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Around the World in Books / Germany (2 Books)
She Found Out Her Grandfather Was A Nazi In Hitler’s Germany
A journalist unearths family secrets in a basement filing cabinet, and a children’s author pens a novel for fans of ‘Tuck Everlasting’
This is the eighth post in the “Around the World in Books” series that will review 30 books from 30 countries in the first 30 days of March. Tomorrow: Hungary
Historians say that young Germans have a stock answer for why their grandparents joined the Nazi Party: “They would have been killed if they didn’t.” But was it always true?
Books like Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners have explored how Adolf Hitler was able to persuade rank-and-file Germans to take part in the Holocaust. They’ve shown that factors in addition to the fear of being killed, such as intense peer pressure, could also come into play.
Géraldine Schwarz, a French-German journalist, takes a more personal approach to the question in her internationally acclaimed memoir, Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe (Scribner, 2020), translated from the French by Laura Marris.
