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World War II – Investigating a Nazi Past – Burkhard Bilger
208 Plays11 months ago
Ep 045 – Nonfiction. How do the descendants of Nazis reckon with the pasts of their families? Burkhard Bilger joins me to discuss his memoir, a ten-year quest to uncover the truth about his grandfather— a Nazi party chief, “Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family.”
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Transcript
Understanding Family History
00:00:00
Speaker
My book is about my kind of trying to come to terms with my family history, specifically my grandfather, who was a school teacher in the Black Forest in Germany in the 30s, but was also a Nazi party member, and then went on to be sent to France to occupied France to reeducate French children and turn them into good Germans. And early in most of my life,
00:00:28
Speaker
I knew that's all I knew and obviously had some suspicions about what that meant, being complicit with this horrific regime. But then in my 30s, my mother discovered that he had actually also collaborated with the local resistance.
00:00:49
Speaker
my book is really trying to explore that like first of all just what how did this man become that man and what did it mean for a german like him a kind of an ordinary german
00:01:11
Speaker
Hello, everyone.
Introduction to the Podcast
00:01:12
Speaker
This is AJ Woodham's host of the War Books Podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I am extremely excited to have on the show, Burkhard Bilger, for his newest book, Fatherland, A Memoir of War, Conscious and Family Secrets.
00:01:32
Speaker
Burkhart has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2001. His work has also appeared in the Atlantic, Harpers, and the New York Times, among other publications. He's received fellowships from Yale University, McDowell, and the New York Public Library's Coleman Center. His first book, Noodling for Flatheads, was a finalist for the Penn Martha Albrand Award. Burkhart, how are you doing today? I'm good. I'm good. Happy to be here.
00:01:58
Speaker
Yeah, likewise. And first, I got to ask, what is what was noodling for flatheads about?
00:02:06
Speaker
Noodling is, I mean, it's a book of essays about kind of crazy old Southern traditions that have kind of survived into the modern age and kind of what they tell us about how the South has changed. It's a thing where you, yeah, you basically, in the springtime, you walk along a riverbank when the catfish are nesting and the female drops a clutch of eggs and the male kind of hovers in the riverbank protecting the eggs.
00:02:34
Speaker
And so noodlers kind of walk along the riverbank and feel for holes. And when there's a hole with a fish in it, it will bite their hand to protect the eggs. And so the noodler will jam his arm down the fish's throat and grab the fish by the gills and pull it out that way. So it's one of these great old, slightly insane Southern traditions.
00:02:58
Speaker
Well, I love the breadth of writing that comes from the guests that I have on this show. Very interesting because I had a writer named George Black on the show who just wrote a book about Vietnam. And he used to write for Fly Fisherman magazine.
00:03:18
Speaker
So there's something interesting coincidence. George Black is my brother-in-law. He's married to my, my wife's sister. Yep. Wow. This is, this is definitely a first on the show. I've been fishing with George Black many times. Is this, so this is, this is a shared, just like two guys who first write about fishing and then go on to write about war. Is that?
00:03:44
Speaker
You know, no, I mean, George is a real fisherman. I mean, George has written books about fly fishing. He's he's been all over the world fly fishing. I'm I'm just I was kind of more into crazy southern traditions, you know, so I kind of did noodling. I also wrote about, you know, coon hunting and frog farming and cock fighting and all these other traditions. But yeah, Georgia, that was one area where we kind of overlap for a moment.
00:04:09
Speaker
Wow. Well, you'll have to tell George I said hello the next time you see him at a family gathering at Christmas or something. Well, let's get talking about your book, which really fascinating.
Grandfather's Dual Role in WWII
00:04:23
Speaker
One of the questions that I like authors to start answering in the show is if in your own words, it just tells what is your book about? Well, my book is about
00:04:35
Speaker
My kind of trying to come to terms with my family history, specifically my grandfather, who was a school teacher in the Black Forest in Germany in the 30s, but was also a Nazi party member, and then went on to be sent to France, to occupied France.
00:04:52
Speaker
to re-educate French children and turn them into good Germans. And early in most of my life, that's all I knew and obviously had some suspicions about what that meant, like being complicit with this horrific regime. But then in my 30s, I discovered that
00:05:16
Speaker
My mother discovered that he had actually kind of also collaborated with the local resistance. So my book is really trying to explore that. Like, first of all, just what, how did this man become that man? And what did it mean for a German like him, a kind of an ordinary German?
00:05:32
Speaker
to be living in that era? And how did they come to join the Nazi party? And how did they change as they were in it? I think we have so many examples of horrific Nazis, as you can understand. And then we have the occasional Schindler, who's a German who rebelled, who
00:05:55
Speaker
distinctly from the beginning, but we don't have a lot of people in the gray area in between, and that was kind of what I wanted to explore with this. What about ordinary Germans who did join but then had misgivings about it and changed their minds? Yeah, and I think, too, it is interesting to think about that gray area, which you explore a lot in the book. As somebody describes your grandfather at one point as a very reasonable Nazi,
00:06:24
Speaker
How did you come away from this story with a better understanding of that gray area?
00:06:31
Speaker
I think part of what you have to do with a story like this is you have to understand the deep context. There's this assumption that this kind of fever of Nazism swept through Germany and tapped into some deep latent antisemitism and deep anti-war-like behavior. There's some assumptions made about Germans in general there that I think
00:06:56
Speaker
kind of missed the history that preceded it. And I think if we look at what's happened since World War II,
00:07:05
Speaker
you see all these terrible mass murders all across the world. You have the Stalin's purges, and then you have under Mao, tens of millions of people died, and you have Pol Pot in Cambodia, and you have Bosnia, and you have the Turkish-Armenian genocide. We all have this capability in us. Any country has a capability or people has an ability to turn to this horrible,
00:07:33
Speaker
murderous behavior, the question then becomes like, how did they get there? What are the historical conditions? What leads people into this? And I think that's still a relevant question for us today. So that's, for me, a lot of my grappling was really about understanding how he got there. His youth in the Black Forest, in this kind of feudal economy, crushing poverty, tenant farmers didn't own their land, barely could keep their family alive.
00:08:02
Speaker
Then getting sent to World War I in 1918 at the very end of this senseless slaughter and losing an eye and losing his best friend in his arms. And then coming back to Germany in the 20s to hyperinflation and deep depression, much deeper than what we saw in this country.
00:08:22
Speaker
with the reparations being sent for the Treaty of Versailles for what they did in World War I. And then, you know, the Nazis come along, and Hitler is clearly a nut, but he also has this economic program that speaks to my grandfather's
00:08:39
Speaker
desire for egalitarianism, for working people to have a decent wage. So a lot of it for me was not so much is he guilty or is he innocent, but how did he become guilty and how did that process, how did he kind of unspool that process?
00:08:58
Speaker
Yeah. Well, before we dive into your grandfather's story and the journey that you went on to discover it, let's actually talk about your own story, which is where you start the book. It is a memoir. Talk about your childhood. Your parents were German immigrants.
Family's Move to America
00:09:15
Speaker
You grew up in Oklahoma. Talk a little bit about that.
00:09:20
Speaker
Yeah, my parents came in 1962 together. They'd grown up together, had been in school together. My father ended up getting his PhD in physics. And 1962, it was beginnings of the space race. And a lot of German rocketry folks like Wernher von Braun had already come over to the United States.
00:09:44
Speaker
So it was a huge boom in that type of physics and electrical engineering that my father did. And so he came over from a postdoc thinking he would just stay for a couple of years. And then they just kind of fell in love with the country. And he was also kind of enamored of cowboy and Indian stories. He'd grown up with these German books about the American West. And so an opening came at Oklahoma State University. So he moved there because he wanted to be an Indian territory.
00:10:12
Speaker
So, you know, my parents, my mother had a horrible war. They were both born in 35, so there were children during the war. And my mother had to flee French bombings two or three times and hide in the Black Forest and almost gotten killed there. And my father, you know, his family had done a little bit better. But, you know, of course,
00:10:34
Speaker
whole country is devastated around them. So I think for them coming to the United States, coming to Oklahoma, being in the middle of the prairie, with none of that history around them was a huge, huge relief. And they kind of, they kept their German culture. I mean, we spoke German at home. There were five kids, two of my sisters and my older brother were all born in Germany and came over as little children, but I was born in the United States and my little sister was too.
00:11:03
Speaker
But we had this little German enclave in the middle of the prairie. You know, we were very academic. We celebrated all these German traditions, Nicolaustag and Fassnacht and these kinds of things, and ate German food. But the one part of that German tradition we didn't really delve into was that history, that specific World War II history. And I think my mom,
00:11:30
Speaker
is an especially interesting person in this case. And she's really the person that brought me into this story because she, as soon as my little sister went to first grade, my mother went back to school and ended up getting a PhD in history and wrote her dissertation, her big doctoral work on the German occupation of France and Marche de Pétain, the French leader. And she spent years on that
00:11:59
Speaker
And yet what was striking to me later as an adult was the fact that she never looked into her father's own story. Here was a story in the middle of this area that she was looking at so closely that spoke to that history so directly. And yet she never really investigated it. And it really wasn't until, I mean, there's this, I can tell you the story in 1983,
00:12:21
Speaker
My parents came to Germany. They came to France originally. They came to Southern France. My father was giving a talk on white noise at a physics conference. Afterwards, they were driving through Northeastern France to Germany to see relatives. Suddenly, my mom saw the street sign, the village sign for the village where my grandfather had been posted in World War II.
00:12:48
Speaker
And she hadn't, she'd only been there once when she was eight years old. My grandfather had taken her there for one day to kind of sit in on his classes while he taught these French children. It was just across the river from their hometown in Germany, so it was an easy trip.
00:13:03
Speaker
So anyway, on this day they're driving, they see this street sign and my mom says, pull over. I want to see this town. And she had just finished her dissertation and I think she was kind of ready to finally kind of confront this history.
00:13:20
Speaker
So she went into the town. She went up to the old schoolhouse, which was now the town hall, this beautiful old building. She walked around, but there was very little left of that history there. And she started to think, what am I doing here? Why am I kind of digging up all these old bad memories? And she was heading back to the car and she saw an old man across the street with a little wagon
00:13:43
Speaker
He's pulling two of his grandkids in this wagon. And she looks at him, she thinks, gosh, you know, if my dad were still alive, I think he'd be about that same age. I wonder if he remembers him. So she kind of rushes across the street and stops him and says, excuse me, you know, my father, Calguna, was here from 40 to 44. Is there any chance you knew him?
00:14:05
Speaker
And the old man, his name is George Cheela, is just kind of dumbstruck and looks at her and says, knew him, I saved his life. And that was when she discovered George Cheela had been the head of the resistance and he and my grandfather had been collaborators during the war and had kind of worked to help protect the village from the harsher Nazi policies and kept people from being sent to the camps. And that was suddenly when it became
00:14:34
Speaker
a much more interesting, much more complicated story for her and later for me. Who was this man and how did he manage to balance those two different agendas? Yeah, and also that moment in your book that you just described as far as cliffhangers go, an excellent cliffhanger because then we actually go in your book into your story and what led you to trace your grandfather's story.
00:15:01
Speaker
Well, but first growing up in, you talk about growing up in Oklahoma state or in the town. What's the, what's the name of the town? Stillwater. That's where Oklahoma state is. Stillwater, Oklahoma.
00:15:15
Speaker
I went to school in Bloomington, Indiana at Indiana University, which by the way you describe Stillwater, it's almost identical because it's a town built around the university and outside of the town, it's farm country and stuff like that. I love Bloomington. Bloomington is a great town. It's a little cooler than Stillwater, but I love Stillwater too.
00:15:46
Speaker
Yeah, it's a cool town. I've got some friends who went to Oklahoma State. I'll have to ask them all about the hip spots in Stillwater. Well, if we were to go back to 13-year-old Burcard and ask, what do you know about World War II? What kind of answer would we get?
00:16:07
Speaker
I think you would have gotten the same answers you've gotten from any American kid at that age. I watched war movies, I watched Hogan's Heroes, which made fun of German prison camps, which is crazy. I can't imagine that happening today. I knew about the Nazis being bad people and I knew that
00:16:30
Speaker
I never felt I think any kind of sense of shame or guilt in that sense. I knew my mom was a kid and my dad were both kids in World War II and had nothing to do with that. And I knew them to be highly moral people. So I never felt personally guilty about it, but I certainly, like everybody else, I think of the thought of the Nazis as bad
Childhood and WWII Perception
00:16:53
Speaker
guys. And I thought of which they were quite obviously.
00:16:58
Speaker
you know, I think what, as I got a little older, you know, into my 20s, I came east for college, I went to Yale, and suddenly there, the questions became much more pointed. Oh, you're German. You know, when, are your parents German? Yeah, they were born in German. Ooh, when were they born in German? You know, and it was this kind of, they were instantly, everybody was instantly looking to see if I was somehow complicit with this history.
00:17:25
Speaker
So that was a new thing for me. I'd always been kind of proud of my German roots, proud of my German heritage. I did not associate it directly with war crimes. That just wasn't part of how I was taught or how I was raised. And what was your relationship like growing up with your grandfather, Carl, who this book is largely about? What was your relationship with him on?
00:17:48
Speaker
You know, I knew him a fair bit considering the distance we were apart. I mean, because when I was five and six, my parents moved to Germany for a year. And so we spent a lot of weekends there at his house and I got to know him and my grandmother. And then when I was in junior high, seventh and eighth grade, we moved to France and then we would go for a couple of years. And so we would often go to Germany and I would see him then as well.
00:18:17
Speaker
He was kind of a daunting figure. He was this tall, gaunt, shock of gray hair. He had one glass eye from the eye he'd lost in World War I, and that was kind of disconcerting. He was very earnest and grave and sober. He was kind to me, but it wasn't.
00:18:43
Speaker
But even my cousins later, when I started to write the book, I would go and interview all my cousins and my uncles and aunts, even my cousins in Germany who'd spent their whole childhood with him.
00:18:56
Speaker
didn't have a real sense of connection to him. He was something that I think was so common in that generation of Germans, which was kind of this spectral figure, this man who had clearly been through huge, traumatic history, amazing, terrible stories, but never spoke about it.
00:19:15
Speaker
And that was true of that whole generation. There was just a silence about all that. And so the upshot was you would have these people in front of you who were clearly formidable, clearly had terrible and amazing stories to tell, but couldn't tell them. And so there was just a built-in distance, I think.
00:19:36
Speaker
Yeah, it's so interesting. So my great grandfather fought in World War II on the American side, and he was on Iwo Jima.
00:19:51
Speaker
And I think we hear a lot in the States about how nobody of that generation talks about their wartime experience. And that was true for him too, although I never met him. That's what I'm told. And I wonder if there's just maybe a shared, not to compare traumas from the different armies who fought against each other, but I wonder if it's specific to that generation or if maybe you think it's specific to Germans who fought
00:20:19
Speaker
I don't know, do you find that there's a lot of the same attitudes when it comes to people who fought on other sides of the war that they just don't want to talk about? You know, I think that's true. I think the huge difference is, I mean, there's obviously terrible war trauma on both sides. And I think you're right. Absolutely. You know, there were a lot of American soldiers who did not want to talk about that. But there was also at the same time this kind of overlay of the greatest generation, this sense of
00:20:47
Speaker
heroism that came from these people. There were heroic stories that were told, that were allowed to be told. Certainly Germans of that generation were not going to go around and talk about their great victories early in the war or how they took over Poland. That was just not something that was allowed to be spoken of.
00:21:12
Speaker
I don't know how, you know, if you felt that kind of war trauma, it's so fundamental and so horrific to have been through that experience. I'm not sure how much those glorious stories can help. I think in some cases they can. I think for other people, it just goes too deep and they kind of think they know those stories to be sentimental constructs anyway, you know, so it's tricky.
00:21:37
Speaker
Well, definitely with my great grandfather, really all the family knows about his wartime experience. Like what he actually did is he had a flamethrower and it would go into the caves. And that was obviously something very traumatic to have to do.
00:21:53
Speaker
You burn people alive in these caves. So I think just maybe shared trauma is, you know, that's not something that people want to talk about. Well, let's get to your grandfather's story first. So your family is from in Germany, the Alsace region. Talk a little bit about first the history of that region and give us some context to the story we're walking into with your grandfather.
Historical Context of Alsace
00:22:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. My parents are from just across the river from Azaz, so they're from the Black Forest region. But the interesting thing is that Azaz and Black Forest, they share almost the same dialect, almost the same history, almost the same culture.
00:22:38
Speaker
And the thing about Azaz is, I mean, its history goes back so deep. It starts with Emperor Charlemagne, who had the first great empire in Europe. And when he dies, it gets divided up into three sections.
00:22:54
Speaker
The western section becomes France, the eastern section becomes Germany, and the middle section, where Alizas is, that goes all the way down from Belgium down to Italy, is the richest, you know, includes, you know, the Vatican City and all this great farmland. It gets fought over for the next few centuries. And the Germans and the French take turns claiming it. For most of the history, it was German.
00:23:22
Speaker
until Louis XIV shows up and takes it over. But he's kind of a benign Roy, just lets the Germans be German, but it's technically French, but they still speak German. And then in 1871, the Prussians march in.
00:23:36
Speaker
and they take it over and they are very stern kind of nationalistic people and they make everybody learn German and they talk about how France is an inferior culture. And then in 1918, after World War I, the French come in
00:23:53
Speaker
And they say, they do the opposite. They kick out thousands of Germans that issue identity cards based on how French you are. They're very prejudiced against the German history. And then finally in 40, the Nazis come in and they're the worst of all. And they come in and
00:24:12
Speaker
take this country and Germanify it so quickly. I mean, all the street sides changed to German names. People's last names gets changed. The grave inscriptions get changed. You couldn't have thermometers that had red, white, and blue colors on them because those are the French colors. I mean, just at every level, it gets Germanified.
00:24:36
Speaker
What's happening is Alsace becomes an incubator for nationalism in Europe. It's a place where the idea of countries identities get ratcheted up generation to generation to the point where the Nazis are just insane about it. They outlawed berets. You could get put in jail for wearing a beret in Alsace. Into this comes my grandfather in 1940. He's sent there
00:25:05
Speaker
to re-educate these French kids and be part of that Germanification process. And of course the Alzations are, you know, they've been through, a lot of the people in that village have been through three regimes already.
00:25:19
Speaker
or were born German and then became French and now they're German again, or they were born French and now they're German. There's so much kind of the whole idea of national identity is so weird in that place. And it feels so kind of imposed upon them both by the French and by the Germans that
00:25:40
Speaker
You know, you kind of have these people in this, I mean, I think most of them truly are French patriots in the end, and they see the awfulness of the Nazi occupation. But at the same time, they almost all grew up speaking German, they all speak German at home. So there's a part of them that is culturally German still. So they're really divided in their feelings about this whole period. So then your family is not actually from Alsace, it's from next to Alsace. We're from
00:26:08
Speaker
directly 20 minutes by bicycle across the river. But again, those distinctions we put on, I mean, some people think of the Rhine as a dividing line going back to Caesar, and some people think of the Vosges as a dividing line, the mountain range, which is west of the Rhine. So you can think of it as all the same area or you can think of it as two distinct countries.
00:26:34
Speaker
Yeah. Well, let's talk about your grandfather's World War I experience first. So your grandfather was born in 1899, I believe. So he was, well, how old was he when he went into World War I? What were the circumstances? What was he doing right before World War I, before he joined the fighting?
00:26:58
Speaker
I mean, he was, he was a farmer's son, you know, he was like working, working their little plot of land. His father had committed suicide when he was, when he was very young, had kind of gambled away the farm. Or so he thought and committed suicide that day. So he grew up with a stepfather.
00:27:17
Speaker
And then, and was very religious. I mean, ended up going to seminary school, religious school and studying to be a priest. And when he got called in by the German army, he was, I think 18 or 19, I think he was 19, just turned 19. Suddenly got thrown into the Western front, kind of green. He was, you know, the very end of the war.
00:27:42
Speaker
kind of the last greenest recruits thrown into that area, into the Western Front. And he became part of the Meuse-Algonne campaign, which is the biggest campaign of the war, but people know very little about it. I think it's kind of such an ugly, ugly battle.
00:28:03
Speaker
that it doesn't have, you know, it's kind of been under, under, under discussed in, in war, in American wartime history. But, you know, I forget the numbers, but hundreds of thousands of people died and it was a huge battle and that's where he lost his eye. Yeah. Well, how did, so he, he fought from right up until I think like September of 1918 where he was injured, correct? Yeah.
00:28:32
Speaker
He managed to make it home. How did the war change him? First of all, just physically, he was kind of broken. He had not just this eye that had been shot out to have a glass eye in it, but he had shrapnel all over his body. He
00:28:51
Speaker
It took him, he couldn't be an engineer anymore or he couldn't be a priest anymore because he'd lost his faith. I mean, the war had just kind of shattered his sense of God and justice of that kind.
00:29:05
Speaker
His alternative thing was to be an engineer. He'd taken some, done some engineering work before the war, and he couldn't do that very well because his vision was screwed up. You know, he couldn't see three-dimensionally very well. And so he applied to be a student, I mean, a teacher to get a teaching degree, and he was denied at first. I mean, I know all this because I found in the Freiburg archives, I found this amazing document, which was kind of a workman's comp kind of,
00:29:34
Speaker
application from him to the German government saying, look, I have these war injuries and they've prevented me from earning income. Could you compensate me for that? And so it's this amazing five or six page single space document where he describes exactly what he went through. So he eventually gets his German teaching certificate after a couple of years of trying and then kind of makes the rounds of little villages as an assistant teacher for years in the Black Forest, just kind of living hand to mouth.
00:30:04
Speaker
and eventually gets a, the next stage, a secondary teaching certificate so he can be a head teacher. And then in 1930, he finally gets his job in Aufengen, this little German village of 650 people, pretty close to Lake Constance down in South Central Germany. And there, that's where he joins a Nazi party in 1933.
00:30:29
Speaker
Yeah. Well, let's talk about some of the research that you did and how your grandfather described him as being very, you found he was very idealistic. Talk about what you found when you went to research kind of his, not a cent, but his coming into the Nazi party and his beliefs about national socialism. Well, it's interesting because that was one of the things I was
00:31:00
Speaker
really concerned about when I started this project. I mean, I knew the beginning and end of this book, but I didn't know. I had a big blank spot when it came to these years because my mother and my uncles didn't remember any of it. They were too young at the time. And I didn't have any documents. He didn't have any diaries from those years. He didn't have any letters. I had that workman's comp document, but it ended in 1928. So I didn't know any of this stuff.
Discoveries in Family Letters
00:31:25
Speaker
And then
00:31:27
Speaker
I called this village mayor's office and I asked, do you have any archives I can look up? And they said, no, there are no archives here. And I said, well, are there old people who might remember my grandfather who had him as a teacher? And they get back to me a few days later. No, there are no, nobody remembers him here.
00:31:44
Speaker
And so I finally ended up going to a bunch of villages, I just flew to Germany, and I went to a bunch of villages around Aufengen, thinking maybe I could triangulate this history. And I end up finding one archivist who says, you know what, I think there is an archive in Aufengen, but this guy Uwe Freilin that you've been talking to, the mayor,
00:32:09
Speaker
He's really the town chimney sweep. He doesn't really know anything about that history. So he puts me in touch with Uwe Freilin. And finally, I show up at that village, and Uwe Freilin makes an appointment with me to look at the archive. And we go down into this kind of dungeon-like space in the town hall. And there are all these leather-bound volumes. And I think, hallelujah, I found this archive. And I look through them, and they're all bills. They're like three centuries of bills.
00:32:38
Speaker
And I'm like, and so I tell Uwe, well, look, I'm going to look through these due diligence, but can you show me where the bathroom is? And he goes, okay. So it takes me up to the next floor. And as we're passing through the vestibule to the bathroom,
00:32:55
Speaker
I see these big armoires and I look at those and he says, oh yes, you may or you may find something of interest in there. So I open one of them up and it's just got like the perfectly organized archive that has not been looked at in 70 or 80 years and including, you know, and it's divided by like police matters, military matters, schooling matters, road work matters. And so in that,
00:33:19
Speaker
I found this file of schooling matters. I found just dozens of letters my grandfather had written to teachers, to students, to the Nazi authorities, responses from Nazi authorities to them. I found circulars that were sent from Berlin and from the regional headquarters in Hauska from the Nazi authorities about tightening the net on Jewish immigrants, Jews in the area.
00:33:47
Speaker
It was an amazing thing. It kind of gave me this granular view of how Nazism kind of infected and took hold of this village.
00:34:00
Speaker
And it's interesting to see because certainly my grandfather is writing letters to the Nazis and signing them Heil Hitler. It was kind of the required sign off in those years. And he's leading the Hitler Youth and he's talking about how he's trying to instill the principles of national socialism and his young charges. And there's plenty in it that shows his passion
00:34:24
Speaker
for Nazism. And he went to two Nuremberg rallies. I mean, those were speech where Hitler really laid out his kind of anti-Semitic agenda. And so he was aware of all that. But the interesting thing is, you know, like a lot of Germans, there was this idea, and I think we see that today, too, in our politics, there's this idea that, yeah, yeah, he's a blowhard, but really, that's not what matters. What matters is economic policies.
00:34:55
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that stuff, that's just hot air. And it's hard to know how seriously someone like my grandfather took that. I know that there was some traces of antisemitism in his life. My mom said occasionally he would make antisemitic comments, but she also said absolutely not, if he had known, like so many Germans say that now, if they had known what was really intended, what would really happen,
00:35:23
Speaker
they wouldn't have gone along with it. It's one of those questions that's kind of unanswerable at some level. Do you think it was the economic conditions that drew your grandfather to Nazism? Absolutely. I mean, that's clear because he didn't join with the first waves that were purely political, but the way he kind of entered it was he
00:35:47
Speaker
joined what's called the Winter Charity Program that the Nazis were now in charge of. And he started doing charity work, giving clothing and food to the poor. And eventually that became a Nazi organization. Then he joined that. And then the Nazis teachers leagues, like 94% of elementary school teachers
00:36:09
Speaker
within a few years were all part of the National Socialist Teachers League. So, you know, I think he just got pulled in little by little and then eventually became kind of convinced by the organization of it, but at an economic level, I think, more than anything else.
00:36:28
Speaker
Yeah. Well, what were some of, as the war drew closer, what were some of the things that, I'm sure going into this archive, I mean, nobody wants to uncover that their family was involved in Nazis and type stuff. And maybe in the back of your mind, you're like, oh, give me something that could vindicate my grandfather here or something like that.
00:36:56
Speaker
What were some of the things that you uncovered that made you think, okay, maybe he's not like this diehard, dedicated Nazi who believes that Jews are inferior in those types of things? Right. Yeah, I mean, certainly going into an archive like that,
00:37:17
Speaker
I mean, I kind of knew already by then that in France he had changed and that he had had this relationship with the resistance. So I knew that later in his career from 40 to 44, he had evolved and become a different man, but I didn't know yet how complicit he was in the early Nazi years. So I was, you know, it was really apprehensive as I was going through this archive. It's interesting, I didn't find any evidence of anti-Semitism in anything he wrote.
00:37:47
Speaker
I didn't find any evidence of him going on with any terrible Nazi policies in any of those files. I did find some interesting counteracting behavior. I mean, for instance, not far from there, at that time, the Nazis were already euthanizing
00:38:06
Speaker
mentally disabled children, mentally disabled adults. And my grandfather had, especially in these files, I found all his report cards and there was one kid who was clearly severely mentally disabled. And my grandfather's reports on him year by year by year
00:38:25
Speaker
He kept him in his class. He kept working with him. He kept giving him better and better scores as he could just tell that this guy, Baldus, this kid, Baldus, was really trying. And it was clearly he had a completely different thinking about this kid than the Nazis wanted. The other thing I found was a letter he wrote to local Nazi authorities.
00:38:49
Speaker
saying, basically complaining because one of his colleagues had been kicked out of town as a teacher and reposted somewhere else because some Nazi party members in that village, the neighboring village had decided he was not, you know, convinced enough Nazis. He was not being enough of a team player in the Nazi party. So they had him kicked out. And so my grandfather wrote a letter to the local Nazi authorities saying,
00:39:17
Speaker
This is insane. The local Nazi party members are liars. What they're doing here is making me think that the party is just a refuge for scoundrels. I mean, he uses very, very strong language.
00:39:32
Speaker
the kind of language that, you know, in that era was dangerous to have, you know, that you could get you at the very least fired or potentially potentially shot or imprisoned. So there are certainly people who got, you know, my mother knew a neighbor who got, whose father got killed simply for saying in a pub that he thought the Germans were going to lose the war, you know, that kind of thing happened. So, yeah.
00:39:55
Speaker
So, there's already kind of evidence that he, even as he was a convinced Nazi Party member, he was a free thinker and that he had the courage to express those thoughts. That was already evident even in that era. Well, let's talk about the war breaks out.
Complexity of Nazi Involvement
00:40:12
Speaker
What is your grandfather's role?
00:40:15
Speaker
Well, he gets sent there. He's the principal of this school in France, and he's kind of coordinating local villages to kind of organize the new German curriculum for these French villages. I think you would say that the reason why he's sent as a teacher, so he fought in the First World War, and he's a little bit older at this point, but he's too old to go to the front lines, so they send him to a school.
00:40:39
Speaker
I mean, he's in 1940, he's 41 years old. So he's too old to fight. So they sent him to be this teacher. And he does that for a couple of years. By all accounts, I mean, I interviewed a number of his former students who are now in their late 70s and 80s.
00:40:56
Speaker
And they all said he was very strict, but very, very good teacher, which wasn't always a case. A lot of the Nazi teachers were, were basically just mouthpieces for propaganda, you know, and they would teach, teach racist stereotypes and they would do war, you know, just everything was based on the war. But, but he was a good teacher. And then in 42, he gets appointed by the local Nazi authorities as, as, um, Altskopenleitel, which is Nazi party chief.
00:41:25
Speaker
And that's when things become quite serious. Because before this, he can kind of ignore some of what he's told to do as a school teacher and simply be, you know, he has them sing some songs and has them look through, you know, the day's war reports. But after that, he's an ordinary teacher. But as a Nazi party chief, he's suddenly got these villagers' lives in his hands. You know, if somebody gets drunk and spouts anti-German rhetoric and gets sent to
00:41:54
Speaker
concentration camp. There are two concentration camps not far from the village. They could very easily get killed or deported, and it's up to him to either write a letter to try and get them released or not. If local young men are trying to avoid the German draft,
00:42:13
Speaker
and don't want to be sent to Russia where they'll probably get killed. And their parents are hiding them in a barn. My grandfather often knew about that. We know this from letters that were later written. And it's his duty as a German Nazi officer to report these people and have them arrested. And he didn't. He did the opposite. He helped hide them. So that's when suddenly
00:42:39
Speaker
lives are at stake and his real question becomes, is your duty really to the Nazis or is your duty to the human lives of these people in this village? Yeah. Well, we haven't talked too much about your mother in this story, but she plays a pretty prominent role. Talk about her role as kind of a researcher and somebody who's alongside you and covering some of this history.
00:43:10
Speaker
Yeah, my mom, I mean, this, this book wouldn't have happened without her. And from the very beginning, I mean, she was, I would interview her almost, you know, every couple days, I would talk to her and ask her for more stories about all these people. And because she's both a grand, both a daughter,
00:43:28
Speaker
and a historian, she was invaluable. I mean, she kind of could talk about both sides of the story. She was able to, I think, really objectively tell me the historical context and what the situation was, but at the same time then talk very personally about her father.
00:43:44
Speaker
And her experience during the war, you know, she, like I said, was born in 35. Her village got evacuated three times, and she would go up to the Black Forest Village where my grandfather was born, Herzog and Vayla, and live with her uncles and aunts in these little farmsteads. And eventually, when she was
00:44:07
Speaker
in 1944 or 45, the French attacked and the village had to evacuate into the forest. And there was a night when they were all laying on the ground and bombs between the French and the Germans were arcing overhead and they could have easily all been killed in that night. So she had, I think, a very traumatic wartime experience.
00:44:33
Speaker
But always, it's the women's experience we don't often hear. What happens when these armies are fighting? Well, it means that all these villages all over Germany and all these cities are emptied of men, right?
00:44:48
Speaker
a farming village like Halsogenweilau. I mean, it's crushing work even when the men are there. Now suddenly all these women and children and old timers have to do all that farm work to keep these places alive. All the mothers have to kind of flee, you know, advancing armies or find refuge for their families when the enemy is attacking. You know, that was her experience was the other side of the war that we so often don't hear about.
00:45:18
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I'm curious how both you and your mother felt, one, when you uncovered something that was maybe more shameful in your grandfather's past that you hadn't known previously, but also how the both of you felt when you uncovered some of the resistance type activities that he was performing.
00:45:37
Speaker
The shameful stuff, the question of antisemitism was a really interesting one because again, I hadn't found any evidence of that in the archives. I found one reference to a speech he gave in France while he was there where he blamed
00:45:56
Speaker
what happened in World War I on the German, on the Jewish kind of plutocracy or something. That was the only evidence I found in the archives. But when I asked my mother about it, again, she tried to be objective and it was hard for her to say, but she did say, you know, and sometimes he would say antisemitic things at home. And that was so common in Germany and in France, all over Europe, you know, this kind of just endemic antisemitism. It was part of his life, just like it was the part of so many peoples. But that was hard for her to admit.
00:46:27
Speaker
And she did. And also I think, not so much shameful, but yeah, I mean, I guess shameful. This idea that my grandfather was just an ideologue, that he was so blinkered about what was going on in World War II with the Nazis and his own wife.
00:46:46
Speaker
hated the fact that he joined the Nazis and could see the war coming and he couldn't. And the fact that he could go to the Nuremberg rallies and not really hear what Hitler was saying. I think my mom never really forgave him that. He thought he knew so well and yet he was blind to so many important things. In terms of finding things on the other side of the ledger, there was this amazing moment
00:47:17
Speaker
About 20 years after that encounter in the village where she heard that he had worked as a resistance, my aunt sent my mom a package. She was living in Wisconsin by then and I was there that summer. She gets this package and she opens it up and my aunt had
00:47:34
Speaker
found all these letters in my grandfather's desk after he died and then thought my mother being a historian might be interested in them. So she had sent my mom this package and we looked at these letters and there were 17 testimonials from the villagers written in 1946 and 47.
00:47:56
Speaker
The amazing thing about it, I mean, they're all kind of on little scraps of paper. Farmers have written these. They're not eloquent. They're kind of very simple, but they're saying, look, I'm a patriotic Frenchman. I hated the Nazis, but this Nazi, please save his life. And what turns out was happening was my grandfather was imprisoned at that point in the Citadel in Strasbourg and being tried for potential war crimes.
00:48:24
Speaker
These villagers had all written these letters to the French military government saying, no, no, this guy was not that. He was actually helping us. He was protecting us. And what's really moving about those letters, what was moving for us at the time was 1946, France was in the middle of this period called the savage purification, where all of the French were turning in on each other and accusing one another of collaborating and being the cause for
00:48:53
Speaker
them losing to the Germans and participating with the Germans. And there were 300,000 trials of collaborators with 9,000 summary executions. It was just a horrifically dangerous time. And nobody wanted to be suspected of being Nazi sympathizers. And in that moment,
00:49:17
Speaker
for these 17 villages to write letters to the French military government saying, by the way, this Nazi was actually a good man, you should save his life. That took huge courage. And more than anything else I learned, anything else I heard from witnesses or saw in the archives where my mother told me, that was convincing to me because they really put their lives on the line to kind of, to vouch for my grandfather. Yeah, and I guess to fill in the,
00:49:47
Speaker
all in our story here because we've jumped ahead to after the war. So the war ends and your grandfather remains in this town, correct? And then he's picked up. What's the story of him, his imprisonment? Yeah, the reason he was in prison. So the truth is he knew the French were coming to liberate the town. He could have not gone over it. He could have stayed home, but he felt like
00:50:16
Speaker
He said at the time he didn't want to leave the villagers hanging. I think he might have worried that the French might indiscriminately kill people they suspected of being collaborators, or he had some kind of idea that he needed to be there. So he crosses over, he gets arrested, he almost gets executed, and then George Chill, the head of the resistance says, no, don't arrest him.
00:50:42
Speaker
This guy helped me out. And so then they just send my grandfather to a prison camp along with hundreds of thousands of other Germans. And he spends a year at the prison camp, finally gets released, comes back to Germany. And then in the meantime, a man in the village, Louis Obrecht,
00:51:06
Speaker
had accused him of giving an order that had led to the killing of a French villager in that village. So he gets re-arrested in 1946 and brought to Strasbourg and put in prison. And that's when they started investigating this claim. Was he really responsible for this guy's death? Was he really, as Obrecht said, kind of, did he rule this village with an iron fist? And that was in the phase where a lot of villagers said, look, Obrecht is
00:51:35
Speaker
He's just trying to make his name as an anti-Nazi. This is not true. This guy's an orivist. He's trying to get power in the village. And that's when those letters were written to the military government that eventually got my grandfather released. And I guess we didn't state, what specifically were the resistance activities that he was doing? Well, the resistance activities were
00:52:00
Speaker
were in some ways passive, some ways active. The active stuff was simply constantly getting people released from the camps or preventing deportations. It was all subtle stuff. I looked at accounts from villages all around Bautenheim because there were post-war reports where they sent questionnaires to all these villagers.
00:52:26
Speaker
And in almost every village that I saw, there were families deported. There were people sent to the camps. There was a death camp not that far from Botanheim. Thousands of people were killed there. But in Botanheim itself, nobody died. So really what he did mostly was simply
00:52:45
Speaker
get people out of camps, not report people for crimes they were doing, helping passively to hide these soldiers that were hiding from the draft. I mean, some of these things were capital offenses. If the Nazi authorities had found out that he knew that there were young soldiers hiding from the draft and he was deliberately helping them stay hidden, he would have been executed.
00:53:15
Speaker
But that was, so that was what was going on. It was, a lot of it was kind of small, boring stuff, but ended up saving lives. Yeah. Well, after you completed this book, I'm curious how you changed personally now having gleaned this more complicated picture of your grandfather. You know, I think I've always felt this way to some degree. I mean, I've never felt
00:53:40
Speaker
I've never really believed in original sin. I've never really believed in this idea that national character is a thing that makes people good or bad. I've always felt like there's that capacity in everybody. But I think doing this research really made that so much more clear to me. I kept thinking when I was doing it, what would I have done?
00:54:04
Speaker
in my grandfather's shoes and it made me realize my own strengths and my weaknesses. My strengths are I'm not a joiner. I think I'm a balanced thinker. I'm not an ideologue like my grandfather. I'm almost positive I wouldn't have joined the Nazi party. I don't do that kind of thing. On the other hand,
00:54:24
Speaker
I can also argue things from both sides. If I had actually been posted in France and been in charge of people's lives, would I have had the courage to put my life on the line over and over again to save people's lives? I don't know. I hope I would have been, but that's where I think his strength of character, his conviction, his
00:54:45
Speaker
you know, his intent, his blinkeredness that got him into the party also made him willing to take these risks to save people's lives. I think the more you look in detail at these stories, you start to see how humans are complicated creatures and they're thrown into these
00:55:03
Speaker
deadly situations and they react differently. And to have some final judgment that says, this man's a good man, this man's a bad man. In most cases, I mean, absolutely, there are Nazi war criminals that should be condemned. Millions of them, you know, but for the great majority of people, they're not in that category. You can't judge them so simply. It's just too complicated.
00:55:29
Speaker
Yeah. Well, you know, I wonder if, do you feel like a more, do you feel like generationally people are
00:55:40
Speaker
I'm thinking specifically of in Germany, how people are talking about the war, but do you think people are becoming more open to reckoning with this very complicated two sides to many of their family members? How is the modern generation dealing with this same question?
Generational Reflection on History
00:56:01
Speaker
Oh, no. Yeah, absolutely. One thing that struck me when I went to Germany, when I got the book contract in 2014,
00:56:08
Speaker
my wife and I and my youngest daughter, we all went to Germany and went to Berlin for a year. And I spent a lot of time just in archives and wherever I went, you know, there were Germans my age doing the same kind of work. And it's kind of a, at this point, a well-recognized movement called the Kriegskinda movement, the war children movement. And it started about 15 years ago.
00:56:33
Speaker
when this woman, Sabine Bode, started to do oral histories with Germans about their wartime experience. And suddenly people my age suddenly realized that there was this big blank spot.
00:56:43
Speaker
in their family history, right? That all those stories their grandparents didn't tell. And then their parents didn't know those stories and didn't pass them on. And so you have this, but we're also repressed. We're also felt shameful about their, ashamed of their own family history. So there was this big blank spot in German history. And I think a whole generation around my age and their middle age have started to go back and dig these things up. The hard part is,
00:57:12
Speaker
as you can tell from my work, it's not easy. The Germans have incredible archives, but there are all these blank spots, and if your parents weren't famous or weren't in some prominent role, it's hard to get the details. So it's an interesting uncovering, but it can be done. Well, Berkar, this has been a wonderful interview. My last question here,
00:57:44
Speaker
What lessons do you think we can draw from your grandfather's story that apply to our modern times? I mean, I think the danger of demagoguery, the danger of not taking people at face value, not believing what they say. I think we have politicians today who make outrageous statements and we often give them a pass and think, oh, they don't really mean it.
00:58:11
Speaker
but they do mean it. Often they do mean it. And we had better take them seriously. This idea that part of what happened in Nazi Germany was you were just getting propaganda accounts. You were just getting, and anything you heard that might make you believe that the Nazis were doing terrible things, that they were starting to be,
00:58:38
Speaker
final solution type activity, you would dismiss that as propaganda. Oh, that can't be true. My side wouldn't do that, but it was true. And I think nowadays it's not outright propaganda, but our news sources are so one-sided.
00:58:55
Speaker
And we're so willing to just dismiss anything we hear that doesn't conform to our point of view. I think that is something we should really be on the lookout for. I mean, this willingness to kind of say, wait a second, I want to be skeptical about my news sources. I'm going to look behind the kind of accepted views of my little political group. That's, I think, hugely important. And that's what I think too many Germans didn't do in the 30s and 40s.
00:59:23
Speaker
Yeah. Well, Burkhart, if people want to stay in touch with your work, if they want to figure out what you're writing about, how can people stay in touch with what you're doing?
00:59:32
Speaker
I mean, Google search will quickly pull me up. I'm still writing for Pieces for the New Yorker. I'm doing a piece on the Stasi right now, the East German Secret Service. It's kind of a follow-up to the book. And so that's easiest, is just to follow my work in the New Yorker. But I think, I'm a person at this point that's pretty well documented online, so you put my name in. There's social media or anything?
00:59:57
Speaker
Yeah, I'm on Facebook and on Instagram. And I'm not a huge poster. I don't tweet. But I put the most important milestones in there. So anyway, that's lovely for me. Well, I'm curious about your book on the Stasi now. I just had Katja Heuer on the show not too long ago, who recently wrote a book about East Germany in the Stasi.
01:00:25
Speaker
Yeah. She wrote her review of my book for the London Times, actually. Oh, excellent. Wow. Look at all these connections that we're making with other former War Books guests today. Well, Burkhart Bilgert, Fatherland, A Memoir of War, Conscious and Family Secrets. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library. What a really fascinating story you write here, Burkhart. And again, thanks so much for your time today. I had a good time. Thank you so much.