Martin Bormann Junior (a.k.a. Kronzi) was born in 1930, the first of ten children of S.S.-Obergruppenführer Martin Bormann, head of the National Socialist Party Chancellery and Hitler’s private secretary, a stocky, muscular watchdog at the entrance to the Machiavellian Third Reich Hades, a hater of Christian churches, the fiercest anti-cleric among the Nazi officials, the man who sparked the Kirchenkampf, who committed cowardly suicide in 1945, biting into a cyanide capsule after he had been wounded while fleeing Adolf’s bunker. There is no help for Martin Bormann Junior, a dedicated young Nazi from 1940 to 1945, attending the Party Academy in Bavaria, who after the war embraces the Catholic faith and becomes a priest, so that he can repent the sins of his father, sins which spun around his body everlasting fibres, leaving him, Martin Bormann Junior, languishing for years like a squished caterpillar in a dark cocoon. Martin Bormann Junior is not helped by God or the Church or the fucking Our Father or “our trespasses, our trespasses”, which he mutters into his beard. So after several wasted decades he bids the Church auf Wiedersehen! and marries a former nun who has also told the Church addio, bye bye, and the two of them start making the rounds of German and Austrian schools, where they tell children of the horrors of the Holocaust and the Third Reich. Then they go to Israel and bow to the victims of Martin Bormann Senior, and in so doing, coexist with the ghosts who sit at their table and crawl into their bed. Martin Bormann Junior told me he remembers the furniture and decorative lamps made of human bones and skin in the home of Himmler’s mistress Hedwig Potthast, Tipura said. Bormann Junior does what he can to cure himself, Tipura said, but his sister Irmgard burns in her own hell, blinded by the flames of her diseased love for her “good and tender father, whom she would love and respect to her death”, Tipura said.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father was a Nazi, Tipura said. Gustav Schwarzenegger asked to join the National Socialist Party as early as 1938, before the annexation of Austria, but it was only in 1941 that the National Socialist Party drew him to its bosom. In his medical records from the time, one can read, Tipura told me, that Gustav Schwarzenegger was a quiet and reliable person, a person of average intelligence, not remarkable for anything in particular. From 1947 until he retires, Schwarzenegger works as a policeman — since, they say, he committed no war crimes. Arnold, however, during a time of peace and blessed Austrian forgetfulness, develops his physique by lifting weights, and in 1967, when he is twenty and before he becomes the Terminator, he wins the title of Mister Universe and looks like this:
Today Schwarzenegger, who did not consent to speak with me, Tipura told me, today Schwarzenegger says, My father was an ordinary soldier in the army of his country. My father fought in Belgium and in France and in Russia, and it is known, Schwarzenegger says, that my father did not commit a single crime, because the soldiers of the Wehrmacht did not kill, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht merely waged war, says Schwarzenegger who probably did not attend the Wehrmacht exhibition, said Tipura, because had he attended the Wehrmacht exhibition he would have seen that even the ordinary German soldiers of the Third Reich committed appalling crimes, which was an insight that stunned the German public then, at that Wehrmacht exhibition, and perhaps that insight would have stunned him, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as well, said Tipura.
I didn’t need Tipura. I could have done without his stories and his discoveries. By 2000 I had amassed my own file of the “case histories” of Nazi descendants, the descendants of the first, second and third generation of Nazis, big and little, known and anonymous, regardless, the symptoms are more or less the same, and my file kept growing, getting fatter like a goose I was ruthlessly fattening until it keeled over. In nearly every case I studied there was a similar pattern: the children and grandchildren of Nazis rarely faced the history of their families and their own story. Nazis, many of them with bloodstained hands, some condemned to death, some sentenced to years in prison, a sentence they often didn’t serve out, many who were never brought to justice, who went on working as physicians and judges, engineers and architects, living “distinguished” lives, these Nazis colluded in conspiratorial silence as weighty as a millstone under which life lies crushed beyond recognition and under which, by some inexplicable or, in fact, explicable miracle like Emperor Trojan’s goat’s ears, a grain of fragile truth would sprout here and there, truth that had a destructive, devastating power. It is incomprehensible that the children, the grandchildren, mostly asked no questions, that they still do not ask. But old photographs, unfinished manuscripts, hidden diaries surface; archives open, movies are made, books are written; the pebbles of history roll underfoot and in time our step grows less steady. Nazi, Fascist, Ustaša, Chetnik, regardless. Their germ has not been eradicated. Norman Frank understood this when he said, I will have no children, I want the vile Frank germ to disappear, then starts pouring milk down his throat, he drinks thirteen litres of milk per day, then dies. Norman’s brother Niklas, however, is alive. A defiant and tireless demystifier, Niklas Frank writes and shouts, and at his unambiguous, defiant declarations, articles, books and projects, not to say performances (such as when, for a couple of years in his childhood, he used to masturbate to the point of orgasm on the anniversary of Hans Frank’s execution), at every warning from him, the hypocritical and cowardly German public has been shocked for the last few decades, snarling at Niklas’ uncomprising stand, wanting to sleep easy, as if a father were a sacrosanct being. But he is not. There are no sacrosanct beings. Even God is not sacrosanct, perhaps He least of all.
The truth is absolutely simple. Our fathers were criminals and murderers, so screw those platitudes about the banality of evil. There are no justifications, there is no valid relativization, there is no excuse. There is no mercy for the pathological debris of humanity, those tainted minds shouldn’t have even been brought to trial, what miserable justice, what defence of which dignity, whose dignity, which pathetic Nurembergs, Stuttgarts, Dusseldorfs, Frankfurts, Munichs, Hagues, money wasted, time wasted, only dark, farcical performances after which not a single diseased mind has learned nor will learn a thing, all of them should have been executed after a summary trial the way the Russians and East Germans did in ’46, ’47 and ’48, their germ should have been sent to seed so the new ones don’t come along who keep coming and coming, they, too, should be swiftly done away with before they die in comfortable prisons playing chess or, worst of all, free, as heroes to whom monstrous monuments are raised, whose names bedeck city squares and airports, that scum ought to be eliminated so that the story wouldn’t continue, elegantly and brazenly, inserting itself into reality and so that the malevolent Phoenix would once and for all stop hovering over our heads. That eternal and infinite Herumgeschmuse of the children of the murderers and criminals is becoming pathetic. Their “They were little Nazis” holds no water. There are no little Nazis. To begin (or end) with, to the children and grandchildren of the murderers and criminals I propose a verbal Exerzier and exercitationes of self-denazification, a mea culpa in the name of the second generation and the third. The fact that the descendants of the Nazis, Fascists, Ustašas, homeguard fighters, Chetniks, and so on and so forth, prefer not to recognize the crimes of their fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, diminishes the overall crimes of the Germans and others, which were committed during the Third Reich. And this holds true, as well, for the descendants of former satellite Nazi-Fascist fabrications, formerly fascist countries. It applies across the board. And it applies to the Israelis today. I’m still waiting now for the Americans to bump off Morales, the silence has poured into a gigantic block of reinforced concrete, and the Catholic Church, this caricatured parade and more than revolting fabrication, this costumed theatre of transparent lies and empty promises should be done away with right now, once and for all, because the gatherings of the zealously blinded masses who bow down to the divine emissary are reminiscent of the ominous gatherings at which people shouted Sieg Heil!