As a historian who studies and writes about Nazi Germany, I have occasionally met the descendants of the criminals who ruled the Third Reich. I’ve always wondered how they can possibly bear the burden of carrying the genes that wrought so much evil. The answer is curious and reminds me of the saying of German philosopher Immanuel Kant that nothing straight will ever be made from the crooked timber of humanity.
The Daily Telegraph carried an interview this week with one such unwitting victim: a 49-year-old psychotherapist named Henrik Lenkeit, who lives in Spain and recently discovered by chance that he is the grandson of one of the most notorious Nazis of them all: SS overlord and Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler. Lenkeit’s much-loved grandmother was Hedwig Potthast, Himmler’s secretary and mistress, who bore two children out of wedlock by the monster: a son called Helge, who died in 2005, and Henrik’s mother Nanette-Dorothea, who died in 2019.
Henrik was close to his grandmother but knew nothing of her history – though he found it odd that so few people came to her funeral in 1994 – and his mother never mentioned her own biological paternity until he happened to see a TV documentary about Himmler’s life. He recognised Hedwig’s picture in the programme as his ‘oma’ (‘nan’), did some research and found out the awful truth. Now he feels that he has been living a lie for the first half-century of his life.
Himmler had one legitimate child by his wife Margarete: a girl called Gudrun. Unlike most descendants of the leading Nazis, Gudrun embraced her father’s warped beliefs, was a regular guest at reunions of old SS comrades, married an official in the neo-Nazi NPD party and financially supported old Nazis fallen on hard times. She died in 2018 aged 88.
Another bearer of the Himmler genes adopted a very different attitude to her family history. Katrin Himmler was the great-niece of Heinrich Himmler, whom I encountered in 2017 when she appeared at the Chalke Valley History Festival in Wiltshire to talk about living with that infamous name.
Katrin, a warm, friendly woman in her fifties, made a deliberate decision to keep her notorious surname in order to confront her challenging family legacy. She has written a book about her family and is married to an Israeli man – a conscious move for a descendant of the fanatic who murdered six million Jews in an effort to exterminate European Jewry.
Heinrich Himmler’s deputy was the terrifying Reinhard Heydrich, the icy police and intelligence chief who even Hitler called ‘the man with the iron heart’. Heydrich chaired the meeting at Wannsee, outside Berlin, in January 1942, which planned the logistics of the Holocaust.
Heydrich’s nephew Peter Heydrich, as a boy, had enjoyed privileges under the Third Reich thanks to his feared uncle’s power, but after the war Peter – who died in 2000 – attempted to make amends for his toxic heritage by becoming a cabaret artist specialising in Jewish songs.
The twisted legacy of Nazism, it sometimes seems, will never be allowed to end
An even more extreme reaction to his inheritance was adopted by Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer and the governor of occupied central Poland during the Holocaust. Frank senior was hanged at Nuremberg in October 1946, and Niklas, now in his 86th year, has adopted an attitude of extreme loathing towards the father he barely knew. As a gesture of his contempt, he used to masturbate over his father’s picture on the anniversary of his execution every year.
Almost as radical a rejection of their family’s genes was the decision by Bettina Goering and her brother – great-niece and nephew of Luftwaffe boss Hermann Goering, Hitler’s closest lieutenant – to sterilise themselves to ensure that the tainted Goering genes are not perpetuated to another generation.
Just as strange and even more tragic is the story of Martin Adolf Bormann, eldest of the ten children of Martin Bormann senior, Hitler’s secretary and manipulative gatekeeper, who was killed attempting to escape from the Berlin bunker in 1945. Bormann senior was an extreme anti-Christian, but nine of his ten children converted to Catholicism after the war, and the eldest, Martin Adolf, became a Catholic priest and a missionary in the war-torn Congo.
In 1971 Martin Adolf, like Martin Luther, renounced his vows of celibacy and married a nun, but continued to teach theology. However, in 2011 he was accused by a former student of having raped him when he was a boy of 12. Other former pupils of Bormann came forward to accuse him of extreme cruelty, but by then he was suffering from dementia and was unable to answer the charges. He died aged 82 in 2013. The Church later paid compensation to his accuser. The twisted legacy of Nazism, it sometimes seems, will never be allowed to end.
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