In order to better grasp their stories, each chapter includes a reminder of the father’s position in the National Socialist hierarchy, the ways in which the child was steeped in the ideals of the historical period, and the mother’s role in the child’s education. Identifying, as closely as possible, the dynamics of the early home environment is crucial to understanding their stories.
The descendants of certain key figures of the Third Reich are missing from this book. For example, all six children of Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, were killed by their parents in the Führer’s bunker. Goebbels’s wife, Magda, had a son from her first marriage to Günther Quant, who in turn had a daughter who converted to Judaism at the age of twenty-four. Quant, a businessman and a German Jew, was sent to the concentration camps.
Hitler himself had no children by choice: “Think of the problems if I had children! In the end they would try to make my son my successor. Besides, the chances are slim for someone like me to have a capable son. That is almost always how it goes in such cases. Consider Goethe’s son—a completely worthless person!”21
More than seventy years later, it is still difficult to write about this subject. Through all the stages of this book, I refrained from judging these children. They cannot be held responsible for actions they did not commit, even if some of them deny none of their fathers’ actions. Is that a form of self-defense, in the face of an indefensible past?
Gudrun Himmler is the perfect illustration.
GUDRUN HIMMLER
Nazism’s “Poppet”
Every year since 1958, a tiny mountain village in the Austrian section of the Bohemian Forest hosts Third Reich nostalgia seekers from all over Europe. In the bucolic setting of an ancient Celtic holy site, these middle-age men in glad rags gather every autumn to greet their former comrades. Young neo-Nazis also attend, to mingle with the veterans. Among this group of former Nazis and personalities aligned to the far-right, everyone agrees that the Waffen-SS simply fulfilled their duty. The attendees praise the soldiers’ sense of sacrifice and sometimes even go so far as to argue that they were victims.
Behind the drawn curtains of a local guesthouse, a man chants slogans to the glory of the great Germany. He takes pleasure in galvanizing his listeners as his own mentor did before him. His goal is to re-create the ambiance and the enthusiasm that Hitler aroused when he gave speeches in Munich’s brasseries. Decades have passed, but the ideals of the group that has gathered are the same as they ever were. Some of the men proudly wear their German military medals from World War II, the Iron Cross, or the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, always with a swastika in the center. They speak in excited tones about the time of the German people’s superiority, of the national community that required complete self-sacrifice, unfailing loyalty, and the rejection of any humanitarian sentiments for the “inner enemies” of the nation.1 This society of conspirators still believes in the quest for greatness and the motto of the SS: “Our honor is loyalty.”
A special guest sits at a distance from the others, where she can receive smaller groups of guests within the circle of her admirers. Only a privileged few are invited in. Her face is hard, weathered by time and bitterness, but she has lost nothing of her verve. Her fine white hair is gathered into a small chignon at the base of her skull, and she wears proudly on her blouse a silver brooch: four horse heads arranged in a circle to form a swastika.
From behind her glasses, two small, ice-blue eyes grip her terrified interlocutors. They idolize her, this singular heiress of the great Germany, the “Nazi princess,” Gudrun Himmler.
The “princess” enjoys watching the faithful parade before her, asking them in turn in an inquisitorial voice: “Where were you during the war? What was your unit?” From her father, whom she sometimes accompanied on his inspection rounds, she learned military logistics and keen powers of observation. This time, it is the war veterans’ parade, and they are proud to show themselves to the daughter of Hitler’s right-hand man. As they recite name and rank for her, they almost feel transported back to the time when their authority reigned supreme in the world. For a moment, some small bit of their lost pride returns to these men who must hide their past on a daily basis.
“Fifth SS Panzer Division Wiking,”2 announces an intimidated-looking man who has just entered the room. She questions him: “Were you a volunteer in the Danish Waffen-SS?”
“Absolutely,” is the answer from this sixty-eight-year-old veteran. His name is Vagner Kristensen, born in 1927 on the Danish island of Fyn. What explains the deference and fear that he shows to this tiny woman? Is it that, having lived in her father’s shadow for so many years, whether he was present or not, she has adopted his gestures, his voice? Her goal in life: exonerate her father’s reputation, to merit being her father’s daughter. Heinrich Himmler had eyes only for her, his one and only legitimate child, and she returns the favor.
On this day, Gudrun Himmler also meets Sören Kam, SS-Nr 456059, a Danish Nazi implicated in 1943 in the murder of an anti-Nazi journalist but never convicted. He fled to Germany and has lived trouble-free in Bavaria ever since. His name is on the list of most wanted Nazi criminals, yet he is a free man. Her father would be so proud of her due to her confidence before these men, in contrast to himself, who had to battle an inferiority complex and difficulties with interpersonal relationships.
As a young girl, she was so afraid of disappointing him that she swore her mother to secrecy whenever she made a mistake or behaved badly. She is convinced of his innocence; she is sure he never committed any of the crimes of which he was accused and she considers his guilty verdict completely unwarranted. She hoped for a long time to write a book that would exonerate him, rather than defend him, which would imply guilt. Gudrun is certain that, one day, his name will be remembered “in the same breath as Napoleon, Wellington, or Moltke.”3
History, however, will forever condemn him.
On Wednesday afternoons, her father sometimes brought her along on inspections, usually at Dachau, the first of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany. The camp was Himmler’s idea, and it opened in March 1933, a few kilometers from Munich. “The ones with a red triangle are prisoners. A black triangle is for criminals,” he explained to her. The little girl thought they all looked like prisoners, unshaven and poorly clothed. She was more interested in the vegetable garden and the greenhouse. “My father explained to me the properties of the different herbs and he let me pick some of the leaves,” she would later remember.4 She was twelve years old when she made this grim visit; the plants reminded her of her childhood on a farm where she liked to help her mother tend the garden. A photo was taken that day at Dachau. In it, a little blonde girl in a black coat smiles for the camera. She looks happy, surrounded by her father, Reinhard Heydrich, the future director of the Gestapo, and Karl Wolff, Himmler’s aide-de-camp. They pose under a sign showing prisoners where to line up.
Gudrun watched with admiration as her father rose through the ranks. In August 1943, she wrote in her diary: “Pappi Reichsinnenminister, that makes me incredibly happy.”5 In July 1942, as he was traveling to Auschwitz to review preparations for the Final Solution, which required the large-scale use of the gas Zyklon B, he coolly closed a letter to his wife, as if he were oblivious to what he was doing: “I leave for Auschwitz. I kiss you, Your Heini.”6 In his letters, he provides no indications as to his movements or activities and says not a word about the extermination of the Jewish people. He reveals only that he has much work and important assignments to complete. The same man will calmly justify his atrocities. “Concerning the Jewish women and children, I did not consider that I had the right to allow these children to grow up to become avengers who would kill our sons and grandsons in turn. That would have been cowardly on my part. As a result, the question was resolved without any need of discussion.”7
Though Gudrun was the daughter of the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the fanatical and uncontested master of the Third Reich’s mo
st dreaded agency, her story is not told in the history books. Heinrich Himmler’s childhood friends remembered that he was incapable of killing a fly.8 As an adult, he became the chief of the Gestapo and the SS and the architect of the concentration camps and of the extermination of Europe’s Jews.
Heinrich Himmler met Gudrun’s mother, Margarete Siegroth (née Boden), a divorced nurse, in 1927, in a train traveling from Munich to Berchtesgaden, near the Austrian border. He was twenty-seven years old, on the puny side, nearsighted, with a receding chin. Looking nothing like the ideal Aryan, he had an inferiority complex about his appearance. His weak physique and fragile stomach ruled out sports and drunken fraternizing. A soldier who never saw active service, he developed an obsession with discipline and uniforms, which helped him shore up his confidence. As a young man, he remained so inexperienced with women that he took the tack of extolling the advantages of sexual abstinence.9 Later, he would regret not having sown his wild oats in his youth; he had his first sexual experience at the age of twenty-eight. Margarete, or “Marga” for short, was tall and blonde with blue eyes, and a Protestant: an ideal Aryan woman. Himmler’s seduction strategy was to supply her with books about Freemasonry and the “global Jewish conspiracy.” The German economy was listing, and the country was in need of both a “savior” and scapegoats. Marga was not immune to the ambient anti-Semitism. “Once a Jew always a Jew,”10 she would conclude about her partner in the clinic she owned when she sold her shares in it, following her introduction to Himmler.
Shy Heinrich wrote her romantic letters, sometimes signing off with “Your landsknecht,” referencing a heroic, solitary, and brutal mercenary soldier of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “We must be happy,” she responded to him, but their marriage was a union more of affection than love. Marga was seven years Heinrich’s senior and would never be accepted by his Catholic family, least of all by his very pious mother. Marga was a divorced Protestant Prussian, anxious and ill at ease in society. The Himmlers worried she would stain their good reputation, and they did not attend Heinrich and Marga’s wedding on July 3, 1928, in Berlin-Schöneberg. Gudrun was born August 8, 1929, a blue-eyed girl weighing eight pounds and measuring twenty-one inches. She would become Heinrich Himmler’s only legitimate daughter, his püppi, his little doll.
Was Gudrun named after Heinrich’s favorite childhood book, The Saga of Gudrun? It sings the praises of the virtuous Norsewoman, for whom any man would lay down his life. Marga proved unable to bear more children, and the couple later adopted the son of a deceased SS soldier. However, the boy would never feel the warmth of a loving family in their home. In her diary, Marga noted the boy’s “criminal nature,”11 calling him a liar and even a thief. They sent him eventually to a boarding school and finally to a section of the National Political Academy, which functioned as a high school for the future Nazi elite. Gudrun, on the other hand, was the very image of perfection; Marga never tired of recording in her journal how pleasant and sweet she was: “Püppi ist liebe u. nett.” Elsewhere, writing about the Germanization of Poland, she noted, “I read this to Püppi and explained what it means: trek and homecoming to the Fatherland. It is an incredible achievement. People will still be talking about this after thousands of years.”12
Having studied agronomy at the University of Munich, Heinrich invested his wife’s dowry in a chicken farm in neighboring Waldtrudering in 1928. The newlyweds dreamed of being farmers, and Heinrich intended to live there with his wife and daughter. For the most part, however, Marga and Gudrun rarely saw Heinrich, and Marga managed the farm by herself. Moreover, the hens laid few eggs, the chicks died, and the whole scheme was soon going south. Marga complained of Heinrich’s frequent absences—which eventually extended into a permanent one—and she sank into depression. The more Heinrich was absent, the more irascible, aggressive, and scornful Margarete became. The Himmlers sold the farm and moved to the center of Munich in 1933. The “nice little man” with a good, though likely inconstant heart,” 13 in the eyes of party leaders, became, in reality, Commander of Political Police and then Chief of German Police for the Interior Ministry, heading up the SS in June 1936. Reichsführer-SS Himmler was a cold and calculating Great Inquisitor who could finally get the upper hand on his inferiority complexes by developing an obsession for racial purity.
After a short stay in Munich between 1936 and 1937, the Himmlers moved to Lake Tegernsee in Upper Bavaria, where Heinrich had purchased a house in the township of Gmund in 1934. However, as he took on ever-greater responsibility within the party, Himmler abandoned his wife and became sexually active, developing an interest for different aspects of sexuality in society. He acquiesced that Marga was not to blame for her sterility but he was not ready to resign himself to the prospect of fathering no further children. He considered monogamy “the work of Satan,”14 and an invention of the Catholic Church that deserved to be abolished. He based his ideas on Germanic prehistory: a free, racially pure Norseman could enter into a second marriage provided children were born of it.15 Himmler allowed his officers experiencing problems in their marriages to divorce or to take a mistress. In his opinion, a healthy man should not content himself for life with one woman and he believed that bigamy would force women to compete for the favors of men.
For certain SS leaders, bigamy and polygamy were also useful tools to keep birthrates up during wartime. Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, for example, before marrying the woman who would bear him six children, had her make a prenuptial agreement with him, allowing him to have extramarital relations. Similarly, the wife of Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and a close advisor to Hitler, had ten children before dreaming up a scheme to support “the cause” by housing her husband’s mistresses under her own roof. Her goal: “[P]ut all the children together in the house on the lake, and live together.”16 The Bormanns believed strongly that a law should be passed allowing “healthy, productive men to have two wives … So many worthy women are destined to remain childless…. We need children from these women as well!”17 Bormann wanted to ban the term “illegitimate” and forbid use of the expression “have an affair” because of its pejorative connotation.
To remedy the low birthrate during wartime, Himmler proposed legalizing births out of wedlock in the hope of encouraging more of them. This led to the creation, in 1936, of Aktion Lebensborn: a breeding program that encouraged anonymous births by unmarried Aryan mothers. Moreover, aiming to discourage homosexuality, Himmler promoted occasions for adolescents of the opposite sex to meet. In the speech he delivered about homosexuality in Bad Tölz on February 18, 1937, he declared: “I consider it necessary to ensure that young boys between the ages of fifteen and sixteen years meet girls at a dance class, a social evening, or at any variety of occasions. It is at the age of fifteen or sixteen (experience has proven) that young boys go through a period of instability. If he finds a girl to dance with or has a young love, he will be saved, he will retreat from danger.”18 This is hardly the Himmler who, as a young man, sang the praises of abstinence.
In 1940, Himmler separated from Marga rather than divorce her, out of respect for the mother of his child. He was careful afterward to remain close to his daughter whom he adored and cherished more than anything. Despite his growing role in the Nazi Party and his frequent absences, he wished to remain a good father and a proper husband. Posing in childhood photos next to her Travel-Papa, as she liked to call him, Püppi is the image of a little angel in traditional Bavarian dress with a sweet expression and blonde braids that were sometimes rolled into buns over each ear: the perfect German child. Her father gave her regular reports about his daily activities, frequently sent her photos of himself, and generally spent as much time with her as he could. The pocket calendars he kept reveal almost daily phone calls to his wife and daughter. Himmler recorded everything to the last detail, such as, “played with the children” or “conversation with Püppi.”19
Her poor grades infuriated him. In his opinion, obedi
ence, neatness, and schooling were central to a child’s education. Himmler himself displayed unfailing obedience as a child and was always a good student. For her part, Marga kept a record of her daughter’s childhood from her earliest years, noting her good behavior, her early predilection for tidiness, or, on the contrary, the trouble Marga had trying to make Gudrun obey her. When Heinrich would visit, he would take her hunting and for walks in the forest. She liked to pick flowers and collect mosses.
The Führer was a central figure in Gudrun’s childhood. One night in 1935, two years after Hitler became chancellor, little Gudrun was having trouble falling asleep. “Must Uncle Hitler also die?” she asked her mother anxiously. Marga reassured her that he would certainly live to his hundredth birthday at least, to which the little girl answered with relief, “No, Mother, I know he will live to see two hundred.”20
The Himmlers were flattered and pleased by the attention the Führer paid to their daughter. In her diary, dated May 3, 1938, Marga wrote: “The Führer visited. Poppet was very excited. It was wonderful to have him to ourselves over supper.”21
At every New Year, the Führer gave Gudrun a doll and a box of chocolates.
Beginning in late 1938, Himmler began a relationship with one of his secretaries, Hedwig Potthast, who had been working for him for two years. He decided to inform Marga, in the event that he might become a father again. In conformity with his policy of encouraging out-of-wedlock births—a position he would defend publicly in 1940—two children were born: a boy, Helge (1942), followed by a girl, Nanette Dorothea (1944). Helge is Germanic for “healthy, racially pure, and therefore happy,” but the boy was nothing like the noble heir Himmler had hoped for.22 Instead, he was troubled by a dermatological condition, a weak constitution, and excessive shyness.
Children of Nazis Page 2
