How Nazi offspring dealt with their family’s hellish histories
Imagine discovering that your loving parent is actually a genocidal monster. In the new book “Children of Nazis” (Arcade), out Tuesday, author Tania Crasnianski presents the people who were forced to face up to this terrible truth.
Some children of Nazi leaders such as Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring and Rudolf Hess couldn’t stop loving their doting dads, spending their lives trying to repair their fathers’ reputations, while others shunned all memory of their parent, knowing they could never accept their atrocities.
“The difference is due to the link they had with their fathers,” says Crasnianski. “Some, like Gudrun Himmler, were very close to their fathers, really in love with them. Niklas Frank’s father, Hans, was very distant. The more you have distance, the easier it is to judge.”
Here’s how Nazi offspring dealt with their family’s hellish histories.
Hans Frank
FAMOUS FOR: Lawyer for Hitler and the Nazi Party; governor-general of the occupied Polish territories. Arrested May 4, 1945. Executed by hanging on Oct. 16, 1946.
SON: Niklas Frank, born to Brigitte Frank on March 9, 1939
Niklas Frank was 4 years old the first time he saw children his age — their clothing soiled and torn, bones protruding from their rib cages — imprisoned in a concentration camp in Krakow. His mother had the two of them driven there in their black Mercedes so she could buy corsets.
“No one makes better corsets than the Jews in the ghetto,” she said.
He learned of his father’s role in all this, including the gassing of nearly 2 million Jews, after the war, and immediately understood the evil of his father’s actions. This might have been because his parents were cold and distant and sometimes violent. They nicknamed him “Fremde,” which means “stranger.”
Niklas became a journalist, serving as an editor at Playboy, writing several books about his hatred for his family, and working at Germany’s Stern magazine for 20 years.
He believes his father was driven by “greed and fanatical ambition” and would have murdered whomever Hitler asked him to. He still carries a picture of his father everywhere he goes. When asked why, he replies, “I am pleased by what the picture shows: He is dead.”
Crasnianski shares that Niklas, who lives with his wife just north of Hamburg and still writes and gives public talks, once wrote that every year, “on the anniversary of his father’s death, he masturbates under his father’s portrait or imagines himself dissecting him.”
Hermann Göring
FAMOUS FOR: Commander in chief of the Luftwaffe (Nazi Air Force); creator of the Gestapo; Hitler’s second-in-command during World War II. Arrested May 8, 1945. Committed suicide by cyanide pill, Oct. 15, 1946, several hours before his scheduled execution.
DAUGHTER: Edda Göring. Born to Emmy Goring on June 2, 1938.
Edda Göring was practically German royalty when she was born. Her father’s fame as a decorated WWI pilot and his renown as a Nazi leader was so great that a picture of Edda in his arms (inset) sold millions of copies at the time. She grew up surrounded by privilege in an “extravagant home” with a cinema, pool and gymnasium — and priceless art pilfered from Jews on every wall.
The life of luxury ended on Jan. 31, 1945. With the Russian army advancing, Edda and her mother fled to the safety of the German/Austrian border, eventually moving into a small Munich apartment they shared until Emmy’s death in 1973. The apartment became a shrine to Göring.
Edda never believed her father’s guilt, once saying, “My father was not a fanatic. You could see the peacefulness in his eyes . . . I loved him very much, and you could see he loved me.”
She became a nurse in Wiesbaden, Germany and had occasional involvement with far-right or neo-Nazi groups.
“In 2015, at the age of 76, she filed suit against the Bavarian parliament to return some of her father’s property that had been confiscated after the war,” writes Crasnianski. “Her suit was immediately rejected.”
Now 79 and living in Munich, the never-married Edda considers her last name “a source of pride,” and has never lost her deep sense of privilege and entitlement.
Martin Bormann
FAMOUS FOR: Hitler’s private secretary and head of the Nazis’ home office. Died, mostly likely of suicide, in May 1945 (identity of his body not confirmed until 1972).
SON: Martin Adolf Bormann Jr. Born to Gerda Bormann on April 14, 1930.
Martin Adolf Bormann Jr. was Adolf Hitler’s first godson. His father, as Hitler’s secretary, controlled all communication to the Nazi leader, making him extraordinarily powerful in Nazi circles.
The elder Bormann was “extremely severe” with his son, and Crasnianski writes that there was “no connection or human warmth” between them.
“Once, when Martin Adolf saluted the Fuhrer with a ‘Heil Hitler,’ his father slapped him; the custom when addressing Hitler directly was to say, ‘Heil, mein Fuhrer.’ ”
Martin Adolf was 15 and at boarding school when the war ended. His family having already fled, he went on the run and was taken in by an Austrian farmer who raised him as a Christian. As revelations about Nazi actions during the war came to light, they contrasted with his new Christian teachings. He realized that everything he’d learned about humanity and morality had been wrong.
Martin Adolf never publicly condemned his father, believing only God can judge, and entered a Jesuit seminary in 1948. He was ordained a priest in 1958.
He was injured in a car accident in 1971. When he awoke in the hospital, he fell immediately in love with his nurse. They were married later that year, and both became religious instructors. Martin Adolf retired in 1992 and died on March 11, 2013.
Josef Mengele
FAMOUS FOR: “The Angel of Death.” SS officer responsible for horrific “experiments” on concentration-camp prisoners. Escaped to Argentina in 1949, wound up in Brazil. Drowned off Brazilian coast in 1979.
SON: Rolf Mengele, born to Irene Schoenbein in March 1944.
Being just a year old when the war ended, young Rolf Mengele didn’t know his father, growing up in a loving home with his grandparents, mother and step-father instead. He was told his father was dead. Learning the truth at 16 was an unhappy revelation for him. His father made attempts to bond with him through letters, even writing and illustrating a children’s book for him, but to no avail.
But while Rolf was clearly opposed to his father’s beliefs and actions, he felt a kinship and sought to know him better.
As Josef Mengele was a prime target for Nazi hunters, Rolf spent five years arranging his two-week-long 1977 visit to Brazil. Traveling under a stolen passport, Rolf’s motivation, Crasnianski writes, was to “try to understand how this man, his own father, could have actively participated in the vast Nazi death machine.”
Soon after he arrived, Rolf broached the topic of Auschwitz. The elderly Mengele was defensive, denying any responsibility for the atrocities, though he did admit to participating in the nightmare “experiments” Jews were subjected to.
“What was I supposed to do with these people?” he asked. “They were sick and half-dead when they arrived.” He claimed that “his job was only to determine who was fit to work,” and that “he guesses he saved the lives of several thousand people.”
Rolf never revealed his location, saying it was “impossible to betray his father.” Still, his feelings about the man hadn’t changed.
“I didn’t even bother to listen to him or think of his ideas. I simply rejected everything he presented,” Rolf said. “I will never understand how human beings could do those things. That my father was one of them doesn’t change my opinion.”
He abandoned the “Mengele” name in the 1980s, taking his wife’s last name instead to spare his children the burden. He lives in Freiburg, Germany, where he works as an attorney.
Rudolf Hess
FAMOUS FOR: Deputy Fuhrer until 1941 — the year he was arrested in England after a rogue mission there. Remained imprisoned until his suicide by hanging on Aug. 17, 1987.
SON: Wolf Rudiger Hess. Born to Ilse Hess on Nov. 18, 1937.
Wolf was only 3 1/2 when his father was arrested in England. He communicated with him over the years by letter, even learning chess from him, and always believed his father’s innocence.
In 1959, he rejected compulsory military service by arguing that his father was imprisoned for creating that very draft, which was regarded as “an act against peace.”
He eventually won his case as a conscientious objector and became a civil engineer. But his mission to defend his father was just getting started.
“Wolf created the Committee to Free Rudolf Hess and launched a petition that was signed by more than 350,000 people, including two former presidents of West Germany [and] two Nobel Prize winners.”
Wolf “dedicated his life to his father,” writing three books about him: “My Father Rudolf Hess” (1986), “Who Murdered My Father, Rudolf Hess?” (1989), and “Rudolf Hess: No Regrets” (1994). When asked about his life, he would reply, “I never had time for myself: I spent all my free time on my father.”
He believed until the end that his father was assassinated by the British, even forming an organization in 1988 dedicated to promoting this theory. He had three sons, the first of which, also named Wolf, was born on Hitler’s birthday.
Wolf died from kidney failure in October 2001.
Heinrich Himmler
FAMOUS FOR: Developing the SS and concentration camps. Arrested May 21, 1945. Committed suicide by cyanide capsule May 23, 1945.
DAUGHTER: Gudrun Himmler. Born to Margarete Himmler on Aug. 8, 1929.
The SS chief’s daughter has fond memories of accompanying her father to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp and Himmler’s brainchild. While she saw her father’s “prisoners,” all “unshaven and poorly clothed,” she had greater interest in the camp’s vegetable garden, as it reminded her of her childhood farm.
She watched her father rise through the Nazi ranks with pride, calling Adolf Hitler “Uncle Hitler,” who gave her a doll and chocolates every New Year.
Convinced of her father’s innocence, she remained his biggest fan after the war, making it her goal to “exonerate her father’s reputation.
Her apartment on the outskirts of Munich became “a veritable museum to the glory of her father,” and she dedicated her life to cherishing his memory.
In 1951, she joined a group in Germany dedicated to assisting Nazi soldiers and formed a similar group of her own the following year, called Viking Youth, modeled after the original Nazi Youth. “The group was banned in Germany in 1994,” Crasnianski writes.
Still, Gudrun, now 88, has spent much of her life as a “militant” advocate for far-right causes in Germany. She married a Bavarian civil servant and Nazi sympathizer in the 1960s. They live in a suburb of Munich and have two children.