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40 Fascinating Facts About the Relatives of Nazis After WWII

Khalid Elhassan March 14, 2019 24 min

2. Gudrun Himmler Went to Her Grave Believing Her Father Was a Good and Misunderstood Man

Gudrun Burwitz, ne Himmler, in old age, and with her father. The Daily Mirror

Gudrun Himmler never turned her back on her father. After the war, she married a far-right extremist and official of a neo-Nazi party, and became Gudrun Burwitz. She became an active participant in Stille Hilfe (“Silent Assistance”), an organization dedicated to helping fugitive former SS members. Among those helped by Gudrun were Martin Sommer, AKA “The Hangman of Buchenwald”, Klaus Barbie, AKA “The Butcher of Lyon”, and Anton Malloth, a concentration camp guard convicted in 2001 of beating over 100 prisoners to death. She died at age 88 in 2018, an unrepentant apologist for her father and the regime he served.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.