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Heinous crimes committed years ago cannot be excused by appealing to the ‘social context’ of the age

Rooting around the basement of my family home in Mannheim, south-west Germany, some years ago, I discovered evidence that in 1938 my grandfather had taken advantage of antisemitic Nazi policies to buy a small business from a Jewish family at a low price. I also found letters from the only survivor of this family: his relatives had been killed at Auschwitz. After the war he wrote asking for reparations, but my grandfather refused to face up to his responsibilities.

I was shocked. Seeking to investigate my family’s Nazi history for a book I was working on, I started by calling on two first-hand witnesses. My aunt Ingrid, born in 1936 and who suffered through wartime bombardments and postwar poverty, excused her father’s actions: “We can’t put ourselves in their place. They lived under a dictatorship – you had to be a hero to resist.”

My father, Volker, born in 1943 and part of the generation in the 60s that forced German society to face its Nazi past, was much less lenient: “I used to tell my father: what upsets me is not that you’ve done the Nazi salute, since I might also have done that; its’s that even today you still don’t recognise the atrocities of the Third Reich and your own responsibility.”

Testimonies are less reliable than documents. They are filtered through experience and emotion, sadness and anger, but also love and loyalty. I had to confront them with historical facts. How far was it possible not to be a Nazi under the Third Reich? What were the risks? What did ordinary Germans such as my grandparents know about the Nazis’ crimes, about the fate of the Jews?

If conceiving of Auschwitz was difficult, it was still impossible to have “seen nothing, heard nothing” as my grandparents’ generation claimed until their deaths. Especially as many took part in auctions held in the apartments of deported Jews: homes abandoned in haste, where there might still have been cups of coffee on the kitchen table or toys in the children’s room. Joseph Goebbels himself said that his compatriots plunged “like vultures on the warm crumbs of the Jews”.

I also took into account the psychosocial mechanisms that form social and individual attitudes: conformism to moral standards, fear, opportunism, as well as political and ideological manipulation. The Third Reich did more than just inundate all levels of society with propaganda; it also devised the perfect way of making people become complicit while keeping their consciences clear: making crime legal.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that my grandfather was not blind to the immorality of his actions. He was enabled by the legalisation of the looting of Jewish property, but he acted from an opportunism that was his own. Of his own initiative, he participated in a state-organised crime, feeding into the inhumane enterprise of a regime he didn’t even support. The fact that antisemitism was the norm by that time doesn’t alter his personal moral failure.

Beyond the complexity of historical contexts and the grey areas of any human endeavour, there are actions that were as wrong yesterday as they are today. Taking refuge in moral relativism while facing the shadows of history is an easy escape, but it leads to a dead end. Yet how many countries are stuck in denial under the pretext that they refuse to judge their imperial past by today’s standards?