Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What was the significance of Ernst Hamaker's trial in 1971?
In 1971, a letter arrived at the home of Ernst Hamaker in Germany. It marked a turning point. After years of questioning by the authorities, he was formally summoned to court. He was being charged, and it couldn't have been more grave. Complicity in the murder of 25,000 Jews in the Rumbula forest, just outside Riga in Latvia, where he had served as part of an SS death squad.
Hemeker was terminally ill with cancer, and he died before the case could come to trial. Proceedings were abandoned. But for his family, the shadow of those allegations endured, bringing with it decades of shame and grief and unanswered questions that would echo across generations. Today, I'm very happy to be joined by Lawrence Hemaker, Ernst's grandson.
Lawrence is an author, a senior journalist at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and he's undertaken a deeply personal investigation into his grandfather's past. I think his brave work seeks to uncover not only the historical truth, but also the human reality behind it. Lawrence first spoke to us in September 2023 about his story.
If you haven't heard that conversation, I'd recommend you going back to listen. Just search for The Nazi Massacre at Rumbler, wherever you get your podcasts. But in this episode, he returns to share his new findings and reflect on the difficult path his research has taken him down. as he continues to piece together the life and actions of his grandfather.
A warning before we begin, this discussion includes very disturbing material. It confronts the brutal realities of mass violence. It's going to raise also difficult questions about how ordinary individuals can become involved in acts of extraordinary evil. And it's also about how families and societies reckon with such histories. For Lorenz, this has been a painful but necessary journey.
I'm so grateful that he chose to make that journey and is so honest about it when he comes on this podcast. This is his story. Lorenz, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Thanks, Dan. Great to be back. I think the whole audience are enormously grateful for your courage and tenacity and resilience in even talking about this.
Lots and lots of people responded to the first episode we did together. But for those of people who didn't hear it, let's go through some of the top line work that you've done. This was your grandpa. Remind us, did you know him? Did he bounce you on his knee as a young man?
I never met Ernst, he became my grandfather because he died five years before I was born. The only thing we had in common was that we were born on the same day, on the 27th of July.
Yeah, I remember that. And how did your parents talk about him?
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Chapter 3: How did Lorenz Hemicker begin his investigation into his grandfather's past?
Because I've been growing up in a kind of no man's land. I'm not the grandson of Heinrich Himmler or anybody of the big... of the big Nazis. But on the other side, most of my school comrades grew up with the knowledge or the imagination of a knowledge that their grandfathers hadn't been Nazis. And in my case, it was obvious. There was something. There was something big.
So I had to defend myself to a certain extent in school, though I never felt guilty. But the teachers always asked me, what about your grandfather? And what do you think about National Socialism? One time more than the others.
Okay, well, listen, Lawrence, I'm going to take you off my amateurish psychologist chair here. And let's actually just briefly recap. Is life a very typical life, you could say, for someone who ended up doing what he was doing? Served in the First World War, which must have in itself been a traumatizing, radicalizing experience.
experience, ended up in the Freikorps, these right-wing militias that were furious about the sort of collapse of German imperial power, the shame of Germany that followed the First World War, and from then into the Nazi party. So quite a standard journey, you might say?
Yeah, a standard journey. He went bankrupt as well. He lost three fourths of his brothers and sisters due to tuberculosis, fallen soldiers, his father as well. And the people that were responsible for that were for him, of course, the Entente from the outside and from the inside, all those Democrats and socialists.
Sorry, we should say he lost his siblings during the war. So from the hunger and the conditions they faced during the Allied blockade of Germany, for example.
Yeah, both. His eldest brother was killed in action already in 1915. And I think the last brother, he was only three or four years old, died due to tuberculosis in the 20s.
Right, okay. He went to the East in 1941, and this is when he goes from being an enthusiastic Nazi into something darker, accusations of war criminality. What have you found? Bring us up to speed. We talked about it in the previous podcast, but people haven't listened. What have you found? And then we'll go on to your subsequent discoveries in a second.
Okay.
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Chapter 4: What disturbing discoveries did Lorenz make about Ernst's actions during the Holocaust?
In the end, they were erected by Soviet Union prisoners of war, 300 of them. And that's what he did.
And then having constructed the pits, he was also party to the execution. And at that point of the war, it's a holocaust of bayonets and bullets, right? I mean, it's unsophisticated. They're just massing people on the edge of these pits and murdering them and throwing them in. And did he leave any written account? Do we know how he felt at this point?
Or have you been able to work out whether he... Was he enthusiastic in all of this? Or was this driven by a belief that there was a global Zionist, the Jewish conspiracy aimed at bringing down Germany? I mean, did he think he was striking a blow against that? Or had he realized that these are... men, women and children. Was he appalled at what was going on?
I think the thing is that both persons were inside him. We have curriculum vitae from him from the 1930s that he had written for the SS, where it was absolutely clear that he was in favor of the national socialistic ideology.
And then we have the testimonies he gave to the prosecutor and to the judges in the 60s, where he was an old man already, where he felt ashamed, where he said, OK, this was a horrible thing I had to do. I didn't want to. I had to do. And we have, I think, about half an hour conversation yet only once with my father already.
where he said the same things, that it was horrible what he did, but he had no other option.
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Chapter 5: How did Lorenz's family confront the legacy of their grandfather's actions?
It was impossible to escape these orders.
You've mentioned the 1960s. So he was arrested or detained or took part voluntarily? How did that work in the 1960s? Did the hand come knocking at the door looking for him?
It was a relatively slow process because at the beginning... He was not in the center of the prosecutor. He just had to testify what he had seen. And it took years until the prosecutor told him to come to Hamburg because he was suspicious, because they wanted to know more about his personal role in the killings of Rombola. But in this time, he had already cancer. He was very ill.
And like for most of the Nazis in this time, it was relatively easy to escape. One thing was illness, and the other thing was that they said, as long as I didn't want to kill the Jews, as long as I had to, I will not go into jail.
Okay, so there was a pretty clear playbook by that point, how to wriggle out of things.
Yeah, definitely.
Was there a social penalty? I mean, neighbours, community, your father's colleagues and your schoolmates. I mean, was that a form of punishment as well when you found out there was someone who'd been detained, someone who'd been questioned living on your street in Germany at the time? For me... Well, for your father and then for you as well, yeah.
Yeah. For my father, I think not so much. I mean, he talked about it in every occasion that was possible, Christmas time with his family, in summer times at the barbecue with neighbors. But they always said, come on, Peter, let it be. So for them, it was kind of a normality that Peter talks about such things. For me, it was a bit different.
As I mentioned, my school time already, looking backwards, I think I felt a bit like Muslims after 9-11, so that I received one additional question. OK, Lawrence, you also think that the Nazis were evil, right? So I always had to defend myself a bit, though I was innocent. Yeah, so this was the way I dealt with the things.
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