{"id":77996,"date":"2020-05-04T17:05:41","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T15:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=77996"},"modified":"2020-05-04T07:56:53","modified_gmt":"2020-05-04T05:56:53","slug":"14-05-59","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=77996","title":{"rendered":"My Grade School Teacher Was a Nazi Mass Murderer With a Secret Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/h5>\n
\"\"<\/a>My Grade School Teacher Was a Nazi Mass Murderer With a Secret Identity<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Itay Mashiach<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Artur Wilke, top left, with his class at the school in Stederdorf, in 1959. The child J\u00fcrgen G\u00fcckel is in the striped sweater, in the bottom row, center.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

SS officer Artur Wilke returned to his village after the war and became a grade school teacher. How could an entire community shut its eyes, and what happens when one boy, now 67, decides to talk?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The ear-splitting din in the schoolyard ceased abruptly; the children hurried to their classrooms. The silence that descended on the small yard threw into bold relief the full provincialism of the streets in the village of Stederdorf, in northwestern Germany: dormant stone houses; small, well-tended gardens; a gentle dripping of winter\u2019s waning days.<\/span><\/p>\n

J\u00fcrgen G\u00fcckel entered an empty classroom and looked around. Sixty years ago he was a pupil in this school. He has a vivid recollection of his first teacher, Walter Wilke. He also remembers how one day, in the middle of a class, Wilke left in the company of two policemen, and never taught there again.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his interrogation Walter Wilke admitted that his real name was Artur and that for 16 years he had been using the identity of his brother, who was killed in World War II. He was one of a group of defendants in one of the most significant judicial proceedings that took place in West Germany, accused of murdering 6,600 people.<\/span><\/p>\n

As an SS officer based in Minsk, in occupied Soviet Byelorussia (today, Belarus), Wilke was the commander of mass executions by firing squads, killed with his own hands those who survived gassing attempts in trucks, and was responsible for the liquidation of the Minsk ghetto. He also oversaw the deportation of the Jews of the Slutsk ghetto in 1943, where he personally shot people who fled \u2013 looking like living torches \u2013 as the ghetto burned. \u201cA fanatic, passionate nationalist,\u201d the judges ruled, and sentenced him to 10 years in prison.<\/span><\/p>\n

None of these facts were known to the children of Stederdorf \u2013 neither before nor after his arrest; nothing of his deeds could tarnish the image of the teacher and intellectual who educated the village\u2019s young children for about a dozen years. G\u00fcckel and his classmates had no idea why their teacher was incarcerated. Wilke served only half his term: He was released after five years mainly because of poor health, returned to Stederdorf and lived there until his death, in 1989.<\/span><\/p>\n

A few years ago, shortly before his retirement, G\u00fcckel, a journalist who lives today in the nearby town of Peine, encountered Wilke\u2019s name in a theological article about remorse among Nazi criminals. \u201cI knew him when he was still calling himself Walter Wilke,\u201d G\u00fcckel says today.<\/span><\/p>\n

Astonished by the information, he started to investigate. Last December, he published a book, \u201cClass Photo with Mass Murderer\u201d (in German), the fruit of more than three years of research in numerous archives. On the book\u2019s cover is a photograph of 6-year-old G\u00fcckel with his classmates and their teacher.<\/span><\/p>\n

For decades, Wilke\u2019s true identity was shrouded in silence. That silence made it possible for the murderer to live and work in the village under an assumed identity, and also to return to it after serving half of what was, to begin with, an unconscionably short prison term \u2013 and then to be completely forgotten after dying at a ripe old age.<\/span><\/p>\n

Blanket silence: on the part of his extensive family, his many acquaintances in the village, his colleagues and the authorities. It was a silence so all-encompassing that it was as though a secret order to maintain it had been issued in 1945 and obeyed for almost three-quarters of a century, until December 2019, when G\u00fcckel published his book. How is it possible for a whole community to shut its eyes, and what happens when one boy, now 67, decides to talk?<\/span><\/p>\n

G\u00fcckel. He didn\u2019t just shatter the silence \u2013 he shattered the lack of interest. \/ Credit: David Bachar<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Aiming for the neck<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Artur Wilke was a promising young man: Born in the Prussian province of Posen, he was a devout Christian, highly educated, an expert in ancient languages, and a graduate of theological and archaeological studies. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931, and seven years later, at the advice of a professor, became a member of the SD, the intelligence agency of the SS. \u201cThey need learned people there,\u201d the professor told his students. Wilke was 28, ablaze with ambition, blond with prominent cheekbones and a high forehead, \u201cracially desirable for procreation,\u201d according to the SS reports.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1942, he was stationed at SD regional headquarters in Minsk, the capital of Soviet Byelorussia. The unit was engaged in thwarting enemy activities, ranging from underground meetings of the Komsomol, the Communist Party\u2019s youth wing, to those of secret partisan networks. Proper judicial proceedings were rare at the time: Suspects were interrogated in the cellars of Minsk\u2019s prisons and afterward disappeared. As SS chief Heinrich Himmler had made it clear that \u201cin principle, every Jew is a partisan,\u201d the unit also dealt with the Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n

The murder sprees in the eastern regions of occupied Europe were raw and ferocious. The local extermination camp in the Minsk area, Maly Trostinets, encompassed several forested areas, each containing a number of pits \u2013 about 50 meters long, five meters wide and two meters deep \u2013 allowing for the shooting of a few hundred people in each round. The shooters were told to aim for the neck. Wilke sometimes shot and sometimes guarded. Eventually he was put in charge of the shooting and when needed, finished off gassing victims who had survived that experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

Between executions, he read poems by the German Romantic poet Friedrich H\u00f6lderlin, which he had brought from home. He also kept a personal diary, which he kept in a closet and was later found by the Red Army.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMonday, Feb. 8, 1943\u2026 05.00 Starting in the ghetto, a very good start, 1,300 Jews removed\u2026 Afterward the sector commander Karl decides to burn (about 300-400 Jews come out of their bunkers)\u2026 March 9, 1943. The sun is shining. At night I had that terrible itching of the skin again.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It is impossible to determine exactly which murders Wilke took part in, but the documents and his diary confirm his presence on certain occasions. It can be proved, for example, that he was the commander of the executions on the first day of one the last Aktions in the Minsk ghetto (about 2,000 victims) and of the liquidation of the Slutsk ghetto (1,600 victims). According to this rigorous calculation, which apparently reflects only some of the massacres that went on, the court of law in Koblenz attributed the deaths of 6,600 victims to Wilke.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wilke married during the war and fathered three children. At the end of the war, however, he abandoned his family, moved to Stederdorf, the village east of Hanover where his brother Walter, who had been killed in the war, had lived, and assumed his identity. He married another woman and had two children with her. A few years later, his first wife died, and Wilke adopted his first three children: To them he was their uncle Walter. They had no idea he was their father, Artur, who had disappeared in the war.<\/span><\/p>\n

No politics<\/strong><\/h4>\n

\u201cPart of it is also guilt feelings, because until now I did not devote enough thought to how the Holocaust still affects us,\u201d says G\u00fcckel, explaining why he undertook his research, when we met in the village recently. \u201cI wanted to understand that now. And also, when I asked people in the village what they knew about Wilke, I would sometimes get hostile replies, even though those people had absolutely no idea what Wilke actually did. That only served to motivate me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

We leave the school and head for the small lake in the heart of the village. We are joined by Gustav Kamps, another former pupil of Wilke\u2019s; his family has lived here for six generations and he himself served as the local mayor for 23 years. On the edge of the lake he and G\u00fcckel exchange banal reminiscences about the village \u2013 about someone who fell into the river, about the kiosk that closed down.<\/span><\/p>\n

The school where Artur Wilke taught, in Stederdorf, Germany. Then and now. \/ Credit: The school’s archive<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn the village they talked about the war, but never about mass murders or anything like that,\u201d Kamps recalls. \u201cThat, they did not see, or did not want to see. There was [tacit] agreement that we don\u2019t talk about things like that \u2013 that\u2019s how I understood it. \u2018Let those old things rest quietly\u2019 \u2013 that was always the comment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

They didn\u2019t talk, but did they know? In the years after the war, West Germany was flooded by impostors, people who assumed false identities who popped up out of nowhere and reinvented their pasts. But Wilke was brazen enough to return to the village his brother Walter had lived in before the war and to assume his identity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kamps estimates that the population of Stederdorf at the time was slightly more than 2,000. From the whole period of his childhood he remembers only one incidental remark. \u201cMy father said once that Wilke went to the war a handball player and returned a soccer player, and that there was something odd there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The same story repeated itself almost without exception in dozens of interviews G\u00fcckel conducted with veteran residents: Before Wilke\u2019s arrest they didn\u2019t know, after the trial they didn\u2019t ask, to this day he is never mentioned. For example, a boy named Eckhardt, who was the best friend of Wilke\u2019s son, never exchange a word about it with him. When it came to the father, he testified, a \u201cdeathly silence\u201d reigned between the two boys.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI still can\u2019t imagine how it was possible,\u201d he told G\u00fcckel. \u201cBut we were brought up to be silent about the past and that is how we accepted it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Wilke\u2019s second wife, who was the local doctor, also knew and said nothing. And his relatives, the 30 members of the Wilke family who lived in Stederdorf at the time, also knew and kept silent. How did he blend into the life of the village so smoothly?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat is a question I asked myself over and over,\u201d G\u00fcckel says. \u201cHow did they let him loose on the children in a place where so many people must have known that he was not who he said he was? It was a time when many people looked the other way\u2026 And as the village teacher and the husband of the village doctor, he quickly became part of the community.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Even after Wilke was sentenced and the explosive material from the trial became accessible, his past remained completely obscured. Many of his neighbors and pupils \u2013 G\u00fcckel among them \u2013 never learned his real name. The school archive documents every detail of the community\u2019s day-to-day life: a new teacher has arrived, someone drowned in the lake, a school fire drill. But about the fact that a veteran teacher was arrested, and later convicted, on a charge of mass murder \u2013 not a word.<\/span><\/p>\n

G\u00fcckel: \u201cThe father of a girl from my class was the school principal for 10 years. For 10 years he had a colleague who was a murderer! That man did not say a word at home about how he was tricked by Artur Wilke. It was simply not talked about.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Did his friends know that he had murdered thousands of people? \u201cNo, we did not give that any thought,\u201d one of those friends told G\u00fcckel. \u201cIt did not interest me. Back then, after he was released, people did not talk about politics.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Artur Wilke’s SS document. \/ Credit: German Federal Archives<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Mum on the Holocaust<\/strong><\/h4>\n

\u201cThe Holocaust played an astonishingly marginal role in the consciousness of most Germans after the war,\u201d Harald J\u00e4hner wrote in his book \u201cTime of the Wolf\u201d (in German) about Germany in the first decade following the war. Few people spoke about the Holocaust publicly.<\/span><\/p>\n

The repression of knowledge of the extermination camps and the disinclination to talk about them continued after the war, despite attempts by the Allies to compel the German people to confront the Nazis\u2019 crimes by means of films, for example. While the world was reeling with shock at the Nazis\u2019 industrialized murder, the Germans occupied themselves with the surge in winter crimes: the theft of coal and potatoes.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cApart from a couple of total and touchingly puppet-like villains, I still have not encountered any Nazis here,\u201d the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote to Thomas Mann in 1949, and continued, \u201cnot simply in the ironic sense that people will not admit to having been Nazis, but in the far more disturbing sense that they believe they never were Nazis, that they have utterly and entirely repressed this.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Repressing the past did not necessarily mean being silent about it, but when it was discussed, the assumption was consistent: The Germans perceived themselves as the victims. Visiting Germany in 1949, Hannah Arendt, who had fled her native country in 1930, was taken aback by the endless verbiage and the stories about hunger, the bombing raids and the suffering the Germans had endured in the war, which she heard time and again from people she met. Of the fate of the Jews, not a word was spoken; about her own fate she was asked nothing.<\/span><\/p>\n

A \u201ccloud of melancholy\u201d covers Europe, but not Germany, Arendt wrote in 1950. There, \u201ca lack of response is evident everywhere,\u201d and \u201cbusyness has become their [the Germans\u2019] chief defense against reality.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Was the silence crucial to rebuilding a functioning society from the ruins? In his book, G\u00fcckel cites a marginal episode from late in the war. In 1933, he writes, the Nazis arrested the head of the Social Democratic Party in Stederdorf, Anton G\u00f6rgner, and the leader of the local branch of the Nazi Party, Heinrich Santelmann, came to his defense. In 1945, when the situation was reversed, a group of vengeance-bent Poles arrived at Santelmann\u2019s house, and he called on G\u00f6rgner for help.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI threw them out with shouts,\u201d G\u00f6rgner wrote in his memoirs. \u201cThis is a decent man and I can vouch for him, I told them. When they laughed contemptuously, I presented the certificate proving I was an inmate in a concentration camp. It worked and they backed off. To Santelmann I said: Now we\u2019re quits.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For his part, G\u00fcckel comments that \u201cpeople had to begin anew, and get along with one another.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Allies were amazed to see that when the fighting ended, no Germans took to the streets to settle accounts with the Nazis. Some historians today view this erasure of the past, including the silence about Nazi crimes, as a development that made it possible to integrate millions of avowed Nazis into (West) German society. This entailed a series of infuriating general amnesties and statutes of limitation. <\/span><\/p>\n

Gustav Kamps, another former pupil of Wilke\u2019s.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

When West Germany\u2019s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, appointed Hans Globke, a lawyer who had helped write the Nazis\u2019 race laws, as chief of his chancellery, he remarked, \u201cYou don\u2019t throw out the dirty water if you don\u2019t have any that\u2019s clean.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The 1968 generation<\/strong><\/p>\n

I accompany G\u00fcckel as he travels to Braunschweig (Brunswick), some 30 kilometers west of Stederdorf, for a meeting with high-school students. He belongs to the generation that came to maturity around 1968 \u2013 the generation of the students\u2019 revolt and the shattering of conventions, of those who were not silent and confronted their parents about what they had done in the war. Was the silence broken then?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe 1968 generation grasped much of all this only in a mediated version,\u201d G\u00fcckel explains. \u201cThat generation studied politics in the university and drew its information from thick books about fascism, but they didn\u2019t connect it to people, to those around them. Everything was always very theoretical.\u201d In the case of Stederdorf, that would mean that no connection was drawn between what was taught at school, and someone who once taught there.<\/span><\/p>\n

The young students listen as G\u00fcckel reads long excepts from his book about villages in Belarus and events in the 1940s that sound as distant as the moon and as remote as ancient Greece. Nevertheless, they display considerable interest. German high-schoolers are used to engaging with the Holocaust.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat surprised you most in your research?\u201d one student asks. G\u00fcckel replies that \u201cthere is so much information and so little of it is well known,\u201d and adds that one of his goals was to give the murderer a face.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a break after the meeting, Helen and Nikita, 17-year-olds, confirm that they \u201ccan talk about the subject without any problem.\u201d Just recently they took part in a seminar about the Holocaust in school, tey say, while at home \u201cwe talk about it openly.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So, is the silence history? Has Germany processed that dark chapter successfully? Samuel Salzborn, a German professor of political science and author of the book \u201cCollective Non-Guilt,\u201d is skeptical.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe confrontation [in Germany] with Nazism and with the Holocaust is often described as a success story,\u201d he says in a phone conversation. \u201cBut what applies to a small part of the society, educated and left-liberal, doesn\u2019t apply to the majority of the public. Accordingly, I view [this success story] as a lie, possibly one of Germany\u2019s greatest postwar lies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Stederdorf, Germany.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Interrogations and torture<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Wilke grounded his false identity in documents, such as a membership card in the Social Democratic party (bearing a date that preceded the party\u2019s reestablishment in the village). But more important, for the British army, which controlled the region, he was apparently an important personage and they did not expose him.<\/span><\/p>\n

He testified in his trial that the British recommended that he keep his true identity secret; indeed, he said that in 1948 they even sent him to a secret service course in Southampton. The reason was not Wilke\u2019s lengthy experience in the killing pits, but the new career he had started to develop at the end of 1942: as an expert on anti-partisan combat. Partisan activity in the Soviet Union was expanding at the time, and the SS responded by establishing a special division for dealing with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

A secret cable was sent to intelligence officers on the front: \u201cBy order of the chief of combat against the partisans\u2026 The decision as to whether villages will be burned and the residents liquidated or evacuated, is delegated absolutely and exclusively to the commander of the SD force.\u201d That was Wilke\u2019s new assignment.<\/span><\/p>\n

Torching villages was not an exceptional operation as part of \u201ccombat against the partisans.\u201d In many cases, women, children and the elderly in a village were herded into a barn or a house that was then set ablaze.<\/span><\/p>\n

The 257 residents of the village of Dory, in Belarus, were forced into the church. \u201cThey shouted all the time, \u2018To the church! To the church!\u2019\u201d related Rudovic Ivan Petrovic, who was 12 at the time. \u201cThen they shot the people in the church\u2026 Maybe wounded people were also burned \u2013 who knows?\u201d The scene repeated itself in hundreds of villages across Belarus.<\/span><\/p>\n

The cinematic version of these horrors, in the feature film \u201cCome and See\u201d (USSR, 1985), is unforgettable. Even if Wilke was not present in every village \u2013 there were a total of 5,295 in Belarus \u2013 he alone possessed the command authority over the atrocities.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the units that executed these orders was that of the sadist Oskar Dirlewanger, and named for him; it was made up of released prison inmates, and known as one of the most brutal in the SS. When Wilke was at the front he often joined the unit. Between operations he returned to Minsk and directed the interrogations in the torture cellars, events accompanied by a lot of drinking, electric shocks and benzine injections \u2013 which almost always ended in the killing pit.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cArtur Wilke belongs to the type of mass murderers who were present in the field and are responsible for victims on a scale of tens of thousands,\u201d says historian Peter Klein, of Touro College Berlin.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe did not have a broad perspective, like the more senior SS and police commanders, who drew up large-scale plans. But in western Belarus, he bears chief responsibility for the mass murders of 1942-1943, both of Jews and of the civilian population.\u201d He was, however, never brought to trial for that anti-partisan episode in his career.<\/span><\/p>\n

G\u00fcckel presented his findings to the Stederdorf villagers in stages, with the sensitivity of a group therapist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Artur Wilke’s daughter Sigrid. When she was 20, the man she called \u201cuncle\u201d was arrested. He was an intelligent man, but very rigid and violent. \/ Credit: David Bachar<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe first meeting was attended by 140 neighbors,\u201d he says. \u201cI presented the story, and a long silence fell on the audience. The people were completely dumbfounded, because they of course did not know beforehand what Artur Wilke really did.\u201d Over a period of three months, the local paper serialized the entire book. Now, Wilke\u2019s name was on everyone\u2019s lips; the hostile responses to G\u00fcckel disappeared completely.<\/span><\/p>\n

The story\u2019s effect on German audiences in general is palpable. At the end of an open evening I attend in Berlin, after G\u00fcckel reads from his book to a gray-haired audience, copies are snatched up and a crowd mills around him. One person tells him that in his family they discovered that an uncle had served in the Gestapo. \u201cIt happens at every event,\u201d G\u00fcckel says afterward. \u201cThere are always people who say, \u2018and in our family,\u2019 or \u2018in our school,\u2019 something similar happened. \u2018And we all kept silent.\u2019 It\u2019s not an isolated case, it\u2019s a phenomenon.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The connection that had been silenced between distant Holocaust events and neighbors and relatives, between the theoretical and the personal, was finally established.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the years, Gustav Kamps, the former mayor, took part in the activity of the local YMCA branch. By a harrowing coincidence, that activity also included the visits of delegations of youth to Belarus, and specifically to locales that were destroyed by his former teacher Wilke \u2013 although Kamps was completely unaware of this. Young people from Stederdorf even took part in rebuilding the church in Dory in which 257 people were burned to death in 1943, without knowing that their parents\u2019 teacher had been in charge of the massacre.<\/span><\/p>\n

G\u00fcckel discovered these links for the first time while working on the book.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kamps: \u201cHe told me, \u2018Did it ever occur to you that Wilke was there committing murder? That he perpetrated multiple crimes there? … A person switches off, doesn\u2019t think about it. He needs some sort of stimulus. And then the interest came too. I have to say in all honesty, then the matter came up. And then we spoke about it significantly more.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps this is the key to the silence: lack of interest. The questions about who knew and why no one cried out lose their meaning, because no one took an interest. G\u00fcckel didn\u2019t shatter the silence \u2013 he shattered the lack of interest.<\/span><\/p>\n

Brother\u2019s screams<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The silence assumed its most grotesque proportions in the home of Artur Wilke. \u201cWe always called him \u2018uncle,\u2019\u201d says Sigrid, 79, Artur Wilke\u2019s eldest child, in the dining room of her house, in Nienburg, a journey of an hour and a half from Stederdorf. They didn\u2019t know a thing, she reiterates. They had not an iota of suspicion. \u201cAfter all, I did not know my father at all.\u201d The \u201cuncle\u201d was an intelligent person but very rigid and violent. He beat her brother so badly that once he needed stitches in his head.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe lived in a small apartment,\u201d she says. \u201cThe neighbors downstairs always heard when there were blows and shouting and everything. My brother\u2019s screams were awful. I can hear them to this day. It never leaves your head.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

With five children in the house it was very crowded, so Sigrid and her sister moved to a vacant room in the school. Afterward, Wilke decided to send his three \u201cadopted\u201d children for another adoption in the United States. Two of them remained there, but Sigrid returned to Germany within months. \u201cMy brother was grateful for the move to America and he didn\u2019t want to hear anything more about Germany. Nothing. I didn\u2019t hear from him for the next 60 years.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sigrid was 20 when the man she called \u201cUncle\u201d was arrested in the school. \u201cA phone call came. Walter has been arrested, my stepmother said. I was shocked.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Did you ask why?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t ask. There are no questions. That was completely taboo.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

How did you come to understand that one doesn\u2019t ask? Children always ask.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTrue, but somehow there was fear. We entered a family we didn\u2019t know at all. You also have to remember that we were still in shock from our mother\u2019s death.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The initial rumors heard by both villagers and the family, was that the reason for the arrest was bigamy. A partial truth. Sigrid didn\u2019t know about the war-crimes indictment. She and her siblings didn\u2019t even ask what Wilke was accused of. \u201cWith us there were no questions. In this story there were no questions. There were questions if something happened in school, you were allowed to ask about that, no problem. But other than that? About personal matters? No. That was the most terrible of all, yes? I didn\u2019t know where my father was born. I didn\u2019t know anything.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Her siblings learned about the arrest one day when they at school in the United States.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Sigrid: \u201cThe teacher came into their classroom and said, \u2018Another pig has been arrested in Germany.\u2019 In front of the whole class! An educator has to have a little understanding! He could have approached them at recess and told them that it was their father. Horrible.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Wilke wrote from prison frequently. Many poems. Sometimes the children wrote back. Then, one day he was released and returned home. \u201cI think he tried to apologize for having been in the war, for the arrest, for not having had time for us. That was my feeling,\u201d Sigrid says. Even after he returned, she never called him Father; or Uncle; or Artur. \u201cI just refrained.\u201d A few years later, her half-brother, Wolfdietrich, committed suicide on his 27th birthday.<\/span><\/p>\n

All the questions about what she knew, what she thought and what she asked elicit the same answer: nothing. It\u2019s difficult today to understand the world in which she grew up \u2013 the orphanhood, the small village apartment, the violent uncle, the war generation that erased its past. It was a world of silence. A crack appeared in that world two years ago, when G\u00fcckel shared his plans with Sigrid, although there wasn\u2019t much she could tell him. \u201cI tried to forget everything until now, when it all surfaced again. It is very hard, yes. Not easy. To discover all this. There is a burden.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Is the burden heavier now?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYes, certainly. After all, we didn\u2019t know a thing, and now we are starting to understand what really happened; or actually not to understand.\u201d
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The book\u2019s publication led to a renewal of the connection with the brother in America, after 60 years. However, ties with her younger sister, who lives in Stederdorf, have been cut since the book\u2019s release. \u201cYou have to let all these old things rest quietly,\u201d it\u2019s said. But Sigrid is not sorry. \u201cI wanted to know the truth,\u201d she says.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

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My Grade School Teacher Was a Nazi Mass Murderer With a Secret Identity Itay Mashiach Artur Wilke, top left, with his class at the school in Stederdorf, in 1959. The child J\u00fcrgen G\u00fcckel is in the striped sweater, in the bottom row, center. SS officer Artur Wilke returned to his village after the war and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77996"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77996"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78053,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77996\/revisions\/78053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}