Gudrun Burwitz

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Gudrun (left) with mother Margarete and father Heinrich Himmler

Gudrun Burwitz , née Himmler (born August 8, 1929 in Munich ; † May 24, 2018 there ), was the only biological child from the marriage of Margarete and Heinrich Himmler . This was Reich SS and Chief of the German Police and later Minister of the Interior in the era of National Socialism . After 1945, Gudrun Burwitz remained arrested for her father's ideology and was actively involved in right-wing extremist and neo-Nazi circles, particularly in the Stille Hilfe association , which supports imprisoned, convicted or fugitive former SS members in emergencies. For two years she worked under a false name as a secretary for the Federal Intelligence Service (BND).

Life

Childhood and youth

Gudrun (right) with mother Margarete Himmler (November 24, 1945)

Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Burwitz grew up in Bavaria . Her parents ("Heini" and "Marga") called her "Püppi". Since Gudrun lived with her mother in Gmund am Tegernsee , while Heinrich Himmler mostly stayed in Berlin , contact with her father consisted only of occasional visits, letters and numerous phone calls. From March 1933 Gerhard von der Ahé still lived in the family. The son of an SS man who was shot in street battles was an orphan and foster child of the Himmlers. At the age of nine, Gerhard first went to a boarding school in Starnberg and then in the spring of 1939 to an educational institution in Berlin-Spandau . From 1939 or 1940 Gudrun was a member of the Nazi youth organization Bund Deutscher Mädel and from then on often separated from her mother, who worked temporarily for the German Red Cross . She has two half-siblings: Helge (born February 15, 1942 in the Hohenlychen sanatorium ) and Nanette-Dorothea (born July 20, 1944 in Berchtesgaden ) from her father's extramarital relationship with Hedwig Potthast , who lived mainly in Berlin.

A few days before the end of the Second World War , she and her mother were brought from Gmund to South Tyrol on April 19, 1945 and hidden there, but betrayed by SS men to the American troops and arrested on May 13, 1945. They were first sent to an internment camp in Italy. On May 23rd, Gudrun learned that her father had committed suicide while in British captivity. Mother and daughter were housed in several internment and prison camps in Italy, France and Germany, including the Nuremberg War Crimes Prison . In November 1946, 17-year-old Gudrun and her mother were released from internment. From the end of 1946, she initially lived with her mother in a facility of the Von Bodelschwinghschen Anstalten Bethel . The institution wanted this accommodation to be understood as an act of Christian charity. In reality, however, after the death of the then head Friedrich von Bodelschwingh the Elder, the Bethel institutions J. went into hiding or even hired numerous Nazis. From 1947 Gudrun Himmler attended the master school for the creative crafts in Bielefeld , but had to break off her training when she did not receive a scholarship after the currency reform in June 1948. She began an apprenticeship as a tailor, which she completed in 1951 with the journeyman's examination.

In the Federal Republic

In 1952 Gudrun Himmler separated from her mother and moved to Munich. In the following years she worked as a cutter, pieceworker, office assistant and finally as a secretary. Because of her origins, she lost her jobs several times. From the end of 1961 to the end of 1963 she worked under a false name as a secretary for the Federal Intelligence Service (BND). She later married Wulf-Dieter Burwitz (* 1935), a journalist who worked for many years as an author for right-wing and right-wing extremist magazines and at times as a functionary in the NPD state association in Bavaria. Gudrun Burwitz lived with her husband in Munich. The couple had two children. She kept her identity secret for a long time after her name change. Even her son-in-law was initially not aware of Gudrun Burwitz's true identity. Officially, the house she lived in was not hers, and she didn't have a phone number registered in her name. There are only a few photos of Gudrun Burwitz after 1945. Fabian Leber describes her in the Berlin Tagesspiegel as follows:

“In these photos she looks upright and shy, the graying hair is tied up at the back, a pony in front, the eyes disappear behind large horn-rimmed glasses. One might mistake this woman for a retired teacher. But Gudrun Burwitz does not simply have a peaceful retirement in mind. She spends her time making victims out of perpetrators. "

On June 28, 2018, the Bild newspaper reported that the Munich registration office had confirmed that Gudrun Burwitz died on May 24, 2018.

Relationship with father

Gudrun Himmler was tenderly attached to her father, embroidered and tinkered for him and collected all of his newspaper pictures in a large album. Even as a child, she was proud to be the daughter of a famous man. But it annoyed her that her father had not come out with military exploits. She wrote in her diary: “Everyone receives medals and awards, only Daddy not. And he should get one first. If it weren't for him, some things would be different. ”In National Socialist Germany, Gudrun Himmler was unofficially and ironically a“ Nazi princess ”. During the Nazi era, she accompanied her father several times on official occasions, for example to public events, when visiting a prisoner collection point and the Dachau concentration camp in 1941. In her diary, she noted:

“Today we visited the concentration camp in Dachau. We looked at as much as we could. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. [...] We saw all the pictures that prisoners painted. Wonderful."

When Gudrun Himmler found out about her father's death in August 1945, she reacted with a total physical breakdown. She later doubted Heinrich Himmler's suicide . In their apartments there was always a large portrait photo of their father in a silver frame. Gudrun Burwitz said: “Today my father is hated as the greatest mass murderer of all time. I see it as my life's work to present my father to the world in a different - true - light. ”Therefore, in the late 1950s, she planned to write a book about her father to relieve him. The book never came out. When Heinrich Himmler's secret speeches were to be published by Propylaen Verlag in the early 1970s , his daughter insisted on her copyrights and won a high severance payment.

Political activity

After 1945 Gudrun Himmler became politically active in the interests of her father. She had never renounced the ideology of National Socialism and tried again and again to relativize and justify its effects and the deeds of her father. She was consistently active in the right-wing radical and neo-Nazi scene and supported the Wiking-Jugend , founded in 1952 , which was organized and ideologically oriented along the lines of the Hitler Youth . In 1955, together with Adolf von Ribbentrop, the son of the executed Nazi foreign minister , she followed an invitation from the British fascist and Oswald Mosley supporter Sidney Proud to London , where she spoke to a group of Union Movement members. Gudrun Himmler explained there that her father was a great man, but that he was very misunderstood and that his good name had been destroyed by the Jews. Furthermore, she was friends with the Dutch woman Florentine Rost van Tonningen , who died on March 24, 2007. She was known in the Netherlands as the “Black Widow” and was active in various associations of the “ old Nazi ” scene after the Second World War . At relevant gatherings such as the Waffen SS meeting and the Ulrichsberg meeting in Austria , she appeared as a “star of the brown scene” and an authority at the same time.

Burwitz was still intensely committed to Nazi perpetrators, especially in recent years. The focus of their activities was the association “ Silent Help for Prisoners of War and Internees ”. For decades she provided significant support to the organization, but without making any specific statements. Their commitment was particularly evident in the Anton Malloth case . Malloth, who had lived undisturbed in Merano for around 40 years , was extradited from Italy to Germany in 1988 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001 for his actions as a guard in the small fortress Theresienstadt after a long investigation. From 1988 to 2001 Malloth lived in Pullach on the southern edge of Munich. Gudrun Burwitz had helped him there on behalf of the "silent help" to a room in a senior citizens' home on a property that had belonged to the "Deputy of the Führer", Rudolf Hess , during the Nazi era . When it became public in the late 1990s that Malloth's retirement home was largely financed by German social welfare , criticism arose from the German public - including the involvement of Himmler's daughter Gudrun Burwitz.

literature

Web links

Commons : Gudrun Burwitz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Death of Gudrun Burwitz Der Spiegel, June 29, 2018
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Jacques Schuster , collaboration: Ulrich Exner: Himmlers Nachwuchs . In: THE WORLD . February 1, 2014 ( welt.de [accessed June 29, 2018]).
  3. ↑ a b Jürgen Matthäus: "It was very nice". Excerpts from Margarete Himmler's diary, 1937–1945. In: WerkstattGeschichte , 25, 2000, pp. 75–93.
  4. ↑ a b c Oliver Schröm, Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades. Berlin 2002, pp. 11-14.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Sven Felix Kellerhoff: Himmler's daughter dead: “Today we went to the concentration camp. It was nice ” . In: THE WORLD . June 29, 2018 ( welt.de [accessed June 29, 2018]).
  6. ^ Peter Longerich: Heinrich Himmler. Biography, Siedler, Munich 2008, p. 482.
  7. ^ Wife Believes Himmler Died Inside Berlin . (PDF; 878 kB) In: The New York Sun , May 16, 1945, p. 8 (English). Himmler's Wife and Daughter Captured . (PDF; 849 kB) In: Union Sun & Journal , May 24, 1945, p. 12 (English) accessed December 10, 2012.
  8. ↑ a b c d e f g h Norbert Lebert: Gudrun Himmler. In: Norbert and Stephan Lebert: Because you have my name. Munich 2002, pp. 138–158 (first in: Weltbild 1960).
  9. ↑ a b c d e Oliver Schröm, Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades. Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 2002, pp. 105–113.
  10. ^ Daniel Siemens: Horst Wessel. Death and Transfiguration of a National Socialist. Munich 2009, p. 260.
  11. ↑ Curriculum vitae in: Wulf-Dieter Burwitz: The Soviet policy for the non-communist countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the eighties . Diss. Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich 1991.
  12. ↑ Himmler's daughter keeps past buried . In: Kingman Daily Miner , December 29, 1982, p. 5 (English) accessed December 10, 2012. Norbert and Stephan Lebert: Because you have my name. Munich 2002, p. 18 f.
  13. ↑ a b Heinrich Himmler daughter devotes life to charity that helps support Adolf Hitler's henchmen . In: Daily Mirror , December 1, 2010 (English). Retrieved December 10, 2012.
  14. ↑ a b Fabian Leber: Gudrun Burwitz and the “Silent Help”: The dazzling Nazi princess . In: Der Tagesspiegel , June 10, 2001.
  15. ↑ Photo in the article by Allan Hall: Himmler's daughter aged 81: She works with neo-Nazis and helps SS officers evade justice . In: Daily Mail , June 17, 2011 (English) Retrieved December 10, 2012.
  16. ^ Himmler daughter worked for the secret service BND . In: bild.de . June 28, 2018 ( bild.de [accessed June 29, 2018]).
  17. ^ Diary of Gudrun Himmler (1945), quoted in in: Oliver Schröm, Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades. Berlin 2002, p. 108.
  18. ^ Klaus W. Tofahrn: The Third Reich and the Holocaust. Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2008, p. 98, note 138.
  19. ↑ Photo at bpk-images.de - Heinrich Himmler with daughter Gudrun, Reinhard Heydrich (back), Karl Wolff (2nd from right) and a. (around 1941).
  20. ^ Diary of Gudrun Himmler (1941), quoted in in: Oliver Schröm, Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades. Berlin 2002, p. 112.
  21. ↑ Omer Anderson: Living in Kins' Shadow . In: The Calgary Herald Magazine , September 16, 1961, p. 5 ( Google News , verbatim in many other US magazines, in English, accessed December 11, 2012); s. a. Norbert and Stephan Lebert: Because you have my name. Munich 2002, p. 95 f.
  22. ^ Graham Macklin: Very Deeply Dyed in Black. Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945. London 2007, p. 93.
  23. ↑ Oliver Schröm, Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades. Berlin 2002, p. 196.
  24. ↑ cit. in: Oliver Schröm, Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades. Berlin 2002, p. 106.
  25. ↑ Oliver Schröm, Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades. Berlin 2002, passim; Siegfried Helm: Himmler's daughter helps the old companion . In: Berliner Morgenpost , April 19, 1998 (accessed December 10, 2012 from hagalil.com).
personal data
SURNAME Burwitz, Gudrun
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Himmler, Gudrun (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German daughter of Heinrich Himmler and his wife Margarete
DATE OF BIRTH August 8, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH May 24, 2018
Place of death Munich