In December 2010, an 82-year-old widower died in a nursing home in the 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 Second World War’s most infamous figures: Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS.
Few people knew that the man who had just died and Himmler had once shared a strange relationship. The old man had been Himmler’s adopted son, a bond that brought no pleasure to either party and cast an unfortunate shadow over the boy’s entire life. His name was Gerhard Vondra Ai, and his story had rarely been told before. Heinrich Himmler had married Margarete Boden in 1928.
She was a divorced nurse seven years his senior. Their only biological child, a daughter named Gudrun, was born in 1929. No further children came of the marriage, and Himmler’s hope for a son never materialized on its own. That changed in 1933, during the political upheaval following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
An SS sergeant named Kurt Vondra Ai was shot and mortally wounded in Berlin during an alleged clash with communists. Although his surname carried the nobiliary particle suggesting noble ancestry, Vondra Ai worked as an electro-mechanic and had been an early member of the SS. The accent at the end of his name gave it a French-sounding quality, though many assumed it was simply German. A murder trial followed, the alleged shooter received a death sentence, and Vondra Ai’s memory was quickly politicized by the Nazis.
A bronze plaque marked the site of his killing, and in 1937, a street in Munich, the birthplace of Nazism, was renamed in his honor. Vondra Ai’s widow was left with two young sons. For reasons that remain unclear today, one of them, five-year-old Gerhard, was put up for adoption in 1933. The Himmler family took him in.
Himmler was pleased, writing in a letter, “We’ve adopted a boy, as we unfortunately don’t have one of our own. ” The adoption apparently involved a payment of money to Gerhard’s mother. Gerhard moved into the Himmler family residence at Gmund on the Tegernsee, south of Munich. Margarete Himmler noted his arrival in relation to their daughter Gudrun, whom the parents called Püppi.
She observed that Gerhard seemed an alert child and that Püppi was pleased with him, consoling him when he cried and said he wanted to go home. But Himmler soon lost interest in the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy. Occupied with affairs of state, he sent Gerhard off to boarding school. Gerhard reacted to his changed circumstances predictably enough, becoming a juvenile delinquent.
Margarete was horrified. She wrote that Gerhard behaved badly, that he lied, stole, and played hooky from school, and that she did not know what to say about it. She attempted to return the boy to his mother, but the widow did not want him back and instead demanded more money. Margarete wrote of her adopted son, “He is a criminal by nature.
With Gerhard, terrible things are always happening. ”
Eventually Gerhard settled somewhat, and his grades improved. In 1939, he passed the entrance examination to attend a Napola academy at Potsdam, outside Berlin. The Napolas, or National Political Institutes of Education, were elite Nazi boarding schools, and undoubtedly his father’s influence helped Gerhard gain admission.
After all, he was legally the son of the Reichsführer-SS. By this time, however, Himmler had left the family home and his wife, taking up with one of his secretaries, Hedwig Potthast. In 1942, his mistress bore him a long-awaited son, Helge, though the boy suffered from epilepsy. A daughter followed in 1944.
In 1944, Gerhard Vondra Ai graduated from his Napola and entered an SS officer cadet school in Prague, likely through Himmler’s influence. He was sixteen years old and began training to become a Panzergrenadier second lieutenant, a platoon commander in the armored infantry. By 1945, the pressures of war meant that training schools themselves were being sent into battle. Under highly experienced and often decorated instructors, officer cadets became ordinary infantrymen.
Gerhard, though only seventeen, was a fully trained soldier. He was drafted with fellow cadets into a makeshift combat group. According to the available accounts, his unit fought for only two days against the advancing Soviet forces before being captured. The NKVD identified him as Himmler’s adopted son.
In December 1949, a Soviet court sentenced him to twenty-five years of hard labor. He worked in mines and as a plasterer on construction sites in the east before being released with a large number of other German prisoners of war in 1955. He was temporarily housed in West Germany at the Friedland camp, where he was collected by Margarete Himmler, whose own circumstances had by then been greatly reduced. Gerhard was twenty-seven years old.
He lived with Margarete for a short while until, in the spring of 1956, he moved to Lübeck and found work as a lorry driver. He married, had a son, and later 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 a quiet, middle-class life in a suburb of Lübeck until his death in December 2010.
Gerhard of course never had any choice in his adoption, yet that relationship with the Himmlers profoundly shaped his life. He was, as one historian put it, another victim of Heinrich Himmler.