In 1942, Himmler moved his second family into roomy lodgings, the Schneewinkellehen house in Schönau, near Hitler’s retreat in Berchtesgaden. Hedwig Potthast and her two children would remain there until the Allied occupation. Hedwig agreed to the arrangement in the hope of being reunited with Himmler after the war. The Allies described her as “a stereotypical Nazi woman.”23 She was Marga’s opposite: cheerful, friendly, and on good terms with Himmler’s entourage. When Marga learned of the affair, she remarked wearily in her diary: “That only occurs to men once they are rich and highly regarded. Otherwise, older women have to help to feed them or put up with them.”24 In her letters to her husband, however, she never mentioned his mistress or his second family.
Gudrun was often alone, or, when her parents were away, in the care of her mother’s sister, Lydia Boden. Beginning in 1939, Marga, wishing to contribute to the war effort, returned to nursing, mostly for the Red Cross in Berlin. She traveled at times to the occupied territories; in Poland in 1940, she allowed herself to comment: “Such a pack of Jews, these Polaks; most of them don’t look anything at all like human beings, and such indescribable filth. Cleaning it up is an endless task.” Or, “These Polish people don’t die very quickly of contagious diseases, they have immunity [sic]! Hard to believe.”25
Gudrun never went far from Gmund. Under questioning at Nuremberg on September 22, 1945, she explained that “during the war, we never went anywhere. For five years, we lived in that house and I went to school; that is all that I did.”26 Himmler had refused to bring Marga and Gudrun to Berlin due to the intensifying air raids. Püppi waited every day for her parents to return, but mostly for the brief and sporadic visits of her father. She suffered from stomachaches and was an anxious girl, whose grades at school declined steadily over time.27 However, she followed the news of the war with great interest. She feared for her father.
Marga remarked in her journal that Gudrun heard many things that a girl should never know.28 Her father, on the other hand, wanted Marga to explain as much as possible to Gudrun, no matter that she was too young to understand most of it.29 On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union, opening up the Eastern front, with Operation Barbarossa. It was a Sunday, and Gudrun, who was twelve, wrote to her father: “It’s terrible that we are going to war with Russia. They were our allies after all. Russia is so big; the struggle will be very difficult if we want to conquer all of Russia.”30
Gudrun seems to be aware of the Nazi fantasy, one shared by the Reich’s leaders, of a greater Germany reaching as far as the Ural Mountains. Her diary entry dated November 1, 1943: “My parents bought another large garden plot. Up behind the greenhouse as far as the back of the woods, next to the large meadow. The prisoners have moved the fence from inside our current garden. When peace comes we are sure to get an estate in the East. The estate would then bring us more money and make it possible to renovate the house in Gmund. So that the hallways are lighter and we get bigger rooms. Later Haus Lindenfycht will belong to me. When peace comes again we are going to move into the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Maybe we will even get a house at Obersalzberg. Yes, once we have peace again, but that will take a long, long time (2, 3 years).”31
In July 1944, she realized Germany was losing the war, yet, as news arrived of the Allied invasion of Normandy and the Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front, she banished the thought of defeat from her mind: “We all believe so firmly in victory (Pappi) that I, as the daughter of the man who is now especially respected and beloved, have to think so too—and I do. It would be unthinkable if we were to lose.”32 Also in July, Himmler ordered the construction of an air-raid shelter on the grounds of the house in Gmund by a work detail of prisoners from Dachau.
Gudrun had few playmates. Her mother was not on good relations with either her husband’s family or her own, with the exception of her sister. Isolated from other human contact, Gudrun suffered the caprices of her increasingly irritable mother. When the family of Gebhrard Himmler, Heinrich’s oldest brother, came to live with them in the house in Gmund, the conflict between her mother and her aunt soured her relations with her first cousins. Over the course of the war and the defeat, and until his death in 1945, Gudrun saw her father no more than fifteen to twenty times.33 When he did visit, he stayed only three or four days at the most. She contented herself with telephone calls and the letters he sent her regularly, which included autographed photographs of himself. He also sent clothing and food: chocolates, cheese, and sweets. One day, she received one hundred and fifty tulips from Holland. At the end of the war, when staples were exceedingly rare and hard to come by, Himmler managed to send food packages to the family. On March 5, 1945, Gudrun wrote in her diary: “We no longer have any allies in Europe, and can only rely on ourselves. And among our own people there is so much betrayal…. The general mood is at zero…. The Luftwaffe is still so bad. Göring does not seem to care about anything, that windbag. Goebbels is doing a lot, but he always shows off. They all get medals and awards, except Pappi, and he should be the first to get one…. The people all look up to him. He always stays in the background and never shows off.”34
Gudrun saw her father for the last time at Gmund in November 1944. He stayed for two days. She spoke to him on the phone for the last time in March 1945, and received a final package from him the following month.35 Her parents’ discussions never strayed from everyday matters or Himmler’s fragile health; he was troubled for years by chronic gastric problems. “When I saw him for the last time, he said he hoped to return at Christmas, but couldn’t be sure,” she told the Allies.36
In April 1945, as American troops approached, Margarete and Gudrun left Gmund, heading south. The bunker Himmler had had built by Dachau prisoners was not going to be enough to protect them.
Fifteen-year-old Gudrun and her mother were arrested on May 13, 1945, in Wolkenstein, near Bolzano in South Tyrol. When General Karl Wolff, Obergruppenführer-SS and Himmler’s chief of staff, was arrested in his sumptuous villa in Bolzano, he had made a deal with the Allies: “Let me return to Germany, and I will tell you where Himmler’s wife and daughter are hiding.”37 Following their questioning, they were taken to luxurious lodgings in the home of a former film producer, where other female prisoners were being held. Next, they were transferred to a hotel in Bolzano, where they waited for two days before being transported to Verona for one night and then to Florence by plane and under escort for their protection from any possible attack by the general public or by the opposition. One of their guards at the British interrogation center in Florence told Gudrun and her mother, “If you tell anyone your name is Himmler, they’ll tear you apart.”38
Their questioning began. Margarete built her defense on ignorance: her husband had never told her about his activities. A British officer reported that she shut herself up “in a provincial bourgeois mentality.”39 Gudrun knew little more: she learned about the war mostly from the Allies and the foreign press during her imprisonment.
Next, they were taken to Rome, where they were held at the Cinecittà, Italy’s largest motion picture studio, where an internment camp and intelligence office had been established. Himmler’s wife and daughter were the only female detainees there, so the Allies had to construct a cell for them on the set of a Fascist propaganda movie. After four weeks, Gudrun began a hunger strike to protest the foul rations. Her condition quickly deteriorated and she began running a high fever. The British commander, known as “Bridge,” sought the help of Hitler and Mussolini’s interpreter to reason with the girl. Gudrun held out, and mother and daughter were served from the officers’ mess thereafter. They were transferred subsequently to prisons in Milan, Paris, and Versailles, where they stayed for three days, before arriving at Nuremberg. “From now on, my name is Himmler. No more aliases, no more disguises,”40 Gudrun declared. Her questioning at Nuremberg would prove fruitless: she knew nothing. When she was asked if she ever discussed the war with her father, she answered: “With my father, I never s
poke of the war or anything like that.”41
Gudrun still did not know what had become of her father. Her mother let it be known that she had a weak heart, leading the officers at the internment camp to withhold the news that her husband had committed suicide a few days previously on May 23, 1945, during a medical visit and strip search following his capture by British forces. After declaring, “My name is Heinrich Himmler,” he had bitten a cyanide pill he had been concealing in his mouth. Although his stomach was pumped immediately, he died twelve minutes later.
On July 13, 1945, the United Press journalist Ann Stringer interviewed Margarete. She confirmed she knew of her husband’s activities as the head of the Gestapo; she was proud of her husband, she said, and scolded the journalist: “In Germany, no one would dare ask a wife such a question.” As for the world’s hatred for the chief of the SS, she concluded impassively, “No one likes a policeman.” When Stringer informed her of her husband’s capture by the British and his suicide, she showed neither emotion nor surprise; she merely folded her hands in her lap and shrugged her shoulders. Stringer said she had never been face-to-face with anyone so cold:
“But even when I told her that Himmler was buried in an unmarked grave Frau Himmler showed no surprise, no interest. It was the coldest exhibition of complete control of human feeling that I have ever witnessed…. Then I asked if she knew what the world had thought of him and she replied, ‘I know that before the war many people thought highly of him.’ Frau Margarete denied the possibility that her dead husband might have been considered the No. 1 war criminal. She said, ‘My husband? How could that be when Hitler was Fuehrer?’ … Then pressed as to whether or not she was still proud of Himmler when he had sentenced millions of innocent people to death by torture, gassing, or starvation, Frau Margarete answered noncommittally, ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. It all depends.’42 It is impossible to feel any sympathy for her.”
Under questioning at Nuremberg on September 26, 1945, Marga Himmler confirmed that Heinrich always carried poison hidden on his person; many Nazi officials did the same and this was in compliance with orders from their hierarchy. She also stated that she discussed the war with her husband but denied that the concentration camps were ever a topic of those discussions: “I never had any knowledge about them. I have only just learned of their existence.” When Colonel John Harlan Amen, the United States Army Intelligence officer who served as the chief interrogator at Nuremberg, inquired why she never asked Himmler about the camps, she answered: “I don’t know.”
He continued his questioning: “You knew that he was building them in certain places, isn’t it true?”
She replied, “Yes, I knew that some of them existed, but I don’t know who told me. I don’t remember. Maybe it was him; I knew they had been built.” After her initial denial, Marga finally admitted she knew that her husband was in charge of the camps and revealed that she had even visited the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück. Nevertheless, she maintained that she was unaware of what went on there until she read about the camps in the newspapers in 1945.43
It was not until an interview that her mother gave to an American journalist on August 20, 1945, that Gudrun learned by chance of her father’s suicide by poison before he could be interrogated.44 The shock made her physically ill; she lay on her cot for almost three weeks in a delirium with a high fever. Gudrun had convinced herself that her father had been assassinated by the Allies; it was impossible for her to admit that he had killed himself. At that point, the British officer whose responsibility she was had had enough and began looking for a way to get rid of his troublesome young prisoner. However, no other officer wanted to have the Himmler girl in his charge, since she was of no use to the Allies and her security was a difficult matter. The only solution he found was to change her name; she would continue her life as Gudrun Schmidt, but not for long.
During the denazification campaign, and until November 1946, Himmler’s wife and daughter were interned at women’s camp 77 at Ludwigsburg. When the commander of the camp offered to release them, Margarete refused. She had no money, feared an assassination attempt, and had no idea where to go. They were finally admitted, under the diagnosis “feebleminded,” to the Bethel Institution, a diaconal hospital for the mentally ill founded by the Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. The Protestant nurses tried to establish a rapport with Gudrun, but she remained aloof, declaring over and over “I want to be like my father,” in other words, Catholic. Himmler had been, in fact, a fervent Catholic in his youth. He had drifted away from the Church eventually but he prayed every evening with his daughter. The nurses never saw Gudrun laugh or cry during her time at Bethel. She and her mother left the hospital in 1952.
What do we know of the world when we are just twenty years old? At the age of twenty, Gudrun still had not developed any emotional or critical distance from her adored father who had remained convinced until the end that he was a moral individual. Nazism, which is based on the concept of “pure” versus “inferior” races, made this logic possible, even in the face of what is universally understood as moral. However, when she learned of the crimes committed by her father, Gudrun could no longer use the skewed principles of the Third Reich as an excuse.
In 1947, her application to enroll in a fashion and design school was rejected outright on the basis of her name. When she was asked what her father’s profession was, she had answered matter-of-factly: “My father was the Reichsführer-SS.”45 She was admitted the following semester after the local head of the Social-Democratic Party intervened, arguing that she should not be punished for the crimes of her father: “Our young democracy does not make children suffer for the sins of their parents.”46 She studied dressmaking and apprenticed as a seamstress. In 1950, when she was twenty-one years old, she left her mother and moved to Munich where she began looking for work. Once she learned she had a half sister and a half brother, she tried to contact them, unsuccessfully. Himmler’s mistress, Hedwig Potthast, blocked her attempts.
Little is known about Hedwig’s life after the war. In the 1950s, she left Bavaria and went to live in a village near Baden-Baden in the Black Forest, near one of her friends, Sigurd Peiper, formerly a secretary in the office of the Reichsführer-SS whose husband had been imprisoned for war crimes. Hedwig remarried and took her husband’s name. Even less is known about her children; they lived in total anonymity. All that is known is that Himmler’s son lived with his mother his whole life because of health problems while the daughter became a doctor. Hedwig Potthast died in Baden-Baden in 1994.
Every time Gudrun had to declare her family name, she was immediately sanctioned, denied employment or lodgings. Her colleagues and clients all refused any contact with a “Himmler.” Yet, she was adamant about keeping her name.
In 1955, she traveled to London where she attended a party organized by Oswald Mosley with Adolf von Ribbentrop, the son of Hitler’s foreign minister. When she returned, she let it be known with some pride that she had met a number of Fascists there. Her loose tongue cost Gudrun her job at the boarding house where she worked on the shores of Lake Tegernsee. When a client learned that the young receptionist was the daughter of Heinrich Himmler, he objected: “How could you let me be waited on by this girl when my own wife was gassed in the ovens at Auschwitz?”47
Her little apartment on the Georgenstrasse, on the outskirts of Munich, was a veritable museum to the glory of her father. Paintings, curios, decorations, busts, photographs: she lived surrounded by the many objects she had collected beginning in childhood. She had searched all over Europe as well, sometimes with the help of former Nazis who had kept relics. She found work as a secretary and led a simple life dedicated to the memory of her loving and affectionate father, whose participation in one of the greatest atrocities of history she could never admit.
She defends him tirelessly, unable to draw a distinction between her loving father and the SS monster, the blinkered fanatic, the architect and overseer of the Final Solution. She firmly
believes that evidence will one day come to light that will exonerate him. The irrefutable proof that others have presented to her proves nothing. Can the particular bond she had with her father explain her willful blindness? It is difficult to form an opinion because she has never spoken on the subject. She gave only one interview, to the journalist Norbert Lebert in 1959.
Some years later, Lebert’s son, Stephan, published that interview and others conducted by his father in the book, Denn du trägst meinen Namen.48 He argues that children such as Gudrun who prostrate themselves to the former glory of their fathers draw assurance from their hero worship. These children are powerless to admit the crushing burden of their families’ histories. Of Heinrich Himmler, Gudrun only knew the good paterfamilias; the other aspects of his personality were only stories she read in the newspapers and in books. The only way forward for these children is to negate secondhand information, no matter how factual it may appear. To act otherwise would be a betrayal. Moreover, the repeated rejections Gudrun suffered during her life perhaps led her to consider herself a victim of injustice, just as she believed her father was.
In 1951, Gudrun joined Stille Hilfe für Kriegsgefangene und Internierte (in English, Silent Assistance for Prisoners of War and Interned Persons). It was created by Princess Helene Elisabeth von Isenberg, with the help of her contacts in the nobility and the Catholic Church, out of a perceived need to come to the aid of prisoners of war and interred prisoners, whom von Isenberg believed had been deprived of all rights. Under the direction of the lawyer Rudolf Aschenauer, the association provided legal aid to those accused of war crimes, whether they were held in prisons maintained by the Allies or detained in German jails, while their trials played out after the war. Von Isenberg thought of herself as a mother to the Nazi criminals held in the American prison in Landsberg, in Bavaria, where Hitler was a prisoner for nine months in 1924, and wrote Mien Kampf.
Children of Nazis Page 3
