Faber & Faber

The Dead Man in the Bunker: Martin Pollack

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Synopsis:

In 1947, a man is found shot to death in an old military bunker, in the high mountains near the Brenner Pass that links Italy to Austria. His papers claim him to be a farm labourer; the scars on his face could only have come from duelling, the mark of a man who was once a member of a German student fraternity. He is Dr Gerhard Bast, lawyer, athlete, SS man, former head of the Gestapo in the Austrian city of Linz and a wanted war criminal. A few years before, his affair with a married woman led to the birth of a son, Martin Pollack, who in his maturity sets out to discover the truth about his father.

This is an unflinchingly honest and painful book. Pollack reveals that his loving grandparents, with whom he spent long and happy holidays as a child, were ardent and unrepentant Nazis who never for a moment ceased to hate and resent Jews and Slavs, and never acknowledged what their son had really done. And what he did is the heart of this book, as Pollack quietly, relentlessly reconstructs the family history, moving from present day Slovenia – where his grandparents were involved in vicious sectarian strife with their Slav neighbours – through Austria between the wars, where the family and their friends were early and enthusiastic members of the illegal Nazi party. Once war begins in 1939, Pollack tracks his father from Austria to Poland and on into Russia, where he was the head of an Einsatzgruppe, a killing squad, and back into Poland during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The closing months of the war find him rounding up Jews and partisans in Slovakia, none of whom survive. In every place that Pollack’s father has been, the evidence of mass murder mounts higher and higher, the undeniable evidence impossible to resist.

The Dead Man in the Bunker is a most unsparing account of how a family can corrupt itself through fanatical nationalism, reaching a state of moral emptiness in which genocide becomes acceptable. Uniquely intimate, detailed and historically informed, it is unlike anything else written by the children of the perpetrators.

Tags:

Categorised as:

Non-fiction

Sub-categories:

Biography & Memoir; History

Genres & Themes:

Families; Nazi Germany; Secrets; WWII