Ep. 75- Guilt and the Postwar Lives of Nazi Perpetrators with Katherina von Kellenbach

How did Nazi war criminals engage with (or deny) their giult?  How was the prosecution and conviction of Nazi perpetrators dealt with in families?  What was the role of religion and faith assuaging guilt?

These are some fo the fascinating questions that we cover in this episode with Katherina von Kellenbach who has engaged with this topic using a unique set of really interesting sources.

Katharina von Kellenbach is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

von Kellenbach, Katharina. The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Lives of Nazi Perpetrators (2013)

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Email the podcast at holocausthistorypod@gmail.com

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

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Waitman Beorn (00:00.622)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Bourne. And today we're talking about a topic that I found personally really, really fascinating. And it has to do with a couple of things simultaneously that we're going to get into. One is sort of how perpetrators, Nazi perpetrators, engaged with their guilt or didn't engage with their guilt as it might be. But also,

Part and parcel of this is a part of the Holocaust that I think needs a lot more work, a lot more attention, but it's difficult to do, which is sort of how do Nazis and their families go on after the Holocaust? What is it like to have a perpetrator in your family? How do families deal with this? What is sort of the post-war German community like, which is, you know, populated with lots and lots of these people? And then how do they deal with that?

And the perfect person for this is Katarina von Kellenbach, who has written a book about this topic, and she's our guest today. Katarina, thanks so much for coming on.

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:10.684)
Thanks for having me. Looking forward to this.

Waitman Beorn (01:12.878)
so can you start by just telling us how, how and why you got into this topic? Cause it's, it's really interesting. And it's, it's also kind of personal as well.

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:23.196)
So I start the book and really the entire research project began with my own family history, which I only discovered once I was in the United States and started meeting and engaging with the second generation on survivor's side and survivors in Philadelphia. And only then did I remember and

realize that my that I had a perpetrator in my own family and that that had been completely hidden by silence. So I grew up never meeting a Nazi. And I would have probably also said I don't know any Nazis because nobody ever introduced themselves or mentioned anything about their Nazi past. So I began digging.

in archives to find out about my own family history because nobody in my family was willing to answer any questions. So that's number one. I'm not a historian, but I was forced into archival research to answer that simple question. And then I needed a sabbatical project and funding and nobody was going to fund personal family history research.

And so I expanded the question, which was essentially, how do perpetrators talk about their past or not? Because clearly they did not talk about it. But my question was, where would I find perpetrators who are forced to think and put into speech something about their history?

And so prison chaplains seem to be, since I'm also a religious studies scholar, seem to be the place to look for primary verbiage, know, something that would actually come out of their own heads and mouths to get a sense of their own experience and how they came to terms with that.

Katharina von Kellenbach (03:51.132)
Now again, I'm not a historian, so I probably went about this in a sort of backwards way. And the book is obviously not a history of prison chaplains working with perpetrators, although that would be very worthwhile because I found much more material than I thought possible. And also when I started digging in church archives, the archivists were rather hostile.

And essentially I just heard, well, you this is all under the seal of the confessional. You know, you won't find anything. And that just wasn't true because I found letters and diaries and correspondence, plenty to then start thinking about.

you know, what to make, you know, how would I sort of frame their expression of their own experience, which wasn't truthful. I wasn't, I mean, I was looking for the truth, but I didn't find the truth. So that's a whole, that's sort of a secondary topic then.

Waitman Beorn (05:02.158)
I mean it.

I mean, it's fascinating. mean, the insights that you get just from that source base, I think are really cool, because they also sort of go behind the curtain of these people, right? Because we sort of have, I feel like when you're, when we're writing history of the Holocaust, particularly for dealing with perpetrators, you sort of have, you know, what they did, you have a trial where you talk about, you know, the trial strategies and the defense strategy.

And then, you know, they sort of drift off. either go to jail or they don't. you know, but they they they appeared in a lot of the work. And I've come across this as well. They sort of like drop off the radar, you know, even if they go to jail, they're sort of.

You know, that's it. And this is what these sources, these letters and diaries from these chaplains, because they also include, as we'll talk about, right, not just what the what the chaplains are generating, but what the perpetrator is generating. Right. So they'll send a letter to this guy or something, and that will end up in his in his files. Right. So it gets it gives an insight into people who are I think you would you would agree are trying to curate their image.

or do some kind of mental gymnastics about their own guilt, but not in the same way that they do on the stand in a courtroom where they're really trying to present a defense. Though I think that's probably part of it. And one of the things that's very clear as you go through this is there's a very religious angle and perspective in how these people are framing their feelings and their feelings about responsibility and guilt and lack thereof.

Waitman Beorn (06:46.922)
So I want to touch on one of those things, which is the title of the book itself. And, know, I've mentioned on this podcast before that one of the best graduate classes I took was with Conrad Yarosh. And one of the things that, you he did was he would always ask us, you know, to explain why we titled something that we did, because he thought that was important, you know, and it took thought. So I'm curious, you know, the title of the book is The Mark of Cain, Guilt and Denial in the Postwar Lives of Nazi Purporteders. I'm curious, why the Mark of Cain?

Katharina von Kellenbach (07:18.043)
Well, the research project that was funded by the Humboldt Foundation was titled Discourses of Forgiveness. And as a theologian, as a Christian theologian, obviously the starting point was the Christian message of forgiveness and reconciliation. And a critique thereof, but also a real question. I mean...

You know, I actually do believe that people can be forgiven, can change, can be transformed, can convert. In theory, I hold that belief. So did the prison chaplains, who felt oftentimes a calling to be sent to, you know, the fallen, the sinner.

the outcasts, the guilty, to redeem them. So that was their mission. And I began looking for what that message sounded like, looked like, and whether it was received. mean, so essentially, I actually also wanted to find one perpetrator who actually embodied a Christian narrative of redemption.

That was what I was ultimately also looking for, whether it's possible for a perpetrator to regret, to articulate remorse, and to begin anew, different, redeemed. So that's sort of a core Christian concept.

And the problem was that I didn't find.

Katharina von Kellenbach (09:20.175)
documents to validate that narrative. So that image of the fallen, guilty, remorseful sinner who repents and then, I just couldn't find it. So I needed to find a different...

entry point, a religious narrative that would allow me to...

explain the experience of these perpetrators and the story of Kane who kills his brother Abel.

Katharina von Kellenbach (10:03.6)
and is punished in various ways, but also protected and then lives a long life. Because all of my perpetrators lived long lives and they've had families and children and professional careers. so, what language, what story would I be able to frame that experience?

The story of Cain and the mark of Cain also was very helpful in that. In part because the mark of Cain is not a stigma. I mean, often read this falsely as a stigmatization. And most Nazi perpetrators in Germany were not stigmatized.

But they lived long lives and they somehow had to... Every so often there would be a scandal or a question or a conflict where that would come up. And so the story of Cain really became a program, a theological program to think about.

perpetration. we also at some point we have to talk about guilt, by the way, because you mentioned that word. I and I and that's of course also the subtitle, because I couldn't find forgiveness. So I started thinking about guilt and how that looks like and what it feels like and what the experience is about. But it's actually much more complex and complicated than we often think about.

Waitman Beorn (11:26.498)
Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Waitman Beorn (11:46.796)
Yeah, I mean, there's just all kinds of sort of mental gymnastics that are going on here with these folks. And one of things that's really interesting, and again, it's kind of, it's not directly your focus, but you do a really good job of bringing this out, which is in a weird way, the opportunity that Nazi war criminals offer to the German churches.

after the war, right, which is an opportunity to, in a certain sense, rehabilitate themselves. And maybe you could talk a little bit about how this works, right, because I thought it was fascinating. I hadn't thought so much about German chaplains in Nuremberg, in Landsberg, in those kinds of prisons, but I definitely hadn't thought about them in POW camps or in the sort of pre-

prison term detainee camps of people that were suspected of being war criminals, which I thought was really fascinating. So maybe you could talk about sort of how that process worked and the way that colored in a certain sense priests and ministers' approaches to those people.

Katharina von Kellenbach (13:00.666)
So again, it triggers a very profound Christian core teaching. Also a missionary impulse because many of the SS men had left first Roman Catholicism, also Protestantism to become godgläubig, godbelievers, which was more nature-inspired.

Nazi theology that tried to separate from what is arguably a Jewish, you know, the God of Israel and Jewish Jesus. So that was, that was sort of a whole, that's a whole other issue that of the churches during National Socialism. But post-war, you know, going to these

Waitman Beorn (13:42.55)
Right.

Katharina von Kellenbach (14:00.513)
fallen, defeated, conquered, broken men, which arguably there were because, you national socialism has been defeated, so their faith has crashed. And they were in fact searching for renewal, a new beginning.

you know, an hour zero, all of that. And when you think about the political language, it actually sort of builds upon a Christian theological language. So the hour zero, know, so this rebirth and renewal. And so they are going in there and they're offering that without demanding reckoning.

or accounting, and of course, to some extent, because they don't demand reckoning and accounting of their own institution or their own lives and the ways in which they had collaborated and been co-opted or been enthusiastic, you know, at adherence, all of that. But the most interesting story to tell were those who were in fact victims.

of National Socialism, know, Martin Niemöller, who spent, you know, since 1938, he was in concentration camps and was one of the most enthusiastic cleanser, moral cleanser of Nazis post 45 and one of the signatories of the secret memorandum of the evangelical church to release and practice Christian forgiveness.

Again, this is a core theological teaching that was used politically in that period, both sort of abused but also used. In the beginning, I was much more judgmental, obviously.

Katharina von Kellenbach (16:19.246)
But the longer I sort of lived with those stories and passions also, the more ambivalent it becomes. I mean, they were really convinced that this was the way to emerge.

Yeah, and so they made lots of really bad compromises.

Waitman Beorn (16:45.358)
mean, it does seem like it does seem like that one of the challenges here is a challenge of authority when we think about forgiveness, right? Because, you know, a priest or a pastor or God, right, can forgive you. But that doesn't necessarily equal or translate to criminal forgiveness.

or, or, you know, a we're not going to prosecute you. I mean, and it seems like that what these what these prison ministers or chaplains are doing is suggesting that particularly while we'll talk about the amnesty things, I think that's really fascinating, but are suggesting that because someone even if they did legitimately sort of become Christian and openly confess their sins, etc., which as you point out, doesn't really happen in that way. But that doesn't that doesn't alleviate your criminal liability for

whatever you did. mean, it's like, great, I'm glad you did that. That's good for your soul. But we also have, you know, secular criminal justice. And so it seems like a challenge there.

Katharina von Kellenbach (17:47.31)
Right. And it didn't mean that in any other case, it only meant it in that collective evil. Because there is, I mean, so what I found was that in Landsberg, it wasn't just Nazis who sat there, but there were also people who were convicted of war crimes, what was considered war crimes. But there were individual murders, for instance.

Waitman Beorn (17:52.128)
All right.

Katharina von Kellenbach (18:17.081)
individual murderers were treated differently than those who acted on behalf of the state. know, prison chaplains who were also very conservative, conservative crowd had no problem advocating for harsh penalties or even the death penalty when it came to, you know, murder, theft, adultery, know, some of normal crimes.

But in those collective crimes, because oftentimes the perpetrators were respectable, high-ranking, especially in the Nuremberg trials, you know, they were very high-ranking, you know, respectable men. And so they did not feel like criminals and therefore they were not considered criminals. And so that's another sort of issue when we talk about guilt, right?

individual criminal guilt and collective political guilt and the way in which that intersected in this case and complicated the moral and theological response.

Waitman Beorn (19:31.599)
I mean, can you talk a little about maybe at Nuremberg, right? Because Nuremberg is sort of where we have most executions, though I was amazed, I hadn't really clocked that all the other executions taking place in everybody else's zones and the Soviets, et cetera. But one of the things that I thought was fascinating is that through these prison chaplain documents, you have access to sort of A, what these people are thinking, what the defendants are thinking, but also kind of their last words.

you know, before they're, before they're executed. And I'm curious based, based on that, can you talk a little about the people at, at, at Lansberg? So predominantly again, these, these Nuremberg people, but also others, you know, how, how did they, we'll say approach their guilt, right? Because most of them didn't acknowledge or engage with, but how did they see themselves, you know, at going, going to their deaths for those that were executed?

Katharina von Kellenbach (20:30.169)
So there are actually two sets of last words. The US authorities recorded and translated every convict's last words. And then the prison chaplains had also actually prepared those last words. They were actually working with the convicts on what to say. And almost to, almost 100%.

went to the gallows and affirmed their innocence. I'm innocent, I'm innocent, I'm not guilty, I'm not guilty, I'm not guilty. And I went through, there's eight boxes of these execution files, and which, you know, in Washington DC in the National Archives. it's just astounding to encounter that level of denial.

which again was to some extent condoned and prepared by those prison chaplains. Which is a separate question, why they would have been drawn into this psychosis. Actually, mean, another prison chaplain calls this a psychosis of innocence.

Katharina von Kellenbach (21:56.782)
The only exception I found, I'm doing this research before the internet, so it was actually extremely labor intensive to go from these files I'm finding in the church archive to the archive where the trial is trying to figure out what they were accused of, what they were convicted of. Anyway, the one guy where...

The prison chaplain talks about that he started crying, there were tears. He regretted he was suicidal, he felt so terrible. His mother was sent to a psychiatric hospital because she was just devastated by what has... So I thought, okay, here's somebody who actually repents and feels terrible.

only to find out that he had killed an American soldier in a black market deal over 300 cans of chocolate sauce. And he claimed it was self-defense or something happened in the airfield of Templehof and he ends up convicted to death for a war crime and feels guilty. So here's...

you know, a narrative as we expected. You commit a crime, you feel terrible about it, you regret it. You are, you know, given forgiveness and you're executed. So that's a normal pace of guilt. But in other cases where, you know, the head of the Einsatzgruppen or Oswald Pohl

you know, the head of the SS overall in the entire concentration camp system, he affirms his faith in the priune God and says I'm innocent.

Waitman Beorn (23:55.791)
And how do they come to that? because I think it's interesting you mentioned this, and you can probably expand on this, why a prison chaplain, a German prison chaplain. And it'd be interesting to hear if there are, at least initially, of American or British chaplains and if they have different.

You know, sort of different takes, but a German chaplain, you know, might be interested in sort of nuancing guilt because of their own institutional, you know, guilt based on what their organization had done, whether it was Catholic or Protestant. But you know, how, how do these guys imagine themselves to be not guilty or innocent, innocent, even, even stronger than not guilty.

Katharina von Kellenbach (24:43.448)
So I think the main theological problem and political problem is that for the Christian liturgy of forgiveness, there is no point at which you have to think about the victims.

Unlike in the Jewish process of Chuvah, where the perpetrator has to ask forgiveness of the victim and God will not forgive instead of the victim. That is different in Christianity. So that's a theological issue. The political issue is that for these prison chaplains, as well as the perpetrators, the victims were

negligible, subhuman, not worthy of human rights. And that had not changed. So they did not see Jews, communists, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals who actually, some of them were immediately transferred from concentration camps into prisons, right? They were never even released, which is a whole other issue.

But so they were not worthy of consideration and they were not considered. And so I never, rarely did I find any story of somebody mentioning a victim. Only in the last chapter did I find one, but that was much, much later in the Majdanek trial and in the...

police interrogations of an SS man who talked about how a dying Jew looked him in the eye and how these eyes had pursued him post-war. So that look, that encounter, that recognition of the humanity of a dying person was completely absent.

Katharina von Kellenbach (26:56.864)
in those early encounters. that the prison chaplains had in common with the perpetrators. So there was this commonality of experiences that was not disrupted at all. so think, theologics, talking as a theologian, right? I mean, one thing that needs to happen within Christian theology is that the role of the victim

in releasing perpetrators from their past needs to be strengthened because otherwise nothing happens. And this understanding that the priest is sort of a mediator between God and the sinner and has the power, the keys to release, mean, that's just, that completely defeated any real

conversion or any real transformation.

And of course, to some extent, the fact that they were German men who had served the military, even if they were not in the party and the US authorities took some care vetting them politically. So they were politically, you know, looked okay. But they were part of the overall...

ideology of German supremacy.

Waitman Beorn (28:35.95)
it also fair to say, you know, that both the chaplains and the defendants were fundamentally not working through their belief in Nazism? Because it kind of sounds like what you're suggesting is that, you know, if you still think that Jews are inferior and you still think that Nazi ideology, though defeated, was right,

then there's no there's no you know there's no way forward and you get exactly what you're talking about in terms of you who cares about the victims because that's not the problem the problem was that i got caught or the problem was that we lost but the problem is not that nazi ideology is wrong and i was wrong for believing it

Katharina von Kellenbach (29:21.272)
And especially so for anti-Semitism. So what they learned on day one of May 9, 1945, is that they had to censor and control their speech. So they all denied racial hatred and said, what we did, we didn't do because we hate Jews. Also, they were very rational, educated men. So of course, they're not emotional.

in a way that hatred, know, what signals, so Rassenhass oder Rassenwahn, they completely denied. What they did, they did because they were ordered to do so because it was sanctioned by their superiors, ordered by the state. They were faithful servants of the state. And that was not condemnable, condemn, you know, worthy of,

of condemnation.

Waitman Beorn (30:20.974)
I mean, and this is also, it's interesting because here you have a bleed over into it from a legal strategy to sort of their, potentially to their understanding of their guilt responsibility, right? Because, know, for listeners very briefly, you know, after 1949, the Germans are then responsible for prosecuting these people. And they rely on, they choose to rely on the pre 1933 code that was in force.

And one of the things that constitutes first degree murder, one of the elements of the crime you have to prove is so-called base motives, right? So this is theft, deception, excessive cruelty, and motivation by sort of racial hatred, et cetera. So as Katarina has pointed out, there's very quickly become sort of a legal strategy of make sure you don't say anything that could be construed as racial hatred, i.e. anti-Semitism.

or anything like that, because then it opens you up to an actual charge. Whereas if you sort of claim that you're just following orders, then that drops you down a category or two, which ultimately then is sort of by statute of limitation, no longer available as prosecution. But here you have sort of, because again, a lot of these are private or semi-private conversations. They're not public legal. So even then you have people that are kind of,

guarding their speech even to their chaplain.

Katharina von Kellenbach (31:56.344)
And again, because this is not an individually committed murder that would be personally motivated by anything, right? mean, so they're not lying entirely either. I mean, there is some truth to the fact that if you shoot 8,000 people in eight hours, you don't kill for

Waitman Beorn (32:09.262)
Right.

Katharina von Kellenbach (32:26.423)
personal motivation, but you do so because you're a member of the police battalion in Belarus and you've been ordered to perform a mass execution. So, you know, that's, that makes it so tricky, both legally and criminally, but also ethically and spiritually to

you know, to get at the evil.

and to frame the evil in such a way that you release. If we stay within that religious language, which sometimes, or looking at the entire period of post-war Germany, and maybe not just in Germany, but there are other countries and societies where you emerge from mass collective violence.

I mean, probably they had to die and they died in unredeemed. I mean, I don't see that they were really capable of really changing because if one of them would have been capable, they would have been able to talk about this and none of them did.

And maybe that's impossible. mean, maybe it is, maybe that expectation that you should have been able to go in front of a classroom and say, I did this and it was terrible and I've suffered my life lifelong from this. Maybe that's impossible. I mean, but still that's sort of the image, you know, that,

Katharina von Kellenbach (34:19.041)
We have, and I don't think we should give it up either.

Waitman Beorn (34:22.158)
I mean, it's quite fascinating, again, because these sources that you're using are not public, right? That they, it lends, it lends them a certain sense of credibility, and necessarily truth, but credibility in that the people writing these letters actually believed what they're saying. Or, you know, in a, than just a, I'm going to present a legal defense.

which again, I mean, I love your example there of, of someone going into a school, you know, because they would have to actually believe, you know, it would probably be too much for most of us to be asked to go into a school and admit doing something wrong if we didn't actually deep down think it was wrong, right? Because no one's going to make us do that.

And so I think we'll get to this in a minute, know, probing the depths of what these people are thinking and then knowing that most of them get out of prison and go back into society is one of the chilling parts of this whole thing, you know, because these guys, as you're suggesting, these guys, most of them didn't think they really did anything wrong. Even when they're, and we'll talk about this a little bit later, but even when they're

sort of regretful it's in this idea of I was kind of duped by the regime or, I regret participating in it or essentially I regret being caught doing this. but deep down they're not saying, you know, anti-Semitism is wrong. Racism is wrong. know, discrimination is wrong. But before we get to all of that, because I want to get, I want to get to that, but I do want to talk about, because we talked about a minute ago about this idea of, of amnesty.

which I think many of our listeners might be a bit surprised slash concerned to learn that the amnesty, demands started quite, quite soon after the war. you know, this isn't, this isn't the Americans, you know, in the seventies and eighties saying, look, Rudolph Hess has been in jail for 30 years, you know, and he wasn't really that important. A guy, can we let him out? This is, this is very shortly after the end of the war and it's not sort of.

Waitman Beorn (36:46.319)
potentially marginal cases like a Rudolph has. It's like really bad individuals that they're asking to get amnesty. Maybe you talk a little about this program in general, but also about, again, the secret memorandum that you talked about earlier with the churches as well.

Katharina von Kellenbach (37:05.175)
So.

Katharina von Kellenbach (37:10.775)
I think what happened is that you had the Nuremberg and follow-up trials and the Dachau trials, which were sort the international military tribunals and then the national tribunals. And then of course you had trials in the French, British and Soviet zones. And you also had trials sort of in the Netherlands. And so, you know, had lots of different trials.

My book and my analysis is mostly the US side because I had access to that. And I think looking at French, British and Soviet tribes is a different story altogether. But for the US side, and the US was also the most rigorous or committed to prosecution.

and sort of a legal regime to deal with perpetration compared to the French and the British, and of course the Soviets had their own goals. But so the US had a commitment to a legal process. But the fact that at the same time there were these Spruchkammerverfahren, what's the English word for that? So that every...

Waitman Beorn (38:35.917)
denutzification trial hearings.

Katharina von Kellenbach (38:37.238)
Yeah, the denazification hearings that every German had to go through a process of cleansing or at least of having an accounting created sort of a mass solidarity. You know, it failed to really separate the mass of ordinary, the majority of ordinary Germans from, you know, the elite.

that was convicted in Nuremberg. And that was a critical mistake, think, politically speaking, because it allowed a mobilization of ordinary party members to feel oppressed by evictus justice and then to demand amnesty. And it...

And again, the other issue is this seepage of individual guilt and collective guilt constantly, you know, that it just wasn't clear whether they were individually criminally guilty or whether they had been, you know, were members of the party or, you know, and were somehow caught up. And that, again, it's both

sort of a failure of law and politics, but it's also sort of in the nature of the beast that it could constantly, and the language goes from one to the other, right? So it's individual, but then it's collective. And why would you punish the individual when it's collective? But then when it's collective, it's really individual. So the ball gets constantly tossed from one side to the other.

And that led very early on to these massive amnesty campaigns. And indeed, 10 years later, by 1958, Landsberg Lech is completely shut down and they're all released. And then the German trials process occurs much later.

Katharina von Kellenbach (40:59.158)
in part that has to do with legal authority because Germany was not given legal authority to prosecute crimes. could in the beginning only prosecute crimes that were committed on German soil. So they did euthanasia crimes and, you know, Kristallnacht crimes, property crimes, but not mass murder because they had all been committed.

Not all, but they were committed in Poland, Belarus, outside German territory, so they could not legally be prosecuted. So there's the theaters of the post-war period, which is international, and then a second round where German, and there mostly, again, my focus is on the West, on West German trials that then...

get underway in 1958.

Waitman Beorn (41:59.344)
I mean, that's that to me, this whole thing is really fascinating because, you have, I I thought that your comment there a minute ago was really fascinating, this idea that, you know, we want to say that people are collectively guilty, but the legal system doesn't function that way. So the legal system only functions vis-a-vis individuals. So like you have to prosecute, you can't prosecute the country. It's prosecute individuals, you know, but then again, the individual says, but I'm part of the collective, right? So there's this sort of catch 22.

situation. But one of the things that you talk about is in the overall sort of context of amnesty, right, part of which is about allegations of victor's justice, you know, that people are being prosecuted for crimes that weren't crimes either under the Nazis or under general law, et cetera, but also there's, there's again this religious piece. And so really curious if you could talk about that secret amnesty memorandum.

Because here you have the churches or a church under Martin Niemoller. So a guy that we generally think is a good human being, a person who literally was a victim of the Nazis for a long period of time. It's quite a remarkable document. So maybe you can talk a little bit about that document.

Katharina von Kellenbach (43:19.19)
Yeah, so it's secret because it was numbered and only those, you know, there was, think 150 number, you know, numbered document that was released. And it's basically, um, sort of general statements about victors justice and appeals to Christian forgiveness and then individual, um, testimony.

about cruelty in prison and false interrogations and sort of character statements for individuals that they were upstanding citizens, members of the church, they didn't deserve it. And it's a weird collection. It's also not, it's not one memorandum, it's sort of a collection of documents.

that really should not have been said. it wasn't publicly discussed. It wasn't well thought out. so there were these networks that had pushed. there's politics going on in the background of the Solidarity Movement, the so-called Stille Hilfe, silent help.

and the name really says a lot already.

Waitman Beorn (44:51.183)
and HIE and the advocacy organizations for the various sort of perpetrators.

Katharina von Kellenbach (44:54.857)
Right.

Right. That has been sort of, you know, and this is the Stille Hilfe. mean, their role in post-war West German society over the decades, you know, all the way into right-wing revival right now is sort of very interesting chapter that has not yet been fully, I mean, there's some journalists who have lost.

looked into this, but that's really also a history that ought to be written, I think, especially now that we're facing, you know, a full blown revival of Nazi ideology.

Waitman Beorn (45:38.64)
Yeah, yeah. mean, one of the that I thought was really interesting as well, since we're talking about sort of amnesty and forgiveness, and again, just to point out that again, they're asking sort of the wrong people because the state can't grant you sort of Christian forgiveness anyway, right? So that an amnesty for a crime is, and it raises interesting questions too about sort of as an American, right? The separation of church and state and the extent to which the state should be

bound by, know, great, he was a good Christian, but that's immaterial to, you know, as a state, I don't need to, you know, demonstrate Christian forgiveness, for example, right. But one of the things that I thought was really fascinating is, and again, it relates to this idea of amnesty, is that it appears to be also impacted by a gendered lens as well, right. So you give the example of Clara Forch, who

is an interesting person and maybe you can talk about her as well. But in the example that you give with her, there's a completely different response when the perpetrator is a woman and somehow her crimes are worse. Maybe you can talk about sort of how that plays out as well.

Katharina von Kellenbach (46:58.357)
Well, it's general, it's also, and again, because this is before the internet where you could just search people, I'm just looking at these files and some of those who were convicted to death were couples. And couples are of course inmates who, today we would be much better or much more.

Now, what's the word, careful or cautious assessing criminal liability of inmates who were guilty of violence and cruelty versus those in charge. so, I mean, in this chapter, I compare Oswald Pohl, who is a general and this heroic SS general in charge.

who converts to Catholicism and then writes a book called Credo, My Path to God. And who even gets the Pope apparently to ask for his amnesty on the grounds of his conversion and, you know, upright Christianity. So there's a large solidarity movement with him.

although he's responsible for the entire concentration camp system, 11 million dead, cruelty beyond speech. And then this inmate who is a communist who first is arrested early on, and she was already as a communist, she was a street fighter, a working class poor woman.

active in the Communist Party, battling Nazis in the streets, is then picked up and sent to Ravensbrück, the women's camp, where she becomes block-eldeste and then she's sent to Auschwitz and becomes block-eldeste. she's, surely she was violent in that system, but

Katharina von Kellenbach (49:19.773)
in terms of her responsibility for her actions or the choices she had that she could make. It's such a vast difference. And yet, emotionally, the chaplains recoiled from this woman. And I'm sure she was a terrible woman. I mean, that's also true. I mean, when we...

You know, when we think of guilt, you know, the homeless drunk, you know, who steals, you know, a mobile phone is so much worse than the banker who steals, you know, several millions. So, I mean, we have to sort of be, when it comes to guilt and how a criminal looks and acts, you know, we have to be, I mean, just

don't trust your instincts. It's not by instinct. But they did. They went by instinct. And so this one, they said, we can't support an amnesty appeal. She was convicted to death, by the way, by the French, which, again, she's an inmate. Why would you? And she had other inmates who were communists supporting her appeal. But there were also other inmates who accused her.

because she was so the last, know, I mean, she had done terrible things. So the ethics of this as well as the Lidl are just very complex.

Waitman Beorn (51:00.335)
I mean, it seems like there's also the, again, the, and this might be the sort of what you were talking about, kind of the emotional, emotional response, right? Or the gut response, which is kind of when women do things that are brutal or violent, you know, because they are violating this sort of patriarchal, societally dictated gender role, it makes them even more sort of.

criminal and degenerate in the eyes of people like even these prison chaplains were kind of like, you know, this is she's, they might not have articulated it that way, but that might've led into sort of how they, how they felt about it. Yeah.

Katharina von Kellenbach (51:41.872)
The beasts, the animals. mean, Ilse Koch would be another example of that. So women who were violent, their violence was potent, just became much more potent and memorable too. Because of course, in these trials, you had to have witnesses who could pinpoint that this person had done that on that day.

And when a woman beat or had a whip or, you know, violence, everybody remembered. Some nameless SS guard, you know, they couldn't recollect their faces or their names. You know, they didn't know who it was. So the trials were, you know, were very uneven. Yet at the same time, most women got away by claiming their feminine

their femininity. So that's also true that the innocence of women, especially also the wives of perpetrators, another chapter that I've dealt with.

Waitman Beorn (52:52.399)
mean, this is the next thing to logically talk about because again, one of the neat things about your source base is that it also allows and brings women into it, particularly the wives and their responses. And one of the things that you note is that by and large, it was a standby your man kind of situation where the wives were sort of.

you know, all in it with their husbands, you know, and with the exception of people that married after the war and then discovered, you know, my husband was an SS guard or whatnot. But maybe we can talk about the role of women here because, you know, you're adding to and in communication with a larger history of what is the role of women in the Nazi state. Claudia Kunst's work, you you talk about sort of this idea that women

In other words, if they weren't sort of opposing their husbands and saying what you're doing is wrong, then they were in essence supporting them and providing a nurturing, comfortable, relaxed environment for their husbands to live in while they're doing terrible things.

Katharina von Kellenbach (54:01.077)
Yeah, and even more so, they didn't just love and support their husbands, but they believed in their mission. So the ideological commitment of these women rarely gets even recognized or asked, right? I mean, they're just sort of these, you know, nice, nice grandmothers, of course, you know, in my case, you know, they're nice women, you know, they're, you know, what could they possibly have?

you know, what's their, how are they evil? And so the question of evil when it comes to women is, you know, is a different one because they're not the agents. And so they obviously can't be directly held responsible for what their husbands do. But they do have a responsibility. And oftentimes they, you know, they were ideologically.

even more fanatical. I mean, in some cases, it's kind of shocking how dismissive towards the victims of these programs they really are. They're more dismissive because they're guarded. They're not under...

accusation and so they can speak freely and their contempt is quite jarring. The hatred.

Waitman Beorn (55:36.772)
I mean, and they're writing letters as well, you know, to, the court and to, to these chaplains, you know, it's, it's really, it's quite fascinating, you know, the extent to which they are, they're advocating, but also, I mean, again, the, the beauty of that chapter is that you have the example of the woman that was like, I didn't know this guy was in, at Auschwitz when I married him after the war. And,

I don't know if it was him exactly, you do cite one example where the court was like, the court literally ruled you can't get divorced from this person because being a guard at Auschwitz wasn't sort of dishonorable behavior enough to justify.

divorce. And I thought that was just maybe talk about that because that's just a really fascinating juxtaposition. know, the people that are married before the war are sort of committed to it. Those married after the war are more willing or at least anecdotally to sort of say, I didn't sign up for this and I'm not going to.

Katharina von Kellenbach (56:37.043)
So that verdict is actually, I found that verdict in the files of the prison chaplains in Landsberg-Lecht. So that was an early verdict. This woman was after the Auschwitz trial in the 60s and she had married afterwards and was unaware. And so that example is really sort of the foil to understand the ideological loyalty of...

of the wives who had been vetted in the 30s and 40s. And the SS was, of course, understood itself as a Sippengemeinschaft. And so these wives all had to go through ideological and political training. And they were fully committed in a way that post-war, she was, you know.

Or, I mean, she reacted the way we would think, right? I mean, you wouldn't think that if you're going to court and you hear what they had done, you would just be horrified. You would say, I can't be in the same bed with this person. And the fact that I only found one is the shocking part.

Waitman Beorn (57:30.999)
Right, yes.

Waitman Beorn (57:48.616)
I mean, it's fascinating because I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but, you know, one of things that I've noticed anecdotally over the years working with perpetrators, you know, is of course, when they, when they give their, their first statement to the police, right, you have the, the biography part, you know, the Lebenslauf part, and it always includes marital status. And actually I found a lot of these guys were divorced, you know, after the war.

Waitman Beorn (58:16.271)
not always, most probably not always in the context of a trial, but it does make you wonder. mean, again, for me, it's only suggestive because I don't really know. It doesn't obviously say why, but it makes you wonder if there aren't divorces that are taking place, you know, that have some element of this in there. But one of the things you also mentioned, I think that's quite astute, you know, is that

For some, for some of these people, the distress comes not so much with what the husband did, but with the fact that the husband had kept it secret. And so then it becomes kind of a trust issue in the relationship rather than necessarily you were a bad person morally. but I thought what I thought was really smart and an interesting way to think about it. And I want to move. I want to stay with the family because this is the part that I'm just really, I'm really fascinated by, you know, how

How do families with Nazi war criminals in them, and in this context, particularly those that didn't get executed, right? So we're talking the ones that go to prison for three, four, seven years and then come home. How do they function? how, and what is the role of, again, predominantly, what is the role of the father's, grandfather's guilt, uncle's guilt in this?

Katharina von Kellenbach (59:37.821)
think they function very well. And I think we have to, again, be very careful not to assume

violent, dysfunctional, alcoholic, domestic violence, images of broken perpetrators. On the contrary, I think we have to assume that perpetrators that manage to uphold their defensive shields.

were very well adjusted and satisfied and proud and legitimated and justified. And they led fairly normal family life. Now, normal German family life may not be, you know, it is a post-war traumatized society that's

rebuilding that's, you know, there are lots of silence, that war wounded. But I actually think that the war wounded had more levels of divorce and trauma in their families than SS men. And I'm speaking personally now from my own family because my father was born in 1925.

When he was 18 in 1943, he was sent to the Crimea and he fought the entire retreat of the German Wehrmacht and came back at 20 extremely traumatized and silent, never talked.

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:01:26.063)
And he looked up to this uncle, Alfred Ebner, who was an SS man and killed Jews as a civilian, as part of the civil administration in Belarus. And was not traumatized. Was not traumatized. And reinvented himself as a very, very successful businessman.

with a happy family, more money than the rest of the family. Okay, so just looking at these two and what trauma does to families and the fact that killing Jews in a position of power is not traumatizing. So guilt is not painful.

And we have to just start to accept this, that guilty people do not suffer. Victims suffer, and they suffer guilt feelings. So we have to make a distinction between guilt on the one hand, which allows a very happy life, and guilt feelings and trauma on the other side, which is absolutely devastating for families as well, and the second generation.

And the injustice of this, again speaking as a theologian here, drives me crazy. Why is this so unbelievably unjust?

Waitman Beorn (01:03:02.851)
I mean, this is the part that I kind of want to dig into because, know, and again, you're welcome to share as much or as little as you're sort of with your personal experience as you like. But I'm always interested, you know, in, you know, and I would love to work on this, you know, perhaps for another project, but about.

You know, these people go to go to prison. You know, and we're talking now the little people because I feel like it's little people that really haven't received the same amount of scrutiny. mean, people have written about the big people and even their children are sort of famous. Right. So like Hans Frank's son is quite famous for his rejection of his father. Other people's family members are are are out there. Some of himmler's children and grandchildren are out there. But.

You know, they're the outliers. mean, they're the special big wigs. But as you say, there's lots of, mean, not as many as we would like, but lots of the lower and middle level Nazis were either investigated or went to trial or even served a little bit of time. And I remember, mentioned this before, but when I was doing my first book, I bumped into the archives, the family members of a Wehrmacht soldier in the unit that had.

murdered a thousand Jews in Belarus, you know, and, I asked them about it and they didn't even know the, it was, it was the, the son of the soldier and his grandson. They didn't even know that his father had been interrogated by the police. Like this was not, they didn't know until I told them and said, here's, here's what your father said, et cetera. And so I'm just curious, you know, how does this work? And particularly, you know, if someone goes to jail, you know, and, then goes back to their village or whatever.

Is it a dirty family secret or is it something that everybody kind of knows and doesn't talk about? I mean, how does this function?

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:04:56.602)
It is a secret. It's a silence. It's a, and it's an aggressively enforced silence. So, and that silence does have damaging effects on families and on the second generation. So that was the, you know, I think the malaise of second generation German families across

the board, a suspicion, and sometimes the suspicion was worse than what had actually happened. So I suspected my father always, because he didn't talk. couldn't, I mean, that suspicion was much worse than by the time I was, now I can say exactly where he was and what he's, that.

but I didn't know at the beginning. So the suspicions were actually more corrosive than the truth. But the truth, they couldn't communicate. And that's, of course, the chapter on the son, the truth about the mistake, this 77-page letter that this father writes to his son.

And by the way, because the book is called The Mark of Cain, I...

decided that I would use names. Although, as you know, in archives, that's really not entirely legally correct because for privacy reasons, there are protections of the identity. But I felt very strongly that I wanted the names and the identities named.

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:06:56.252)
But I also tried at least to connect with those people and I actually tried to reach out to the son who may or may not have received this letter because I found the letter in the archive. So I didn't quite know was this actually sent, did the son get it, how would he have reacted to this missive. And then in the chapter I give three possible...

Waitman Beorn (01:07:10.159)
Right.

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:07:25.734)
responses, hypothetically, or in the literature. What I didn't mention in the chapter and what actually happened to the son was that he killed himself.

And since then, by the way, all of these chapters would have to be rewritten because I have received communications from family members who found themselves. So that's a whole interesting postscript.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:53.455)
I talk about that. mean, what do they say? Because I've had that experience personally with a couple of people from Unoska. What do they say when they contact you?

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:08:08.082)
mean, they basically just want to know because to this day, it's secrets and the archives are so closed and it's complicated and not everybody is a historian. And then, of course, when I wrote the book, I wrote a book, I didn't know it would be online, searchable anywhere in the world. So that was sort of added some anxiety because I was also really scared of what

whether it would get sued or what might happen. But mostly it was very, very positive. And people were also eager to share their perspective and their experience and to enter into dialogue about that story. Because my interest is not to sensationalize.

or to condemn or to declare monsters or to find monsters. But my interest is obviously sort of a shared question of how to recover personally, collectively, morally, politically. I mean, how does one keep on living? And that's a shared...

You know, we all somehow muddle through. But what I'm convinced of, and that's again the title, is that to keep the past open and visible is more healing or redemptive, to use that word, than to hide it. Because as long as it's hidden, it is destructive.

Waitman Beorn (01:09:55.415)
I'm ready.

It's interesting because it sort of seems like, and I've kind of felt like this a little bit as well, but that you're sort of functioning as a minister in a certain sense for these, when these contact you, I mean, I've also, I mean, maybe it's just me, but I've also felt like that sometimes they want me to tell them something that will help them manage.

this memory, right? You know, you know that will not necessarily, you know, make them feel better about it, but that whatever that what they're asking me for is some piece of information that they don't have about their relative that will help them to come to terms with, with whatever with their relationship with that person, with that person in general.

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:10:47.409)
We have very few spaces to talk about guilt, come back to this, to articulate and express terrible violence. And I think it's very, important that we center the experience of perpetration or we create spaces where that experience can be expressed and processed. And so, know, early on, I...

I talked a lot with hospital chaplains, for instance, and said, you know, who do you think is dying in your hospitals right now? You know, you need to, you need to ask them. You need to talk to them because if you, and it hadn't occurred to them that it's perpetrators dying in German hospitals. And if you don't prompt the conversation, then you know, it, they will not bring it up.

by themselves, I mean, it has to be that a good number carries secrets.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:52.749)
Yeah, I mean, just from my own example, know, Friedrich Katzmann, who was the SSM police leader for L'viv, after the war, ditches his entire family, changes his name, lives under a same name, and on his deathbed, he confesses who he is to a priest. And I don't know the full details about how and why and what he did that, but it's exactly what you're talking about. This guy, for whatever reason, decided...

he needed to die as himself, whether it was sort of his final victory or whatnot. But one of the things that you point out that I thought was really useful, because it changed the way that I look at the second generation perpetrator, if we're using that of that word, or families, family members, is that the children of the wartime generation, right?

And this is the way I think you were alluding to earlier with these sort of three responses, you know, that two of them are number one, just stand by your family, except whatever they're saying, you know, that your family is innocent and that your father, uncle, grandfather, whatever was being railroaded by the state, et cetera, et cetera. And the second is to go the other direction, the 1968 or kind of direction and sort of say that my, my parents' generation were all Nazis and fascists. And, and I reject all of that.

but it's this third way that's actually the challenging one, you know, because the first two, even the second one, you know, the sort of rejection, which we all might agree with and sort of say, that's great. You know, that you're, rejecting that, but it's actually not engaging either with it. It's just sort of a knee jerk. You know, it's the sort of the post-war German version of everybody who was like, my parents are terrible. You know,

And then it's actually this third way. So maybe you can talk a little about, about, about this third wave. Like how do, you know, what, what is the third way of engaging in a family that has a, as a Nazi perpetrator? I mean, do you, do you talk with your family? Have you had conversations with your family about, about your uncle or your uncle, right? And, know, and, know, what is it? is it? I mean, again, you don't have to, if you don't want to, don't, but what

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:14:05.359)
Yep.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:11.906)
What is that like? mean, how does that work?

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:14:17.966)
Yeah, so the closer you are and the more intense the guilt is, the harder it gets. So it's, you know, it's easier to talk to people on the fringes and then it is to the, you know, the, the closer to the heart you get. So I have not been able to talk to his children or, you know, I've tried multiple times, but they will not talk to me.

which is.

So they're stuck in the first group, which is essentially just saying, he was a good man. He did everything right. This was a miscarriage of justice. I think that that is a... So on one level, one could say, who cares if they deny? But on another level...

You know, it's that denial that goes straight into the revival of right-wing anti-Semitism. I mean, you know, as long as you deny, you're really denying the Holocaust. I mean, that is what you have to do in order to protect your father. And so it's not OK. You know, I mean, ultimately, I cannot allow for that, although with my father, I could allow him. I could say, OK,

you know, we don't have to talk about this. You know, can, I can, I could give him that space because he was so close to this man. which, you know, because in the end you can't force it either. and in the end also I negotiated my right to speak publicly, which I have done, you know, and so.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:05.998)
All right.

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:16:15.919)
And that, course, they also couldn't prohibit me, if they wanted to. And so the fact that I was not canceled, that's already progress, right? I mean, that's, to some extent, success to force my family to accept that this will be talked about publicly.

If not in the private realm of the family, it will be open public knowledge.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:49.4)
I mean, there's an interesting issue here with guilt as well, which is...

the it sounds like almost the sort of unconscious or subconscious acceptance that the guilt is transferable to to the sons and daughters and granddaughters and grandsons.

Whereas I think we would all agree it's absolutely not. In the American context, for example, I know that my family way, back in the day owned slaves and I am thoroughly competent to say I disagree with that. They were slaveholders and this is wrong. I don't feel any need to sort of.

to own that in the sense of saying, feel to defend them or whatever, you know, I they're guilty. It's not. But also I know that doesn't translate directly to me. But it sounds like oftentimes in these families and maybe in your case as well, you know, there's there's a knee jerk in there of saying that I have to accept some guilt on behalf of my father and therefore I have to defend.

that because otherwise I'm admitting that I'm guilty, which is kind of not necessarily rational. but it also is, is in some ways an evidence of the inability to say that on the one hand, my father could have been a great loving father and also could have been, you know, the deputy commandant of Pukinvold or whatnot. know, these two things can be true.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:24.846)
And so I'm curious how that works because it sounds like why on its face do you have to defend your father or grandfather or whatever? You can say he was a Nazi war criminal and I also loved him as a father. He was a great father to me. And these two things can be true at the same time.

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:18:43.792)
Well, I started using a different metaphor because after I finished with this book on the Mark of Cain, I realized that we talk about guilt oftentimes as a remainder, but also as a, I can't say it in English, it's amazing, living in Germany again, as dirt.

as something that contaminates, that needs to be washed away. And forgiveness is an act of cleansing and purification. And that this mark of Cain cannot be cleansed. It's not supposed to be cleansed. And so from that language of washing your hands, white vests, clean hands, yeah, so all of this...

Waitman Beorn (01:19:14.286)
to be concealed.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:36.14)
Pass to China.

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:19:40.088)
know, cleansing language, which is of course why you want to cleanse your parents, right? Because if your parents are not good, then somehow you are contaminated, you're polluted. And so there's a fear of pollution by guilt, by these legacies of, and these moral remainders.

And so I started experimenting with images of composting and realizing that when you wash your hands, you create dirty water. And it has to go to a sewage plant. And sewage plants are interesting places where you work, where you revive, where you separate. mean, it's a whole process in order to...

to separate out and to transform the legacies of living, the ruins of history, so to speak. And so that becomes a much more sustainable process oriented, so long-term, right? Even multi-generational. mean, this is guilt to the extent that it is collective guilt that cannot be atoned.

by the perpetrators. It is something that will be transmitted into the second and the third generation. And eventually it will have to become a decontaminated legacy. So it's process of decontamination rather than cleansing.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:28.522)
I think that's a fascinating way to approach it. And maybe that's great place to sort of end because I mean, it is an ongoing process, you know, and that sort of everybody is involved in it. Historians, survivors, their families, perpetrators, their families, you know, it's a collective process. I think you've, mean, there's lots and lots of insights in sort of how people are thinking. But before we let you go,

shift gears slightly. You know, we always ask what is one book that you found particularly useful or insightful or that you would recommend to our listeners in relation to this?

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:22:09.434)
So think the most important books for me are the survivors, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, but mostly Rote Kluge, Weiterleben, or Still Alive, I think is for me a really incredible book. And everything I have learned about perpetrators, I have learned because of survivors. And they're incredible.

inhumanly strong ability to face their past and turn it into something life-giving. And it took enormous effort and strength and energy. And I think if the perpetrator side could learn from that process and just adapt some of it, know, redemption is possible.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:07.462)
That's amazing and what a great way to end. Thank you so much and thank you to our listeners. Again, as always, feel free to leave us a like, comment, subscribe. If you have suggestions for shows you'd like to see, feel free to let me know. And Katarina, thank you so much for coming on and talking about both your work, but also your personal family history, which was really great to hear.

Katharina von Kellenbach (01:23:32.432)
Thank you.