On May 20, 1945, British forces captured Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust and the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Three days later, he bit down on a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth and was dead within minutes. He chose suicide over facing justice. The world saw this as the final act of a monster evading accountability.
His daughter, Gudrun, saw it differently. For the rest of her life, she insisted her father had been murdered by the British because they feared what he knew. She carried that belief, along with her unbending love for him, for seventy-three more years. Gudrun Himmler was born on August 8, 1929, just as her father was beginning his rise to power.
In 1929, Hitler appointed Himmler leader of the SS, a bodyguard unit of just 280 men. Within fourteen years, Himmler transformed that unit into the most feared organization in Germany, one that controlled the Gestapo, the concentration camp system, and the mobile killing squads that shot over a million Jews across Eastern Europe. He oversaw the construction of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor. He was the man whose orders sent millions of people to their deaths.
But to Gudrun, he was simply her father. Himmler adored his daughter with an intensity that surprised even his inner circle. His marriage to Margarete Boden, a nurse seven years his senior, was cold and unhappy, but Gudrun was different. She was his golden child, his perfect Aryan princess with blonde hair and blue eyes.
He called her Püppi, his little doll, and wrote her letters filled with affection. When he was away, he phoned her almost every day. When he was at his field headquarters, he had her flown across Germany just to spend time with him. Adolf Hitler himself took a liking to her.
She called him Uncle Hitler, and every New Year he gave her presents, first dolls and later boxes of chocolates. When Gudrun was eleven years old, her father took her on a trip that came to define her life. In 1941, he brought her to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, which Himmler himself had established in 1933. By then, Dachau had already seen the deaths of thousands of prisoners.
But Gudrun did not see what Dachau really was. She recorded in her diary that day the gardening work and the pear trees, the pictures painted by the prisoners. She wrote that everything was marvelous and that afterwards they had a lot to eat. Her father showed her what he wanted her to see, and she saw it.
In the final weeks of the war, as the Third Reich collapsed, Gudrun and her mother fled south toward Italy. They were captured by American troops in May 1945. Her father was captured separately by British forces. After his suicide, Gudrun refused to accept the official story.
She insisted that the photographs of his corpse were faked and that he had been murdered by his captors. She could not accept that he had chosen death over accountability. She could not accept that he had abandoned her. After the war, Gudrun and her mother were held in Allied internment camps for over a year.
They were brought to Nuremberg to testify. Gudrun later called this the most difficult time of her life, saying she and her mother were treated as though they had to atone for the sins of her father. That phrase revealed everything. She did not see herself as the daughter of a war criminal.
She saw herself as an innocent child being punished for what others had done to her family. That perception hardened into certainty over the years and became the foundation of her entire identity. Gudrun never changed her surname. Even after marrying Wolf-Dieter Burwitz, a far-right journalist active in the extremist NPD party, she remained in her own mind Gudrun Himmler.
In the decades after the war, she became one of the most active defenders of the Third Reich’s legacy. Her primary vehicle was an organization called Stille Hilfe, or Silent Help. Officially founded in 1951 to provide legal aid and financial support to former SS members facing prosecution, it did far more than that. It helped war criminals escape justice, provided them with money, lawyers, and safe houses, and worked to prevent their extradition.
Gudrun became one of Stille Hilfe’s most prominent figures, and admirers called her the Princess of Silent Help. At quarterly meetings, she held court among aging SS veterans, including Anton Malloth, a supervisor at the Theresienstadt concentration camp who had beaten at least one hundred prisoners to death; Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon; and Martin Sommer, known as the Hangman of Buchenwald. She arranged for Malloth to stay in an expensive nursing home near Munich, funded in part by Stille Hilfe, until he was finally sentenced to life in prison in 2001. She asked the men where they had served, displaying observers described as a vast knowledge of SS military logistics.
One journalist reported that everyone was terrified of Gudrun, not because she was threatening, but because of who she was and what she represented. In the early 1960s, Gudrun did something almost unthinkable for someone bearing her family name. She got a job with the West German government as a secretary at the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the federal intelligence service known as the BND, working under an assumed name at its headquarters near Munich. The BND at that time was headed by Reinhard Gehlen, a former Wehrmacht general who had hired numerous ex-Nazis based on their experience with anti-communist activities.
Gudrun fit right in. She was dismissed in 1963 when authorities discovered her true identity, but she had spent two years at the heart of West German intelligence, typing documents and attending meetings in the successor organization to her father’s security apparatus. Throughout her life, Gudrun gave few interviews. But when she did speak, what she said was remarkable for its absolute consistency.
In a 1999 interview with author Stephan Lebert, she spoke of her desire to clear her father’s name. She said she was saving money to go to America to examine documentary evidence and to compare her childhood memories with the historical record. She planned to write a book called simply Heinrich Himmler, which would show the world who her father really was. She described him as a devoted father who always made time for her.
She blamed Allied propaganda for smearing him. She said the Holocaust was exaggerated or fabricated by those who wanted to destroy Germany’s reputation. She acknowledged that what happened to the Jews was horrible, but she insisted it was quite separate from her father. Her father’s problem, she said, was his loyalty to Hitler.
He had sworn a personal oath and would never abandon it, even when Hitler had gone too far. Many children of prominent Nazis chose differently. Bettina Göring, Hermann Göring’s great-niece, had herself sterilized so the bloodline would end with her. Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank, the Butcher of Poland, publicly denounced his father as a murderous narcissist.
And Kathrin Himmler, Heinrich’s own great-niece, married an Israeli man whose family had been confined to the Warsaw ghetto. She had a son who was half Jewish. She wrote a book called The Himmler Brothers, documenting how her entire family had been complicit in Nazi crimes. She understood, she said, that Himmler did monstrous things, but he was not a monster but a human being, a loving husband, father, brother, son, and uncle.
She said this as a warning, not an excuse. She understood that the capacity for love and the capacity for evil can coexist in the same person. That was precisely what Gudrun could never accept. Gudrun Himmler Burwitz died on May 24, 2018, at the age of eighty-eight, almost exactly seventy-three years after her father’s death.
There was no public funeral, no memorial, no grave that could become a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. She never changed her name. She never publicly criticized her father. She never acknowledged his role in the Holocaust.
She never expressed remorse. Instead, she worked to help his former officers escape justice and to rehabilitate his reputation. To the very end, she was her father’s daughter. She went to her grave believing Heinrich Himmler was a good man, a loving man, and the kindest man she ever knew.
She had access to every piece of evidence the world possessed about his crimes. She simply could not let that evidence touch the memory of the man who called her Püppi.