The horror of discovering that your grandfather was an SS officer who personally participated in the murder of Jews

SS Major Otto Kraus, left, and his brother Hans.

After a good while of conversation about horrors, in his office in a somewhat dilapidated block in the south of Berlin, near the entrance to the enormous park that is today the old Tempelhof airport, the pride of the Third Reich, the writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus for end collapses.

He is a vital and robust man (just like his grandfather) and is used to dealing with terrible things, but something has broken inside him.

He pales and his blue eyes water.

He has been asking her to explain exactly what role his grandfather had in the Nazi regime and in the extermination of the Jews.

“My grandfather, Otto Kraus, was part of the Baltic German minority in Latvia.

Reinhard Heydrich recruited him for the SD, the SS agency that acted as an intelligence service and was central to the Holocaust.

In 1941, he participated in the invasion of the USSR as a member of Einsatzgruppen A, one of the traveling squads that carried out executions mainly of Jews, marching behind the combat troops.

He then he was the head of the SD in Riga.

He rose to the rank of Sturmbannführer, a major in the SS.

He personally intervened in at least two mass shootings”.

One of those ghastly episodes is recreated by Chris Kraus in his novel, which just appeared this week,

(Salamandra, translated from the German by Isabel García Adánez), starring a character who is very closely based on his grandfather and who follows his career with great accuracy.

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My family the Himmlers

In the book, on a summer day outside Riga, the SS and their Latvian auxiliaries subject a group of Jews to "special treatment," a scene that accurately reproduces one of the massacres perpetrated in the Bikernieki (Bickern) forest. ), the main scene of the massacres in Latvia (of the population of 90,000 Jews, 70,000 were killed).

They are forced to strip naked next to a ditch and are shot in several batches.

Kraus writes: “Executing someone at point-blank range often means that the victims' brains and blood splatter in all directions, and they did.

Shards from the skulls shot like shrapnel to where I stood, twenty meters away.

Screams could be heard, blood soaked the ground, and the air smelled of wet iron mixed with cold sweat, excrement, and urine.”

The scene continues when the protagonist advances to fire the coup de grâce at a young woman and leans out of the grave with the Luger in his hand: “In the midst of that jumble of bodies I could see some feet that kept moving.

She was a girl whose skull cap had been chipped off, which had landed next to her.

She looked at me with wide open eyes while still hugging her baby, who seemed intact, simply asleep (…) Before I was unable to hold back the vomit, I emptied the gun on both of them”.

The passage gives the measure of the world in which Otto Kraus (become Konstantin

Solm in the novel) moved and the inheritance with which his descendant has to deal.

"The discovery of my grandfather's story was horrible, very disturbing," explains a broken Chris Kraus, who gets up to open a window.

"I loved my grandfather."

It was in 1985, when he was a student, that he became interested in what Otto Kraus had to say.

"He spoke of executions, and yet he never used clear words, but terms such as

, and you could think that what they were doing was something else, like going to the forest to cut firewood.

But then I read a book about General Vlasov [the Russian defector who commanded troops for the Nazis] and it contained details about my grandfather and his involvement with the extermination.

It was horrible.

No one in my family knew.

So I dedicated myself to going to the archives to look for information and clarify what had happened.”

black heritage

He discovered the whole truth, but no one in his family wanted to believe him, except one of his cousins, the editor Sigrid Kraus (founder of Salamander), who is named after Otto's wife, the grandmother.

“From my research I wrote an essay,

(Cold Blood), published in a reduced print run for the family and our environment in 2014, in which I told everything, to show that they were not my fantasies and how incompatible they were. everything turned out with family memory.

It has not worked.

It is like in all of Germany, it seems that the Nazis came from the moon: most people say that their grandparents were excellent people, anti-Nazis and that it was all the fault of Hitler, Himmler and four psychopaths.

The black heritage of the Kraus is not limited to grandfather.

“His two brothers”, continues Chris Kraus, “also belonged to the SS and were part of death squads, an extraordinary case, crazy.

The eldest, Hans, was even more involved in atrocities, while the youngest, Lorenz, was an SS war correspondent and, gifted with artistic ability, drew anti-Semitic drawings.

The three Kraus brothers, Frank, Lorenz and Otto.

How do you carry all that load?

Chris Kraus thinks for a long time.

"It is difficult to explain.

I try to understand, to investigate what really happened, a very hard task.

I try to correct things with the truth.

It has fallen to me to do it among all the children and grandchildren of Otto.

I do not want to be a passive accomplice, I will not accept silence, even if the process is negative for me.

Did he get to confront the truth with his grandfather?

"Never;

he died in 1989, and until 10 years later I did not know the real story of him”.

Would you have liked to be able to talk to him?

“Yes, but he provoked so much respect… I don't know if he would have dared me, even though I was the one who got along best with my grandfather.

The others reproach me that he can no longer defend himself.

To them he was a good man, period.

The truth is that he died without having to face his responsibility and his crimes,

like so many others from the SS elite, because Germany did not dare to bring them to justice.”

Where is he buried?

In Latvia?

“In Nuremberg;

what irony”, laughs bitterly Chris Kraus.

"That city that, in addition to symbolizing the punishment of the Nazis after the war, was previously so anti-Semitic and my grandfather and Hitler liked it so much."

The scoundrel factory

turns the life of Otto Kraus into a novel of almost a thousand pages, which included participating in secret SS missions such as the Zeppelin operation to kill Stalin (he met Otto Skorzeny, famous for his risky military actions, such as the rescue of Benito Mussolini), his conversion into an agent of the CIA, of the new secret services of the German Federal Republic, Org-BND, and even, it seems, of the KGB and the Mossad.

"It's a fictionalization of his story, it's based on years of research and the essay I wrote for the family."

The grandson recounts the origins of the Kraus (the Solms), his life in Latvia (similar to that shown in the 2010 Chris Kraus film

) and the progressive involvement of Koja and his older brother Hub in the Nazi machine.

The novel begins in 1974 in a Munich hospital where the protagonist is hospitalized with a gunshot wound, who tells his life story to his neighbor in bed, an

innocent, well-intentioned, Buddhist hippy and

not believe what he hears.

The novelist has introduced the character of an adoptive sister, Ev, who becomes the center of the sentimental interest of the two brothers (and has just become a doctor at Auschwitz).

“I have reflected aspects of my grandfather in Koja and Hub, the older one is more brutal and the younger apparently more sensitive and introspective, but you like him worse and worse.

Both carry evil within.

At least Hub has a coherent position, but Koja presents that personality of agents and spies who lack a core of convictions and function like a fish in water in a universe of falsehood and lies.

The ambiguity is the most disturbing element in the novel.”

Writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus.

Surprising in

the sense of humor - the irony of Koja, the black lover who sings the

, the prohibition of Monopoly for being "a Jewish game", the SS with a cleft lip, Himmler's car stopped to let some frogs pass by on the road, the circumcision of the protagonist in order to infiltrate Israel in the postwar period as the professor of Hebrew Himmelreich.

“That has brought me fierce criticism in Germany.

I knew I would have them.

Actually, I think the humor makes the story even more unbearable.”

The book adds to the long debate over whether humor and Nazism should be mixed.

There is also a long-distance love story.

“The terrible thing is that those Nazis like my grandfather were people.

I did not want to describe some demons but human beings in an inhuman regime.

In Germany, it has been preferred to see the Nazis as monsters that had nothing to do with the rest of the population,

and demonizing them is incompatible with humor and love, that's why it's so disturbing”.

Can't that be seen as a form of justification?

“No, they are stylistic resources, to understand that these human abysses that I describe are not a fiction.

The key issue is morality, the amorality of the character.

He is someone despicable and humor and love bring him closer, but they do not justify him.

We cannot distance ourselves from evil, it is part of the human condition.

My grandfather was a person capable of loving and being loved.

That has disturbed me a lot.

How is it possible that a person I knew and loved was like this in another context?

I wanted to make that experience accessible to readers.

It could happen to all of us."

to understand that these human abysses that I describe are not a fiction.

The key issue is morality, the amorality of the character.

He is someone despicable and humor and love bring him closer, but they do not justify him.

We cannot distance ourselves from evil, it is part of the human condition.

My grandfather was a person capable of loving and being loved.

That has disturbed me a lot.

How is it possible that a person I knew and loved was like this in another context?

I wanted to make that experience accessible to readers.

It could happen to all of us."

to understand that these human abysses that I describe are not a fiction.

The key issue is morality, the amorality of the character.

He is someone despicable and humor and love bring him closer, but they do not justify him.

We cannot distance ourselves from evil, it is part of the human condition.

My grandfather was a person capable of loving and being loved.

That has disturbed me a lot.

How is it possible that a person I knew and loved was like this in another context?

I wanted to make that experience accessible to readers.

It could happen to all of us."

How is it possible that a person I knew and loved was like this in another context?

I wanted to make that experience accessible to readers.

It could happen to all of us."

How is it possible that a person I knew and loved was like this in another context?

I wanted to make that experience accessible to readers.

It could happen to all of us."

The world of the secret services he describes, the stories of General Gehlen, Otto John, Isser Harel, of the hunt for Eichmann… “Everything is true, during the war and after.

When I discovered that my grandfather was also a spy, how do you combine that with the importance that my family has always given to being honest?

Officers of Einsatzgruppen A. Fourth from left is Otto Kraus.

The scoundrel factory,

in which an echo of

, by Marguerite Yourcenar, has many points in common with

, the great novel by Jonathan Littell;

among them that the narrator is a Nazi criminal and the atrocities are described in detail;

in addition to the fixation by the sister.

“I consider the comparison a compliment.

It is an extraordinary book that I loved.

We did our research in parallel: during the 15 years that I was looking for information about my grandfather, we visited the same archives and consulted the same documents, I saw his name.

His perspective is also that of the executioner.

Its protagonist, Max Aue, is a member of the SD and is part of the Einsatzgruppen.

But Littell worked more on erotica than horror.

It is a very literary book, with all its homoerotic and perverse fantasies.

It was an inspiration, but my approach is different, harder”.

In the relationship between the protagonists of

, there are also many perverse and scatological elements, in its coprological sense: Koja and Ev are marked by sharing children's potties, and masturbation.

“It's true, but I do it looking for the archaic, the elemental.

There is also excrement, and blood, and the process of turning people into corpses in acts of extermination.

My grandfather saw all that.

He smelled the excrement, the blood and the fear of those killed.

What did he think then he?

How did he handle that experience?

Some of my grandfather's comrades confessed that they liked to kill.

Others argued something that seems grotesque to me: that they participated in the massacres, yes, but in a charitable way, to avoid unnecessary suffering to the victims.”

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