The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History

About this book

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 Hitlers SS mastermind of the concentration camp system and chief perpetrator of the Holocaust. When Katrin Himmler Heinrichs great-niece was 15 one of her schoolmates 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 realizes that she cannot evade the past so easily. Katrin Himmlers cool but meticulous examination of the Himmler story revealsin all its dark complexitythe gulf between the "normality" of bourgeois family life and the horrors perpetrated by one member and a more nuanced portrait of Heinrich himself emergesnot a lone evil executioner but a middle-class family man loved and fully supported by his respectable German family.