Hinrich Himmler orchestrated the murder of 6 million Jews.
When he bit down on a cyanide capsule in May 1945, he left behind four children.
You would expect them to live in hiding, to denounce their father, to face some kind of justice.
But his favorite daughter spent the next 73 years doing something far worse.
She ran an organization that helped convicted Nazi war criminals escape prosecution and live free.
This is the story of what really happened to Hinrich Himmler’s children after the war ended.
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[music] The little doll who watched everything.
To understand how Goodran Himmler became what she became, you have to see how she was raised.
She wasn’t just Himmler’s daughter.
She was his obsession.
He called her Pepi, which means little doll in German.
Hitler personally gave her chocolates and dolls every new year.
She was paraded at Nazi rallies as the ideal Aryan child, blondhaired and blue-eyed, the perfect propaganda image of German purity.
Photographers followed her constantly.
Party officials faed over her.
She grew up believing she was royalty in an empire that would last a thousand years.
But Himmler didn’t just spoil her.
He indoctrinated [clears throat] her.
From the earliest age, Goodran was brought into her father’s world.
She attended SS ceremonies.
She met the highest ranking officials in the Reich.
She absorbed the ideology the way other children absorbed fairy tales completely and without question.
Her father wasn’t a monster to her.
He was a hero.
A great man building a great Germany.
And on July 22nd, 1941, when Goodran was just 12 years old, Himmler took her somewhere that would reveal exactly how deep that indoctrination went.
He took her to Dao concentration camp, the diary entry that changes everything.
This is what Goodren wrote in her diary that night.
We saw the gardening work.
We saw the pear trees.
We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners.
Magnificent.
Then we ate.
Then everybody got a present.
It was lovely.
Dau would eventually kill 41,500 people.
Prisoners were worked to death, shot, and subjected to horrific medical experiments.
The camp had been operating for 8 years by the time Goodran visited.
Bodies were being burned in crerematoria.
The smell of death hung in the air.
To Good, it was a pleasant family outing.
This was not ignorance.
This was something more disturbing.
A child so thoroughly shaped by her father’s worldview that she could walk through a place of systematic murder and notice only the pear trees and the paintings.
The prisoners were not people to her.
They were gardeners, background figures in her perfect day.
Some historians point to this diary entry as evidence that Goodran was simply a child, unable to comprehend what she was seeing.
Others argue it reveals something darker, a girl already so steeped in Nazi ideology that Jewish and political prisoners did not register as human beings worthy of her attention.
What is undeniable is that this visit did not disturb her.
It did not plant seeds of doubt.
If anything, it reinforced her belief that her father’s work was noble and good.
But the Nazi fantasy could not last forever.
In April 1945, Adolf Hitler discovered something that sent him into a rage.
Hinrich Himmler, his loyal Reichfurer SS, the man he had called the man with the iron heart, had been secretly negotiating peace with the allies behind his back.
Hitler immediately stripped Himmler of all his positions and ordered his arrest.
The man who had commanded the SS, the Gestapo, and the entire machinery of the Holocaust was now a fugitive in his own collapsing Reich.
Himmler fled.
He shaved off his distinctive mustache.
He wore an eye patch.
He carried forged papers identifying him as a sergeant in the secret military police.
For two weeks, he moved through the chaos of defeated Germany, hoping to slip through Allied lines and disappear.
On May 20th, British forces stopped him at a checkpoint.
The disguise fooled no one.
3 days later, during a medical examination, a British doctor ordered him to open his mouth.
Himmler bit down on a cyanide capsule hidden in his teeth.
Within minutes, the architect of the Holocaust was dead.
That same month, American troops arrested 15-year-old Goodrin and her mother, Margaret as they fled through northern Italy.
They were heading toward the Alps, towards some vague hope of escape.
Instead, they found themselves in Allied custody, their names among the most hated in Europe.
For the first time in her life, Goodran faced consequences.
The Nazi princess in a broken world.
The Allies didn’t know quite what to do with Himmler’s family.
Good and her mother were held in detention camps across Italy, France, [music] and Germany for more than a year.
They were interrogated repeatedly.
Officers wanted to know what they knew about hidden assets, escape networks, and the locations of other Nazi officials.
Good gave them nothing useful.
She went on hunger strikes.
She refused to weep.
When other prisoners cried or showed remorse, she remained stonefaced.
According to interrogation reports, she defended her father’s innocence with absolute conviction.
The 16-year-old insisted that her father had been a great man, that everything being said about him was Allied propaganda.
When mother and daughter were finally released in November 1946, they returned to a Germany that wanted nothing to do with them.
The Himmler name was poison.
Their property had been seized and their bank accounts were frozen.
The comfortable life of privilege that Goodran had known since birth was gone completely.
She and her mother moved into a cramped apartment in Munich.
They survived on a small pension, and whatever help they could get from old acquaintances who remembered the family’s former glory.
Good tried to work.
She found jobs as a dress maker, a book binder, a tailor, anything that would pay.
But the pattern was always the same.
She would get hired, someone would discover who she was, and she would be fired immediately.
No one wanted Hinrich Himmler’s daughter handling their clothes or their books.
This struggle lasted for years.
By the early 1950s, Goodren had married Wolf Diet Bervitz, a journalist and member of the farright NPD.
She took his surname, hoping it might provide some cover.
It helped a little, but not enough.
Here’s where the story takes a darker turn.
The spy who came in from the cold.
In 1961, Goodran found a solution to her employment problems.
One so audacious it almost defies belief.
She took a job as a secretary for West Germany’s BND, the Bundas Narrand.
This was the country’s primary intelligence agency, their equivalent of the CIA.
She was hired under a false name.
Think about what this means.
The daughter of the man who built the Nazi security apparatus was now working inside the intelligence service of the democratic government that had replaced her father’s regime.
She sat at a desk in the very institution tasked with protecting Germany from the ghosts [music] of its Nazi past.
The BND in the early 1960s was notoriously riddled with former Nazis.
The Cold War had created strange bedfellows.
West Germany needed experienced intelligence officers, and many of those officers had learned their trade under the Third Reich.
Some historians estimate that dozens of former SS members found employment in the agency during this period.
Good stayed hidden there until 1963 when the West German government began purging known Nazi sympathizers from its ranks.
She was identified.
She was fired.
But this dismissal did not shame her into silence or push her toward reflection.
It radicalized her further.
The organization that helped murderers walk free.
After losing her government job, Goodran threw herself into an organization called Stiller Hilfer, which means silent help.
Founded in 1951, Stila Hilfur had an official purpose that sounded almost humanitarian.
It claimed to aid imprisoned German soldiers and their families, widows of men who had served, children left fatherless by the war, and soldiers who had been convicted by what the organization called Victor’s Justice.
But its real purpose was far darker.
Still a Hilfur existed to help convicted Nazi war criminals avoid punishment and live free.
Under Goodren’s influence, she became one of its most prominent and active members.
The organization provided an entire support network for mass murderers.
They funded legal defense for men convicted of Holocaust crimes.
They obtained fake medical certificates, claiming that elderly war criminals were too sick to serve their sentences.
They arranged housing in sympathetic retirement homes where these men could live out their days in comfort.
They funneled over $150,000 annually in donations to support their work.
Their beneficiaries included Klaus Barbie, known as the butcher of Leyon, who had personally tortured French resistance members and sent Jewish children to their deaths.
They helped Anton Malath, convicted of murdering prisoners at Theresian.
They supported dozens of others whose names are less famous, but whose crimes were just as real.
This was not just failing to denounce her father.
This was not just refusing to accept what he had done.