‘He knew, for example, how many Jews were killed on a certain date in November 1942. That sort of information was not known by the general populace’
Derek Niemann’s new book explores grandad’s SS past
THE photograph shows a middleaged man tending his garden.
He is wearing his day clothes – a Nazi uniform. His captain’s pips are on his lapels. The Iron Cross is on his breast pocket, just beneath the ribbons of the Cross of Honour – both of them awards he earned in the bloodshed of the Western Front.
At the time of the photograph – possibly May, 1944 – the sight of an SS officer in his garden, on an SS estate in Berlin, would have been perfectly normal.
But for Derek Niemann, the photograph is extraordinary. For the man in the uniform is his paternal grandfather, Karl.
Derek has now written a book about him, called A Nazi in the Family.
Karl’s job that meant he visited many of the concentration camps for which the Nazis are forever notorious.
“It took many years for my grandfather’s story to come out, that as an SS officer he had been a manager of slave labour in concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen and many others,” says Scots-born Derek.
“For most of his life, my own dad Rudi, who had grown up in Germany then, like his sister Anne, emigrated to Scotland, hadn’t told his family anything about his early childhood in Germany.
“Once, he let slip that Karl had been a ‘pen-pusher’ in Dachau.
“But it wasn’t until I was 50 when, searching the internet, I came across my grandfather, and references to what he had done: ‘crimes against humanity’, ‘use of slave labour’.”
It was a revelation that Derek has never forgotten, and that, several years later, has now led to his book.
“I suppose Karl was a middle-ranking functionary in the SS,” says Derek, an author and nature writer. “My dad had called him a pen-pusher, which made me assume that he had just been a clerk. But he was more than that.
“Karl ensured that thousands of concentration-camp inmates were pushed into work.”
Karl Niemann was born in a small hamlet on April 30, 1893, the youngest of seven children. He saw action in the Great War and was taken prisoner. He was freed is March 1920.
He and his wife, Minna, eventually settled in Dortmund, where they raised a family. Karl worked for a publishing company but was able to land a job with the SS in Bavaria as an auditor for an SS training camp next door to Dachau.
By the time war broke out in 1939, he had become a business manager in the SS Business and Administration Office, in Berlin.
During the war years, as a troubleshooter and quality inspector, he toured all the industrial “plants” – the concentration camps – tied into the SS’ woodwork production business.
In 1945, however, his luck ran out. Karl disappeared in a US army jeep, and he spent the next three years in internment in former PoW camps.
In July 1948 he stood before a denazification tribunal. Finally, he was allowed home to his family. But nothing was ever the same again.
Says Derek: “He knew, for example, how many Jews were killed on a certain date in November 1942. That sort of information was not known by the general populace.”
Afterwards, Karl was a broken man. “It’s impossible to say for sure – I don’t think he was broken by what he had done, more by the fact that everything had gone wrong for him.
“He had lost his job, he no longer had a status. Two of his children had left for Scotland. I feel, too, that maybe he distanced himself. He said, ‘I didn’t kill anyone: I was just doing my job’.
“But my dad definitely said when he came home, he was not the same.”
Derek has also given a lot of thought to Karl’s wife, Minna.
“She wouldn’t have wanted to have voiced any criticism of the regime,” he says. There was always the risk that little children would go into school and say, ‘My mum says this...’, and then they would all be straight into the concentration camp.
“In the book I’ve tried to be as honest as possible.”
A Nazi in the Family is published by Short Books at £14.99