Henrik Lenkeit, a Christian pastor and life coach living on Spain’s Costa del Sol, woke up one summer day in 2024 with his usual worries and life much as it always had been; more or less predictable. Within hours, everything changed, and he became a different person. A year later, this German national who is married to a Mexican citizen and a father of three, recounts his story in fluent Spanish.
“I felt like a pressure cooker,” he recalls. “My children had never seen me like that. I wasn’t myself.”
Lenkeit explains that, at age 47, he had just discovered “by chance” and in horror that his maternal grandmother, Hedwig Potthast (1912-1994) had been the lover of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the Gestapo, and one of the architects of the murder of six million Jews during Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. He learned that they had had a son, Helge, and a daughter, Nanette Dorothea, during World War II. And that the daughter was his mother. And that he, therefore, was the grandson of Himmler, the mass murderer and Nazi war criminal.
“I had to process all of this,” Lenkeit says over the phone from Benalmádena (Málaga), where he settled seven years ago after moving from Mexico. “When 47 years of your life are a lie, a large part of your identity dies. I went through a period of mourning.”
It was August 20, 2024. That afternoon, Lenkeit didn’t feel like reading the Bible, and there was no soccer on TV. He started watching a documentary about Himmler. Intrigued, he looked for more information online.
“And I saw that Himmler had a mistress,” he recounts. “And I saw her picture and I thought to myself, ‘She looks a lot like my grandmother.’ I compared it to the family album, and yes: it’s her. Her name is Hedwig: my grandmother’s name. Her surname, Potthast. It wasn’t the surname she used, but it dawned on me that it was my great-aunt’s. Then I saw that, with this super-Nazi, she had two children, and I see the children’s names, which are my uncle’s and my mother’s. Another shock. If my mother was his daughter, then I am… Can you imagine? This takes time to process.”
It was a profound personal earthquake. Now he’s preparing a book and talks about the experience, which further motivates him to apply the Christian principle of helping others and immigrants. “A mission” and “an obligation,” he says.
To clear up any doubts about his origins after the discovery, Lenkeit contacted political scientist Katrin Himmler, author of a seminal book on the family, The Himmler Brothers, and herself a great-niece of Heinrich Himmler. He obtained Nanette Dorothea’s birth certificate, which recorded her date of birth as June 3, 1944. The document states that Heinrich Himmler acknowledged the daughter, the result of his extramarital affair with Hedwig Potthast, who had been his secretary and lover since 1938. Himmler committed suicide at the end of the war.
After “evaluating birth certificates and family photos, consulting historians, and contacting relatives,” the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, which broke the story in October, concluded that Lenkeit was indeed Himmler’s grandson. When contacted by EL PAÍS, Katrin Himmler confirmed: “I have no doubt that he is the grandson.”
Another surprising element in the case is that Lenkeit didn’t discover who his grandfather was until the summer of 2024. If it was a secret, it was hidden in plain sight. The names of his mother and uncle appear in books such as the canonical biography of Himmler, written by the historian Peter Longerich.
Hedwig Potthast was by no means unknown to scholars, and she was mentioned in films and documentaries. The transcript of her interrogation by the U.S. Seventh Army in May 1945 describes her as “an attractive woman in her early thirties who could fit the prototype of the Deutsche Frau,” the German woman. The interrogation also reveals that she “bore Himmler two children.”
Potthast remarried in the 1950s and took a different name. She spoke very little about her past. Hedwig’s daughter, Nanette, received information about the identity of her biological father, says Lenkeit. But he regrets that this information was kept from him.
“Perhaps they wanted to protect me…” he supposes. But how can it be that it took him so long to find out? “I can’t explain it,” he replies. “It was so obvious…”
Katrin Himmler observes: “Nanette Dorothea remained silent until her death about who her biological father was, so, incredibly, it’s entirely plausible that Henrik Lenkeit only discovered who his grandfather was a year ago, and by chance.” “In Germany,” she points out, “there are still many families who maintain a stubborn silence about the past, and especially about the perpetrators within their own family, so their family was far from unique.” “I hope their story will give others the courage to ask questions within their own families about the Nazi era and the role their ancestors played in it,” adds the granddaughter of Ernst, Heinrich Himmler’s younger brother.
Lenkeit’s parents — his mother a doctor, his father a teacher — were politically moderate. They took their son to see the film Schindler’s List and admired Israel: a typical family from the Federal Republic, aware of the lessons of history. The son also observes that they were a family “distant in their dealings with others,” who kept a low profile. He can’t help but see it in the light of his rediscovered past. “There are things that are inherited. And there are generational traumas. My family inherited this guilt,” he reflects, though the statement would apply to a large portion of Germans who grew up after the war.
“In Germany,” Lenkeit continues, “there are a lot of children or grandchildren of perpetrators, and they aren’t fascists. We’re a new generation. Now a [far-right] party like the AfD is polling at 26%. If I can do my bit to prevent them from coming to power…”
Lenkeit’s experience may seem extraordinary. But it’s not so different from that of so many Germans who, although they accepted collective responsibility for the crimes of Nazism, took longer to identify their grandparents as individual perpetrators or accomplices. Of course, very few had a grandfather like Himmler…
“If I think about it, he was a monster, and I have the blood of a monster,” he says. “My faith is what kept me going. Without faith, I might be in a psychiatric hospital.”
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