Dan Snow's History Hit - 'My Grandfather, the Wehrmacht General in Russia'

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

Angela Findlay was determined to find out if her grandfather, Karl von Graffen, was a Nazi and what he did on the Eastern front. An artist and speaker, Angela spent her youth feeling a constant sense of guilt and shame but couldn't figure out why. It wasn't until her 40s that she turned to her German roots and discovered that she was enmeshed in the horrors of Nazi Germany and the Second World War.She knew her German grandfather had been a Wehrmacht general in the Second World War but never really understand what that meant. She set out on a research mission to find out what her grandfather had been involved in and what he'd known. Her journey took her across Russia to the swamps of the Volkhov Front where he’d fought in Operation Barbarossa in Hitler's war of annihilation.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Challenging episode of the pod today. As someone who descended from a long line of colonizers, generals, I'm keenly aware of what it's like to think about your ancestors in terms of their involvement in things that we now consider beyond the pale, as unacceptable as human rights abuses, crimes. And my guest today is going through that process at the moment and is very courageously sharing some of her thoughts about it. She is Angela Findley. She is half

German on her mother's side. She is German and her grandfather fought as a senior general in the Second World War. He's a senior Wehrmacht commander. He personally interacted with Hitler. and World War. He's a senior Wehrmacht commander. He personally interacted with Hitler. He fought on the Eastern Front amid scenes of monstrous crimes against humanity, of genocide, of terrible barbaric violence. And whilst he may not have expressed anti-Semitism in his letters home, he was part of a military machine responsible for genocide. She knew her German grandfather had been in the Wehrmacht, but had never asked too much about his wartime service. Well, that changed in her 40s. She watched the movie Downfall and decided that she wanted to understand about the difference,

if any, between the Nazis and senior military commanders. Was it possible to be a patriotic, professional German general, a soldier, whilst maintaining distance from the Nazi regime. Well, that's what we talk about in this podcast. She went on a journey across Russia following her grandfather's footsteps in Operation Barbarossa. And as you'll hear, I think she's still unresolved about how she feels about her grandfather's role in the war. People like Angela Findlay and me will always be in a dialogue with the past. Here's the ep.

T-minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Angela, thanks very much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm really delighted to be here. Tell me about your childhood. Where did you grow up and what was it like? I grew up in England, in the south of England, and I always described it as a kind of perfect childhood. It was probably just lots of playing, lots of love around brother and sister, fighting, all that kind of thing. And we'd always spend Christmases extremely exciting and birthdays as well. There were traditions with flowers, with Christmas trees, with real candles on them and Advent. So it was a little bit different. We were completely sort of English, but with this German tilt to it, to childhood. When did you realise that being German meant something in Britain in that period?

The first time was when a woman came to our house. My parents were having a dinner party and we had this little ritual. My brother, my sister and I, my brother would open the door, I would take the coats and my sister would give them a glass of bubbly or something like that. And one day this woman followed me into the room with the coats and she saw this photograph of my German grandfather on my writing desk. And she came out, she kind of went ashen and just said, gosh, bit tactless of Jutta to have a Nazi sitting on her writing desk. And that was the first time I heard the word Nazi.

I'd kind of grown up with this photograph of what I later found out was a German Wehrmacht general. But to me, it was just a German soldier and my dead grandfather. And I only knew the word Nazi from the sound of music. And they were just the baddies, obviously, nasty Nazis. It was synonymous. And that was when the first seed, I think, of doubt was sown from sort of teenage on. That's when it all began to go a little bit wrong for me. I just watched everybody around me saying, I hate the Germans. My mother would sometimes have something whispered to her like the only good German is a dead German. A friend's grandmother refused to sit at the same table as me because I was half German,

which I only found out later. But they were small incidents which just began to have an impact on me. And I began to realize that half of me was seen and perceived as bad. And I would always defend the Germans because I only knew good Germans, my lovely relatives. I loved Germany. But then when the TV series Holocaust spread around Europe and America in 1979, that's when suddenly there was no defence. And that's when I began to suppress my German side. When did you start to ask more about your grandfather? I never really asked about him until I turned 40. That's when I began to do the research on him. until I turned 40. That's when I began to do the research on him. But my mother used to tell us a few little stories. She just occasionally kind of enthralled us with her childhood stories,

which were about the flight from the Soviets in Berlin, where they lost everything, her escape on her own with her little sister from burning Berlin main train station and giving coffee and water to the wounded and dying soldiers on the train station on the platforms of Uteborg where they lived. And that her grandfather had been a phenomenal athlete, that he'd nearly qualified for the Berlin Olympic Games, that he'd done a handstand on his 60th birthday, that he'd fought in the war, we knew, but as a soldier, just a soldier, nothing was hidden, but there were just these few stories. And always that he'd been this broken man on his return from the war, having been a prisoner of war for three years. This broken man sitting in a chair, smoking cigarettes

until he died of lung cancer just a week after I was born. Why did you, age 40, why did you choose to suddenly try and learn a bit more? I'd had a lot of difficulties as a teenager. I went through all sorts of different mental health issues from, I had inexplicable depressions. I went through all sorts of different mental health issues from I had inexplicable depressions. I had no outer reason whatsoever to have depressions. I developed very low, low sense of self feeling lost. I often existed in this kind of fog, constantly being driven by this sense of you are bad. I could almost hear this voice saying you are bad, you need to atone. And I could never understand where that came from. So I went on, I developed a career in working with prisoners, with the guilty in society, helping them work through guilt. And then I went to see the film

Downfall about Hitler's last days in the Berlin bunker in about 2005. And I came out of that just crying. And it was just ridiculous. Hitler was dead. The Nazis were beaten. The war was over. There was no reason to cry. But I just cried and cried. And that's when I googled my grandfather's name for the first time. And that's when this extraordinary photograph came up on my screen of the very moment where he is surrendering the unconditional capitulation in May 1945. And he's surrendering in North Italy to the Americans. And that was what triggered then my whole journey. I just knew I was at the beginning of an extraordinary research journey. What did you find? He was a career soldier. From the age of 10, he was in a Prussian military school as a cadet.

He fought in the First World War in the trenches. In 1936, he was made the head of the Uteborg Artillery School, just south of Berlin, about 40 miles outside of Berlin. That's where he wrote a book on ballistic missiles. He was very respected as an artillerist. He was part of the 100,000 elite army that was selected after the Treaty of Versailles reduced the whole German army to just 100,000 men. He was selected. And then he was sent to Berlin when war broke out. And in 1941, he was part of the massive invasion Operation Barbarossa.

What was it like typing his name into Google? That must have been a big moment. It was a big moment, particularly because this photograph that I'd never seen came up. And here he was. It was more like a kind of snapshot. And then when I began to Google more, I found all these people on a military website discussing other pictures which I'd never seen. And even on eBay, there were people bidding for photographs of my grandfather. So I just thought, what is their interest in this man? Who is he? And above all, my questions were like, well, what did he know? What did he do?

What had he been part of? You gallop straight into the middle of a very, very lively and emotional debate around the German army and its politics in the Second World War and people after the war saying actually the German army was somehow separate to the Nazis and they were just patriots and it was Hitler and the SS and the Nazis who did all the, or most of the horrific crimes against humanity. And then there's people who disagree with that. You entered into a very, very difficult bit of terrain and you had a personal stake in it as well. Yes, that's exactly it. Because I was brought up to believe, like pretty much everybody believed, that the Wehrmacht had been clean. They had been declared clean after the war. That was, I think, in the interests of everybody that the Germans could get back on their feet and help

defend against the Russians and the threat of the Cold War. But it was only in 1995 that there was this massive exhibition called The Crimes of the Wehrmacht that really did send shockwaves through Germany as well. And I vaguely remember that, but it was only in my research that I actually discovered how involved the Germans were and how actually the war on the Eastern Front wasn't just an ordinary war. This was an ordered, legitimized by Hitler, war of annihilation. And that meant civilians, women, children, the partisans, the Russian prisoners of war were left to die. None of the rules of warfare that my grandfather was steeped in applied. And that's where it became really uncomfortable reading his letters and seeing him as part of this, but also trying to work out,

well, what was he doing? He was on the very front line. So was he responsible for the cleaning up, as he talked about, of the SS who were behind. And it just was such a brutal war, such horrendous conditions for everybody. This is probably why we need to clarify people listening. The Wehrmacht is basically the German army, the German army, which takes great pride in its history and heritage, stretching back through Frederick the Great and beyond. And then the organs of the Nazi state that were set up far more recently under Nazi rule, like the SS, which ran the concentration camp system and other sort of paramilitary forces. But this is the debate, is what did the army do and know to further those

aims of racial annihilation and total war, particularly in the Soviet Union? So tell me about these letters. It must have been amazing to discover that your aunt had letters. That's remarkable. I received from my aunt in Germany who had typed up hundreds and hundreds of letters sent from the Eastern Front. That's where I got the most of my information. A whole chunk of them got lost, which is sad because there would have been so much more information in them. But I got into his head, his war was basically going well or badly according to how much tobacco he had or didn't have. And then there was a actual day to day running of being a division leader,

and how they would march up to 100 kilometers in, I think it was 48 hours, which was a huge amount considering the amount of pack they were taking. He would be sleeping in a hole in the ground. On the one hand, I was just so impressed by the sheer bravery of soldiers going through the temperatures that got down to minus 50. Then there was the dust, then the snows, and then the mud, this unbelievable mud. And he describes the whole Battle of Volkov, which is sort of was part of the siege of Leningrad, south on the River Volkov. And that was just a swampland where whole horses and carts and just drowned in it. And the conditions are horrendous. Then he talks about the partisan warfare of people jumping out of the forest or pretending to surrender

and then not surrendering in this whole band of people of Russian partisans massacring German soldiers. And then he talks about the plight of the local Russian civilians who just, the poverty, the extreme poverty. So the whole thing is unbelievably uncomfortable reading for absolutely everything. It makes you just think there can never be another war. Horrific. You listen to Dan Snow's History. There's more coming up. 75 years ago, US President Harry Truman created a top secret central intelligence agency, the CIA. Today, the CIA is one of the most advanced and powerful intelligence agencies in the world,

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Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And what about his own views on his political superiors, on the Nazis? What do you think his relations were with them? That's interesting, because he sometimes talks about the ridiculous orders from the idiots above. And when I followed his course across Russia, he kind of zigzags all over the place and sometimes grinds to a halt. And I imagine that was some of the orders that are now known to have been mistakes by Hitler not to take Moscow or to

send troops all over the place. But then at the same time, I do think he believed in this war, the validity of the war against Bolshevism. But I never read any kind of anti-Semitic. I didn't find that kind of attitude at all. I didn't find that kind of attitude at all. Many of the traditional elite of the army were involved in the assassination attempt against Hitler in the summer of 1944, the Stauffenberg plot. Do you think your grandfather would have had sympathy for them? Well, I found out in my research that my grandfather was approached to be part of that plot. But apparently he turned it down, which made me really sad when I first heard that he was approached because that showed that he was trusted enough to even be approached. But he turned it down and he said he believed it was

murder. In my book, I actually go quite into this. There's a whole question dedicated to murder, because there was this man later being accused of murdering millions, but turning down qualifying murdering of one person, the intentional assassination of Hitler as murder, that would have been for him treason. And he very much defended his position by saying it wasn't the duty, it wasn't the role of soldiers to be political. And I find that fascinating, absolutely fascinating. In Russia, as you say, millions of prisoners of war were starved to death and treated terribly. Jews were herded into squares and publicly executed. There were villages destroyed.

He must have witnessed those things. Yes, I believe he must have witnessed those things. He must have seen them. It was the army who took cities. They fought their way in and towns and villages. And then he does talk about the SS who are clearing up. So my only slight consolation is that sometimes he would have been so occupied with the actual frontline battle that maybe he wasn't hanging back. But I have no evidence either for or against. It's deeply uncomfortable and upsetting, obviously, to think he would have known. He would have known. There's no doubt about it. What happened towards the end of the war? He was taken out of Russia in 1942,

and then he spent the rest of the war in Italy. Just finish off his war for me quickly. So he then got transferred to Italy, and he was, again, I think he had a division. I've found almost no information about that. For a start, most of his letters until the very end have been lost. There's very little information I could find in Italy about this and very little information in the military records or anything. All I know is that he fought in the battles for Monte Cassino. He was based a lot around Rimini and Ferrara. And then in the very last days of the war, he was in charge of a panzer division up in the foothills of the Dolomites in a little place called La Stanga. And that's where he surrendered to the Americans. And I think he was the most

prominent general in that whole area. So he became in charge of, I think it was 100,000 prisoners of war who were then kept in camps down in Rimini. And I've been to all these places that I mentioned. I went to stand in all these places. I've seen where they were all kept. And then after a year in Italy, he got transferred to Germany to a British prisoner of war camp, tried for Nazi war crimes, for being a militarist and a danger to society. And he was eventually found not guilty on all counts and released in 1948. Tell me about finding the man who had served with him. Well, I didn't meet him. It was just a phone call. He was a very elderly man living in America.

And we just had this extraordinary phone call. He was a very elderly man living in America. And we just had this extraordinary phone call. It was a bit like me getting him to dig into the recesses of his memory to pull out these horrific memories of the Battle of Volkov, which was, I believe, one of the bloodiest battles of the Eastern Front. I couldn't ask him much about what they knew, what they saw, what they didn't. I actually found it too delving. He was very kind to even speak to me. He was one of the first people who I really, really did feel could understand. After all, all the people around me, nobody else was delving into whether their grandfather was a Nazi or not.

It's interesting you say, trying to understand if he was a Nazi or not, because what's the bit that would have upset you? If he was involved in the Holocaust or is not fighting a gigantic war invading Soviet Union and the appalling damage and murder, rape, brutality that occurred, is that somehow different? And I don't know, I'm just asking, is that different, do you think, in your mind to him being a signed up, passionate Nazi and someone who really believed in the final solution of killing Jews in industrial quantities?

It's a really interesting question because I think, yes, I think it does make a difference because the people who were descendants of the real full-blown Nazis, they suffered in incredible ways. Also feeling that their very genes, their bloodline was completely tainted. Many didn't have children. Some went into recluses. So it's very real what you feel you can inherit and the enormous amount of shame. I carried a lot of shame anyway. At first, of course, I wanted to exonerate him. We want our relatives or forefathers to be heroes. It's much easier to deal with that. When I was growing up, the Germans were synonymous with the Nazis. We were good. They were bad. We were the winners. They were the losers. And I realized straight away or very soon, this is much more nuanced.

And until we have a more nuanced version of history, we are always going to repeat it. So I began to ask myself, well, what is a Nazi? Is it somebody who signed up to the Nazi party? Well, he didn't. Is it somebody who served in the concentration camps, went on those Kristallnacht and all this kind of thing. He didn't do that either. Very soon, I realized all I want to do is understand. I want to understand how people become bad. That was what I tried to do in prisons. And once you've become bad, what can you do with guilt? How do you work through it? How can you repair guilt if it's even possible? How can you reconcile differences? How can you prevent these things from happening again? That was what became my wider goal rather than deciding whether he was a Nazi full stop or not. He was definitely a cog in and quite a big cog

in that war of annihilation and in Hitler's war. Yes, there's no doubt about that. Why is it important on this journey? You've talked to people, you've read letters, but you also went to place in person. That's interesting. What was the importance of the trips to see the ground itself? So I particularly wanted to visit the Volkov Front, which was halfway really between Moscow and St. Petersburg, or Leningrad, as it was called then. And it was this swampland where the Wehrmacht were tasked with capturing, I think it was about 160,000 Russian soldiers in what they called in German a Kessel. I think it's called a ring, encircling them. And his 58th Division, which he was in charge of, were at the very sort of mouth of this encirclement.

And it was all in the swamp. Soldiers were drowning in it and being starved. So I think that's a typical battle strategy. And that's where he fought and really fought on the front line with his men. It was an extremely bloody battle with huge losses to both sides. I just felt I will understand this man if I can be in the location where he was fighting this hideous battle. Just one of these sort of battles that we've forgotten to remember, but was astonishing. About 300,000 Soviet casualties, 60,000 German casualties,

all part of the extraordinary counterattack in the winter of 1942 after the failure of Barbarossa, the Soviets pushed forward again and the Germans, they kind of reel backwards, but managed to firm up the line. And your grandfather would have been a key part of that process. I've always thought that's one of the grimmest of all the grim chapters of the Eastern Front. That's certainly one of the grimmest and some ad hoc battles going on along a thousand miles of front, terrifying. What did you see in particular in the Volkov battlefields? Because that sounds amazing. You got a real sense of the scale of that war. Well, first of all, there really are still tanks and those anti-tank

hedgehogs that stop tanks rolling. And there were even helmets. And we were told that young Germans still go to that area to help dig up the identity bracelets from the swamplands of either side to give to their family. And all these birch forests, which had been reduced to stumps during the battle. So you get this sense of this new growth on the ground that was devastated. But I think the most impressive in a devastating way was the countless memorials to the Russian dead. And it was rows and rows and rows of names of Russian dead. That was, I think, more devastating than anything. And you really feel that the war is still alive. Of course, it's taught as being the great patriotic war. And when you think of the numbers, the 26 million who died in Russia, it's incomprehensible, the scale. It's devastating.

Did that trip make you feel differently about your grandfather? Again, this kind of focus that many people have on, I don't know, the Holocaust and what was going on behind the lines. The action on the front line was hideous enough. It was appalling. How did you come away from that trip? I actually came away more unsettled than I thought I'd find some resolution, some kind of way to put things to bed. I thought that might be the sort of full stop on my research, but I didn't. I felt more horrified, I think, than even than before. And a friend in Germany before had said to me before we left, she'd sort of said they were all murderers. And that really

rattled me, I think, to think of my grandfather as a murderer. And that's what led me to really look into the whole nature of soldier and war and the difference between killing and murdering and how that all came about. And so I really did try to understand that. And I still don't. I'm not a military person remotely. And it is, again, very deeply uncomfortable. But I also found, well, is he just doing what a soldier does? What the soldiers going to Iraq did? What soldiers do everywhere, obeying orders and killing the enemy? To what degree was he doing that? What choices did he have?

I don't know. There's still lots of question marks. Thank you for being so honest and going on this journey. What's the book called? The book's called In My Grandfather's Shadow, A Story of War, Trauma and the Legacy of Silence. Thank you. you