Podcaster Hanna Steger meets author and journalist Lorenz Hemicker: in a conversation about his successful book "Mein Großvater, der Täter" (My Grandfather, the Perpetrator), they discuss family history, the German past and Lorenz's moving research trip.

In the late fall of 1941, the SS and their helpers murdered over 27,000 Jews in the Rumbula forest. The pits in which the people were shot were constructed by SS officer Ernst Hemicker, Lorenz's grandfather. He is never convicted for this.

80 years later, the grandson embarks on a year-long search for clues: to the site of the massacre, to Holocaust survivors in Riga and into the depths of German World War II archives. The result is a picture of a man who - like many others with him - goes from being an everyman to a perpetrator and whose deeds accompany his son and grandson like a shadow long after his death.

Lorenz Hemicker and Hanna Steger both grew up in Kierspe in the Sauerland region and attended the same school. After initially moving in different directions, they are now reunited by the topic of family history and their own reappraisal of it.