Martin Davidson - The Perfect Nazi: Uncovering My Grandfathers Secret Past

Table of Contents

FOR ALEXANDER AND LOUIS

DANTE, INFERNO, CANTO XXXIV

A personal book as enmeshed with the lives of so many in my familynone of whom I wish to discomfort, embarrass, or expose to scrutinycould have been undertaken only with their collective blessing, even if it was sometimes hard for them to express. First, I would like to toast my main collaborator, my sister, Vanessa. We conceived the book together and shared much of the research, and I looked to her throughout for support, reality checks, and her sureness of touch, navigating where family and history collided. I held the steering wheel, but it was she who held the maps. I have to thank my mother, Frauke, not least for enduring the anguish that dredging up all this caused her, but above all for bowing to the pressure of what must have looked like a strange and personal obsession on my part, and not standing in its way. To my father, Ian, my huge appreciation for sharing with me his own family recollections, and for responding so positively to an early draft, as many of his suspicions about this father-in-law took on worrying form. Thanks also go to Gudrun and Georg, my aunt and uncle in Berlin, who watched nervously from the sidelines; and to my German cousins, Stella and Bakis, who were infectiously curious about what we might uncover.

Friends and colleagues read various drafts and gave invaluable suggestions; Michael Jackson in New York and Tim Kirby and Denys Blakeway in London were just three of them. All were kind enough to insist that, in a world heaving with books about the Nazis, there was indeed room for this one. My editor, the redoubtable Eleo Gordon, earned my gratitude for seizing on the storys potential right from the start, but especially for her stoic patience in the face of the (many) months it took me to adapt the art of writing for television to that of the printed page. Ben Brusey helped steer the project through its key stages with great tenacity and skill. In America, Kathryn Davis provided much-needed acumen, while George Lucas was the source of endless diplomacy and encouragement. Peter Robinson, agent and friend, wielded his editing pruning knife with the lan of a samurai, proving time and time again that less is always more.

I benefited from the help of a number of academics and researchers who illuminated the parts of Brunos story that were otherwise inaccessible to me. Early on, Professor Michael Wildt, the worlds expert on the SD, steered me in some very helpful directions, not least toward a research student of his acquaintance, Anna Hjkov, an authority on wartime Czechoslovakia, who is writing a Ph.D. dissertation on Theresienstadt; her forays into the Prague archives were invaluable. Jaroslav vanara was also kind enough both to share his enormous expertise on Prague in the shadow of the swastika and to lend me immensely valuable primary materials. The Terezn Initiative Institute provided me with both guides to wartime Prague and valuable background information. In London and Washington, D.C., I was particularly fortunate to work with Dr. Nick Terry, whose insightsand formidable organizational skillswere indispensable. His forensic grasp of the inner workings of the SS formed the basis for some riveting conversations. In Berlin, Dr. Martin Schuster guided me through the dark underworld of the Charlottenburg storm troopers of the Berlin SAand much more besides. The team at the London Library furnished me, as they do so many writers, with the wherewithal to complete huge swaths of my research. My old BBC colleague Tilman Remme pointed me toward a number of other experts, in Ludwigsburg, Berlin, and London, all of whom dealt with specific inquiries with exemplary patience and knowledge. Any errors, lapses, or outrageous extrapolations should, of course, be laid at my door, not theirs.

Two debts, however, tower above them all: First, to my boys, Alexander and Louis, who, for about as long as they can remember, have had to pick their way around mountains of their dads Hitler books on the way to the family computer. And last, to the person who not only shared the trawl through family darkness at first hand, but also directed the rigor of her peerless mind toward my attempts to make sense of it, merciless on what should go, yet even more important, on what should stay: my wife, Janice Hadlow. Truly my trina luce... n unica stella scintillandotriple light dazzling in a single star, muse, confidante, love of my life.

For thirty-five years of my life, my sister and I lived in the shadow of an unanswered question: What had Bruno Langbehn, our German grandfather, done during the war? When we were young, we didnt know how to ask it. But even as we grew older, and understood better, we still couldnt broach it. We knew it was there, but, like the rest of the family, tiptoed round it. It became a taboo.

The answer, when it came in the early 1990s, proved that, in a world full of dark family secrets, ours had lost none of its power to appall. For the next ten years, it burrowed its way deep inside me, until I could bear it no longer. I had to know everything. I was driven by curiosity. But trepidation, too. What would I find out? Did I really want to know? Having once embarked, there was no turning back. I was determined, once and for all, to know the truth about my Nazi grandfather.

Bruno may not have been a participant in the darkest of Nazi atrocities; there were many Nazis more heinous than he. Neither a camp Kommandant nor an architect of the Holocaust, neither a Hss nor an Eichmann, he was nevertheless an enabler of evil, one of its indispensable, and very active, minions.

Men like Bruno propelled the Nazi movement from the fanatic fringes into the mainstream. Their support gave it life long after it should have fizzled out in the Munich beer cellars of its birth; they made sure it took root in the minds of more than just a handful of madmen. Bruno and fellow early joiners provided the energy, the determinationand the violencethat overcame all obstacles to power. They formed the backbone of the apparatus of terror that ensured compliance in the new Third Reich and they were in the front line, fighting the war that erupted six years later, regarding it as the final great expression of Nazi values and its most important project.

As a self-declared Nazi militant, Bruno did none of this out of coercion, or even convenience, but from deeply held, long-term conviction. His commitment to National Socialism never wavered. He remained true to its world vision until the bitter end. He had no reservations about Hitlers genius or its consequences for the people of Europe. Only self-preservation eventually forced him to renounce it.

No account of Brunos life could therefore be complete that did not confront his beliefs or interrogate the values that he found so inspiring, values that he was prepared not just to support but also to help realize, even to the point of war. The Nazi movement set out to destroy all that was liberal, decent, and humane, which they regarded as weakness and corruption, and they came close to doing it. Bruno proudly wore uniforms that he felt embodied a truth that was superior, stronger, and more heroic than what were, in his mind, the outmoded values held by the rest of the civilized world.