On the night of May 1, 1945, deep beneath the shattered streets of Berlin, six children were given hot chocolate laced with morphine by their own mother. They were aged between 4 and 12 years old. When they drifted off to sleep, their mother placed a cyanide capsule inside the mouth of each child and pressed their jaws shut. By morning, all six were dead.
Their names were Helga, Hildigard, Helmut, Haldine, Hedvig, and Hydrron Gerbles. They were the biological children of Joseph Gerbles, Reich Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich and one of the most fervent and ruthless servants Adolf Hitler ever possessed. Their deaths were arguably the most harrowing single act committed in the final hours of the Nazi regime.
Not on a battlefield, not in a concentration camp, but in an underground bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, carried out by a woman who had dressed her children in their finest clothes, combed their hair, and sang them to sleep before ending their lives. Yet while these six children perished in circumstances almost too awful to comprehend, a seventh child who had grown up in the same household survived the war, rebuilt his life, and went on to inherit a fortune worth hundreds of millions of marks.
His name was Harold Quant. He was Magda Gerbles's son from her first marriage, not a biological child of Joseph Gerbles at all. While the propaganda minister's own children were murdered in a bunker, his stepson became a billionaire.
To understand the story of the Gerbles children, you first have to understand who Joseph Gerbles was. Born in the Rhineland on October 29, 1897, Gerbles was not the typical image of a Nazi leader. He was short, slight, afflicted with a club foot that had kept him out of military service in the First World War, and possessed of a biting, brilliant mind that he turned entirely toward propaganda and political manipulation.
He had studied at the University of Heidelberg, earned a doctorate in philology and literature, and channeled his considerable intelligence into becoming the most effective propagandist Adolf Hitler ever had. Gerbles joined the Nazi party in 1924 and rose swiftly through its ranks, becoming Reich Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in March 1933, just months after Hitler came to power.
From that position, he exercised total control over German media, film, radio, newspapers, theater, and art. He orchestrated some of the most notorious events of the Nazi period, including Kristallnacht in November 1938, when Jewish businesses, synagogues, and homes were attacked across Germany in a state-organized pogrom that left at least 91 people dead and more than 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to concentration camps.
Magda Quant had married Gerbles in December 1931, bringing with her a son from her previous marriage to the wealthy industrialist Gunter Quant. That son was Harold. Between 1932 and 1940, Magda and Joseph had six children together, and they were seen throughout the Nazi period as a model German family, a vision of the wholesome Aryan domestic life that the regime claimed to champion.
Their children were photographed constantly, shown at official functions alongside Hitler, dressed immaculately, presented to the German public as the ideal of what national socialism supposedly stood for. The reality behind that manufactured image would only become fully apparent in the spring of 1945, when the Red Army closed in on Berlin.
By late April 1945, the Soviet forces were fighting street by street through the German capital. Hitler had retreated to the Führer bunker, the underground complex beneath the Reich Chancellery Garden, and Joseph and Magda Gerbles, alone among the senior Nazi leadership, chose to follow him there. Magda brought all six of their children into the bunker.
Senior Nazi officials offered to smuggle the Gerbles children out of Berlin. There were escape routes available. The children could have been taken to safety. Magda refused. She was absolutely convinced that a world without national socialism was not worth living in, and she had decided that her children would not live in such a world.
On April 30, Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide. The following day, May 1, 1945, with Soviet soldiers closing in and the bunker's inhabitants facing imminent capture, Magda Gerbles murdered her six children. She reportedly gave them sedatives first, waiting until they were asleep, and then used cyanide to end their lives. Shortly afterwards, she and Joseph went up to the Reich Chancellery Garden, where both committed suicide.
The oldest of the Gerbles children was Helga Susanna Gerbles, born on September 1, 1932. She was 12 years old when she died in the bunker, old enough to have some understanding of what was happening around her. She was, by all accounts, a thoughtful and sensitive child, the one who most closely resembled her mother in temperament.
Post-war forensic examination of her remains indicated that she had suffered bruising consistent with a struggle before her death, suggesting that unlike her younger siblings, Helga may not have been fully sedated when the cyanide was administered and may have resisted.
The second child was Hildigard Traud Gerbles, known as Hilde, born on April 13, 1934. She was 11 years old at the time of her death. Little is known of her individual personality beyond the photographs and film footage that survived, which show a fair-haired, solemn-faced girl standing beside her siblings at official events.
The third child was the only son, Helmut Christian Gerbles, born on October 2, 1935. He was 9 years old when he died. As the only boy among six siblings, Helmut's existence must have carried a particular weight of expectation in his father's mind. He never had the chance to grow up and find out what kind of man he might have become.
Haldine Katherine Gerbles, known as Holde, was born on February 19, 1937, making her eight years old at the time of her death. She was by the accounts of those who knew the family a cheerful and energetic child. She had been baptized as a Catholic, as all the Gerbles children had been, in a gesture that sat somewhat incongruously alongside her father's fanatical commitment to an ideology that had little use for traditional Christianity.
Hedwig Johanna Gerbles, known as Hedda, was born on May 5, 1938. She was 6 years old when she died. She was named partly in honor of Adolf Hitler, a reflection of the extraordinary closeness between the Gerbles family and the Führer. Hitler had a particular fondness for the young Gerbles children, and they were frequent visitors to his various residences throughout the war years.
The youngest of the six was Hydrron Elizabeth Gerbles, known as Heidrun, born on October 29, 1940, which happened to be her father's birthday. She was only 4 years old when she died in the bunker on May 1, 1945. At four, she would have had no comprehension whatsoever of politics, war, or ideology.
Their deaths are not classified as a war crime in the legal sense, because the woman who killed them also died that same evening and never faced justice. But in any moral reckoning of the Third Reich's crimes, the murders of these six children belong near the center of the account.
If all six of Joseph Gerbles's biological children died in that bunker, who was the Gerbles stepson who inherited a fortune? His name was Harold Quant, and his story is in many ways the most extraordinary of all.
Harold Günter Quant was born on November 1, 1921, in Berlin. His father was Gunter Quant, one of the most powerful industrialists in Germany, a man who had built a vast manufacturing empire in textiles, batteries, and armaments that would eventually give the Quant family a controlling stake in companies that included BMW. Gunter and Magda Quant divorced in 1929, and in 1931 Magda married Joseph Gerbles.
Under the terms of a remarkable arrangement, young Harold was formally adopted into the Gerbles household and grew up calling Joseph Gerbles his stepfather, even as he remained the legal heir to the Quant industrial fortune. In the photographs of the 1930s, Harold appears alongside the Gerbles children as a member of the family.
Harold Quant was old enough by the time the war began to serve in the German military, and he did so, joining the Luftwaffe and serving as a paratrooper and pilot. He was captured by Allied forces in 1945 and spent time in a prisoner of war camp in Italy. He was therefore away from Berlin entirely when his mother murdered his half-siblings and then killed herself.
After his release from the prisoner of war camp, Harold Quant faced the challenge that confronted virtually every German with connections to the Nazi regime: the process of denazification. His stepfather had been one of the most culpable individuals in the entire Nazi government, but Harold himself had served as an ordinary military pilot, not in any capacity connected to the crimes of the regime. He navigated the denazification process and was cleared.
His biological father, Gunter Quant, had survived the war and was himself undergoing denazification hearings related to the use of forced labor in his factories during the war years. Gunter was briefly interned but eventually cleared, and control of the Quant industrial empire began to be restored to the family. When Gunter Quant died in 1954, Harold and his half-brother Herbert Quant inherited the family businesses jointly.
The empire they inherited included significant stakes in a range of German industrial enterprises. But the crown jewel, the investment that would transform the Quant family into one of the wealthiest dynasties in Europe, was BMW, the Bayerische Motoren Werke. BMW had been in serious financial difficulty after the war, but under Herbert Quant's guidance it was revived and rebuilt into one of the most successful luxury automobile manufacturers in the world.
Harold Quant himself became a prominent figure in the West German business world, investing in various industrial enterprises and building a reputation as a serious and capable businessman entirely separate from the shadow of his stepfather's name. He married Inga Bandekow in 1955, and together they had five daughters.
Harold Quant died on September 22, 1967, in a plane crash near Nice in southern Italy. He was only 45 years old, and his death came at the height of his business career, leaving behind a widow, five daughters, and a share in an industrial empire that would continue to grow for decades after his passing.
His daughters, the grandchildren of the man who had run Nazi Germany's propaganda operation, became among the wealthiest heirs in the Federal Republic. The total wealth of the Quant family in the decades following Harold's death would be measured not in mere millions but in billions, driven primarily by their stake in BMW.
Moving from the Gerbles family to another household synonymous with the worst of the Nazi regime, we come to the story of Gudrun Himmler. Gudrun Himmler was born on August 8, 1929, the only legitimate child of Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust.
As the head of the SS and the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler oversaw the construction and operation of the entire machinery of mass murder that killed six million Jews and millions of others in camps across occupied Europe. He was in the hierarchy of guilt for the Holocaust second only to Hitler himself.
His daughter Gudrun adored him. Heinrich Himmler had a genuine warmth toward his daughter that stands in grotesque contrast to the coldly bureaucratic manner in which he directed the murder of millions. He called her by the childhood nickname Püppi, kept in constant touch with her by telephone and letter, and arranged for her to be flown to his Berlin offices to visit him.
Gudrun visited concentration camps as a child during the war, including Dachau, and appeared to have found the visits interesting rather than disturbing. She noted in her diary at the time that the visit was very nice.
When the war ended, Gudrun and her mother were apprehended by American forces and held in a series of camps in Italy, France, and Germany. They were brought to Nuremberg to give testimony at the trials of the major Nazi war criminals and then released in November 1946. Heinrich Himmler had not faced trial. He had been captured by British forces on May 21, 1945, but committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule concealed in a tooth before he could be interrogated or tried.
Gudrun refused to accept this account. Until her death, she insisted that her father had been assassinated by his British captives. No evidence whatsoever supports this version of events, but Gudrun clung to it with a tenacity that speaks to the depth of her devotion to his memory.
Far from retreating from her father's legacy, Gudrun Himmler spent the rest of her long life actively working to protect and rehabilitate it. She became a prominent member of Stille Hilfe, which translates as Silent Aid, a secretive organization founded in the late 1940s to provide financial support, legal assistance, and practical help to former SS members who had been arrested, were on trial, or were fugitives from justice.
She married the neo-Nazi activist Wulf Dieter Burwitz in 1961 and thereafter was known as Gudrun Burwitz. She and her husband were active participants in far-right political circles in West Germany for decades, maintaining connections with surviving veterans of the SS and their sympathizers and continuing to work through Stille Hilfe well into the 21st century.
Gudrun Burwitz Himmler died on May 24, 2018, at the age of 88. She had outlived virtually every other child of a senior Nazi leader, and she had spent all of those long decades defending one of the men most responsible for the Holocaust. She never expressed remorse. She never acknowledged the crimes her father committed.
Another of the children of the Nazi inner circle who found himself confronting an almost impossibly complex moral inheritance was Martin Bormann Jr., the eldest son of Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary and one of the most powerful figures in the Third Reich in its final years.
Martin Bormann senior was in many respects the hidden power of the Nazi regime, the man who controlled access to Hitler, who filtered the information that reached the Führer, and who accumulated enormous personal authority precisely because he worked in the shadows rather than seeking public recognition. Born on April 14, 1930, Martin Jr. was the eldest of 10 children that Bormann senior had with his wife Gerda.
By the end of the war, Martin senior's fate had become one of the great mysteries of the post-war period. He disappeared from the Führer bunker in the final days of the war and was believed by many to have escaped to South America. It was not until 1998 that DNA testing confirmed that skeletal remains found in Berlin in 1972 were indeed those of Martin Bormann senior, establishing beyond reasonable doubt that he had died in Berlin in May 1945.
Unlike Gudrun Himmler, Martin Bormann Jr. did not respond by defending his father or trying to rehabilitate his memory. Instead, he went through a profound crisis of conscience that led him to make one of the most dramatic reversals of allegiance seen among the children of the Nazi leadership. He converted to Catholicism, entered the church as a priest, and devoted his life to missionary work.
He served in the mission fields of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon, working in some of the most demanding and impoverished conditions imaginable, as if seeking through service to atone for the crimes that bore his family name. He reportedly said that he was trying to do some good in the world that his father had helped to make so terrible.
However, the last significant chapter of Martin Bormann Jr.'s public story was not a happy one. In 2011, a former student came forward with allegations that Bormann had abused him as a 12-year-old in the early 1960s when Bormann had been working in an educational capacity within the Austrian Catholic Church. Further allegations of severe physical violence against other students also emerged.
At the time these allegations surfaced, Bormann was in his early 80s and suffering from dementia. The cases never resulted in criminal charges, but the independent Klasnic Commission set up to investigate abuses within the Catholic Church in Austria reviewed the case and awarded compensation to the accuser. Martin Bormann Jr. died in December 2013 at the age of 83 in a care home in Bavaria.
One of the most remarkable figures among the children of the Nazi leadership is Nicholas Frank, son of Hans Frank, who served as Hitler's personal lawyer and later became the governor general of occupied Poland. Hans Frank was known by a name that made clear exactly what his administration meant for the people under his authority: the Butcher of Poland.
As governor general from 1939 to 1945, he oversaw a territory in which millions of Polish Jews and non-Jewish Poles were murdered, in which the entire population was subjected to brutal occupation, mass executions, and the systematic destruction of Polish culture and society. He was among those convicted at the Nuremberg trials of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and he was hanged on October 16, 1946.
Nicholas Frank was born in 1939, which means he was only about 6 years old when the war ended and his father was arrested. But as he grew, he confronted what his father had done with a directness and a ferocity that sets him apart from almost every other child on this list. He did not defend his father. He denounced him in the most unambiguous terms possible, calling him a murderer and making the case publicly and repeatedly that Hans Frank had deserved to hang.
Nicholas Frank has written several books about his father and about growing up in the shadow of the Nazi elite, the most notable of which is "In the Shadow of the Reich," a memoir that caused considerable controversy in Germany when it appeared. He has spoken at conferences, schools, and institutions around the world, sometimes alongside other children of Nazi leaders, taking part in dialogues about guilt, responsibility, and the long aftermath of atrocity.
He became friends with the son of another senior Nazi, Baldur von Schirach, and the two of them have traveled together to give talks about growing up in Nazi households. Nicholas Frank has described carrying a photograph of his father in his wallet throughout his adult life, not as a memento of affection, but as a constant reminder to himself of what the man had done.
And then there is Edda Göring, the only child of Hermann Göring, the Reich Marshal and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, one of the most flamboyant and in many respects one of the most grotesque figures in the senior leadership of the Third Reich.
Hermann Göring had been a celebrated fighter ace in the First World War, the last commander of the famous Richthofen squadron, and he brought to Nazism a showman's instinct that made him one of the most publicly recognizable figures of the regime. He was known for his enormous girth, his fondness for lavish uniforms and personal decorations, his vast estate at Carinhall north of Berlin, and his obsessive looting of artworks from across occupied Europe.
Edda Göring was born on June 2, 1938. From the moment of her birth, she was treated as something like Nazi royalty. Hitler was named her godfather, a mark of the extraordinary closeness between Göring and the Führer. Her early years were spent at Carinhall, the enormous hunting estate that Göring had built as a monument to himself.
Hermann Göring was tried at Nuremberg, where he proved to be the most formidable defendant among the Nazi leadership. He was convicted of war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity, and was sentenced to death. He avoided the gallows by swallowing a cyanide capsule that had been smuggled into his cell the night before his scheduled execution on October 15, 1946.
Edda Göring grew up in the aftermath of all of this. Unlike Gudrun Himmler, she didn't spend her life in active defense of her father's ideology. But she also did not take the path of Nicholas Frank, openly condemning her father's crimes. Instead, she chose something closer to silence. She lived quietly, avoided the public eye, and refused to give interviews or make statements about her father, except on rare occasions.
She became involved in legal disputes over some of the art objects that had been given to her as a child from her father's collection, including a Madonna and Child painting attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder. Most of these legal battles went against her, with courts ruling that the works had to be returned to their original owners or their descendants.
In 1986, Edda broke her habitual silence to give a television interview in Sweden, in which she spoke warmly about both her parents. She died in December 2018 at the age of 80, having lived a long and largely private life in Munich.
Rolf Mengele carries what is perhaps the most difficult surname of anyone on this list. His father was Josef Mengele, the SS physician who conducted sadistic and often fatal experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, using human beings as experimental subjects in tests of endurance, disease, surgery without anesthesia, and numerous other forms of deliberate torture that he disguised under the language of medical science.
Mengele personally selected prisoners arriving at Auschwitz for death or for slave labor, standing on the selection ramp and directing those who would live to one side and those who would die immediately to the other. He became known as the Angel of Death. He was particularly obsessed with twins, conducting comparative experiments on them that resulted in the deaths of an enormous number of victims.
Rolf Mengele was born on March 16, 1944, near the end of the war, to Josef Mengele and his first wife, Irene. By the time Rolf was old enough to form memories, his father had already fled Germany. Josef Mengele escaped from Allied custody in the immediate post-war chaos, managed to obtain false identity documents, and eventually made his way to South America, settling first in Argentina and later in Paraguay and Brazil. He lived as a fugitive under various false names until his death by drowning at Bertioga, Brazil, on February 7, 1979.
Rolf grew up without his father, raised by his mother and later by other relatives. As a child, he was told that his father had been a war hero, a cover story designed to protect the family and the fugitive in South America. The truth came to him gradually as he grew older and learned what the name Mengele actually meant in the outside world.
He studied law and worked as a corporate lawyer, making a deliberate effort to construct an identity separate from his father's name, changing his surname and living as privately as possible. What makes Rolf's story particularly complicated is what happened in 1977, when at the age of 33, driven by a mixture of curiosity and lingering filial attachment, Rolf traveled secretly to South America to visit his father in hiding.
The meeting was by his own subsequent account deeply troubling. Josef Mengele showed no guilt whatsoever for the experiments he had conducted at Auschwitz. Rolf found himself simultaneously despising his father and unable to turn him into the authorities. Despite everything, he kept the secret of Mengele's whereabouts. He did not contact Simon Wiesenthal or any other Nazi hunting organization. He stayed silent, and as a result, Josef Mengele lived for two more years before dying in the sea at Bertioga.
After their encounter, Rolf severed contact with his father completely. He changed his identity, altered his name, and sought to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Mengele legacy. By the time Josef Mengele's remains were identified in 1985, and the DNA confirmation came in 1992, Rolf acknowledged publicly that he had visited his father in 1977 and confirmed the identity of the skeleton found in Brazil.
Wolf Rüdiger Hess was the son of Rudolf Hess, one of the most singular figures in the entire Nazi leadership. Rudolf Hess had been one of Hitler's closest companions since the earliest days of the Nazi movement and rose to become deputy Führer, the second-ranking member of the Nazi party.
On May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess took off alone in a Messerschmitt Bf 110 aircraft and flew to Scotland, apparently intending to make contact with British aristocrats and negotiate a peace between Germany and Britain before the planned invasion of the Soviet Union. He parachuted out of the aircraft over Renfrewshire and was captured by a Scottish farmer with a pitchfork.
After the war, Hess was tried at Nuremberg and convicted of crimes against peace and conspiracy. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and became the longest-serving prisoner in Spandau prison in West Berlin, where he remained for four decades. He died in his cell on August 17, 1987, at the age of 93, reportedly by hanging himself with an electrical cord.
Wolf Hess was born in 1937, the only child of Rudolf and Ilse Hess. He grew up with a father who was first a prisoner of war in Britain and then a prisoner for life in Spandau. His childhood was defined by this absence and by a choice that Wolf made early and maintained throughout his entire life: to believe in his father's innocence and to fight for his release.
He visited his father regularly throughout his imprisonment and mounted a decades-long campaign to have Rudolf Hess freed. Wolf established the Committee to Free Rudolf Hess and gathered several hundred thousand signatures on petitions calling for his father's release. When his father died in Spandau in 1987, Wolf immediately disputed the verdict of suicide and claimed that Rudolf Hess had been murdered by British agents.
Wolf Hess died in October 2001, having spent his entire adult life in service to his father's memory and legacy, never having acknowledged the crimes of the regime his father had helped to build.
Albert Speer Jr. was born on July 29, 1934, in Berlin, just days before Hitler consolidated his power as Führer following the death of President Hindenburg. He was the eldest of six children that Albert Speer senior had with his wife Margarete.
Albert Speer senior was perhaps the most technically gifted of all the senior Nazis, an architect of genuine talent who had begun his relationship with Hitler as the dictator's personal architect and who had risen to become Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production. He extensively relied on the forced labor of concentration camp prisoners and slave workers from across occupied Europe.
Albert Speer senior was convicted at Nuremberg of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 20 years in prison, which he served in Spandau alongside Rudolf Hess. He was released in 1966, having cultivated during his imprisonment and in the memoir he wrote there a reputation as "the good Nazi," the one member of the senior leadership who claimed to have been unaware of the Holocaust.
For Albert Speer Jr., the experience of growing up with a father who was first a convicted war criminal in prison and then a famous and controversial memoirist was a peculiar kind of ordeal. After his father was sentenced, the family relocated to Heidelberg to live with Albert Junior's grandparents. He reportedly developed a severe stutter during this period.
He eventually overcame the stutter and went on to build his own career as an architect. He trained initially as a carpenter before moving into architecture, and he eventually built a significant practice working primarily in Frankfurt. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2010, he stated with characteristic directness that he had spent his whole life trying to separate himself from his father.
Albert Speer Jr. died on September 15, 2017, at his home in Frankfurt. He was 83 years old. He had, by most accounts, largely succeeded in the ambition he had set himself: to be known as an architect in his own right rather than as the son of the man who had used slave labor to build the weapons of a genocidal regime.
Of all the people examined here, perhaps none made a more startling personal choice in response to their family's history than Bettina Göring, a great-niece of Hermann Göring. She was not the daughter of the Reich Marshal himself, but she was close enough to the Göring family blood to feel the weight of the name acutely.
Bettina Göring made a decision in adulthood that speaks to the extreme measures that some descendants of Nazi perpetrators have felt compelled to take. She had herself sterilized. She chose never to have children, not because of any medical necessity, but because she did not want to continue the bloodline of the Göring family.
She has lived for many years in the American Southwest in New Mexico, as far geographically from Germany and from the Göring legacy as she could place herself while remaining in the Western world. Her brother Matthias Göring, also a great-nephew of Hermann, similarly chose to remove himself from Germany.
Moving to the family of another of the most powerful figures in the Nazi state, we come to the children of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich foreign minister whose signature appears on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939. Von Ribbentrop was captured by British forces in Hamburg in June 1945, tried at Nuremberg, convicted of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and became the first of the major Nazi war criminals to be hanged on October 16, 1946.
Von Ribbentrop had several children, among them Rudolf von Ribbentrop, born in 1921, who served as an officer in the Waffen-SS during the war, fighting on the Eastern Front. He survived the war and lived into old age, writing a memoir that attempted to present his wartime experiences in a favorable light. He died in 2019 at the age of 97.
The story of the children of Baldur von Schirach offers another variation on the theme. Baldur von Schirach was the Reich youth leader, the man responsible for the indoctrination of millions of German young people through the Hitler Youth Organization, and later the Gauleiter and Reich governor of Vienna, where he oversaw the deportation of Viennese Jews to death camps in the east.
He was convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against humanity for his role in the Vienna deportations and sentenced to 20 years in prison, which he served in full at Spandau alongside Albert Speer and Rudolf Hess. He was released in 1966 and died in 1974.
His son Klaus von Schirach was born in 1934 and was old enough to have had real memories of the Nazi period and of his father's role in it. After the war, he went through the complex process of coming to terms with what his father had actually done, and he arrived at a position of genuine condemnation, which he has expressed in interviews and public discussions.
One of the most astonishing stories connected to the children of the Nazi period concerns a man who was not the child of a senior Nazi official, but rather of the man who was in many ways the most central figure in 20th century history: Adolf Hitler himself. Hitler had no children of his own, or at least none that has ever been definitively established. But he did have a nephew, the son of his half-brother, Alois Hitler Jr.
His name was William Patrick Hitler, and he was born in Liverpool, England, on March 12, 1911, the son of Alois Hitler Jr. and his Irish wife Bridget Dowling. William Patrick Hitler grew up in Britain, visited his uncle Adolf in Germany during the early days of the Nazi rise to power, and attempted to use the family connection to advance his own career.
When war broke out, William Patrick Hitler found himself in an increasingly impossible position in Germany, and he eventually managed to leave and make his way to the United States. In America, he embarked on a lecture tour speaking about his experiences with Adolf Hitler. Then, in perhaps the most extraordinary twist of this extraordinary story, he attempted to join the United States military.
He wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1942 asking for permission to enlist in the US armed forces, explaining that he wanted to fight against the regime his uncle led. Roosevelt referred the matter to the FBI, which investigated William Patrick Hitler and eventually cleared him. He was allowed to enlist in the US Navy in 1944 and served until 1947. He was wounded in action and received the Purple Heart.
After the war, William Patrick Hitler settled in Long Island, New York, changed his surname to Stuart-Houston, married a German American woman named Phyllis Jean-Jacques, and had four sons. He lived in profound obscurity, working as a blood technician, and declined all requests for interviews and public appearances. He died in 1987. His four sons have continued to live in obscurity in the United States and have reportedly agreed among themselves never to have children, so that the Hitler bloodline in their branch of the family will die out with their generation.
Katherine Himmler is not the daughter of Heinrich Himmler, but the great-niece of the Reichsführer SS, the granddaughter of his brother Ernst Himmler. She was born long after the war in 1967 and grew up in West Germany with full knowledge of what her great-uncle had done.
Katherine Himmler responded to her inheritance in a manner almost diametrically opposite to that of Gudrun Burwitz Himmler. She wrote a detailed historical book published in 2007 titled "The Himmler Brothers," which examined the lives of Heinrich and his brothers Ernst and Gebhard and their involvement in the Nazi state, drawing on family letters and documents that had not previously been published.
What makes Katherine Himmler's story even more remarkable is the personal dimension that accompanies her scholarly work. She is married to an Israeli man, the son of a Holocaust survivor. Her husband's father survived the very machinery of murder that her great-uncle Heinrich had built and administered. The two of them have a child together.
The children of Reinhard Heydrich face an inheritance of perhaps the darkest kind on this list. Heydrich himself, known as "the Blonde Beast" and "the Hangman," was arguably the single most dangerous individual within the entire Nazi leadership structure. He chaired the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, at which senior Nazi officials coordinated the implementation of the plan to murder all European Jews.
On May 27, 1942, Czech and Slovak soldiers trained by the British Special Operations Executive ambushed Heydrich's open-topped car in Prague in what became known as Operation Anthropoid. He was critically wounded when a bomb thrown at his car detonated underneath it, and he died of his wounds on June 4, 1942.
Heydrich and his wife Lina had four children: Klaus, Heider, Silke, and Marte. Klaus, the eldest, died during the war in a road accident in 1943 at the age of 10. Heider Heydrich, born in 1934, was the second son. He grew up in postwar Germany, carrying one of the most dangerous surnames in the historical record. He became a hotel owner and local politician in Bavaria, serving as mayor of Rösrath from 1990 to 1994. He died in 2009.
The children of Rudolf Höss occupy a particularly tormented place in this history, because their father was not a senior policy figure or a minister or a general, but rather the man who actually built and ran Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and most murderous concentration and extermination camp in the Nazi system.
Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943 and again briefly in 1944, and he oversaw the murder of between one and one and a half million people, the vast majority of them Jews. He lived with his wife and five children in a house directly adjacent to the camp perimeter. His wife, Hedwig Höss, famously loved living there and reportedly referred to Auschwitz as her paradise.
Rudolf Höss was captured by the British in 1945, tried at Nuremberg as a witness and later by a Polish court, and hanged at Auschwitz itself on April 16, 1947, on a gallows constructed next to the gas chambers where so many of his victims had died.
Of the Höss children, the one who has spoken most about the experience is Hans Jürgen Höss, who was a boy of about 12 during the years his father commanded Auschwitz. He has described the psychological work involved in later life in genuinely confronting what his father had done, in accepting that the man who had been a loving and apparently engaged father to his children was the same man who had supervised the killing of over a million people.
Another of the Höss children, Brigitte Höss, immigrated to the United States after the war and eventually settled in Washington, DC, where she worked in the fashion industry. She rarely spoke publicly about her father.
The children of Hans Frank, the Butcher of Poland, numbered five. We have already met the most prominent of them, Nicholas Frank. But Hans Frank had other children as well, among them Norman Frank, who took a very different approach from his brother. Norman Frank was deeply loyal to his father's memory for many years and found Nicholas's condemnation of their father genuinely distressing. Norman Frank eventually died in 2013.
Alfred Rosenberg was the Reich minister for the occupied Eastern territories and one of the principal ideologues of the Nazi movement. He was convicted at Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, 1946. He had a daughter, Irene Rosenberg, who was in her early teens when the war ended and who grew up in post-war Germany carrying the name of one of the men who had done most to provide the racist ideology that undergirded the Holocaust. She lived quietly, avoiding public attention.
Julius Streicher was among the most virulently anti-Semitic of all the Nazi leaders, the publisher of the grotesque propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer. He was convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against humanity specifically for his propaganda activities, making him one of the few defendants convicted solely on the basis of incitement. He was hanged on October 16, 1946. Streicher had two sons, Lothar and Elmar Streicher, both of whom spent their lives outside the public eye as much as possible.
The children of Ernst Kaltenbrunner faced a particularly severe version of the inherited burden. Kaltenbrunner was the head of the Reich Security Main Office from 1943 onward, taking over from Heydrich after the latter's assassination, and in that capacity he was the senior SS officer most directly responsible for the administration of the concentration camp system in the final years of the war. He was hanged on October 16, 1946.
What is striking when you look across all of these stories together is the degree to which the children's responses cluster around a small number of fundamental choices. There were those who defended their fathers, like Gudrun Himmler and Wolf Hess, who never acknowledged the crimes and spent their lives in active opposition to the historical verdict. There were those who condemned their fathers openly, like Nicholas Frank, who made the denunciation of their parents a central project of their lives.
There were those who tried to live quietly, to change their names, to build identities separate from the family history, as Albert Speer Jr. and Rolf Mengele attempted to do with varying degrees of success. And there were those who engaged intellectually and historically with what their families had done, like Katherine Himmler, who tried to understand rather than simply to condemn or defend.
The question that runs beneath all of these individual stories is a broader and more troubling one: What does it mean to be the child of a mass murderer? Not in the legal sense, which is clear enough, but in the moral and psychological and social senses. These children did not choose their fathers. They did not choose the households they were born into, the ideologies they were surrounded by, the names they carried. And yet those names and that history have defined their lives, shaped their identities, constrained their choices, and followed them to their graves.
Consider the specific challenge faced by the children of Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo. Müller is the only senior Nazi official whose fate remains genuinely unknown. He disappeared in the chaos of the final days of the war in Berlin, and despite extensive searches by intelligence agencies, Nazi hunters, and historians, his fate has never been definitively established. His children grew up not only with the burden of their father's crimes, but with the additional uncertainty of not knowing whether he was alive or dead.
The broader phenomenon of Nazi children reckoning with their inheritance eventually became the subject of organized dialogue and collective inquiry. In the 1990s, groups began forming in Germany and Austria that brought together descendants of perpetrators and descendants of victims in facilitated discussions. These groups, sometimes called Nazi Kinder circles or descendants dialogues, created spaces in which people who had inherited opposite sides of the Nazi period's history could speak to each other directly.
The work of the German psychologist Dan Bar-On, who conducted extensive interviews with children of Nazi perpetrators in the late 1980s and early 1990s, provides one of the most systematic accounts of the psychological experience of this group. Bar-On published his findings in 1989 in a book titled "Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich."
What he found was a consistent pattern across many of the families he studied: an enforced silence in the post-war years about the father's role in the Nazi regime, a silence maintained by the perpetrator generation and absorbed by the children, which created what Bar-On called a double wall between the generations.
Among the Speer children, the one who has spoken most directly about the family's experience is Hilde Schramm, born in 1936 as Hildigard Speer, one of Albert senior's daughters. She became a politician in West Germany, sitting in the Berlin House of Representatives for the Green Party in the 1990s. She used her inheritance of a portion of her father's estate to establish an organization that supports the descendants of Jews whose art was looted by the Nazi regime in recovering their cultural heritage. The name of the foundation is Zurückgeben, which translates as "to give back" or restitution.
The story of the Quant family deserves a fuller account of what happened after Harold Quant's death in 1967. Harold left five daughters, and the Quant industrial inheritance passed to them and through them to their own children and grandchildren. The total wealth of the Quant family has at various points in the 21st century been estimated at over 30 billion euros, driven primarily by their controlling stake in BMW.
The question of how the Quant fortune was built and whether it has ever been adequately reckoned with became a matter of public controversy in Germany in 2011, when a documentary film titled "The Silence of the Quants" was broadcast on German public television. The documentary examined in detail the role of the Quant family during the Nazi period, focusing particularly on Gunter Quant's use of forced labor in his factories.
The reaction of the Quant family to the documentary was initially defensive, but the sheer scale of the public attention generated by the film eventually led the family to commission an independent historical investigation into their activities during the Nazi period. The resulting scholarly report confirmed in detail what the documentary had suggested: that the Quant family had profited substantially from forced labor during the war and that this history had not been adequately addressed in the family's public self-presentation. The family subsequently acknowledged the findings, expressed regret, and made donations to funds supporting the documentation and commemoration of forced labor.
Among the children of the senior military leadership rather than the political core of the Nazi regime, the story of the children of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz offers an instructive comparison. Dönitz was the commander of the German submarine fleet and later the overall commander of the German Navy, who also served briefly as Hitler's designated successor in the final weeks of the war. He was convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against peace and war crimes and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Dönitz had two sons who served in the German Navy during the war. Both were killed in action. Peter Dönitz died in 1943 when his torpedo boat was sunk in the English Channel, and Klaus Dönitz died in 1944 when his minesweeper was sunk. The Grand Admiral outlived both his sons.
The children of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the high command of the German armed forces who was convicted and hanged at Nuremberg on October 16, 1946, illustrate another variation on the familiar pattern. Keitel had several children, including his son Karl-Heinz Keitel, who grew up after the war and had to navigate the legacy of a father who had signed numerous criminal orders during the war.
Alfred Jodl, the chief of the operations staff of the Wehrmacht, who was also convicted and hanged at Nuremberg, had a similar impact on his family. His wife Luise worked extensively after his execution to rehabilitate his reputation, and a German denazification court briefly overturned his conviction posthumously in 1953, a decision that was subsequently itself overturned.
The children of Martin Bormann, whose fate was unknown for decades and who was tried and convicted at Nuremberg in absentia, faced a parallel uncertainty. Martin Bormann senior had nine other children with his wife Gerda. Gerda Bormann had been one of the most fanatically devoted Nazis in any of the senior families, writing letters to her husband during the war that reflected a chilling embrace of Nazi ideology in its most extreme form. She died in 1946 of cancer, leaving 10 children without either parent.
The orphaned Bormann children were dispersed across different family members and institutions in the immediate post-war period. They grew up in varying circumstances of poverty and uncertainty, the offspring of one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, scattered and without resources. Most of them lived in relative obscurity throughout their adult lives.
The children who were born into the households of Göring and Himmler and Gerbles and Heydrich and the rest of the Nazi inner circle did not choose their fathers or their inheritance. But they were given choices about what to do with that inheritance. Choices of varying difficulty and varying moral clarity.
Some made choices that were courageous and morally serious. Some made choices that were self-protective and morally inadequate. Some made choices that were actively harmful, perpetuating the ideology of the fathers or supporting the networks of former SS members and their sympathizers that persisted into the post-war era. And some simply made the choice of ordinary life, retreating into privacy and trying to build existences that were as far from the weight of history as they could manage.
What they share, regardless of the choices they made, is the experience of being formed by a history they did not make, shaped by crimes they did not commit, and defined by names they did not choose. In that sense, they are the most intimate human consequence of the Nazi regime's crimes. Not victims in the legal sense, not perpetrators in any sense, but the unavoidable inheritors of what was done.
The six Gerbles children who died in the Berlin bunker on May 1, 1945, were not responsible for their father's crimes. They were not responsible for the propaganda that sustained a genocidal regime. They were not responsible for the ideology of hatred that their father promoted with such lethal effectiveness. They were children, the youngest of them four years old, and they died because their mother could not imagine living in a world without national socialism and chose not to let them live in it either.
Their deaths are not simply a tragedy in the personal sense. They are a concentrated emblem of what happens when ideology becomes more real to people than the lives of the human beings immediately in front of them, including their own children. In the end, the Nazi ideology consumed even those it had claimed to cherish the most.