THE GUARDIAN: My father did terrible things during the second world war, and my other relatives were equally unrepentant. But it wasn’t until I was in my late 50s that I started to confront this dark past
My family were all Nazis. My grandfather and grandmother. My mother and my father. My stepfather, my uncle – literally all of them were hardcore Nazis during the second world war. And after? Not a single one changed their convictions or voiced any regrets for the Nazi crimes. On the contrary, they denied or justified them, including the Holocaust and mass murder committed with their knowledge and, worst of all, sometimes their active participation. We were not exceptional – in Austria and Germany, there were many families like ours.
The official postwar version of events stated that Austria had been the first victim of Hitler’s expansionist politics. The four victorious allies – Britain, France, the US and the Soviet Union – specifically approved this interpretation, which, some believe, got Austria and Austrians off the hook for their complicity in Nazi atrocities.
But not all Austrians accepted this version. Large parts of Austrian society still felt strong ties to national socialism, an aggressive Greater German ideology that rejected the notion of Austria as a separate country with its own history and mentality, and cultivated a deeply rooted antisemitism and anti-Slavic sentiment. My family, like many others, held on to their belief in Hitler and the Third Reich until they died. “We are not Austrians but Germans,” was the oft-repeated credo fed to me as a child. “And we will forever be proud of it.”
I was born in 1944, a year before the end of the war. When I was 10 I was sent to boarding school, far away from Linz, where I had lived with my mother and stepfather, and from Amstetten, where I had often stayed with my Nazi grandparents. Why my relatives sent me away is still a mystery to me. Maybe they were attracted by the fact that the school was high up in the mountains, surrounded by woods, far from the corrupting influence of the cities, from the Jewish, anti-German spirit, as my grandmother put it. Another bonus was that we had to learn a trade in school – I became a carpenter.
What they didn’t know was that the school was very liberal in spirit. Not a single teacher was an old Nazi, which was an exception in Austria in the 50s. As I spent most of my time in school, I was removed from the influence of my Nazi relatives, and soon began to doubt the wisdom of their beliefs, their Great German ideas, their antisemitism and hatred for Austria and democracy. In school, we were taught other beliefs. » | Martin Pollack | Tuesday, July 23, 2024
