the alleged silencing of Heinrich Himmler The Documents on the alleged silencing of Heinrich Himmler Image added by this website Wednesday May 5, 1999 ‘I tell her that her husband has committed suicide’ Ann Stringer met Margherita Himmler at the end of the war. This is an extract of the recently unearthed interview I VISITED Margherita Himmler, wife of the most hated man in the world, after Hitler, naturally.
She has been interned by the allied authorities and now lives in a luxurious villa in the suburbs of Rome. With her is her 15-year-old daughter, Gudrun . An expression of stiff coldness emanates from all her being. Not a movement of her face, no lowering of her eyes or eyebrows, no gesture of the hands marked, during all of the interview, the manifestations of any particular emotion or revealed any repentance.
She sits in an armchair with her legs crossed, her hands nobly extended, her head erect and her cold, light-blue eyes immovably fixed on me. Up to this moment she has not known the fate of her husband. As she suffers from heart trouble, the allied authorities have up to now not told her that the sanguinary chief of the Gestapo, captured by the troops of the Fifth Army, went to his death by crushing between his teeth a capsule of poison . I tell her the news.
She receives my words with the same indifference as if I had announced the death of the household cat. Then, interrupting what I was saying, she begins to talk about the last conversation she had with her husband. ‘I was near Munich and he was in Berlin. He called me by telephone. It was during last summer.’ I try to lead the conversation