In 1952, Gudrun also helped found the group Wiking-Jugund, or Viking Youth, modeled on the Hitlerjugund youth organization of the Nazi Party. The group was banned in Germany in 1994.
The hard-core network of Stille Hilfe consisted of twenty to forty members and a hundred or so sympathizers. The association also provided aid to war criminals on the run: Adolf Eichmann, Johan von Leers, and even Josef Mengele would take advantage of these Nazi exfiltration networks, referred to as “rat lines” by the Allies. With the unfailing support of Stille Hilfe’s members, they were all able to escape to South America. Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyon, would also be helped by the association.49 Oliver Schröm and Andrea Röpke, the authors of Stille Hilfe für braune Kameraden: Das geheime Netzwerk der Alt-und Neonazis, point out that the organization not only aids former members of the National Socialist Party but also officially collects funds for the neo-Nazi movement.
When journalists have questioned Gudrun about these activities, she has always given the same terse answer: “I never talk about my work; I just do what I can when I can.”50 Her work for the association included helping Anton Malloth, who was the Oberscharführer-SS at the Theresienstadt concentration camp; he was one of its cruelest and most feared guards and was undoubtedly in close contact with her father. For over forty years, Malloth lived undetected in Merano, Italy, before being extradited to Germany in 1988. Procedural failings left his case unresolved until 2001, when a Munich court delivered a life sentence. During all those years, Gudrun was his leading advocate. Stille Hilfe obtained a room for him in an upscale retirement home that had been built on land that had once belonged to Hitler’s Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess. In 1990, when it became publicly known that the German social security system (paid for by the German taxpayer) had footed most of the bill for Malloth’s care in the home, the news was met with general consternation, much of it directed at Gudrun Himmler. Loyal and undeterred, however, she continued her bimonthly visits to him, until his death in 2002.
Gudrun’s isolation is not wholly by choice: society has no tolerance for her defense of her father or her own positions. Her involvement in organizations that aid former Nazis and her support of Germany’s political far-right movement demonstrate that she means not only to rehabilitate her father but to pursue his gruesome ideals as well.
In the 1960s, Gudrun married a Nazi sympathizer, the writer Wolf-Dieter Burwitz, a Bavarian civil servant. He was accepting of her family history and subscribed to her father’s beliefs. They live in Fürstenried, a Munich suburb, in a big white house. The couple has two children, one of which, a son, is a tax lawyer in Munich.
In 2010, Stille Hilfe also tried to block an extradition request by the Netherlands regarding a Dutch Nazi, Klaas Carel Faber. A Dutch court had pronounced him guilty in 1947 of the murder of twenty-two Jews and resistance fighters during the war.
Gudrun also became a militant for the National Democratic Party, a far-right ultranationalist political party in Germany, and she seems to enjoy her celebrity at meetings such as the Nazi gathering in Ulrichsberg in northern Austria. Perhaps she has concluded that, no matter what she does, she can never escape her past. If her reasoning is correct, rejecting the past would change nothing: her card has been dealt. As her father probably did before her, she has chosen to avoid any questions of morality, another way of avoiding her psychological burden. Is it possible that Himmler’s daughter has never felt the tweaks of conscience? Even her great-niece, Katrin, has admitted feeling guilty “in some inexplicable yet distressing way.”51
Guilt can sometimes skip a generation. Katrin Himmler’s in-laws are a Jewish family who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, and when she became a mother, she decided to write about her family history in a book entitled Die Brüder Himmler.52 She had learned of the atrocities committed by the Nazis when she was younger, but, like many Germans, she had found it too painful to examine her own family’s role. She has written that when it comes to condemning close family members, the psychological obstacles are too strong: “It is an uncomfortable process, constantly accompanied by fears of the loss it might bring.”53 In light of the very different choices she has made compared to those of her great-aunt, she maintains no contact at all with Gudrun Himmler.
In the case of children, those mental blocks are even stronger. Gudrun Himmler’s most pertinent characteristics are her complete lack of objective distance from her father figure and her active role in the perpetuation of National Socialist ideals. For her, paying homage to her father goes hand in hand with supporting the Nazi ideology.
EDDA GÖRING
The Little Princess of “The Nero of Nazi Germany”
It is a summer night in the port city of Hamburg in the late 1970s. Opera music is playing while an elegantly dressed group sips cocktails; their style is from another era and the music reminds them of their glory days. They are guests on a splendid vessel, a testament to the supremacy of German naval shipbuilding and a floating museum to Nazi Germany. The notes are from the Prelude to Act III of Parsifal, the last opera of the great Richard Wagner, the Third Reich’s favorite composer. When the ship still belonged to its former owner, over forty years earlier, the same opera played then. Now, however, the music can hardly be heard over the voices of the guests, who pay it no attention. They are too busy remembering the best days of their lives.
The Carin II is a magnificent, eighty-nine-foot wooden yacht with the elegance of a royal cruise ship. That was, in fact, its intended purpose, when it was renamed the Royal Albert and served England’s royal family for some fifteen years after the war—that is until its true identity was discovered and the family decided to sell it. Emmy, the widow of the yacht’s original owner, immediately demanded it be returned to her, and her price was not cheap.
Among the guests on board, a large man stands out. His thinning blond hair is combed to one side over his high forehead, and thick square-framed glasses hint at his failing eyesight. He likes to be the center of attention and he loves anything that sparkles; he reminds some of the passengers of the ship’s first owner, for those who once knew him, a man so tall he could barely squeeze his imposing frame into the ship’s shower without becoming stuck there.
One woman sits by herself near the bow. Her name is Edda, and she stands out as much by her beauty as her identity. A solitary figure, she seems to inhabit the world only to maintain the memory of her father, for whom her love remains as unflagging as it is unconditional. He is the former owner of this yacht, Hermann Göring, and the most important man in her life. In 1937, the German automobile industry offered him this colossal gift, valued at 1.3 million reichsmarks (about 8 million dollars today). The ship was christened for his first wife, Carin von Kantzow, a Swede who died in 1931 at the age of forty-two. Edda often vacationed on this monument to her father’s adored first love, and some of her most cherished childhood memories were made there. Photos in her family albums show her next to her father in the exact spot where she is seated tonight: he is wearing a yachting cap while she is laughing hilariously. Back then, he docked the yacht on Lake Wannsee, between Potsdam and Berlin. He loved to sail for hours on Potsdam’s lakes and canals and he hosted sumptuous dinners on board that flowed with excellent wines and cognacs. There was even a platform that made it possible to hunt ducks, which were then served on board.
The boat’s current owner is one Gerd Heidemann, a journalist at Stern, one of postwar Germany’s largest news magazines. He is also a former member of Germany’s state security service, the Stasi, and a Nazi apologist. Above all, he is a man who feeds on recognition and glory. He first discovered the ship while preparing a story on private yachting in 1972, but he had no intention of buying it then. He would reverse that decision one year later, taking advantage of the proceeds of the sale of his house and a favorable payment scheme, and in the hopes of reselling it to an American buyer. But he would change his mind yet again; the Carin II would be his vehicle to wealth and fame, no matter the price. Obsessed by the yacht�
��s first owner, he would make it into a museum piece, replicating exactly its former decor by buying back much of its original fittings: silver and place settings, ashtrays, pillowcases, uniforms, etc. For five years, he would even be the suitor of Göring’s only daughter.
The glory he sought so avidly would never come, however. A few years after this dinner, he published Hitler’s private diaries, dating from 1932 to the Führer’s death in 1945: seventy-two black-leather volumes carrying an embossed “FH” in the lower right-hand corner of each cover. Their last-known whereabouts had been a plane that crashed near Dresden in 1945. However, the “Hitler diaries” were no more than forgeries. Historians who were asked to authenticate the journals immediately expressed doubts, but the profits Stern stood to make were too huge to resist; the magazine brushed aside any attempt to declare them forgeries and published extracts as quickly as possible. Adolf Hitler became the hottest thing in publishing: Stern’s sales went through the roof and the foreign press, led by Paris Match magazine, fought to acquire publishing rights. Paris Match succeeded and ran the story on its cover, but the German police closed the party down when it revealed that the materials used in the notebooks dated from after the war. A forger named Konrad Kujau had written and sold them over a three-year period, with Gerd Heidemann’s help, for 9.3 million deutschmarks. The story is one of the greatest scandals of German publishing, and Heidemann received a multiyear prison sentence.
But on this May evening in 1978, the night air is warm despite a cool breeze, and the guests are happy to gather, just like in the old days when Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, or even the Führer himself might have joined them as the guest of honor.
Seated among them, however, are other emissaries of the Third Reich—Himmler’s aide-de-camp Karl Wolff; and Wilhelm Mohnke, the Kommandant of the Führer’s bunker. The story of Hitler’s final moments thrills the guests, and the alcohol that flows freely sharpens their nostalgia, but Edda, the “little princess of Nazi Germany’s Nero” seems far away. She is the daughter of the Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.
Edda was born on June 2, 1938. Her mother, the second wife of the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, was Emmy Sonnemann, a provincial actress at the German National Theater in Weimar. Her parents had met in that city in 1932, when Hermann Göring had accompanied Hitler there. It was love at first sight for Emmy, who congratulated herself on her luck, declaring, “I am happy to have met a man, Hermann, who meets my expectations.”1 Their wedding in 1935 reflected Göring’s taste for everything opulent and ostentatious; it could have been the coronation of an emperor.
Emmy Göring’s sudden rise in status was ridiculed by her former friends at the theater. They called her sarcastically, “the grand lady,” and the opera singer, Helene von Weinmann declared: “My God, Emmy is such a show-off. I knew her before she was a ‘grand lady’ and could be ‘had’ for a cup of coffee and 2.50 shillings.”2 Weinmann was immediately slapped with a three-year jail sentence; when she was released from Stadelheim prison in 1943, she was on her deathbed.
Hermann Göring became a father for the first time at the age of forty-three. Emmy announced the birth to him by telephone, sending all my congratulations, mine and little Edda’s.” He was ecstatic, rushing to her bedside and declaring Edda the most beautiful child he had ever seen. This reversed his earlier decision to wait a few days before meeting his daughter; everyone had told him newborns were hideous! To celebrate the birth, Göring led a squad of five hundred Luftwaffe planes on a flyover in the skies above Berlin. If Emmy had given him a son, it would have been a one-thousand plane flyover.
Edda’s father was a decorated World War I fighter pilot who had received Germany’s highest military honor, the Pour le Mérite cross. After the death of Wilhelm Reinhard, one of the famous Red Barons, Göring was named commander of the celebrated Flying Circus, an elite squadron.
He was one of Hitler’s earliest lieutenants; nothing excited him more than power and its privileges. The creation of the Gestapo and the first concentration camps, including Oranienburg, near Berlin, were some of his contributions.
Rumor has it that Hermann Göring wanted to name his new baby after Mussolini’s favorite daughter, Edda Ciano. Edda Göring has insisted that the name came from German mythology, which both of her parents loved, whereas Emmy claimed it was the name of one of her friends. Edda loved to remind people that, “Farah Diba, the wife of the Shah of Persia, only received 16,000 telegrams for the birth of the crown prince, whereas when I was born, my parents received 628,000!” She was baptized November 4, 1938, at Carinhall, Göring’s hunting estate northeast of Berlin. The religious ceremony took place with great pomp and circumstance, a fact that irritated certain members of the Nazi Party, which included many anti-Church radicals at the time. But with the Führer as the godfather, what good did it do to complain? A portrait of Edda in the arms of her loving father sold by the millions throughout Germany, and she received many presents, including one from the city of Cologne, a painting of The Madonna and Child, by Lucas Cranach the Elder whose work Göring admired. The gift would later become the subject of a dispute between Edda and the city of Cologne that lasted nearly fifteen years.
The Görings’ family life was organized entirely around the new child, whom they affectionately nicknamed “Eddalein.” She was the sunshine of her parents’ lives. The star child soon inspired jokes and anecdotes, so central a figure was she in German life:
“Did you hear the Reichsautobahn has been closed to traffic?”
“No, why?”
“Edda is learning to walk.”
In 1940, the Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer reported that Edda had been conceived by artificial insemination and was not Göring’s daughter.3 The accusation rested on one fact—that Emmy Göring was already forty-four when she became pregnant—and one rumor—that Göring had been rendered impotent by a bullet wound he took in the groin during the famous Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The British ambassador to Berlin himself was credited with telegraphing this information in 1936.4 An enraged Göring demanded that Walter Buch, the Nazi Party regulator and a jurist, bring a lawsuit against Der Stürmer’s publisher, Julius Streicher. This quasi-pornographic publication was the organ of vulgar anti-Semitism, but its sales had been steadily growing since 1935.5 It was only after Hitler’s intervention that Streicher was saved from Göring’s claws and allowed to continue to publish his rag from his farm near Nuremberg.
Carinhall, named also after Göring’s first wife, was the symbol of his power. Carin herself was there. Göring had his beloved wife’s corpse brought back from Sweden in a monumental pewter casket and inhumed on the property. Built in 1933, about thirty miles from Berlin, the imposing lodge was as big as a castle and designed by Werner March, who would also design the Olympic stadium in Berlin. The building underwent two renovations in 1937 and 1939, which increased its size considerably. Still, nothing was too big, nothing too beautiful for Göring, who spent the Reich’s money by the fistful, while failing to pay his workers. His reason: Carinhall was an official residence, the “House of the Reich.” Hitler quipped that if you compared Göring’s hunting lodge to his own mountain chalet, the latter would look like a lowly gardener’s hut.
Edda grew up with Carinhall as her extravagant home, surrounded by immense grounds and, beyond that, thousands of acres of forest where bison, buffalo, deer, elk, and wild horses roamed freely. The rooms were stuffed with all of the artwork Göring pillaged in his insatiable treasure hunting: he liked to think of himself as the Reich’s greatest patron of the arts.
The mansion’s basement was equipped with a cinema, a gymnasium, a pool, a billiards room, and a Russian steam bath. Elsewhere on the property were medical examining rooms, a bunker and a reception hall, called the Jaghalle, or hunting hall, measuring over three thousand square feet. It was lined with hunting trophies and featured a church’s nave heated by an immense fireplace. For leisure activities, as if the hunting and other distractions were not enough,
two thousand feet of electric train tracks, worth $268,000, had been laid in the attic. Lion cubs were also on the property, raised solely for the delight of the family and visitors. In the interest of safety, they were replaced every year by the Berlin Zoo when the resident cubs reached one year of age. The Görings raised seven cubs in all, and all were hand-fed with a baby bottle. Edda delighted in watching her father play with her favorite cub, Mucki, and even Mussolini liked to have a tussle with the little lion when he came to visit. Yet another of his fantastical ideas was a weight-loss machine that he liked to demonstrate for the Duchess of Windsor. By this time, his fighter pilot’s physique was a distant memory. The dashing and muscular officer who liked to call himself Iron Man weighed 320 pounds in 1933. The American ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, joked about him, “He is at least a yard across the bottom as the crow flies … two inches of padding extending each [shoulder] … nearly a yard from rear to umbilicus … and encases himself in a glove-tight uniform, the effect is novel.”6
Not only was Göring an immoderate collector of jewels, he also loved to dress up in different outfits; and was known to change clothes as many as five times a day. His guests might discover him in a Roman toga or an emperor’s robe or carrying a spear. He wore makeup, red nail polish, and diamond rings, and in these accoutrements he did not hesitate to parade around in front of a transfixed Albert Speer or a mesmerized Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a famous pilot.
Speer met him in 1943 as the Nazis’ fortunes began to turn, and he recorded later his “astonishment” to discover a “rouged” and “lacquered” Göring in a green velour dressing gown pinned with an enormous ruby, who “occasionally scooped a handful of unset gems from his pocket and playfully let them glide through his fingers” while they talked.7 The Italian foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, noted in his journal in 1942, seeing Göring in a fur coat “such as a high-class prostitute would wear to the opera.”8
Children of Nazis Page 4
