He was the most feared man in Nazi Germany, the head of the SS and the architect of the Holocaust. But he had two brothers raised in the same house, with the same upbringing and the same beliefs. One wore the SS uniform. The other broadcast Nazi propaganda to the world.
By May 1945, one would be dead, and the other would sit before Allied investigators and say something no one expected. In Munich in 1898, a schoolmaster’s wife gave birth to a boy named Gebhard. Two years later came Heinrich, and five years after that, Ernst. At the outbreak of the First World War, Gebhard was old enough to fight, but Heinrich was not.
Gebhard was exactly the kind of son their father had always wanted. Heinrich was 18 years old and had never seen combat. While Gebhard had stories to tell, Heinrich had nothing. The resentment grew, and it would shape everything that came after.
When the Freikorps paramilitaries formed in 1919, both brothers saw an opportunity. It was their first taste of political violence, and it would not be their last. In November 1923, Adolf Hitler and his followers attempted to seize power in Bavaria as a first step toward overthrowing the Weimar Republic. The same year, Heinrich formally joined the Nazi Party.
He arranged to have his wife’s lower party membership number transferred to him, making it appear he had joined years earlier. Heinrich rose through the ranks, and by the time Hitler came to power, he controlled the SS. His career was built on loyalty and ruthlessness. But the family story was different.
The brothers were presented as having drifted apart, with Heinrich as the monster and the others as innocent. The narrative was simple: Heinrich was the aberration, the one who went wrong, while his brothers remained pure. In reality, both Gebhard and Ernst had joined the Nazi Party voluntarily. Both held SS ranks.
Both attended meetings with high-ranking officials. And both had benefited directly from Heinrich’s rise to power. Ernst, in particular, had crafted a career out of Nazi propaganda. His job was technical, but its purpose was political.
Radio was the regime’s most powerful weapon, reaching every home, every factory, and every school. In 1936, the Berlin Olympic Games became the first global sports broadcast in history, with 41 countries receiving the signal. Ernst was the man behind that broadcast, shaping the image of a peaceful, prosperous Germany for the world to see. It was exactly what the regime wanted them to see.
One of Ernst’s colleagues at the broadcasting company was half-Jewish. His name was Anton Lechner, and he came to Ernst because Ernst was the brother of the Reichsführer-SS. If anyone could help him, it was Ernst. Instead, Ernst wrote to Heinrich describing Anton as useless.
He knew exactly what that word meant. Anton was sent to a labor camp. After the war, a colleague who knew of the letter said, “It would have been perfectly possible for Ernst to support that colleague without any danger to himself. ” But Ernst didn’t.
He sent the letter, and Anton’s life was destroyed. As the war turned against Germany, the family’s fortunes began to shift. Gebhard, who had been a minor Nazi official, began to distance himself. He signed anti-Semitic decrees as a bureaucrat, but he always maintained he was just following orders.
Ernst, too, claimed he only did his job. But the evidence was clear. They were not innocent bystanders. They were part of the machine.
By 1945, the Third Reich was collapsing. The question was no longer whether Germany would fall, only when and how many more would die before the end. As the Battle of Berlin reached its final days, Heinrich received his orders. The regime demanded one final sacrifice.
On May 2nd, 1945, Heinrich Himmler was killed in the fighting. The exact circumstances are unknown, and his body was never recovered. He had shaved his mustache, wore a false uniform, and carried forged papers identifying him as a discharged sergeant named Hinrich Hitzinger. When captured by Allied soldiers, he bit down on a cyanide capsule hidden behind his teeth, and the most feared man in Nazi Germany was dead within minutes.
His family had fled Berlin weeks earlier, heading south to Bavaria and finding shelter in Gmund, a quiet lakeside town where they stayed with Heinrich’s arranged wife, Margarete. When the Allies arrived, they interrogated Gebhard. He told them he had always been against the Nazi regime, that his brother was the villain, and that he had only served as a clerk to survive. “Personally, I would never see my brother as the culprit of these things,” Gebhard said.
Then he went home. The Allies had established a system to purge former Nazis from public life, requiring every German who had held a position of authority to fill out a questionnaire. Gebhard was classified as a follower, a minor category. He was allowed to keep his job and his pension.
Eventually, he returned to the German university system. He never publicly spoke about Heinrich, never gave interviews, never wrote a memoir. He never denounced his brother and never expressed regret. He simply lived out his years in quiet obscurity and died in 1982 at the age of 83.
The family maintained its silence for decades. The story passed down through generations was simple and convenient. Heinrich was the aberration, the monster, the one who went wrong while his brothers remained innocent. It was a comfortable lie, and for 50 years, no one challenged it.
In 1997, Heinrich Himmler’s granddaughter was asked by her father to look into the family records. She found something else entirely. Both brothers had joined the Nazi Party voluntarily. Both held SS ranks.
Both attended meetings with high-ranking officials. And both had benefited directly from Heinrich’s rise to power. And then she found the letter, the one Ernst had written to Heinrich about his half-Jewish colleague, the one that described the man as useless, the one that sent him to a labor camp. She published her findings in 2005 in a book called “The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History.
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One side of her family had tried to exterminate the other. She kept the name Himmler, not out of pride, but because changing it would have felt like running away. Thanks for watching, and subscribe and hit the bell for more history inside, and we’ll see you in the next one.
