Katrin Himmler
Once upon a time the Himmlers were just a normal German family, middle-class, hard-working, well-educated. There were three brothers, Gebhart, Heinrich, and Ernst. Heinrich grew up to become the head of Hitlerâ€™s SS, mastermind of the concentration camp system, and chief perpetrator of the Holocaust. When Katrin Himmler, Heinrichâ€™s great-niece, was 15, one of her schoolmates asked during a history lesson if she was related to the Himmler. "Yes," she stammered, at which there was a deathly hush in the classroom and the teacher, embarrassed and unsure, quickly moved the lesson on. As she grew older, Katrin gave her family history a wide berth, but married to an Israeli whose family was confined to the Warsaw Ghetto and with a young, half-Jewish son, she realizes that she cannot evade the past so easily. Katrin Himmlerâ€™s cool but meticulous examination of the Himmler story revealsâ€”in all its dark complexityâ€”the gulf between the "normality" of bourgeois family life and the horrors perpetrated by one member and a more nuanced portrait of Heinrich himself emergesâ€”not a lone evil executioner, but a middle-class family man, loved and fully supported by his respectable German family.
History,Nonfiction,War,World War II,Biography,World War II,Holocaust,War,German History,Nazi Party,Autobiography,Memoir,European Literature,German Literature,Literature,European Literature
The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History