MAIL ONLINE: Descendants of the leaders of the Nazi regime have spoken on camera for the first time about the feelings of pain and revulsion they have for their ancestors.
They include Bettina Goering, great niece of Adolf Hitler's second in command Hermann Goering, who says she has had herself sterilised so she would 'not pass on the blood of a monster'.
Adolf Eichmann's son Ricardo says he simply cannot find a way to explain why his father became the chief architect of the Holocaust.
While Hitler himself had no offspring, many others at the heart of the Reich had families and some of the children can remember being patted on the head by the Fuhrer.
One is Hitler's godson Niklas Frank, whose father Hans was Nazi governor of occupied Poland responsible for the death camps in which six million Jewish people were killed.
He says in the documentary Hitler's Children, by Israeli director Chanoch Zeevi, that he 'despises' his father's past and describes him as 'a slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic'.
The film also shows Monika Hertwig, daughter of Amon Goeth - the death camp commandant played in the movie Schindler's List by Ralph Fiennes --meeting a man who tells her how her father shot women and babies 'for sport'.
Zeevi said he found 'fascinating similarities' between the emotions of those related to Holocaust perpetrators and those of survivors, some of whom meet the children of their tormentors in the programme.
Frank lectures about his infamous father to young people in the former East Germany in a bid to prevent them from straying into the far-right scene that preys on the young unemployed and desperate.
'I have never managed in my life to get rid of the memory of him,' he said. 'I live with this deep shame about what he did.'
Bettina Goering lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she practices herbal medicine.
'Either side of me live Jewish neighbours,' she says, 'and they are always quarrelling. It's left to me to sort them out!'
Bettina told the programme both she and her brother were voluntarily sterilised. >>> Allan Hall | Thursday, January 21, 2010
