As the Soviet army closed in on Berlin in April 1945, Ernst Himmler received his orders. At 39 years old, he had spent the entire war working as a radio engineer behind a microphone, not holding a weapon. None of that mattered now. He was called up by the Volkssturm, Germany’s last-ditch militia made up of old men and boys as young as 16, given an armband, an obsolete rifle, and a few hours of training before being sent to face Soviet tanks.
On May 2, 1945, Ernst Himmler was killed in the fighting. The exact circumstances remain unknown, and his body was never recovered. He died defending a regime that had already surrendered, just days after Hitler’s death. Ernst was the younger brother of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and one of the chief architects of the Holocaust.
But the story of the Himmler brothers is not the story of one monster and two innocent men. Heinrich was not the only brother who served the Nazi regime. His older brother Gebhard rose through the ranks of the Nazi education system, and his younger brother Ernst helped broadcast Nazi propaganda to the world. All three joined the Nazi Party, all three held SS ranks, and all three benefited from Heinrich’s rise to power.
Born in Munich in 1898, Gebhard was the eldest. Two years later came Heinrich, and five years after that, Ernst. Their father, Josef, had taught Greek and Latin at a prestigious high school and had once tutored members of the Bavarian royal family, a fact he mentioned to visitors at every opportunity. Their mother, Anna Maria, ran the household like a barracks, with Mass on Sundays, prayer before meals, and rules for everything.
The boys attended good schools, wore uniforms, and learned discipline, duty, and obedience. Father Josef expected success and reminded them of it constantly. Nothing about this family suggested what was coming. They were respectable and ambitious by every measure of the time, completely normal.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Gebhard was old enough to fight, but Heinrich was not. Gebhard enlisted in 1917 and went to the Western Front. He endured the trenches, the mud, the gas, the artillery, and watched men die around him. He survived, earned the Iron Cross, and came home a decorated veteran.
He was exactly the kind of son their father had always wanted. Heinrich, meanwhile, trained as an officer cadet, desperate to prove himself. He dreamed of glory and medals, of coming home a hero like his brother. The war ended in November 1918.
Heinrich was 18 years old and had never seen combat. According to those who knew him, this failure haunted him for years. His older brother had served, he had not. 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. Germany was in chaos as communists seized power in Bavaria and the old order collapsed. Gebhard and Heinrich joined together, marching under Franz Ritter von Epp with a mission to crush leftist uprisings in Munich.
It was their first taste of political violence. In November 1923, Adolf Hitler and his followers attempted to seize power in Bavaria as a first step toward overthrowing the Weimar Republic. They marched through the streets of Munich in what became known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Heinrich was among them, carrying the Imperial War flag.
Gebhard had joined another paramilitary group that supported the coup, though whether he marched that day remains unclear. The coup failed. Police fired on the marchers, killing 16 Nazis, and Hitler was arrested and imprisoned. But Heinrich had made his loyalty clear.
He had stood with the movement from the very beginning. Gebhard’s career advanced steadily once the Nazis took power. In 1933, he became headmaster of a vocational school in Munich. The same year, he formally joined the Nazi Party.
By 1935, he was director of a polytechnic institute. But there was a problem. Joining the party on January 30, 1933, just as Hitler became chancellor, looked opportunistic. True believers looked down on these latecomers.
So Gebhard found a solution. He arranged to have his wife’s lower party membership number transferred to him, making it appear he had joined years earlier. It was a small deception, but it revealed everything about his priorities. Appearance mattered, and loyalty had to look authentic.
By 1944, Gebhard held the rank of SS Standartenführer, equivalent to a colonel in the regular army. He worked in the Reich Ministry of Education, overseeing technical training programs. His job was to decide who could become an engineer and who could not. The criteria were not based on skill or intelligence.
They were based on blood, on who was racially acceptable and who was not. Ernst was the youngest, always in the shadow of his older brothers. He studied electrical engineering and graduated in 1928. A practical man with a practical skill.
On November 1, 1931, he joined the Nazi Party. This was before Hitler came to power and before Heinrich controlled the SS. Ernst joined when joining still carried risk. He was not an opportunist.
He was a believer. In 1933, with Heinrich’s help, Ernst secured a position at the Reich Broadcasting Corporation in Berlin. 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.
Ernst helped broadcast the Nuremberg party rallies to the world. The torch-lit processions, the roaring crowds, the Führer’s voice. Millions listened, and Ernst made sure the signal was clear. In 1936, the Berlin Olympic Games became the first global sports broadcast in history, with 41 countries receiving the signal.
The world saw Germany as modern, organized, and peaceful. Exactly what the regime wanted them to see. By 1939, Ernst held the rank of SS Sturmbannführer. He attended meetings with senior officers and passed information to Heinrich about internal matters at the radio company, who was loyal and who was not.
He was an insider. One of Ernst’s colleagues at the broadcasting company was half-Jewish. Under the racial laws, his position was precarious, and he needed protection. He came to Ernst because Ernst was the brother of the Reichsführer SS.
If anyone could help him, it was Ernst. A word in the right ear, a quiet intervention, would have cost Ernst nothing. Instead, Ernst wrote to Heinrich describing the colleague as “useless. ” He knew exactly what that word meant.
The man was reclassified and deported to a labor camp. Decades later, Ernst’s granddaughter Katrin found the letter in the Federal Archives. “It would have been perfectly possible for Ernst to support that colleague without any danger to himself,” she said. “He was the brother of the Reichsführer.
This was the turning point for me. ”
Ernst was not passive. He made a choice, and someone else paid the price. By the spring of 1945, the war was lost, and everyone knew it.
Soviet forces had encircled Berlin with two and a half million soldiers closing in from every direction. The Reich Chancellery was rubble, and Hitler was in his bunker beneath the ruins issuing orders to armies that no longer existed. Ernst and Gebhard had been living together in western Berlin since August 1943. They had watched the city burn around them at the hands of Allied bombing raids every night, with fires lighting up the skies and refugees flooding in from the east carrying whatever they could.
Three weeks after Ernst was killed, near the Danish border at Flensburg, Heinrich was captured by British forces. He had shaved his mustache, wore a false uniform, and carried forged papers identifying him as a discharged sergeant named Heinrich Hitzinger. The disguise did not work. During processing, a British doctor attempted to examine his mouth.
Heinrich bit down on a cyanide capsule hidden behind his teeth, and the most feared man in Nazi Germany was dead within minutes. Gebhard survived. His family had fled Berlin weeks earlier, heading south to Bavaria and finding shelter in Garmisch, a quiet lakeside town where they stayed with Heinrich’s estranged wife, Margarete. When British forces arrived, Gebhard was arrested and transported to internment camps.
He was brought before Allied investigators who wanted to know about Heinrich, about the SS, and about what Gebhard had known and when he had known it. When asked about his brother, Gebhard said, “Heinrich had deep kindness. He was upright, simple, and true to his path. Personally, I would never see my brother as the culprit of these things.
”
He said this with a straight face. Then he went home. Gebhard underwent denazification. 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.
Tribunals determined guilt. Gebhard was classified as a “follower,” a Mitläufer in German. Not a perpetrator, not an activist, just someone who went along with the regime. It was a category that allowed millions of former Nazis to escape serious punishment.
He lost his pension rights but appealed, and in 1959 he won. His pension was restored. His later years took an ironic turn. The man who had spent years in the Reich Ministry of Education deciding who could become an engineer based on racial bloodlines spent his final decades as a study adviser for Afghan students in Munich, helping young men navigate the German university system.
It was a bizarre ending to a career built on racial exclusion. 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. Ernst had been apolitical, just an engineer who happened to work in radio. Gebhard had been a teacher, nothing more.
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, Katrin Himmler, Ernst’s granddaughter, was asked by her father to look into the family records. The Federal Archives in Berlin had recently received documents that American authorities had held since the end of the war, and her father wanted to know what was in them.
She began her research expecting to confirm what she had always been told. 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. Katrin published her findings in 2005 in a book called “The Himmler Brothers: A German Family History. ” The research had taken years, and there were moments, she admitted, when she wanted to stop, when the discoveries became too painful, when the gap between the family myth and the historical reality became too wide to bear.
She appeared in the documentary “Hitler’s Children” in 2011, speaking openly about what she had learned. She married an Israeli man whose family had survived the Warsaw Ghetto. The irony was not lost on her. 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. In interviews, she offered a conclusion that haunts anyone who reads her work: “These are such damn normal people, and that’s the scary thing. “
