Germany: Himmler's daughter Gudrun has died (obituary)

Gudrun with her parents, Margarete and Heinrich Himmler

Via The Telegraph:

Gudrun Burwitz, who has died aged 88, was known in her youth as Gudrun Himmler and was the only legitimate child of the SS Reichsfuhrer, Heinrich Himmler, the sinister chief architect of the Holocaust.  

She was 16 when the war ended and her father cheated the hangman by crushing a cyanide pill between his teeth after being captured by British forces. She was by no means alone among “Nazikinder” in having to bear the consequences of crimes she did not commit, but unlike the sons of Hitler’s number two, Martin Bormann, and “Dr Death” Aribert Heim, who grew up to express horror at their parents’ crimes, Gudrun remained loyal to her father’s memory and spent her life supporting Stille Hilfe (“Silent Help”), a “charitable” organisation which aids former Nazis. (…)

Gudrun Burwitz had been politically active since soon after the end of the war, joining Stille Hilfe and supporting the founding of the “Wiking-Jugend”, an underground Neo-Nazi organisation modelled on the Hitlerjugend, in 1952.

In 1955, with Adolf von Ribbentrop, the son of the former Nazi Foreign Minister, she travelled to London at the invitation of Sir Oswald Mosley and addressed a meeting of his Union Movement party, telling her audience that her father was a great man who had been misunderstood and whose good name had been destroyed by the Jews.

Stille Hilfe operated covertly from 1946, initially aiding the escape of Nazi fugitives over Allied lines, particularly to South America. From 1951, when it went from being covert to overt, registering with the German authorities so that it could raise funds to help “prisoners of war and interned persons”, Gudrun became increasingly active in the organisation. Stille Hilfe is known to have aided some of the Third Reich’s most prominent officers, including the Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher Of Lyon”; Martin Sommer, the “Hangman From Buchenwald”; and Artur Axmann, head of the Hitler Youth.

As a central figure in the organisation Gudrun Burwitz arranged a comfortable retirement for Anton Malloth, or “Beautiful Tony” as he had been known in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechosolvakia where, after beating Jews to death, he was known to comb his dishevelled hair back with his swastika badge.

In 1948 Malloth had been sentenced to death in his absence by a Czech court, but Gudrun Burwitz later used Stille Hilfe funds to rent him a comfortable room in a old people’s home in Munich. In 2001, when he was finally prosecuted in Germany, she continued to visit him twice a month until his death from cancer in 2002. He is said to have bequeathed her all his personal possessions. Another beneficiary of her largesse was Martin Sandberger, the leader of an elite SS squad responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews, communists and Gypsies in the occupied Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and whom she cared for in a retirement home in Stuttgart until his death in 2010.

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