So Philip Larkin said, anyway. I assume his parents were relatively normal. But what if your parents weren't normal at all? What if they were some of the greatest monsters and criminals of the last century? How badly would they f*** you up then?

This is exactly what West German journalist Norbert Lebert decided to find out in 1959. He interviewed the children of six of the most important Nazi leaders to find out how their lives were progressing, how their infamous family name had affected them, and how they felt about their notorious fathers. They were all young at the time, and few had much of an idea of where their lives would take them. Forty years later, Lebert's son, Stephan, also a journalist, decided to follow up the story, interviewing the subjects again to see what had become of them. And that's this book.

After a couple of introductory chapters we get to the main part of the book. Firstly you get the father's interview with the subject, followed by the son telling us what had become of the subject, and his own interview if he managed to get one. The father interviewed children of Goering, Himmler, Hess, Bormann, Frank (the governor of Nazi-occupied Poland) and Schirach (the first Hitler Youth leader). The son managed follow up interviews with four of them, Himmler's and Goering's daughters refusing to participate this time around.

They fall into two camps - those who accept their father's guilt (Frank and Bormann) and those that do not (the rest). Of the latter, Gudrun Himmler and Edda Goering refused to believe there was anything amiss about what the Third Reich did, Hess's son believes that his father was blameless and was murdered in prison, and Schirach's sons believed that their father was an essentially good and noble man who fell in with a bad crowd. (Hess and Schirach weren't directly responsible for any of the truly abominable crimes of the regime they served, so their children'
;s rejection of their fathers' commonly assumed guilt is more easily understood.)

The stories of their lives are often fascinating, if a little disturbing. All were obviously heavily influenced by their father's careers and beliefs. Gudrun Himmler suffered rather brutal treatment at the hands of the Allies (who didn't tell her that her father was dead until some weeks after it happened) and had immense difficulties finding a job, burdened with a family name that she refused to change. She still apparently maintains links with right-wing organisations. Wolf Rudiger Hess refused to do national service, on the grounds that his father was imprisoned as a war criminal by the very people whose armed forces he was expected to enter. He later visited South Africa and became convinced that racial segregation was the only sensible way to run a country.

Martin Bormann jnr seems to be the happiest. He converted to Catholicism after his father's death, and became a missionary. He is the only person interviewed who fully acknowledges his father's guilt whilst still admitting that he loves him. He understands that Bormann snr did some astoundingly evil things, but can somehow reconcile this with the father he remembers fondly. Niklas Frank, on the other hand, scandalised West Germany in the 1980s by publishing a book in which he revealed a deep hatred for his father, claiming that he regularly masturbated over photographs of his corpse. His book also tells of how, as a child, he was taken to a concentration camp where Jewish prisoners were tortured for his amusement. He presumably hates his father for having made him an accomplice.

This is an extremely interesting book. When reading biographies of Nazi leaders I'd often wondered what became of their children, who are always mentioned in passing, never taking centre stage. Here we get the stories of some of them. Although the interviews themselves often seem a little sparse the acc
ounts of their adult lives and careers contain enough material to give an understanding of what they must have experienced without being too intrusive. I rather wish that the children of Albert Speer had been interviewed, as they were the only children of a really important Nazi minister who had the opportunity to properly know him as adults (he lived for 15 years after his release from prison). But after all, they are real people and are entitled to their privacy, in spite of my prurient desire to gawp at them as if they lived their lives in some kind of fishbowl.

My only real criticism would be that the translator occasionally throws in words like 'bloke' which seem inappropriate, although I daresay that he was only translating what was written in German. At the end of it all you can't help but feel slightly sorry for the Nazi children, patronising though that is. No one chooses their parents, and they were dealt a particularly bad lot. They've obviously never escaped from the shadows of their infamous parents, and probably never will.