Breitbart mourns the death of Himmler’s daughter
Gudrun Himmler Burwitz died recently in Germany, at the age of 88.
She was the daughter of the notorious Nazi, Heinrich Himmler, the second man in the Reich, after Hitler. Himmler ran the dreaded secret police and the concentration camps. He surely would have been sentenced to death at Nuremberg, except that he killed himself by swallowing a capsule of cyanide after being captured by Allied soldiers in 1945.
Gudrun Burwitz (her married name) never renounced her father or the Nazi regime that launched World War II. Not only was she unrepentant, she was a member of a secretive group, Stille Hilfe (Silent Help), which promoted the cause of former Nazis and helped them escape justice. She also was a Holocaust denier.
All of this made Gudrun a heroine to the far right of many nations, including the U.S. The ties between America’s white nationalist-anti-Semitic-racist extremists and the Nazi party are well known; the Nazis who marched at the pro-Trump rally in Charlottesville, VA were but one piece of evidence of how far the Republican Party has wandered down the Nazi path. And now, Breitbart “News” is publicly mourning Gudrun’s death. In a recent editorial the online publication praised her as a “faithful daughter” and said “Her commitment to family values, in preserving her father’s honor, should be an example to all Americans, especially so-called ‘progressive’ liberals, who scorn family values and routinely mock those who believe in them.”
The editorial added that Breitbart had made “a sizable donation” to Stille Hilfe “in President Donald Trump’s name.” The amount of the contribution was not revealed.
At the White House, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked about the incident. “This President mourns whenever anyone dies. He sends his thoughts and prayers to Ms. Burwitz’s family.” Pressed to comment on the Breitbart donation to Stille Hilfe, Huckabee said the President has no desire to blame anyone for wanting to help “oppressed refugees.” Trump, she insisted, “feels that the events under discussion happened a long, long time ago, and it’s time to move forward.”
President Trump’s ties to Nazis and affiliated organizations go back to at least the 1970s. In this undated picture, he is seen with his arms around Herbert and Evelyn Schweikart, the leaders of a white nationalist-Christian Ku Klux Klan chapter.
Trump has never explained his connection to the KKK, but his father, Fred, was a Klan member, and Trump’s two sons, Eric and Donald, Jr., have a long history of flirting with racist organizations. Most recently, Donald, Jr. retweeted Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet in which the former T.V. star compared Obama’s senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, to an “ape.” As for Eric, the Washington Post has published unconfirmed reports that he was a member of a whites-only fraternity at Georgetown University, and was once a guest of David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard (and Holocaust denier). Duke has called Eric Trump “one of the finest white people I have ever met” and urged Eric Trump to “store his sperm” so that “future generations can be replenished with pure, Aryan DNA.” Eric Trump has never addressed Duke’s comments.
The president’s wife, Melania, also has had troubling connections with fascism. Her father, in her native Slovenia, was a member of a far right nationalist group that sought to ethnically cleanse the country of non-Christians, especially Muslims, and while Melania herself has not publicly expressed racist or anti-Semitic views, the New York media often has noted that no Jews were ever hired to work in the Trump household after she and Trump were married, in 2005.
Backlash to Breitbart’s editorial among Republicans was feeble to non-existent. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, asked by The Hill to comment, ignored the question. House Speaker Paul Ryan told Politico, “It’s a free country.” One Senator who did speak up was Utah’s Orrin Hatch, who told the Washington Post, “Look, I might not have made the donation to that Nazi group. But from everything I’ve heard, Gudrun Himmler was a fine, decent woman. And Breitbart is a great news organization. These attempts to smear Breitbart are really indirect attacks on Donald Trump, who is turning out to be the greatest President in American history.”
Trump’s history with Nazis, racists, and the KKK go way back, and both his wife and his wife’s family’s exploits along similar lines do as well. They’re as anti-American and anti Christian as one could conceive, and it seems like affection that they could be sitting in the White House of the country that once brought Hitler to its knees.