Researching my father’s childhood under the Nazis

Since a young age, I have been interested in history and family history in particular. I have always volunteered to store the records and vintage photo albums of deceased relatives. With my love of the past, those were precious to me as so few things had survived in a country that was twice destroyed by world wars. There is a shortage of physical objects from the past, but in contrast, many Germans have well-researched family trees. At the time of the Nazis, they were forced to document their ancestry to establish their Aryan blood lineage.

I collected what I could get my hands on and am the go-to family member when somebody wants to know how they are related to so and so. I even won a Facebook prize when I shared my story, locating a lost family branch by contacting everybody named Pickenpack in