Dan Snow's History Hit - Investigating the Nazi Massacre at Rumbula

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

An underground Nazi weapons factory and stash of 77-year-old Denazification files. What is it really like to discover that your grandfather was a member of the SS?In 2023, journalist Lorenz Hemicker joined us to tell the tale of his grandfather, who took part in the massacre of 25,000 Jews at Rumbula in Latvia. We heard about how a radicalised First World War veteran took up the cause of National Socialism, became directly involved in the darkest of Nazi atrocities, and tried to justify himself in the years that followed.But the story goes even deeper than that. Today, Lorenz joins us again to share his incredible discoveries in the years since, and discuss how his family have confronted this legacy of atrocity.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up's History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like How William Conquered England. What it was like to live in the Georgian era. And you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover.

Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. In 1971, a letter arrived at the home of Ernst Hemacher in Germany. It marked a turning point. After years of questioning by the authorities, he was formally summoned to court.

He was being charged, and it couldn't have been more grave. Complicity in the murder of 25,000 Jews in the Rumbuller Forest, just outside Riga in Latvia, where he had served as part of an SS death squad. Hemmaca was terminally ill with cancer and he died before the case could come to trial. Proceedings were abandoned. But for his family, the shadow of those allegations endured, bringing with it decades of shame and grief and unanswered questions that would echo across generations. Today I'm very happy to be joined by Lawrence Hemacher, Ernst's grandson.

Lawrence is an author, a senior journalist at the Frankfurt, Algemann-Zaitung, and he's undertaken a deeply personal investigation into his grandfather's past. I think his brave work seeks to uncover not only the historical truth, but also the human reality behind it. Lawrence first spoke to us in September, 2023, about his story. If you haven't heard that conversation, I'd recommend you going back to listen. Just search for the Nazi massacre at Rumbuller, wherever you get your podcasts. But in this episode, he returns to share his new findings and reflect. on the difficult path his research has taken him down as he continues to piece together the life

and actions of his grandfather. A warning before we begin, this discussion includes very disturbing material. It confronts the brutal realities of mass violence. It's going to raise also difficult questions about how ordinary individuals can become involved in acts of extraordinary evil. And it's also about how families and societies reckon with such histories. For Lawrence, this has been a painful but necessary journey. I'm so grateful that he chose to make that journey and is so honest about it when he comes on this podcast. This is his story. Lauren, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.

Thanks, Dan. Great to be back. I think the whole audience are enormously grateful for your courage and tenacity and resilience in even talking about this. Lots and lots of people responded to the first episode we did together. But for those are people who didn't hear it, let's go through some of the top line work that you've done. This was your grandpa. Reminded, did you know him? Did he bounce you on his knee as a young man?

I never met Ernst. He became my grandfather because he died five years before I was burn. The only thing we had in common was that we were born on the same day on the 27th of July. Yeah, I remember that. And how did your parents talk about him? My father talked with me about Ernst the first time when I was five year old. And we were talking about the Second World War. We did it very soon.

I was interested in military issues already as a child. And on a car drive from Cologne to our hometown in the Sowerland, he told me that Ernst was involved in atrocities close to Riga in Rumbola, where he was a gravedigger for more than 25,000 Jews. This was the one side and the other side was that he told me narratives that are for Nazis who had a big debt. He said he didn't want to. He was a technician and he tried to have Jews at the end of the war. So your dad's an interesting sort of transitional generation. They knew they had to acknowledge what had happened, but they also couldn't, obviously,

it's his father who he loved. They were adept at sort of finding excuses and finding extenuating circumstances that helped to explain his father's behavior. Yeah. That's exactly the case. He was. wasn't able to deal with the issue. He tried to defend his father to understand him on the one side. On the other side, it was absolutely obvious that he was involved in the atrocities in Ramboulin. Why do you think you have been able to sort of approach this as a journalist, a historian, and come to terms with the reality of what this man did? Is it just distance and time? Well, I think distance in time is the one thing, though on the other side I am and you're the same generation.

We are still close enough to be personally involved to a certain extent. But the other thing was definitely the sudden death of my father in 2011. He died two weeks before we wanted to fly to Riga on our own to start our search for traces. So towards the end of his life, your father was becoming more confident and comfortable trying to get towards some truth. He didn't want to shut down these conversations. He tried to, but I think what he felt was that I wanted to find the truth. I wanted to confront myself and wanted to confront him with a thing. And I also wanted to give him a kind of relief.

I know that's impossible. But I tried to help him, and he appreciated that. My grandfather died before I was born. And if I'm being honest, I don't feel I've read a lot about him and seen pictures. I don't feel a kind of a visceral kinship because I never met him. when you were growing up, did you feel any shame or kind of a real connection? Did your spirits ride on maybe he wasn't so bad or maybe he was terrible? Is this something that you feel affected you deeply personally?

Or is this just a fascinating intellectual journey to go on? I think it's a combination of things. On the one side, he was a phantom for me. I never met him. I had never a personal relationship to him. But on the other side, I also felt, especially in school, that there was something special with him. Because I've been growing up in a kind of Nomen's land. I'm not the grandson of Heinrich Himla or anybody of the big Nazis.

But on the other side, most of my school comrades grew up with the knowledge or the imagination of a knowledge that their grandfathers hadn't been Nazis. and in my case it was obvious. There was something. There was something big. So I had to defend myself to a certain extent in school, though I never felt guilty. But the teachers always ask me, what about your grandfather?

And what do you think about national socialism? One time more than the others. Okay, well, listen, Lawrence, I'm going to take you off my amateurist psychologist chair here. And let's actually just briefly recap. Is life a very typical life, you could say, for someone who ended up doing what he was doing, served in the First World War, which must have in itself been a traumatizing, radicalizing

experience, ended up in the Freikor, these right-wing militias that were furious about the sort of collapse of German imperial power, the shame of Germany that followed the First World War, and from then into the Nazi Party. So quite a standard journey, you might say? Yeah, a standard journey. He went bankrupt as well. He lost three-fourth of his brothers and sisters due to tuberculosis, fallen soldiers, his father as well. And the people that were responsible for that were for him, of course, the Entente from the outside and from the inside, all those Democrats and socialists. Sorry, we should say he lost his siblings during the war, so from the hunger and the conditions

they faced during the Allied blockade of Germany, for example. Yeah, both. His eldest brother was killed in action already in 1915. and I think the last brother, he was only three or four years old, died due to tuberculosis in the 20s. Right. Okay. He went to the East in 1941, and this is when he goes from being an enthusiastic Nazi

into something darker accusations of war criminality. What have you found? Bring us up to speed. We talked about the previous podcast, but people haven't listened. What have you found, and then we'll go on to your subsequent discoveries in a second? What I found out was mainly the truth that my father told me already when I was a child. Ernst was responsible as a grave digger from Rumbola for the killing of 25,000 Jews and more. And he has also been responsible as a person that oversaw the killings at the first of the graves for at least half an hour. That is the core.

That is obvious and that is true. So you say he's a grave dig. So he was an engineer, wasn't he? He brought in as an engineer. He was an engineer. He constructed the pits. He oversaw the construction of the pits. In the end, they were erected by Soviet Union prisoners of wars, 300 of them. And that's what he did. And then having constructed the pits, he was also party to the execution. And at that point of the war, it's a holocaust of bayonets and bullets, right? I mean, it's unsophisticated. They're just massing people on the edge of these pits and murdering them and throwing them in. Exactly.

And did he leave any written account? Do we know how he felt at this point? Or have you been able to work out whether he was enthusiastic in all of this? Whether this was driven by a belief that there was a global Zionist, the Jewish conspiracy aimed at bringing down Germany? I mean, was he, did you think he was striking a blow against that? Or how do you realize that these are men, women and children? Was he appalled at what was going on?

I think the thing is that both persons were inside him. We have curriculum vitae from him from the 1930s that he had written for the SS, where it was absolutely clear that he was in favor of the national socialistic ideology. And then we have the testimonies he gave to the prosecutor and to the judges in the 60s, where he was an old man already, where he felt ashamed, where he said, okay, this was a horrible thing I had to do. I didn't want to, I had to do. And we have, I think, about half an hour conversation. He had only once with my father where he said the same things, that it was horrible what he did, but he had no other option. It was impossible to escape these orders.

You've mentioned in the 1960s. So he was arrested or detained or took part voluntarily? How did that work in the 1960s? Did the hand come knocking at the door looking for him? It was a relatively slow. process because at the beginning he was not in the center of the prosecutor. He just had to testify what he had seen. And it took years until the prosecutor told him to come to Hamburg because he was suspicious

because they wanted to know more about his personal role in the killings of Rombola. But in this time, he had already cancer. He was very ill. And like for most of the Nazis in this time, it was relatively easy to escape. One thing was illness, and the other thing was that they said, as long as I didn't want to kill the Jews,

as long as I had to, I will not go into jail. Okay, so there was a pretty clear playbook by that point, how to wriggle out of things. Yeah, definitely. Was there a social penalty? I mean, neighbours, community, your father's, colleagues and your schoolmates?

I mean, was that a form of punishment as well when you found out there was someone who'd been detained, someone who'd been questioned living on your street in Germany at the time? For me? Well, for your father and then for you as well, yeah. Yeah. For my father, I think, not so much. I mean, he talked about it in every occasion that was possible,

Christmas time with his family in summertime at the barbecue with neighbors. But they always said, come on, Peter, let it be. So for them, what is kind of a normality that Peter talks about such things? For me, it was a bit different, as I mentioned, my school time already. looking backwards, I think I felt a bit like Muslims after 9-11, so that I received one additional question, okay, Lawrence, you also think that the Nazis were evil right. So I always had to defend myself a bit, though I was innocent. Yeah, so this was the way I dealt with the things. Okay, so that brings us largely up to the point of which we left it last time with a fascinating

discussion. But your journey continues. First of all, why? You're a truth seeker in your professional life. why keep going, why keep pulling at this thread? Because I found out by accident, so to speak, that there was much more. I found a publisher that convinced me to write a book. And in my pre-research, I found more than 15,000 additional pages of court files. The reason is because they had been digitized in the meantime. And this court files opened new trace. for me. First to a prosecutor that interrogated Ernst, the second to a large underground

factory project of the Nazis in Austria, Project Quartz, and the last the denetification file of him. And so with all that new information, you couldn't turn your back on that? No, absolutely. So tell me about, should we start with Project Quartz, that sounds remarkable. Tell me about that. Yeah, of course. The person who brought me back to Project Quartz was a British historian, Mary Fulbrook. She told me. me that in Austria at the location where Ernst was on service at the end of the war were horrible tunnels, she told me. And that was the reason why I double-checked all the things I had already.

And I found a two-liner I had overseen before. And in this two-liner, I registered that the last location of action where Ernst had been was actually Project quartz. And that was the reason why I started to. read a book about Project Quartz, and Project Quartz was really a horrible project. The Nazis started, they had to start it because the Allied bombers destroyed their industry, and they had to find a plan B. And the plan B was burying that industry? Yeah, the plan B was to bring as much as possible of the factories, of their plants under the surface and produce planes and tanks and weapons under the

surface. This is a gigantic endeavor and it's not only a question of resources but also question of manpower. And as you know at the end of the World War, there were not many men left to work in factories. So the solution for the Nazis was to use prisoners of war, Jewish people and criminals. They had to do the job under horrible conditions. And people might be familiar. There's some in what was Silesia now in southwestern Poland. There's more buried incomplete factories. And what I've learned walking around those is they are just horrifically difficult to construct and indeed work within them, even when they've been built. So you're talking about brutal, brutal conditions, I'm imagining. And a terrible toll taken on those forced laborers,

those slave laborers. Yeah, the people lived or survived in ordinary concentration camps. They weren't an inch better than the other ones. As you pointed out, they worked under horrible conditions without enough food. They had to work in the water. They were very often victims of explosions. They were victims of shootings because they didn't work fast enough. If they became ill, they were dying because they didn't receive a medicine. They had to stand outside because a lot of the trains didn't come due to the bombings.

they were on their feet for more than 16 to 20 hours. It was absolutely horrible for them to work there. And that's the reason why one third of all those people there in this concentration camp in Milk were killed in the Second World War, died. You listen to Dan Snow's history. There's more coming up. So one third of your grandfather's workforce died. I call him your grandfather's workforce.

Can you give me any more details about what his job was at this time, what role he was carrying out? Ernst was one of the construction managers on the side. There were two of them. He was a deputy. And against this backdrop, he was a guy who was responsible for the work progress. So if the progress was not fast enough, then he was a person who decided about the, it's ironic, it's sarcasm to say, security conditions. But he was the one who decided who has to take a bigger risk to.

increase the speed of the work speed. So he, you believe, is directly responsible for much of the hardship, because the workers could have worked less than 20 hours a day on their feet. So you think his fingerprints are all over this? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the SS contingent was relatively slow. I think you should mention that most of the work was overseen by civil factories, Austrian civil factories because the SS also had a lack of personnel at the end of the Second World War, but they were in charge for the workspace and they had to take the final decisions there. Were you able to look at archives or even talk to people, probably not now, sadly,

but were you able to see your grandfather through the eyes of the workers? Were you able to access any documents or sources that talked about him? Not by the workers, and that's interesting to see because I made here the similar observatory. like in Riga, the Jewish people just weren't able to take a closer look on the officers. It was even dangerous to do such things. But I received an impression of the behavior of the SS people from other citizens because the SS behaved in the area around Meg, according to a mayor there, like occupiers, not like friends.

They just took what they were. They needed, they destroyed what they thought had to be destroyed. For example, giving houses if they were standing in a way of a new road that had to be built, all those things. There were many rumors. There were many differences between the civil societies, the civil Nazis there and the SSS in that time. They were really reckless. But when you have looked at those survivors' accounts, the Holocaust took many different forms. I mean, would you include this under the banner of the Holocaust?

I mean, these people are being worked until they die. They're being enslaved effectively, working in horrific conditions. And they're also being forced to live in concentration camps. So this is just another corner, just another branch of what we call the Holocaust. Yeah, it is. And it's maybe an even more perfidious one because you do not just kill people, but you also try to press as much out of them as possible all of their workforce before you kill. them. Do we know anything about how else he would have conducted himself? I mean, was he in

comfortable surroundings? I mean, how far separated from the brutal reality of what was going on, was he? At least he was separated from this brutal reality after his work, because he didn't live in the concentration camp. All the people that were on the construction site were living and drinking and sleeping in an hotel, not far away. So they had very comfortable conditions. I don't know how much Ernst enjoyed them, of course. I know from another record that he preferred a relatively simple life, but nevertheless, he wasn't faced with all the horror of the concentration camp realities when he was there. That was the job from other SS officers. But just in case people think that he might have perhaps not understood exactly.

what was going on. Tell us about your next discovery because it makes it all too clear that he did know exactly who was suffering and in what numbers. Talk to me about a denartification files. It's a remarkable discovery. And it was a discovery I made at the very end of my research. It was possible due to two circumstances. The one was AI. I've had a large language model with a complex prompt with all the locations where Ernst had been in his time as a prisoner of war. There were many of them and of his life afterwards. So we should say because he was captured at the close of the Second World War and was imprisoned. Exactly. Ernst was captured at the end of the Second World War in Ebensi, in Austria, by the

US Americans and then spent more than two years as a prison of war in their camps. And the other thing was after he returned from the prison the rest of his life, he was in Kierspe in North Rhine Westphalia. So I fed the LMM with all these information and I received a long list with possible locations where his denetification file might be. And at the very end of the list, there was the federal archive of North Rhine Westphalia in Düsseldorf. And this is the other thing. there was a very, very helpful archivist. He found, finally, the denatification file of Ernst, misfiled under herniacar, not hemica, and non-digitized.

That's the reason. And so you were given this, I mean, that's extraordinary. So there was a file that had so far alluded to you. And just tell us, what is a denatification file? What are they? How many of these would there have been? How many former Nazis generated one of these files? You know, almost every German man was more or less a Nazi.

And when you have been part of the notion of Socialistic Democratic Party or of the SS or of any other Nazi organization, who had to run through this denatification process in Western Germany, so there were millions of these files. And the progress changed after the end of the Second World War. At the beginning, it was very, really strict. And then, you know that better than me, the Cold War came. and you needed all those people. So you had many, many processes that were abbreviated and shortened.

And then the people were set free and everything was fine. And with Ernst, the depressing thing is that I found sentences from him. He told the denetification people that he had put the trigger. He should choose in the Second World War. He had mentioned it at his former. a working place in Lundschide. And he confirmed that he had said these things. And yeah, this was really depressing for me.

And this, you're reading about this in a transcript. Are you seeing his words on the paper? I'm seeing his words on the paper. It's a transcription file, yeah. And this made something from me, you know? The thing is, I'm crystal clear. He was part of the Holocaust anyhow. But if you discover as a grandson that he,

pull the trigger against all the things he told before in testimonies and in the family, it really does something with you. It's funny how still just you can oversee, you can organize, you can set the logistics up, but there's something about pulling the trigger, isn't it? That feels like a different level. Did he talk about the circumstances? Was it part of these mass executions or was it a sort of individual punishment? Was it one-off? I mean, do you know any more? No, he wasn't specific at that moment. I do not. not know if this in Germany will say Gnartenschus, so killing people that are already heavily

wounded or ill or something like, or they weren't hit precisely by another shooter, then you do the final shot. That's a Gnardenshuss. I don't know if he referred to something that happened in Rumbola or if he refers to something that happened at Project Quartz or maybe something in between. I mean, there are indications that he may also have been part of an anti-partisan operation of the SS Operation Swampfeber in the Soviet Union in Belarus or something else. Yeah? I don't know. It remains in the fog of war. Despite that, how has he dealt with after this denazicification file is assembled and presumably would have gone through some sort of process?

Was it sent to judges or American occupies? What was the process after that debriefing and that attestation noting everything down? The board that was responsible for the denazification progressed just closed the fire. And they called him a mid-lawful. That's level four or five, so the second-closed level that was possible. Now, why do you think that is? Is that because, depressingly, that probably is what he was, given the monstrous crimes of that period of that regime that actually even pulling the trigger

still puts you fairly low down the pecking order in terms of that criminality? Or was it corruption or desire to obscure the past? Why was he labeled a midlofer? In the time when the file was closed, I think it was just the political circumstance that they didn't want to punish him. And as I laid out, later on, when he went to testimonies, the prosecutors didn't know anything about this file. He was lucky that they didn't know about it, I think. And that's just what it is.

It's just like the whole system was so vast. And indeed, this file had been cataloged incorrectly as well. Yeah. And I mean, you can look at the German dealing with Nazi crimes in two ways. The one way is you can say there are a lot of. unfound crimes. I think that's a truth. On the other side, this is what Philip Sands told me, and I think he has a point. There are not many countries that have tried so hard to find people that were responsible, especially in the last 10 or 15 years. I mean, today, Ernst would never

went out of prison with the things he did. I think both is true. These are two sides of the matter. You can never find all of them. And today, you would try to find much more out of the crimes that were committed. I think most of them, this is also what the prosecutor told me that interrogated Ernst the last time. They tried to do what they were able to do in the time they had. How would it affect your family if he'd been locked up, do you think? Would that have changed your situation? Well, I don't have a crystal ball then, but I think, of course, it would have changed a lot

because with a grandfather going to prison, people who still try to work. turn away from what has happened, who try to do not think about it, would have been forced to do it because there would have been no excuse. With that what has happened, he was never convicted. You were always for decades able to say he was not responsible. Okay, until my book came out, but before. At the end of this process, as someone who, although as you say is nuanced in your case, but that you have a direct personal stake in this.

Do you think in the aftermath of monstrous criminality, wherever it occurs in history, wherever it occurs over the world, that the best solution is very aggressive stock-taking, justice pursued to the nth degree, or has something about Germany's mixed approach been pragmatic and effective? Where have you come down on that kind of big strategic idea?

I think that with the way the Germans took in the 60s and in the 17s, they made a step. I'm from another generation. As someone from our generation, I would be more happy with a more transparent approach, especially if you take a look at the circumstances we are living in right now. I mean, in the end, Ernst was an average person with an above average selfishness. and to erect an autocracy, to kill people, you cannot do it only with fundamentalists and sadists. They are too few. You need people like Ernst, you did millions of them.

And I think what was a key moment for me was when I understood that Ernst was a person like you or like me with another way of life. We were blessed with our way of life so far. but the risk that people like Ernst will do things like in the past again is there. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And we see it every day in our world. And I think this is the key conclusion for me of the book. So we should have pursued Ernst more than we did. Yes.

Well, Lawrence, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast and talking about it. It can't be easy for you, but we're very, very grateful indeed. If people want to read the book or follow your work, how can they do that? They can find it at Amazon, of course, and they can take a look at Frankfurt Algemeine Seitung, where I'm writing as an author as well. Great. I hope they do that. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast again. Thank you so much, Dan. Bye. Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit.

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