SANTA FE, N.M. — A Russian television crew was in Santa Fe last week to interview two local residents for a documentary about the psychology of the relatives of Nazis.
Bettina Goering and Shanti Elke Bannwart have lived in the area for more than 20 years, but avoided each other and publicity about their past until recently.
Goering is the grand-niece of Hermann Goering, a founder of Germany's National Socialist Party, chief of the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler's chief administrator for the "final solution."
In 2004, she traveled to Australia to meet Ruth Rich, an artist trying to come to terms with her legacy as the child of Polish Jews who narrowly escaped the Holocaust. The encounter became fodder for the 2008 documentary Bloodlines, by Australian filmmaker Cynthia Connop.
Bannwart is the daughter of a high-level civilian engineer for the German military and, after the war, for the Allies, and then for the Opel automobile manufacturer.
Last month, Santa Fe's Sunstone Press published her memoir, Dancing on One Foot: Growing up in Nazi Germany, about her strangely normal childhood in wartime Hamburg, and her mother's death after the war from an illegal abortion. Bannwart will talk about her book and sign copies at 6 p.m. June 15 at Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 202 Galisteo St.
Both Bannwart and Goering appeared in a recent Israeli documentary, Hitler's Children, that is to air on European television later this year.
"I had my tubes tied at the age of 30 because I feared I would create another monster," Goering says in that film. "I look like him for a start — the eyes, the cheekbone, the profile. I look more like him than his own daughter."
Tatiana Freidensson, a producer for Channel One Russia, that country's biggest and most watched network, said she contacted Bannwart and Goering after reading Bannwart's essay, "Place of Forgiveness," on a blog about the Bloodlines documentary. Freidensson said her crew has already been in Germany for interviews for the yet-unnamed documentary.
"This is not only about Nazi children or relatives," she said in an email from Moscow. "This is much more about hate, about suffering inside. ... At the same time, this theme (is) about Nazism, evil, neo-Nazism, etc. But ... this is about us. About (being) human."
Bannwart and Goering had not met until about a year ago, even though they have lived for years within a few miles of each other in the Apache Canyon area south of Santa Fe. Jewish neighbors finally brought them together by asking Bannwart at a dinner party, "Do you know Bettina? She is the grand-niece of Hermann Goering."
"I said, 'Uhhh,' " Bannwart recalled, grabbing her gut as if she were in pain." I moved so far away and here she is, a neighbor. I felt like throwing up. I mean, physical."
But the next time they saw each other, on Ojo de la Vaca Road waiting for a dogfight to clear so they could drive on, Bannwart introduced herself and invited Goering to her home.
Bannwart said she easily recognized Goering from her resemblance to her great-uncle. Goering recalled that she had seen Bannwart before at a local party.
"I think what brought us together, and is the strongest similarity, is that we basically had nothing to do with what happened," Bannwart said in a recent interview. "But we feel so deeply involved in it — guilty and full of shame, as if we carry the burden for thousands."
Goering said she felt the same collective guilt until she started speaking out about her family.
"Through this sharing, I don't feel so bad anymore," she said. "But there are moments — like I went this last year or the year before to a concentration camp in Germany. I felt so bad. I needed help from somebody to get rid of some of those ghosts. It was physical. I felt sick afterward for weeks."
Neither Bannwart, a psychotherapist and life coach, nor Goering, a doctor of Oriental medicine specializing in herbs and acupuncture, finds it purely coincidental that they both found a home in Santa Fe. In fact, they say, the Russian documentary crew wants to check out Santa Fe's reputation as a place of healing.
Bannwart and Goering both admit, almost reluctantly, that they became fascinated by the Southwest as girls by reading the novels of Karl May (1842-1912), who specialized in adventure stories of the Old West. As adults, they were drawn to the area because friends had moved here.
"This is a very European-type city, very cosmopolitan, not (a) typically American city," Goering said. "There's a lot of Europeans here and tons of Germans."
Bannwart and Goering don't see Nazi Germany as a unique evil in modern history. The United States, for example, they note, destroyed many Native American cultures and enslaved Africans.
The German Nazis do compare, in their view, to today's U.S. right wing, "with their strange way of thinking, to go out into the streets to protest your own medical insurance," Bannwart said. "They are ruled by fear, making decisions from a place of fear."
Any country has shameful secrets, but aside from Germany and Israel, few have begun to examine them, Goering said.
"Look what the Germans did to the Jews," she said. "Look what's happening now in Israel. Here you have victims (becoming) perpetrators and on and on it goes, unless you just take a stop and say, 'Let's work this out.'
"And this is the beautiful thing about Israel. A lot of people want to do that. There are a lot of aggressive people, but it is just like here or anywhere in the world. People are divided.
"Why am I still doing this? I can only say, if my process has helped other people in Germany or somewhere else — it doesn't have to be Germany; we're not the only people who have had genocides — to face this thing head-on, which is a very hard thing to do, then great."
Information from: The Santa Fe New Mexican, http://www.sfnewmexican.com