I’m looking for serious replies only, please. I have a friend whose family ‘escaped’ from East Germany and moved to the US during the Cold War. My friend’s opposition to socialism seems to be almost exclusively based upon this idea that their poor family had to ‘run from evil communists’. This person either doesn’t know or won’t tell me what their family was up to in Germany from 1930-1945. I suspect they were nazis and were not ‘escaping’ socialism but hiding their participation in war crimes by moving to a country that would not persecute them for killing civilians etc. I know their grandfather’s name (who was just a boy when his parents forcibly moved them all to the US). How would I go about proving my hypothesis that they were nazis? Are their databases with the names of nazi party members and so on? Any advice and guidance would be much appreciated. Thanks.
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Digging up evidence that your friend’s dead ancestors were Nazis so you can rub it in his face doesn’t sound likely to result in a comrade or a friend.
Not rubbing it in their face but more vindication for me. I don’t think I’d discuss it with them unless it explicitly came up and I don’t like lying by omission.
It’s practically a given that they didn’t flee because of that. If his family would’ve had something to worry about, they wouldn’t have been in East Germany any longer when it was still the Soviet Occupation Zone. Anybody high up in the NSDAP, anybody involved with the SS Einsatzgruppen etc. etc., they already knew what was coming for them when the Red Army moved on Berlin. And unless they were so deeply involved in war crimes that you would know their last name from school, they would have had no reason to flee West Germany with its eagerness to rehabilitate nazi criminals.
That doesn’t mean his grandparents weren’t nazis during 1933-45, odds are pretty good they may have been, but anybody who left either German state when the Cold War was already underway didn’t do so because of any involvement in nazi war crimes or anything like it. They unfortunately didn’t have to. And any “former” nazis who made it to the USA didn’t go there because they had to escape punishment, but because the US government had a lucrative job offer for them.
I know the National Archives in DC has a lot of that kind of thing. My mom’s family is German, she went to see what they had and found the German paperwork from that time verifying that her family was “100% German”. I know her family members were not Nazis, but her father did get conscripted by the German Army. So if they have that info, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had the paperwork detailing who was and wasn’t a Party member.
Good to know, thanks!
