Dan Snow's History Hit - The Nazi Massacre at Rumbula

Episode Date: September 10, 2023

What would it be like to discover that your grandfather was a Nazi? For decades, generations of Germans have been grappling with the legacies of relatives who were part of the Third Reich. These legacies inspire feelings of tremendous guilt but also present an opportunity to acknowledge and learn from the past. So why is it so important to address these stories head-on? And how can they be useful for later generations?On today's episode, Dan is joined by Lorenz Hemicker, who works at the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Lorenz takes us through his journey of discovery as he delves into the story of his grandfather, an SS engineer who played a crucial role in the Rumbula Massacre.Produced by James Hickmann and Mariana Des Forges, and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.PLEASE VOTE NOW! for Dan Snow's History Hit in the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice category here. Every vote counts, thank you!We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In 1971, a letter arrived at Ernst Hemeker's house in Germany. His secret was out. For years he'd been interrogated by the authorities about his involvement in a wartime massacre of Jews just outside Riga in Latvia. He'd been a member of an SS death squad. That letter told him that he now had a court date. He would be put on trial for aiding and abetting the mass murder of 25,000 Jews. Ernst had cancer that would kill him shortly afterwards, so he was never put on trial and the case was abandoned. But for the Hemeker family, this was a disgrace, a source of shame and embarrassment and tragedy that would take generations to properly work its way through.

On the podcast today, I'm going to talk to Lorenz Hemeker, the grandson of Ernst. He's an author and he's a senior journalist at one of Germany's finest newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemein Zeitung, and he has taken it upon himself to follow the story wherever it leads, to uncover the truth about his grandfather and his involvement in mass murder. Just at the start of this podcast, I just want to warn you, it's pretty dark. We're going to be discussing content that people may find very disturbing indeed. This is a podcast both about why pretty ordinary people do things of extraordinary evil. It's also a podcast about our own reluctance as people to face up to darker elements in our family and our nation's past. This journey has not been easy for Lorenz, but it's been vital.

Here's his story. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs 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 liftoff. And the shuttle

has cleared the tower. Lawrence, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for the invitation, Dan. So we're the same age. You were raised in Germany. I was raised in the UK. And when I was a kid,

we used to play in the schoolyard. We would play Allies against the Germansans we'd play a d-day we play we'd all watch the war movies where eagles dare and we did so with a kind of rosily optimistic and smug way that we knew we'd been the good guys like we we were six-year-olds but you know we felt we were the good guys somehow what was your experience what were your first memories of of the war and how did you and your schoolmates interact with it?

Yeah, that's a good question. A good starter, Dan. Thank you. We didn't play the same because obviously we, our ancestors weren't the good guys. But what I did already when I was a young boy was that I took a look at books about the Second World War. So we had a Time Live book series above our television with many pictures, and I took a look at these pictures. Other children might have taken a look at books about Indians or so, and I took a look on these pictures about the Second World War. So I talked already a lot with my father about Patton, Rommel, all the guys and the operations. And for me, this was the start with the Second World War.

And how quickly did you move from talking about Patton and Rommel and the commanders to asking about your own family? Yeah, it was the other way around. My father started to talk about it. I can still remember it. I was just other way around. My father started to talk about it. I can still remember it. I was just five years old. We were driving home from Cologne, which is pretty close to our hometown, Kierspe in the Sauerland in the southeastern part of Northern Australia.

And we were listening to the music, talking about the Second World War. And then my father said a sentence I have never forgotten. And it was was your grandfather has rendered merit of course i didn't understood directly what he meant the only thing i registered already was the irony in his voice and my father was a person always when he was trying to deal with something his irony was his favorite shield so I know there was something not clear but then he later added Ernst this was the name of my grandfather had been charged with aiding and abetting murder in 25,000 cases and this was the start for me today I know that my father was traumatized by the story of his father yeah and. And did you ever meet your grandfather? No. He died five years before I was born due to cancer in 1973.

So the only information I have about my grandfather are second or third information, not first-hand information. So your father knew that he'd been indicted for this, of aiding and abetting the massacre of 25,000 people. Did your father need your help to investigate this further? Did your father wish to explore what had happened? Did he know more than he was telling you? I guess so, yes.

On the one hand, yes, he needed somebody to talk about it. talk about it. Not only with me, I remember that on many occasions when we invited neighbors for barbecue or when at Christmas our relatives came, that he always repeated these sentences. My father has run out of marriage. He has been charged. And sooner or later, a guest said to him, come on, Peter. Peter was his name, let it be. And yes, he always tried to talk with people about what happened. But he never invested a lot of energy into research, maybe on the one hand, because he wasn't able to, he was not a journalist, he was an architect. And of course, we had no internet at that time. But on the other hand, I think he was reticent because he feared to get more affirmation he would not like to have. Yeah, it was both, I think.

Did he love his dad? Was he close to his dad? Was there a distance between his own feelings and pride in a father that children feel and the knowledge that he had been part of something evil? My father had a very warm relationship to his mother. She was about 15 years younger than his dad. But with his father, as far as I know, the relationship was challenging. They did not have a very warm emotional relationship. This might have to do something with the circumstance that my grandfather Ernst returned to his hometown 1950 after years as a prisoner of war and tuberculosis. And afterwards, he was, as far as i know another person yeah so they never had a close relationship to each other yeah it's worth remembering that many of the prisoners taken on

the eastern front were only returned to germany years and years after the end of the of the second world war so he was an american prisoner of your yeah but um he was in the SS, so he was not an ordinary soldier. Okay, so SS men were imprisoned for, that's interesting. And you became a journalist. Maybe that gave you the passion for asking questions. So you did know how to research things, and you were curious, and you liked to pull on threads. Was your father happy when you decided you wanted to do that in the case of your family's history? Yes, I think so.

My first purpose was not to write a story. My first purpose was to give him a taste of relief, though he was not responsible for it. Of course not, but he carried it through his whole life. What I did when I became a journalist, I had made my hobby to a passion because I always dealt with military issues for many, many years as a journalist. I talked to politicians I knew who were heavily involved in the remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust in Riga. And they connected me with survivors of the Holocaust in Riga. me with survivors of the Holocaust in Riga. So I planned a journey where we wanted to visit the remembrance place of the killings in Rumbola, and we wanted to meet with survivors of the Holocaust.

But the sad thing is that 14 days before journey, my father passed away due to a brain stroke. And this was the moment where my research began. This was in 2011. So you're two weeks before you're going to go to the site where you believe that your father's father was involved in this massacre. Your father passed away. That is just extraordinary. It is. Yes. So you went though.

I went several times. Actually, I was already there one time for a story about air policing in the Baltics, which is very interesting against the backdrop of the Ukrainian war right now. And then I went there, I think, three or four times again to Riga, talked to the survivors, portrayed them for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and visited the place of the killings there. Okay, so let's go back to the beginning then. First of all, who was your grandfather? Where was he born? Where was he from?

Ernst was born in 1896, the year where Queen Victoria hit the record on the throne. And he was born into a very rich family. You could say a Trump-like family. Why? Because his father had a building business. He had about 100 or 150 workers. And he was so rich that one of his sons, he had nine children, and Ernst was the third out of nine. And one of his children became the first plane in Kiespe.

And another one drove the first car and the one with the first car was Ernst. So it was a very rich family. And he was aware of it. There is still a picture hanging in the house where my mother lives, where you can see him in an age, I think about 16 or 70 year old, sitting in the front seat of this car behind him

his brothers and sisters and friends and you can see it in his face that he's very proud and very selfish and this was the mood when the great war breakout he just turned 18 on the 27th of july shortly before the breakout by the way it's the same day where I was born. And then he volunteered and went to war. He went to the Western Front, then was transferred to the Eastern Front, and there he was wounded in 1915 in the Carpathians. So this was his first experience of the war. I sometimes think it's these keen young junior officers, volunteering, patriotic, indoctrinated, you might say.

The only way they survived the war, I think, is to get wounded early on and then they move to a staff job or a job behind the lines. Because I just think men like that wouldn't survive all three, four years in the trenches. Yeah, they would be too risky, I guess so as well. With Ernst, he wasn't able to fight anymore. He was sent home into his garrison and the doctor said, okay, you can stay there. And from our perspective, you could say, okay, that's not the worst card you receive because you can have a relatively good life at home

and still serve your country but ernst was different ernst tried to do everything to return to the front he failed one time he tried to go to the rangers that didn't work and then he brought his self back into the game with his driver's license you know know, 100 years ago, of course, their driver's license was a really rare good. And so he began to drive high ranking officers across the front lines from the Balkans to the Baltics. And this was also the first time where he visited Riga shortly before the end of the First World War. Germany's fighting an extraordinary war. It's fighting in the Balkans against Greeks, Serbs, Brits, and French.

It's fighting and supplying the Turks. It's fighting in the East. It's fighting on the Western Front. So moving around inside and on these internal lines of communication, I guess, was very important. So Ernst, at the end of the war, is he one of those veterans who's traumatized, militarized, radicalized, and rues the passing, is upset at the passing of this German empire? Yeah, absolutely. He's one of those angry young men who returned from the war, who think that they could have won.

Shortly after the end of the war, he joined the Freikorps, one of the radical military groups who were not satisfied with the Versailles Treaty. And he also joined the Jungdeutsche Orden. The Jungdeutsche Orden was anti-Semitic. And he left the Jungdeutsche Orden when it became too democratic and left for him. He was one of those guys, as you exactly pointed out. So he's a textbook World War I veteran who is fascist curious by the 1920s and is looking for a military strongman who's looking for Germany to become great again. Is he one of the earliest converts to Nazism? Where did he first come across Hitler and the Nazis? Yeah. And he's also one of the biggest losers. I in the 20s maybe to add this as well his eldest brother had been fallen on the front his father and his second eldest brother died due to tuberculosis so he had to take over the

business of his father but he failed he studied engineer but he failed. In 1928, he was bankrupt because of three reasons he pointed later out in his curriculum vitae for the SS. First, of course, the economical crisis. Second, because he had to pay out his brothers and sisters still alive. And the third thing, because of his strong national politics, the governmental organizations and the politicians didn't give him any new tasks and didn't pay him anymore. And yeah, so at the end of it, he had to say the family villa and he received social welfare. So this also paid on the extremist and angry young man ticket, I guess. So because he's a proud, traditional German patriotic, he's been cancelled.

He's been cancelled by these socialists and the new men, the Jews and the Central and Democrats, right? Right, yeah. So he's been wounded in battle. He's traumatised almost certainly. He's seen terrible things. He's lost his status. He's eliding his own status with that of Germany's.

It's a really powerful narrative building up. Okay. Yeah. So he applies, what is the SS? Can you join it? Is it a paid gig? What is that? What's going on here? He was one of the early adopters of the Nazis. He joined the NSDAP in 1931. And he joined the SS as well pretty early in 1933. And with the Nazis, his resurrection began. It was a win-win situation. Ernst climbed the lower ranks of the SS hierarchy pretty fast and helped them to erect structures in his home region in Kiersbüttel and the neighboring towns.

And on the other side, it was the SS that helped him to gain his civil position in a planning office in a city close to his hometown. And what is the SS at this stage? I think for him, it's a kind of home. The SS is a paramilitary organization of the Nazis. It is not that powerful as it was in the 1940s, but the SS evolved as a stronger organization. And due to this, Ernst also became stronger in his home region. It's almost like what critics think the Freemasons is. You know, you kind of join

and then you get given a secret handshake and a better job in government. Or, you know, it's a, as well as the camaraderie and the feeling of macho martial spirit, there are practical results. You can get a nice job. You get advanced socially. Okay. All this. Yes, there are practical results. You can get a nice job, you get advanced

socially. Okay. All this. Yes, all this. Yeah. Okay. Now, by the end of the 1930s, Europe is moving towards war. Do we think Ernst welcomes? He wants to overturn the Treaty of Versailles, right? He wants Germany's lost lands back. He wants to expand. He wants to see Germany great again, does he? Yeah, this sounds absolutely plausible for me. At the end of the 30s or the beginning of the 40s, I think this was the time of his life. I mentioned the resurrection. He was living in a large luxury apartment in Lünnscheid, the larger city close to Kierspe, with his three children, with a son born in 1938, my father,

with a good position in a planning office, with a son born in 1938, my father, with a good position in a planning office, with a powerful position in the SS, with a good life. And this all changed in 1941 when Ernest turned 45, my age now, and he was drafted for service in the East by the SS in autumn 1941. You're listening to Dan Snow's History, talking about mass murder in the Second World War. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And what was the SS doing in the East? We should say the German invasion of the Soviet Union took place in June 1941. Massive invasion. should say the german invasion of soviet union took place in june 1941 massive invasion wehrmacht

units charging across the uh ukrainian belarussian russian step what is the ss doing how are they different from the army the ss mostly i mean you also had fighting divisions of the ss especially later on in the second world war but especially at the beginning of the Operation Barbarossa and later on in the Soviet Union, a main task of the SS was killing people. Killing people that were evil in the eyes of the Nazis, foremost the Jews, but also partisans and people who were not satisfied with the Nazis.

So everybody who was against the Nazis as well. And Ernst joined the staff of Friedrich Jeckeln, who was a senior group leader that's comparable with the general and one of the most important monsters, let me say, of Heinrich Himmler at the Eastern Front. He joined them in Kiev at a time where the SS murdered already tens of thousands of Jews in Kiev. I've never found out if he knew that already then when he was transferred to the SS, but he must have experienced it pretty soon,

at the latest when he arrived at Riga. And how are these massacres taking place? Because there's no gas chambers at this point. Right. Let me say it's pure handwork. It's shooting into the neck of a person. So in Kiev, you have a lot of people who were involved, who were ordered to bring the Jews into certain areas, Babin Yar, for instance, and then kill them one after the other. It's really, really brutal. It's absolutely not industrialized. And this is the way how it happens. Tens of thousands of people brought

together at one place and then shoot them one after the other. So he's gone to Riga in Latvia now. The Baltic states were conquered in this great German thrust into the Soviet Union. You can place him exactly there. Why are we certain that he was at this next massacre? This is because I had the possibility to study five interrogations with him that had taken place in the 60s. And it was himself who talked about it very blunt. And he said what happened. So when he arrived at Riga, Ernst said that pretty soon he became the task to dig pits for the killing of Jews in numbers between 25 and 28,000.

There were several killings around Riga in the forest, but the killing I am talking about is the killing in Rumbula. It's a little forest in the east of Riga on the street to Daugavspir's, I guess. And in mid-November 1941, he received the task. And then he suddenly began to construct the pits. So his job was killing these Jews and then getting rid of the bodies?

His job was the job of a grave digger. So he had to construct the pits. job was the job of a grave digger so he had to construct the pits and he had i think about several hundred soviet prisoners of war who had to dig the pits with their bare hands in winter times and he was the one who constructed them and it's interesting to see if you study the interrogation it sometimes seems that different persons are talking on the one side you see the human being ernst that is stunned especially because of the number of victims and on the other side there is this engineer who gives to protocol how to fulfill the order with the human body that measures between 1.80 and two meters with corresponding measurements in width.

And what that means if you want to construct a pit for five to 6,000 persons, how large it has to be 10 meters wide, 10 meters long, three meters deep. And sometimes you also see that these perspectives mix, you know, it's pretty obvious if you take a look at a constructive detail the entrance of the pits he constructed a ramp why because he said he does not want to send poor people into a pit they should not jump into it yeah i mean they were stripped down to underwear they had a horrible march behind them if they survived it. It was bitter cold, but he thought about a comfortable way to bring them into the pits before they were shot into the neck.

It's absolutely crazy from our perspective, but it's very, very interesting because you see how these perspectives mix. And anywhere does he describe his misgivings about this? Well where he knew he was doing this for men, women, children? Did he think it was necessary or he disassociated himself from that side of it? He said that it was a horrible task, but it was also an order he had to fulfill. He said also in another interrogation that he's still absolutely unhappy with what he did and he can't stop thinking about it but I can't remember that he said I had any other chance so we had to fulfill the order yes and of course as you pointed out and I said it already as well, he was a convinced Nazi. So he was really standing in this ideology.

You know, one minute you're dressing up in cool uniforms and singing old World War I songs from the trenches and feeling good about your life. The next minute you're digging pits for women and children in the forest in Riga in November. You nail it. I guess you just get locked into this machine and this system and it requires, I mean, I don't think I'd be strong enough to kind of break out of it once I was locked in there. But do we know if he was present when the masquerades were filled with their victims? Yes, we do. He had the command at pit one on the first of the shooting days. There were two, November 30, and 8 of December.

And on the first day, he had the command for the first 30 minutes at pit one. And he gave to protocol why only 30 minutes only, he said, because he was so exhausted that he asked to relieve him from the task. I was not able to double check it. Nobody else who was interrogated, and I had the privilege to read the text, said that this was correct. But from Ernst's point of view, he said that he was not able to fulfill the order anymore. And it's interesting because in this moment, in the interrogation, Ernst takes obviously over a new role, the role of a victim. He said Jekyll became furious and threatened him to shoot him or send him to a punishment camp. And of course, nothing happened like this. It never happened.

Also, in other cases, not. But Ernst received the order to find a storage for the personal belongings of the Kirchhoffs. He confiscated the market horse in Riga, and for the next five months he supervised then a Latvian woman that sorted the belongings from boots over glasses to clothing, diamonds, and also puppets. You can see he was a gravedigger of Rombola, and later he became the rat picker as well. When you say he was exhausted, he was too tired, he couldn't go on with it. Are you under the impression he was wielding a weapon in that situation as well?

Or was he just overseeing it? Do you think he was actually shooting into the crowd of Jews? As far as I know, he was overseeing it and he had to give the order if a person was not hit appropriate that the shooter had to shoot a second time. We should say, I mean, this is one of the reasons behind the gas chambers is that at some stage, senior Nazis talk to each other and go, the toll on our own men of killing this many Jews is proving huge. And it becomes a kind of disgusting, it becomes kind of an HR issue that you have to find a more efficient ways of killing Jews that don't then break the perpetrators of these crimes. Exactly. Yeah. This was one reason. And the other reasons were simply the costs. From the Nazis' point of view, it was too expensive to give one bullet to each Jew.

Wow. What did he do for the rest of the war after he sold and sorted through all his victims' possessions? Well, as far as I know, of course, a lot vanished in the fog of war. He fulfilled several building tasks. He also went to the Leningrad front for several weeks and also took over a command of a Dutch labor camp. By the way, this was the only situation where he came close to one of the survivors I talked to because next to the Dutch camp was a concentration camp and the big old Latvian historian, Marius Westermanis, an old standing man comparable to Sir Peter Ustinov,

they were close to each other because they shared the same fence, but he never saw my grandfather. So, these were the duties he took over in the vortex. And in 1944, he was commanded to Austria, where were also in Austria production capabilities for the Vergeltungswaffen, the V1 and V2, where Jews were forced to produce those weapons. The Nazis had an awful phrase for it, productive extermination. So they had to work very hard until they die. Which role precisely Ernst played played there i don't know i know that he commanded transport from the ruhr valley to austria with parts for

the production of the rockets i know this because my father was on this convoy as well as a young child and ernst later gave to protocol in these integrations that he never mistreated or killed a single Jew and that he always treated them as human beings, that there was no Jew that could say anything bad about him. For me, it's absolutely implausible, especially against the backdrop where he was and what happened there. It's very well documented what happened in those concentration camps, which are horrible things. But this is what he said. Yeah. You've been to Rumbola. What's it like now? What's there in the woods?

Rumbola is relatively, let me say this with all respect,pectacular place you have a monument you can see at the street to dog of piffs and dog of spiffs it's a bit comparable with a burnt tree black this is the most impressive part but if you climb onto the hill off the side there it's a park with small trees and you have on the left side, you have a building company with lorries driving around pretty loud. On the top of the side, there is still the railway. You hear trains passing by all the time. The things that are impressing me most are the careers of the pits they are still there and there is also um the menorah and and hundreds of little stones yeah if you don't know what has happened there it might

not impress you so much but for me of course with my background it was the first time i went there it was very very uh emotional there were a lot of things that were flowing through my mind I was crying I was praying though I'm not very religious but there I was praying and I talked to my father I was very very angry with my grandfather there were so many things that touched me there so for me it, it was very, very intensive. But if you don't know what's happening there, it may not touch you as well. Were you praying for forgiveness in a strange way, even though it was nothing to do with you? You mean if I prayed for forgiveness?

Yeah. No, no, I didn't. No, no, I can't remember what I was praying. I think it was praying for the victims, as far as I can remember. So that experience didn't make you feel in any way responsible? You were able to, okay, good. No, absolutely not. Because it was nothing to do with you?

No, no. That's interesting because that's a question that I've been asked very, very often. It's an obvious question, but no, no, I've never even seen my grandfather. My connection is my father. I think for me, it was a way to find more peace with the fact that my father was never, ever able to find his peace with the history of his father. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research.

From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades.

Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Did you meet anybody while you were there who was a survivor, a member of that community, a descendant, or did the SS do too comprehensive a job?

Yes, there were several survivors. I think from Rumbula, it were only not even a handful. There has been a horrible, but very, very worth reading book from Frieder Mikkelson, who was one of the survivors of Rumbula as a little child. But I met Magas Vestamanis and Alexander Bergmann. They both did not survive the killings of Rumbula, but the Holocaust in Riga and in the Baltics. And with both of them, we have developed a very close connection. For me, it was very, very impressive to see that, though we came from

different sides, I'm from the perpetrators, they from the victims, that you develop a feeling that you're sitting in the same boat, because you have the same aim, you want to keep the remembrance alive, you want to transform it or to give it further to the next generations. I mean, the millennials and the Generation Z have a completely different perspective also, as we both have. So we all have been thinking about what can we do to maintain the remembrance yeah i feel very very close to them i mean alexander bergman has passed away a couple of years ago but marcus vester manis is still alive and though we do not talk often to each other i'm very very interested

in all the things that are happening there yeah do you have any insight into how you think your grandfather did feel towards the end of his life? No, not really. What I know is that my father tried several times to talk with him about the killings in Rumbola. And he only once pointed out briefly what happened. He once pointed out briefly what happened, and this was when the letter of the court arrived in 1971 about him and the killings. But later on, he always left the room and didn't talk with him about it. So I don't know what he was really thinking about the room on the 21st of December, which was a very important bank holiday for the Nazis. It's called Winter Sonnenwende in Germany, you know, the shortest day of the year. And he put the candles on on this Nazi chandelier.

he put the candles on on this nazi chandelier for me this is not a clear proof that he was still very fine with all the things that happened but at least there was still a close connection to the nazis and the camaraderie all the things that from his point of view may have been good in the old days yeah So he was arrested. He was kept in a camp by the Americans till 1950. And then it was actually the legal system caught up with him about Rombolo, not until 1971. In the 1960s, it started. The interrogations took place in the 1960s.

And as far as I know, he didn't tell anybody about it. It's funny because they were taking place in his hometown. And in one interrogation, he even had a lunch break. And he must have went home with telling nobody anything about what has happened, maybe to his wife, I don't know. But the point where he had to tell it was when the letter arrived in his house. And he was living in the house of my father, by the way. And he was accused in killing or helping killing 25,000 people. So this was a moment where he had to be blunt.

Yeah, but only once. And as he had cancer, he was not able to attend in Hamburg before the court. Was he found guilty? Was he tried in absentia or was the case postponed? No, he was. They stopped the process because he was too ill. He passed away in 1973.

But this is an interesting point as well because I talked to lawyers from our time what they would estimate would be happening today. And today, he would be guilty, of course. Currently, the latest process, you see secretaries

who have been working in the concentration camps, they are guilty from our point of view. And of course, if you're the gravedigger of Rumbola, you're absolutely guilty. What's it like bravely following the truth where it leads in Germany today? What's it been like for you? What's it been like for your family? Did some people think you've been transgressive? Are people critical? Or is this something that you feel there's enough time now that you're able to just explore this? I think the time was absolutely appropriate for such a story. To be honest, I've never received so many reactions on an article from you. And most of them, the vast majority of it was absolutely positive. I've read many mails from people who are sharing the same

thoughts who feel that there is a gap, they know what happened with the Holocaust in our society. holocaust in our society but they do not know or did not reflect intensively which role their ancestors played so i think it was the right time it may have helped many people if so i'm pleased with it but i don't know if this is enough to keep the remembrance alive i believe that improving the knowledge about the personal relationship of your ancestors is absolutely necessary for this. And so my hope is that many other peoples will try to find out what their ancestors did with this personal connection. I think it's easier to maintain the remembrance alive. Yeah. And last thing, you've said you feel personally engaged because of your father's pain,

but you don't feel personally engaged with the story of that terrible day in Rumbula in the Baltics. So what's your advice to lots of people around the world, and we're having this conversation in the UK at the moment, who their ancestors might have been involved in the transatlantic slave trade or in brutal colonial operations. What's your advice to people like them about not feeling it's an attack upon you?

To be honest, for me, it's hard to give an advice because I think every person is different. I think it wouldn't be right to give an advice. The only thing I can say for me is that the research about my grandfather has sensibilized me pretty, pretty much. And I'm aware that the evil pretty often is just three steps around the corner. corner so it's not not a hitler that appears one day and then he's there and then from one day of the other um there is racism and there uh takes place a holocaust no there are many many small steps that lead to such a thing like killings of people and we always have to be aware that this can happen and we have to prevent anything that leads into this direction um i mean take a look at the alt-right take a look at the alternative

for germany's there are many people again that think that people from outside are not good because they are not german or not us guys we always have to be careful. This might be my only recommendation to be careful. Yeah. Be careful out there, folks. Lorenz, thank you very much for coming on the podcast to talk about this extraordinary story. I'm very grateful indeed. How can people follow your work? If they want to, you can follow my work at Twitter. It's just my name, Hemiker, or take a look at fads.net. There you will find my stories. Thank you very much.

Indeed. Thanks for having me. you