Healing intergenerational trauma and epigenetics—the children of the Third Reich

Catrine Clay with the story of the children of Nazi perpetrators and Holocaust survivors came together under extraordinary circumstances to come to terms with their dark past.

In the early 1990s, historian and author Catrine Clay was working at the BBC, making a documentary about a woman named Renate.

Renate had been born in Germany in 1941, and grew up in the postwar years as the sole child of a single mother.

When Renate asked her mother about her missing father, she was told he had been an important general in the German forces, who had been imprisoned by the Russians.

But that wasn't the truth.

Renate's father was actually a Nazi war criminal of the highest rank, and she had been conceived as part of an experiment to produce Aryan children for the German fatherland.

Catrine and Renate travelled through Germany and Eastern Europe to find the truth about her father and the home she'd been born into.

Eventually, they go to Israel, where Renate comes face to face with the children of Holocaust survivors.

There, they bond over their shared attempts to find a way forward, out of the silences and hidden fears of their parents' dark pasts.

Children of the Third Reich: Three pasts three futures is published by Hachette.

This episode of Conversations was produced by Meggie Morris. Executive Producer is Nicola Harrison

It explores World War II, history, family trauma, intergenerational trauma, holocaust survivors, Aryan super-race, experiments on humans, genetic experiments, SS soldiers, the body keeps the score, Epigenetics, psychology, suicide, mental health, mental illness, healing, Jewish history, reconciliation, German history, Nazis, reckoning with the past, family secrets, absent fathers, Israel, Palestine, forgiveness, humanity, Hitler, war criminal, war crimes.