In late April 1945, as Allied forces advanced through Bavaria, Margarete Himmler and her teenage daughter, Gudrun, fled south toward Italy. They were hoping to reach a safer zone near the border. On May 21, 1945, just one day before Heinrich Himmler’s arrest, American troops stopped them near Bolzano. Both were taken into custody and placed in Allied internment camps for questioning.
At the time, Gudrun was only 16 years old. Known affectionately within SS circles as “Püppi,” she had often been photographed beside her father at official events. To Allied interrogators, however, she was simply the daughter of one of Europe’s most notorious men.
Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and one of the chief architects of the Nazi regime, had been captured days earlier. Disguised as a sergeant, he was stopped by British soldiers near Bremervörde on May 22. When his identity was revealed, he was taken into custody. During a medical examination the following day, he bit down on a hidden cyanide capsule and died. His body was buried in an unmarked grave on the Lüneburg Heath.
In the months that followed, Margarete and Gudrun were transferred between camps in Italy, France, and Germany. They were interrogated repeatedly by U.S. and British officers who wanted to know whether Himmler had left behind hidden networks or documents. Their internment overlapped with the Nuremberg trials, which began in November 1945. Although neither woman was charged with a crime, both were questioned as witnesses.
Interrogation reports described Margarete as loyal, reserved, and deeply bitter about her treatment. She insisted she had known nothing of her husband’s political work, claiming to have lived a quiet life focused on her daughter and household affairs. Historians still debate how credible those claims were. Letters exchanged during the 1930s suggest Margarete supported many of Himmler’s beliefs and enjoyed the privileges his position provided.
Gudrun, meanwhile, reportedly showed open hostility toward Allied officers. She maintained her father’s innocence, describing him as a great man. When the trials ended in late 1946, the Allies concluded that neither woman posed a threat. Both were released in November of that year and allowed to return to Germany.
The Germany they returned to was unrecognizable. Their home had been confiscated, their bank accounts frozen, and their name despised. Both women settled quietly in the Munich area, living on small pensions and support from sympathetic acquaintances who had once served under Heinrich Himmler.
In the early years of occupation, denazification tribunals were set up across Germany to classify citizens according to their involvement with the Nazi regime. Margarete’s case was reopened several times. In 1951, she was first classified as a follower, one of the mildest categories. But new information surfaced, including records of her participation in Nazi welfare organizations and correspondence showing ideological loyalty to her husband.
In January 1953, British occupation authorities upgraded her classification to activist. The consequences were harsh by postwar German standards. She was ordered to complete 30 days of special work duty, stripped of the right to vote, and temporarily lost her pension privileges. Margarete wrote letters complaining about her treatment, describing herself as a victim of Allied hatred. Her insistence that she had only ever been a wife and mother clashed with evidence of her political sympathies.
Gudrun, by then in her early twenties, faced her own struggle to adjust. She had grown up idolizing her father and never renounced him. Her postwar statements revealed a young woman still fiercely loyal to the man the world now condemned. “I will never believe that he did anything wrong,” she once told an interviewer.
By the mid-1950s, Gudrun began working as a dressmaker and later as a secretary in Munich. She sometimes used different surnames to avoid attention, though those who knew her rarely forgot who she was. In 1952, she reconnected with former SS families and attended private gatherings where they shared memories of the old regime.
In 1951, Gudrun married Wulf-Dieter Burwitz, an engineer and member of the far-right National Democratic Party. They settled near Munich and had two children. Outwardly, she lived as a wife and mother in a recovering country. Yet behind closed doors, she remained fiercely attached to her father’s memory.
Between 1961 and 1963, Gudrun Burwitz briefly worked as a secretary at the Bundesnachrichtendienst, West Germany’s new intelligence agency. She was employed under a different surname. Decades later, the BND confirmed her employment, acknowledging that it had hired Heinrich Himmler’s daughter during the Cold War.
After leaving the BND, Gudrun became increasingly active in veterans and revisionist circles. By the 1970s, she had become one of the most visible figures in Stille Hilfe, a group officially founded to support Germans convicted by Allied tribunals. In practice, it became a haven for unrepentant Nazis and a fundraising vehicle for their legal defense.
Gudrun attended reunions of former SS officers, wrote letters to imprisoned war criminals, and raised money for their families. She rejected any claim that her father had been responsible for atrocities, referring to him as a great man who had done good things for Germany. In interviews, she accused Allied historians of distorting the past.
She continued her activities into the 1990s and 2000s, attending private meetings and quietly supporting younger sympathizers. She never disavowed her father or expressed remorse. When she died in Munich on May 24, 2018, at the age of 88, she was still regarded by some as a symbolic daughter of the SS.
Other branches of the Himmler family took a different path. Heinrich’s brother Gebhard was interned by Allied forces in 1945 and held until 1948. Classified as a follower rather than an active Nazi, he was allowed to rebuild his life. He settled in Munich, worked in industry, and died quietly in 1982.
The youngest brother, Ernst, never lived to see the end of the war. A journalist and radio executive before 1945, he joined the Nazi party early and served with the Volkssturm during the final defense of Berlin. He was killed on May 2, 1945, just days before Germany’s surrender.
Decades later, Heinrich’s great-niece, Katrin Himmler, took the opposite stance of her older relatives. Born in 1967, she grew up in postwar West Germany knowing that her surname carried a burden. As an adult, she confronted it head-on.
Trained as a political scientist, Katrin became a writer and researcher. In 2005, she published “The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History,” a deeply researched study tracing the parallel lives of Heinrich, Gebhard, and Ernst. In interviews, she explained that her goal was not to cleanse the name but to understand it. Her work humanized without excusing, depicting the Himmlers as a mirror of their time.
“I cannot change the past,” she said, “but I can decide how to live with it.”
Even today, the Himmler name evokes unease. In 2014, the discovery of Heinrich Himmler’s private letters and diaries reignited debate about the nature of evil and ordinariness. The documents showed a man deeply concerned with domestic minutiae, writing tenderly to his wife and daughter between reports on deportations and executions.
The Himmler family’s story mirrors Germany’s path after the war. From denial and silence to confronting the past, Gudrun defended her father’s legacy. Katrin chose to face it. Their lives show how Nazism’s shadow reached far beyond 1945.