I've just finished watching an episode from the excellent BBC Storyville documentary series, this one about the private life of Heinrich Himmler. Link here to the I-player page for it: it's still available to watch on I-player for another 12 days.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05t2h9x
For anyone well-informed about Nazi Germany and its crimes, there won't be anything new of general historical interest in the documentary of course. I have to confess that watching it was more a case of morbid compulsion, wallowing in the sickening contrast between the sentimental and kitsch-Germanic bourgeois propriety of the Himmler family set up and his day job of organising genocide and crimes of stomach churning cruelty and barbarism.
But the thing that prompted me to post about it, which I was tempted to do on the "WTF" thread, was the "what happened to them all" post-script at the end. You might have thought that his legitimate daughter Gudrun (he also had children with a mistress), 15 at the end of WW2, would have felt shame at her father's crimes against humanity and wanted to atone for them. If you did think that, you could not be further from the truth. I was shocked at what I saw written on the TV screen, and it's confirmed by Wikipedia and other sources. Just speechless at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudrun_Burwitz
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05t2h9x
For anyone well-informed about Nazi Germany and its crimes, there won't be anything new of general historical interest in the documentary of course. I have to confess that watching it was more a case of morbid compulsion, wallowing in the sickening contrast between the sentimental and kitsch-Germanic bourgeois propriety of the Himmler family set up and his day job of organising genocide and crimes of stomach churning cruelty and barbarism.
But the thing that prompted me to post about it, which I was tempted to do on the "WTF" thread, was the "what happened to them all" post-script at the end. You might have thought that his legitimate daughter Gudrun (he also had children with a mistress), 15 at the end of WW2, would have felt shame at her father's crimes against humanity and wanted to atone for them. If you did think that, you could not be further from the truth. I was shocked at what I saw written on the TV screen, and it's confirmed by Wikipedia and other sources. Just speechless at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gudrun_Burwitz
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