WWYD? Grandad’s war record

[TrickyGrandad]

As a part of my son’s work sent home from school, there’s an investigation project into relatives experience of war, rationing, evacuation, service, that sort of thing.

WWYD if you knew that Grandad’s war record was highly controversial? My child never met this Grandad but knows where he fits in the family tree, obviously.

Would you use this as a learning experience OR keep it under wraps for when they’re older. Safe to say this isn’t an aspect of war that school are exploring.

Sorry cross posted

Not everyone (in the holocaust or any other time) had good motivations for committing terrible acts. I'm shocked at the scrambling to find the positives on this thread! OP you seem pretty grounded to me - you recognize that your relative was a whole person with complex motivations, but you're also not minimizing his acts (and the rewards he recieved for them). From the limited amount I've heard from German friends, that is how they approach their history. I appreciate your relative wasn't German, but looking at resources for German children/teenagers seems a good idea.

In terms of your 11 year old, I would suggest not lying. Tell him that its complicated, that great grandad wasn't a nice person, even that he was a Nazi. But leave it relatively vague for now and discuss more details as he gets old enough to handle them. And I'd definitely leave school out of it - this thread is evidence of the lack of understanding in the UK, and unless he has an exceptional teacher I wouldn't trust them to handle even the basic information well.

He is going to tell a friend and the friend will tell other friend and...
Suddenly everyone knows and he is now being called SS and more.

I would wait

DH aunt is 98 and was in the the Hitler Youth
She says it was one of the happiest times of her life, it was like a youth club and “everyone “ was a member. It also go her away from her awful father who was suffering after being gassed in WW2 and was quite abusive. It’s very easy to judge standing in your own shoes but we weren’t there and we can say what we would and wouldnt have done.
I’m pretty sure that to keep my own family safe I would have done some things that would very very questionable today.

Yes I agree about not demonising the people who made these choices. From the records we found, when he was interrogated, he said his career was in the doldrums, and the local branch of the National Socialists promised him progression

Very Adolf Eichmann with resonances of Hannah Arendt.

Ive been thinking about this thread. High ranking officers in all armies commit atrocities frequently. ‘Accidental’ drone strikes on schools and hospitals etc. The UK and US just as much as everyone else.

There’s no such thing as goodies or baddies.

Obviously the Holocaust was pure evil, but it mainly stands out due to its scale. Genocides have happened throughout history and us ‘goodies’ have committed enough of our own.

Can you expand a bit on that, Anotherspartacus? I haven’t read any Arendt

This might explain it OP

aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil

Basically, in a couple of articles in The New Yorker Arendt reported on the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem. She argued, put crudely, that evil isn't always as we picture it; the nasty being consumed with ideological driven hatred, but often the banal bureaucrat who is just following orders and trying to fit in and/or advance his/her career. She was scathing of Eichmann, finding him shallow and not inclined to either critical thinking or empathy, but there were more SS types who simply did what they were told without thinking; hence the banality of evil. This is not quite the same defence used at Nuremberg, which was more (I think) about military discipline.

That’s fascinating. And I agree - there is a banality to it. For evil to persist, it must be boring, and not challenge whatever moral/emotional fibre is already there.

I remember reading that only single men without children were allowed to work with the children of the concentration camps. If they had their own children they just couldn’t deliver. It was too emotional.

Interesting thoughts ... you might enjoy reading Arendt's own words - the articles she wrote are freely available. I do love the phrase 'the banality of evil'. I think it says so much.

And there were the people often referred to, I think, as 'Mitlaufer' followers people with no ideological investment in Nazism whatsoever, who joined the party out of opportunism to, say, take advantage of “Aryanisation” policies to, say, buy a Jewish business at a bargain price. The kind of people who would shrug and say 'Oh, you have to look after yourself.' It was through that kind of 'I'm all right, Jack' attitude, blinkered vision and small acts of cowardice that helped create the right conditions for the Third Reich to perpetrate its crimes. Everyone wasn't Goebbels. They didn't need to be.