A Duty of Remembrance: The Story of My German Family

by Gudrun Moore

A Duty of Remembrance recounts the lives of two families during the first half of the twentieth century. August, a cooper, spent WWI in Flanders carrying the dead and wounded by horse-drawn wagon to the field hospital. His son, Gustel, joined the SS at the age of twenty; saw his first action September 1, 1939 during the invasion of Poland. He was deployed in an Einsatzkommando unit to the Ukraine, and, then, as a Gestapo officer back in the Reich and in Greece. Schoolteacher Herbert was a passionate National Socialist as were his daughters, Irmgard and Erika. His son, Manfred, joined the Waffen SS at the age of eighteen and saw his first action in Dieppe. Captured by the Russians at twenty-one, he spent five years in the Gulags of Siberia and in the Lubyanka in Moscow. Erika, fleeing from the Russians during the trek of women and children, was one of only four women to make it to the West. Irmgard and her two little girls were driven out of their home by French troops; they spent weeks on the road. Although disillusioned and feeling betrayed by their government, all rebuilt their lives.

568 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2010

Reviews

[Simon Wood]

I chanced on this quite by accident and need to declare an interest without which I would not have found it. My family - like that of the author - hails from Schwaebisch Hall in Baden-Wuerttemberg and it was through researching my family history that I came across this book. I visited it this year for the first time in my 56 years: it is a very beautiful place that is immediately appealing to the visitor. This is a book that operates on two distinct levels. The author, having emigrated to Canada as a young woman, writes attractively and simply about life in Germany immediately prior to, during and after the Second World War: the grinding poverty, the difficulty of survival, the impact of National Socialism. Save for the latter, I suspect that what she describes is very much what my great grandmother fled from in the 1890s and so a window is opened to a time long lost as well as setting out the conditions for National Socialism to develop and thrive.

In part this is told from the author's childhood recollections but it also draws on recording she made of her relatives reported verbatim, interspersed with commentary and her own observations.

The second level on which it operates is quite different in that the author confronts the fact that her father was a convicted war criminal, a member of the SS, who was implicated in serious war crimes including a shocking incident in the Ukraine where man thousand Jews were murdered. It is, I confess, the first book I have read reading it from the perspective of the very persons who committed such crimes. There is a degree of justification, excuse, minimisation, transference of blame on to others, but, even making allowance for that, it is shocking to read as a first hand description of actual events as well as an insight into the circumstances that caused people such as her father to end up in such situations. It is not under any circumstances forgivable but I was left feeling that it was understandable at this basic level: without full participation one was simply killed. It is not a judgmental book but its descriptive language enables one to confront in a way that I had not, in the language of those at the front line, the appalling dilemmas that faced people in a manner unimaginable to us today. The author's father served his sentence and sought to atone (not really dealt with in any detail in the book) by cataloguing the city archives (and thereby enabling me to identify over 400 years of records relating to my own family).

Also written in the language of the survivor is the story of other family members, particularly the author's uncle Manfred who described the horrors of the war in the USSR and his experiences as a POW which, against all the odds, he survived.

Thus, aside my interest in Schwaebisch Hall, this is a valuable source book of first hand experiences of a rural Germany long since changed, a war criminal and a POW in the USSR. There is an immediacy and directness in the writing which is compelling. It is a book that deserves to be read in its own right but should take its place alongside other first hand accounts of those living and caught up in the terrible events of the 1930s.

[L]

Excellent book. Includes a very helpful, brief history of the times , which helps answer the question- "How could this happen"
I also agree with the author- when she summarizes and says "I will not judge. I did not walk in their shoes."

[Edna]

Rare first person accounts of serving the third reich during WWII. Raw but gripping
Would have loved to hear the author's personal story of meeting her husband, moving to Canada and her life here. Perhaps another book?

[James]

read some reviews on www.gudrunmoore.com