Can You Ever Apologize For Your Nazi Grandfather?

Updated August 27, 2024 at 5:30 p.m.*

BERLIN — When my grandfather died, I was 12 years old.

When I tell his story, people often ask if I knew him.

I remember a small apartment in a new post-war building, I remember a trench coat, strawberries with whipped cream, and the watercolors that he painted. I remember short sentences and a restrained smile. He called me “my little mouse tail.”

I suspected that there was some dirt around my grandfather. My father didn’t exactly speak warmly of his father, whom all his children called “papa”, with the emphasis on the second “a”.

Once he told me that they were in Berlin together for the Führer’s birthday, for which my grandfather had helped organize the parade. He told me how they rode through the Brandenburg Gate on a motorcycle. My father, riding pillion, didn’t dare say that he had to go to the toilet. So he wet his pants just as they were driving through the gate and disappointed my grandfather. He was also disappointed when my father didn’t become a soldier but studied art, which my grandpa thought was effeminate.

The last time I asked what my grandfather did during the war was in 2009. My father and aunts sat together and said things like this: “I’m not saying he was innocent, but he didn’t choose it.”

He wasn’t a Nazi, he was a soldier, they said.

Reckoning with family history

In the summer of 2021, I visited a winery near Montalcino in the Italian province of Siena, tasted Brunello wine, ate taralli and asked the young employee where this German love of Tuscany actually came from.

He didn’t have to think long: the Germans had been there as soldiers and had found it so beautiful. I facepalmed — internally: I knew that my grandfather had also been to Italy, but I didn’t type “Wolf Ewert Italy” into the search window until I was back home.

I was surprised that he had his own Wikipedia page. It said: “Under his leadership, the regiment was confronted with partisan attacks. These were followed by the San Polo massacre and other killings in the area. As the prisoners had been mistreated before the execution, Ewert arranged for the grave sites to be destroyed with explosives for fear of later discovery.”

In my bed in Berlin, 77 years and 4 days later, I read what my grandfather had done and felt dazed and overwhelmed. I read about children who had been shot. Of people who were locked in a cellar to be questioned. The Nazis took hoses from the wine cellar and beat their bare skin with them, put vinegar and salt in open wounds. Somewhere I would later read the expression “orgy of violence”.

What do I do with this story? Does this knowledge translate into a responsibility?

In the months that followed, I asked myself: What do I do with this story? Does this knowledge translate into a responsibility? And if so, what is my responsibility?

I didn’t want to ask my father whether he knew about the massacre in Tuscany, what he thought about it, he was already so ill that he could hardly remember his daughters’ names. My mother said that my father had asked his father what he had done in the war, but he had blocked it out.

At least my parents talked about other people’s pasts. Günter Grass‘s Peeling the Onion — the 2006 autobiographical work in which the Nobel Prize-winning author made his SS membership public — was discussed critically at home. The same was true for Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s saying about “the mercy of a late birth” — a phrase that refers to Germans who are theoretically too young to share the collective guilt of Nazi crimes.

An “orgy of violence”

The historian Carlo Gentile, who teaches in Cologne, has written the book Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in the Partisan War: Italy 1943-1945. It states that 3,778 civilians were killed in Tuscany during these years. This was after the vote of no confidence against Benito Mussolini, after the Nazi occupation of Italy.

Most of the victims were killed in 1944. The Allies were closing in, the partisans were fighting against the Germans and against fascist compatriots. In June 1944, the Allied commander-in-chief called on the Italians to resist. The German leadership in turn ordered the troops to act with “extreme severity” against the partisans. They were shot, hanged and burned.

Gentile’s book says that my grandfather commanded Grenadier Regiment 274. He was 38 years old at the time; a year younger than me when I first read about his deeds. They took up quarters near Arezzo. On July 13, they arrested a German deserter who admitted to being in contact with partisans who had captured German soldiers 12 kilometers away.

My grandfather sent his troops out early in the morning to free the prisoners, killing partisans and civilians and capturing people who were being used as shields. On the way, a married couple, a pregnant woman and another man were simply shot dead. Then the men fit for military service were loaded onto trucks and driven to my grandfather’s regimental command post.

He was in an irritable mood, it says on page 373 of the book. He is then quoted as saying: “Down with the pigs, kill everything.” When I read these words, they seemed familiar to me because my father also liked to use “pigs” as an insult.

I called Gentile, who told me what happened to the prisoners. The next day, after the torture, they were led from Villa Mancini across a field to a small wood near Villa Gigliosi. They were made to dig three pits and shot. Two of them had to pile up the bodies in the pits. A passing innkeeper who complained that the soldiers had not paid their bill was also shot. The soldiers blew up the bodies and then left.

Family history in historical records

My sister said, you see, that’s where our heaviness comes from.

I searched the internet for intergenerational trauma, visited a group a few times where relatives of Nazi victims and perpetrators meet, heard many stories there, but found no answers to the question of whether I had a special responsibility.

I signed up for an Italian course. Via Zoom, Martina taught me that I was una giornalista dalla Germania. I thought that I should know Italian if I was going to San Polo — and I knew relatively quickly that I wanted to go there. What I didn’t know exactly was what I actually wanted to do there.

I have Gentile and Udo Gümpel to thank for the fact that I know this part of my family history. Gümpel is a German journalist who lives in Rome. The two of them worked together to track down several war criminals.

When I visited Gümpel in Rome, he told me a lot and quickly. That the case was investigated in Giessen in 1967 and that my grandfather and other soldiers testified there.

Because the English were in San Polo after the massacre, everything is well documented. They dug up the remains of the victims, they took photos, they filmed. The images are unbearable.

But in 1972 it was ruled that the shootings were not murders, but manslaughter, which could not be prosecuted at the time because too much time had passed. Gümpel believes that this also had to do with the fact that the co-defendant Klaus Konrad had made a remarkable career in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and was considered a confidant of the then Chancellor Willy Brandt.

When the military prosecutor’s office in Italy reopened the investigation in 2004, Gümpel and his colleague René Althammer drove to Konrad in Scharbeutz and confronted him with his actions for the program Kontraste.

Konrad said that he was “no longer particularly affected by this matter.”

In 2006, the military court of La Spezia opened proceedings against Konrad, partly because the partisan attacks mentioned on Wikipedia were now in doubt. He died the same year, too early for a verdict.

Grandfather’s diary

Almost 20 years later, I went to Cologne because the files from the 1970s with the statements on the case had recently been taken away to be chemically preserved. Gentile offered me the chance to look at them on his computer. It is probably the only instance where I will be able to read about my grandfather being confronted about his deeds. So I just printed it out and saved it.

Gentile showed me photos. Women waiting on a staircase to identify their husbands or sons. Dark rags on the trees. “What’s that?” I asked. Gentile told me that the English wondered why there were so many flies buzzing in the trees. The shreds in the pictures are parts of human bodies.

My sister, who is older, remembers her horror of our grandfather.

Gentile also sent me my grandfather’s diary. You can buy it; his nephew published it in 2012. Grandpa made notes almost every day about the beauty of the Italian landscape or architecture, the good food. He only summarized the days between July 10 and 15 as follows: “Fighting near Arezzo, with very disruptive partisan actions, which were successfully fought off.” Then he made fun of a drunken English sergeant who had wrongly wandered off into a German post.

My grandpa went to cadet school when he was 11, at least until he had an accident; he fell between the train and the platform on his way home on vacation. I read that in the diary, too. He then became a soldier at 18.

He attached great importance to military ranks. The fact that he married a woman who not only had a “von” in her name, but whose ancestors had also fought in the Battle of Waterloo, was part of a proud family narrative. On the ancestor pictures, he noted which famous poets or soldiers my ancestors had been in contact with.

My sister, who is older, remembers her horror of our grandfather. His tics, a slight twitch. Shortly before he died, his doctor said it was unbelievable that he was always standing upright when his back was so broken.

Asking for an apology?

In June 2024, Gümpel wrote to me. He told me about a discussion event that the mayor of Civitella, a town near San Polo where there was also a massacre, was organizing: Le stragi dimenticate, “The forgotten massacres”. He asked if I wanted to take part online and give a welcome speech. So I wrote a few sentences and practiced them in Italian.

On July 6, I clicked on the link and all I saw was Gümpel at a table looking into the camera. And in the small windows next to it: the mayor, Gentile and a German journalist who had already researched the massacres in Tuscany at the end of the 1990s.

I explained how I found out about San Polo and that it filled me with sadness, pain and shame. I announced that I wanted to come to San Polo on the 80th anniversary, the following week, “to understand what must never happen again.” When I finished, I heard a loud round of applause.

Suddenly, time went by very quickly. The Italian newspapers were writing about the Nazi granddaughter who wants to come to Italy. Local and national newspapers said that I had announced in tears that I wanted to apologize. Somewhere it also said that I had broken down and had to end the meeting. But I hadn’t even said that I wanted to apologize.

Asking for an apology for something for which there can be no apology and for which I am not to blame, doesn’t that minimize the suffering?

There was a lot going on in the days that followed. Ivana, the granddaughter of a murdered woman, was interviewed in a newspaper; she wanted to welcome me to San Polo, she said. My words meant to her that we could move toward a more civilized world where there are no wars. “I think about Gaza and Ukraine every day,” she also said.

In another article, the local priest promised to heal my “wounds of the heart and soul” with wine and olive oil and invited me to speak at the church — which sounded more like an order.

Granddaughter of an eyewitness

Then came an email from Alessia Donati, the granddaughter of an eyewitness. We arranged to meet on the morning of the day before the memorial service. She met me in an alleyway in Arezzo. We hugged each other. We had tears in our eyes. I was trembling.

Alessia is 23 years old and studies psychology. We sat down for coffee next to a children’s merry-go-round and discussed what was going to happen the next day: wreath-laying, speeches, mass. Alessia was also going to give a speech. She had been contacted by the German embassy, and I had been contacted by the President of the Tuscany Regional Council.

The event had turned out to be a bit bigger than we had both thought. She said: “If we survive this, we’ll survive anything.” So we also share a certain theatricality.

Her grandmother’s name was Santina Badii. Since she died two years ago, Alessia has been telling her story.

When her grandmother was 16 years old, she lived on the farm that my grandfather had occupied.

In the afternoon, we drove to San Polo. She showed me the villa where the torture took place, the route the prisoners had to take. When her grandmother was 16 years old, she lived on the farm that my grandfather had occupied. She slept in the stable with the horse Rondine because the soldiers took up the beds. She mourned the dog that the soldiers had shot because it had barked.

Alessia’s grandmother was beaten and threatened. But not killed. And again and again she told her granddaughter what she had seen on July 14, 1944 through the slits in the wooden shutters on the second floor of the house where she was supposed to hide. How the soldiers drove the men, who were only wearing rags, into the garden. She heard them playing loud music. It was accordion music, Alessia found out later.

Santina Badii saw the men being killed. She continued to hide in the house, even after the music had stopped playing. Two days later, the English came and took the bodies to one of the two churches that the small village still has today. The horse Rondine pulled the cart.

They sent for a doctor to determine the causes of death, and he noted that not all the men died from gunshot wounds, 16 of the 47 had suffocated. In 2006, Santina Badii testified in La Spezia and met Klaus Konrad there again. She also told her granddaughter what the first thing she did when the war was over was to finally sing out loud again.

I smelled a tree full of unripe walnuts and wondered if the trees were there 80 years ago. What do the rings of a tree look like in the year when its roots were cut with shovels, soaked in blood? I stood with my bare feet on the ground and said to Alessia: “I’m sorry about what happened.”

That evening I finally read my grandfather’s statements. He knew every date of his promotions; about what happened in Tuscany on July 14, he usually just said, “I can’t remember.”

The anniversary

The next morning, Alessia picked me up with her mother. We were early, but not the first on the small hill next to the church. At least 50 people were already there. Men with standards and scarves from the partisan association were standing near the olive trees under which we parked. They approached us immediately.

They grabbed my hand and thanked me, that much I understood. A great gesture, said one of them. One man gave me a file and showed me old documents, another handed me a picture he had painted. An elderly lady, very small, held my hand. Gümpel said to me quietly: “You can give her kisses, that’s what they do in Italy.”

A man who no longer has a voice explained with his hands how old he was and how small he was when the crimes happened. A woman talked about her mother, who had recently died and unfortunately could not live to see this day. She cried. We held each other in our arms.

Let’s create a better world together.

Cameras in my face, microphones on our mouths. They spoke of courage, of gratitude, of how I was not to blame. They said: “My uncle died here.” And: “You are always welcome here.”

Trumpets sounded. Alessia at my side, her aunt, her mother nearby, as if they were looking out for us. As Alessia and I laid white flowers together, we barely made it past the cameras. An older man with tears in his eyes wouldn’t let go of my hand. Another gentleman was watching me.

I broke away from a conversation with a politician who folded his hands in front of me to be photographed by his employee and tried to approach the man, but he turned his head, he didn’t want to speak. He continued to look at me from a safe distance, as if he was trying to fathom whether my grandpa was inside me. While people were singing Bella Ciao, the Italian partisan song, Ivana, the one from the newspaper, came in. She said that her grandmother’s middle name was also Laura and added: “Let’s create a better world together.”

Why did I come? 

Alessia gave her speech in the packed church, to which the journalists listened impatiently. She spoke about the experiment conducted by U.S. psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961 to test whether people would follow orders even if they went against their conscience.

After her, I said in Italian: “We are seeing once again how fragile peace is. Yet you and I can testify to how the consequences of violence and war are felt over generations.”

A little boy took a photo of me with his cell phone. A man wanted my autograph, saying that he had only ever asked Yuri Gagarin for one. I didn’t feel comfortable with that. The cameras wouldn’t go away. “Perché?” I was asked. Why did you come?

The next morning I saw my face in the newspapers. “The embrace of Laura” was a headline. As I made my way back, strangers stroked my cheek and took my hand to say thank you.

Why did I come? So that my son wouldn’t have to later, I thought, taking a green walnut out of my pocket and smelling it.

*Originally published August 21, 2024, this article was updated August 27, 2024 with enriched media.