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Gudrun Burwitz

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Gudrun Burwitz
Gudrun Himmler (right) with her mother Margarete Himmler at the Nuremberg trials, 1945
Born
Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler

(1929-08-08)8 August 1929
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Died24 May 2018(2018-05-24) (aged 88)
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Other namesPüppi
Known forDaughter of Nazi Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler
SpouseWulf Dieter Burwitz
Children2
Parents
Relatives

Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Burwitz (née Himmler; 8 August 1929 – 24 May 2018) was the daughter of Heinrich Himmler and Margarete Himmler. Her father, as Reichsführer-SS, was a leading member of the Nazi Party, and chief architect of the Final Solution.[1] After the Allied victory, she was arrested and made to testify at the Nuremberg trials. Never renouncing Nazi ideology, she consistently fought to defend her father's reputation and became closely involved in neo-Nazi groups that gave support to ex-members of the SS. She married Wulf Dieter Burwitz, an official of the extremist NPD.

Relationship with her father

Gudrun with her parents.

Born in Munich in 1929,[2] 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 and legitimate child[3] of Himmler and his wife Margarete Siegroth, née Boden,[4] 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.[5])

Heinrich Himmler adored his daughter and had her regularly flown to his offices in Berlin from Munich where she lived with her mother.[6] 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".[7] She accompanied her father on some official duties,[2] including a visit to Dachau concentration camp, where more than 30,000 prisoners died.[8] “Uncle Hitler” gave her a doll and chocolates every New Year.[9]

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.[6] After the Second World War, she and her mother were arrested by the Americans in Northern Italy,[8] 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.[8] They were brought to Nuremberg to testify at the trials,[10] and were released in November 1946.[11] 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.[6]

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".[12] People who knew her say that Gudrun created a "golden image" of her father, like the father she wished she had.[13]

Later life

She 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,[4] 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.[14]

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, near Munich.[10][15] 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.[2][16]

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.[17] 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 "flamboyant Nazi princess" ("schillernde Nazi-Prinzessin").[18] 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".[19]

Peter Finkelgrun, 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 Finkelgrun's grandfather in 1943.[13]

Gudrun Burwitz died on 24 May 2018 at her home near Munich at the age of 88.[2][20][8]

Notes

  1. ^ Browning, Christopher R. (2004). The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. Comprehensive History of the Holocaust. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 36–110. ISBN 0-8032-1327-1.
  2. ^ a b c d "Gudrun Burwitz, ever-loyal daughter of Nazi mastermind Heinrich Himmler, dies at 88". The Washington Post. 1 July 2018. Retrieved 1 July 2018.
  3. ^ King, Martin (6 September 2022). Blood Is Thicker than War: Brothers and Sisters on the Front Lines. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-63758-353-1.
  4. ^ a b Kelerhoff, Sven Felix; Meyer, Simone; Schuster, Jacques; Schuster, Ulrich (1 February 2014). "Himmlers Nachwuchs". Welt Online (in German). Retrieved 30 April 2015.
  5. ^ Andersen 2007, p. 165.
  6. ^ a b c Helm, Siegfried (1998). "Himmlers Tochter hilft den alten Gefährten". Berliner Morgenpost (in German). Retrieved 5 October 2008.
  7. ^ Longerich 2012, p. 468.
  8. ^ a b c d Sandomir, Richard. Gudrun Burwitz, Ever-Loyal Daughter of Himmler, Is Dead at 88. New York Times. 6 July 2018. Retrieved 22 September 2024.
  9. ^ Getlen, Larry (3 February 2018). "How Nazi offspring dealt with their families' hellish histories". Retrieved 22 September 2024.
  10. ^ a b "Himmler's daughter worked for post-war German spy agency". BBC News. 29 June 2018. Retrieved 22 September 2024.
  11. ^ Katrin Himmler, The Himmler Brothers, Pan Macmillan, 2012, p.275.
  12. ^ Lacapra, Dominick (2016). "Trauma, History, Memory, Identity: What Remains?". History and Theory. 55 (3): 375–400. doi:10.1111/hith.10817. ISSN 0018-2656.
  13. ^ a b Sanai, Darius (1999). "The sins of my father". The Independent (London). Retrieved 5 October 2008.
  14. ^ Pike 2000, p. 380.
  15. ^ Daly-Groves, Luke (15 April 2020). "Control not morality? Explaining the selective employment of Nazi war criminals by British and American intelligence agencies in occupied Germany". Intelligence and National Security. 35 (3): 331–349. doi:10.1080/02684527.2019.1705101. ISSN 0268-4527.
  16. ^ "Germany's BND spy agency employed Heinrich Himmler's daughter". Deutsche Welle. 29 June 2018. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
  17. ^ Fulbrook, Mary (2020). "Reframing the Past: Justice, Guilt, and Consolidation in East and West Germany after Nazism". Central European History. 53 (2): 294–313. doi:10.1017/S0008938920000114. ISSN 0008-9389.
  18. ^ Fabian Leber: Gudrun Burwitz und die „Stille Hilfe“: Die schillernde Nazi-Prinzessin; in: Der Tagesspiegel, 10 June 2001 (In German)
  19. ^ Kellenbach, Katharina von (1 May 2013). The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Post-War Lives of Nazi Perpetrators. Oxford University Press. p. 159. ISBN 978-0-19-932375-3.
  20. ^ "Tod von Gudrun Burwitz: Heinrich Himmlers Tochter, Nazi bis zuletzt". Der Spiegel (in German). Retrieved 30 June 2018.

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. Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-86153-231-X (in German)
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