Niklas Frank, Son of Hans Frank, Governor of Nazi Occupied Poland (1939 - 45) HARDtalk


Niklas Frank, Son of Hans Frank, Governor of Nazi Occupied Poland (1939 - 45)

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Now on BBC News, it's time for HARDtalk.

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Welcome to HARDtalk.

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I'm Stephen Sackur.

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Today I'm in rural northern Germany.

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Stable, prosperous, 21st century Germany.

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But I'm here to talk about the past and its relationship to the present.

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My guest is the writer, journalist and son, Niklas Frank.

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Now, his father was appointed by Hitler to be the governor general

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of Nazi-occupied Poland.

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He was intimately involved in the murder of millions of people.

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So, how has this German son dealt with the terrible crimes

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of his father?

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Niklas, I'm wondering why you have chosen to make your life in the very

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far north of Germany.

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Is it because you wanted to get as far away as possible

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from your family background in Bavaria?

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No, I still love Bavaria.

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And every year we have about many weeks in Bavaria,

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in the same village where I grew up.

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But it was my profession as a journalist at Stern magazine,

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which I worked for 23 years, was based in Hamburg.

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So, I had to lure my wife, she was attached to Munich,

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because she is a big gardener, to her house with a big garden,

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so we've lived here for 33 years.

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This place where you now live is extraordinarily peaceful.

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Yes, it is.

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Would you say it has helped bring you some sort of peace of mind?

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Ah, no.

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No, I don't think that it depends on the country I am living in.

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It is...

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In myself I have found peace, because I acknowledge

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what my father has done.

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That I think is the first and most important step.

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Thinking of my father is thinking first about his victims.

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There is no German around who has not certain pictures of corpses

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in his mind.

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And those pictures always remind me of my father,

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what he did.

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And especially when I look at him...

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That's the leather coat of my father.

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It's a scarecrow.

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In German, you call it vogelscheuche.

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And this scarecrow is the most expensive one in Germany,

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I would say, because I bought it from a soldier who had stolen it.

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The coat, you mean?

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The coat, yes.

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And someone gave me a call and asked it if I was interested

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in the coat of my father and I said yes.

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She wanted $500 and I paid it.

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You mean this old military greatcoat, leather coat,

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is actually your father's old coat?

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Yes.

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What I have to admit, since the scarecrow is standing

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here, I have got a stronger connection to my father.

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It's very strange.

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And always, when I'm sitting in our living room,

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looking at him and say, "This you have earned,

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Father, being a scarecrow in the end."

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That's your fault.

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Niklas, I want to hear more about your family history.

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I want to dig deeper into your relationship

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with your father.

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But I also want to get out of the cold north German wind.

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That is a good idea.

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Why don't we head back into your home?

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OK, that's great.

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Bye-bye, scarecrow.

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Niklas Frank, welcome to HARDtalk.

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Thank you.

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Do you feel that you have some sort of a duty to your country to speak

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about your past?

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I think so, yes.

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I think I have the duty because, by chance, I was born in this family

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and I could tell the people...

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Ah, how to behave with parents like I had.

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When do you think you first began to feel that you must speak out

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as volubly, as publicly as possible about your father

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and about your feelings toward your father?

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It was a growing wish, because of the silence in Germany.

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Families, all the families of my friends, everybody was silent.

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And they didn't talk about the past.

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And this I couldn't endure, because I always wanted to know how

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is it that society behaves if it changes to a dictatorship.

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And I always have a feeling that Germany is still prepared

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to do this.

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And so I looked closer towards families and friends

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and connectedness, and I found out that still there is something

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in the German people which makes me fear them.

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Fear, your own country and your own people?

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Yes, I would say so.

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Well, I want to pick up on that, because that's a pretty remarkable

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thing to feel and to say.

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But before I get to your thoughts on the country, on Germany,

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I do want to stay with the personal.

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Because it seems to me in that period you're talking about,

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after the end of the war, and for decades afterwards,

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many families of senior, top Nazis still felt a vestigial

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loyalty to their kin, to their blood.

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Did you never feel that?

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No.

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Especially not for my father.

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It's slightly different with my mother, because I have

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experienced my mother as a really fighting mother for us.

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But she was a Nazi too.

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She wasn't a Nazi.

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Was she not?

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She was never a member of the Nazi party, nor was she a Nazi.

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She hated all this screaming of her husband when he was

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delivering a speech.

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And she hated this kind of stuff.

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But she very much liked the luxury she found through the position

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of her husband.

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She was a very cold and inhuman woman.

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In terms of your father, I want you just to look at this

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picture with me.

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That is your father in his Nazi uniform.

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When you look at him, do you feel anger, rage,

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what do you feel?

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Anger and rage, anger and rage.

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And the next thing was I always...

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The word which for me is always sticking to my father is,

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what a coward you are.

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What a coward.

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And that feeling isn't just a memory feeling,

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it is something that is very alive in you.

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It's very alive, it's very alive.

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It is still as if he is sitting in your place.

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I despise him, really.

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He died, he was hung, after the Nuremberg trials,

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when you were seven years old.

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So I'm just wondering how strong your memories can be of him

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when you were in that castle in Krakow, his headquarters,

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the headquarters of the Nazi force in Poland, do you really remember

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what it was like and what he was like?

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No, I didn't remember what kind of profession he had.

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I only knew Poland was ours.

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And the castle was ours.

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And the other castle outside of Krakow was ours.

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And there were our properties.

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It was almost like you were part of the royal family.

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Yes, it was, it was.

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And this I enjoyed very much, like my mother.

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I enjoyed it.

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What about the truth of the unimaginable crimes

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and cruelty as a young boy growing up from the age of,

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well, from being a baby to being six years old.

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Did you have any awareness of what was happening?

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No.

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The only thing was, when I accompanied my mother

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into the Krakow ghettos, when she was shopping,

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maybe it was one visit, maybe more, but I remember especially this one

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visit, there was a lot of people, everybody was looking very sadly.

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And this was the only memory.

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But I didn't know where it was.

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Later on I talked to my mummy, my beloved Hilda, and I told her

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the flashes of my memory.

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And she told me it was Krakow and we were together

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and I remembered her sitting beside me in the car.

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We now associate your father with the Holocaust.

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He was instrumental in delivering millions of Jews and others

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to their deaths, and he seemed to be enthusiastic about it.

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Was there any way that anybody else in your family could have known

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exactly what was happening?

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Exactly knew it, um, his wife, my mother.

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Your mother?

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She knew exactly.

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You have to imagine this castle in Krakow, it was really

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like a kingdom.

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Everybody knows each other, yes.

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Everybody talked to each other.

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They knew exactly what was going on in the death camps

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and what was going on day by day.

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You have said, I think, that you have no doubt

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that your father loved Hitler more than he loved his own family.

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Yes, that's for sure.

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And you use that word love advisedly.

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You really mean love.

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Really love, real love.

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It is something of a homosexual kind of love.

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Tell me about your last encounter with your father.

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He, of course, was tried at Nuremberg as one of the top Nazis

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to be held responsible for the genocide, for the war

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crimes, crimes against humanity.

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But before he was executed, you saw him one last time.

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Yes.

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Sitting on my mother's lap, it was a big room

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on the other side...

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I will always remember I was sitting behind this window with small holes

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to understand each other.

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I was sitting on my mother's lap.

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And knowing that will be my last visit to him.

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And he smiled at me and laughed.

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Do you have a picture of him at Nuremberg?

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It is here, during his...

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This is during the trial.

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During the trial, yes.

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So, he smiled.

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And what did he say to you, what was his last message to you?

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The last message to me was a big lie.

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I knew that he would be hanged and he told me,

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"Hi, Niki," which was my name in the family, "Heil,

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Niki, we will soon celebrate Christmas at our house,"

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and I was really thinking, "Why is he lying, why is he lying?"

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Let's move forward and think about the impact of all this

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on your family.

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You have siblings, two older sisters and I think two brothers.

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Yes.

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Could you, in the years that followed, talk to them,

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share feelings with them, actually have the same sort

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of understanding of what your father had done and what it meant

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to you as a family?

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I was living in a boarding school until I finished school.

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We were separated in different places.

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But whenever we came together, after a short "Hi,"

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we were discussing our father.

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And then very slowly I found out the very different approaches

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to my father especially.

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And this separated me.

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Because your sisters, what, they...

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Three of my sisters defended my father as innocent victim of Hitler,

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Himmler and the justice of Nuremberg.

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I would say it cost them their lives.

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They died very early.

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My next oldest sister, Frigita, called Kitty,

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she wrote in her diary when she was a teenager,

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she said that she would not become older than our father

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and she committed suicide at 46, the same age my father

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was when he was hanged.

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My next older brother, a really great looking guy,

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very sporting, a very funny guy he suddenly started to drink milk,

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litres a day and became fatter and fatter and died of all that

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follows when you are too fat.

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He was alive when my book came out and he attacked me in public.

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It sort of destroyed your family.

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Yes, certainly.

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What about forgiveness?

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There are many people who hear your story and the rage

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and the anger you acknowledge to this very day.

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They say there is something inhuman about it, because humanity is full

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of the deepest failings and flaws and in the end,

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part of humanity is to find forgiveness.

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I am an inhuman being.

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I will never forgive him.

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Looking around in Europe and also in other countries,

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such as America, wherever, I find a lot of families

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have fathers who have killed a part of that family.

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I cannot forgive that.

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Never.

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Do you ever wonder if you may have had a better, happier,

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more positive life if you had found a different way to deal

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with what is, after all, your father's terrible crime?

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Not yours?

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Yes, but these crimes, you can say it was my father,

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but it comes out of demolishing society

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and demolishing families and killing innocent children.

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They were the victims, not my father.

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My father did it, he gave the signatures for death penalty

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and that sort of thing.

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He was responsible by German law, he was the deputy

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of Hitler in Poland.

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Every death camp, he was responsible for.

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The true power, certainly it was with Himmler,

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but he was responsible.

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With you talking to me, asking me this question,

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maybe you can see my face going red, I become furious again

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because it was unbelievable in which he was involved.

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But that is...those red cheeks, the fury that you feel,

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you are allowing your father to define you.

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Define me exactly?

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You are giving your father another form of enormous power.

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He wielded this terrible power over so many millions in Poland

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and still over you.

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I think you once called yourself a puppet on a string.

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Why not cut those strings?

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Do not allow your father, even in death, after so many years,

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to pull your strings.

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Too many victims.

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Too many victims.

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Let's not just talk about you.

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Let's also talk about Germany.

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You introduced that topic earlier and I would like to return to it.

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It seems to me that you feel, I think you used the word fearful,

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still, of your own country and your own people.

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Today, 72 years after the

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liberation of Auschwitz.

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Why?

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You don't know my people as I do.

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I do not trust them.

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Nobody spoke, a normal German family never really spoke

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about what our fathers, mothers, grandfathers,

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grandmothers have really seen.

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Whether they were cowards, whether they were actively involved

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in the system.

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They are silent.

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This is like a swamp.

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That swamp was never drained.

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So here and there in Germany you find nowadays, you find these

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poison flowers coming up.

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Meadows full of them.

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But when you say there is suddenly a meadow full of poison flowers,

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that is where I wonder whether that is fair.

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This interview is being filmed by three young German men

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in their 20s and 30s.

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Why should they have to bear any sense of guilt

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or shame or responsibility?

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No.

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No guilt, no shame.

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Acknowledge.

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Really acknowledge.

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If you talk to these youngsters, really, you will find out a lot

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of uncertainty, or not really wanting to talk about it.

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They say why should we be taking high school trips to Bergen-Belsen?

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Why should we have to, as kids, be fed this sense

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of our collective responsibility?

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The responsibility, for me, it's a dead word.

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You have to know your history, the history of your people.

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It hurts to admit that there was a time in Germany where we left

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a family of people all around the world, and we killed millions

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of innocent people in a system which was really a difficult system.

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And to be against the system then was to have a very brave character.

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But this hurt, you can endure, like I endured and I still love

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Germany.

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I love being world champion in football, for instance.

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Really.

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I am a nationalist.

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I also love very when Merkel said she will do this refugees,

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now it may be thrown out, but that was a good thing.

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You can especially see with Merkel, everything changed

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because we are treating them as if they were Jews again...

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That swamp is coming.

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You really feel that, you feel so insecure

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about your Germany today?

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Don't trust us.

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Especially, I was very happy when the European community suddenly...

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Suddenly we were watched countless all over Germany,

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we have very determined centrists, so that what gave me a happy feeling

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- now England is leaving, Poland is like a dictatorship,

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Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, who is the strongest left?

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The Germans.

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But the Germans, as you painted, Germany today is a bulwark

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of moderation, of tolerance, compared to so many messages coming

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from Hungary or Marine Le Pen or from so many people

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in so many corners.

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As long as our economy is great and as long as we make money,

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everything is very democratic.

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But let's wait and hopefully not see if we have five to ten years heavy

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economic problems and the swamp is a lake, it is a sea

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and we are swallowed again.

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I swear it to you.

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I don't trust it.

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It always makes me...

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Thinking and feeling exactly...wait a minute,

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there is something else.

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You can lead a happy life, but there is something

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else around you.

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Yeah, it hurts but, on the other hand, because I have had

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a really happy life.

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Ask my grandchildren.

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Niklas, what a nice way to end, and we must end.

0:24:190:24:22

Thank you for being on HARDtalk.

0:24:220:24:34

Thank you for being on HARDtalk.

0:24:340:24:42

Hi there.

0:24:420:24:44

It felt pretty chilly at times yesterday, didn't it?

0:24:440:24:47

It was even cold enough for some snow on the ground up

0:24:470:24:50

in the Highlands of Scotland.

0:24:500:24:51

Not bad going for late April.

0:24:510:24:53

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