The site of the Rumbula massacre, Latvia (Lorenz Hemicker)
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On the podcast this week.
As a child growing up in Germany, Lorenz Hemicker heard that his grandfather had done “distinguished service” in World War II.
Decades later, Lorenz set out to learn the whole truth.
On this week’s podcast
This week's guest is Lorenz Hemicker, a German journalist who spent over a decade finding out exactly what his grandfather did during the Second World War. Ernst Hemicker was an SS officer who served at Rumbula, the site outside Riga where roughly 25,000 Jews were murdered in 1941. Lorenz grew up hearing fragments of the story from his father Peter, who never got the chance to find the answers himself before he died. So Lorenz picked up where his father left off, using the tools he had as a journalist to track down archives, interrogation transcripts and survivors, including a meeting with Alexander Bergman, who survived Rumbula but lost his entire family in the Holocaust.
What struck me most in our conversation is that fear wasn't really what drove him. Curiosity and the need to understand what his father had carried his whole life were the bigger forces. Still, there were two moments along the way when fear caught up with him, and we talk about both.
Lorenz wrote a book about everything he found, and he has a lot to say about why this history still matters, particularly as fewer people who lived through the Holocaust are here to tell their own stories.
Lorenz Hemicker
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“My Grandfather, The Perpetrator” (F.A.Z.-Foto / Lucas Bäuml)
Coming up on the podcast
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