The son of notorious Nazi leader Martin Bormann has left Israel after a four-day unpublicized visit aimed at reconciling children of Nazi criminals with children of Holocaust survivors.
Martin Bormann Jr., the eldest son of the man who played a leading role in carrying out the extermination of European Jews in his capacity as Hitler’s aide, joined eight other children of Nazi war criminals in meetings with nine children of Holocaust survivors at a four-day symposium last week.
The symposium was held at Neve Shalom, a model community in which Arabs and Jews live and work together. It was arranged by a Ben-Gurion University psychologist, Professor Dan Bar-On, who is author of a book about the guilt felt by descendants of Adolf Hitler’s henchmen.
Bar-On said he organized the symposium to see whether the offspring of criminals and those of their victims can coexist.
Bormann Jr., who is 63, is a former priest and current theology teacher. He was quoted in the daily Yediot Achronot as saying he found it easier to face Israelis, whose anger and pain he could accept, than present-day neo-Nazis in Germany who seek to harm him.
Bormann said he was not recognized when he visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem on Monday.
“My feeling was one of mourning, especially at the place where the names of children are listed,” he said.
“A painful thought went through me, that there are thousands more victims nobody knows about. Entire families were erased.”
The elder Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946, but where and when he died is still unclear.
One common opinion, held by the younger Bormann as well, is that the Nazi leader committed suicide in Hitler’s bunker at the end of World War II. However, there was a recent report that he died of cancer in Paraguay in 1945.
Bormann Jr. said he had mixed feelings about his father.
“He was a good father to his children, and on the other hand he was an unknown quantity to me. I knew then that he had a high position but not what he really did,” Bormann Jr. said.
“As a religious man, I can say that only God in heaven can judge him. I cannot,” he added.
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