Am Beispiel meines Bruders

“Absent and yet present he has accompanied me through my childhood, in the sorrow of the mother, the doubts of the father, the overtones between the parents. It was told by him that these were small, always similar situations, which proved him to be brace and decent. Even if the talk was not about him, he was, however, present, more present than other dead people, through stories, Photos and in the comparisons of the father, who include me, the descendant”. Who was this Karl-Heinz Timm, born in 1924 in Hamburg, who died in 1943 in a military hospital in the Ukraine? Why did he voluntarily report for the Waffen SS? How did he deal with the duty to kill? What options did he have, which opportunities are still closed to him? Where is the place of guilt, where that of the parents’ conscience, who survived him?