Gudrun Himmler was born on August 8, 1929, in Munich, Germany. She entered the world as the National Socialist movement was entering its prime. Her father was Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS and one of the most important men of the Third Reich.
Her mother was Margarete Siegroth, a nurse. Gudrun was the only child from that marriage. She grew up in a tense environment because her father was often away from home for work.
In practice, that work meant supervising the concentration camp system, a task Heinrich Himmler began in 1933. Her upbringing was handled by her mother, but the SS leader never lost contact with his daughter. Those close to him knew that he adored her more than anything in the world.
He called her on the phone almost every day. He wrote her letters weekly. From time to time, he had her flown to his offices to see her in person. Himmler called her by the nickname Püppi, a word that in German means little doll.
It is strange to think that one of the biggest Nazi criminals, responsible for the internal security of the Third Reich and in charge of arresting and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of people, was also a good father. Yet the bond between the two was extremely strong.
At the same time, it is natural that the SS leader's indifference to people of supposedly inferior races permeated Gudrun. That is why, when she was 12 years old and visited the Dachau concentration camp, she was not moved by the horror she saw there.
Dachau was one of the most abhorrent concentration camps of the Third Reich. It was inaugurated in 1933 and remained in operation until 1945. During those years, tens of thousands of prisoners were sent there and experienced indescribable suffering.
They were subjected to the arbitrariness of the prison guards, who operated with total impunity and acted as lords and masters of the lives of the inmates. Punishments ranged from whipping sessions to confinement in small dark cells where the inmate did not see sunlight again for months and was fed crusts of moldy bread and rotten water.
No one in their right mind would think that a concentration camp was a nice place. However, in 1941, a person visited the site and recorded her impressions in her personal diary. Today we have been walking through Dachau, and dad has shown me the orchards where lettuce, cereals, and pear trees grow. Then we have seen the pictures that the prisoners have painted. They were all very beautiful. In the end, we had a very good lunch.
Those were the words of Gudrun Himmler, the daughter of Heinrich Himmler. At that time, the girl was 12 years old, so it was impossible for her not to notice the terrible state in which the inmates were. In truth, she had been raised to ignore the tears, the bruise marks, and the disturbing thinness that made their skin hang in tatters.
She was the daughter of a monster, and once she reached adulthood, it would be proven that the apple does not fall far from the tree.
Himmler wanted Gudrun to receive the best possible education, so he sent her to an Institute of National Political Education. These were the most prestigious educational establishments in Nazi Germany, where the children of the elite were educated to learn the values and virtues of national socialism. They were expected to be the future leadership of the Third Reich, so discipline was extremely severe.
Himmler placed great hopes in his daughter, since these establishments had very high standards of study. However, the girl had to drop out of school due to poor academic results. She decided to follow in her father's footsteps and at age 16 joined the SS in the city of Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic. At that moment, the young woman did not suspect that her life was about to take a radical turn.
In 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allies, since it was cornered on all sides and the Führer had committed suicide. However, Himmler evaded his enemies and went on the run using false documentation and a change of appearance. He shaved off his mustache, shaved his head, and put on an eye patch so he would not be recognized.
None of it helped him, since he was eventually arrested by the Allies on May 23, 1945. Knowing that a trial and a death sentence awaited him, he preferred to bite into a cyanide capsule and kill himself with the poison.
The news devastated Gudrun, although she did not have time to cry, since she was soon detained along with her mother by the Americans. The women were housed in different prison camps in Italy, France, and Germany. Finally, they were taken against their will to testify in Nuremberg, where the war crimes of the defeated were tried.
Gudrun always referred to this stage as the darkest of her life. She was treated as if she were to blame for what her father had done and as if she had to repent for his sins. However, she never renounced Nazi ideology and was sympathetic to Himmler's actions, arguing that they had to be seen in their context. By relativizing his crimes, she was throwing a cloak of suspicion over the statements of the victims of the concentration camps and their suffering.
On the other hand, she never admitted that her father had committed suicide. Instead, she always maintained that he had been assassinated by the British.
At the end of the Nuremberg Trial, she was released and attempted to rebuild her life as a dressmaker and bookbinder. Her life story, however, brought her numerous problems when it came to finding a stable job.
Around those years, she married a propagandist with Nazi sympathies, Wolf-Dietrich Burwitz, from whom she took her last name. In this way, by changing her name, she could go unnoticed and not be pointed out as the daughter of a war criminal.
It is at this point that we come across one of the greatest mysteries of her biography. In 1961, she was hired by the German intelligence service under an assumed name, according to official records, to serve as a secretary. At this time, the spy agency was commanded by Reinhard Gehlen, who had served in the Wehrmacht when Hitler was in power.
After the end of the Third Reich, Gehlen managed to successfully retrain and adapt to democracy to remake the intelligence service. He hired people famous for their ties to Nazism and for their anti-communist activity. Gudrun was one of them, although it is impossible to know exactly what her true tasks were.
In 1963, following a restructuring of the West German government, Himmler's daughter was dismissed from her post. From then on, she lived a low-profile life and remained associated with the Stille Hilfe organization, which in German means Silent Help.
This group's objective was to help former SS members who were in legal trouble or who were fugitives from justice. Through an extensive network of contacts, Stille Hilfe provided escape routes for criminals whom they helped flee to South America under a false identity.
Gudrun was one of the group's main financiers and spokespersons and was revered like a true Nazi princess. She regularly attended the meetings, and on the few times she appeared in public, she was seen surrounded by men who had served in the SS with her father. In that circle, it was common to refer to her as the Mother Teresa of the national socialists.
In 2015, a British journalist traveled to Germany to confront her at her home. He accused her of aiding murderers and of lacking scruples. The woman's response was brief and laconic: I never talk about my job. I just do what I can and when I can.
It is not known how many criminals she helped, although dozens are suspected. Gudrun passed away on May 24, 2018, at the age of 88 in the city of Munich. Until the end of her days, she wore a silver-gold brooch given to her by her father, which showed four horses arranged in the shape of a swastika.