In the Shadow of Silence: From Hitler Youth to Allied Internment: A Young Woman's Story of Truth and Denial

As a naive young German student in the last months of World War II, Gertrud Baer faced a tough choice: working in an armament factory where she could be killed by bombs or toxic chemicals, or joining the Nazi secret police. She opted for the latter and went to work for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), or Security Service, one of the most sinister organizations in the Nazi state. After the war, Baer was interned in Allied detention camps and later immigrated to Canada, where she became director of the Goethe Institute in Ottawa. Her wartime experiences provoked years of soul-searching about the responsibility of individual Germans in supporting the Nazis, culminating with In the Shadow of Silence.
At the SD, Baer was tasked with spying on fellow students. A branch of Hitler's infamous Schutzstaffel (SS), or Protective Squad, the SD looked for the slightest hint of discontent or defeatism, which could land citizens in concentration camps or worse. Baer claims she joined over the protests of her father, himself an honourary member of the SS (his reason: her lack of "political smarts"). Some reviewers question how Baer could have possibly not known Hitler's aims. SD chief Reinhard Heydrich was the man who convened the conference where the Holocaust was planned. The SD also included the SS Einsatzgruppen, special units that rounded up and executed thousands of Jews, Slavs, and gypsies. Baer frequently returns to her theme that Germans have not fully acknowledged their responsibility for Hitler's crimes. "After the war," she writes, "the Hitler generation--das Volk--instantly and collectively repudiated any personal knowledge of, let alone involvement in, the crimes of the Third Reich." Baer's book is a start in reversing that lapse. --Alex Roslin