I know, there are more stories like mine.
Ah, said my wife Rebecca, relax. The world is full of horrors and life is unpredictable. Look what happened to Beate Niemann, the protagonist of that documentary My Father the Murderer.
I know the story.
Beate Niemann was born in 1942, but it was only in 1997 that she set out to search for her father, which seems both comprehensible and incomprehensible, reasonable and unreasonable, courageous and cowardly. But who am I to judge?
Beate Niemann looked for a father she could be proud of, but she found a murderer. She found S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler up to his elbows in blood. She traced a life shadowed by her mother’s lies, by lies never renounced or denied. Only a few weeks before Beate Niemann was born, Bruno Sattler grouped gassing trucks around SajmiŜte concentration camp on the outskirts of Belgrade, he assembled lorries for the gassing of women and their children. Bruno Sattler was killing women and children at SajmiŜte concentration camp and sending his pregnant wife little love letters, photographs from the field, photographs of nature. Beate Niemann’s father, S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler, had ordered the shooting of several tens of thousands of Jews in Smolensk and near Moscow. They say that Beate Niemann’s father, S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler, took part in the liquidation of 500,000 Yugoslav partisans, Jews, Gypsies and others.
Poor Beate Niemann. Born in Nazi Germany which after the war has for decades publicly, persistently, even courageously, been uncovering the dangerous refuse of its past, Beate Niemann, fifty and something years later decides to start digging through the secrets of her own family, utterly shaken with and surprised by what she finds. Where had the loads of logical doubts been hidden? Which waters did they flow into? Where were her parents’ monstrous truths stored? In tightly packed bundles of hatred which will, covered by layers of mould, of deposited dirt, spontaneously dissolve?
Thus, when in her sixties, when body, but also spirit, become weaker, Beate Niemann, as if stepping on a land mine, faces the truth that additionally crushes her.
After World War One, during the 1920s, Bruno Sattler sells jewellery at the Wertheim department store in Berlin. The proprietors of the store were members of the Wertheim Jewish family, Sattler knows that, so he quickly joins the Nazi Party and becomes a policeman, then advances further and further, until he finally arrives at the Gestapo. Then he moves to the secret service of the S.S., then to the Einsatzgruppen who kill more than a million and a half civilians in the Soviet Union before the butchers and slaughterers of Auschwitz and Treblinka even appear on the scene in Poland.
Beate Niemann’s mother dies in 1984, and that is when Beate Niemann starts searching for her father. She makes the rounds of more than a hundred archives in three countries, but the first traces of truth she finds among her mother’s belongings and in the urban planning office in Berlin, right under her nose. She comes across a document that confirms how already in 1942 Bruno Sattler buys a house from a Gertrud Leon for the miserable sum of 21,000 Reichsmarks. To the purchase and sale agreement which Beate Niemann finds, there is attached a guarantee from Bruno Sattler in which he declares that he will spare Gertrud Leon from any possible transport, that he will guard her life, and that he will not allow anyone to move her anywhere or take her out of Berlin. Two weeks later Gertrud Leon goes off first to Theresienstadt, then from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz to breathe her fill of gas.
Beate Niemann then visits Belgrade. In Belgrade she meets Ljiljana Ȉorđević, who says, Oh, yes, I remember S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler. S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler killed my father at the camp in Sajmište.
So, how does S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler come to his end? In 1947 Russian agents pick him up in broad daylight on a Berlin street and take him off to an East German prison. Many years later, Beate Niemann goes to Leipzig, to the former Stasi prison then already abandoned, in order to peep into the cell her father had occupied. It is a small cell, in it twenty people slept on boards, they tell her, in that cell one could not walk, one could only lie. The walls were still filthy, ghostly, stained with various histories. Finally Beate Niemann learns that her father, S.S.-Major Bruno Sattler, died on 15 October, 1972, they say he was shot in the back of the neck. After that agonizing but greatly belated revelation, Beate Niemann begins her homage to Eastern Europe, seeking out surviving Jews, those who lived through the camps and all the torture and all the humiliation, and when she couldn’t find them, because not many remained, she looked for their children, and to everybody she would say, to those who prevailed, to the leftover people, Beate Niemann would say, Forgive me, forgive me, please forgive me.
Then there’s Monika Göth, the daughter of Amon Göth, the commander of Plaszow camp, the one from Schindler’s List who loved shooting inmates from the balcony of his villa, and people wouldn’t have known about him, they would have had no idea who he was, most people wouldn’t have known who Amon Goth was had they not watched Schindler’s List, but many did not see Schindler’s List, they didn’t want to see Schindler’s List, because the theme of Schindler’s List makes them nauseous, that’s what they say, We don’t want to get upset, they say, all that is in the past now, they say, and Monika Göth, who was one year old when in 1946 her father was hanged as a war criminal, Monika Göth, many years after, forty, fifty years after, also searches for surviving camp inmates tortured by her father and seeks their forgiveness, she roams the world and asks for forgiveness and to everyone she says, I am not like him. Every year Monika Göth goes to Auschwitz and in Auschwitz she pays her respects to the victims of her father, Amon Göth.
Then Peter Sichrovski, a journalist from Vienna, born in Vienna, who grew up in Vienna and who after the war played with the children of former Nazis, and who then, many years later, goes looking for them, for his street pals, in order to ask them, What did your fathers do during the war? and then records their answers.
Some of my kind ask me, What does the child of a murderer look like? Is it obvious, is it evident that we are the children of murderers? Oscar tells me that until their death his parents regretted that today no-one can force him to wear a pink triangle. We are all trapped, we, the children of Nazis. The prisoners of history. Those who grieve for their “tender” fathers who brought them souvenirs from Polish concentration camps and dandled them on their knees, and we who are trying to face our family truths. The woman who begs Sichrovski to take her paralysed father living in an old people’s home for a short “walk”, that pathetic, demented old man who still feeds on his Nazi faith, even if through a feeding tube, literally through a tube, she, too, is fucked up. No matter what he was, says this woman to Peter Sichrovski, he is still my father, he loved me, I know he loved me, says the woman in whose bosom a tornado must be raging. That frightens me. When in people who are monsters, butchers, slaughterers, perverse sadists we discover scraps of gentleness and frailty, I freeze in horror.
Hans, what do the children of murderers look like? some of my kind ask me.