← Back to the front page

40 Fascinating Facts About the Relatives of Nazis After WWII

Khalid Elhassan March 14, 2019 24 min

22. Executioners and Victims in the Same Family

Simon Pasternak’s Jewish grandfather had moved from Latvia to Denmark in the 1930s, leaving his family behind, where many were killed by the SS during WWII. When Simon asked his grandmother how executioners and victims could live in the same family, she told him that his uncle Dirck hadn’t really been a Nazi. He had just gone to the USSR to fight the communists, but when he saw what the Nazis were up to there, he wanted out, but by then it was too late. That seemed plausible to Simon, and the suitcase was soon forgotten.

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.