The culture of shhh -- what my Nazi legacy taught me about silence
Oskar Jakob, 94, is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who once assembled V-1 flying bombs in a subterranean concentration camp, and I’m the granddaughter of the engineer who developed those secret Nazi super weapons. Despite or perhaps because of our respective histories, we’ve worked to become friends. And while I’ve known Oskar for a few years, it’s only recently, as neo-Nazis flew swastika flags in Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio, that I felt the need to use my own ancestry to fight this brand of hate.
The white supremacist demonstrations in Ohio weren’t one-offs. Last fall, another black-clad group, their faces covered, did the same just three miles from Oskar’s St. Louis home. “America for the White Man,” declared the banner they hung from an overpass on Interstate 64. Oskar’s son snapped a picture as he drove by and sent it to me along with three angry-face emojis.
These incidents made me angry too, but also profoundly uncomfortable. What is the proper response when thugs perpetuate the hateful rhetoric of a political party to which your grandfather once belonged? And what could be more uncomfortable than the weight of the history between Oskar and me?
In 1945, after 40 of Oskar Jakob’s family members died at Auschwitz, the SS imprisoned him at the Mittelbau-Dora camp in Nordhausen, Germany. Deep in the tunnels of this former gypsum mine, 14-year-old Oskar was forced to rivet sheet metal used to make Vergeltungswaffe Einz: Vengeance Weapon #1. This was the world’s first cruise missile and my grandfather Robert Lusser headed the Luftwaffe project to create it.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-03-25/nazi-grandfather-weapons-engineer
It can't happen here...
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