Germany: Who Do You Think You Are?

The popular BBC television series, Who Do You Think You Are?, has produced some problems in its German incarnation.

Episodes of the German show on public channel ZDF have uncovered celebrities' Nazi ancestors.

An article on the Expatica.com site illustrates the discoveries.

Walter Sittler, 54, a German actor, already knew that his father, Edward Sittler, had been a US academic who moved to Nazi Germany before World War II, adopted German citizenship and wrote propaganda for dictator Adolf Hitler's Information Office.

The channel said that 8 percent of viewers, some 1.26 million viewers, watched the Sittler segment.

The other featured German celebrity, actress Mariele Millowitsch, 51, comes from a theatrical family in Cologne. She dug up movie footage of her father doing comedy shows for jack-booted Nazi German officers during World War II.

Millowitsch looked vexed as she watched, but said she could not believe her father Willy had been a committed Nazi.

ZDF, according to the article, had not made a decision to produce more episodes.

The article continues:

So far, family history has yet to catch on as a mass pastime in Germany. Its upswing under the Nazis, when people had to prove non-Jewish pedigrees, has given genealogy a bad name in Germany, many practitioners admit.

In addition, much 20th-century data in Germany is locked away under difficult-to-negotiate data restrictions.

Click here to read the complete article.