Gudrun Burwitz
Daughter of Heinrich Himmler who unlike some other ‘Nazikinder’ treasured her father’s memory
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. She was by no means alone among “Nazikinder” in having to bear the consequences of crimes she did not commit, but unlike the sons of Hitler’s number two, Martin Bormann, and “Dr Death” Aribert Heim, who grew up to express horror at their parents’ crimes, Gudrun remained loyal to her father’s memory and spent her life supporting Stille Hilfe (“Silent Help”), a “charitable” organisation which aids former Nazis.
Oliver Schröm, the author of a book about the group published in 2001, described her as “a dazzling Nazi Princess, a deity among these believers in the old times”.
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.
When Marga adopted a son after being unable to conceive more children, Himmler largely ignored him. Frequently absent from home while he embarked on an affair with his secretary Hedwig Potthast (with whom he had two more children), he still 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 camera.
As Gudrun grew older, her diary revealed how much she enjoyed being the daughter of one of the most feared men in Germany. She wrote of how “the whole nation looks at him” and how she was addressed as “Miss Gudrun” by her father’s men. She appeared delighted when a science teacher caught her cheating in an exam but did not punish her.
Her close relationship with her father was made clear in a cache of Himmler’s correspondence, hidden for 40 years, which made headlines when it was rediscovered in 2014. In one letter to Gudrun and her mother Marga, Himmler cheerily signs off: “I’m going to Auschwitz. Kisses”. In another, Gudrun, then aged 11, observes: “It’s terrible we are going to war with Russia. They were our allies after all. Russia is sooo big. The struggle will be very difficult if we want to conquer all of Russia.”
After the Second World War Gudrun and her mother were arrested by the Americans and held in various camps in Italy, France and Germany. They were brought to Nuremberg to testify at the trials, at which, according to Stephan and Norbert Lebert in their book, My Father’s Keeper (2002), “she vowed herself to him. She did not weep, but went on hunger strikes. She lost weight, fell sick, and stopped developing.”
When Gudrun was informed that her father had committed suicide, she was said to have suffered a psychological and physical breakdown. She never accepted that her father had taken the “coward’s” way out, claiming he had been murdered by his British captors.
After the trials were over, Gudrun and her mother struggled with everyday life because of their surname, which they refused to change. Gudrun was turned down by scholarship programmes and was unable to find a job. Eventually they were offered refuge in the north German industrial town of Bielefeld, where Gudrun trained in bookbinding and dressmaking at the town’s Master School for Craft & Design.
She later moved to Munich, where, in her late 30s, she met and 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.
Gudrun Burwitz had been politically active since soon after the end of the war, joining Stille Hilfe and supporting the founding of the “Wiking-jugend”, an underground Neo-nazi organisation modelled on the Hitlerjugend, in 1952.
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.
Stille Hilfe operated covertly from 1946, initially aiding the escape of Nazi fugitives over Allied lines, particularly to South America. From 1951, when it went from being covert to overt, registering with the German authorities so that it could raise funds to help “prisoners of war and interned persons”, Gudrun became increasingly active in the organisation.
Stille Hilfe is known to have aided some of the Third Reich’s most prominent officers, including the Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher Of Lyon”; Martin Sommer, the “Hangman From Buchenwald”; and Artur Axmann, head of the Hitler Youth.
As a central figure in the organisation Gudrun Burwitz arranged a comfortable retirement for Anton Malloth, or “Beautiful Tony” as he had been known in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where, after beating Jews to death, he was known to comb his dishevelled hair back with his swastika badge.
In 1948 Malloth had been sentenced to death in his absence by a Czech court, but Gudrun Burwitz later used Stille Hilfe funds to rent him a comfortable room in an old people’s home in Munich. In 2001, when he was finally prosecuted in Germany, she continued to visit him twice a month until his death from cancer in 2002. He is said to have bequeathed her all his personal possessions.
Another beneficiary of her largesse was Martin Sandberger, the leader of an elite SS squad responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, communists and Gipsies in the occupied Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and whom she cared for in a retirement home in Stuttgart until his death in 2010.
A skinny, unsmiling woman, Gudrun Burwitz 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 Burwitz 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.
Gudrun Burwitz, born August 8 1929, died May 24 2018