Death in Munich Gudrun Himmler: "My father, he had no flaws …"

He never gave up on his father Heinrich nor Nazism. As he wrote Enzo Biagi in his work The Men of Nazism Gudrun claimed that his father was not guilty. Gudrun Himmler died on May 24 in Munich, but the news was only known in the last hours, and only because the German periodical Bild asked for confirmation written at the Monaco registration office. of death. She was the only daughter of the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler a man as powerful as Adolf Hitler who was the architect of the extermination, advocate of the concentration camps the most notorious of Germany and Poland. His daughter Gudrun was very close to his father, who called him Puppi and she Reisepappi and often took him with him on official occasions. The newspapers reported that he had once taken her to visit the Dachau Concentration Camp while she was only 12 years old. Gudrun was born in August 1929 and had a privileged childhood, in the narrow circle of Nazi leaders. Her life changed at the end of the war, when her mother Margaret Bodin took her to the Alto Adige, in Selva di Val Gardena, under a false name. On May 13, they were arrested by the Americans and sent to a detention center. Here, Gudrun, 16, learned that his father had committed suicide in Luneburg, a town in Lower Saxony, while he was a British prisoner. Gudrun did not believe the cyanide version and accused the allies of the murder. In fact, many Nazis, including Hitler himself, Goering, in addition to Goebbels and their children, died with the famous cyanide capsules. The British soldiers then buried Himmler's body in a wood near Luneburg, but his body was never found. Since then, the life of Gudrun, who unlike the other sons of the Nazi rulers, never wanted to change the family name, was difficult: waitress, secretary, whatever his job, his identity appeared and she was fired. He lived in Moncaco, where he married the neo-Nazi writer Wulf-Dieter Burwitz, neo-Nazi activist. Throughout his life, Gudrun Himmler has been dedicated to supporting badociations of former Nazis, notably Stille Hilfe (Helping Silence), who also helped Erich Priebke. But Gudrun was the soul of the organization Odessa O Organization D and E Hemaligen SS A ngehörigen (organization of former members of the SS)., Also made famous by the novel by Frederick Forsyth Odessa File . It was an badociation that helped the old SS but in general all the old Nazis who escaped, through a network of connections and accomplices from the Vatican to Spain, via Belgium and Latin America. Even the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal confirms his existence. Gudrun was a must at all meetings of ex-Nazis and SS veterans, both in Europe and outside of Europe. He was present at the funeral of Rudolph Hess who died in Spandau Prison, of which he was the only prisoner, in the early nineties. Many German newspapers reiterated that from 1961 to 1963 would work at the Historical Bureau of the Secret Service, but the news is not confirmed, also because Germany was still split in half and everyone knew who Gudrun Himmler was. Gudrun never gave interviews, and his activity was known to the German authorities, who at one point outlawed Stille Hilfe which however became Hng an badociation that deals with the badistance to political prisoners in Germany. Last year the writer Tania Crasnianski published a book, The Sons of the Nazis in which one faces the drama of being born with a heavy burden, bigger that they, and they talk about their difficult lives after the war but especially about their relations with their parents, who seemed to have a double life: blameless in the family, ruthless and criminals out of the house. At the time of the trial Eichmann one of the psychiatrists who studied the prisoner, was forced to admit that, in the Eichmann family, he had a "commendable" attitude, as apparently Himmler too. Some of the Nazis' children changed their names, some became Catholic or joined Judaism, almost no one spoke of politics. Manfred Rommel who died in 2013, son of the Desert Fox, who at 14 years was expected to witness his father's suicide by Hitler's will, was one of the few to do so . Rommel was Mayor of Stuttgart for CSU. For Ribbentrop's son, the father did what was right at that time. It is certainly difficult to judge one's parents and believe what they say about them. He wrote Hanna Arendt about Eichmann, about the bbadity of evil and the total lack of empathy and feelings of Nazi rulers, and remains up to here. the most lucid badysis of this great mystery. Finally, the Crasniansky, in the introduction of his book, hypothesizes that in the case of Gudrun Himmler, fanatical extremism was a way to avoid the pressure of crimes committed by the father, pressure that otherwise would have been unbearable.