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40 Fascinating Facts About the Relatives of Nazis After WWII

Khalid Elhassan March 14, 2019 24 min

6. Goeth’s Daughter

Amon Goethe had an affair with an aspiring actress named Ruth Irene Kalder, that produced a daughter, Monika Hertwig. Kalder presented Monika with a rose-tinted view of her father, and it was only after confronting her mother as a teenager that Kalder admitted that Goeth “may have killed a few Jews“. When a shocked Monika demanded to know how many, her mother grew enraged and whipped her. She struggled to come to terms with her father’s legacy ever since, but it was only after watching Schindler’s List as a middle-aged woman that Monika finally grasped the true extent of her father’s crimes. In 2002, she described that struggle in her memoirs, titled I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I?

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.