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Today's Paper | May 21, 2024

Published 22 May, 2020 05:54am

From The Past Pages Dawn: 1945: Seventy-five years ago: ‘Better off dead’

LONDON: Frau Margarethe Boden Himmler, who has been arrested by the Allies, disclaims knowledge of the whereabouts of her husband, Heinrich Himmler. Arrested by 5th Army soldiers with her 15-year-old daughter in a hideout in the Tyrol, she declared she assumed that Himmler — known to her as “Bopie” — was killed in Berlin. “They’re all better off dead,” she commented.

Frau Himmler, sick and worn and aged 51, says she has not seen her husband since last November, cables “Globe’s” special correspondent. She got her last letter from him by messenger in mid-April. It was presumably written near Berlin.

She removed all pictures of Himmler from the mountain chalet where she was hiding because, she said, “when people came to the house I didn’t want them to know who we were”. She asked if the Americans were going to shoot her and her daughter. When told she would be treated as a “displaced person” and sent to a refugee camp, she sobbed her thanks in broken English. According to the “News Chronicle” correspondent in Lueneburg, the whereabouts of Himmler is an artificial S.H.A.E.F. mystery. “The 2nd Army authorities knows where he is,” he declares.

Published in Dawn, May 22nd, 2020

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