My Father's Keeper

Children of Nazi Leaders - An Intimate History of Damage and Denial

Contributors

By Norbert Lebert

By Stephan Lebert

Formats and Prices

Price

$19.99

Format

Trade Paperback

Format:

Trade Paperback $19.99

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 5, 2002. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

In 1959 the German journalist Norbert Lebert interviewed the children of prominent Nazis: Hess, Bormann, Goring, Himmler, Baldur von Schirach (creator of the Hitler Youth) and Hans Frank (governor of Poland). Not knowing what to do with the interviews, he boxed them up and stored them. After Lebert’s death, his son Stephan — also a journalist — inherited the files. Fascinated by what he found, he set out to re-interview the same people forty years later.

Revisiting his father’s subjects, Lebert explores how each of them deals with the agonizing question: What does it mean to have a father who participated in mass murder? For the most part, the Leberts found that the children remained intensely loyal to their fathers, regardless of their crimes. Gudrun Himmler, for example, lives in a Munich suburb under her husband’s name, keeping secret contacts with other nostalgic Nazis. In fact, Niklas Frank is the only one who rejects his heritage. But when he writes in a popular German magazine of his rage against his father — a man charged with two million deaths — hundreds of letters pour in from outraged readers. Whatever your father did, they argue, fathers must always be honored.

Remarkable in both its content and its narrative power, My Father’s Keeper is an illuminating addition to the dark literature of the Nazi past — and perhaps of any totalitarianism — and of how this past continues to haunt the present.

Genre:

On Sale
Sep 5, 2002
Page Count
256 pages
Publisher
Back Bay Books
ISBN-13
9780316089753