How much can we really know about the secret worlds of the older members of our families? Guardian columnist and author Derek Niemann describes finding out the truth about his grandfather, and how it impacted his view of the past.
Karl Niemann with his wife and son.
It should have been nothing more than an interesting diversion during a holiday to Berlin. My dad told me where he had lived as a child during the war. I looked up the street on the internet. And there was a name I knew – my grandfather, together with the words 'crimes against humanity' and 'use of slave labour'. I remember rocking back in my seat as if someone had just punched me and crying: "No!"
My dad had told me his dad had been a Nazi, though 'just a pen-pusher'. It turns out that he'd been much more than that. My grandfather, Karl Niemann, was a middle manager working for the SS. I now know that on his business trips to all of the ghastly concentration camps, he saw a great deal of brutality. But he carried on right through the war, nonetheless, making work for innocent people who had been deprived of their freedom.
I went to archives in Berlin and discovered books written by historians who had pored over his records and published his words, without any of us in the family knowing anything. I visited my dad's old house in a leafy suburb of the city. The family who live there now told me that the whole estate had been built on Himmler's orders for SS families. And then I travelled to Dachau on the outskirts of Munich. My grandfather had worked for a while in an SS training complex, right next door to the concentration camp and he would have socialised with men who would be the future commandants of Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and others.
I remember rocking back in my seat as if someone had just punched me and crying: "No!"
I retraced the family's flight in the last days of the war to the Alpine village where my dad recalled seeing American soldiers grab his sister at gunpoint, then take his father away to serve three years' imprisonment in former POW camps.
Plentiful records came to light that showed Karl Niemann had joined the Nazi Party by 1931. Even a full transcript of his postwar tribunal survived, revealing that he had told the judge he had to carry on working for the SS or he feared he and his family would have been put in a concentration camp too. Yet I read the testimony of a number of freed inmates who would have faced certain death if this complex character had not released them from the camps to work for him. My father recalled that one would even join Karl's family for Sunday lunch.
For all the dreadful things I have found out, there were some huge positives. My 77-year-old German uncle was shocked by what I had discovered, but shared all he could remember of his childhood and urged me on: "It is all true! You must tell everything, the good and the bad." And everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, has encouraged me likewise. Perhaps the last word belongs to the late German president Richard von Weizsacker: "Those who close their eyes to the past will remain blind regarding the future."
Derek's book A Nazi in the Family: The Hidden Story of an SS Family in Wartime Germany is published by Short Books and available on Amazon.