed about this than the German youth (you remember the other quote from this thread, were a US mom said that the German exchange student she had was very well informed about this subject?).

As for your links:

How does this prove your point?
In teaching German the topic is frequently found in classroom reading, mainly in the age group 11 to 15. The best know books are e.g. "Damals war es Friedrich" for the lower grades, of course "Das Tagebuch der Anne Frank" and others like "Ich trug den gelben Stern". . Sometimes you will find the use of comics: Spiegelman`s "Mouse" and Bedürftig / Kalenbach`s "Hitler", which is also used in history lessons. Other Subjects

In other subjects the holocaust is a theme also, but rather in special projects like Schneider's teaching module about "Schindler`s List", which integrates ethical educa-tion, film analysis and English language teaching.
http://www.civiced.org/german_conference2000_boge.html

It rather proves mine, doesn´t it?

As for the other links (I checked all of them, but don´t have the time to respond to each one in detail): There´s some info in it that´s correct, as for instance the OLDER generation not being to eager to talk about this subject, but if you read it closely, you will find out that your initial statement "The holocaust is not being taught in Germany" can not be made. For instance, the once link you provided had a German exchange student in California comparing THE WAY the holocaust was taught (in Germany: very matter of factly, in the US focusing on individual suffering), but not stating that it wasn´t taught at all in Germany. That of course is also very dependant on the teachers themselves, my world history teacher in the US had less of a clue about the holocaust than I had, a then 16 year old student from Germany...

From on of your links:
49 percent approve of the German parliament decision to authorize the building of a national Holocaust memorial in Berlin, and 27 percent disapprove. Support is highest among young people, of whom 55 percent approve of the memorial with a disapproval level of only 18 percent. In general, the older the respondent, the more likely they are to express negative attitudes toward Jews and other minorities. There are consistent correlations in the poll between higher levels of education and lower levels of prejudice
Doesn´t this rather suggest that something is being done RIGHT in educating the young people?

I am not quite sure why you linked the "Deutsches Historisches Museum" article (www.dhm.de), as the info it provides doesn´t seem relevant to this topic (though it´s very interesting and true).

As for the link to the "game that shifts blame on WWII on Poland": Sorry to be blunt: This is one of the stupidest arguments I have ever heard in my whole life. The article at the link provided by you knows NOTHING about the game itself and PC games in general. I am an avid gamer, so let me help out: First of all, the game was NOT programmed in Germany, but somewhere in Eastern Europe (heck, it might even have been Poland, but I think it was in the Czech Republic or Russia). It is only published by German publisher CDV. I have read about the "blaming it on Poland" thing only on FR, and German public is hyper sensitive to something like this. I have NOWHERE read HOW the game "shifts the blame" on Poland, and I´d be really intersted in how it´s supposedly done. Can you help here? I know that this is a "big market" title, so the company would have to be crazy to jeopardize it by a "blame the war on Poland strategy". The only thing I can think of is sort of a mission briefing before the game starts, with some Nazi officer telling the player that "the Poles have attacked our radio station at Gleiwitz, we must take revenge" (the original "excuse") to remain "in character". I don´t know however.
I did a search and came up with a discussion on this, half of it in English. It is very much like I expected it to be:

http://www.cdv-board.de/deutsch/showthread.php?threadid=19249

In 1994 (?) American company SSI had an even bigger commerical success with the game "Panzer General", which let you assume the role of a German general and let you conquer the whole world, even letting you park your panzers at Pennsylvania Avenue in the last mission. The game was probably the best selling strategy title ever. Care to enlighten me about the difference between the two games? Oh, now I remember another detail. The game actually got BANNED in Germany, because you could WIN WW2 as Germany. Not so in the US or Poland however.

To make my point: Just go out in the streets and ask an average US citizen/pupil the questions asked by the Jewish poll in your link, and judging from my experience, you might be very surprised. I am quite sure that none of the people I met at highschool would have known the exact six million figure.

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