1991 Reports

Keeping the Lies Alive: Case Studies of the Psychology of Stalinism in Contemporary Soviet Literature and Film

Chances, Ellen

The book Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich, contains a series of interviews with people whose fathers had been Nazis heavily involved in committing atrocities during World War II. The interviews, conducted from 1985 to 1987 by Daniel Bar-On, an Israeli psychologist who is a Holocaust survivor, are moving testimonies to the ways in which Hitler’s ghastly policies of murder have continued to affect, forever after, the lives and psyches of these “children” of Nazi perpetrators. When Bar-On began his research in 1984, he could only find information about the psychology of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, but none about the psychological impact of the Hitler era upon Nazis and their offspring. “Legacy of Silence" describes the tragedy of a post-Hitler Germany whose silence about the Holocaust has ensured that subsequent generations — whether they be children of the tormented Jewish victims of the concentration camps (Bar-On himself) or of the tormentor Nazi victimizers (the interviewees) continue to endure the pain inflicted by Hitler upon Germany many decadesago.