https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2018-07-12/register/gudrun-burwitz-obituary-vnvl9xhlt
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.
Daughter of Heinrich Himmler who kept a chilling diary during the war and later joined a secretive charity helping Nazi war criminals
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.”
