The inheritance of shadows: what the children of Nazi leaders told me
For years, I carried one question into rooms where most people would never be welcomed: what does it mean to grow up loving a parent whose name is synonymous with atrocity?
While researching Hitler’s Children, I interviewed sons and daughters of leaders of the Third Reich. What emerged was not a single story, but a spectrum—people who reject their parent’s legacy with moral ferocity, people who defend it to preserve their own identity, people split between documented horror and private memory, and those who try to transform inherited debt into public responsibility.
The psychology here is not abstract. Shame is identity-deep; guilt is action-based. Many of my interviewees described how a surname can shape romance, work, friendships, and even the decision about whether to have children. And it is not only a German story. The same family dynamics and moral accounting appear wherever societies confront mass violence, collective crimes, or political mythologies that collide with evidence.
I wrote this piece for Skeptic as a way to think clearly about second-generation trauma and the legacy of atrocity—without sensationalism, and without easy redemption arcs.
Read it at Skeptic:
https://www.skeptic.com/article/the-inheritance-of-shadows-intergenerational-guilt-trauma-and-the-legacy-of-atrocity/
“Can I love my parent without condoning their crimes?”
Of course. Forgiving a parent is a good first step in letting go of past atrocities and reclaiming your own sense of self. My father was a pedophile. My sisters hate him. I fought him off, so the damage to me was less than to them. Yet the fact that he wanted to have sex with me was destabilizing. He was supposed to protect his children, not use them for his pleasure. What a scummy thing to do to your own kids. I forgave him but my sisters never did. I even made sure he was allowed into my children's lives. But I never left him alone with him and consistently contradicted every misogynistic statement he made. Now I rarely think of him. My sisters are still damaged. He occupies a place in their head. My forgiving him, but not forgetting who he is, was key to my recovery.
“What do I owe to victims and their descendants?”
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. If you want money from people who profited from the Nazi atrocities, go after the Swiss. Many of them are filthy rich from playing both sides during the war. What did they call their profiting? Oh yeah, being neutral. Bull. They funded both sides of the war and made a mint of their “neutrality.” Three generations later, their offspring are still rich. They should pay the bill, not the grand kids of men who went along to get along in a dangerous system.
If you have personal wealth that came from other people's suffering, pay your reparations. If you are a white person who had to earn your own money in life, you owe NOTHING for slavery. No one is responsible for what another person has done, even if you are related to them.
How do I build a life that is truly my own?
First, stop thinking you're responsible for another person's actions. For dog's sake, if you have WHITE GUILT let it go. You didn't do it. You didn't own another human. In fact, most slave-owners throughout history and today are dark skinned people who own other dark skinned people.
If you have wealth from evil acts, give it away. Otherwise, just let go of whatever sense of responsibility you have for your ancestors actions. You didn't do it. When people tell you that white people own reparations, tell them to eff off. It's not your bill. If your ancestor was a Nazi and people criticize you for that, use the same technique. Tell them they're stupid and you're not the one who did the damage. Tell them all of us have ancestors who've committed atrocities. Humans have fought and killed each other for tens of thousands of years. Whoever is still alive today is a descendant of the winners who killed the others. Get over it.
Excellent article. In my view, the sins of the father should not be passed on to the son. This is the sort of mistake that has resulted in 2000 years of anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust.