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40 Fascinating Facts About the Relatives of Nazis After WWII

Khalid Elhassan March 14, 2019 24 min

15. Niemann’s Grandfather

At first, Derek Niemann tried to convince himself that his grandfather had been a lowly pen pusher, but subsequent research revealed a more sinister picture. Karl Niemann had been an SS officer, who had organized slave laborers in Nazi concentration camps such as Dachau and Auschwitz. He made the rounds of all the concentration camps to inspect their finances and oversaw an SS commercial enterprise that used a slave workforce, toiling in horrific conditions, to produce furniture and war supplies.

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.