My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: A Black Woman Discovers Her Family's Nazi Past by Jennifer Teege, Nikola Sellmair Page B

never live with a murderer; I could never bear to be with a man who took pleasure in tormenting other people.
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    Whenever Jennifer Teege talks about her grandmother, her voice goes soft and her eyes beam.
    Her feelings fluctuate between rejection and affection, attack and defense. She cannot get a handle on who her grandmother really was.
    “I had no idea.” Ruth Irene Kalder would repeat this sentence often after the war. It is a sentence that many young Germans have grown up with: Parents and grandparents claim they had no knowledge of the murder of countless people—and their children and grandchildren don’t know whether or not to believe them, whether or not they should believe them.
    But surely you must have known!
    Is it possible that no knowledge of what was really going on filtered down to the ordinary Germans?
    In 2011, Friedrich Kellner’s diaries from the years 1939 to 1945 were published for the first time. During the war, Friedrich Kellner was a simple judicial officer. He came from a modest background and lived in the Hessian backcountry until his death in 1970. He had no access to secret files, but simply wrote down the bits of information he overheard, gleaned from conversation with other locals and, above all, read in newspapers available to the general public. His diaries are evidence of what those who “had no idea” could have known about the dictatorial regime, the war, and the Holocaust. For example, in 1941 Friedrich Kellner wrote: “The mental asylums have turned into centers for murder.” Reading the newspapers, he had noticed a suspiciously high number of death notices for people in mental hospitals. He had also been told about a case where a couple was able to bring their mentally ill son home from such a hospital just in time. Around the same time, immediately after the attack on the Soviet Union, Friedrich Kellner heard about the mass murder of the Jews: “A soldier who was home on leave described the awful atrocities he had witnessed in occupied Poland. He had seen how naked Jews, men and women, were made to stand in front of a long, deep trench. Upon SS command, a number of Ukrainian men shot them in the backs of their heads and they fell into the trench. The trenches were filled in even though screams could still be heard from within!” In September 1942, two Jewish families were deported from Kellner’s hometown, Laubach. In his diary he writes: “In the last few days, the Jews from our district have been deported. From Laubach they took the Strausses and the Heinemanns. A well-informed source tells me that all the Jews are being taken to Poland, where they will be murdered by SS troops.”
    In 1996, the artist Gunter Demnig started laying stolpersteine , or “stumbling blocks”—cobblestone-sized, brass memorials—in front of houses where victims of the Nazis used to live. Now in over 800 German towns and villages, they make the number of victims palpable: In some streets there are stolpersteine in front of every other house, sometimes with a single name, sometimes with the names of an entire family. On these streets it would have been glaringly obvious that some neighbors were missing: the Jewish family, the girl with Down syndrome, the homosexual, the communist.
    Yet in many German families, the parents and grandparents have never been asked any probing questions. “The Nazis” were others. It is inconceivable that the friendly grandfather might have committed any crimes on the frontline, or that the kindly grandmother might have cheered Hitler. Just as unimaginable as it was for Jennifer Teege to discover that her grandmother once enjoyed the good life on the edge of a concentration camp.
    This self-delusion, this schizophrenic view of one’s own historical narrative, is rarely as apparent as it is with Ruth Irene Kalder. She was no perpetrator, but she was a bystander and a profiteer. Amon Goeth made his career, and she joined him in it. Amon Goeth remains a