My Father's Keeper: Children of Nazi Leaders--An Intimate History of Damage and Denial

by Norbert Lebert

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There are and always have been ways of escaping one's own past. But there are some who have never had this chance: the children of prominent Nazis. On one hand they have the memories of the nice, kind man who was their father, on the other they are confronted with the facts of history: with the madness, the murders, the personal purgatory. The Leberts, father and son, spoke at an interval of forty years - 1959 and 1999 - to these men and women who bore a tainted name and were crushed by the show more burden of the past: Gudrun Himmler - 75, runs a network for old Nazis in Munich, denies her father did anything wrong; Martin Boorman (junior) - 70, believes his father was a monster; Etta Goring - 70, will hear no bad word about her father; Nicholas Frank (father was in charge of Auschwitz) believes his father was the incarnation of evil. The result is a series of snapshots of rare intensity and a demonstration of how these destinies have more to do with the twenty-first century than many would care to think. show less

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11 reviews
The children of the leading Nazis are an incredibly intriguing phenomenon; are they products of their parents or have they been able to make a clean break from the past - or some combination of the two? This narrative, written by a father and son, consists of interviews occurring during the children's 20s and then 40 years later. It attemps to chronicle the evolution of these people, and to use them as a showcase of how the German people have dealt with their Nazi past. I am not sure that it was an entirely successful narrative, since I found the flow to be a bit disjointed and the tone to be far too speculative, but it was none the less an informative read.
Fascinating yet rough. Norbet Lebert interviewed the children of famous Nazi Leaders in 1959 and the interviews were published in a German magazine to mixed reactions. His son, Stephan, revisted the articles with attempts at interviewing the now elderly children in the 2000s. It's a much more intensely personal memoir than that description seems, perhaps much more understandable to Germans. How do these children come to grips with who their father's were but how to all Germans come to understand the entire Nazi period? Alot of questions without alot of answers but all thought provoking. The poresentation is a bit scattershot but it is still worth reading.
Almost finished. This is just so good. It's a mixture of a 1959 manuscript by the father and then updates by the son before 2000. Utterly fascinating and very well written (um, translated).
Fascinating read; really pulled me in from the first page. Thought provoking
Disfunctional fathers and the burdens they lay upon their children.
½
Het levensverhaal van de kinderen van Hess, Göring, Himmler en andere nazi-kopstukken

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Holocaust
100 works; 13 members

Author Information

Author
6 Works 328 Members

Some Editions

Evans, Julian (Translator)
Janssens, Pieter (Translator)
Weber, Anne (Translator)

Series

Belongs to Publisher Series

Common Knowledge

Canonical title*
I figli dei gerarchi nazisti : una difficile eredità
Original title
Denn Du trägst meinen Namen
People/Characters
Edda Göring; Hermann Göring; Gudrun Himmler; Heinrich Himmler; Niklas Frank; Hans Frank (show all 8); Wolf-Rüdiger Hess; Rudolf Hess
Important places
Germany
Important events
World War II (1939 | 1945)
First words*
Conosco Karl-Otto Saur da molto tempo, e pensavo di conoscerlo molto bene. Ci siamo visti per la prima volta più di quindici anni fa, quando insegnava alla Scuola Tedesca di giornalismo a Monaco.
Original language*
Tedesco
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.

Classifications

Genres
Nonfiction, History, General Nonfiction, Biography & Memoir
DDC/MDS
943.087History & geographyHistory of EuropeGermany and neighboring central European countriesHistorical periods of GermanyGermany 1866-East And West 1945-1990
LCC
DD256.5 .L41613History of Europe, Asia, Africa and OceaniaGermanyHistory of GermanyHistoryBy periodModern, 1519-19th-20th centuriesRevolution and Republic, 1918-Hitler, 1933-1945. National socialismPeriod of World War II, 1939-1945
BISAC

Statistics

Members
320
Popularity
99,042
Reviews
11
Rating
½ (3.63)
Languages
9 — Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Portuguese, Spanish
Media
Paper
ISBNs
14
ASINs
2