from investigating the German activity there. The Germans had to be there for some classified reason. What was that? It stands to reason and starts to make sense that this trip by our government was of serious national security importance, and was absolutely handled that way. With all the massive resources used, and

The interesting questions are what did Hitler know, did Himmler conceal it, did he keep it from Hitler, where was the killing done, was it Auschwitz, was it the Reinhard camps and that's what people are frightened to research, because they go to prison for it.

We are watching the Germans closely; we are not forgetting what they did to us during the war.

If only we could get hold of a German atomic physicist, we felt, we could soon find out what the rest of them were up to. To us physicists the problem seemed very simple. Even those of us who were not working on the atom bomb project knew pretty well what was going on over here. No amount of military security could have prevented us from knowing, difficult as it was for the military to understand this. Active scientists engaged in the same general field of research inevitably form a kind of clan; they work closely together and know all about each other's specialities and whereabouts. You can't take a group of key scientists from their accustomed haunts and have them disappear in some remote place in New Mexico, together with their families, without their colleagues who are left behind wondering about it and deriving the right conclusions. The same thing, we knew, would be true of the Germans.

Is it not sad, I said to my countrymen, that we have to learn from a foreigner about ourselves? Thanks to the German scholars we get accurate information about ourselves, and when everything in our country has been destroyed and we wish to verify the historical correctness of certain facts we shall have to come to Germany to search for these facts, in German museums and books!

I've always been fascinated with the one question: Did the Germans know? … The scariest book I ever bought was Mein Kampf. I bought it because I wanted to answer that question. The answer was "Yes, they knew." I think the Germans, however, were an awful lot like we are now. We're kind of living in a denial, "no that can't really be happening, no that really—" You don't want to believe some things, but you have to. You have to actually think about them.

I have loved my German people and my fatherland with a warm heart. I have done my duty by the laws of my people and I am sorry this time my people were led by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge. Germany, good luck.

But walking became more important and more explicit in connection with my grandfather Rudolf, my father's father; I had the sense of walking in his landscapes. I was closer to him than to my actual father. I think it all had to do with the way the turn-of-the-century generation had deeper historical roots than the generation of my parents, who quit the continuum of European culture when they opted for National Socialism. They descended into a vague Germano-mystical archaism and went under with it. Perhaps I am being too subjectively concentrated on my own family here. Families are strange creatures, and mine is no exception. In addition, there is the circumstance that I knew my grandfather only when he was already insane.

My family history is a series of gaps, leaving questions to mark the spaces: What happened to my father while he was gone? Who took us in after the Nazis evicted us from our apartment? How did we get by after they confiscated the small business my father had painstakingly built up over the years? How did my father get out of the camps? My parents talked about those years, selectively. And not often.

In short, we knew very little about the German uranium project, and what little we knew we almost invariably interpreted in their favor. In the long run, this was probably all to the good, since it accelerated our own work enormously. But in those days, before the invasion of Europe, we would have given a great deal to know more.

Despite himself, Webster was drawn to the people. “The Germans I have seen so far have impressed me as clean, efficient, law-abiding people,” he wrote his parents on April 14. They were churchgoers. “In Germany everybody goes out and works and, unlike the French, who do not seem inclined to lift a finger to help themselves, the Germans fill up the trenches soldiers have dug in their fields. They are cleaner, more progressive, and more ambitious than either the English or the French.”1

recently I went along with a field secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. in Mississippi to investigate a murder that had been hushed up. We rode around through those back roads for hours talking to people who had known the dead man, trying to find out what had happened. And the Negroes talked to us as the German Jews must have talked when Hitler came to power. (1969)

My grandmother always insisted that when people fall in love they should look closely at what the family of the betrothed is like, because one never marries the bridegroom alone but also his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and the whole damned tangle of the ancestral line. I refused to believe her even after what happened when Quintín and I were still engaged. (beginning of QUINTÍN AND ISABEL'S PLEDGE)

This book is dedicated to the women who made me what I am today. My maternal great grand mother, my Herero and Damara grandmothers Metha Ngatjikare and Christofine Gamamus both of whom lived during the German occupation and gave birth to children whose fathers were German, and who were forced by German and South African occupation to bring up these children on their own. And despite these challenges these children made history in their own right.