What happens when a Jew & a Nazi descendant fall in love?

I never imagined myself living in Germany. Growing up, my extended family would playfully boycott German products, still bitter about the war. The truth is, I'm only here because of love. When I met my German partner by chance (kismet) on an app while traveling, I told him early on: I don't want to date a Nazi descendant. I figured my Jewish ancestors had already been through enough. He laughed. "No problem," he said. "Zero Nazi heritage here. My family is mostly not even German."

We went on a date on a very cold November evening in Kreuzberg, Berlin. I nearly stepped on a shrine atop a Stolperstein, a small brass cobblestone-sized memorial plaque for victims of the Third Reich. Someone had lit a candle and left a rose intentionally across it. Matthias explained to me, with a dash of pride, about Germany's commitment to honor Reichspogromnacht (or what Americans call Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass) every year through this gesture. I learned that on this night, many German citizens take it upon themselves to polish the stones, light candles and remember the lives destroyed.

Wow, I thought to myself. Germany really has its stuff together! Americans can't even agree that our economy was built on slavery and genocide, let alone build a formal culture of remembrance around it.

A year later, I met Matthias' mother for the first time, and we went on a walk in the quiet hills of rural Bavaria. I asked her about her family history, and the first thing she told me was about her drunk Nazi grandfather.

Well, technically not a drunk, but as she later discovered through meticulous research, ein Quartalssäufer: "a quarterly alcoholic," according to the Nazi administrative system. He was an early NSDAP member, a clear fanatic. Oy vey!

Matthias deep in thought (and shame) after his mother (on the left) talks about their Nazi heritage.

Matthias, needless to say, was mortified. His mother insisted he'd been told about his great-grandfather's history many times. He was stunned into silence. We stood together in the sheer discomfort of the limits of perpetrator memory.

Perhaps, I thought, the state's elaborate remembrance culture (the Stolpersteine, memorials, the school trips to the concentration camps) relieves individual Germans of the burden of remembering their own family's past.

I started to wonder: How many others who diligently polish the stones each year have also sublimated or twisted or conveniently forgotten their own family's participation in the Third Reich?

And, as my colleague, scholar Nahed Samour, pointed out to me, why would we ever trust the state to do the remembering for us, when it was the state that created these horrors to begin with?

German memory culture asks: Who gave orders? Who pulled triggers? Who was a true believer? Who was a true anti-Semite?

It does not tend to ask: Who funded the Nazis' rise to power and who are those living descendants today? And what are they doing with the wealth that accumulated through the Third Reich? And - Who was able to use capital from that era to start other lucrative businesses after 1945? The Third Reich was more than just a horrific chapter in Germany's past. It was a transformational economic event that still shapes Europe's economy today.

David de Jong writes in hist book Nazi Billionaires (which I highly recommend) aabout the infamous secret meeting on February 20, 1933, when roughly two dozen of Germany's wealthiest industrialists gathered with Hitler. They pledged over 2 million Reichsmarks to his campaign because, essentially, they believed he would make them more money. De Jong writes that some of these tycoons were ardent Nazis who unquestioningly embraced Hitler's ideology, but most were simply calculating, unscrupulous opportunists looking to expand their business empires at any cost.

Wealthy people don't have to believe the ideology to profit from fascism. They just have to see opportunity.

The industrialists who were tried at Nuremberg received light sentences and were quietly released within a few years; most were never tried at all. And certainly, their wealth was preserved: the Quandts and Fincks are among Germany's wealthiest families today, and the Quandts still control BMW. The von Fincks are major funders of the AfD, Germany's far-right party. The Porsche family, whose car was central to Nazi propaganda and whose factories used forced labor including concentration camp inmates, has a net worth of approximately €66.5 billion.

Abandoned homes in Detroit, MI. 'White flight' left predominantly Black neighborhoods without investment or resources for generations. This is one fragment of the immense impacts of racial capitalism on the city. Photo: Kelsey Caroline.

I know something about selective memory around wealth. When I turned 22, my great-uncle Joe passed away, and I inherited a portion of his wealth. Joe was a furniture upholsterer and a working class man. However, thanks to the GI Bill, after he served in the war he received federal support that allowed him to buy a home and start investing in Wall Street. While he hardly spent money on himself and lived a frugal lifestyle, Wall Street multiplied this money, miraculously turning him into an almost-millionaire.

Marjorie Kelly describes this magical phenomenon so well in her book ‘Wealth Supremacy’:

“When investors look at their/our portfolio returns, we step into the dreamworld of wealth, the fiction that financial gains somehow fall from the sky, pristine and unblemished. The system is so focused on benefit to wealth that it ignores the impact on others. Wealth has an underside we rarely talk about.”

So if that wealth did not fall from the sky, where was it from? What was its dark underside?
The money I inherited was invested in oil companies, weapons, big pharma, private prisons, and other typical companies in the stock market.

Digging deeper, my great-uncle grew up in one of America's most segregated cities, Detroit, Michigan, where Black communities were largely excluded from buying homes or attending college, not by Southern law but by Northern practice: housing discrimination, economic barriers, systematic exclusion. And to make matters even more clearly unjust, most Black veterans were denied benefits of the GI bill due to discrimination.

My family has always opposed racism ideologically, and my parents fought for civil rights. But what does it mean to accumulate wealth when your Black peers faced violent resistance if they tried to move into your white neighborhood, when banks refused them mortgages, when they were systematically locked out of the wealth-building opportunities we could access as easily as breathing?

This is the ubiquitous story of wealth accumulation. How we accumulate wealth is not usually a story of clear 'evil,' or malicious intentions. But rather it is often in the not doing, the opportunism, the looking away, that fosters wealth accumulation.

Stories like my great-uncle's, and like the Nazi billionaires, are not exceptions. They reflect how wealth protects itself everywhere. Just as we have a strong human need to believe we are good people, wealth holders must find a 'story' to justify keeping more resources than others. A story of why we deserve wealth, why we are one of the good ones. And so I was told that my great-uncle Joe was a frugal man who 'got lucky.'

I am not here to question my great-uncle's fundamental goodness or even his character. But I use his story to illustrate what I hope more wealthy Germans might be able to do: to demonstrate the ways in which wealth is created from systems of harm, be that racism, genocide, colonization, no matter our individual ideology.

I am pleased that I managed to divest this inheritance from the stock market entirely, and to use half of that money to fund climate justice and reparations work in the United States. Aligning money with my values is deeply satisfying, but it is also just one part of how I see myself trying to honor and heal my lineage. There is so much more work to be done.

I have been guiding inheritors of wealth toward redistribution and reparations for over fourteen years. As I brought my career to Germany, it was impossible to not mostly talk about the Third Reich. All of the agonizing contradictions I have described led to the need for answers. That was the birth of the Hour Before Dawn.

The Hour Before Dawn is a programme for wealth holders to explore if and how their ancestors financially profited from the National Socialist (NS) regime.

We support wealth-holders to find the truth, sit with the truth, and decide how to use that information to guide personal and financial choices in the present. We invite participants to face the massive shame and guilt and collective trauma that comes with the legacy of perpetration. We guide participants through family and wealth research, a deepened analysis of fascism, tools for organizing one's family, storytelling, and most importantly - tools for taking reparative action.

Our facilitation team is a cross-class mixture of Jews and non-Jews, descendants of those who were targeted and descendants of those who looked away. We've found a special power in bringing those perspectives together to grapple with these very complex histories. Pictured here is Teresa Distelberger, Iris Brilliant, and Justine Epstein. You can read more about the team here.

Justine leading a workshop on anti-Semitism, fascism, and zionism.

Shouldn’t we just leave the past in the past?

There is a collective fatigue in revisiting WWII in Germany, and sometimes a resistance to return to the past. Yet fascism is rising again. The AfD, classified as a right-wing extremist organization by Germany's own intelligence agency, is polling neck and neck with the governing CDU. The democratic firewalls built after 1945 might not hold.

Today there are different scapegoats, different contexts, different regime names, but the same underlying structure is once again rearing its ugly head.

As historian Jason Stanley writes, “Fascism is not a new threat, but rather a permanent temptation.”

One major reason, I believe, for fascism returning to Germany is that Germany did not address how much wealth inequality shaped the success of fascism to begin with. The more inequality there is, the more vulnerable people become to being seduced by simple answers, strong leaders, propaganda, and scapegoats. Memory culture unfortunately fixates much more on ideology, but without oppression, why would one need a scapegoat?

Wealth holders today have a specific responsibility in resisting fascism. To continue to accumulate more wealth than you need encourages fascism, no matter who you vote for. And because wealth-holders can move money in ways the state never would, they can tell the story of opportunism, which is more common than pure hatred.

When a wealth-holder is a bystander during a genocide, it’s more than complicity - it is investment, it is profit. And that profit echoes forward, generation after generation, until someone chooses to interrupt it. Today there are multiple genocides and wars, and wealth-holders - regardless of ideology- benefit financially.

Here's what we encourage of our Hour Before Dawn participants: Find out the truth, and go to the archives, and find what your family gained while others lost. Then tell that story. Every time an inheritor tells the truth about their wealth's origins, it can redirect class rage away from scapegoats and toward actual systems of power.

Hour Before Dawn Events: May Calendar

This is a confidential dinner for those who have access to wealth and want to explore their family's history related to the NS regime. Please RSVP here, or click on the photo.

This event is open to all. To RSVP, please email: thehourbeforedawn@googlegroups.com

Curious about the Hour Before Dawn programme and want to learn more before applying? You're welcome to join our informational session to meet the facilitation team and hear about the programme. Open to all. RSVP here or click on the photo.

Registration for the Hour Before Dawn 2026 programme is now open

Overview of dates:

Cycle One runs from November 2026 through June 2027. It's designed as an arc: you begin by grounding in community and exploring your family's history, move into the emotional and financial dimensions of that inheritance, and finish with concrete plans for reparative action steps.

The programme includes two immersive in-person retreats in Berlin, one in-person daylong, five virtual sessions (Sundays, 16:00-19:00 CET), monthly peer group meetings, and three individual coaching sessions.

Key Dates:

6–9 November, 2026 — Opening Retreat (in-person, Berlin)
13 December — Online Session One
17 January, 2027 — Online Session Two
20 February — In-Person Daylong (Berlin, with hybrid option)
14 March — Online Session Three
11 April — Online Session Four
2 May — Online Session Five
4-6 June — Closing Retreat (in-person, Berlin)

A Jew & A Nazi Fall in Love

What happens when a Jew & a Nazi descendant fall in love?

The Hour Before Dawn is a programme for wealth holders to explore if and how their ancestors financially profited from the National Socialist (NS) regime.

Hour Before Dawn Events: May Calendar

Registration for the Hour Before Dawn 2026 programme is now open

Read more about the 2026 programme in detail here.