Only when I was 10 did my mother explain why the television had to be turned to another channel whenever Dad's Army or Hogan's Heroes came on, and that leaving my school history books lying around was not a good idea.

It was because my father was German. He died 13 years ago, but I am sure that this weekend, with celebrations taking place marking the 60th anniversary of the end of the war, my mother is still sticking to that golden rule.

My father spent the war years growing up in Munich, the birthplace of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. He was 15 when the war ended and emigrated to Australia five years later, for job opportunities, but I suspect also to escape memories.

He spoke little of the war - so little that my school history assignments showed no more insight into the conflict than did those of my classmates, even though I had the advantage of a first-hand source.

Relatives on my mother's side fought alongside British and American soldiers and had mementoes, but my father had no reminders. The only hint of his background, apart from his accent, was a school report card from 1938, which had a swastika emblazoned at the top.

Only once did he give me an inkling of what he went through. One night, sitting on the back step with a few bottles of beer inside him, he told me that he had barely known his father, a sergeant in the German army who spent much of the war in a French prison.

As the eldest son of five children, he had to do what he could to help his mother. Drafted into Hitler's youth movement, he spent the latter days of the conflict dodging bombs to clear rubble, scrambling through rubbish for food, and worst, picking up body parts.

There was no need for him to say any more, and he never did. The stillness of night that settled around us as we sat, father and son, on the top step, deep in our thoughts, closed the door on the matter for us.

I remained perplexed, though. Nowhere could I find an account of the war from my father's perspective. My school textbooks and histories in the town library, written from the viewpoint of the victors, gave no hint that Germans, as a people, were anything but the aggressors.

My questions at school were met with blank looks and having let my apparent allegiances slip, I was cast among the baddies when war was the playground game at lunchtime.

Silence, as at home, seemed the best approach, and it is a rule I have since lived by, except with people I have grown to know and trust.

My father and his family were victims of circumstance. They did what they were told and, to the best of my knowledge, had no option.

I have no reason to feel shame. Yet both times I have spoken to the world's foremost Nazi-hunter, Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Israel office, I felt uneasy.

Germans in their homeland, through their collective experience, have doubtless better weathered such feelings. My children have no such thoughts. I sense that I will never come to terms with my father's war - the one I never properly knew, but have nevertheless lived.

Peter Kammerer is the Post's foreign editor