Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Burwitz

Gudrun Burwitz, the true-believing daughter of Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s highest-ranking official after Adolf Hitler, died May 24 in or near Munich. She was 88.

Her death was first reported by the German newspaper Bild, which also confirmed that Mrs. Burwitz had worked for two years in West Germany’s foreign intelligence agency. The agency’s chief historian, Bodo Hechelhammer, told the newspaper that Mrs. Burwitz worked as a secretary under an assumed name in the early 1960s. The agency does not comment on current or past employees until they have died.

Mrs. Burwitz, who was sometimes called a “Nazi princess” by supporters and detractors alike, remained unrepentant and loyal to her father to the end. Although she had visited a concentration camp, she denied the existence of the Holocaust and, in later years, helped provide money and comfort to former Nazis convicted or suspected of war crimes.

“In one day and night on Barrow Island, I see more rare species than most biologists get to see on the mainland in their career.”

At the time of her birth in 1929, her father was consolidating power as leader of the elite Nazi paramilitary corps known as the SS. Himmler also commanded the German secret police, the Gestapo, and established the system of prison and concentration camps in which more than 6 million people — primarily Jews but also Roma (or Gypsies), homosexuals and others — would perish.

The only person who outranked Himmler in the Nazi hierarchy was Hitler himself.

Gudrun, who was Himmler’s oldest child and only legitimate daughter, was exceptionally devoted to her father. Himmler and his wife later adopted a son, and Himmer had two other children with his mistress.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the bespectacled, undistinguished-looking Himmler enjoyed having Gudrun at his side, as a blond, blue-eyed symbol of Aryan youth. In a diary later seized by Allied authorities, she noted that she liked to see her reflection in her father’s polished boots. She attended Christmas parties with Hitler, who gave her dolls and chocolates.

When she was 12, Gudrun accompanied her father to the Dachau concentration camp, which was the site of Nazi medical experiments and the execution of tens of thousands of people.

Gudrun recalled the visit in her diary: “Today we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau. We saw everything we could. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous.

“And afterward we had a lot to eat. It was very nice.”

As the Third Reich was collapsing in May 1945, 15-year-old Gudrun and her mother fled to northern Italy, where they were arrested by American troops. Himmler was captured, and, while in British custody, killed himself on May 23, 1945, by biting on a cyanide capsule he had concealed.

Gudrun and her mother were held for four years in various detention facilities in Italy, France and Germany. She refused to believe that her father’s death was a suicide and maintained that he had been killed by his British captors.

She was present at some of the war-crimes trials of her father’s associates in Nuremberg, Germany.

“She did not weep, but went on hunger strikes,” Norbert and Stephan Lebert wrote in “My Father’s Keeper,” their 2002 book about the children of Nazi leaders. “She lost weight, fell sick, and stopped developing.”

After their release, mother and daughter settled in the northern German town of Bielefeld, where Gudrun trained as a dressmaker and bookbinder. She found it hard to hold a steady job with her family history.

In 1961, she joined the German intelligence service as a secretary under an assumed name at the agency’s headquarters near Munich. She was dismissed in 1963, when West German authorities were reviewing the presence of former Nazis in the government.

In the late 1960s, she married Wulf-Dieter Burwitz, a writer who became an official in a right-wing political group, and settled in a Munich suburb. They had two children.

Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler was born Aug. 8, 1929, in Munich. Except for a brief interview in 1959, she is not known to have spoken in public about her father or her later life.

She did, however, often wear a silver brooch given to her by her father, depicting the heads of four horses arranged in the shape of a swastika.

She was also known to be active in a group called “Stille Hilfe,” or silent help, which was formed in the 1940s to help Nazi fugitives flee Germany, particularly to South America, and to support their families.

The organization is “closely linked to a number of outlawed neo-Nazi movements and actively promotes revisionism — the notion that the Holocaust never happened and Jews caused their own downfall,” Andrea Roepke, a German authority on neo-Nazis, told Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper in 1998.

Among followers of the group, Mrs. Burwitz was “a dazzling Nazi princess, a deity among these believers in the old times,” according to German author Oliver Schrom, who wrote a book about Stille Hilfe.

Mrs. Burwitz attended underground reunions of Nazi SS officers, often held in Austria, possibly as recently as 2014.

“She was surrounded all the time by dozens of high-ranking former SS men,” Roepke said, after attending one such gathering. “They were hanging on her every word . . . It was all rather menacing.”

Mrs. Burwitz also provided support, through Stille Hilfe, to convicted Nazi war criminals, including Klaus Barbie, an SS officer dubbed the “Butcher of Lyon,” and Anton “Beautiful Tony” Malloth, who was convicted of killing prisoners at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Malloth was sentenced to death in absentia by a court in the Czech Republic, but Mrs. Burwitz reportedly helped arrange for him to stay at a retirement facility outside Munich on land once owned by Nazi official Rudolf Hess.

“I never talk about my work,” she said in 2015 when British journalist Allan Hall confronted her at her home. “I just do what I can when I can.”

“Go away,” her husband said. “You are not welcome.”

Gudrun Burwitz, geborene Himmler ist das einzige Kind aus der Ehe von Margarete und Heinrich Himmler. Dieser war der Reichsführer SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei und später Reichsinnenminister in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. Gudrun Burwitz blieb nach 1945 der Ideologie ihres Vaters verhaftet und betätigte sich aktiv in rechtsextremen und neonazistischen Kreisen, insbesondere im Verein Stille Hilfe, der inhaftierte, verurteilte oder flüchtige ehemalige SS-Mitglieder in Notlagen unterstützt. Wikipedia DE Wikipedia EN

До последнего вздоха Гудрун Бурвиц (урожденная Гиммлер) была ярой сторонницей нацистской идеологии, сообщает Bild.

"Ее отец Генрих Гиммлер, рейхсфюрер СС, был одним из организаторов Холокоста и нацистского террора", - пишет издание, редакции которого стало известно о том, что Гудрун Бурвиц недавно скончалась в возрасте 88 лет.

Как удалось выяснить Bild, "дочь нацистского монстра работала на Федеральную разведывательную службу Германии (BND)". Предположительно, в период с 1961 по 1963 год она занимала должность секретаря в ведомстве. "Дочь одного из главных виновных в убийстве 6 млн евреев получала жалование в органах внешней разведки!" - недоумевают авторы публикации Штефан Кюрти и Ханс-В. Зауре.

В то время, замечает таблоид, BND возглавлял Райнгард Гелен, бывший генерал-майор вермахта. "Многие его сотрудники в прошлом работали в СС или Гестапо", - передает издание.

В Федеральной разведывательной службе, пишут авторы, подтвердили факт работы дочери Гиммлера в ведомстве.

Как заявил в беседе с изданием Бодо Хехельхаммер, руководитель отдела по вопросам истории в BND, "время ухода госпожи Бурвиц с секретарской должности совпадает с началом переломного момента в отношении к сотрудникам с нацистским прошлым".

"Гудрун Бурвиц в молодости обожествляла своего отца и никогда не дистанцировалась от его чудовищных деяний и нацистской идеологии", - продолжают журналисты. Вплоть до преклонного возраста она была активным членом праворадикальных кругов.

Гудрун Бурвиц (нем. Gudrun Burwitz, урожд. Гиммлер (Himmler); род. 8 августа 1929, Мюнхен — 24 мая 2018 ) — старшая дочь рейхсфюрера СС Генриха Гиммлера.
"Еще несколько лет назад она регулярно принимала участие в маршах неонацистов и бывших сотрудников СС - например, устраиваемых в ходе ежегодных встреч европейских националистов в австрийском Ульрихсберге", - говорится в статье. Она считалась "звездой коричневой сцены" и сторонницей правоэкстремистских организаций, таких как запрещенный в 1994 году "Викингюгенд", сформированный по аналогии с "Гитлерюгенд".

"Единственный рожденный в браке ребенок убийцы Гиммлера, она многие годы была лицом нацистского союза "Тихой помощи военнопленным и интернированным". Основанная бывшими нацистами в 1951 году организация оказывала финансовую поддержку преступникам из рядов СС и сотрудничала с правыми радикалами и теми, кто отрицает Холокост", - сообщают авторы статьи.

Только однажды дочь Гиммлера дала интервью репортеру. В 1959 году, когда ей было 30 лет, она заявила следующее: "Мой отец сегодня представляется как самый ужасный массовый убийца всех времен. Я хочу попытаться разрушить этот образ", - цитирует Bild.