My family and other Nazis

Martin Pollack, born in 1944, describes his experience as the child of an entirely Nazi family in Austria - including his grandparents, mother, stepfather, and biological father Gerhard Bast, who was a Gestapo chief and SS officer. His family maintained their Nazi convictions even after the war, believing Austria should be part of Germany and expressing no remorse for Holocaust crimes. Pollack was sent to boarding school at age 10 and learned about his true parentage at 14, discovering his biological father had been responsible for deportations and mass murders, including signing death sentences for individual Jews like Max Gorcha. His father's career ended when he accidentally shot a beater during a hunting trip and was reassigned to lead a death squad on the Eastern front. Pollack's parents had an affair during the war, and his mother divorced her first husband to marry the Gestapo officer in 1945. His father spent two years as a fugitive after the war before being murdered in 1947 while attempting to flee to Paraguay with forged Red Cross papers. The family's Nazi ideology stemmed from German nationalist sentiment in the former Austro-Hungarian territories, fostered through student fraternities that promoted anti-Semitism and anti-Slavic racism. Pollack ceased contact with his family in the 1960s and has spent years researching his father's crimes, including visits to mass grave sites in Eastern Europe. He argues that individual cases of persecution, not just mass murder statistics, are important to remember, and draws concerning parallels between his family's beliefs and contemporary far-right movements, particularly regarding Putin's Russia and Austria's Freedom Party.