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What Happened to Himmler’s Daughter After the War? — Transcript

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0:00Gudrun Himmler is 15 years old, and
0:02she's hiding in the South Tyrolean city
0:04of Bolzano with her mother when American
0:06troops come for them on May 13th, 1945.
0:10According to later accounts, SS men gave
0:12away their hiding place. She's the only
0:14child Heinrich Himmler had with his
0:16wife. Her father nicknamed her Püppi,
0:19little doll. In one of the last letters
0:21he sent the family, dated April 17th, he
0:23addressed it to Mommy and to Püppi. And
0:26for the first and only time in those
0:27letters, he closed with Heil Hitler. She
0:30doesn't know yet where he is. She
0:32doesn't know that 10 days after her
0:34arrest in a British army headquarters in
0:36Lüneburg in Northern Germany, he'll bite
0:38down on a capsule of potassium cyanide
0:40hidden in his mouth and be dead within
0:42about 15 minutes. And she certainly
0:45doesn't know that she has 73 years ahead
0:47of her, or what she'll do with them. The
0:49name she carries weighs more than almost
0:51any other in modern history. Heinrich
0:54Himmler took over the SS when it had
0:55fewer than 300 men and turned it into
0:58the machine that ran the concentration
0:59camps and the killing centers. He was
1:02one of the chief architects of the
1:03Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were
1:05murdered. And his killing units also
1:07targeted Roma, disabled people, and many
1:10others. Most children of the Nazi
1:12leadership spent their lives running
1:13from that kind of inheritance or quietly
1:16living with it. Gudrun went the other
1:18way. She made her father's reputation
1:20her life's work. And the new West
1:22Germany, the democracy built on the
1:24ruins of his Reich, didn't stand in her
1:26way. More than once, it actually made
1:28room for her. A church charity, then a
1:30spy agency that put her on its payroll
1:32under false names, and later a welfare
1:35office that ended up covering the care
1:36home bills of a man later convicted of
1:38murder. The story we've pieced together
1:40comes from German and international
1:42court reporting and newspaper archives,
1:44from the files the West German
1:46Intelligence Service opened up after she
1:47died, from journalists who spent years
1:49following her, and from members of her
1:51own family who chose a very different
1:53path. It starts though in a villa beside
1:56a Bavarian lake with a little girl who
1:58thought her deserved more medals. Gudrun
2:01Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler was
2:04born in Munich on August 8th, 1929.
2:07That same year, Hitler made her father
2:09Reichsführer of the SS. She grew up
2:11mostly with her mother, Margarete, in a
2:13house at Gemund am Tegernsee, south of
2:15Munich, while Himmler spent most of his
2:17time in Berlin.
2:19Contact came through occasional visits,
2:21a steady stream of phone calls and
2:22letters. He wrote to her every week.
2:25There was a boy in the house, too.
2:27Gerhard von der Ahe was born in 1928.
2:30His father, an SS man named Kurt von der
2:32Ahe, was shot during a street fight in
2:34Berlin in February 1933. In that March,
2:38the Himmlers took Gerhard in and raised
2:40him as their son. He'll come back into
2:41the story later because the war treated
2:44him very differently from his sister. As
2:46for Gudrun, the record of her childhood
2:48is unusually detailed because she kept a
2:50diary and because the family's private
2:52papers survived. And what comes through
2:54is a child who adored her father and
2:57wanted the world to honor him. In one
2:59entry, she complains that everyone else
3:01gets medals and decorations and only
3:03Puppy doesn't.
3:04She called Hitler Uncle Hitler in that
3:06diary and, according to the reporting on
3:08her life, he gave her a doll and
3:10chocolates. Then there's the entry most
3:12people quote. In 1941, when she was
3:15about 12, her father took her to Dachau,
3:17the Nazis' first concentration camp,
3:19which he'd set up himself back in 1933.
3:22She wrote that they went to the SS camp
3:24and saw everything they could.
3:26She described the pear trees and the
3:28paintings made by prisoners. Depending
3:30on which translation you read, she
3:32summed it up as very nice or marvelous.
3:35The prisoners themselves, the people the
3:37camp was built to hold, barely appear in
3:39what she wrote. It's easy to read that
3:41line and judge a 12-year-old. It's
3:44harder and probably more useful to
3:46notice what a child was shown and what
3:48she was kept from. Himmler built a
3:50private world for his daughter that ran
3:52parallel to his public one. She was a
3:54member of the League of German Girls,
3:56the female branch of the Hitler Youth,
3:58from 1939 or 1940. Her father liked to
4:01have her at his side. People called her,
4:03with some irony, the Nazi princess. What
4:06she didn't know about was her father's
4:08second family. By around 1940, Himmler
4:10was in a relationship with his
4:11secretary, Hedwig Potthast, and they had
4:14two children, a son named Helge, born on
4:16February 15th, 1942, and a daughter,
4:19Nanette Dorothea, born on July 20th,
4:221944. Helge was born at the Hohenlychen
4:25Sanatorium. Accounts differ on whether
4:27his sister was born there or in
4:28Berchtesgaden. Gudrun's mother knew
4:30about the affair by early 1941 at the
4:33latest, and she was bitter about it.
4:35Gudrun herself learned that she had a
4:36half brother and a half sister only
4:38after the war. That discovery has its
4:40own ending, and we'll get to it. In the
4:43spring of 1945, that whole private world
4:46fell apart in about five weeks. On April
4:4819th, Margarete and Gudrun left Gmund
4:51with SS men for South Tyrol, just across
4:53the Alps in northern Italy. Over the
4:55following days, Himmler went behind
4:57Hitler's back. He asked Count Folke
4:59Bernadotte of the Swedish Red Cross to
5:01pass a surrender offer to the Western
5:03allies. Hitler found out, stripped him
5:06of every office, and ordered his arrest.
5:08His wife and daughter hid in Bolzano
5:10until the Americans arrived. Then came
5:12the arrest on May 13th. Himmler,
5:15meanwhile, was trying to vanish. He
5:17carried a forged military pay book in
5:19the name of Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger.
5:21Around May 21st, he and two aides were
5:24stopped at a checkpoint at Bremervörde,
5:26set up by former Soviet prisoners of
5:28war. They were passed between several
5:30camps until, on May 23rd, they reached
5:32the British 31st Civilian Interrogation
5:34Camp near Lüneburg.
5:36There, officials noticed something odd
5:38about his papers. They carried a stamp
5:40British military intelligence had
5:41already seen on documents used by
5:43fleeing SS men.
5:45The duty officer, Captain Thomas
5:47Sylvester, began what should have been a
5:48routine interview. Himmler admitted who
5:51he was. He was searched, then taken to
5:53the headquarters of the British Second
5:54Army for a medical examination. When the
5:56doctor tried to look inside his mouth,
5:58he jerked his head away and bit down.
6:01The British buried him in an unmarked
6:03grave near Lüneburg, and nobody found it
6:05since.
6:06The news reached Gudrun in Allied
6:08custody.
6:09By one account, she suffered a nervous
6:10breakdown. German sources describe a
6:12physical collapse, and over time she
6:15came to doubt the official version. She
6:17believed her father hadn't killed
6:18himself at all, but had been murdered by
6:20the British.
6:21A British author, Hugh Thomas, later
6:23argued a version of that theory. But the
6:25reference works in museums that document
6:27his last days, from the interrogation
6:29camp to the cyanide capsule, record a
6:31suicide. And that's the account
6:32historians generally accept. So at 15,
6:36in the space of about 5 weeks, Gudrun
6:38lost her father, her home, and the
6:40protection her name had always given
6:41her.
6:42What the Allies did with her next shaped
6:44her, and her own account of those months
6:46would harden into something close to a
6:48lifelong grievance. Mother and daughter
6:50weren't charged with anything, but they
6:52weren't free either. They were held in
6:54camps in Italy, then France, then
6:56Germany. In Rome, Gudrun went on hunger
6:58strike. By the autumn of 1945, they were
7:01in Nuremberg, where the International
7:02Military Tribunal was preparing to try
7:04the surviving Nazi leadership.
7:06A photograph dated November 24th, 1945,
7:10shows the two of them in Allied
7:11internment there. Margareta was
7:13questioned in connection with the
7:14Nuremberg proceedings in September.
7:16Himmler's biographer, the historian
7:18Peter Longerich, concludes from her
7:20interrogation that she'd been told very
7:22little about her husband's official work
7:24and that her outlook was narrow and
7:26small town.
7:27Their last stop was an internment camp
7:29at Ludwigsburg.
7:30In November 1946, the Allies let them go
7:33because neither was treated as a
7:35suspect.
7:36Gudrun was 17.
7:38She later called that period the most
7:39difficult time of her life.
7:41Margareta complained that they'd been
7:43treated as though they had to atone for
7:45the alleged sins of Gudrun's father.
7:47From the other side of the wire, it
7:49looked very different. To the American
7:51and British authorities, these weren't
7:52simply grieving civilians. They were the
7:55wife and daughter of the man who ran the
7:57SS at the very moment the scale of the
7:59camps was being laid bare to the world.
8:02In our reading, holding them for 18
8:03months wasn't gentle, but it wasn't
8:05punishment for anything they'd done
8:07either.
8:08It was the logic of investigators
8:09sorting through the evidence of a
8:10continent-wide crime.
8:13Those two perspectives, the daughter's
8:14sense of injustice and the
8:16investigator's sense of necessity, don't
8:18seem ever to have met. We haven't found
8:20any public statement in which Gudrun
8:21acknowledged the second one.
8:23Where do you go when you're released as
8:25Himmler's widow and Himmler's child? The
8:27answer was a church charity.
8:30From late 1946 they lived at the
8:32Bodelschwingh Institutions in Bethel
8:33near Bielefeld, a large church-run
8:35welfare foundation. They worked in
8:37weaving and spinning and their keep was
8:39partly paid for by donations. German
8:42researchers have pointed out that Bethel
8:43also sheltered or employed a number of
8:45other former Nazis. Not everyone was
8:47comfortable with that. In June 1947 the
8:50European edition of the New York Tribune
8:52ran a story under the headline Widow of
8:54Heinrich Himmler lives like a
8:55gentlewoman. Whether that was fair or
8:58not, it caught something real, the
9:00unease of watching the families of the
9:02regime settle back into ordinary life
9:04while millions of its victims had no
9:06families left to return to. Gudrun, for
9:08her part, tried to build a trade. From
9:101947 she attended a master craft school
9:13in Bielefeld, but after the currency
9:15reform of June 1948 she didn't get a
9:17scholarship and had to stop. She trained
9:19as a seamstress instead and passed her
9:21journeyman's exam in 1951. A year later,
9:24at about 22, she left her mother and
9:26moved to Munich. Her mother's own
9:28reckoning, meanwhile, dragged on through
9:30the denazification tribunals. In 1948 a
9:33tribunal in Bielefeld classed Margarete
9:35in category three, less incriminated.
9:38Her lawyer appealed in 1950 and in 1951
9:42she was reclassified as a mere follower.
9:44Then a second proceeding in Munich
9:46opened over an unresolved property
9:47question about the Gemund house went the
9:49other way. On January 15th, 1953 she was
9:53classed as incriminated, category two,
9:56on the grounds that she'd profited from
9:58her husband's rise.
9:59The penalties included 30 days of
10:01special labor, the loss of her pension
10:03rights, and the loss of her right to
10:05vote. To us, it's a small window into
10:07how uneven those tribunals could be. The
10:10same woman judged a follower in one city
10:12and a beneficiary in another. And
10:14Gerhard? At 16, he joined the SS in Brno
10:17and fought on the Eastern Front. He was
10:20captured by the Soviets, and he came
10:21home years later as what Germans called
10:23a late returnee.
10:25For a while, he lived in Margareta's
10:27apartment. He died in December 2010, and
10:30as far as we can find, he never sought
10:32any public role.
10:33The two children Himmler raised came out
10:35of the war in completely different ways.
10:37One kept his head down. The other was
10:40about to lift hers up. In Munich, Gudrun
10:43took whatever work she could get as a
10:45cutter, a piece worker, an office
10:47assistant, a secretary.
10:49Several times she lost the job when an
10:51employer found out whose daughter she
10:52was. She described that in what's
10:54usually called the only real interview
10:56she ever gave to the German journalist
10:58Norbert Lebert in the late 1950s.
11:01Decades later, his son, Stephan Lebert,
11:03tried to interview her again for a book
11:05on the children of Nazi leaders. She
11:07refused.
11:08Silence with journalists, though, didn't
11:10mean silence everywhere. Her private
11:12loyalty was about to find an
11:14organization.
11:15On October 7th, 1951, a founders meeting
11:18was held in Munich for an association
11:20called
11:24Silent Aid for Prisoners of War and
11:26Internees.
11:27It was entered in the official register
11:28of associations at Wolfratshausen on
11:30November 15th. Its first president was a
11:33Catholic aristocrat, Princess Helene
11:35Elisabeth von Isenburg, who became known
11:37to the inmates of the Allied War Crimes
11:39Prison at Landsberg as the mother of the
11:41Landsbergers. On paper, it was a
11:44charity, and its founding committee
11:45included two senior churchmen, Theophil
11:48Wurm and Johannes Neuhäusler. But
11:50sitting alongside them were men like
11:51Wilhelm Spengler, a former department
11:53head in Himmler's own Reich Security
11:55Main Office, and Heinrich Malz, a former
11:57advisor to Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Silent
12:00Aid campaigned against the death penalty
12:02for convicted Nazis, presenting them as
12:04men who'd only followed orders. It sent
12:06Christmas money to prisoners, paid
12:08lawyers, filed clemency petitions, and
12:10supported families. Over the decades,
12:12the list of people it reportedly helped
12:14reads like an index of the most wanted.
12:17Klaus Barbie, Erich Priebke, Josef
12:19Schwammberger, and defendants from the
12:21Majdanek trial in Düsseldorf.
12:23Some accounts go further and link the
12:24network to the escapes of men like Adolf
12:26Eichmann and Josef Mengele, but the
12:28evidence for that is thinner and it's
12:30best treated as an allegation rather
12:32than an established fact.
12:33For decades, Gudrun was the most famous
12:36face connected with Stille Hilfe,
12:37treated inside the group as a symbol and
12:39an authority.
12:41One German journalist who investigated
12:42it, Oliver Schröm, called her a
12:44flamboyant Nazi princess. The theologian
12:47Katharina von Kellenbach described her
12:49as a prominent spokesperson for the
12:51neo-Nazi movement. One early detail is
12:54genuinely disputed. Some
12:55English-language sources say Gudrun
12:57helped found the Viking Jugend, a youth
12:59movement modeled on the Hitler Youth.
13:02German sources say it was set up in 1952
13:04and describe her as a supporter rather
13:06than a founder. We haven't found a
13:08document that settles it, so treat the
13:10stronger version with caution. What's
13:11[clears throat] clearer is how she used
13:13her name abroad. In 1955, she and Adolf
13:16von Ribbentrop, the son of Hitler's
13:18foreign minister, traveled to London at
13:20the invitation of a follower of the
13:21British fascist Oswald Mosley.
13:24She spoke to members of Mosley's Union
13:26Movement. According to the historian
13:27Graham Macklin's research, she told them
13:29her father had been misunderstood and
13:31she blamed Jews for destroying his
13:33reputation. That is an antisemitic claim
13:36made by the daughter of the man who
13:38organized the murder of Europe's Jews,
13:40and it's recorded here because it shows
13:42what her loyalty involved. This was
13:44grief turned into politics. She once
13:47said she saw it as her life's task to
13:49show the world her father in a
13:50different, true light. Translations of
13:52that quote vary, but its meaning never
13:54did. And in the late 1950s and early
13:571960s, the strangest chapter of that
13:59project played out inside West Germany's
14:02own intelligence service. In June 2018,
14:05a month after Gudrun died, the
14:06Bundesnachrichtendienst, Germany's
14:08foreign intelligence agency, known as
14:10the BND, confirmed something to the
14:12newspaper Bild. Himmler's daughter had
14:15worked for it as a secretary from 1961
14:17to 1963 under a different name at its
14:20headquarters in Pullach, just outside
14:22Munich.
14:23The agency doesn't normally comment on
14:25personnel matters. Its historian, Bodo
14:27Hechelhammer, explained that it could do
14:29so because she was no longer alive and
14:31that it was part of the BND's effort to
14:33be open about its Nazi links. How was
14:35that even possible? Look at who ran the
14:38BND. Its chief at the time was Reinhard
14:41Gehlen, a former Second World War German
14:43general who'd also worked for American
14:44intelligence after the war. He led the
14:47agency until 1968 and under him it
14:49employed many former military officers
14:51and former Nazis.
14:53Historians have argued that ex-Nazis
14:55inside West Germany's security agencies
14:57may have protected others like them, and
14:59the BND has faced criticism for failing
15:01to root out right-wing extremists in its
15:03early decades. None of that makes her
15:05hiring less startling. It just makes it
15:07less surprising.
15:09Then, in December 2019, the BND
15:11declassified its file on her at Bild's
15:13request. According to the Associated
15:15Press, the documents showed that the
15:17agency knew perfectly well who she was.
15:20It even helped her negotiate a contract
15:21with a newspaper for an interview and
15:23the payment that came with it. The
15:25Spanish newspaper ABC, summarizing the
15:27files, went further. It reported that
15:29Gudrun had signed a confidentiality
15:31agreement as early as August 22nd, 1958
15:34under the name Gudrun Boden, her
15:36mother's maiden name. That from July
15:381st, 1960 she was paid through a cover
15:41company called Pata und Schubut at 550
15:43marks a month. That over time she used
15:46the names Gudrun Boden, Gudrun Hiller,
15:48and Gerda Sievers, and that her file
15:50carried the number V-54026.
15:54According to the same report, the
15:55interview in question was Norbert
15:57Lebert's piece for the Münchner
15:58Illustrierte, and the BND asked the
16:00publisher to raise her fee from 1,000 to
16:032,000 marks. So the intelligence service
16:06of a democratic state helped Himmler's
16:08daughter get paid more to tell her story
16:10to the press. Those 1958 and 1960 dates
16:13also sit earlier than the official 1961
16:16start, which suggests her links to
16:18agency went back further than the
16:20original statement admitted.
16:22A note of caution though, these details
16:24come from newspaper summaries of the
16:26file, not from the file itself, which we
16:28haven't seen.
16:29Why did it end in 1963?
16:32Here the sources pull in different
16:34directions. One American account says
16:36she was dismissed after her identity was
16:38discovered, but the 2019 files undercut
16:40that because the agency had known all
16:42along.
16:43ABC reported that she was let go along
16:45with other former Nazis. Heckelhammer
16:48put it more delicately. Her departure,
16:50he said, coincided with the onset of a
16:52change in understanding.
16:54Whether that means she was pushed out in
16:56a deliberate cleanup or simply eased out
16:58as the climate changed, the files as
17:00reported don't say outright. If you've
17:03spotted something in this story that
17:04doesn't match the record, a date, a
17:06name, or a number, tell us in the
17:08comments. We'll check it and pin the
17:10correction at the top so everyone sees
17:12it. The rest of Gudrun's life settled
17:14into a shape she'd keep for half a
17:15century. She married Wolf Dieter
17:18Bourwits, a journalist born in 1935 who
17:21wrote for right-wing publications and at
17:22one point served as an official of the
17:24far-right National Democratic Party, the
17:26NPD, in Bavaria.
17:28They had two children and lived in a
17:30detached house in the Munich district of
17:32Fürstenried. She kept her origins quiet.
17:35Her own son-in-law, according to German
17:36reporting, didn't know at first whose
17:38granddaughter he'd married. She also
17:40kept a large portrait of her father in a
17:42silver frame in her home. In the 1950s,
17:45she'd planned a book to rehabilitate
17:47him, which never appeared. In the early
17:491970s, when the publisher Populine
17:51prepared to publish Himmler's secret
17:53speeches, she went to court over the
17:55copyright and won a substantial
17:56settlement. Consider what kind of words
17:59those were. In a secret speech to SS
18:01leaders at Posen in October 1943,
18:04Himmler had spoken openly of, and here
18:06we're quoting a standard translation,
18:08the extermination of the Jewish people.
18:11His daughter went to court over the
18:13rights to that man's speeches and she
18:15came out ahead.
18:16She became a fixture at the gatherings
18:18of the old guard. She was friends with
18:20Florentino von Tonningen, the Dutch Nazi
18:22widow nicknamed the Black Widow. She
18:25attended Waffen-SS reunions and the
18:27annual veterans gathering at Ulrichsberg
18:29in Carinthia, Austria, where a Norwegian
18:31report noted she'd look over the men's
18:33medals and ask which units they'd served
18:35in. In 1995, according to one account,
18:38she was among the handful of people at
18:40the funeral of Ilse Hess, the widow of
18:42Rudolf Hess. In those circles, she was
18:44treated as a kind of star.
18:46Most of her work, though, happened out
18:48of sight, and the clearest case of it
18:50begins in an Italian spa town. Anton
18:53Malloth was an SS guard at the small
18:55fortress at Theresienstadt, the Gestapo
18:57prison about 50 km north of Prague.
19:00Inmates called him Handsome Tony. In
19:021948, a Czechoslovak court sentenced him
19:05to death in absentia. By then, he was
19:07gone. He spent about 40 years in Merano
19:10in South Tyrol, the same region where
19:12Gudrun had been arrested as a girl. In
19:141983, the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal
19:17tracked him down there, and in 1988,
19:19Italy expelled him to Germany. German
19:22prosecutors interviewed him and let him
19:24go for lack of evidence. And then,
19:26Stille Hilfe stepped in. According to
19:28German accounts, the group instructed
19:30Gudrun to find him a room, and she did
19:32in a comfortable retirement home in
19:34Pullach, built on land that had once
19:36belonged to Rudolf Hess. Malloth lived
19:38there for more than a decade. In the
19:40late 1990s, it came out that the welfare
19:43authorities had been paying most of the
19:44bill. The German press was sharply
19:46critical, and so was much of the
19:48coverage of Gudrun's role. On the other
19:50side of that story is a man named Peter
19:52Finkelgruen. He's a German Jewish writer
19:55whose grandfather, Martin Finkelgruen,
19:57was taken to the small fortress in
19:58December 1942.
20:00According to eyewitnesses, on the day he
20:02arrived, Malloth clubbed him to death in
20:04broad daylight.
20:06Finkelgruen admitted he once thought
20:08about getting a pistol and shooting
20:09Malloth himself. Instead, he wrote a
20:11book, which an Israeli playwright,
20:13Yehoshua Sobol, adapted into a stage
20:15play called Handsome Tony. For years,
20:18while Malloth lived quietly in his care
20:20home, Finkelgruen kept his grandfather's
20:22case in the public eye. German
20:24prosecutors dropped the case twice, the
20:26last time in 1999. Then, a Czech witness
20:30came forward. On May 30th, 2001, a
20:33Munich court sentenced Anton Malloth,
20:35aged 89, to life in prison for beating
20:38and kicking a Jewish inmate to death in
20:401944 and for the attempted murder of a
20:42prisoner who was shot for hiding a
20:44cauliflower under his jacket.
20:46Survivors said he'd killed and tortured
20:48many more, but the court convicted him
20:49on those two counts. The Czech writer
20:52Ivan Klíma, who'd been sent to Terezín
20:54as a boy, said simply that everybody is
20:56responsible for his own acts. Malloth
20:59was released in late 2002 with cancer
21:01and died that October. Malloth wasn't
21:04the only one. Klaas Carel Faber was a
21:06Dutchman who served the German
21:07occupiers, and he was convicted in the
21:09Netherlands in 1947 of involvement in 22
21:12murders, including six at the Westerbork
21:14transit camp, the place from which Anne
21:16Frank was deported. He escaped in 1952
21:19and fled to Germany, which refused to
21:21extradite him because he was a German
21:22citizen. When the Netherlands tried
21:24again in 2010, the Daily Mail reported
21:27that Gudrun, then 81, was working to
21:29keep him in Germany. Faber died a free
21:32man in Ingolstadt, Bavaria in 2012 at
21:34the age of 90. There were also reports
21:37in 2011 that she backed efforts to stop
21:39the Danish SS man Søren Kam from being
21:41sent back to Denmark, though we haven't
21:43been able to confirm her personal role
21:45in that case independently.
21:47When the Daily Mail approached her, she
21:48gave an answer that could stand as a
21:49summary of her whole life. "I never talk
21:52about my work," she said. "I just do
21:54what I can when I can." The journalist
21:57Andrea Röpke, who has investigated
21:58Stille Hilfe for years, put it more
22:00bluntly. Everyone was terrified of
22:03Gudrun. She told the Daily Mail in 2011
22:05that the group also collected money for
22:07the neo-Nazi movement. The case against
22:09her is strong. Even so, three things
22:12complicate it, and they deserve a
22:13hearing.
22:14First, a lot of what's said about her
22:16rests on a small number of sources, and
22:18she never answered them. She refused
22:20interviews for most of her adult life.
22:22Descriptions of her role run all the way
22:24from affiliated with Stille
22:27Hilfe to its leading figure or
22:29figurehead. And the difference matters.
22:32Stille Hilfe itself never published its
22:34finances and by one count had only
22:36around 40 members. Its donations have
22:39been estimated at the equivalent of 60
22:41to 80,000 euros a year, at least until
22:44the late 1990s. That's not nothing, but
22:47it's not a vast hidden empire either.
22:50And some of the louder labels attached
22:51to her, godmother, mother Teresa of the
22:54Nazis, say more about headline writing
22:56than about evidence. In 2014, when a
22:59Munich paper approached her around her
23:0185th birthday, her husband complained
23:03that the family's experience of the
23:05press had been one-sided.
23:07He has a point about the tone of some
23:08coverage, even if the substance holds.
23:11Second, the group she served didn't
23:13describe itself as a fugitive network,
23:15and in its earliest years it wasn't only
23:17that. Two churchmen sat on its founding
23:19committee. And in our reading,
23:21opposition to the death penalty was a
23:23moral position plenty of people could
23:25hold without sympathizing with the SNS.
23:27The trouble is what came later. In
23:30November 1999, Germany's federal fiscal
23:32court denied Stille charitable status
23:35after the Bundestag had debated whether
23:37it was a revisionist, right-wing
23:38extremist organization. A state that had
23:41tolerated it for nearly 50 years finally
23:44drew a line. And third, there's the
23:46question of choice. Gudrun was 15 when
23:49her world ended. Most of what she knew
23:51about her father came from a man who
23:52wrote to her every week and who showed
23:54her Dachau as a place of pear trees and
23:56paintings. Plenty of people would ask
23:58how much freedom a child like that
24:00really had. A relative of hers puts the
24:02dilemma well. Katrin Himmler, Heinrich's
24:05great-niece, is a political scientist
24:07who wrote a history of the Himmler
24:08brothers. In a 2012 interview with the
24:10BBC, she said, it's a very heavy burden
24:13having someone like that in the family,
24:15so close. She described descendants as
24:17facing a choice between breaking with
24:19their parents and giving them
24:20unconditional loyalty. Can you really
24:22love them? She asked. If you want to be
24:24honest and really know what they did or
24:26thought? Katrin answered that question
24:28one way. She kept the surname, studied
24:31the family, and married an Israeli whose
24:33family had been confined in the Warsaw
24:34ghetto, which was burned on her
24:36great-uncle's orders. Gudrun answered it
24:38the other way, and she did it as an
24:40adult for decades in a country where the
24:42evidence of her father's crimes had been
24:44laid out in open court at Nuremberg.
24:46Being a child in 1945 explains where she
24:49started. It doesn't explain where she
24:51chose to go. In early 2014, the evidence
24:54came to her door one more time. The
24:56newspapers Die Welt and Yediot Aharonot
24:59began publishing a private archive of
25:00Himmler family papers that had been
25:02sitting in Tel Aviv for decades. Letters
25:04between Heinrich and Margarete from 1927
25:07to the last weeks of the war, notes,
25:09recipes, and photographs. How the
25:11archive ended up in Israel is still
25:13unclear. One version says an Israeli
25:15collector, Chaim Rosenthal, bought it at
25:18a flea market in Brussels. Another
25:20traces it through Karl Wolff, Himmler's
25:22personal assistant. The head of
25:24Germany's federal archives said there
25:26was no reason to doubt the documents
25:28were genuine. In those letters, Himmler
25:30signed off to his wife and daughter as
25:32Euer Papi, your Papi, while running the
25:35apparatus of mass murder. And the war,
25:38as one account of the published letters
25:39notes, barely appears in them at all.
25:42Gudrun said nothing publicly. When a
25:44Munich newspaper asked her for an
25:45interview that August as she turned 85,
25:48her answer, as reported, was that she
25:50had nothing to say. There was one more
25:53door she'd tried to open long before
25:55that never opened back. After the war,
25:58when she learned that she had a half
25:59brother and a half sister, Gudrun tried
26:01to make contact with them. Their mother,
26:03Hedwig Potthast, turned her down. That
26:06detail comes from Katrin Himmler's
26:07research. Hedwig's children grew up
26:09under another surname and only learned
26:11who their father was from Joachim
26:13Peiper, whom Hedwig asked to tell them.
26:15Nanette Dorothea became a doctor in
26:17northern Germany and died in 2019.
26:20Accounts of Helga's fate disagree. One
26:22British report says he died in 2005,
26:25while some German sources suggest he was
26:26still alive much later. And Nanette
26:29Dorothea's son, Heinrich Lenkheit,
26:31discovered by chance from a television
26:33documentary that his grandfather was
26:35Heinrich Himmler. Speaking to the press
26:37in 2025, he said he felt he'd been
26:39living a lie for the first half century
26:41of his life. So the people who carried
26:43Himmler's blood or his name ended up
26:46living with him in strikingly different
26:47ways. Some through silence, some without
26:50knowing, some through study and open
26:52confrontation. Gudrun alone chose
26:55devotion. She died at her home near
26:57Munich on May 24th, 2018, aged 88. As
27:01far as we can tell, the news didn't
27:02reach the international press until the
27:04end of June. When it [clears throat]
27:05did, it arrived alongside the BND's
27:08confirmation that it had employed her.
27:10The obituaries that followed in the
27:11Washington Post and the New York Times
27:13described her the same way, the
27:15ever-loyal daughter. So what happened to
27:17Himmler's daughter after the war? In the
27:19narrowest sense, she survived. She was
27:22interned, released, trained as a
27:24seamstress, married, raised children,
27:26and grew old in a Munich suburb. But the
27:28fuller answer is uncomfortable for more
27:30people than just her. Allied
27:32investigators let her go because she
27:33wasn't a suspect, which was true. A
27:36church charity took her in because
27:37that's what charities do. A spy agency
27:40run by a former wartime general put her
27:42on the payroll and helped her get a
27:43better price for her story. The welfare
27:45authorities paid most of the care home
27:47bills of the Theresienstadt guard she'd
27:49found a room for. Each of those
27:51decisions made a kind of sense on its
27:53own. Together, they let one woman spend
27:55most of seven decades doing the thing
27:58her father would have wanted, in plain
28:00sight, in the country that had built its
28:02new democracy on rejecting everything he
28:04stood for. That's the part we find
28:06hardest to settle, and we're curious
28:08where you land. Was Gudrun Himmler
28:10mainly a product of what was done to her
28:12as a child, or did she, as an adult with
28:15every fact available, become one of the
28:17people responsible for keeping her
28:19father's world alive? If this story
28:21stayed with you, a like helps it reach
28:23more people, and subscribing means you
28:25won't miss the next one. Gudrun wasn't
28:27the only Nazi leader's daughter who
28:28turned Stefan Libbert away. Etta Göring
28:31did too. How Hermann Göring's widow and
28:33daughter lived with that name once the
28:35Nuremberg verdicts were in is a story
28:37we've already told on this channel, and
28:39it asks some of the same hard questions
28:41about loyalty.

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