June 5, 2005

Investigation

A multi-billion-pound scheme has been launched to save Venice from drowning. But will it? And why are the Venetians so sceptical about it?

The siren that can often be heard wailing across the rooftops of Venice whenever the sea threatens to engulf the city is redolent of a second-world-war air-raid warning. But few people panic — most simply calculate what footwear they will need that day. Venetians, or at least those who have chosen to remain in the city while many thousands have left, have become used to this. At the start of the previous century, St Mark’s Square — one of the lowest points in Venice — flooded an average of 10 times annually. Today the vast piazza can be covered in water more than 100 times each winter. In the past 10 years alone, the siren heralding extreme high water has rung out from a network of towers across the city more than 50 times, mostly in the winter months. It is then that the strong sirocco wind whips up the waters of the Adriatic, sending it surging into the lagoon and along the city’s canals virtually unchecked.

In the past 30 years, the population of Venice has been haemorrhaging; the number of people living here has declined from 130,000 to around 60,000. And in this slow evacuation, the floods have played their part. After centuries of gradually raising the levels of the foundations of many of the city’s buildings and pathways to their maximum height, the lowest part of Venice now lies just half a metre above sea level. Homes and shops are frequently inundated with water; shopkeepers know they must move quickly to shift goods onto high shelves. In this city, there is no such thing as a basement flat.

Some Venetians actually welcome what they refer to as acqua alta — high water. “I love it,” says Ana Bianchi, 51, whose family has run a restaurant in the old San Jobbe slaughterhouse district of the city for generations. “It makes the city seem somehow surreal. Besides, the salt water cleans the streets.” Shaking his head and laughing, her 77-year-old father, Lino, agrees: “When I worked in the meat-packing houses around here, we used to welcome high water, because it drowned the mice and rats.”

But ask Venetians what they think about the multi-billion-pound engineering scheme now under way to check the flooding and they are far less phlegmatic. “Folly,” “Absurd,” and “A white elephant” were just three reactions confided to me. It is not that Venetians believe the floods should be ignored: many are simply sceptical about both the motives behind the scheme and its long-term effect. Many now question: for whom precisely is Venice being saved? The answer, they believe, is the tourists. Some fear the city is rapidly being turned into the museum quarter of the greater Venetian metropolitan area. “Venice is a dying organism, it’s become a circus, a Disneyland for tourists, and who wants that?” laments Gherardo Ortalli, a history professor at Venice University.

For decades, saving Venice has been the focus of international debate. Much of the impetus behind the plans to safeguard the city has come from international bodies such as Venice in Peril, set up by the former British ambassador to Italy Sir Ashley Clarke in response to disastrous floods in Venice in 1966. This British charity, which for 30 years has received a proportion of the proceeds from every Veneziana pizza sold in the Pizza Express chain of UK restaurants, has donated millions of pounds for the restoration of the city’s buildings and art works.

Construction of the latest flood-protection scheme began two years ago. Known as Mose, after the Italian acronym for “experimental electromechanical module”, it has become the focus of huge controversy. The scheme, costing around £2.5 billion, is based on the creation of 78 mobile underwater barriers — each weighing more than 300 tonnes — which will for most of the time rest on the sea bed. But when the high tide surges more than 1.1 metres above the mean sea level, these barriers will be raised like a string of giant medieval drawbridges. It is a fantastically grandiose scheme; but the grandiosity is not such a surprise when you examine its provenance. The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, cut the ribbon on this gargantuan project and declared it “the most important environmental-protection measure in the world”.

The scheme, which is due to be completed by 2011, is the most ambitious in a series of grand engineering works given the go-ahead in recent years by the Italian premier. Other projects include the building of a giant bridge linking Sicily to the mainland, and a high-speed railway link between Turin and Milan. But it is the barriers that Italians, and especially Venetians, are most sceptical about. As Berlusconi preened, placing an elaborate scroll carrying his name inside a hollow in the first massive stone to be laid at the inauguration ceremony, a mini armada of protesters surrounded the site. They have since regularly blocked water traffic on the Grand Canal with their flotillas of boats
carrying placards denouncing the scheme.

Many Venetians, and environmental organisations including the World Wide Fund for Nature, fear the barriers could impede tidal flushing and irreversibly damage the lagoon’s delicate ecosystem. Others oppose them on the grounds they will, at worst, be ineffective, and at best, only a short-term solution, with rising sea levels owing to climate change rendering them obsolete within a few decades.

Critics are also incensed that the barriers are being built by the same consortium of industrial and engineering concerns that proposed them — a consortium that operates with little control or restraint. They say there are no proper safeguards, and that the project is simply another example of political opportunism by a perma-tanned premier who once compared himself to Jesus Christ. Long embroiled in scandal, Berlusconi sees investment in infrastructure as a way of stimulating the economy — and saving his political skin. Many of the scheme’s critics are, however, reluctant to shout too loudly. They fear that if this project is scuppered by opponents — given the amount of time the Mose scheme took to progress from drawing board to construction — it could take decades before an alternative system of protection is approved. “There is absolutely no alternative to the barriers at present,” argues Anna Somers Cocks, chairman of Venice in Peril. “They must go ahead. They should not become a victim of stop-go government.”

If construction is stopped, experts predict the city that was once Europe’s most powerful merchant empire could be uninhabitable by the end of this century. Far-fetched as it sounds, they argue, Venice could become a real-life Atlantis, only visible from a glass-bottomed boat.

For centuries, Venetians have tried to hold at bay the water that has threatened to engulf what has always been one of the world’s most fragile cities. Engineering work began as early as 1501, when legions of workers toiled for nearly 200 years, diverting the three main rivers and scores of smaller ones that flowed into the lagoon. The problem then was that the rivers brought so much debris with them from the surrounding plains that they were silting up the lagoon and slowly raising water levels.

The rate of human intervention in the natural dynamics of the lagoon speeded up dramatically with the advent of the industrial era, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. From the 1920s, factories on the mainland around the perimeter of the lagoon started tapping into underground freshwater, causing serious land subsidence over a wide area, and depressing land under Venice so that the city started slowly sinking. By the time pumping was stopped in 1970, Venice had sunk by more than 12 centimetres — a significant change. In addition, the lagoon itself was reduced in size by almost a third when the giant industrial port of Marghera expanded in the 1940s and 50s; with this came highly polluting chemical and petrochemical plants. Large sections of the lagoon were also lost when they were separated off for use as fish farms. Perhaps the harshest blow to the stability of the lagoon, however, was the construction in 1952 of a 15-metre-deep channel in one of the three main inlets leading from the Adriatic. to allow oil tankers to berth at Marghera. Deep shipping channels were also dredged through the two remaining inlets.

These modifications had a complex and devastating effect on the lagoon. Pollution of its water from industrial waste and pesticides contained in agricultural runoff from the surrounding area killed off much subaquatic life, including sea grass that once helped anchor sediment on the lagoon bed. This lack of aquatic vegetation, together with the deeper channels, allowed stronger currents to flow into the lagoon, accelerating the speed with which high tides could rush towards Venice. It also led to the floor of the lagoon becoming further eroded, with unknown quantities of sediment washed out to sea each year.

A freak confluence of low atmospheric pressure and torrential rainfall, along with exceptionally high tides exacerbated by these conditions, caused Venice to succumb to its worst recorded floods on November 4, 1966. Back then, there was no siren system to alert the city’s population to impending disaster. It was left to a handful of volunteers to run through the streets shouting a warning through megaphones.

It was around 7am when Ranieri da Mosto heard someone calling at the door of his palazzo in the heart of Venice. Da Mosto was then a correspondent with the Rai broadcasting corporation, and the caller was a technician who had come to pick him up — by sailing a small gondola right through the front door. When da Mosto heard the warning an hour or so earlier that an exceptionally high tide was expected, he was, he says, “alarmed, but not too much. We had no idea then what would happen later that day”.

With the water rising to 1.27 metres above sea level at the height of that morning’s tide, da Mosto was taken by gondola to his office near the train station. He was able to make a single brief broadcast about the city’s exceptional flood before the phone lines and electricity went dead. As torrential rain continued, strong sirocco winds prevented the morning tide from leaving the lagoon before the afternoon tide rushed in. By 7pm the water had risen to nearly two metres above sea level. “There were boats in many of the streets, a total electrical blackout and, because many underground oil tanks had burst, there was thick black fuel floating on top of the flood water,” da Mosto recalls.

When his loyal technician finally managed to get one phone line working that evening, da Mosto broadcast a report, written by candlelight, alerting the world to the fact that Venice was submerged in the worst floods for over 1,000 years. Paolo Canestrelli, the current director of the city’s tidal forecasting and warning centre, also remembers that day in 1966 clearly, though he was just 14 at the time. He recalls making paper boats with his brother, which the boys launched from the first-floor window of their home, carrying lighted candles. “Looking back I realise how dangerous this was, given the amount of raw fuel floating on the water. But for us at the time, it was an adventure.”

Few others saw it as such. When the flood water eventually receded 20 hours later, Venice was devastated: 5,000 people had lost their homes, businesses had been destroyed, and some of the city’s unique treasure chest of art and architecture was irreparably damaged. But Venice was not the only Italian city to have suffered that day. Torrential rain and flooding across the country, particularly in Florence, had caused widespread destruction. In the following weeks and months it was Florence, not Venice, that became the focus of national and international efforts to salvage precious art works and buildings damaged in the floods.

Once this work was under way in Florence, however, art and architecture experts from around the world turned their attention to the problem presented by Venice. Organisations such as Venice in Peril were formed, and they have kept the city’s plight in the international spotlight ever since. In the wake of the 1966 disaster, the government provided funding for restoration projects and for work to find long-term measures to protect Venice from future flooding. Under the auspices of Unesco, experts from around the world gathered to discuss what could be done to “save Venice”.

Italy’s unstable political scene — 60 changes in government in as many years — did little to ease decision-making in the search for definitive solutions. It was not until Berlusconi was re-elected four years ago that he threw his weight behind the Mose barriers mooted for decades. Other, less costly proposals — which were also easier to reverse if found to be ineffective — were dismissed. One of the alternatives was to make the three inlets to the Adriatic shallower, to reduce the amount of water flowing in and out of the lagoon. This, it was argued, would restore its natural equilibrium. This proposal was rejected on the grounds that it would block the passage of deep-draught oil tankers to Marghera, and of gigantic cruise liners. Yet many believe the largest ships should be banned from entering the lagoon anyway. Their powerful wash, together with the waves from the growing number of motorboats constantly ploughing along the canals, is one of the biggest causes of crumbling foundations. Plans have long existed for building a marina beyond the lagoon’s perimeter, from which passengers could be ferried into Venice, and for laying a pipeline between Marghera and a docking station for tankers in the Adriatic.

“These cruise ships are like skyscrapers,” argues Gherardo Ortalli, who is also a member of Italia Nostra, one of Italy’s foremost environmental organisations. “It is both stupid and dangerous to allow them into the lagoon. People say tourism is important for Venice, yet it is not Venetians but international shipping companies that profit from these ships.”

In common with many Venetians, Ortalli believes it is because of the “enormous financial interests invested in the Mose project” that it was given the go-ahead while other cheaper, possibly more effective solutions were shelved.
“It is obviously in the interest of the big companies and industrialists who proposed the Mose scheme, and are now contracted to build it, to have as expensive a project as possible,” says Stefano Boato, professor of city planning at Venice University and another keen environmentalist, who has been trying to challenge the legality of the Mose project.

He questioned the conflict of interest that the same consortium proposing a solution to Venice’s flood problem was then charged with executing that solution. More recently, he has launched a legal challenge on the grounds, he contends, that the scheme contravenes urban planning laws. Maria Teresa Brotto, the engineer who co-ordinated the final design of the barriers and one of the chief spokespeople for Consorzio Venezia Nuovo (CVN), the consortium of private companies behind the Mose project, dismisses critics such as Boato and Ortalli as “a small but noisy minority”. Dressed in a white-and-silver leather jacket, jeans and cowboy boots, Brotto eases back in her chair as she fields questions about the scheme with an exasperated look on her face. “I am amazed that people keep asking me the same things after all this time. This is the most studied project in the world. I am strongly convinced it is the best solution to this city’s problems. It has all the necessary approvals,” she concludes, looking at her watch.

But the scientific community remains divided. In 1996 the Italian government commissioned two exhaustive studies on the Mose project: one environmental-impact assessment by Italian experts, and another by scientists from Brussels, the Netherlands and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The former issued a negative report, not only questioning the efficacy of Mose, but saying it would be too detrimental to the environment. The latter concluded, with reservations, that it was the best solution for Venice. Some have since questioned the independence of their verdict, noting that several of the MIT professors had previously been paid as consultants by the consortium that is building the barriers.

This is the crux of much of the controversy that continues to engulf the Mose project. As far as many are concerned, the consortium behind it — set up by the Italian government 20 years ago as an “exclusive concessionaire” charged with uniting private companies vying for fat public-works contracts — is simply too powerful and operates with too few checks and balances.

In theory, the activities of the consortium are supervised by a local authority in Venice called the Magistrato alle Acque. In practice, critics argue, this thinly staffed local body acts as a virtual rubber stamp. “It is an empty box. The consortium controls everything and, like our present government, it is very interested in big business,” says Silvio Testa, a senior correspondent with one of Venice’s main newspapers, Il Gazzettino. “People here are both perplexed and dubious about Mose, and those who are more informed are very critical of the scheme. They simply don’t want it. I am convinced that as people come to realise the impact it will have on the environment, hostility to it will grow considerably.”

Even people such as Somers Cocks, of Venice in Peril, recognise that the barriers are likely to be only an interim measure. “The barriers will probably only buy Venice some time to search for longer-term solutions,” says Somers Cocks. “But I believe their construction should go ahead. People are living in a state of denial about how Venice is being irreparably damaged by the constant flooding.”

Two years ago, the British charity, which funded a research project into the problems facing Venice, organised a conference in Cambridge aimed at clarifying the state of scientific research into these problems. Somers Cocks admits that some Italians initially viewed such efforts by outsiders, particularly the British, as “interference”. Some even went as far as to suggest it smacked of “colonial arrogance”. But the Cambridge conference was considered a great success. It brought together 130 scientists and engineering experts from around the world who specialised in lagoon processes and flood control. Among the accusations levelled at the Mose scheme, when alternatives to it were being mooted, was that crucial data that should have been made available to the scientific community for independent analysis were not released by the consortium. One of the principal conclusions of those who attended the Cambridge conference was that it was essential that those in charge of Mose — already by then given the green light — remain flexible enough to adapt to improved understanding of the lagoon, advances in technology and unforeseen consequences of the construction of the barriers.

To ensure this happens, Somers Cocks believes an international commission should be set up — under the auspices of the European parliament, perhaps — not only to oversee the project as it is being built, but to monitor how it is working once construction is complete. “This will not happen unless there is enough international pressure to push it forward,” she says. “But I believe passionately that the Italian government needs to wake up to its responsibility, and to realise that you cannot deal with the problem of Venice on an ad hoc government-by-government basis.

“Venice is a microcosm,” she adds. “Some of the problems the city faces now, and will face in the future as a result of global warming, will eventually confront other cities around the world. We all need to wake up to this. We need to get it right here, of all places.”

It is a conclusion echoed by Jane da Mosto, an environmental scientist and co-author of a book, The Science of Saving Venice, that resulted from the Cambridge conference: “Venice is a precious laboratory for dealing with complexities. Man and the environment have co-existed here for a thousand years. Whatever is done to safeguard Venice, we need to take into account all the interrelationships that exist here.”

What Venice lacks — and, most agree, desperately needs — is a long-term strategic plan. Because saving the city from flooding has been the focus of attention for so long, the question of what sort of city is being saved has been ignored. Lack of jobs, rising housing costs and the inconvenience of living in such an unusual city have driven young people, in particular, to the mainland, leaving it with an ageing population and an ever-expanding influx of tourists — an estimated 15m a year. Although tourism provides a vital source of income for Venice, it makes life almost unbearable for many who live here. Testa reflects the view of many Venetians in describing tourism as a “cancer” that is destroying the fabric of the city. Initiatives such as tax breaks for businesses that are relocating here, and the provision of affordable housing for young workers and their families, could revitalise the city’s economy and make it less dependent on tourism. Plans for an underwater metro line linking Venice to the mainland — known as the sublagunare, or sub-lagoon railway — are also mooted as a solution to the island-city’s transport difficulties — though some fear this would simply increase the influx of tourists.

But here again, the expense of the Mose scheme comes under attack. For as soon as the project was approved, nearly all state funding for Venice, which once went to projects such as reinforcing the foundations of the city and repairing its buildings, was funnelled through the consortium constructing the barriers. Those who run it now virtually control the city’s purse strings, deciding how all government money allotted to preserving Venice is allocated.

One of the most startling sights for any visitor to Venice is the spectacle of sections of canals drained of water, as workmen using the latest technology shore up the city’s rotting foundations. Such work follows a tradition dating back to the 9th century, when Venice was transformed from temporary refuge to permanent settlement, as millions of wooden poles of alder, oak and larch were sunk into the lagoon floor so that Istrian-stone and marble platforms could be laid on top. But what money will be available now for such feverish restoration activity is in doubt.

Since the very first plans for the Mose scheme were first mooted, the retired architect Pino Rosa Salva has campaigned vigorously against them. Sitting in front of a large draughtsman’s table scattered with photographs of Venice during its many floods, Rosa Salva unfurls one of the posters he and other members of Italia Nostra have repeatedly plastered up on the city’s crumbling walls over the years.

In stark black and white, the poster depicts the barriers as giant teeth stretching across the three inlets of Venice, denouncing them as “monstrous dentures” that will destroy the lagoon and devour millions in state funds. “This scheme is a folly. There are cheaper and simpler solutions that should at least be tried,” concludes Rosa Salva, now in his nineties. “If man cannot save Venice, what can he save? But I am an old man now and do not have much energy left to fight.”

It is a weariness echoed by many in La Serinissima, which, when it comes to the fallout from the Mose project, is anything but serene.

November 14, 2004

Interviews

For over 10 years, the children of Nazi war criminals have been talking to the families of Holocaust victims. Has this radical therapy done anything to ease the pain?

His earliest memory is of playing on a swing in his garden as a small boy. Then his father shouts out that he must get off and give his younger sister Ilse a turn. He kicks himself to the ground. But his sister is standing too close behind. The swing flies back into her face. She starts to scream, blood running down her chin.

Martin makes a run for it, afraid his father will give him a beating. He hides for hours in a coal bunker close to his home in Pullach, near Munich. It is 1934 and Martin is four years old. When he eventually returns home, the small boy is astounded that his father does nothing. “He just told me that the fear I had felt deep in my bones all that time was my punishment.” Seventy years later, this story is retold with an unsettling air of tenderness. Yet its last line provides a chilling clue to his father’s twisted psyche. For Martin’s father was Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler’s brutal private secretary and the man who, by the end of the second world war, was second only to the Führer in terms of real political power in the Third Reich.

So close were Bormann and his wife, Gerda, to Hitler that when Martin was born, he was given the middle name Adolf, and Hitler became his godfather. “Godfather” in the Nazi sense of the word, Martin points out, since Hitler and his own father increasingly despised any form of religion. For this reason, Martin, the first of the Bormanns’ 10 children, was the only one to be christened. Because of Hitler’s refusal to oblige by holding him over the baptismal font, that honour was passed to the wife of the Nazi-party deputy, Rudolf Hess. As he sits bolt upright, 74 now and grey-haired, Martin explains all this as if he is speaking about the eccentricities of a squabbling uncle and aunt.

But as he recounts his memories, they become ever more troubling. There are the times he recalls sitting down, with the sons and daughters of others in Hitler’s inner circle, for cake and hot cocoa with Hitler to celebrate his birthday and New Year. “These were never very comfortable occasions,” Martin recalls. “Hitler did not know how to behave around children. He rarely stayed longer than 10 or 15 minutes.”

After the families of Hitler’s cronies moved in the mid-1930s to the Bavarian retreat built for the Nazi elite at Berchtesgaden, and the machinery of war ground into gear, Martin says he saw little of his father. He remembers Hitler giving him a set of toy soldiers for his ninth birthday. But when he bungled his greeting to Hitler — snapping to attention and barking “Heil Hitler, mein Führer!” instead of “Heil, mein Führer!” — his father gave him a sharp slap. And when Bormann received reports that his eldest son was skipping lessons at school, he banished the 10-year-old to a strict military academy at Feldafing in Bavaria. Martin has few memories of his father after that. The last conversation he remembers was when Bormann paid a short visit to Feldafing to have a father-to-son talk about the facts of life. As the two strolled out into the school grounds, Martin, then 13, dismissed his father’s attempt at a heart-to-heart, saying he already knew all about that. But having spent three years carrying out regular drills to become a member of the civil guard and being force-fed extracts from Mein Kampf, the teenager did have one burning question: “What exactly is national socialism?” His father’s answer was simple: “National socialism is the will of the Führer. Full stop.”

The memory that follows this is so grotesque that for most of his adult life, Martin suppressed it deep in his subconscious. Even now his voice gets lower and quieter as he speaks. It was during a brief visit home, he says. He was 14 and he, his mother, sister Ilse and a schoolfriend from Feldafing were invited to tea with Hedwig Potthast, the secretary and mistress of Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo and mastermind behind the Nazis’ “final solution”. “After a while, this woman told us she wanted to show us something: Heinrich’s ‘little room’, she called it.” The tea party was led up to the attic. What they saw there Martin describes as “terrible, just terrible”. The entire room was furnished with human body parts. There was a chair made out of a pelvic girdle, its legs constructed from human thighbones and feet. Lampshades made from human skin, the blood vessels visible, and a copy of Mein Kampf bound in human skin. “At the time, we children did not fully understand what we were seeing. But we sensed our mother’s horror. She pulled us straight from the room. When we got home, my mother grabbed a similar lamp in our living room she had been given by Himmler without realising what it was made of, and threw it out.”

As he finishes telling this story, Martin holds my gaze for an unusually long time, as if trying to judge if I fully comprehend the horror of what he is talking about. This is, of course, impossible. Only those who survived the Nazi regime of terror can do that. Even Martin only felt able to speak of this incident openly for the first time more than 40 years after it happened, and only then in the company of a small group of other children of Nazi war criminals.

He spoke of it again several years later in meetings between this German group and a small number of children of Holocaust survivors — a gathering of tortured souls brought together at the suggestion of an Israeli psychologist convinced that both groups shared similar problems.

Unlikely as this seemed, so profoundly did his conviction prove to be true that the two groups quickly joined to form a tight-knit circle called To Reflect and Trust (TRT). Gently and gradually, by listening at length to each other’s stories over the course of 10 years, they helped each other try to understand what they had struggled with as children and as adults. From 1992 until last year, they met regularly — first in Germany, then Israel and the United States. Since then, they have started talking about what they learnt from these meetings to others in areas of current or recent conflict such as South Africa, Northern Ireland and the Middle East. If the children of those on either side of such a catastrophic gulf as was opened by the Nazis can help each other, they believe, then no attempt at reconciliation, or at least mutual understanding, is impossible. Only by tracing the path Bormann and another of the group — the son of a senior Gestapo commander — travelled long before they joined the others, is it possible to begin to understand such optimism. How any son or daughter could cope with the legacy of such an ominous past is hard to imagine. In Bormann’s case he came close to not trying.

In the chaos and confusion of the last days of the war, as Russian forces surrounded Hitler’s bunker in Berlin, and allied forces advanced from the south and west, the pupils at Bormann’s school were evacuated, issued with guns and told to prepare to fight to the last to defend the “thousand-year Reich”. After being trucked back and forth across country close to Germany’s crumbling front line, Bormann, 15, and a few other boys were billeted in a small guesthouse in Jenbach in the Tyrol, where a group of die-hard Nazi-party loyalists were also staying.

Shortly after midnight on May 1, 1945, news came over on the radio that the Führer had fallen, surrounded by those in his closest circle. “It was as if Hitler had died in battle, together with those around him. It wasn’t until days later that we learnt he had shot himself, and Eva Braun had taken poison,” Bormann recalls. “I was just a boy, but I thought, ‘My God. It’s the end!’ I was convinced my father had died then too. Much later this turned out to be true, though he did not die in the bunker. He took cyanide while trying to flee Berlin on a road near the Lehrter train station.”

This brief summary of events omits the fact that a worldwide manhunt lasting more than three decades was launched when his father’s whereabouts at the end of the war was unknown. Many remained convinced that he had escaped and was still alive. For this reason, in October 1946, Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia at the international military tribunal in Nuremberg. It was not until 1972, during construction work near the Lehrter station, that two skeletons were unearthed near the spot where Bormann’s diary had been found in a discarded leather jacket shortly after the war. Via dental records, the shorter of the skeletons was identified as Bormann’s. Minute scratches on the teeth of both — the other skeleton belonged to Hitler’s surgeon — showed both men had bitten into cyanide capsules. Only with the advent of DNA analysis, however, was there definitive confirmation that one of the skeletons’ bone tissue matched blood samples from the Bormann family. Fifty-four years after the war, in the summer of 1999, his remains were finally released for burial — quietly scattered in international waters, for fear the event would become a rallying call for neo-Nazis. No member of the Bormann family was allowed to attend.

Continuing his account of the night he heard Hitler, and he assumed his father too, had died, Martin recalls how he went out into the garden of the small hotel and, in the darkness, heard a series of shots ring out. Eight Nazi-party die-hards killed themselves that night. “I thought then that this was what I must do too.” He pulled out the gun he had been issued and prepared to shoot himself in the head. As he stood there on the point of committing suicide, he felt a hand on his arm. A schoolfriend had come out into the garden with the same intention. “He stopped me. We stopped each other. We just clung to each other and cried.”

From then on, he vowed to make his way home to his mother and siblings. But much of the region was by then in the allies’ hands and his family had fled further south. After hitchhiking as far as Salzburg, he fell sick with food poisoning and was incapable of going any further. With the help of a German soldier, he was issued with false identity papers and told to seek shelter in the country, pretending he was an orphan. Within months this would be true: his mother, who had been held by British and US intelligence officers seeking her husband, died of abdominal cancer. He never saw her again and learnt of her death in a newspaper.

Under the name Martin Bergmann, the boy did find shelter with the family of an Austrian farmer, an elderly man who came to treat him as a son. It was this man, a devout Catholic, rather than his real father, he says, who changed his life. At night he used to lie in bed listening to the family praying downstairs. “They were not the sort of people who talked about their religion. They lived it. They seemed so at peace with themselves, I thought, ‘I want that peace too.'”

After months in the fields helping the farmer tend cows, Martin started reading the newspapers. They were full of reports of the Nuremberg trials getting under way and the horrors of the concentration camps. He claims he had known little of their existence before this. Given what he witnessed in Himmler’s attic, this is hardly credible. But the night he read that his father had been sentenced to death, he confessed his true identity to the farmer sheltering him. Rather than turn the boy over to the police for questioning, the old man encouraged him to start regularly attending church. Within a short time he converted to Catholicism.

Without similar beliefs, it is easy to view this as escapism. Martin sees it differently: “I never thought I could run away from my past. I have to live with it. But my salvation was an enormous gift from God. It allowed me to deal with what had happened. I felt great shame. My God, I still feel it. You cannot blast it away, this collective shame. What happened in Germany from 1933 to 1945 was terrible,” he says slowly, looking into the distance as if no longer engaged in conversation, but lost in thought. “I felt ashamed, in pain, helpless. I had to acknowledge that my father was responsible for a lot of the crimes of the Nazi regime. My father forced the mass deportations, the slave labour. My father’s signature was on so many orders.” Not escaping from his past, perhaps, Martin did escape the continent on which its worst atrocities were committed. He buried himself in another heart of darkness. After being ordained as a Catholic priest, he became a missionary in the Belgian Congo.

During the six years he spent there in the 1960s, the region was plagued by civil war; he was kidnapped three times by rebels, once narrowly escaping execution by a firing squad. After contracting a severe gastric infection, he returned to Germany for treatment. Shortly after his release from hospital, the car he was driving was involved in a head-on collision and he fell into a deep coma. Whether this collision was really an accident or due to a subconscious death wish is open to question. If the latter, it was once again thwarted: he regained consciousness, though his legs were so badly crushed it was thought both would have to be amputated. Nursed back to health by a Dominican nun, he realised he would never be able to return to the rigours of work as a missionary, and asked to be released from holy orders. Shortly afterwards, Cordula — the nun two years his senior who had acted as his nurse — applied for a similar dispensation. On November 8, 1971, the couple married.

For 20 years they lived a quiet life as religious-studies teachers in a pretty, medieval market town near Hagen in northwest Germany. It is here, in the beer cellar of a hotel, that we sit talking. Even today, though the son is in his mid-seventies and the last pictures taken of his father date from 1945, when the Nazi henchman was in his mid-forties, there is a striking resemblance between both men. Both share a strong, square jaw, broad forehead, hooded eyes and wide, thin lips. But while Bormann Sr is invariably pictured in military uniform, his son wears a tweed jacket, denim shirt, casual trousers and thick-soled white orthopaedic shoes. As a result of his car accident, he still walks unsteadily. His German is precise and he speaks in a slow monotone, almost as if he is recalling someone else’s life and not his own.

As he talks, Cordula, who still prefers to be known by the name, meaning “Little Heart”, that she was given when she became a nun, sits beside him, sometimes stroking his arm, laying her head on his shoulder and soothing him with the words “Lieber Martin” — “Dear Martin”. Everything in their lives changed, she says, when he received a telephone call one day from the Israeli professor Dan Bar-On, of Ben Gurion University of the Negev. He wanted to know how children of Nazi perpetrators had been affected by their parents’ past. “When Dan Bar-On came it was the worst time,” says Cordula, pressing her hand on Martin’s to quieten his protest. “I know because I lived this with Martin. Bar-On pulled out all the drawers — the spiritual drawers, you understand — where everything had been stuffed, and all that Martin thought he had already overcome was there again.” Only then, she says, did her husband understand what it really meant. “He read all the books, all the documents of the Nuremberg trials. He watched the videos of the concentration camps, all those terrible things, and he sat there crying, crying, crying. Before, he was such a joyous person. He laughed and made jokes. We sang. But since then, he is a very sad person.”

Some have criticised Martin for hiding behind his faith.

A Canadian writer, Erna Paris, concluded that “Theology has allowed [Bormann] to transform pain and grief over a criminal father into a bland, bloodless paste”. Even his wife concedes that his religion acts as emotional armour: “It is good that Martin has his faith. It keeps him protected.”

But while the offspring of other prominent Nazis such as Hess’s son Wolf Rüdiger and Himmler’s daughter Gudrun — who helps run a support network for ageing Nazis, called Stille Hilfe, or Silent Help — continued to vigorously defend their father’s wartime actions, Martin has done the opposite. Since retiring as a teacher 12 years ago, he has travelled throughout Germany and abroad, giving talks and taking part in meetings in schools, colleges and community halls denouncing the crimes of the Third Reich. Fearing angry reactions — some old Nazi sympathisers called him a Nestbeschmutzer, dirtying his own nest — tight security was sometimes organised for these meetings. But public reaction, especially among younger Germans eager to learn about the past, says Martin, was overwhelmingly positive. And he would never have spoken out so publicly, he believes, had he not been forced by Bar-On to confront the truth.

When Bar-On began speaking to the children of Nazi officers in the late 1980s, there was a feeling that acknowledging they also suffered was morally offensive. There was a feeling among other psychologists that it equated what they had gone through with the suffering of Holocaust survivors and their children at the hands of the Nazis. But the more Bar-On spoke with the children of both “sides”, the more he felt they were “in some ways opposite sides of the same coin” and that, if they met, they could help each other. Both, he says, “suffered tremendously from the silence surrounding their past”.

Dr Joe Albeck, whose parents were among only six survivors of a Nazi labour camp in Poland, likens this silence to “growing up with an elephant in the room”.

As a child, he says, “you learn there is something going on in the world that you can’t put a name to and nobody will acknowledge”. Now a Boston, Massachusetts-based psychiatrist, he admits he had deep reservations about Bar-On’s proposal for such a meeting. But when the group — eight Germans, four Americans and four Israelis — met for the first time in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1992, they all felt able to talk openly about the past in a way they never had before. “All the players from both sides, so to speak, were there. The historical circle was complete.”

Julie Goschalk, also from Massachusetts and a therapist whose parents were survivors of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, says she was shocked by the “horrific shame” the Germans felt. “Had they said, ‘Well, yes, we hate our fathers, but it’s nothing to do with us,’ it would have been an awful lot harder to make any connection with them,” she says. “But we saw that their lives had been destroyed by what their fathers did. The burden they were carrying was their parents’ burden.” Goschalk admits she was also terrified at the thought of the meeting. When she shook Martin’s hand, her reaction was: “My God, whose hand have I just had in mine?” But her hatred of Germans was so great, she says, she was in some way “guilty of what the Nazis had done in hating a whole race”. The meetings allowed her to see them as individuals, people who had suffered too as a result of the past. “After the very first meeting, listening to everyone’s individual stories, I felt my hatred melt away,” she says. “That was liberating.”

Relatives on both sides also struggled to accept any good would come of these meetings. With the exception of his sister Ilse, who died several years ago, Martin says his younger siblings want little to do with the past. For the Germans, it was invariably their mothers who had tried the hardest to cover up the reality of who their father was.

Some did not discover the truth about their fathers until they were young adults and their fathers were arrested, put on trial and served prison sentences. Dirk Kühl is grateful that he was spared this. His father was head of the Gestapo in Braunschweig, and was hanged by the British for war crimes in 1948. Kühl, 64, tries hard to keep calm as he speaks of the past in his spacious home in Nuremberg. “I’m glad I did not have to deal with knowing my father,” he says defiantly. “He paid for what he did, and that freed me.” But as he talks, a darker story emerges. When he found out the truth about his father, Kühl had a nervous breakdown.

He was just eight when he saw his father, Günter, for the last time. The meeting was in a tent at a temporary prison run by the British. “He told me to be a good son, and gave me some chocolate and some crayons in a box with a picture of William Tell on it. I can still recall the cover of that box better than I can my father’s face. I did not know I would never see him again.” After that, Kühl says, his father was todgeschwiegen — silenced to death; rarely mentioned. After a few years, his mother said his father had died in prison. Her son appeared to accept this; many schoolfriends had lost fathers too. But Kühl says he always sensed there was something he was not being told. When he was 16, he was sent to stay with a relative in Holland. It was this relative who told him that his father had been executed by the British for war crimes — even though, he was told, his father was “only doing his job”.

Kühl says he accepted this impression that the death sentence was not deserved, and he became obsessed with rehabilitating his father’s reputation. But when he tried to enlist the help of a prominent lawyer, he was told
“forget it”. “The message I received from that lawyer was that he was shocked I could even consider my father could be rehabilitated after all the awful things he had done.”

Furious that his mother had deceived him for so long, Kühl, an only child, refused to talk to her for years and, at 19, had a nervous breakdown. In an incident reminiscent of what happened to Bormann, he was involved in a car crash. He describes being “pieced back together” in a clinic in Bavaria. But it was not until he started studying to become a history teacher and met the woman he would marry — a Jewish refugee from Russia, who had narrowly escaped being sent to a concentration camp as a child by the Gestapo — that he slowly started to discuss his father. With her support, he started reading the transcripts of his father’s trial. “After that, whenever I saw a man walking along the street with a briefcase, I had to admit that when my father carried a briefcase, it was not full of papers about water pipes or electricity: it was full of orders to punish people, kill them, put them in concentration camps. It was murder by administration. I fell into an emotional abyss.”

While Kühl’s first wife, Lena, who has since died, helped him begin to confront his past, he says it was not until he began taking part in the meetings organised by Bar-On that he really learnt to “fully face the truth — without any camouflage”. Kühl says he will never find peace. “There is so much rage that runs in my blood about what was done.” The most frightening realisation of all, he says, when he began to look at the human being behind the man his father became, was acknowledging how quickly events had changed him. “Evil comes step by step,” says Kühl. “None of us knows what we are capable of and I don’t trust anyone who says, ‘I would not have done that’ — I have looked far enough into the abyss not to trust such statements.”

The next day, before formally shaking my hand and walking unsteadily away with Cordula on his arm, Martin Bormann said something similar. Because of failing health, this is one of the last times he is prepared to speak publicly about the past. “I owe my life to my father. I have to thank him for that. But I have had to learn to distinguish between the man I knew as my father and the man I have learnt about who was a complete stranger; a man who was totally ruined by Hitler’s ideology. A man who did everything he did of his own free will, with his eyes wide open.”

As a result of his many meetings with Kühl, Bormann and the others, Bar-On says his view of human nature has changed profoundly: finally he has come to agree with their conclusion. “I no longer have the luxury of believing there are evil people and good people: these two possibilities lie very close together and this means we are all much more defenceless,” he says. “You cannot simply ‘screen out’ the evil people. The important thing is to make sure you do not create the circumstances where this side of human nature can thrive.” His words in my ears, I switch on the evening news and listen to a report of the latest beheading in Iraq.