Book description
Katrin Himmler's cool but meticulous examination of the Himmler story
reveals - in all its dark complexity - the gulf between the 'normality'
of bourgeois family life and the horrors perpetrated by one member. This
riveting family memoir provides essential new information on the private
life and background of one of the twentieth- century's most notorious
killers - not a lone evil executioner, but a middle-class family man,
loved and fully supported by his respectable German family. It also
offers a unique account of one women's courageous attempt to deal with
her chilling inheritance. 'It is part of the creeping discomfort in
reading her book to realise the incredibly ordinary middle-class
background of these three sons of a rather pompous provincial headmaster
and to see how, right until the end, he was almost able to convince
himself it hadn't happened like it had' Sunday Times 'You get a vivid
sense of a particular kind of German conservatism - Roman Catholic,
monarchist - and of how, weirdly, it found an outlet in the upstart,
part-pagan thuggery of Nazism' Independent 'One can only admire her
bravery . . . In a way, Katrin Himmler's book is not a story about the
past, but one about the present. The most interesting details are the
ones she gives of her own quest' Daily Telegraph
Katrin Himmler is the great-niece of Heinrich Himmler, head of the
SS, Gestapo and leading organiser of the Holocaust. She was born in
1967 and lives in Berlin.
