Bad blood: How descendants of Nazis have been blighted by household ties

Earlier this month, the allies commemorated 80 years since D-Day – the day that marked the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.

In the eleven months that followed, the allies swept across Europe from the west and east, and Germany finally fell to its knees.

As the true scale of the Nazi’s crimes against humanity became clear, attention soon turned to the capture of war criminals. Some were successfully apprehended and tried, while many escaped justice – either by suicide or by fleeing the continent.

Several of these evil men left families behind in their wake, and had young children who would later learn of the crimes of their ancestors.

Today, their surviving children are well into their 80s. They have children of their own, and some had passed away themselves.

These descendants of Nazis have had to live with the shame of knowing what their ancestors did under Hitler’s regime, and have found different ways to cope.

Hermann Goering’s great niece, for example, took the drastic measure of having herself sterilised in order to put and end the family line. Others have spoken out against their ancestors, condemning them for their murderous actions.

However, others – like the daughter of SS monster Heinrich Himmler – continued to defend their Nazi ancestor’s actions until the day they died.

Here, MailOnline looks at what some of the descendants of Nazi Germany‘s most infamous criminals have said of their dark family history…

Rudolf Höss 

The descendants of Rudolf Höss – the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp – were thrust into the spotlight in 2023 with the release of ‘Zone of Interest’, an Oscar-winning film depicting their idyllic life on the grounds of the camp.

Höss was the commandant of the camp from May 4, 1940 to November 1943, and again from May 8 1944 to January 18, 1945.

During that time, Höss tested and perfected methods to accelerate Adolf Hitler’s ‘final solution’ – the dictator’s plan to exterminate Nazi-occupied Europe’s Jewish population – including introducing Zyklon B into gas chambers.

More than one million people were murdered at Auschwitz over the course of the Nazi Holocaust, including a staggering 400,000 Hungarian Jews in less than three months during Höss’s second stint as commandant of the camp.

But while Höss was carrying out Hitler’s murderous plot, his family lived on the grounds of the camp in relative seclusion behind the walls of their villa.

Höss and his wife, Hedwig Hensel, shared five children together.

Historic pictures show them living happily, playing together in the garden’s paddling pool and posing for smiling family photographs – just moments away from where the atrocities were being committed.

As they grew older, however, they became more aware of their father’s actions.

Brigitte Höss – one of Rudolf Höss’s two daughters – spoke in a series of rare interviews in 2013, and again eight years later in 2021.

The man she spoke to was journalist and author Thomas Harding whose great-uncle was Hanns Alexander, a German Jew from Berlin who joined the British army and later set about hunting down the Auschwitz commandant.

Brigitte told Harding that her mother was ‘nice’ and that her father was a ‘wonderful person’. She said she ‘couldn’t have wished for a better father’ and described him as affectionate, recalling how he would kiss them goodnight every day.

In 2013, she recalled how Hanns Alexander tracked her family down after her father had fled, and how her mother was interrogated into revealing his location.

‘I remember when they came to our house to ask questions,’ she said at the time.

‘I was sitting on the table with my sister. I was about 13 years old. The British soldiers were screaming: ‘Where is your father? Where is your father?’ over and over again. I got a very bad headache. I went outside and cried under a tree.’

Höss was later captured, tried and hanged in 1947 on the grounds of Auschwitz itself – on the site of the crematorium where the bodies of the victims were burned.

Brigitte, meanwhile, would go on to leave Germany for Spain, where she modelled for Balenciaga, before moving to Washington DC in the 1970s.

In the 2021 interview, published in The Observer, she said she found what was ‘going on’ at the camp after she left it, but said she did not believe it was her ‘dad’s fault’. 

‘I don’t think he knew what he got into when he started. Because he was very unhappy many times. And when I talked with my mom after all this happened, you know, she told me he was a very unhappy man,’ Brigitte said.

Pushed on whether she acknowledged that her father was responsible for the killings, she said she believed people were killed, but that he was pressured.

‘I still don’t believe it,’ she told Harding, ‘because there were people on top of him, who made him do this.’ 

Brigitte died in 2023, two years after the last interview. But she is not the only descendant of Rudolf Höss to have spoken about their life.

In an emotional interview last month, 62-year-old Kai Höss said he was at school on the day he realised he was the grandson of Rudolf Höss.

Höss, now a pastor from Renningen, Germany , grew up in Ludwigsburg not knowing of the murderous sins of his grandfather, until that fateful day in school.

Today, he says he has been left with inherited guilt over his grandfather’s evil actions, and is cursed by his family’s attempt to avoid the subject for years – something he attempted to rectify by making a documentary with his father.

The film, ‘The Commandant’s Shadow’, is set to be released on July 12.

‘It was in sixth or seventh grade,’ when he learned the truth about his family, Kai recalled in an interview with Germany’s FOCUS. ‘The Holocaust was a topic in class, and the name Höß came up. I went home and asked, ‘Mum, is that us?’

‘She said, ‘yes, that’s us. Rudolf Höss is your grandfather’,’ he told the magazine.

To his horror, this confirmed to him that Kai’s father – Hans-Jürgen Höss, was indeed the son of Rudolf Höss – the mass murderer’s fourth child with Hedwig.

‘I was born in 1962, so when I was young, Höss was no longer a big topic in public,’ Kai told Germany’s FOCUS magazine.

‘But when I was 16, I read my grandfather’s biographical notes, which he had written in prison. The book was on my parents’ bookshelf. I was shocked. My grandfather was the greatest mass murderer of all time.’

After this discovery, he said, ‘I just wanted to get away.’ 

After leaving school, he trained to be a chef in Stuttgart before going on to join the German army. He was stationed in England for a time.

But his desire to escape his family history later led him to Macau, Singapore, Thailand, Bali, China, Egypt and Dubai as part of a career in the hotel industry.

Although he lived a life of booze, women and high-end clubs, inside he was completely broken.

‘I was an arrogant, self-absorbed 28-year-old with a Rolex on my arm. Upscale nightclubs, double gin and tonics, parties, girls, bodybuilding, six-packs – that was my thing. But inside, I was broken,’ he told the magazine.

Kai’s turning point came after a near-death experience following tonsil surgery in Singapore. He lost so much blood, he almost died.

In hospital, he stumbled upon a Gideon Bible: ‘Faith saved me,’ he said.

Today Höss still has his own vivid memories of his grandmother, Hedwig. She was a stern, disciplined woman who maintained strict order, he told FOCUS.

‘She was tough but also loving with her children’ said Höss. 

Although his father Hans-Jürgen also grew up in the villa, with the camp’s crematorium visible from their garden, he grew up ashamed of his father’s actions.

He hid the identity of his father from his wife (Kai’s mother) when they first met.

Hans-Jürgen’s wife eventually found out the truth from an aunt who had seen a newspaper report about Rudolf Höss’s execution in 1947.

As a result, Kai Höss’s childhood was marked by silence and repression, and this avoidance put enormous strain on his parents’ marriage, he said.

Hedwig, deeply embedded in Nazi ideology, showed no remorse for her husband’s actions, believing that they ‘rose with the National Socialists and fell with them.’

In a bid to reconnect with his father and reconcile with their past after 30 years of no contact, the documentary sees Kai and Hans-Jürgen Höss visit Auschwitz together, including the site of their father and grandfather’s execution.

There, Kair said his father acknowledged his father’s crimes, telling him: ‘He deserved it, he paid. What he did was wrong.’

‘I hate what he did, and to a certain extent I hate him. His heartlessness, the meticulous, clinical way in which he fulfilled his task.’

But he said it is important to learn the lesson from this in terms of how evil can take hold of people’s hearts.

‘The film is a reminder of where populism can lead. Hitler didn’t start out by saying ‘I’m going to murder six million people and overrun the world with war’. 

[Hitler] said ‘I will make you great again, I will give you back your pride’.

Today Kai Höss also frequently wrestles with the question of whether his grandfather has been forgiven by God.

‘If he really repented, God forgave him. Then we’ll see each other in eternity. But I don’t know what really happened in his heart at the end.’

Meanwhile, Kai’s younger brother – Rainer, was publicly active as Höss’s grandson but was later revealed to have exploited the family history for financial gain.

He travelled to Auschwitz several times, and publicly stated that – although he never met him – he would have killed his own grandfather if given the chance.

In 2020 he was found guilty of fraud, and he has been criticised by some. One Israeli journalist said Rainer’s involvement is ‘motivated by pure opportunism’.

To this day, the Höss family villa still stands on the grounds of Auschwitz.

Hermann Goering

Another notorious Nazi whose descendants have made headlines is Hermann Goering, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe (German air force), the creator of the Gestapo, and Hitler’s second-in-command during the Second World War.

On June 2, 1938, his wife Emmy gave birth to Edda Goering, who instantly became German royalty at the time of her birth on account of her father’s position.

Goering received approximately 628,000 messages of congratulations on his daughter’s birth, and a famous picture of her in the arms of her Nazi father sold millions of copies at the time.

She grew up in a lavish home that featured a cinema, pool and a gymnasium, and whose walls were adorned with artwork stolen from Jews sent to the death camps.

Edda was even gifted some of this artwork, including a painting of the Madonna and Child by Lucas Cranach the Elder.

Her life of luxury came to an end on January 31, 1945 when she and her mother Edda fled Berlin to the German/Austrian border as the Russian army advanced west.

A year later, just hours before he was scheduled to be executed, Goering committed suicide by cyanide pill on October 15, 1946.

Edda, meanwhile, eventually moved into an apartment in Munich, which she shared with her mother until Emmy died in 1973. But Goering’s daughter never believed her father’s guilt, and the apartment became a shrine to him.

She said: ‘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.’

Edda went on to become a nurse and was occasionally involved in far-right and even neo-Nazi groups, and in 2015 she is reported to have filed a suit against the Bavarian parliament to return some of her father’s confiscated property. 

This was immediately rejected.

Edda died in 2018 in Munich, aged 80, and is buried in an undisclosed location.

In a stark contrast, Bettina Goering, the great-niece of Hermann Goering, has shown disdain for her Nazi ancestor.

To prevent the continuation of the family tree any further, both she and her brother took drastic action and chose to be sterilised.

‘We both did it… so that there won’t be any more Goerings,’ she has previously explained. ‘When my brother had it done, he said to me ‘I cut the line’.’

According to the BBC, she was so disturbed by her likeness to Hitler’s chosen successor that she left Germany more than 40 years ago to the US. ‘It’s easier for me to deal with the past of my family from this great distance,’ she said.

Ms Goering said her father, Heinz, was adopted by his uncle after his own father died, and became a fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe. Heinz was shot down over the Soviet Union and returned from captivity in 1952 to find that his two brothers had killed themselves because of their shame, and the family’s fortune was gone.  

She said her father, who died in 1981, never spoke about the Holocaust, nor about his notorious uncle. ‘But my grandmother was less evasive – she adored him,’ she said.

‘Another hard part for us is that they thought they were the descendants of heroes. And they were not. We are now the descendants of criminals and mass murderers.’

Heinrich Himmler

As with Bettina Goering, Katrin Himmler – the great-niece of Heinrich Himmler – has also publicly disowned her Nazi ancestor.

Himmler was the fourth Reichsführer (leader) of the Schutzstaffel (also known as the SS) and known as the main architect of the Holocaust.

In 16 years, he developed the SS from a 290-man battalion into the feared million-strong paramilitary group that it eventually became.

He also controlled the Waffen-SS (the military branch of the SS), and was made chief of the criminal police and the Minister of the Interior.

This made him by far one of the most powerful men in Germany, and most feared.

What’s more, he had a strong interest in the occult and incorporated such symbolism into the SS. It also influenced his beliefs on race.

In his position as leader of the SS, he oversaw Nazi Germany’s genocidal programs, forming the death squads and administering extermination camps.

As a result, he directed the killing of six million Jews, between 200,000 and 500,000 Romani people, and countless other victims.

He also drafted Generalplan Ost – the Nazi blueprint for the genocide, extermination and large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, Eastern European Jews, and other indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe categorised as sub-human by the Nazis.

This led to the deaths of around 14 million more people.

Upon realising the Second World War was lost, Himmler attempted to make peace with the allies behind the back of Hitler, prompting the dictator to order his arrest.

He attempted to go into hiding, but was arrested by British forces. He died by suicide in British custody on May 23, 1945.

As a way to come to terms with having one of the most evil men in history as a great uncle, Katrin Himmler wrote The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History.

She also went on to marry an Israeli descendant of Holocaust survivors. 

‘It’s a very heavy burden having someone like that in the family, so close. It’s something that just keeps hanging over you,’ she said in 2012, the BBC reported.

In the book, she said, ‘I did my best to distance myself from it and to confront it critically. I no longer need to be ashamed of this family connection.’ 

In Hitler’s Children – a documentary about the children of famous Nazis – Katrin said that to feel irreparably damaged by her relative, she would have to subscribe to his ‘ridiculous ideology that everything depends on bloodlines.’

She added: ‘I don’t believe in that bullsh*t.’

Katrin has said descendants of the Nazi war criminals are often caught between two extremes. ‘Most decide to cut themselves off entirely from their parents so that they can live their lives, so that the story doesn’t destroy them,’ she said. ‘Or they decide on loyalty and unconditional love and sweep all the negative things away.’

In an interview with History First, she said that Himmler was no monster, but a human – warning that ordinary people can be capable of terrible things.

‘I learned that you never get to a point where you find a balance between looking on your grandparents as Nazis and as loving humans. They were both, and it is difficult for me until nowadays to think of both together,’ she said.

‘As to Himmler, it is much more difficult: although he did monstrous things, he was not a monster, but a human, a loving husband, father, brother, son and uncle.’

But like Goering, Himmler also had a daughter – Gudrun. She was born to his wife Margarete Himmler on August 8, 1929.

And like Goering’s daughter Edda, Gudrun never disowned her father.

She has spoken of her fond memories of visiting Dachau – the first Nazi concentration camp – with her father when she was a young girl, and watched as he rose through the Nazi ranks with pride. She would even call Adolf Hitler ‘uncle Adolf’. Hitler gave her chocolates and a doll every New Year. 

‘On December 24 each year I used to drive with my father to see Hitler at the Brown House in Munich and wish him Merry Christmas,’ she once said. ‘When I was little he used to give me dolls. Later he always gave me a box of chocolates.’

Into her later years, she remained a supporter of the Nazi ideology, and was described by some as a ‘true believer’.

Indeed, the intervening years did little to quell her passion for the convictions held by her father – and that passion led her to be worshipped as ‘almost a deity’ in far-right and neo-Nazi cells in Germany and other countries.

She dedicated her life to ‘helping’ surviving Nazis evade justice, and even in her 80s, was considered the ‘godmother’ of far-right women’s groups, intent on infiltrating nurseries and schools to help them spread their ideology amongst the young.

One of the biggest ‘lies’, Gudrun claimed, is how her father died.

She clung to the belief her father was murdered by the Allies, who had captured Himmler after he went on the run dressed as a soldier – completing his disguise by shaving off his moustache and wearing an eye patch.

‘I don’t believe he swallowed that poison capsule,’ she said. 

‘My mother and I never had official notification of his death. To me, the photo of him dead is a retouched photo of when he was alive.’

As the leading figure in the shadowy and sinister support group Stille Hilfe – Silent Help – she gave financial help to Nazi monsters still at large.

In 2010, Gudrun’s organisation paid for the defence of Samuel Kunz, an SS man charged with complicity in the murders of 437,000 Jews in Belzec extermination camp in occupied Poland.

Two years before he died in his bed, she came to the defence of Klaas Carel Faber, 90 – a Dutchman who served with the SS in Holland where he murdered Jews – to prevent his being extradited to his homeland from Germany.

During Gudrun’s time with Stille Hilfe, the group eased the way into society for many Nazi war criminals, including Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo Butcher of Lyon, and Erich Priebke, SS murderer of Italian partisans.

It also helped Anton Malloth, a guard in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, who was sentenced to death in his absence before finding refuge in Germany.

Her husband was also said to be a neo-Nazi.

She died on May 24, 2018 at the age of 88.  

Hans Frank

Niklas Frank is the son of Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, and has spent much of his life researching and condemning his father’s crimes.

He was born in Munich in 1939, the youngest of five children, and was just eight months old when his father was appointed to the position in Poland.

There, Hans Frank became responsible for the Nazi policy of enslaving the Polish people and exterminating Polish Jews, and during that time, over four million people were murdered under his jurisdiction.

Niklas was just four when he first saw children his age imprisoned in a concentration camp, and seven when his father was one of 11 executed in the Nuremberg trials. 

He only learned the full extent of his father’s involvement after the war, and – unlike some of the other children of Nazi criminals – understood the man’s evil.

He has spoken of how his parents were cold and distant, saying how they gave him the nickname ‘Fremde’ or ‘Stranger’.

Niklas went on to study literature, sociology and history before becoming a journalist. He worked for the German edition of Playboy.

Frank has said he was ‘condemned to a living death because of the slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic I had for a father’ and that he remembers seeing concentration camp prisoners tormented as his father chuckled.

‘Thin men were mounted on to a wild donkey and the donkey bucked and the men fell off, and they could only pick themselves up again very slowly, and they didn’t find it as funny as I did,’ he said in the ‘Hitler’s Children’ documentary.

‘And again and again they got back on and the donkey was given a slap and again they fell off and they tried to help each other; it was a fantastic afternoon. Then we had cocoa. These are the s****y images I carry around of my father.’ 

Frank has lectured about his infamous father to young people in former east Germany, in an attempt to keep them from straying into the neo-Nazi scene that preys on the young, unemployed and desperate.

‘I have never managed in my life to get rid of the memory of him,’ he said. ‘I live with this deep shame about what he did.’

Niklas Frank is 85 and lives in Munich.

Amon Goeth

Other participants in the ‘Hitler’s Children’ documentary included Monika Hertwig, daughter of Nazi death camp commandant Amon Goeth.

He was a Austrian SS functionary and war criminal, who was eventually tried in Poland and found guilty of  personally ordering the imprisonment, torture, and extermination of individuals and groups of people. 

He was also convicted of homicide, the first such conviction at a war crimes trial, after he was found to have been ‘killing, maiming and torturing a substantial, albeit unidentified number of people.’ He killed more than 500 people by his own hand.

Goeth was played in the Holocaust classic Schindler’s List by Ralph Fiennes as a ruthless enforcer who shot prisoners from the balcony of his house within the grounds of the camp.

In the documentary, Hertwig describes what it is like to be related to a man who also shot babies for ‘sport’ and also what it was like to watch Schindler’s List.

‘I kept thinking this has to stop, at some point they have to stop shooting, because if it doesn’t stop I’ll go crazy right here in this theatre,’ she said. 

‘He liked to shoot women with babies in their arms from the balcony of his house, to see if one bullet could kill two,’ she said.

‘How far do you separate the murderer from the father? How much of the murderer is in me? These are the things that torment me.’ 

Martin Bormann

Martin Bormann was Hitler’s private secretary and head of the Nazi’s home office, and therefore controlled all communication with the dictator.

This made him hugely powerful in Germany and senior Nazi circles.

Bormann had a son, Martin Adolf Bormann, who was born in April 1930. He became Hitler’s first godson, and was given Hitler’s first name as a middle name.

His father was severe and that there was no warmth between them, according to author Tania Crasnianski and her book ‘Children of Nazis’.

‘Once, when Martin Adolf saluted the Fuehrer with a ‘Heil Hitler,’ his father slapped him; the custom when addressing Hitler directly was to say, ‘Heil, mein Fuehrer.’ ‘

When the war came to an end, the younger Martin was at boarding school. His father died in May 1945 – likely by suicide, his family had already fled and he went on the run, before being taken in by an Austrian family who raised him Christian.

As Nazi war crimes came to light, he realised this went against his new religious teachings, and he realised what he had been taught as a child had been wrong.

In 1958 he was ordained as a priest and worked as a missionary in the Congo from 1961 to 1964, but was forced to flee following a rebellion.

In 1969, he was injured in a car crash and fell in love with the nurse – a nun – who treated him. The pair renounced their vows and married in 1971.

Martin Adolf Bormann went on to become a teacher in theology and in 2001 toured schools in Germany and Austria speaking about the horrors of Nazi Germany.

He also visited Israel and met Holocaust survivors. 

However, Martin Adolf Bormann is believed to have never publicly condemned his father, and in 2011 he was accused of rape by a former pupil at an Austrian Catholic school in when he was working there in the 1960s.

By this point, he was suffering from dementia and was either unwilling or unable to comment on the accusations. He died on March 11, 2013.

Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele’s name will forever live in infamy for carrying out deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

He was a member of a team of doctors at the camp who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers, and was one who administered the gas. At the camp, he conducted genetic research on human subjects, focusing primarily on twins.

With the red army closing in, he was able to escape the camp ten days before Soviet soldiers arrived, and he fled to Argentina in 1949 – assisted by a network of former members of the SS – and died in 1979, drowning off the coast of Brazil.

A year before the war, Mengele had married Irene Schönbein. The couple’s only son, Rolf, was born in 1944 – the year before he fled Auschwitz.

Rolf grew up not knowing his father, instead living with his grandparents. He was told his father was dead.

However, he learned the truth when he was 16, and his father reached out – attempting to bond through letters from South America.

Wanting to know more about his father, Rolf spent five years arranging a two-week trip to Brazil in 1977, aware that his father was a prime target for Nazi hunters.

Crasnianski writes in her book that Rolf wanted to ‘try to understand how this man, his own father, could have actively participated in the vast Nazi death machine.’

On his visit, Rolf asked his father about Auschwitz.

His father defended his actions, the book says, telling his son: ‘What was I supposed to do with these people? They were sick and half-dead when they arrived.’

He is said to have 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 gave his father’s location up, but did not accept his father’s worldview.

‘I didn’t even bother to listen to him or think of his ideas. I simply rejected everything he presented,’ Rolf said of the meeting. ‘I will never understand how human beings could do those things. That my father was one of them doesn’t change my opinion.’

In the 1980s, Rolf gave up the family name to spare his own children.