Dachau: Son of the concentration camp commander talks about difficult family inheritance – Dachau

Many Germans lie to themselves about the Nazi era and believe that their own ancestors were not Nazis. Ralph Schwerdt is the son of a former Dachau concentration camp commander – and that’s exactly what he doesn’t do. About dealing with a heavy family inheritance.

On this evening in the visitor center of the Dachau concentration camp memorial site, the all-pervading and still effective lie about the successful processing of the Nazi legacy becomes tangible. The Catholic pastor Karl Morgenschweis, clergyman in the Landsberg prison for war criminals, was one of the countless disgusting Germans who, after the end of the war, set about denying or relativizing the Nazi crimes, portraying the American military tribunals as criminal and exonerating the convicted perpetrators and their liberation to effect. The young democratic Federal Republic thanked the clergyman in the 1950s with the Federal Cross of Merit, the state of Bavaria with the Bavarian Order of Merit, and the city of Landsberg with the Golden Ring of Honor in 1960.

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