Hilmar and Odette: Two Stories from the Nazi Era

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

Eric Koch, a long-time CBC producer and much-published author, is a
German Jew who was sent from England to internment in Canada in the
early years of World War II. He eventually made his way to university
and to a worthwhile career here, but many of his relatives were not so
fortunate. The Holocaust snuffed German—and European—Jewry,
including some unfortunates who scarcely realized they were Jewish.

This book studies the contrasting lives of two relatives Koch
discovered very late in his life. His father had an illegitimate child,
the Odette of the title, whose mother was successfully married off to a
Count. Odette lived well throughout the war, survived, and prospered.
Her husband was a dabbler in the Resistance but prudently kept up his
Nazi connections and cultivated his party patrons, tactics that
guaranteed a relatively good life until the Reich collapsed in flames.
Hilmar, a stepcousin whose Jewish mother was raped by some unknown (or,
as Koch speculates, may have had a hushed-up love affair), had the
misfortune to be adopted as a baby by a lunatic, a woman who did her
best to turn him over to the Gestapo on grounds that he was at least
half-Jewish. Poor Hilmar, caught up in the toils of the Nazi race laws
and a monstrous bureaucracy, tried to discover his origins—a Christian
father could have saved him for a time. His common-law wife, a racially
pure German who stood by him despite all the difficulties the Reich put
in her way, also tried to protect him at substantial risk to her own
well-being. But nothing availed, and he was sent to the camps. A few
months after V-E Day, he died from illness.

This extraordinary story illustrates as few books have the impact of
Hitler’s racial theories and laws on individuals. Koch does not claim
too much for his book. Indeed, he says in his last lines that “I
don’t know what the book is about, other than that no word can
adequately describe the Nazi race-laws and the way they were carried
out....” But that is more than enough.