History of National Socialism: Cellar full of perpetrator files

Anyone who knows Thies Marsen and listens to him regularly on “Bayerischer Rundfunk” knows that one of his focuses is German history – especially that of National Socialism and its consequences to this day. He is also considered the “BR” expert on the extreme right in the country and their ugly faces. His voice is the radio man’s trademark and is pleasant to listen to.

Now Marsen has achieved something extraordinary: He made a podcast about his own family history and, in a very special way, created a touching memorial to his grandmother Caroline, known as Ini, who died at the age of 103 in the middle of the 2020 pandemic. Her cracked voice with a strong Bavarian tongue can be heard and she tells how in 1944 she got the briefcase in which Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg transported the bomb that was supposed to kill Adolf Hitler on July 20th of that year. This failed, as we know, and resulted in severe repression for several hundred people in opposition to Hitler, and many even cost their lives.

According to Marsen, he dismissed this story as more than just one of his grandmother’s quirks and simply didn’t pay any attention to it for a long time. But the strange story ultimately left him no peace, and he felt something like an assignment to investigate the matter – after all, Ini was so proud of him as a reporter and historian. And so he did something that only the third generation after the Second World War and only at an advanced age seems to be able to do properly: investigate what it really could have been like.

Research into perpetrators of the grandchildren

He documents what Marsen does with his recording device in his hand, and he has succeeded in creating an acoustic masterpiece of coming to terms with German history. A podcast with four almost 40-minute chapters, the focus of which is the Hitler assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 and the contribution that General Staff Officer Major Walter Rudolph, his grandfather, may have made. Like many others of the “Boomer” generation, Marsen found a huge pile of letters, documents and other remnants of history from 80 years ago in an “airtight filing cabinet” when visiting the family archivist, his cousin Alexander.

There is now a wealth of such family research, almost all of them revolve around boxes, cupboards and folders in which these documents have been stored somewhere in the basement or attic for decades and have survived the test of time in often immaculate condition. A few books from the first generation should be mentioned here, such as Dörte von Westernhagen’s “The Children of the Perpetrators” or Niklas Frank’s reckoning “The Father.” There are also documentaries such as the impressive “2 or 3 things I know about him” by Malte Ludin. Ludin also finds a box with documents from his father Hanns Ludin and counters the evidence of his complicity with the embellished family story about his father, who in reality belonged to the Nazi extermination elite.

But now the grandchildren are coming. A pioneer of this generation’s – in the truest sense of the word – reappraisal work is perhaps Johannes Spohr with his questioning of the unsuspecting and uncritical memory of his grandfather in his home town of Nordenham. At least he is one of the few who made public the anger and hostility that this research caused them and developed a kind of self-help system from it. Today, Spohr regularly gives workshops for members of the second, third and fourth generations of descendants – not only members of the murder elite, but also ordinary “cogs in the wheel” of the Nazi state from 1933 and in the National Socialist war machine from 1939 to 1945.

Toxic genealogy

As Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tschuggnall in the book “Grandpa was not a Nazi. As National Socialism and the Holocaust in Family Memory” prove in a shocking way, the family stories usually leave out the darkest chapters, complicity, complicity and crimes, and trivialize or gloss over the work of the ancestor. Participation in the crimes against humanity committed by National Socialism remains the subject of denial and repression for generations, but also shame, anger and helplessness. Spohr offers ways to refine and systematize family research and thus provides subsequent generations, who are often overwhelmed with the results of archive searches, with tools for the difficult process of coming to terms with the family’s involvement in the Hitler state. On his blog “Preposition” and his website “Presentpast” he provides information about all aspects of this genealogical research, which is toxic for many descendants.

In this respect, the ARD podcaster Thies Marsen also experienced his surprises when he began researching his grandfather and the story his grandmother told about the briefcase containing Stauffenberg’s bomb. He also stumbles upon the myth and reality of the resistance of German officers against their leader Adolf Hitler.

Many of the perpetrators were fanatical supporters of fascist megalomania until the turning point of the war, for example around the defeat of Stalingrad in the war of annihilation against Stalin’s Soviet Union. They took part in the crimes against humanity in their high-ranking positions in the Wehrmacht, the SS, in the party apparatus and the civil service; they were ardent anti-Semites and nationalists who were prepared to walk over mountains of corpses for the “Greater German Reich”. Much to the grandson’s dismay, this also applies to Marsen’s grandfather, the mountain infantry major Walter Rudolph.

Resistance or perpetrator?

In the podcast, Marsen asks historian Ralf Klein, who speaks plainly about the failed assassination attempt on July 20th and denies what Foreign Minister Scharping once said, namely that July 20th, 1944 was the “epitome of German resistance.” Quite the opposite is the case. “I have difficulties with the term resistance, especially in this context,” says Klein, recalling who the attackers were and what their beliefs were: “They certainly weren’t all Democrats.”

Historians estimate that at most 200,000 Germans actively resisted the regime at the risk of their lives.

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Historians estimate that there were at most 200,000 Germans who actively resisted the regime at the risk of their lives – that was around 0.3 percent of the population at the time, mostly communists, but also social democrats. Christians of different backgrounds, Jews and others.

Marsen also talks about the role of the military’s resistance with Stauffenberg’s granddaughter, Sophie von Bechtolsheim, with a historian at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and, above all, with members of his own family. The fact that some of them are no longer alive makes the audio documents with the voices of his grandmother, his mother Bärbel and his aunt Dorle even more moving.

The journalist is torn between a certain pride that his grandfather was somehow a resister and horror that he was also an accomplice in the Shoah. He describes his scruples about expanding the family history with all its dark sides in such a way and probably making it even more public via the easily accessible podcast than would have been possible with an essay or book. Can he even expect his grandmother, who was still alive during the research, to read the “whole story,” especially the part about Grandpa Walter’s involvement in the Nazi mass murder?

Finally, Marsen quotes the “family archivist,” Cousin Alexander, again: “Even if there is nothing to the story, I still find it interesting how such a myth is constructed. And what’s behind it? But I think we owe it to at least do everything we can to find out: is there something to it and was Is it there?” With regard to this guilt, Thies Marsen has set a standard with his podcast.

The podcast “Grandma’s Bag and the Hitler Assassination” can be found at: www.ardaudiothek.de
The websites: www.present-past.net and www.preposition.de provide information about Johannes Spohr’s family perpetrator research