Gudrun Burwitz

Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Burwitz (; 8 August 192924 May 2018) was the daughter of Heinrich Himmler and Margarete Himmler. Her father, as , was a leading member of the Nazi Party and chief architect of the Final Solution. After the Allied victory, she was arrested and made to testify at the Nuremberg trials. Never renouncing Nazi ideology, she consistently fought to defend her father's reputation and became closely involved in neo-Nazi groups that gave support to ex-members of the SS. She married Wulf Dieter Burwitz, an official of the extremist NPD. In the 1960s she worked for West Germany's (AGD), at its headquarters in Pullach, near Munich.

Early life

Born in Munich in 1929, of Himmler and his wife Margarete Siegroth, , though her parents later adopted a son named Gerhard von der Ahé. (Himmler also had two out-of-wedlock children with his secretary, Hedwig Potthast.)

Heinrich Himmler adored his daughter and had her regularly flown to his offices in Berlin from Munich where she lived with her mother. When she was at home, he telephoned her most days and wrote to her every week. Heinrich always called her by her childhood nickname "Püppi". She accompanied her father on some official duties, Adolf Hitler, known to her as "Uncle Hitler", gave her a doll and chocolates every New Year.

She disputed that Heinrich Himmler, who died in British captivity on 23 May 1945, died by suicide when he broke a concealed cyanide capsule, and instead maintained that he was murdered. 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. People who knew her say that Gudrun created a "golden image" of her father, that of the father she wished she had had.

Later life and death Gudrun Himmler married the far-right propagandist and author Wulf Dieter Burwitz, who later became a party official in the Bavarian section of the far-right NPD, At the time, the agency was headed by Reinhard Gehlen, an American-recruited general who hired, among others, ex-Nazis to work for BND based on their connections and experience with Eastern Europe and anti-communist activities.

For decades Burwitz was a prominent public figure in , who provided legal and financial support to former SS members from its founding in 1951. At various meetings, for instance, the annual Ulrichsberg gathering in Austria, she received the status of both a star and an authority. Oliver Schröm, author of a book about the organisation, described her as a . She has also been described by theologian Katharina von Kellenbach as "a prominent spokesperson for the neo-Nazi movement and an important link between old perpetrator networks and young sympathisers".

Peter Finkelgruen, a German-Jewish investigative journalist, discovered that Burwitz provided financial support for Anton Malloth, a former Nazi prison guard and a fugitive war criminal. In 2001, Malloth was convicted of beating at least 100 prisoners to death at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, including Finkelgruen's grandfather in 1942.