In 2003 whenHans-JurgenBrennecke was 57 years old he discovered a cache of letters that shocked him to the core. In those faded lines there were indications that his fatherHans a Hamburg policeman was not as innocent of war crimes as he had once thought.  “What I was told was that my father was responsible for helping Germans build air raid shelters ” he says. That though was only partially true. The letters revealed that his father was a member of extreme right-wing groups and by all indications contributed heavily to the Nazi war effort. While he was not murdering innocents in the East in his letters he admits to interrogating prisoners and learning how to use a machine gun — a skill that directly connected him to the SS. There was no question where his sympathies lay. “Tonight I heard their stories [soldiers who returned from the East]. They were great ” he wrote. Brennecke will never know the ultimate extent of his father’s culpability: Those dark secrets died with his mother. And in that fact he joins rank with the majority of children of perpetrators who discover the truth only after their parents are gone. But unlike some Brennecke refused to mitigate his father’s crimes. Instead he began to research the role of the Hamburg police during the war to confront the sorry reality head-on. .