Gudrun Burwitz: Himmler’s daughter and torchbearer 1929-2018
● Gudrun Burwitz, who has died aged 88, was known in her youth as
Gudrun Himmler and was the only legitimate child of the SS Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, the sinister chief architect of the Holocaust.
She was 16 when the war ended and her father cheated the hangman by crushing a cyanide pill between his teeth after being captured by British forces.
Gudrun remained loyal to her father’s memory and spent her life supporting Stille Hilfe (Silent Help), a “charitable” organisation that aids former Nazis.
Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler was born on August 8 1929, the year after Himmler married her mother Marga.
With her perfect blonde Aryan looks she soon became the apple of her father’s eye. Having risen from being a chicken farmer to one of Hitler’s most feared henchmen, Himmler would arrive home, pop his “Puppi” (little doll) on his lap, play with her pigtails and tell her stories.
He idolised his eldest daughter and flew her out to wherever he was just to spend a few hours with her.
“We saw everything we could,” she wrote in her diary after one such outing when she was 12. “We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvellous. And afterwards we had a lot to eat. It was very nice.”
The day trip in question was to the concentration camp at Dachau, an event recorded in a snapshot of a delighted Puppi surrounded by SS officers, smiling to the camera.
After the war she married Wulf- Dieter Burwitz, a writer who shared her political views and with whom she had two children.
From 1961 to 1963 she worked as a secretary for the West German foreign intelligence agency, the BND, according to reports after her death in the German newspaper Bild.
In 1955, with Adolf von Ribbentrop, the son of the former Nazi foreign minister, she travelled to London at the invitation of Sir Oswald Mosley and addressed a meeting of his Union Movement party, telling her audience that her father was a great man who had been misunderstood and whose good name had been destroyed by the Jews.
A skinny, unsmiling woman,
Gudrun was a regular at the annual gatherings of veterans of the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS, held, since 1958, at the Ulrichsberg mountain in Austria, where she achieved something approaching celebrity status. “Everyone was terrified of Gudrun,” recalled Andrea Ropke, an authority on neo-Nazism who accompanied her to one of these rallies. “All these high-ranking former officers lined up and she asked, ‘Where did you serve?’, showing her vast knowledge of military logistics. It was all rather menacing.”
To the end of her life Gudrun treasured an heirloom given to her by her father, a silver brooch featuring the heads of four horses twisted into the unmistakable shape of a swastika.
Everyone was terrified of her . . . It was menacing