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Welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me,

Marry and James Holland and Jim, we are delighted to be joined by some very, very special guests for this edition. Very, very special guests. We've got Henry Montgomery, great friend of the show. Yeah. Grandfather of the marginally more famous Phil Marshall. Yes. And we've got Angela Finlay. And Angela has written a book called In My Grandfather's Shadow. Yep. Because although she was born and brought up in the UK, her grandfather was a German general by the end of the war. Goodness. All the complications that come with that. And you knew about it, didn't you? I mean, you were aware of your German ancestry growing up,

and that was slightly problematic growing up in rural Hampshire? Rural Hampshire, exactly. And my mother had a photograph of her father in Wehrmacht General's hat with his knights cross around his

neck, you know, and sitting on her writing desk for everybody to see. And for us, it was completely

normal to have a German general sitting on a writing desk. And for others, it absolutely wasn't.

So, yeah, but it only came much later that it dawned on me. What a sort of impact and what a

significance this had. I just didn't know the context. So then you went on

this sort of journey of discovery, didn't you, to sort of find out about your grandfather's roots and

wartime experiences. Sort of when I turned 40 and before that, it was all kind of unconscious.

Because of course, I grew up then, as probably we all did,

with all three TV channels being full of anti-German war films. People around me were going,

I hate the Germans, the Germans were the baddies, they were the evil ones, they were the losers,

and they are the enemies. So it isn't kind of psychological rocket science that I internalised that

half of me must be bad, evil, enemy to those around me. Then of course we learned about the

Holocaust at school and of course suddenly you, I'd been brought up that not all Germans were

Nazis and that there were good Germans

and my grandfather was one of them, of course.

But, you know, when you see the Holocaust, there's suddenly no excuse.

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