Alma hadn’t only cheated her brother, she had also been insanely jealous of his wife, who by chance was also named Alma. She wrote a letter informing the bishop of their Mormon church that her sister-in-law’s eldest son, Franz, was actually an illegitimate son born to a different man. The irony, I had learned that day in the records, was that her own first child had also been conceived out of wedlock and was born only twenty days after her marriage to the Nazi Erich Kramer.

. . .

We search through the cards further. The postmarks follow the course of the war, and Erich Kramer seems to have landed wherever the action was. He was part of the original invasion in Poland, and he joined the invasion of France and Yugoslavia as well. The postmarks move east to Melitipol in the Ukraine from January to March of 1943.

Most troubling to Franz, however, are the cards in 1944 from Lodz. The Jewish ghetto had been disbanded that year, its residents shipped off to extermination camps, primarily Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. The military police, Franz figures, certainly would have played a role.

“I’d rather not know what he did there,” says Franz. “That was a terrible address. It troubles me a great deal what he might have done there.”

I look at the front of the card from Litzmannstadt. It bears a naive painting of two sweet girls with red headscarves playing wooden flutes. The date is November 2, 1944, Litzmannstadt—Lodz, Gr. Kaserne, Gneisenaustrasse.

Franz frowns: “One only chose the most trusted of the Nazis to break up the ghettoes.”

I remind myself that my bloodline is different from Franz’s. I find odd comfort in remembering that his father, the good Nazi, doesn’t have any Schumann blood coursing through him.

. . .

This paternal approach continues through to his time in a Soviet gulag. One letter sent from “Lager 7099-3” in Alma Ata responds to a note from Franz’s mother about problems the boy was having at home and in school. “Hopefully your next school marks will improve,” he writes. But at the same time he reminds Franz that learning his Sunday school lessons at the Mormon church could be much more important for his later life than anything else.

The irony of the imprisoned Nazi preaching religion to his son is lost on Franz. “He felt very strongly about the church,” he says. Indeed, says Franz, Mormonism and National Socialism were his father’s two great passions. Both worlds, Franz suggests, offer a man discipline and a doctrine of absolutes by which to lead his life. One requires absolute faith in some superior being, and the other demands absolute loyalty to a Führer.