In December 2010, an 82-year-old widower died in a nursing home in Lübeck, Germany. On his nightstand, his son found a folder containing two black-and-white photographs: one of the man as a 17-year-old in 1945 wearing an SS uniform, and another of Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS. Few people knew the old man had been Himmler’s adopted son, a relationship that brought no pleasure to either party and marked the boy’s life with misfortune. The man’s name was Gerd Vondra Ai, and his story is one of the lesser-known personal tragedies tied to one of World War II’s most notorious figures.
Himmler married Margarete Borden in 1928, a divorced nurse seven years his senior. Their only natural child, Gudrun, was born in 1929, but no son followed, and Himmler’s hope for a male heir never materialized. In 1933, during the political turbulence following Hitler’s rise to power, an SS sergeant named Kurt Vondra Ai was shot and mortally wounded in Berlin, allegedly during clashes with communists. Vondra Ai, an electro-mechanic and early SS member, was killed, and a court case followed, resulting in a death sentence for the alleged murderer.
The Nazis politicized Vondra Ai’s memory, placing a bronze plaque at the site of his murder and, in 1937, renaming a street in Munich in his honor. Vondra Ai’s widow was left with two young sons. For reasons that remain unclear, one of them, five-year-old Gerd, was put up for adoption by the Himmlers in 1933. Himmler was reportedly pleased, writing in a letter: “We’ve adopted a boy, as we unfortunately don’t have one of our own.
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The adoption appears to have involved a sum of money paid to Gerd’s mother. The boy moved into the Himmler family residence at Gmund on the Tegernsee, south of Munich. Margarete noted of him in relation to daughter Gudrun, known as “Püppi”: “An alert kid. Püppi is really pleased.
She consoles him when he cries that he wants to go home. ”
Himmler, however, soon lost interest in the blond-haired, blue-eyed boy, busy with affairs of state, and sent him to boarding school. Gerd reacted to his circumstances predictably, becoming a juvenile delinquent. Margarete was horrified, writing: “Gerd behaves very badly.
He lies, steals, and plays hooky from school. I don’t know what to say. ”
She attempted to return the boy to his mother, but she refused to take him back and instead demanded more money. “He is a criminal by nature,” wrote Margarete of her adopted son.
“With Gerd, terrible things are always happening. ”
Eventually, Gerd settled somewhat, and his grades began to improve. In 1939, he passed the entrance exam to attend a Napola academy in Xpando outside Berlin. The Napolas were elite Nazi boarding schools, and it was likely Himmler’s influence that secured Gerd’s acceptance, given he was legally the son of the Reichsführer-SS.
By that time, Himmler had left the family home and taken up with his secretary Hedwig Potthast. In 1942, she gave birth to a son, Helge. The boy suffered from epilepsy, and a daughter, Nanette Dorothea, followed in 1944. That same year, Gerd Vondra Ai graduated from his Napola and entered an SS officer cadet school in Prague, likely due to Himmler’s influence.
At 16, he began training to become a Panzer Grenadier second lieutenant, an armored infantry platoon commander. By 1945, the pressures of war meant military training schools were being sent into battle. Under highly experienced instructors, the officer cadets became ordinary infantrymen, and Gerd was drafted with fellow cadets into a combat group. According to sources, his unit fought for only two days against advancing Soviet forces before being captured.
Identified by the NKVD as Himmler’s adopted son, Gerd was sentenced by a Soviet court in December 1949 to 25 years of hard labor. He worked as a miner and a plasterer on construction sites in the east before being released with many other German POWs 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 greatly diminished. Gerd was 27 years old.
He lived with Margarete for a short while until, in spring 1956, he moved to Lübeck and worked as a lorry driver. He married and had one son, and later appeared to become a journalist for a local newspaper, the Lübecker Nachrichten, until his retirement. Very few people knew of his relationship with the Himmler family. He and his wife lived quiet middle-class lives in a suburb of Lübeck until his death in December 2010.
Gerd never had any choice over his adoption, but his life was profoundly shaped by that relationship. In the eyes of many, he was another victim of Heinrich Himmler.