Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo and architect of the Final Solution, circa 1940. Photo / Hulton Archive via Getty Images
When Henrik Lenkeit looked up Hitler’s right-hand man while idly watching a WWII documentary, he was shocked to see a familiar face.
When Henrik Lenkeit was a child growing up in northern Germany, his parents often took him to visit his maternal grandmother in the south. She was a warm, friendly woman who would give the young Henrik chocolates. She died in 1994, and Lenkeit attended her funeral. “But I was aware that the atmosphere wasn’t particularly sad,” he says. “I was only 17, but I remember thinking how odd it was that so few people seemed to be mourning her.”
Last August, 49-year-old Lenkeit, who works as a couples counsellor in southern Spain, discovered why. It was a hot, sticky afternoon and, after a tiring morning at work, he idly began watching a TV documentary, Who Was Himmler? Intrigued by the life of a man he knew had been Hitler’s right-hand during the Second World War – head of the Gestapo and architect of the Final Solution – but little else, he decided to look him up online.
To his horror, he found himself staring at a photograph of Himmler’s mistress and recognising the open, imperiously beautiful face of his grandmother. Hedwig Potthast – whom he had known as Mutti – had borne Himmler two children while working as his private secretary during the war. Potthast’s husband, Hans Staeck, who Lenkeit had grown up believing to be his grandfather (the couple married in 1955), was no blood relation at all. His mother, Nanette-Dorothea, born in 1944, had been Himmler’s daughter. She died in 2019, having never uttered a word to her son about his lineage.
“My stomach emptied,” says Lenkeit. “I felt like a pressure cooker that was boiling over. I said to my wife, ‘Am I really the grandson of this guy?’ And she looked at what I had been looking at and said yes.”
My stomach emptied. I felt like a pressure cooker that was boiling over.
Lenkeit began digging deeper. His grandmother’s affair, which started in 1938, was hardly a secret – she even has her own Wikipedia page, where he learnt about the house that Himmler, who already had a wife and child, had bought for her. Potthast lived there during the war with her children – Lenkeit’s mother and his uncle, Helge.
Himmler sent more than 200 letters to Potthast, whom he called Bunny (she called him King Heinrich), writing in one: “I’m going to Auschwitz. Kisses, your Heini.” Ghastly details emerged, including a rumour that his grandmother lived surrounded by furniture made from human skin – something Lenkeit does not believe – while the doctor present at his mother’s birth was Karl Gebhardt, who conducted surgical experiments on the women of Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Lenkeit also learnt more about Himmler himself, struck in particular by how the man responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews would play tennis after visiting the gas chambers and watching people die. “I watched the film The Decent One – a 2014 German-Austrian-Israeli film about Himmler – in which he says that yes, the Nazis did all these things, but out of duty to the people. They still maintained they were decent human beings. Hearing that was such a blow to me in that moment.”
Lenkeit and I are speaking over Zoom from his home near Malaga, where he has lived with his Mexican wife and their three children since 2018. Only now, a year on, does he feel able to talk about his discovery. “I am more open today than I was,” he says. “But I go up and down. You lose your sense of life, you get back up again. It’s not linear. At times I questioned whether I had the right to go on living.”
Yet while he has managed to piece together some of the facts, silence, secrecy and obfuscation persist. His uncle Helge, for instance, is still alive but has refused to speak to him, and the two are no longer in contact. Lenkeit has siblings, but they too have chosen not to talk, and out of respect for their wishes, he declines to give further details. (By contrast, he and his wife have told their children everything.)
Although he does not believe his parents subscribed to a Nazi world view – both encouraged him to watch Schindler’s List, and he describes his late father as “always a great admirer of Israel” – he is struggling to reconcile the image he had of them with what he now knows.
“My parents always taught me to be a straight person. Don’t skirt around things. Don’t avoid things. Be upright. This was the thing my father criticised me for not being the most. When I learnt what they had been hiding, I thought: who’s not being upright now? But I now understand that their attitude was a form of projection. People often criticise in others the very thing they are themselves.”
Even so, he admits to experiencing an extreme form of grief. “My whole life has been a lie – 47 years of it weren’t true. So yes, I am in mourning, with all the feelings of anger, sadness, depression and fear that that entails.”
Himmler never faced justice for his atrocities, dying by self-administered cyanide poisoning in 1945 before he could be tried. Potthast was never tried either, although some historians have speculated that she may have struck a plea bargain with the CIA to avoid prosecution. Lenkeit is unsure what to believe. “There is a lot of ‘fake news’ around this sort of thing. I try not to make any assumptions.”
He is, however, in no doubt about his grandmother’s culpability. It has never been established whether Potthast actively collaborated with the Nazi regime – in later interviews she refused to discuss her relationship with Himmler – but Lenkeit is certain she knew what was happening. “Of course she knew. And she should have been denounced. It’s enough to have known what was happening with the gas chambers and not to have spoken out.”
Lenkeit has wrestled with his own feelings of guilt. Even at his lowest, though, his Christian faith has helped him through; he also works as a pastor in Spain. “When I thought about whether I had the right to carry on living, it was faith that reminded me it is by God’s grace. It’s not for you to decide. You are made the way you are made. You don’t choose your bloodline.”
He wishes his parents had seen it the same way. “For me, it is important to speak out about it. To say, for example, ‘Himmler was our ancestor, but we’re not Himmler.’ My mother bears no guilt – she was born in 1944. Nor does my uncle, who was born in 1942. So why all this shame?”
He is now devoting his life to encouraging German families to talk openly about their Nazi heritage. He believes his country is at a crossroads. For decades, Germany has been engaged in a process of national reckoning known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, during which it has attempted to grapple politically, culturally and psychologically with the atrocities of the Holocaust. Yet Lenkeit believes there is a gap between a nation’s ability to face its past and that of individual families to do the same.
“It’s not exactly a lie to say that Germany has been facing up to the past,” he says, “but we have a saying in German that goes ‘we lie in our pockets’. It means we lie to ourselves. We all like to think: of course we would have hidden the Jews, of course we wouldn’t have become a high-ranking Nazi leader. But these questions are not so easy to answer. Because if we are honest, who wouldn’t commit great evil in order to survive?”
We saw in the 1930s how easily people were manipulated. And I fear it’s growing again.
He sees a direct link, too, between Nazism and the rise of the far-right AfD party, arguing that the failure of the political centre to get a grip on immigration has allowed extremists to exploit people’s fears.
“If we had talked about this issue before it took hold, we wouldn’t have this problem. Both Nazism and the AfD encourage people to blame other groups for their misfortunes. They encourage supporters to see themselves as victims – and this is an offence to those who really were victims, like so many of the Jews. We saw in the 1930s how easily people were manipulated. And I fear it’s growing again.”
He fears for the future. “Much of Europe today feels like the Weimar Republic,” he says. “The German author Niklas Frank, whose father was a high-ranking Nazi official, posed the question in his book: ‘Are we ready to murder again?’ It’s a good question.”
Lenkeit is now writing his own book, at the suggestion of his wife, who thought it might help him make sense of his discovery. The burden clearly still weighs heavily. When I mention that my husband is Jewish, he falls silent for a moment before asking me to seek forgiveness on behalf of his family. I reassure him my husband would never hold him personally guilty. But I am curious whether he can forgive his grandparents.
“I have to forgive,” he says.
“Not because I’m a pastor, but because I’m a human being. I can’t curse my bloodline. That doesn’t mean these people deserve forgiveness. Of course it hurts – it’s like a blow to the heart as well as the stomach. It’s extremely difficult. But if you want to be free, you have to be able to do it.”