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40 Fascinating Facts About the Relatives of Nazis After WWII

Khalid Elhassan March 14, 2019 24 min

23. Simon Pasternak’s Surprise Discovery

The suitcase discovered by Pasternak in his childhood. The Telegraph

Danish author Simon Pasternak recalls rooting through his parents’ basement as a child, when he came across a rusty suitcase belonging to his maternal uncle Dirck, who had died in the Ukraine during WWII. When he opened the suitcase, he found some unexpected items: dusty SS documents, an SS dagger, and an Iron Cross. As he put it years later: “I knew that the Nazis were the worst kind of bogeymen. My Danish grandmother married a Russian Jew, my grandfather, and half my family is Jewish. So, how could this suitcase be in our basement?“

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.