Children of NAZI Leaders - Where Did They Go?

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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.
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Channel: The Infographics Show
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Length: 21min 49sec (1309 seconds)
Published: Wed Apr 24 2024
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