Bettina Göring
Bettina Goering is not only a doctor of oriental medicine, but also the grandniece of Hermann Goering. She was born into a family, who was on both sides of the fence in the 'Third Reich'. A maternal grandfather, that was a stand up anti fascist and a paternal grandmother, who was a diehard Nazi, she was early on confronted with this conflict.
Coming of age in the 60ties, she tried different ways to deal with it, for a short time drugs, politics and Jungian psychology as approaches. It took a while to realize, that all of the above was more of a reaction to her upbringing and she started to look on a spiritual level to find solutions. It is a process of coming to terms with the 'Sins of our fathers' and finding forgiveness for the deeds of our own ancestors.
Her grandfather's brother was the right-hand of Adolf Hitler and Marshall of the Empire, the leader of the SA and founder of the feared GESTAPO - Hermann Goering. He was a leading architect of the "Final Solution" to exterminate Europe's Jews and condoned the concept of the concentrations camps, where in perfectly engineered gas-chambers and extermination ovens more than six million, mostly Jewish, human beings were destroyed. After the war he was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials, but he committed suicide in his cell the night before the execution.
His grandniece's odyssey to cleanse herself of the family's tarnished past has brought her to meet Ruth, a child of Holocaust survivors. In her she could face the pain of an angry victim, which started her break through from a guilt-ridden life. Hoping to help others Bettina and Ruth had the courage to tell their story in a documentary called "Bloodlines". In this film both of them struggle to come in their personal encounter to terms with a horrific historical event. They dare to be torn open and made vulnerable to their deepest pain. This encounter turned out to be a practical portrayal of the path towards reconciliation and change. It is not the way, how official politics is practiced, but it seems more effective and engaging. This is politics of the heart and soul.