A German priest discovered he was the grandson of Heinrich Himmler after recognising a photograph of the Holocaust architect’s mistress as his own grandmother.
Henrik Lenkeit, 49, was horrified to learn while trawling the internet that Hedwig Potthast, who had fed him with chocolates as a child, had an affair with the Nazi politician during the Second World War before giving birth to his mother.
Mr Lenkeit, a couples counsellor in southern Spain, recently revealed that his mother, who died in 2019, had never mentioned the connection, and that he had grown up believing Mrs Potthast’s husband, Hans Staeck, was his biological grandfather.
He told German outlet Der Spiegel that he was “completely shocked” to learn the family connection. “On Wikipedia, I suddenly found myself looking into my grandmother’s face,” he said. He asked his wife: “Am I really the grandson of this guy?”
Mr Lenkeit said he was moved to read about Himmler after watching a biographical documentary. It was only then that he found his maternal grandmother already had her own page, detailing a shady extramarital relationship with Himmler from 1938.
“How could my grandmother have loved such a monster?” he wondered. Himmler was the second most powerful man in the Third Reich and organised Nazi Germany’s ‘Final Solution’.
“If you could bring people back to life, I’d grab my grandfather and give him a good thrashing,” Lenkeit reflected to Der Spiegel.
The Wikipedia entry on Mrs Potthast describes how Himmler and his private secretary “confessed their love for each other at Christmas time” that year. Much of the relationship remains unclear. Other sources say they began their affair in 1940.
Mr Lenkeit said he reached out to political scientist Katrin Himmler, Himmler’s great niece, who was able to share more detailed research and confirmation of the connection. Some of his own family members, he said, were less forthcoming.
Letters between the pair are said to include their pet names for each other: he called her ‘Bunny’, and she called him ‘King Heinrich’.
Mr Lenkeit learned that Mrs Potthast gave birth to Helge, a son, in 1942, followed by Nanette-Dorothea, Mr Lenkeit’s mother, Nanette-Dorothea, in 1944. Himmler died by suicide in British custody in 1945. Mrs Potthast would go on to marry Mr Staeck in 1955.
“My whole life has been a lie – 47 years of it weren’t true,” Mr Lenkeit told The Telegraph. “So yes, I am in mourning, with all the feelings of anger, sadness, depression and fear that that entails.”
Since learning the connection, Mr Lenkeit has told his children. Helge Staeck, his uncle, died childless.
He said it took him a year to be able to open up about the discovery of his connection to Himmler.
He also spoke of his difficulty adjusting his view of his parents, even though he believes neither believed in the Nazi ideology.
Mr Lenkeit told The Telegraph that he remembered thinking it strange that “so few people seemed to be mourning” his grandmother at her funeral after she died in 1994.
