The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History

The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History

Katrin Himmler

Language: English

Pages: 352

ISBN: 0330448145

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Once upon a time the Himmlers were just a normal German family—middle-class, hard-working, well-educated. There were three brothers, Gebhart, Heinrich, and Ernst. Heinrich grew up to become the head of Hitler’s SS, mastermind of the concentration camp system, and chief perpetrator of the Holocaust. When Katrin Himmler, Heinrich’s great-niece, was 15, one of her classmates asked during a history lesson if she was related to the Himmler. "Yes," she stammered, at which there was a deathly hush in the classroom and the teacher, embarrassed and unsure, quickly moved the lesson on. As she grew older, Katrin gave her family history a wide berth, but married to an Israeli whose family was confined to the Warsaw Ghetto and with a young, half-Jewish son, she realized that she could not evade the past so easily. Katrin Himmler’s cool but meticulous examination of the Himmler story reveals—in all its dark complexity—the gulf between the "normality" of bourgeois family life and the horrors perpetrated by one member. A more nuanced portrait of Heinrich himself emerges—not a lone evil executioner, but a middle-class family man, loved and fully supported by his respectable German family.

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Them, Lu Zahler. The Zahlers were distant relations and close friends of the Himmlers. Lu and his two sisters, Mariele and Pepperl, also in the photo, spent a lot of time together with the Himmler brothers. While at university in Munich, Heinrich, Lu and Gebhard saw each other almost every day – in the family circle in the Pension Loritz, but also for the military exercises of Rifle Brigade 21, a successor organization to the Freikorps Epp, which they all joined together. 10 Professor Gebhard.

Family and friends. One of Heinrich’s particular strengths lay in the cultivation of personal contacts and their exploitation by loyal allies and subordinates. Heinrich first of all approached the Bavarian Broadcasting Company for his brother, since Ernst would have preferred to return to Munich. There, however, he met with a rebuff, so he mobilized his influential contacts in Berlin, where Ernst started work on 1 June 1933 as an engineer with the Reich Broadcasting Company. Ernst had put his.

Already been cleared of Jews. ‘In the space of four days the twenty-two thousand Jews registered in the District,’ he stated, had ‘paid five million zloty in taxes, fines etc’. On the basis of this experience he planned, he went on, ‘as far as possible to concentrate the Jews in the other sections in one or two places; they must definitely be cleared from the rural areas. The forced labour camps are proving exceptionally effective; a month’s stay there works wonders.’ At a police meeting in.

Previous ones, she would later recall, tearing pages with dedications out of books and sometimes writing in new names. But her fight to recover her possessions was so successful that she had to arrange a small lorry to take them back to Dinslaken. The furniture, books, kitchen- and tableware she now had made life slightly more bearable, but they did nothing to quell the pangs of hunger. At night they went out into the fields to steal cabbages. Paula and her second daughter would cut them, while.

Remain important to him for the rest of his life. Gebhard Himmler must have made an impression on the Lamezan family; as late as 1936 a friend of the family recalled in a provincial Bavarian newspaper how much he was respected as a teacher by Lamezan’s two sons. Among other things, his task in St Petersburg had been ‘as a German tutor to implant German character and German culture more firmly in the hearts of his charges’. When Gebhard returned to Munich at Easter 1890 he took up an appointment.

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