Waving goodbye to her grandchildren, Gudrun Burwitz has the look of a woman ready to live the rest of her days in peace and quiet. Instead, the 81-year-old daughter of Heinrich Himmler still works at a ruthless pace to keep the Nazi flame alive.
Himmler and daughter Gudrun in the war years. He ran the Gestapo, the S.S. and the extermination program that murdered six million Jews
Mrs Burwitz has always nurtured the memory of her father, believing the man who ran the Gestapo, the SS and the extermination program which murdered six million Jews, to be good and worthy.
And despite her advanced years, she continues to help the aging remnants of the Nazi regime to evade justice.
As the leading figure in the shadowy and sinister support group Stille Hilfe –Silent Help – she helps bring succor and financial help to those still at large.
Said to have been formed in 1951 by a clique of high-ranking SS officers and right-wing clergy in Germany, it exists ‘to provide quiet but active assistance to those who lost their freedom during or after the war by capture, internment or similar circumstance and who need help to this day’.
Now it is in the hands of Mrs Burwitz. And her work has taken an even more sinister turn. She has become ‘grandmother’ to a new breed of female Nazis on the radical right.
These disciples of Hitler wear the traditional dirndl dresses of Bavaria and their hair in plaits.
Andrea Roepke, an expert on Mrs Burwitz, said: ‘The Silent Help is not only about former National Socialists. It collects money too for the neo-Nazi movement.’
Mrs Burwitz, who lives in Munich with her husband, is fighting to keep Klaas Carel Faber, 89, from being extradited back to his homeland from Germany.
The Dutchman served with the SS in Holland where he murdered defenseless Jews in cold blood.
And her latest client is Soren Kamm, a Danish SS officer wanted in his homeland for murder in wartime.
Kamm, 90, is wanted in conjunction with several murders, including the execution of newspaper editor Carl Henrik Clemmensen in Copenhagen.
In 1946, a Danish court sentenced one of Kamm’s associates, Flemming Helweg-Larsen, to death in the same case and citing the same evidence material.
Helweg-Larsen was executed the same year.
Germany has refused to act on an EU extradition warrant although Kamm has admitted his guilt in a TV interview.
Mrs Burwitz, the ‘Princess of Nazism,’ as one historian called her, lives in a maisonette in the Munich suburb of Furstenried with her husband Wolf-Dieter.
‘I never talk about my work,’ she told the Mail. ‘I just do what I can when I can.’
An intelligence official said: ‘She is over 80 but pin sharp. She likes it if you think of her as some Mrs Doubtfire figure but that is not the case.’
