Daughter of Heinrich Himmler who kept a chilling diary during the war and later joined a secretive charity helping Nazi war criminals
Gudrun Himmler in Berlin in 1938 with her father
In 1941 Gudrun, the 12-year-old daughter of Heinrich Himmler, began keeping a diary in which she idolised her father and wrote of her hopes for peace.
The next year, 500 miles away and hidden in a house in Amsterdam, Anne Frank, the same age as Gudrun, began keeping a diary with similar hopes. If peace came, wrote Gudrun, “we will certainly get a country estate in the east . . . Yes, if only peace came, but that will be a long time.” Anne wrote: “What’s the point of the war? Why, oh why can’t people live together peacefully? Why all this destruction?”
Long after the evils of Nazism had been exposed and its proponents brought to justice, Gudrun Burwitz continued to support veterans of the regime, keeping alight the flame of their barbarous ideology. Her father, who called her Püppi (little doll), had been the architect of the final solution in which Anne and millions of other people were systematically killed.
Unlike the children of other high-ranking Nazis, Burwitz, known as the Nazi Princess, never expressed horror at her father’s crimes. Instead, she became a key player in Stille Hilfe (Quiet Aid), a charity that brought succour to some of the Third Reich’s most notorious criminals. She would help them to start new lives, often with new identities. “It’s true I help where I can,” she said in 1998. “But I refuse to discuss my work.”
Stille Hilfe is believed to have about 25 key members, but receives funding from hundreds of anonymous sympathisers. In 2010 it paid for the defence of Samuel Kunz, an SS man charged with complicity in the murders of more than 430,000 Jews. On another occasion it came to the aid of the murderous Dutchman Klaas Carel Faber, helping to prevent him being extradited to his homeland from Germany. And when Anton Malloth, a brutal former concentration camp guard known for brushing his dishevelled hair back with a swastika badge after beating a Jew to death, was given a place in an OAP home built on land once owned by Rudolf Hess, Burwitz would visit once a week with fruit and chocolate.
“You need building up,” she would tell him, stroking his hands. Many of those whom she had helped would leave their Nazi memorabilia to her.
She was born Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler in Munich, in August 1929. Her father was a former chicken farmer who rose to become one of Hitler’s most feared henchmen; her mother was Margarete Siegroth (née Boden), a former nurse and the blue-eyed daughter of a wealthy East Prussian businessman. Marga was unable to have more children and the Himmlers, who moved to Gmund in Upper Bavaria, later adopted a son, in whom Heinrich showed little interest.
Young Püppi, who had a pet tortoise called Lieselotte, was the apple of her father’s eye, though her poor school grades infuriated him. She remembered him looking “magnificent” in his uniform, his hat sitting high on his head, his boots polished until she could see her reflection in them. Yet her parents’ marriage was disintegrating and Himmler spent much time in Berlin with Hedwig Potthast, his lover and secretary, with whom he fathered a son and a daughter.
Gudrun, her blond hair in pigtails, would accompany Himmler on his murderous travels. She was 12 when he took her on a special treat. “Today we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau,” she recorded. “We saw everything we could. 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.” There was even a snapshot taken of Püppi surrounded by Nazi officers. She was spared the crematorium tour.
Gudrun Himmler with her mother Margarete in detention in Rome in 1945GETTY IMAGESHimmler was such a hero to his daughter that he could even decide the date of Christmas: “Sometimes December 17th, at others the 20th or 21st, because Pappi can only be present then,” she wrote. On another occasion she described how “on December 24 each year I used to drive with my father to see Hitler at the Brown House in Munich and wish him Merry Christmas”. When she was little the Führer “used to give me dolls. Later he always gave me a box of chocolates.”
The July 20, 1944, attempt on Hitler’s life featured in the diaries of both Gudrun and Anne Frank. “Great news! An assassination attempt has been made on Hitler’s life, and for once not by Jewish communists or English capitalists, but by a German general,” wrote Anne. Gudrun took a different view: “An attempt was made on the Führer’s life . . . Thank God Pappi wasn’t there, although the final responsibility rests on him.”
On May 21, 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed, Himmler was detained and handed over to the British. Two days later he bit into a potassium cyanide pill and was dead within 15 minutes, having cheated justice. His daughter never accepted this version of events, believing that the British killed him. Her manuscript, which she claimed “demolishes the lies”, has never been published.
After the war Gudrun and her mother were imprisoned in Rome by the Americans — for nothing more than being Himmler’s daughter, she protested while on hunger strike. Their luxurious houses and extensive estates were seized by the Allies, meaning that mother and daughter were penniless on their release. They found refuge in Bielefeld, where Gudrun learnt bookbinding and dressmaking. Later she moved to Munich and in her late thirties married Wulf Dieter Burwitz, an author who shared her views. They had a son, who became a tax lawyer, and a daughter.
The family lived in the suburb of Furstenried, 15 miles from the site of Dachau, the camp that Burwitz had visited as a child. Their phone number was unlisted and their maisonette registered anonymously. She remained largely unseen, devoting her life to a secret world, one from which outsiders were barred. The author of one book about Stille Hilfe described her as “a deity among these believers in the old times”. She kept an antique silver brooch featuring the sculpted heads of four horses twisted in the shape of a swastika, an heirloom from her father.
Stille Hilfe was founded as a covert organisation in 1946 by former high-ranking SS officers and right-wing clergy. In 1951 it registered with the authorities so that it could raise funds to help “prisoners of war and interned persons”. Its first president was Helene Elisabeth, Princess von Isenburg, chosen for her aristocratic connections and her contacts in the Catholic church.
Gudrun Himmler in 1998REX FEATURESBurwitz spoke of visiting America to clear her father’s name. “At least I will try to show what my father thought and why he acted as he did,” she said. She never did go. Yet in 1955 she visited London at the invitation of Sir Oswald Mosley, accompanied by Adolf von Ribbentrop, the son of Hitler’s foreign minister. She told Mosley’s Union Movement that her father was a great man who had been misunderstood and that his name had been destroyed by the Jews. One observer described how she “looked like a schoolteacher, with fair hair, National Health-style glasses, a tweed skirt and brown jacket”.
From 1961 to 1963 she worked for West German intelligence under a false name, but she insisted on using her own surname for another job as a receptionist at a boarding house on the shores of Lake Tergensee. It ended when a client objected: “How could you let me be waited on by this girl when my own wife was gassed in the ovens at Auschwitz?”
Gudrun Burwitz would visit neo- Nazi rallies in Ulrichsberg, northern Austria, attended by SS veterans. “They were terrified of her,” said Andrea Ropke, an authority on neo-Nazism who described Burwitz speaking in clipped, old-fashioned High German. “All these high-ranking former officers lined up and she asked, ‘Where did you serve?’, showing off her vast knowledge of military logistics. It was all rather menacing.”
In 1983 Burwitz’s wartime diaries came to light. Extracts published in the German magazine Stern showed how she worshipped her father. “The whole nation looks at him,” she had written. One entry, dated May 20, 1942, describes how he came back from the Netherlands carrying “many vegetables, fruit and 150 tulips”, something she had not seen before. “We were sitting on the terrace in the evening . . . suddenly there was a loud toot, we wondered who was allowed to do that, and there was Pappi.”
The diaries continued into April 1945. “Now things must start to look up again. I almost believe again in victory,” she wrote. The next day her father was in Berlin, where the big battle was. Things were so hard for him, he had so much to do. Meanwhile, Anne Frank, whose diary entries had ended on August 1, 1944, had just died in Belsen. Soon, Pappi too would be dead. Gudrun Burwitz, Nazi sympathiser, was born on August 8, 1929. She died on May 24, 2018, aged 88
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