In December 2010, an 82-year-old widower died in a nursing home in the northern German city of Lübeck. On his nightstand, his son found a folder containing two black-and-white photographs. The first showed the old man as a 17-year-old in 1945, wearing the uniform of the SS. The second was a portrait of one of the Third Reich’s most infamous figures: Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS.
Few people knew that the unassuming elderly man who had just died shared a strange and tragic bond with Himmler. He had been Himmler’s adopted son—a relationship that brought no pleasure to either party and shaped a deeply unfortunate life for the boy Himmler had taken in. His name was Gerhard Von der Ahé, and his connection to the most powerful man in the Nazi security apparatus began in the turbulence of 1933. That year, shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, an SS sergeant named Kurt Von der Ahé was shot and mortally wounded in Berlin during an alleged clash with communists.
Though his surname carried the nobiliary particle “Von,” suggesting noble ancestry, Kurt Von der Ahé had worked as an electromechanic and had been an early member of the SS. His death became politically useful to the Nazis: a court case followed, the alleged murderer received a death sentence, and a bronze plaque was placed at the site of the killing. In 1937, a street in Munich—the birthplace of Nazism—was renamed in his honor. Kurt Von der Ahé’s widow was left with two young sons.
For reasons that remain unclear, one of them, five-year-old Gerhard, was placed for adoption with the Himmler family. Heinrich Himmler had married an older woman, Margarete Boden, a divorced nurse seven years his senior, in 1928. Their only child, a daughter named Gudrun, was born in 1929. Himmler had long hoped for a son, but no further children came from the marriage.
When the adoption of young Gerhard was arranged, Himmler was delighted. He wrote in a letter: “We’ve adopted a boy, as we unfortunately don’t have one of our own. ” The arrangement appears to have included a sum of money paid to Gerhard’s mother. The boy moved into the Himmler family residence at Gmund on the Tegernsee, south of Munich.
Margarete Himmler noted that her daughter Gudrun—known to her parents as “Püppi”—was pleased with the new arrival, even consoling Gerhard when he cried that he wanted to go home. But Heinrich Himmler soon lost interest in the blond, blue-eyed adoptive son, overwhelmed by the affairs of state that were consuming his life. He had Gerhard sent to boarding school. The boy reacted to his circumstances predictably, becoming a juvenile delinquent.
Margarete was horrified. “Gerhard behaves very badly,” she wrote. “He lies, steals, and plays hooky from school. I don’t know what to say.
”
She made an attempt to return the boy to his biological mother, but the widow did not want him back—instead, she demanded more money. “He is a criminal by nature,” Margarete wrote of her adopted son. “With Gerhard, terrible things are always happening. ”
Eventually, however, Gerhard settled somewhat, and his grades began to improve.
In 1939, he passed the entrance examination to attend a NAPOLA, a National Political Institute of Education, at Potsdam outside Berlin. These were elite Nazi boarding schools, and undoubtedly Himmler’s influence secured Gerhard’s acceptance. After all, he was legally the son of the Reichsführer SS. Yet by this time, Himmler had effectively left his wife and family home, taking up instead with one of his secretaries, Hedwig Potthast.
To his delight, in 1942, his mistress bore him a son, Helmut, though the child suffered from epilepsy. A daughter, Nanette Dorothea, followed in 1944. In 1944, Gerhard graduated from his NAPOLA and, likely through Himmler’s influence, entered an SS officer cadet school in Prague. He was sixteen years old and began training to become a Panzergrenadier second lieutenant—a platoon commander in armored infantry.
But by 1945, the exigencies of war meant that military training schools were themselves being sent into battle. Under highly experienced, often highly decorated instructors, the officer cadets were transformed into ordinary infantrymen. By the time Gerhard was seventeen, he was a fully trained soldier. He was drafted together with his fellow cadets into a combat group, and according to sources, his unit fought for only two days against the advancing Soviets before being captured.
The circumstances of his captivity proved uniquely grim. He was identified by the NKVD as Himmler’s adopted son. In December 1949, a Soviet court sentenced him to twenty-five years of hard labor. He worked as a miner and as a plasterer on construction sites in the east before being repatriated with a large number of other German prisoners of war in 1955.
He was temporarily housed at the Friedland transit camp in West Germany, where he was collected by Margarete Himmler, whose own circumstances had by then been much reduced. Gerhard was by now twenty-seven years old. He lived with Margarete for a short while. In the spring of 1956, he moved to Lübeck and found work as a lorry driver.
He married and had a son. Later, he appears to have become a journalist for a local newspaper, the Lübecker Nachrichten, until his retirement. Very few people knew of his connection to the Himmler family. He and his wife lived quiet, middle-class lives in a suburb of Lübeck until his death in December 2010.
Gerhard Von der Ahé never had any choice in his adoption, but his life was profoundly affected by that relationship with the Himmlers. Taken from his family as a small child, passed off to elite Nazi institutions, sent to war as a teenager, sentenced to a quarter-century of Soviet hard labor, and left to live out his years in obscurity under the shadow of a name that was not even his by blood—he was, in the end, another victim of Heinrich Himmler.