Eva Neidlinger, 34, is telling her story in a café in Babelsberg, the story of her and her great-grandfather. She reaches into her purse and unfolds a silk kerchief in which she has wrapped the pictures that her great-grandfather took so many decades ago. She pushes her teacup to the side and spreads the photos out on the table. Women in headscarves can be seen along with men in traditional clothing – and her great-grandfather in uniform. The uniform of the Wehrmacht, the military of Nazi Germany.
For a long time, she had known nothing of her great-grandfather, nor was she all that interested in him. Why would she be? Nobody in her family talked about him. These days, though, he’s almost the only thing she is thinking about – a function of the vicissitudes of life in general, and of her life specifically.
After finishing high school in Bavaria, she left for Switzerland in 2008 where she worked for a nongovernmental organization for several summers. It was a place where young people from all over the world came. She can’t really explain it, but she felt especially drawn to the Ukrainians. "I’m still friends with them today.”
[M] Scherl / SZ Photo, C. Schlegelmilch / akg-images, Sergey Ryumin / Getty Images
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 19/2025 (May 3rd, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.
She visited her friends in Ukraine many times, even later when she was studying film direction at the Film University Babelsberg. One of her first documentary films told the story of a local politician in Ukraine who believed his country was on the cusp of a promising future. Shortly after it was finished, the Russian army invaded Ukraine. Eva Neidlinger’s friendships changed, becoming weighted down with her fear for the safety of the people she knew.
A bit over two years ago, she joined her family in Bavaria for Christmas. They all started talking together about the family’s history and about how they had turned out the way they had. And suddenly, this great-grandfather came up. Hardly anyone knew anything about him, just that he had apparently been killed as a Wehrmacht soldier during World War II "somewhere in the east.”
Wehrmacht troops marching into Kyiv in 1941.
German troops on the outskirts of Kyiv in 1941.
But then, her grandmother pulled out this box of photos that her great-grandfather had left behind. In the pictures, Eva Neidlinger saw places in Ukraine that she knew well: The Derzhprom building and Freedom Square in Kharkiv, the typical roofs of the rural areas surrounding Poltova, the coast of Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula. Her great-grandfather must have marched through Ukraine as a Wehrmacht soldier.
And that meant that he was an aggressor in a war that violated international law. "I wonder – did he see the land as part of the new 'Lebensraum’ (living space) for the Germans, as it was referred to back then? And what is my view, as a German today, of Ukraine?” says Neidlinger.
She pulls out the journal that her great-grandfather kept during the war – a great aunt had given it to her a few months before. Neidlinger is currently in the process of deciphering the diary, since her great-grandfather wrote it in the Sütterlin script used at the time.
She is planning on bringing the photos and the diary with her to Ukraine in the coming days. Together with Ukrainian curators and two additional artists, she is preparing an exhibition in Kyiv entitled "Memory.Interchange” in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War. The show opens on May 9, the day after the end of World War II in Europe will be commemorated there. The exhibits, including Neidlinger’s family artefacts, are intended to trigger a discussion about the war back then but also about the current war Russia is waging against Ukraine.
Neidlinger hopes that she will someday be able to find out what her great-grandfather did as a soldier in the country. She wants to gain a better understanding of the responsibilities that arise from the past for her as a German – including responsibility for German attitudes toward Ukraine.
The Wehrmacht occupied the territory of Ukraine and turned the country into one of the main theaters of fighting during World War II, with over 8 million deaths including an estimated 5 million civilians. With the knowledge of the Wehrmacht, and sometimes even with its help, GermanSonderkommandosrounded up Jews and shot them, ultimately slaughtering around 1.5 million Jews on Ukrainian soil in this "Holocaust of Bullets.” Soldiers also took food from the starving population. Among the aims of the German war of annihilation was securing both the country’s grain supplies and the beautiful Crimean Peninsula.
Eva Neidlinger with the copied diary of her great-grandfather.
Neidlinger’s ancestor was one of 17 million Wehrmacht soldiers. Most of them did not join voluntarily, but that changes nothing about the atrocities they committed. For men of military age living in Germany during World War II, it was normal to serve in the Wehrmacht. It was also part of normal life during the Nazi period to take part in crimes – or at least accept them by looking the other way.
The evidence is widely known: In 1945, ever fifth German adult was a member of the NSDAP, even though the party didn’t accept everybody and ceased admitting new members for many years. Concentration camps like Buchenwald, Dachau and Neuengamme were easily visible and located near towns and villages. In the territory of the German Reich, there were more than 20 concentration camps and over 1,000 satellite camps. In excess of 13 million people were pressed into service as forced laborers in factories, on construction sites, in small companies, on farms or in households and were thus part of everyday life in Germany. The possessions of deported Jews were expropriated and publicly auctioned off – with much of this looted property still being bequeathed to younger generations today.
And: On the Righteous Among Nations list kept by the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem to document those who helped Jews survive the slaughter, only 659 of the 29,000 entries are German.
Such facts, though, frequently remain strangely abstract. In the stories passed down, the perpetrators, accomplices or sympathizers are usually not from one’s own family. In 2002, the study "Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi” was published, compiled by a team led by the social psychologist Harald Welzer. The study documents how in the stories that families told of their ancestors, anti-Semites were frequently transformed into resistance fighters.
In the comprehensive MEMO study from 2020, 23.2 percent of the respondents stated that there were perpetrators among their ancestors, but 35.8 percent said they had victims in their family. The study was compiled by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence Bielefeld (IKG) on behalf of the EVZ Foundation.
In 2020, the weekly newspaperDie Zeitcommissioned a representative survey. In response to the question "What was your family’s position on National Socialism at the time,” 30 percent of the respondents answered "opposed,” only one in five said they "accepted” it and just 3 percent identified their own ancestors as "supporters of National Socialism.” More than a third said they didn’t know.
Last Tuesday, IKG and EVZ presented their new MEMO study. Once again, respondents make a clear distinction between the population at large and their own family. Only 20 percent "strongly disagree” with the idea that the prosperity of many families is still based on crimes committed during National Socialism. Yet almost 80 percent "strongly disagree” with the notion that their own family’s prosperity can be traced to such crimes.
It seems as though there is an unspoken agreement that dealing with the Nazi period can be outsourced to the memorial sites and museums and that families themselves are absolved from doing so in all but the most drastic cases.
Some ancestors of the worst war criminals have gone on record. Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank – who was a leading NSDAP politician, Hitler’s personal legal adviser and, as head of the General Governate of occupied Polish territories, earned the moniker "Butcher of Poland” – wrote several books about his family. Albert Speer, the son of the eponymous Nazi architect and armaments minister, spoke about his father in an interview with DER SPIEGEL.
Bettina Göring, the great-niece of Hermann Göring, an influential Nazi from the very beginning, wrote a book about her great-uncle last year. Kai Höss, grandson of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, also spoke with DER SPIEGEL last year after the film "Zone of Interest” hit the big screen, a movie in which his grandparents play a central role. These descendants faced up to the guilt of their ancestors because it was important to them. But the guilt of those ancestors was also far too obvious to deny.
Beyond such cases, however, there are countless families in which it is far trickier to establish the culpability of ancestors or even to find out exactly what they did in Hitler’s Germany. But for as long as so many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of average Germans refuse to recognize that a dictatorship can only last for 12 years if ordinary people support it, the picture will remain skewed.
Because if the majority of Germans are uninterested in accepting the truth about their own family histories, are they even able to identify the reasons for which democracy can fail today? Do they understand how anti-Semitism worked, how an entire group of people was marginalized? Are they able to adopt an acceptable approach to the current war in Ukraine if their knowledge of the National Socialist crimes committed in Ukraine remains abstract? What about the extremely complicated conflict in the Middle East?
Still, a kind of countervailing trend has been visible for a while now. Eighty years after the end of the war and of National Socialism, younger people like Eva Neidlinger are becoming curious about their family’s stance toward Adolf Hitler back then. The example of her great-grandfather’s deployment in Ukraine, says Neidlinger, made it clear to her how much many families don’t know. "And that has political consequences.”
A few weeks ago, Neidlinger attended a research seminar, where she learned how to work in archives and to approach historical documents. Historian Johannes Spohr, 42, has been giving such seminars since 2011 and says interest as recently been growing. A new generation is now joining in, Spohr says. In the past, his seminars were mainly attended by the grandchildren of the World War II generation, but now, great-grandchildren like Neidlinger are also enrolling.
Professional researcher Johannes Spohr at the Federal Archives.
Spohr has made a career out of helping descendants with their research into the Nazi period. He goes to archives on their behalf and sifts through documents – and along the way, he frequently finds out why they set out on this journey.
During the coronavirus pandemic, he says, many people finally found the time to clean out their cellars and attics, and many of them stumbled across old photos and documents with Nazi stamps for which they had no explanation. "And then came the 2022 full Russian invasion of Ukraine. People began hearing strange place names that were familiar from family stories.” Starting in 1941, Wehrmacht soldiers marched through places like Kharkiv, Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk – and all these names were suddenly dominating the nightly news.
Many of his customers are also concerned about the political situation in Germany and the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, says Spohr. "They ask themselves if there are connections between the unprocessed Nazi legacy and the present.”
There is no single statistic that proves a growing German interest in their families’ National Socialist pasts. The number of queries at the Federal Archives, which holds files on institutions and people from the Nazi era, has remained consistently high at around 75,000 per year, with many of them focused on individual people. The Federal Archives are also, though, a central research site for the descendants of victims as well.
And yet there are a number of indications which, when taken together, seem to show that things are changing in Germany. The Working Group for Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust, an association for the descendants of both perpetrators and victims, has doubled in size, to 160 members, since the pandemic. That is, to be sure, not a huge number of members in absolute terms, but the trend is interesting. The association has been offering online events since the pandemic and has thus become better known among younger people. And the younger members, the association says, have mostly joined for political reasons – out of concern for Germany’s shift to the right.
Files and documents from the Nazi period. As the elderly generation passes away, their successors are stumbling across boxes of old keepsakes.
Indeed, digitalization has broadly lowered the barrier for those interested in looking into their ancestors’ histories. Files can be ordered over the internet and sometimes even read online. Addresses, contact persons, literature and brochures can all be found on the web. Still, any such search requires intuition, patience and knowledge about where to look.
Melanie Longerich, a journalist who works in the NS Documentation Center in Cologne, says it is a frequent occurrence that descendants are interested in the Nazi past of their ancestors but don’t really know how to proceed in their search for information. It is something that Longerich, 52, has also seen from comments generated by the podcast she produced together with her coworker Brigitte Baetz, in which they talk about how people can approach the project of investigating their family’s history during National Socialism.
For the history of her own family, she didn’t initially need much in the way of research skills. When her grandmother died in the last 1990s, she found a photo of her grandfather wearing an SA uniform. One year later, she received the diary kept by her grandparents for their children, which made clear the privileges they enjoyed thanks to their loyalty to the regime – such as a lavish wedding celebrated together with SA comrades and at which the Deutschlandlied was sung.
The grandfather, who had been unemployed for a long time, also received a public servant position thanks to his contacts. Jews had been forbidden by law from holding public servant jobs and the positions made available by the purge were frequently given to party loyalists. "It had always been said in the family that this grandfather was an asshole, that he drank and beat his children. But how exactly he had profited from the Nazi period, what he had done – his children never asked those questions, even though there was this diary in which he wrote it all down. But nobody ever read it,” says Longerich.
It was only after her grandmother’s death that Longerich began asking questions about the past – which is rather typical and one reason why family research now appears to be on the rise. Stephan Lebert and the psychologist Louis Lewitan mention the phenomenon in their book – "Der blinde Fleck” or "The Blind Spot” – which was published in April. "The armor of silence” about the culpability of ancestors begins to break down once those ancestors are no longer alive, the publisher’s announcement notes: "Because they no longer have to fear confrontation with their grandparents or parents, more and more people have begun researching their family history and examining how it has affected their own lives.”
Many grandchildren of people who lived through the Nazi period are currently clearing out the apartments and homes of parents who have either moved into care homes or passed away. Some find documents from National Socialism that their parents stowed away because the knowledge they held was simply too painful or intimate. Because of the time that has passed and the generational distance, grandchildren are less reluctant to approach the past, particularly once their parents are no longer alive.
The result has been the questioning of family narratives that may have been far too lenient with the truth. Those who either became aware of crimes or took part in them themselves frequently handed down their own versions of events to their children – sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. Memories, as research has shown, are easily distorted and tend to conform to one’s wishes.
Children, meanwhile, have an extremely intimate relationship with their parents, says the Cologne-based doctor and psychotherapist Peter Pogany-Wnendt, the descendant of Holocaust victims who is a member of the board at the Working Group for Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust. First and foremost, he says, because children are existentially reliant on their parents during the first years of their lives. "The close bonds remain even if they don’t get along well” – which means, he says, that the stories told by parents are often not questioned.
The following generations, however, are far less encumbered by the emotions experienced by those who were children during the war and by their parents. Great-grandchildren, for example, each have eight great-grandparents, but have only ever known them in the rarest of cases. "The elderly often still feel directly guilty or are preoccupied with the question as to the guilt of someone else in the family,” says Eva Neidlinger. "My temporal detachment allows me to set aside questions of guilt, even while acknowledging them. For me, it’s more about a sense of responsibility for the future.”
Private Nazi-era document from Eva Neidlinger's family
Furthermore, says Neidlinger, her generation is far more familiar with psychological issues than their forebears. "It used to be the case that going to therapy was much more of a taboo, but today it has finally become the norm.” For this reason as well, she says, great-grandchildren are interested in what their ancestors went through. They want to know more about what shaped their families and themselves.
Normann Bötel and Bastian Klug are also looking into the lives of their great-grandparents. The two 28-year-olds met years ago on the internet, playing video games together. Bötel is a graphic artist and Klug is a research assistant in philosophy at the University of Giessen. They quickly realized that they shared a number of common interests. During an online interview – with one joining from Giessen and the other from Hamburg – they say that they started talking to each other about Germany’s rightward shift.
"Many in our generation are afraid of the future,” says Klug. "The AfD targets these people on social media, enticing them with topics like homeland, roots and identity.”
Bötel and Klug want to establish a kind of counteroffer. They are behind the multimedia project "Worüber wir nicht reden” or "What we’re not talking about,” a film and a fictional diary. The diary is based on interviews with 16- to 29-year-olds and is written from the perspective of a young person who learns that grandpa was a war criminal. The person is horrified that family members defend the grandfather, but also learns more about themselves through this confrontation with the past.
One’s own identity is not merely the product of pride and identification with perceived greatness, is the message Bötel and Klug want to impart, but also comes from a confrontation with one’s own past, as painful as that might be. They submitted their project for the "Talent Award” bestowed by the German Art Directors Club and know that they are going to win a prize, but they will only learn which one at the ceremony in late May.
Items from the multimedia project "Worüber wir nicht reden"
Photos from the multimedia project "Worüber wir nicht reden"
May 8th marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, and there are at least some people still around who can remember the war and the Nazi era. It is an opportunity to talk to them – perhaps one of the last significant anniversaries to do so. The political situation this time around is also different than on previous anniversaries: The AfD party, elements of which are right-wing extremist, will be present for the anniversary ceremony in the Bundestag, and the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East will continue.
All of that has an effect on those who set out to learn more about the Nazi generation. They are eager to hone their current political views with knowledge about the past.
But it also reinforces those who have never wanted to know about the past, and who are even less inclined to embark on a search now.
Historian Oliver von Wrochem, who is head of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial east of Hamburg and conducts research seminars and dialogue seminars on ancestors in the Nazi era, says there is a consistently high level of interest in such seminars, but believes that the group of those wanting to learn more about the past is but a "growing minority.” Unfortunately, he says, "there are opposing forces that want to remember the suffering of the German majority population and the consequences of the defeat for this group – and who are demanding an end to the "cult of guilt.”
The result is something of a mixed picture on this anniversary. There is curiosity, openness and questions – but also reservation, denial and defensiveness. Will grandchildren and great-grandchildren take advantage of the opportunity and break the silence in their families? Or will the possible culpability of one’s own ancestors for the collapse of the first German democracy, for the hatred and exclusion, for the crimes committed – will all that be forgotten because it seems unimportant or too embarrassing?
On a recent morning in Berlin, the historian Johannes Spohr heads off to work. A client of his wants to learn something about an ancestor. Spohr heads to the Federal Archives in the Lichterfelde district of Berlin, checks in at the security desk, enters the main building, puts his bag in a locker and sets his laptop in a basket emblazoned with the German eagle. At the file counter, he is handed a number of blue folders and he makes his way to the reading room to examine what is inside. There are four other men sitting there, all far apart from each other, poring over their own files. They don’t even look up when Spohr is photographed for this piece.
One of the documents that Spohr sets on his table is faded and worn, old lettering making clear what it is about. Spohr is accompanied by an archivist who is supervising the photo shoot – and both ask that we refrain from taking photos of the document or even writing about it.
Like most of Spohr’s clients, this one, too, is interested in learning the truth, but also wants protection from it – or at least from possible public reactions.
Eva Niedlinger has devised an artistic expression to portray this mixture of curiosity and reticence that is so typical of Germans 80 years after the end of the war and National Socialism. She recently took part in the "Enkel:Innen” art project organized by the Schloss Wiepersdorf Cultural Foundation, where descendants of Holocaust survivors worked together with descendants of perpetrators on creating art works. Neidlinger came up with the idea of wrapping the human sculptures in the castle park.
What is wrapped can become visible. But someone must decide to unwrap them.
