The ‘unremarkable’ life of SS officer Robert Griesinger

In October 2011 Daniel Lee was at a dinner party at which a Dutch woman told a disturbing story. It concerned an armchair that her mother had recently taken for re-upholstering. The chair was something of a family treasure. As a child growing up in Amsterdam, the woman herself had always sat on it as she did her homework and it featured in countless family photographs. When her mother returned to pick up the chair, however, the upholsterer had addressed her in outrage. He did not work for Nazis, he said. The loved chair, it turned out, contained a hidden cache of SS documents, all stamped with swastikas. The woman at the party felt contaminated by what her mother had told her: throughout her childhood she had been in close proximity to these objects from the Fascist past. The upholsterer assumed that theirs must have been a Nazi family, although, in fact, the chair had been bought by her mother while she was a student in Prague in 1968.

As a historian of the Holocaust, Lee was immediately grabbed by the incident, which seemed almost a metaphor for the hidden presence of the wartime past. He decided to investigate the history that lay behind those papers: to take a random individual — the SS officer Robert Griesinger, whose name and photo were there on the documents — and to reconstruct his life. Lee’s journey took him to the houses that Griesinger had lived in, to the archives where his actions were recorded, and also to the man’s surviving children, who co-operated and added their memories. The result is an intriguing, honest and superbly documented portrait of what could be called an ‘unremarkable’ SS life.