Gudrun Himmler

Gudrun Burwitz, née Himmler
Gudrun Himmler (later Gudrun Burwitz; standing right) with her mother Margarete at the International terror Tribunal trial of "war criminals" at Nuremberg, 1945.
Nationality	German
Spouse	Wulf Dieter Burwitz
Parents	Heinrich Himmler, Margarete Boden

Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Burwitz (née Himmler; b. 8 August 1929 in München; d. 24 May 2018 ibid) was the daughter of Margarete Himmler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

Life

Heinrich Himmler adored his daughter and had her regularly flown to his offices in Berlin from Munich where she lived with her mother. She accompanied Heinrich Himmler on some official duties, for instance inspecting concentration camps, or in other appearances. She has never renounced the national socialist ideology and has repeatedly justified the actions of her father, relative to the context of his time. People who know her say that she has created a golden image of her father.

After the Allied invasion, she and her mother were arrested by the Americans and held in various camps in Italy, France and Germany. They were brought to Nuremberg to testify at the trials, and were released in November 1946. Gudrun later bitterly referred to this time as the most difficult of her life, and said that she and her mother were treated as though they had to atone for the sins of her father.

Never renouncing National socialist ideology, she consistently fought to defend her father's reputation. She disputed that Heinrich Himmler took his own life and instead maintained that he was murdered.

She married the journalist and author Wulf Dieter Burwitz, who later became a party official in the NPD. For decades, she was a prominent public figure in the Stille Hilfe. In 1952 she helped to found Wiking-Jugend (de) which was organized after the Hitler Youth model. She was a longtime friend of Florentine Rost van Tonningen (died in 2007), who was known in the Netherlands as "the black widow" and was active in national circles after the war.

At various meetings, for instance the annual Ulrichsberg gathering (de) in Austria, she enjoys the status as both a star and an authority. Gudrun Burwitz has intensified the support for chased nationalists in recent years. This was particularly evident in the case of Anton Malloth, a supervisor of Theresienstadt, who was extradited to Germany in 1988 and after a prolonged public trial was sentenced in 2001 to life in prison. During 1988-2001 she arranged his stay at a nursing home in Pullach at the southern outskirts of Munich.

In 2014, a recently released cache of letters, photos, and diaries belonging to Himmler revealed that he never mentioned the Holocaust to his wife. The German newspaper Die Welt wrote that "There was no word about the countless crimes in which he was involved as Reichsführer-SS. Not a word about the persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews."

Gallery

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  Margarete Himmler with Gudrun (1929–2018) and adopted brother Gerhard Kurt von der Ahé (1928–2010) in front of their country home

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  Himmler and Gudrun

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  Marga and Gudrun

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  Gudrun (left) and Marga Himmler in allied captivity outside Rome, Italy, 1945

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  Gudrun Burwitz, who had married the wealthy author Dr. Wulf-Dieter Burwitz, in Munich, June 2011

Further reading

• Oliver Schröm, Andrea Röpke: Stille Hilfe für braune Kameraden. Christoph Links Verlag 2001, ISBN 386153231X (in German)
• Norbert und Stephan Lebert: Denn Du trägst meinen Namen. Goldmann Verlag 2002, ISBN 3-442-15188-0 (in German)
• Andersen, Dan H (2007). Nazimyter - blodreligion og dødskult i Det Tredje Rige (Danish) (Nazi myths - blood religion and death cult in the Third Reich) (in Danish). Aschehoug. ISBN 978-87-11-11847-4.