In May 1945, as American forces swept through southern Bavaria, an eight-man patrol from the 1st Battalion, 141st Infantry Regiment of the 36th Texas Infantry Division reached the village of Gmund on the Tegernsee, a picturesque lake south of Munich. There stood a fine villa purchased in 1934 and expensively remodeled, complete with a guard house and air raid shelter. It belonged to Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany and perhaps the most feared. The house was abandoned.
Himmler’s wife Margareta and their daughter Gudrun had fled days earlier by car with several female relatives to northern Italy, still in German hands, leaving everything behind. The house proved a treasure trove of Himmler-related artifacts, and American troops thoroughly looted it for souvenirs. In recent years, many of these items have surfaced at auctions, particularly in the United States. That same day, the US 7th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division captured Berchtesgaden, the exclusive Nazi Alpine town, and discovered Himmler’s second villa, the one he shared with his mistress Hedwig Potthast at Schönau am Königssee.
Also abandoned, it was stuffed full of his uniforms and personal belongings. In one garage, troops found an armored limousine Himmler used to travel up to Hitler’s Berghof or to and from the airport when he flew in aboard his private Focke-Wulf 200 Condor. That car now sits on permanent display in a German museum. This house, too, was thoroughly looted.
Himmler himself was nowhere near Bavaria at war’s end. He had left Berlin in late April, moving north into Schleswig-Holstein to be near Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz’s government, which succeeded Hitler after the Führer’s suicide on 30 April 1945. Himmler remained in northern Germany until his capture by British forces on 21 May, and he died by suicide in Lüneburg two days later. But his Bavarian properties had long since fallen into American hands.
The unit most closely associated with the looting of the Gmund house was the 22nd Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, which arrived shortly after the initial patrol. One of its soldiers, First Sergeant Paul E. Davis of Company E, made off with a host of items. Among them was a summer dress tunic, the only authenticated Himmler uniform to have survived the war.
Davis later wrote a receipt for the sale of these items to a famous collector in June 1982, and he wrote it on Himmler’s personal headed notepaper. The receipt listed stationery, photographs, a sash of the Order of Saint Maurice and Saint Lazarus, and the grand prize: Himmler’s white summer tunic. A photograph from the period shows Davis standing outside Himmler’s house at Gmund, wearing the tunic and the Italian sash, and holding in his left hand an SS pre-war parade helmet. That helmet, brought home by Corporal Raymond W.
Dyckar of the same unit, now resides in the Museum of Jewish History in New York, donated by Dyckar’s son after his father’s death. Davis also brought his items back to the United States and was honorably discharged on 3 February 1946 at Fort McPherson, Georgia. He kept everything until 1 June 1982, when he sold the lot to collector Dr. Robert Lee, who later sold it to Dave Delich, the foremost collector of Third Reich material in the United States.
The tunic itself is a remarkable piece. Lightweight summer versions of the black and field gray SS tunics were introduced in 1937 for wear by officers between April and September, designed to be easy to wash, and discontinued in 1940 due to wartime economies. Himmler’s example was finely tailored in white doll skin wool with a four-button front, open collar, French cuffs, scalloped and pleated breast pockets, scalloped flap slash hip pockets, and silver pebbled buttons. The Nazi Party armband was of red wool with black ribbed rayon borders, hand applied.
The very rare cuff title was of silver aluminum thread with black borders, also hand applied. The Reichsführer rank badges, unique to Himmler, consisted of collar tabs of black velvet backing with silver aluminum twist cord piping and hand embroidered clusters of three oak leaves surrounded by an oak leaf wreath. The tunic had a single shoulder board of three interwoven twist silver aluminum cords, and the rank cipher, a three oak leaf spray on black wool backing, was retained by a silver pebbled button on a screw post. On the right sleeve was an honor chevron issued to all SS personnel who had been members of the SS or the Nazi Party before January 1933.
The tunic was lined in cream-colored silk, and in the right breast pocket was the maker’s label, Steckbart, with the handwritten name Reichsführer SS Himmler and the date 22 April 1938. The tunic contained stitched loops on the left breast to hold a ribbon bar and various decorations. Himmler’s medals were modest compared to the chestfuls of ironware carried by men like Hermann Göring, because his World War I service had been very limited. He had received few high Nazi decorations, with one notable exception: the Blood Order, whose ribbon was permanently stitched to the tunic’s right pocket buttonhole, indicating his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.
His actual medals, photographed in the 1960s after being captured from his home, included the SS Long Service Award, the NSDAP Long Service Crosses in silver and bronze, and four campaign medals: the 1938 Anschluss Medal for the takeover of Austria, the Sudetenland Medal with the Prague Bar, the Memel Medal of 1939, and the West Wall Medal. On the left breast were loops for the Golden Party Badge, his Reich Sports Badge in silver, which he had struggled hard to earn, and another award that cannot be identified with certainty. Later, Göring awarded Himmler the combined pilots and observers badge in gold with diamonds, despite Himmler never having flown a plane. Among the foreign orders Himmler received was the boxed set of insignia for the grade of Grand Officer of the Order of Saint Maurice and Saint Lazarus, awarded by the Italian government in the 1930s and commonly given to high-ranking Nazi officials and police leaders.
It included a green sash, which First Sergeant Davis later wore in the photograph outside Himmler’s house. Himmler also received the Grand Cross of the White Rose of Finland and the Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Pribina, a Slovakian order awarded in March 1943, though he wore these gifts only once, at the moment they were bestowed. The types of items found at Gmund suggest that Himmler had placed much of this material in long-term storage there. The pre-war parade helmet was no longer used in World War II, and the summer tunic was of a type he had stopped wearing in 1940.
Notably, the decorations usually fastened to Himmler’s uniform were missing when Davis wore it shortly after finding it, indicating that the metal badges had been stripped and transferred to the field gray uniforms Himmler kept at Schönau, Berlin, and elsewhere. This uniform had simply been packed away. Following Dave Delich’s death, his collection was auctioned by the German auction house Hermann Historica in 2023 and 2024. With buyer’s premium, Himmler’s white summer tunic sold for $2.
2 million, making it the most valuable SS relic in existence. Unlike the Himmler parade helmet, which now sits in a museum in New York where it can be viewed by the public, the tunic has disappeared into another private collection. Quite a number of Himmler’s tunics were undoubtedly hanging in closets at both of his houses when the US Army arrived. Yet not one of his field gray World War II uniforms has ever surfaced.
According to research, some of the Reichsführer’s clothing was removed from the house at Königssee in April 1945 by one of his secretaries, Erika Lorenz, along with documents, and later burned on the property before American forces arrived. Other materials were crated up and trucked out, then destroyed or eventually looted by US forces. Word among collectors holds that several of Himmler’s uniforms were indeed taken as souvenirs by American soldiers but never surfaced, either a myth or items still sitting in veterans’ families’ attics and trunks, unrecognized for who once wore them.