Contributor: The culture of shhh — what my Nazi legacy taught me about silence

Yahoo

25-03-2025

Oskar Jakob, 94, is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who once assembled V-1 flying bombs in a subterranean concentration camp, and I'm the granddaughter of the engineer who developed those secret Nazi super weapons. Despite or perhaps because of our respective histories, we've worked to become friends. And while I've known Oskar for a few years, it's only recently, as neo-Nazis flew swastika flags in Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio, that I felt the need to use my own ancestry to fight this brand of hate.
The white supremacist demonstrations in Ohio weren't one-offs. Last fall, another black-clad group, their faces covered, did the same just three miles from Oskar's St. Louis home. 'America for the White Man,' declared the banner they hung from an overpass on Interstate 64. Oskar's son snapped a picture as he drove by and sent it to me along with three angry-face emojis.
These incidents made me angry too, but also profoundly uncomfortable. What is the proper response when thugs perpetuate the hateful rhetoric of a political party to which your grandfather once belonged? And what could be more uncomfortable than the weight of the history between Oskar and me?
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In 1945, after 40 of Oskar Jakob's family members died at Auschwitz, the SS imprisoned him at the Mittelbau-Dora camp in Nordhausen, Germany. Deep in the tunnels of this former gypsum mine, 14-year-old Oskar was forced to rivet sheet metal used to make Vergeltungswaffe Einz: Vengeance Weapon #1. This was the world's first cruise missile and my grandfather Robert Lusser headed the Luftwaffe project to create it.
I met Oskar eight decades later when I flew to St. Louis to interview him for a podcast I host about my German history. I'd been wanting to speak with a survivor for years, but it wasn't easy to connect because each Holocaust group I asked for help declined. Putting a relative of the Nazi engineer who created weapons of mass destruction in touch with a slave laborer who assembled them in conditions so horrific that 20,000 prisoners died was a nonstarter. But finally, I found Oskar, and on a warm spring afternoon, I found myself sitting in his neat dining room, listening to him tell of a night when guards caught a group of prisoners resting.
'They hung 70 people simultaneously, and we were forced to march by the dead bodies and everybody had to punch them with their fist,' he said. I stared out at the bright, Midwestern afternoon, longing to feel the sun on my face.
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'I feel very much like I want to tell you that I'm so sorry,' I said instead, not exactly sure on whose behalf I was apologizing. My own? My family's? All of humanity?
'I appreciate that,' Oskar said, his face folded neatly, like an old map. 'Up 'til today I have never heard from a German that they are sorry for what I went through.'
Technically, I'm not German. My grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1948, recruited to build bombs for America. I had ignored my controversial German legacy for most of my life. After all, no one really wants to ask the question: Was Grandpa an ideological Nazi? Our family lore emphasized the genius engineer theme and disregarded the fact that Robert Lusser joined the Nazi party in 1937 to advance his career.
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A decade later, the Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA, cleared my grandfather of any crimes, in part because it benefited America's Cold War cause to have him on our weapons team. Investigators categorized him as Mitläufer — a 'fellow traveler' — someone who benefited from Hitler's regime while not actively participating in its atrocities. My grandfather stood silent in the face of evil because that was the beneficial, easier choice.
Just as many Germans ignored the rise of National Socialism in the 1920s and '30s, too many Americans are ignoring what's happening here a century later. "Antisemitic incidents in the U.S. rose 140% from 2022 to 2023,' Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism told me. 'We documented over 10,000 incidents between the Oct. 7th, 2023, attack on Israel and its anniversary in 2024.'
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After wrestling with generational guilt, which feels like a curse handed down through time, and questioning my responsibility as an American personally connected to Nazi history, I made a decision. When swastika flags fly in America and white supremacists shout 'Heil Hitler!' and racial slurs, when a presidential surrogate offers a Nazi-style salute and makes common cause with Germany's neo-Nazi-adjacent political party, the AfD, I will not be a fellow traveler. Or a bystander.
My first social media post using my family history as a cautionary tale was viewed almost 2 million times and drew thousands of comments, some full of hate and ridicule. It makes me anxious to put myself in the public eye, but it's no underground death camp, without sunlight, escape or hope.
When Oskar and I spoke last May at the Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum in St. Louis, it was standing room only. 'Suzanne Rico is a descendant of a Nazi engineer,' said the master of ceremonies. Oskar nodded his white-haired head as 300 people waited to hear what I had to say. I said that history's most terrifying ghosts are coming back to life.
If you don't believe me, look closely at photos taken on an Ohio street or a Missouri interstate. Pay attention to the covered faces of cowards trying to intimidate through fear. And then ask yourself: What uncomfortable legacy might we leave our children and grandchildren if we stay silent this time around?
Suzanne Rico is an award-winning television and print journalist. She hosts the podcast "The Man Who Calculated Death." @suzannerico on all platforms
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.