On May 20, 1945, British forces captured the man who had built the SS and administered the Holocaust. Three days later, he was dead, having bitten down on a cyanide capsule concealed in his mouth during a medical examination. The man was Heinrich Himmler, and his suicide denied the world the chance to see him answer for crimes that included the murder of six million Jews and millions of others. But his daughter, Gudrun, never accepted that account.
For the next seven decades, she insisted her father had been murdered by the British because they feared what he knew. She defended him publicly, called him the kindest man she ever knew, and described the Holocaust as Allied propaganda designed to destroy Germany. She maintained this position until her death in 2018 at the age of 88. To understand Gudrun, one must first understand the father she adored, and the world he built around her.
Himmler was born in 1900 into a respectable Catholic family in Munich. His father was a schoolteacher who had once tutored a Bavarian prince. Young Heinrich was sickly, bespectacled, and physically unimpressive. He desperately wanted to prove his manhood as a soldier in the Great War, but by the time he finished officer training, the war was over.
He never saw combat, and that failure haunted him for the rest of his life. He spent those years trying to prove he belonged among warriors, even as he became the greatest desk murderer in history. After the war, Himmler drifted through failed careers. He studied agriculture, raised chickens, and sold advertising for a fertilizer company.
His true calling arrived in 1923 when he joined the Nazi Party and fell under Hitler’s spell. He rose steadily through the ranks, and in 1929, at age 28, Hitler appointed him Reichsführer-SS, leader of a small bodyguard unit of just 280 men. Over the next fourteen years, Himmler transformed that insignificant unit into the most terrifying organization in Nazi Germany. By 1933, the SS numbered over 52,000.
By the end of the war, it had become a state within a state, with its own military divisions, economic empire, and a system of concentration camps stretching across Europe. He controlled the Gestapo, the criminal police, and all uniformed police forces in Germany. He commanded the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that followed the army into Poland and the Soviet Union, systematically murdering Jews, communists, and anyone else deemed an enemy of the Reich. He oversaw the construction of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and the other death camps where millions were gassed and burned.
This was the man who came home and picked up his little daughter. This was the man Gudrun would remember as peaceful, loving, and kind. Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler was born on August 8, 1929, just as her father was beginning his rise to power. By the time she was old enough to form memories, everything had changed.
Her father was one of the most powerful men in Germany, and she was treated like a princess. The marriage between Himmler and his wife Margarete, a nurse seven years his senior, was not happy. Margarete was cold and difficult, and Himmler was rarely home. But Gudrun was different.
She was his golden child, his perfect Aryan princess with blonde hair and blue eyes. When she was at home in Munich, he phoned her almost every day. When he was away, he wrote letters constantly. He called her his puppy throughout his life, even when she was a teenager, even when he was commanding armies of death.
He had her flown to wherever he was, to Berlin, to his field headquarters, to official functions. 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. In 1941, when Gudrun was 11 years old, her father took her on a trip that would define her life.
He brought her to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, established by Himmler himself in 1933. By 1941, it had already seen the deaths of thousands of prisoners. It was a place of systematic brutality, medical experiments, and execution walls. Gudrun did not see what Dachau really was.
What she recorded in her diary that day was something entirely different. She wrote about the gardening work, the pear trees, and 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.
She was a child, and her father was her entire world. By every account, Himmler was genuinely devoted to his daughter. Not performatively, but genuinely. His marriage fell apart in all but name by 1939, when he began an affair with his secretary Hedwig Potthast, with whom he had two more children.
But he never abandoned Gudrun. Even as he divided his time between two families, even as he ran an empire of terror, he made time for his puppy. In 1941, he wrote to her that in life, one must always be decent, courageous, and kind-hearted. This came from the man who at that moment was overseeing the murder of millions, who gave speeches to SS officers about the hardness required to shoot women and children, and who called the Holocaust a page of glory in our history.
Gudrun was 15 years old when the war ended. Her entire conscious experience of her father was love, attention, and the privileges of being a Nazi princess. In the final weeks of the war, she and her mother fled south toward Italy and were captured by American troops in May 1945. Her father was captured separately by British forces.
When he died three days later, Gudrun never believed it was suicide. She insisted for the rest of her life that he was murdered, and that the photographs of his corpse were faked or retouched. She could not accept that he chose death over facing justice. She could not accept that he abandoned her.
After his death, Gudrun and Margarete were held in Allied internment camps for over a year. They were interrogated and brought to Nuremberg to testify. Gudrun was 16 years old in a prison camp, her father dead, her world destroyed. She later called it 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 is revealing. Atoning for sins, not acknowledging or understanding them. She hardened into certainty that she was being punished for crimes that were not hers. After their release in November 1946, they had nowhere to go.
They lived under assumed names because no one would take in the family of Heinrich Himmler. Margarete was eventually classified as a beneficiary of the Nazi regime, sentenced to 30 days of punitive labor, and lost her pension rights and her right to vote. For Gudrun, the contrast was devastating but clarifying. She saw it as persecution, as punishment inflicted on an innocent child for the actions of her parent.
Unlike many children of prominent Nazis, she never changed her surname. When she married Wolf-Dieter Burwitz, a far-right journalist active in the extremist NPD party, she became Gudrun Burwitz, but in her own mind she remained Gudrun Himmler, the daughter, the keeper of the flame. 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, founded in 1951 ostensibly to provide legal aid and financial support to former SS members imprisoned or facing prosecution for war crimes.
It presented itself as a charitable endeavor, but it did much more. It helped Nazi war criminals escape justice, provided money, lawyers, and safe houses, worked to prevent extradition, and maintained a network of support that kept the SS brotherhood alive. Gudrun became one of its most prominent figures. At quarterly meetings, she would hold court among aging SS veterans, men who had commanded concentration camps and led mobile killing squads.
They lined up to shake the hand of Himmler’s daughter. The men she helped were among the worst war criminals in history. Anton Malloth, a supervisor at Theresienstadt, was convicted of beating at least 100 prisoners to death. Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Lyon, personally tortured French resistance members and deported Jewish children to their deaths.
These were the men Gudrun considered worthy of her support. In the early 1960s, she did something unthinkable for most people bearing her family name. She got a job as a secretary at the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the federal intelligence service known as the BND, working at its headquarters in Pullach near Munich under an assumed name. The BND at the 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 by then she had worked there for two years at the heart of West German intelligence. She gave very few interviews, but when she did speak, what she said was consistent. In a 1999 interview, she spoke of her desire to clear her father’s name, saving money to go to America to examine documentary evidence.
She described him as a devoted father who always made time for her. She blamed Allied propaganda for besmirching his good name. She said the Holocaust was exaggerated or fabricated by those who wanted to destroy Germany’s reputation. In 2015, at 85 years old, she still questioned the authenticity of the photographs of his body and insisted he was murdered.
When asked how she reconciled her loving memories with the historical record, she acknowledged that what happened to the Jews was horrible, but insisted it was quite separate from her father. Other descendants of prominent Nazis chose different paths. Bettina Göring, Hermann Göring’s great-niece, was so haunted by the family name that she had herself sterilized so the bloodline would end with her. Katrin Himmler, Heinrich’s own great-niece, took a different path entirely.
She married an Israeli whose family had been confined to the Warsaw Ghetto, had a son who was half-Jewish, and wrote a book meticulously documenting how her entire family had been complicit in Nazi crimes. She understood that the capacity for love and the capacity for evil can coexist in the same person. That understanding was precisely what Gudrun could never accept. Gudrun Himmler Burwitz died on May 24, 2018, at the age of 88, almost exactly 73 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 had never renounced her father or Nazi ideology. She went to her grave believing her father was a good man, believing he was murdered rather than a suicide, having spent her entire adult life helping his former officers and trying to clear his name. She was to the very end her father’s daughter.
She had access to every piece of evidence historians have. She lived in a society that collectively decided her father was one of history’s greatest monsters. And she simply said no. She said he was a good father to me.
He was the kindest man I ever knew. I will defend his memory until I die. And she did.