Ever wondered where you come
from? Who were your ancestors? Imagine that one day, your curiosity
gets too much. You decide it’s time to invest in a DNA test, and after
swabbing the inside of your cheek, you send the kit back to the company and prepare
to find out a little more about your family roots. Maybe you’ve got a war hero in your bloodline. Or an award-winning scientist. Or a selfless
humanitarian who advanced the interests of humankind. You might even get lucky and find
out the identity of your long lost father. When the results come in, you see a name
you don’t recognize - a German name. You had no idea that your father came from
Germany! Quickly, you head off to Google to cross-reference his name and find out
if he ever did anything worth documenting. A short Google later, your jaw drops. You
see the horrible and unmistakable words under his name on the Google panel:
“Concentration Camp Commandant.” What would you do if you found out your father
was Adolf Hitler's second-in-command? Would you try to make up for his crimes? Change your
name and never speak of it again? These are the questions that the children of Nazi Leaders
had to contend with after the end of the war and the fall of the Third Reich. Some of them
tried to rebuild what their parents broke, others defended them until the bitter
end. Today, we're taking a look at what exactly happened to the children of
some of the most infamous Nazi leaders. The children of the fallen Nazi leadership
ended up in a wide variety of places after the war. Some, however, never got to see
it end. This brings us to the children of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels
and his wife, Magda Goebbels. Together, Magda and Joseph had six children, and
Magda had one other son from a previous marriage. This eldest son, Harald Quandt,
would be the only one of Magda's children to survive the end of World War II. The
other six, twelve-year-old Helga Susanne, eleven-year-old Hildegard Traudel, nine-year-old
Helmut Christian, eight-year-old Holdine Kathrin, six-year-old Hedwig Johanna, and four-year-old
Hedrun Elisabeth, would not make it out alive. It was January of 1945, and the Red Army was
closing in around the Nazi forces in Berlin. As the threat grew closer, Goebbels moved his
family from their Lanke estate to Schwanenwerder. They remained there until April 22, 1945, when the
Red Army crossed the border into Berlin. At this point, the Goebbels family moved again, retreating
to the Fuhrerbunker under the Reich Chancellery garden. In the face of potential Soviet capture,
many hiding out in the bunker began to discuss the possibility of dying by suicide rather than facing
whatever punishment the enemy forces had in mind for them. Several people, including Karl Gebhardt
and Albert Speer, offered to take the Goebbels children out of Berlin with them to ensure
their safety, but Magda refused to allow it. Joseph Goebbels refused to leave Berlin,
writing that "reasons of humanity and personal loyalty" required him to stay where
he was. He would die there in the bunker, alongside Hitler. What happened next varies from
witness to witness, but what we do know paints a grim picture. Rochus Misch, the bunker's telephone
and radio operator, was one of the last people to see the children alive. He saw them sitting around
a table in his work area, wearing their nightgowns as Madga combed their hair. Helga was crying
softly as bedtime approached. As Madga took the children upstairs, he felt something terrible was
about to happen. But still, he did not intervene. Misch was correct. Something terrible did happen.
According to Dr. Helmut Kunz, an SS dentist, Magda Goebbels approached him toward the end of April,
asking for his help killing her children. He refused at first, insisting that the fate of her
children was not his responsibility. However, she refused to let the issue drop and later told him
that it was now a direct order from Hitler rather than a plea for help. On the evening of May 1, the
time had finally come. Madga gathered the children together in one room and told them that the doctor
was there to give them an injection and that there was no reason to be afraid because all children
and soldiers got this type of injection. One by one, Kunz injected each of the children with
morphine. He started with the eldest daughters, then the son, and then finished with the youngest.
The entire process took about 10 minutes. Once the children were unconscious, Kunz later
testified that Magda entered the room with cyanide capsules in her hands. After a few minutes passed,
she told the doctor that she could not do it and insisted he do it instead. He refused, and she
replied, "Well, if you cannot do it, then get Stumpfegger." She was referring to Dr. Ludwig
Stumpfegger, Adolf Hitler's personal surgeon. At first, he refused the horrific order as well,
insisting that he was "not there to kill other people's children." But after being threatened
with Joseph Goebbels' wrath should he fail to comply, he entered the room with Madga Goebbels.
A little while later, Madga left the room and told Kunz that it was "all over." The cyanide capsules
had been crushed in the children's mouths, and they were dead. Soon after, Madga and Joseph
Goebbels followed them, taking their own lives. On May 3, 1945, Soviet troops discovered the
six dead bodies of the Goebbels children in the bunker, still dressed in their pajamas, with
ribbons in the girls' hair. Vice Admiral Hans Voss and radio broadcaster Hans Fritzsche were
brought in to identify the bodies and positively identified them as the children of Magda and
Joseph Goebbels. Their bodies were taken to the Buchau Cemetary in Berlin for an autopsy and
investigation by Soviet doctors, and their cause of death was identified. Dr. Kunz would later
stand trial for his part in the children's deaths, and in January 1959, he was charged with six
counts of aiding and abetting a homicide. The court proceedings were later stayed, citing the
Impunity Act of 1954 as a justification. Kunz died at the age of 66 on September 23, 1976,
nine years after Madga's only surviving child, Harald, was killed in a plane crash over Italy.
And that was the end of the Goebbels family. Nazi leader Hermann Göring's only
daughter, Edda, was baptized on November 4, 1938. At her christening, Adolf Hitler himself
became her godfather. She grew up at Carinhall, the Göring country estate, where she was
known as Kleine Prinzessin, or "Little Princess." The Telegraph called her "The Shirley
Temple of Nazi Germany." As the Allied forces began to close in and the war drew to an end,
Göring took Edda, along with his wife Emmy, to his mountain home at Oversalzberg. On May 21,
after the surrender of the Wehrmacht on May 8, six-year-old Edda and her mother were interned
at the US military-controlled Palace Hotel in Luxembourg. They were freed in 1946 and moved
into a home near Nuremberg. When it was time for her father to stand trial at Nuremberg,
Edda was granted permission to visit him in prison. He was sentenced to death for his crimes
but refused to face his scheduled execution and swallowed a cyanide pill the night before.
Edda was eight years old when her father died. After his death, Edda and Emmy found
themselves living in a cottage with no electricity or running water. They later moved
to Munich, where Edda eventually attended and studied law. When it came to her father's role
in the Third Reich, she largely kept to herself, speaking of her father as a person
more than anything else. In 1991, she spoke to journalist Gerald Posner for his
book "Hitler's Children: Sons and Daughter of Third Reich Leaders," and said: "I loved
him very much, and it was obvious how much he loved me. My only memories of him are such
loving ones. I cannot see him any other way." In 2015, she petitioned the Bavarian State
Parliament for the return of property confiscated from her father's estate after the war. The
request was denied unanimously after only a few minutes. She died in 2018 at the age of 80
and was reportedly buried in an unmarked grave. While Edda had fond memories of her father, other
Nazi commanders' children never really knew them and had to learn about what their parents had
done later in life. Monika Hertwig was the daughter of Amon Goeth, an SS officer who oversaw
the operations at a concentration camp in Plaszow, Poland. He is perhaps best known as the
villain of the Holocaust film "Schindler's List." When he was executed for his crimes,
Monika was only one year old. As a child, Monika's mother told her that her father
was a good man at heart and that he had not meant to do anything wrong. But in 1993,
when Monika saw Schindler's List in theaters, the reality of what her father had
done hit her like a freight train. The realization made her sick. Monika set out
to address her father's crimes through her work, including a 2008 documentary titled 'Inheritance."
In the film, she reached out to Helen Jonas, a woman who had been taken from a concentration
camp at age 15 and made to work in the Goeth house. In the film, Monika says, "For
Helen, it's time to bring closure. But it was not closure for me. I think it was
the beginning of another life, a life where I'm able to live the truth." Monika Hertwig is
currently still alive at the age of 78 years. Niklas Frank was born on March 9, 1938, to
his mother, Brigitte Herbst, and his father, Hans Frank. When Niklas was eight months old, his
father was appointed governor of German-occupied Poland. There, Frank was responsible for many
human rights abuses, including the murders of the Jewish population of Poland. The amount of
death and destruction he was responsible for earned him the nickname "The Butcher of Poland.
Niklas did not witness much of this personally, as he was only seven years old when his father was
sentenced to death at Nuremberg. But as an adult, after the death of his mother in 1959,
Niklas went into the field of journalism. He worked for German Playboy and at the
weekly Stern. The more he learned about his father and the older he got, the more
he developed what he called a "burning, obsessive hatred" of the man. In 1987,
he published a book about his father, Der Vater: Eine Abrechnung (The Father: A Settling
of Accounts), later published in English in 1991 as "In the Shadow of the Reich." In 1995, his
play "Der Vater '' (The Father) premiered, a depiction of a fictionalized version of
himself exhuming his father's corpse and asking him to answer for his sins. He did not stop
at writing about his father. In 2005, he wrote "My German Mother" about his mother and "Brother
Norman!" about his eldest brother in 2013. In November 2020, Niklas spoke to Mia Swart
of Al Jazeera about his father and growing up in occupied Poland. "I had known that we were
privileged, that we were not “normal” people, but the war was not that real to me. I
recall one time, when I was four or five, sitting in my father’s black Mercedes and
seeing a German tank that had been burned. Our chauffeur said “oh that’s a Tiger Tank”
and I was thrilled. But I never experienced any bad things, any war things. There was
only one time, towards the end of the war, when we were sitting at Schliersee and saw an
armada of planes on their way to bomb Munich." Now, with all the knowledge he
has accumulated over the years, Niklas reflects on his father's death: "I oppose
capital punishment, but I am happy that my father got to experience the fear of death that he
had inflicted upon so many innocent people." Albert Speer was a German architect and close
confidante of Hitler, who served as the Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany
throughout most of the war. During his time with the party, he also oversaw the Central Department
for Resettlement, which evicted Jewish residents from their homes in Berlin. His son, Albert Speer
Jr, was born on July 29, 1934. Like his father, he pursued a career in architecture with a
focus on urban planning. In 1977, he became a professor of urban planning at the University
of Kaiserslautern in Rhineland-Palatinate. He designed the Shanghai International Automobile
City and was the Beijing Olympics' lead designer. He spoke of his father infrequently and
not especially fondly. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he deliberately
distanced himself from his father throughout his life. His decision to become an architect was
his own and had nothing to do with his father, according to him. He did not hate his father
but did describe him as "not the kind of father who went over your homework." Albert Speer Jr.
died on September 15, 2017, at the age of 83. One of the most infamous Nazi leaders of all
time was Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler's most devoted followers and a driving force behind the
Holocaust. He and his wife had only one biological child, a daughter named Gudrun. When Gudrun
was born in 1929, her father was the head of the SS. As Gudrun grew up, she experienced life
as the daughter of Hitler's second-in-command, attending Christmas parties with Hitler
and receiving gifts from him. At age 12, Gudrun and her father traveled to a concentration
camp together. She wrote about the experience in her diary: "Today we went to the SS concentration
camp at Dachau. We saw everything we could. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear
trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous. And afterward,
we had a lot to eat. It was very nice." Over the years, her diary captured her feelings
and views on the Third Reich and Germany. She wrote on March 5, 1945, "We no longer have
any allies in Europe and can only rely on ourselves. The Luftwaffe is still so bad.
Göring does not seem to care about anything, that windbag. Goebbels is doing a lot, but he
always shows off. They all get medals and awards, except Pappi, and he should be the first to get
one.” Pappi, of course, referred to her father, Heinrich Himmler. On April 19, as Hitler
retreated to his bunker, she wrote, "Daddy and all the others are up there and remain for the
moment now that the great battle in the East has begun. Daddy has found it terribly difficult with
the incredible amount of work. The Fuhrer will not believe that the soldiers will no longer fight.
Still, perhaps everything will turn out fine." In May of 1945, 15-year-old Gudrun and her mother
left Germany for Northern Italy and were arrested by American troops there. Meanwhile, her father
had fled Germany after Hitler's death, shaved his mustache, and put on an eyepatch to hide his
identity. It did not work, and he was captured by Soviet forces on May 20, killing himself with
a smuggled cyanide capsule three days later. While Gudrun and her mother were held
in detention camps throughout Italy, she went on hunger strike. After four years
in detention camps, Gudrun and her mother were released and settled in Bielefeld in
northern Germany. Gudrun sought work as a seamstress and bookbinder but struggled to get
jobs with her infamous last name and ties to the Nazi regime. She used an assumed name to take a
secretary job at the German Foreign Intelligence Service from 1961 to 1963 until her true
identity was discovered and she was dismissed. In the late 1960s, she married a writer named
Wulf-Dieter Burwitz, who became an official of the NPD, the right-wing National Democratic Party of
Germany. The two moved into a home in the suburbs and had two children. You might be wondering how
exactly Gudrun reckoned with her father's legacy in the aftermath of World War II. The answer is
she carried it on as best she could and never expressed shame. She would wear a silver brooch
that he had given her, made up of four horse heads shaped like a swastika. She was an active
member of an insular group called Stille Hilfe, or Silent Help, which helped former Nazis escape
prosecution after the war, primarily by fleeing to South America. Through her work with the
organization, she is reported to have aided Nazi war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, known
as the Butcher of Lyon, and Anton Malloth, who was an SS guard convicted of killing prisoners at
the Theresienstadt concentration camp. When he was sentenced to death in absentia by a Czech court,
Gudrun helped make arrangements for him to stay in a retirement home outside of Munich, on land that
had once belonged to Nazi official Rudolf Hess. He lived there until 2001. As for Gudrun herself,
she died unrepentant in 2018 at the age of 88. Rudolf Hess was a prominent member of the Nazi
Party who held the position of Deputy Fuhrer to Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1941. His only son, Wolf
Rudiger Hess, was born in Munich on November 18, 1937. He lived with his parents until May of
1941 when Rudolf Hess flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to arrange peace talks with the Duke
of Hamilton. Hess was immediately arrested there, and the Nazi government officially denounced
him, saying that he had a mental illness. So, Wolf's mother, Ilse, took Wolf to the family's
country home at Bad Oberdorf. On June 3, 1947, Wolf's mother was arrested and interned at
Augsburg-Goggingen camp. He lived with his aunt until his mother's release in March
1948. He became an architect in 1961, but architecture was not his only passion. Wolf was fixated on his father's death, which
had been an alleged suicide at Spandau Prison in Berlin. Wolf believed that the British
Secret Intelligence Service was responsible for his father's death. He wrote three
books on the subject of his father, "My Father Rudolf Hess." "Who Murdered My
Father, Rudolf Hess?" and "Rudolf Hess: I regret nothing." Wolf Rudiger Hess suffered a stroke
on October 24, 2001, and died at the age of 63. At age 15, a boy named Rainer Hoess was on
a school trip to the Dachau Concentration Camp when he recognized his last name on an
informational placard. Rudolf Hoess (not to be confused with Rudolf Hess) was the commandant
of the Auschwitz death camp for five years and was also his grandfather. After discovering the truth
and facing his family's denial of that truth, he left home and cut them off. He then began
a career of speaking about his family's dark past and confronting the horrors of the
Holocaust, as well as attempting to help return stolen possessions to the descendants of
the Holocaust survivors they were taken from. The story of Rainier Hoess would
have ended there, but in August 2020, he was faced with accusations of fraud. He
was found guilty of defrauding a businessman, taking money that he claimed was going to be used
to finish a film about the Holocaust. However, there was no film, just 200,000 euros in
personal debt. According to The Irish Times, he has faced 18 convictions in 20 years,
and 15 of those were for fraud. These fraud accusations (and convictions) have called into
question Hoess's motivations for discussing his grandfather's crimes and whether or not he is
simply cashing in on his family's terrible legacy. Martin Bormann was the head of the Nazi
Party Chancellery and private secretary to Adolf Hitler. He had ten children, but
his first and eldest, Martin Bormann, Jr., was named after him. Like Edda Goring,
Bormann was baptized with Adolf Hitler as his godfather. He was a dedicated young Nazi
who was nicknamed Kronzi, short for Kronprinz, or Crown Prince. He attended the Nazi Party
Academy of Matrei am Brenner from 1940 until the school's closure On April 15, 1945. On May 1,
Bormann's father died (along with Dr. Stumfegger, the one who helped kill the Goebbels children).
In 1946, his mother died in the prison hospital at Merano. After his mother's death, Martin was taken
into the care of the Church of Maria Kirchtal and converted to Catholicism. He became an altar boy
at the church, where he was arrested by American intelligence officers and taken for questioning.
After his release, he returned to the church. Martin was ordained a Catholic priest on July 26, 1958. He worked as a missionary in the Congo
from 1961 until 1964. In the early 1970s, he left the priesthood and married a former
nun after the two renounced their vows. In 2000, Martin spoke to Spectator UK about his
father, saying: "I love him as my father, and I hope that I can meet him as a redeemed, saved man
. . . but I cannot acquit him of any of the guilt that he brought upon himself in his political
life by following Adolf Hitler. I can't do that." In 2011, a troubling story came out regarding
Bormann's time teaching at a Salzburg monastery boarding school when he was 30 years old.
According to a man known as Victor M., who reached out to newspapers with his story,
Bormann molested him while he was a student and told him that no one would believe him if he
reported it. Three other students claimed that Bormann was physically abusive during his time as
a teacher there. Victor M. demanded an apology, but Bormann told Austrian magazine
Profil that he did not remember Victor. The case was never officially
resolved, and Bormann died in 2013. One of the most notable descendants of Nazi
Leadership is not the child of one of the leaders but rather the granddaughter of his
brother. Katrin Himmler is the granddaughter of Ernst Himmler, Heinrich Himmler's younger
brother. Rather than run from the ghosts of her family's past, she confronted them head-on
and researched the Himmler family for her book "The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History."
The book traced the lives of Ernst, Heinrich, and their third brother Gebhard. As she delved
deeper into her family's history, there were times when the task became almost too much to bear. In
an interview with The List, she said, "Many times during my research, it was quite difficult for
me to go on. As things were revealed, they became more and more shocking. We descendants were left
with no doubt about what Heinrich had done. But his actions cast a large shadow that the rest of
the family were standing in, many hiding there." Though Heinrich Himmler is the most infamous of
the brothers, Katrin discovered her grandfather was responsible for plenty of his own
horrific deeds. During her research, she learned that her grandfather had been
directly responsible for the deportation and later death of Major Schmidt, a Jewish engineer.
The man had been protected due to his expertise, but after Ernst wrote him off and dismissed him
as unuseful, the man was reclassified and sent to die in a labor camp. In 2011, she appeared in the
documentary "Hitler's Children," which covered the lives of several descendants of prominent
Nazi leaders. Following the documentary, she gave an interview to Time, where she
spoke openly about her relationship to her name. She once planned to change her name
from Himmler but kept it after deciding that changing the name would be another way to
hide from the truth of her family's lineage. During the interview, journalist Belinda
Luscombe brought up the tendency of many descendants of Nazi leaders to avoid having
children, deciding to end the family line. Katrin explained that this was not her personal
decision: "Other children of perpetrators in Germany have decided to do that. But for
me, that's a continuity of how the Nazis thought — that bloodlines define everything.
Genes aren't everything. You can always make your own decisions. For me, it was
important to pass on what I learned." Today, Katrin has a son with her ex-husband, whose family
escaped the Warsaw ghetto during the holocaust. Now check out “What They Didn't Tell You About
Concentration Camps.” Or watch this video instead.
