By Susan Diamond
He was just a kid back then. A lonely kid, bewildered by how his life took a bad turn. It wasn’t his fault – he knew that yet somehow he felt responsible. He felt guilty. He felt dirty.
That’s how Johann described it to me thirty-five years later when I interviewed him for a magazine article I was writing about white supremacists.
His parents divorced the year he was in the ninth grade. Father moved out and Mother was overwhelmed with the task of being a single working mom to her one teenage son. She was absent in the home and her once loving heart had turned cold.
Johann was truly on his own.
There was no escape from the dark cloud he was living under. He was alternately ignored and bullied in school. He was friendless. He could find no happiness at home or school, and he had no social circle to support him.
Until Johann found what he didn’t know he was looking for.
Tenth grade. Elisabthenschule, Berlin Germany. First semester of the 1989 school year. Holocaust education is mandatory in modern-day post-war Germany. The curriculum is designed to teach children about Germany’s role in World War ll. It covers Hitler, Nazis, and the concentration camps. It’s meant to dispel old notions of racial prejudice and encourage a more inclusive German nationalism. But anti-Semitism, anti-Black and anti-Muslim views still
prevail.
And that’s how Johann found his place in the world.
Kids will be kids and some German teenagers liked to joke around during the Holocaust lessons. They would “Heil Hitler” each other, make mean jokes about Jews, draw racist pictures.
Turns out, Johann was very good at hating. He would crack a few Jew jokes and the other kids laughed. And this became his entree to a perverted type of popularity. He became known as the “Nazi kid.” He was protected by his new image and even respected for it...read more
