From “My Father’s Keeper” by Stephan and Norbert Lebert, a book of interviews with children of Nazi leaders:
Himmler’s name and home have a particular – a particularly grisly – significance for Martin Bormann [Junior, son of Martin Borman Senior, famous Nazi]. About a year before the end of the war he and his sisters were at the house at Tegernsee, on a visit with their mother. Suddenly Himmler’s secretary (and lover) Hedwig Potthast said, with solemn excitement, that she wanted to show them all something very interesting: a very personal collection of her boss’s. Taking them upstairs to the attic floor, she opened a room. In it stood tables and chairs made from human body parts. One of the chair seats was made of a carved and polished pelvic girdle, another had legs made from human legs, complete with human feet. Then Frau Potthast showed them a copy of Mein Kampf bound with the skin from a human back. Bormann remembers it, as if it were yesterday, how clinically and medically it was all explained [emphasis added].
“My Father’s Keeper” is a book written by a German, quoting here from the mouth of a German child of a Nazi leader. On top of the pictures, the films, the testament of real American patriots (WII veterans), and the above – how much more proof does one need?
Really – how anyone could deny the existence and the horror of the Holocaust I cannot know. I am only left believing it is a sickness of similar ilk to those who committed these crimes.
Incidentally, I highly recommend reading this book. It will challenge one’s assumptions of the clarity between those we would call “good” versus those we would call “evil”. Or to quote Simon Wiesenthal from the book:
The were the same people who lovingly kissed their children goodbye in the morning and then a few hours later were gassing or shooting Jews.
and:
because only the person who has grasped it knows that evil lies dormant in most people and can break out at almost any time. Let no man say that such a ghastly dictatorship is no longer possible today. That is the true lesson from the horror of National Socialism: we must fight against it constantly, against evil, so that it does not emerge again.
Something to contemplate.
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