text: Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Gudrun Burwitz pictured with her father Himmler - who led the SS 
   
   The daughter of top Nazi Heinrich Himmler was hired by West Germany's foreign intelligence agency (BND) in the 1960s, officials have confirmed. 
   
   The revelation about Gudrun Burwitz was first reported in the German newspaper Bild following her death aged 88. 
   
   Her father was in Hitler's inner circle and is viewed as the chief architect of the Holocaust. He killed himself in custody in 1945. 
   
   Burwitz never disavowed Nazism and defended her father's reputation. 
   
   She was a teenager when the war ended and was released in 1946 after testifying at the Nuremberg trials. 
   
   German Tabloid Bild reported on her post-war involvement with the BND on Friday, following her death in Munich last month. 
   
   Image copyright Shutterstock Image caption Gudrun Burwitz continued to attend neo-Nazi events throughout her life, and died in May 
   
   The head of the spy agency's history department then corroborated the newspaper report about Burwitz's activities in West Germany, which reunited with communist East Germany in 1990 to form the present German state. 
   
   "The BND confirms that Ms Burwitz was a member of the BND for a few years until 1963 under an assumed name," Bodo Hechelhammer said. 
   
   "The timing of her departure coincided with the onset of a change in the understanding and the handling of employees who were involved with the Nazis." 
   
   She worked as a secretary at BND headquarters in Pullach, near Munich, from 1961 to 1963. 
   
   At that time the organisation was under the control of Reinhard Gehlen, a former Nazi military intelligence commander who left the BND in 1968. 
   
   Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Himmer (left) pictured inspecting SS Guards with Adolf Hitler 
   
   Mr Hechelhammer said the organisation did not ordinarily discuss current and former employees but was making an exemption because Burwitz had died. 
   
   German organisations such as the BND have grappled with how to address their own Nazi links in the post-war era. 
   
   Burwitz remained prominent in far-right politics throughout her life. She was reported to be a prominent member of Stille Hilfe (Silent Help), a secretive group known to provide legal and financial support to former SS members. 
   
   She was also known to attend other neo-Nazi events and rallies before her death. 
   
   Heinrich Himmler was in Adolf Hitler's elite circle. He commanded the SS (Schutzstaffel) - the organisation which played a major role in murdering millions of Jews, Poles, Soviet prisoners-of-war, Roma and others categorised as "racially inferior" during the Holocaust. 
   
   After being taken into British custody in 1945 he killed himself, evading trial for war crimes. ||||| Gudrun Burwitz, the true-believing daughter of Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s highest-ranking official after Adolf Hitler, died May 24 in or near Munich. She was 88. 
   
   Her death was first reported by the German newspaper Bild, which also confirmed that Mrs. Burwitz had worked for two years in West Germany’s foreign intelligence agency. The agency’s chief historian, Bodo Hechelhammer, told the newspaper that Mrs. Burwitz worked as a secretary under an assumed name in the early 1960s. The agency does not comment on current or past employees until they have died. 
   
   Mrs. Burwitz, who was sometimes called a “Nazi princess” by supporters and detractors alike, remained unrepentant and loyal to her father to the end. Although she had visited a concentration camp, she denied the existence of the Holocaust and, in later years, helped provide money and comfort to former Nazis convicted or suspected of war crimes. 
   
   At the time of her birth in 1929, her father was consolidating power as leader of the elite Nazi paramilitary corps known as the SS. Himmler also commanded the German secret police, the Gestapo, and established the Nazi network of prison and death camps throughout Europe. Millions of people — primarily Jews but also Roma (or Gypsies), homosexuals, disabled people and others — would perish in the Holocaust. 
   
   The only person who outranked Himmler in the Nazi hierarchy was Hitler himself. 
   
   Gudrun, who was Himmler’s oldest child and only legitimate daughter, was exceptionally devoted to her father. Himmler and his wife later adopted a son, and Himmer had two other children with his mistress. 
   
   Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the bespectacled, undistinguished-looking Himmler enjoyed having Gudrun at his side, as a blond, blue-eyed symbol of Aryan youth. In a diary later seized by Allied authorities, she noted that she liked to see her reflection in her father’s polished boots. She attended Christmas parties with Hitler, who gave her dolls and chocolates. 
   
   When she was 12, Gudrun accompanied her father to the Dachau concentration camp, which was the site of Nazi medical experiments and the execution of tens of thousands of people. 
   
   Gudrun recalled the visit in her diary: “Today we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau. We saw everything we could. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous. 
   
   “And afterward we had a lot to eat. It was very nice.” 
   
   As the Third Reich was collapsing in May 1945, 15-year-old Gudrun and her mother fled to northern Italy, where they were arrested by American troops. Himmler was captured, and, while in British custody, killed himself on May 23, 1945, by biting on a cyanide capsule he had concealed. 
   
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   Gudrun and her mother were held for four years in various detention facilities in Italy, France and Germany. She refused to believe that her father’s death was a suicide and maintained that he had been killed by his British captors. 
   
   She was present at some of the war-crimes trials of her father’s associates in Nuremberg, Germany. 
   
   “She did not weep, but went on hunger strikes,” Norbert and Stephan Lebert wrote in “My Father’s Keeper,” their 2002 book about the children of Nazi leaders. “She lost weight, fell sick, and stopped developing.” 
   
   After their release, mother and daughter settled in the northern German town of Bielefeld, where Gudrun trained as a dressmaker and bookbinder. She found it hard to hold a steady job with her family history. 
   
   In 1961, she joined the German intelligence service as a secretary under an assumed name at the agency’s headquarters near Munich. She was dismissed in 1963, when West German authorities were reviewing the presence of former Nazis in the government. 
   
   In the late 1960s, she married Wulf-Dieter Burwitz, a writer who became an official in a right-wing political group, and settled in a Munich suburb. They had two children. 
   
   Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler was born Aug. 8, 1929, in Munich. Except for a brief interview in 1959, she is not known to have spoken in public about her father or her later life. 
   
   She did, however, often wear a silver brooch given to her by her father, depicting the heads of four horses arranged in the shape of a swastika. 
   
   She was also known to be active in a group called “Stille Hilfe,” or silent help, which was formed in the 1940s to help Nazi fugitives flee Germany, particularly to South America, and to support their families. 
   
   The organization is “closely linked to a number of outlawed neo-Nazi movements and actively promotes revisionism — the notion that the Holocaust never happened and Jews caused their own downfall,” Andrea Roepke, a German authority on neo-Nazis, told Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper in 1998. 
   
   Among followers of the group, Mrs. Burwitz was “a dazzling Nazi princess, a deity among these believers in the old times,” according to German author Oliver Schrom, who wrote a book about Stille Hilfe. 
   
   Mrs. Burwitz attended underground reunions of Nazi SS officers, often held in Austria, possibly as recently as 2014. 
   
   “She was surrounded all the time by dozens of high-ranking former SS men,” Roepke said, after attending one such gathering. “They were hanging on her every word . . . It was all rather menacing.” 
   
   Mrs. Burwitz also provided support, through Stille Hilfe, to convicted Nazi war criminals, including Klaus Barbie, an SS officer dubbed the “Butcher of Lyon,” and Anton “Beautiful Tony” Malloth, who was convicted of killing prisoners at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. 
   
   Malloth was sentenced to death in absentia by a court in the Czech Republic, but Mrs. Burwitz reportedly helped arrange for him to stay at a retirement facility outside Munich on land once owned by Nazi official Rudolf Hess. 
   
   “I never talk about my work,” she said in 2015 when British journalist Allan Hall confronted her at her home. “I just do what I can when I can.” 
   
   “Go away,” her husband said. “You are not welcome.” 
   
   An earlier version of this story stated that Heinrich Himmler was captured by Russian forces on May 20, 1945. Historical accounts differ on how and when he was captured. The story also incorrectly implied that all victims of the Holocaust died in concentration camps.
target: – The daughter of the man seen as second only to Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany has died at age 88. Gudrun Burwitz, the oldest child of Heinrich Himmler, was famous in her own right, however. When she was a child, Himmler frequently brought her to public events "as a blond, blue-eyed symbol of Aryan youth," in the words of the Washington Post. In her later years, she was believed to have been a member of the group Stille Hilfe (Silent Help), which provides assistance to former SS members and their families. Gudrun, who was detained temporarily after the war and testified at the Nuremberg trials, never denounced her father or the Nazi regime, reports the BBC. With her death, the German newspaper Bild has uncovered a nugget that has caused a stir in Germany: For about two years in the 1960s, Gurdrun worked for what was then West Germany's spy agency. "The BND confirms that Ms Burwitz was a member of the BND for a few years until 1963 under an assumed name," says an official with the agency. She worked there while the agency was run by a former Nazi military intelligence commander. The BND still exists as the unified Germany's foreign intelligence agency, and Deutsche Welle notes that its use of former Nazis in Eastern Europe after the war remains controversial. One item in wide circulation in Gudrun's obituaries is a diary entry she wrote at the age of 12 after her father took her to the notorious Dachau concentration camp. "We saw everything we could," she wrote. "We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous." (Himmler's own diaries were found a few years ago.)