Heinrich Himmler’s daughter worked for Germany’s post-war foreign intelligence agency, it has been revealed.
Gudrun Burwitz, the daughter of the architect of the Holocaust and a fervent Nazi until her death last month, was employed by West Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) from 1961 to 1963, the agency has confirmed.
She worked as a secretary at the BND’s headquarters in Pullach, near Munich, but used a different name.
Her work for the German intelligence service has been revealed by the German newspaper Bild, at the same time that it reported that Ms Burwitz had died aged 88, seemingly from natural causes.
Despite her father having been head of Hitler’s SS and therefore heavily responsible for the murder of six million Jews, as well as the deaths of gypsies and homosexuals, Ms Burwitz remained a committed Holocaust denier to the very end.
As an ageing grandmother, she took a leading role in an organisation called Stille Hilfe (Silent Help), which supported former SS members when they were arrested for crimes against humanity, and gave succour to others who were seeking to evade justice.
The group is thought to have been first created in 1951 by a group of SS officers and right-wing German clergy.
Ms Burwitz’s later leading role in it led to her being referred to in some quarters as the “Princess of Nazism”.
She was also suspected of being a supporter of, and inspiration to modern Neo-Nazi movements.
In 2011 Andrea Ropke, an authority on neo-Nazism, was quoted as saying: “Silent Help is not only about former National Socialists. It collects money too for the neo-Nazi movement.”
The BND told Bild that it didn’t normally comment on personnel issues but had confirmed Burwitz worked there as part of its effort to be transparent about Nazi links in its past.
That such a character could have worked for the post-war German intelligence service should, however, not come as so much of a surprise.
As long ago as the 1950s, the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau was reporting that in the early days of the post-war organisation that became the BND: “It seems that in the headquarters, one SS man paved the way for the next and Himmler’s elite were having happy reunion ceremonies.”
That was a reference to the Gehlen Organisation, set up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War by Reinhard Gehlen, who had served Hitler as head of German army intelligence on the Eastern Front.
At the end of the war, Gehlen surrendered to the Americans and seized the opportunity to present himself as the ideal man to help them in their new struggle against communist Russia.
He had in place, he promised, anti-communist agents who could switch from serving Nazi Germany to assisting the US.
American intelligence spirited Gehlen away to Fort Hunt, Virginia, despite the US having promised at the Yalta Conference to give the Russians any captured German officers who had been involved in “eastern area activities”.
Then, in 1946, the Americans returned Gehlen to West Germany, to set up what became known as the Gehlen Organisation, helping the CIA and Nato in their Cold War intelligence battle against the Soviet Union and the countries of communist eastern Europe.
Operating until 1956, when it was superseded by the BND, the Gehlen Organisation was allowed to employ at least 100 former Gestapo or SS officers.
Among them were Adolf Eichmann’s deputy Alois Brunner, who would go on to die of old age despite having sent more than 100,000 Jews to ghettos or internment camps, and ex-SS major Emil Augsburg.
Despite Augsburg being wanted in Poland for having planned the executions of Jews and other ‘enemies of the Reich’, a glowing CIA assessment from 1952 described him as “Honest and idealist” with a love of “good food and wine” and an “unprejudiced mind”.
Also recruited into the Gehlen Organisation was Karl Josef Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer who effectively sent Anne Frank to her death by tracking her down and arresting her and her family as they hid in an Amsterdam attic in 1944.
When tracked down by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in 1963, Silberbauer seemed to show a distinct lack of remorse, instead demanding: "Why pick on me after all these years? I only did my duty. Now I am suspended and I have just bought some new furniture and how am I going to pay for it?"
His only expression of regret about Anne Frank seems to have been the comment: "I bought the little book last week to see if I am in it. But I am not. Maybe I should have picked it up off the floor.”
The suspension Silberbauer referred to was from his job as a police inspector in the Austrian capital Vienna. Silberbauer, however, was soon back at work, having been reinstated after a brief investigation led the Austrian authorities to conclude he had only been obeying orders while working at department IVB4, the Berlin headquarters of the programme to exterminate the Jews.
Similar forgiveness also seems to have been extended to former senior Nazis when in 1956 the Gehlen Organisation passed from CIA to West German government control and became the BND, with Reinhard Gehlen serving as its first president until his retirement in 1968.
Many ex-Nazi functionaries including Silberbauer, the captor of Anne Frank, transferred over from the Gehlen Organisation to the BND.
Their commitment to combating communism, it seems, trumped any concerns the BND might have had about their past involvement in Nazi atrocities.
Instead of expelling them, the BND even seems to have been willing to recruit more of them.
In 1965, two years after Himmler’s daughter Gudrun Burwitz left the BND, Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ became one of its agents.
