Gudrun Burwitz
Daughter of Heinrich Himmler (1929–2018)
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Through Final Solution, Nazism and Berlin
Early life
Born in Munich in 1929, Gudrun Himmler was the daughter of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer-SS, Chief of Police and Security forces, and Reich Minister of the Interior in Nazi Germany. She was the only biological child of Himmler and his wife Margarete Siegroth, née Boden, though her parents later adopted a son named Gerhard von der Ahé. (Himmler also had two out-of-wedlock children with his secretary, Hedwig Potthast.)
Heinrich Himmler adored his daughter and had her regularly flown to his offices in Berlin from Munich where she lived with her mother. When she was at home, he telephoned her most days and wrote to her every week. Heinrich always called her by her childhood nickname "Püppi". She accompanied her father on some official duties, including a visit to Dachau concentration camp, where more than 30,000 prisoners died. Adolf Hitler, known to her as "Uncle Hitler", gave her a doll and chocolates every New Year.
She disputed that Heinrich Himmler, who died in British captivity on 23 May 1945, died by suicide when he broke a concealed cyanide capsule, and instead maintained that he was murdered. After the Second World War, she and her mother were arrested by the Americans in Northern Italy, and were held in various camps in Italy, France and Germany. While they were held in Rome, she went on a hunger strike until she grew weak. They were brought to Nuremberg to testify at the trials, and were released in November 1946. Gudrun later bitterly referred to this time as the most difficult of her life, and said that she and her mother were treated as though they had to atone for the sins of her father.
She never renounced the Nazi ideology and repeatedly sought to justify the actions of her father. She blamed Allied propaganda for besmirching Himmler's "good name". People who knew her say that Gudrun created a "golden image" of her father, that of the father she wished she had had.
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Later life and death
Gudrun Himmler married the far-right propagandist and author Wulf Dieter Burwitz, who later became a party official in the Bavarian section of the far-right NPD, and had two children. She was affiliated with Stille Hilfe ('Silent Aid'), an organization formed to aid former SS members, which assisted Klaus Barbie ("the Butcher of Lyon") of the Lyon Gestapo and Martin Sommer, otherwise known as the "Hangman of Buchenwald", and she reportedly continued to support a Protestant old people's home in Pullach, near Munich.
From 1961 to 1963, she worked, under an assumed name, as a secretary for West Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), at its headquarters in Pullach. At the time, the agency was headed by Reinhard Gehlen, an American-recruited general who hired, among others, ex-Nazis to work for BND based on their connections and experience with Eastern Europe and anti-communist activities.
For decades Burwitz was a prominent public figure in Stille Hilfe für Kriegsgefangene und Internierte ('Silent Assistance for Prisoners of War and Interned Persons'), who provided legal and financial support to former SS members from its founding in 1951. At various meetings, for instance, the annual Ulrichsberg gathering in Austria, she received the status of both a star and an authority. Oliver Schröm, author of a book about the organisation, described her as a schillernde Nazi-Prinzessin ('flamboyant Nazi princess'). She has also been described by theologian Katharina von Kellenbach as "a prominent spokesperson for the neo-Nazi movement and an important link between old perpetrator networks and young sympathisers".
Peter Finkelgruen, a German-Jewish investigative journalist, discovered that Burwitz provided financial support for SS-Scharführer Anton Malloth, a former Nazi prison guard and a fugitive war criminal. In 2001, Malloth was convicted of beating at least 100 prisoners to death at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, including Finkelgruen's grandfather in 1942.
Gudrun Burwitz died on 24 May 2018 at her home near Munich at the age of 88.
General references
- Andersen, Dan H. (2007). Nazimyter—blodreligion og dødskult i Det Tredje Rige (in Danish). Aschehoug. ISBN 978-87-11-11847-4.
- Lebert, Norbert, and Stephan. Denn Du trägst meinen Namen: das schwere Erbe der prominenten Nazi-Kinder. Goldmann Verlag 2002, ISBN 3-442-15188-0 (in German)
- Lebert, Norbert, and Stephan. My Father's Keeper: Children of Nazi Leadership: An Intimate History of Damage and Denial, translated by Julian Evans. New York: Little, Brown, 2001. ISBN 0-316-51929-4
- Longerich, Peter (2012). Heinrich Himmler: A Life. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-959232-6.
- Pike, David Wingeate (2000). Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen, the Horror on the Danube. London: Routledge.
- Schröm, Oliver and Andrea Röpke. Stille Hilfe für braune Kameraden. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-86153-231-X (in German)