The Nazi's Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather Was a War Criminal

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My grandmother confessed that she fell in love with him because he looked like a Hollywood movie star—a swashbuckler battling the evil Communists who had subjugated and ravaged our tiny, proud country.

Over the years, she sang only his praises.

The details of his life that she crooned as I grew older only enhanced his image in my astounded eyes. He had been interrogated and beaten with a baton for two years in a crowded KGB prison. He had led a revolt against the Russians—not once, but twice. He had dared to clash with the mighty Germans, and for his impertinent insolence been sent to a concentration camp where the Nazis pounded him with their fists.

That story is all I knew for thirty-eight years. I had no hint of anything deranged about him.

So I was caught so implausibly uninformed that the shameful evidence flattened me. I had known nothing about his machinations in the genocide, nothing about his prowess in organizing the redistribution of the property of those marked for death with a yellow star, nothing about the sinister orders he signed to squash thousands of innocent civilians into a cheek-to-jowl-packed ghetto in advance of certain execution.

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