What Happened To Himmer's Brothers After WW2?

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]May 23rd, 1945, Heinrich Himmler, chief architect of the Holocaust, bit down on a cyanide capsule in British custody and died.

[00:00:12]The hunt was over, but for his two brothers, Gebhard and Ernst, a different kind of reckoning was only just beginning.

[00:00:19]Ernst Hermann Himmler was born on December 23rd, 1905 in Munich, the youngest of the three Himmler brothers.

[00:00:28]For decades after the war, the story told within the family bathroom and largely accepted outside it, was that Ernst had been an apolitical man, a technical person, an electrical engineer who had kept his head down, done his job at a radio broadcasting company, and had the misfortune of sharing a surname with one of history's greatest criminals.

[00:00:51]Ernst completed his university course in electrical engineering in 1928.

[00:00:55]He joined the Nazi Party on November 1st, 1931. And in 1933, joined the SS with Heinrich's help, securing a job with the Berlin radio.

[00:01:07]The connection between the brothers was, from the beginning, one of mutual usefulness.

[00:01:12]On several occasions, Ernst supplied Heinrich with internal information from the broadcasting world. He was not a passive bystander riding his brother's coattails. He was an active participant, feeding intelligence back to the SS from inside one of Germany's most important media institutions.

[00:01:32]He ultimately reached the rank of SS Sturmbannführer in 1939.

[00:01:38]That is not the rank of a man who joined the party reluctantly or kept his distance from its machinery. It is the rank of someone who rose through it.

[00:01:49]The most damning evidence of Ernst's true character came not from Allied investigators, but from his own granddaughter decades later.

[00:01:58]Katrin Himmler's most disturbing discovery was that her grandfather had directly caused the deportation and death of a Jewish engineer, a Major Schmidt, a deputy manager of an engineering firm who had been protected because of his expertise.

[00:02:13]Writing to Heinrich, Ernst dismissed his usefulness knowing that he would then be reclassified and deported to a labor camp.

[00:02:21]He had the power of the family name, the ability to protect a man who would otherwise die, and he chose not to use it.

[00:02:30]As Katrin Himmler writes, it would have been perfectly possible for him to have supported Schmidt without any danger to himself as the brother of the Reichsfuehrer.

[00:02:40]Ernst never had to answer for any of this.

[00:02:43]Ernst Himmler died with the Volkssturm during fierce fighting in Berlin on May 2nd, 1945, 3 weeks before his brother swallowed cyanide in British custody.

[00:02:55]He was 39 years old. The Volkssturm were the last desperate conscript militia of a collapsing regime.

[00:03:03]And Ernst died in the rubble of the capital he had served.

[00:03:07]There would be no trial, no reckoning, no testimony, just silence and the comfortable myth of the apolitical engineer that his family would maintain for another generation.

[00:03:20]Gebhard Ludwig Himmler was born on July 29th, 1898 in Munich, the eldest of the three brothers.

[00:03:28]Where Ernst died in the final chaos, Gebhard lived [music] and was therefore forced to confront what survival actually meant for a man with his history and his surname.

[00:03:40]Gebhard served on the Western Front during the First World War, receiving the Iron Cross and being promoted to lieutenant.

[00:03:48]He was a decorated soldier before the Nazi era even began.

[00:03:54]After the war, the two older brothers moved together through the turbulent political landscape [music] of Weimar Germany.

[00:04:01]In 1919, Gebhard and his brother Heinrich left the Munich Citizens Militia to join the paramilitary Freikorps under Franz Ritter von Epp.

[00:04:13]In early 1923, Gebhard [music] joined the Bund Reichskriegsflagge under Ernst Röhm, who took part in the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923.

[00:04:25]This was not a man who stumbled accidentally into radical politics.

[00:04:29]He was there at the beginning, standing alongside the men [music] who would shape the movement that Heinrich would eventually lead.

[00:04:37]During the Nazi years, Gebhard built a career in engineering and education >> [music] >> that benefited directly from his brother's position.

[00:04:45]Gebhard Himmler enjoyed the protection of Fritz Todt, [music] who ensured that in December 1939, he was posted to a department of the Reich Education Ministry in Berlin.

[00:04:56]By 1940, he had been promoted to director, >> [music] >> and in 1944, he became successor to his retiring superior.

[00:05:06]These were not positions won entirely on merit in a normal civil service. They were positions shaped by proximity to power, by the fact that the most feared man in Germany was his younger brother.

[00:05:19]When the war ended, Gebhard [music] Ludwig Himmler was taken prisoner by the British Army near Cappeln.

[00:05:25]In early March 1946, he was interned at a leather factory in Gadeland, later transferred to Bad Fallingbostel, a former Allied prisoner of war camp.

[00:05:36]In 1948, he was moved to an internment camp on Ungererstraße.

[00:05:42]His testimony at the Nuremberg trials is one of the most revealing documents to emerge from the entire post-war process.

[00:05:51]Standing before the tribunal as an affiant in the Nuremberg medical trial, Gebhard described his brother Heinrich as a man of deep kindness, someone who was, in his words, "upright, simple, and and true to his path. Personally, I would never see my brother as the culprit of those things," [music] Gebhard told the tribunal. He said this at Nuremberg in 1947.

[00:06:15]With the full record of the Holocaust already entered into evidence, with the testimony of survivors already in the court record, with photographs and documents detailing the machinery his brother had built and operated, Gebhard Himmler looked at all of that and said, "Not my brother." Following his release in 1948, he worked on the manufacture of capacitors.

[00:06:38]At a denazification panel, he was assessed as category two, follower.

[00:06:43]Category two, in the Allied denazification classification system, meant an activist or significant Nazi, someone who had actively supported and benefited from the regime, rather than merely tolerating it. It was not the lowest category, but the consequences were limited. He was barred from working for the government and disqualified from his pension, but he successfully appealed this in 1959.

[00:07:10]Within a decade, even those modest restrictions had been reversed.

[00:07:15]In his later years, Gebhard found a quiet professional niche.

[00:07:20]In the European Afghan Cultural Office in Munich, Gebhard Ludwig Himmler worked as a study advisor and arranged internships for Afghan students.

[00:07:31]He built a modest post-war life in the city where he had been born, among a community that was either unaware of or unmoved [music] by who he was.

[00:07:40]He died in Munich in 1982. The Himmler story does not end with Gebhard's quiet death.

[00:07:47]It continues with his granddaughter and with the question of what a family does when one of its members finally decides to look honestly at what everyone else has chosen not to see.

[00:07:58]Katrin Himmler was born in 1967 and is the granddaughter of Ernst Himmler and the great-niece of Heinrich Himmler.

[00:08:07]She grew up with the sanitized version of the family history, the story of the apolitical brothers, [music] the engineers who had nothing to do with any of it.

[00:08:17]Despite her family being told that her grandfather Ernst had had no interest in politics, Katrin discovered that he was an enthusiastic Nazi who had joined the party in 1931 and was also an officer in the SS.

[00:08:31]Her book, The Himmler Brothers, published in Germany in 2005 and later in English, was not an act of self-flagellation or public performance.

[00:08:41]It was a methodical attempt to establish what had actually happened and what the family had spent 60 years not talking about.

[00:08:49]"Many times during my research, it was quite difficult for me to go on," Himmler told an interviewer in August 2007.

[00:08:56]What she found was a family deeply embedded in the Nazi project, not as bystanders, but as willing participants who used Heinrich's power for their own advancement and who, when given the opportunity to protect innocent people from that same power, sometimes chose not to.

[00:09:14]"Meanwhile, I know these are such damn normal people and that's the scary thing," said Katrin Himmler.

[00:09:22]Katrin Himmler chose to keep the name Himmler rather than deny her heritage, >> [music] >> despite being married to an Israeli.

[00:09:30]She said she researched and wrote the book so that her son would have a full understanding of his family's [music] history.

[00:09:37]It [snorts] is the opposite choice to the one Gebhard made at Nuremberg, >> [music] >> and it may be the most significant thing any member of the Himmler family has done since 1945.

[00:09:48]>> [music] >> That's it for today.

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[00:09:57]Thanks for watching.