Blood on Their Hands

Men of This Generation. Chapter 2 of Who Was WM? Investigating a Televisionary: The Life and Work of Wolfgang Menge

4 min readApr 21, 2024

Blood on Their Hands

German men of that generation have been monstrous to me ever since I learned what they had done. The majority of them, at least. Even though they no longer wanted any knowledge of it.

In the early 1960s, Israeli tourists visiting Hanover recognized one of their Nazi tormentors on the street, Gestapo Commissioner Günther Fuchs. In 1963, he and his superior, Dr. Otto Bradfisch, the former Gestapo chief of Lodz, faced trial for the murder of tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners.

We lived in Hanover. I was eight years old at the time, and my father had been ill for as long as I could remember. He had been conscripted in 1939 at the age of 18 and got shot down as a fighter pilot over the British Channel in the early 1940s. The Germans did not have penicillin at the time. His left hand would have had to be amputated. However, the Führer needed pilots. And pilots required both hands. My father earned a Knight’s Cross in the Richthofen fighter squadron with his festering hand. Hitler put it on him.

After the war, however, his heart began to fail — in more than one respect. He was the first in his family to study, gain a doctorate, and set up his own law firm. His office was located directly opposite the Hanover district court. But business was not going well. My father was sick too often. He would then sit at home in his robe all day, with the doctor visiting twice to give him injections.

Bonding Over Stahlnetz

In the evenings, we would watch TV crime dramas together. 77 Sunset Strip. Danger Man. But we liked most Perry Mason and, as the only German series, WM’s Stahlnetz. I enjoyed this time with my father. He was to die of his war injuries in 1966.

However, before that, in 1963, another disaster struck. It came in the disguise of a lucrative offer to represent the Nazi mass murderer Bradfisch as a public defender. The local press reported daily on the proceedings. Before every court session, and sometimes during the breaks, my father had injections to keep him going.

On the way home from school, I read ‘secretly’ at the newsstand. And couldn’t sleep at night. It wasn’t easy to get hold of the historical truth in the early sixties. In the public library, I sneaked into sections off-limits to children. I saw horrible photos.

How could people who had committed such atrocities roam our streets freely? And how did my father come to defend one of them? He was sick; he didn’t have to. Even my mother said so.

Whenever I saw grown men, men in their prime, on the streetcar, at family celebrations, at school, I thought about how many people they had murdered, defenseless men and women and children standing at dug-out trenches where the corpses were already piled up, naked, ribbed creatures being driven into entrances with gas chambers hiding behind them.

Hardly anyone wanted to talk about it. And the few who did considered ‘such’ trials like the one against these two Gestapo men to be wrong. The past should be put to rest. Who could even remember what had happened so long ago, twenty years ago? Nobody! Not an honest person!

My Grandmother’s Good Memory

However, my grandmother, my father’s mother, remembered very well. Of course, she wanted to reassure me. Fighter pilots wouldn’t have harmed any Jews. They were defending the civilian population against the Allied bombers. But she did begin to talk about other matters and she did not stop until her death. She recalled the violence on the streets, the harassment of Jewish neighbors, their deportation, and the suicides the days before. She pointed out the window and named the apartments where the “disappeared” had lived and which party members had moved in. She remembered the floor in the house down Lister Meile Street from which her Jewish gynecologist had thrown himself. It was my grandmother’s intact memory that made me doubt the amnesia of the others.

Thus, in 1987, as I sat in my hotel in Sylt, late in the evening, 32 years old, I didn’t know what to think. Or what to write. Because Wolfgang couldn’t remember anything. Of course, he didn’t. He was also a man of that generation, only three years younger than my father.

Later, when we had become good friends, I told Wolfgang all this.

“Yes, after the war, everything went on just as before,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “They were still there. Except they no longer killed Jews.”

It was only after his death that I learned that Wolfgang also had blood on his hands. Had I known whose blood — it would only have strengthened our friendship and reinforced the certainty that you better only messed with him if you were willing to fight.