Relatives of notorious Nazis have come together to film new documentary

The niece of Hitler's deputy Hermann Goering has revealed she had herself sterilised rather than risk giving birth to 'a monster'.

Bettina Goering, who now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a great niece of Goering, who founded the Gestapo secret police, organised the Holocaust and ordered the Blitz on Britain.

The 60-year-old, who practices herbal medicine, is one of a number of relatives of infamous Nazis who have revealed how their family ties have affected them.

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Bettina Goering (left), who now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is a great niece of Hermann Goering (right), who founded the Gestapo secret police, organised the Holocaust and ordered the Blitz on Britain

She has revealed how both she and her brother were voluntarily sterilised.

'I had my tubes tied at the age of 30 because I feared I would create another monster,' she said.

'I look like him, for a start - the eyes, the cheekbones, the profile. I look more like him than his own daughter.'

Her comments came as part of a documentary about the forgotten children of the Third Reich whose parents and uncles were responsible for some of the worst atrocities in history.

They banded together in a documentary screened on the MDR channel called 'My Family, the Nazis and Me' to bear witness to a terrible past that haunts their lives.

The programme about the children of leading Nazis took three years to complete. For those who took part it was the first time they peeled back the layers of shame abd guilt to speak about living with the memory of their relatives' crimes.

Katrin Himmler, the great niece of SS chief Heinrich Himmler - second only to Hitler and in charge of the extermination programme - married an Israeli Jew and ponders how 'one day, I will tell the story to my son about his great-uncle Heinrich'.

Katrin Himmler (left) is the great niece of SS chief Heinrich Himmler (right) - second only to Hitler and in charge of the extermination programme

She said: 'I don't believe I inherited his 'badness'. But I live with his name. When I was 11 the TV series Holocaust was shown in Germany. I sat at my desk, crying because, of course, the name Himmler was repeated again and again. I realise he was the worst mass murderer of modern times. But I am not responsible.'

Other participants include Monika Hertwig, daughter of Nazi death camp commandant Amon Goeth.

Goeth was played in the Holocaust classic Schindler's List by Ralph Fiennes as a ruthless enforcer who shot prisoners from the balcony of his house within the grounds of the camp.

She describes what it is like to be related to a man who also shot babies for 'sport'.

Another participant is Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank, Hitler's brutal governor of occupied Poland who was directly responsible for the extermination camp programme there that killed six million Jews.

Frank was hanged by the Allies after the war, but Mr Frank says he was 'condemned to a living death because of the slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic I had for a father'.

Israeli Chanoch Zeevi, director, said he found 'fascinating similarities' between the emotions of those related to Holocaust perpetrators and those of survivors, some of whom meet the children of their tormentors in the programme.

Another participant is Niklas Frank (left), the son of Hans Frank (right), Hitler's brutal governor of occupied Poland who was directly responsible for the extermination camp programme there that killed six million Jews

'I have made a powerful dialogue between the children of the perpetrators and the children of the survivors,' he said. 'Both live out the Holocaust daily, unable to move forward with their lives.'

Adolf Hitler had no children, while those of his propaganda chief Josef Goebbels died with him in the same bunker in which their Führer killed himself.

But many others at the heart of the Reich had families - something that was encouraged by Hitler, who idolised youth as the bedrock of his empire meant to last 1,000 years.

Some of the children can remember being patted on the head by Hitler as they visited his mountaintop home in Berchtesgaden with their parents. Niklas Frank remembers seeing concentration camp prisoners tormented as his father chuckled.

'Thin men were mounted on to a wild donkey and the donkey bucked and the men fell off, and they could only pick themselves up again very slowly, and they didn't find it as funny as I did,' he said.

'And again and again they got back on and the donkey was given a slap and again they fell off and they tried to help each other; it was a fantastic afternoon. Then we had cocoa. These are the s****y images I carry around of my father.

Other participants include Monika Hertwig (right), daughter of Nazi death camp commandant Amon Goeth (left)

'I dream of the piles of corpses in the camps: my country will never be rid of that history. It is a story that is still not over.'

Mr Frank lectures about his infamous father to young people in former east Germany, in an attempt to keep them from straying into the neo-Nazi scene that preys on the young, unemployed and desperate.

'I have never managed in my life to get rid of the memory of him,' he said. 'I live with this deep shame about what he did.'

Ms Goering said her father, Heinz, was adopted by his uncle after his own father died, and became a fighter pilot in the Luftwaffe. Heinz was shot down over the Soviet Union and returned from captivity in 1952 to find that his two brothers had killed themselves because of their shame, and the family's fortune was gone.

Hermann Goering was sentenced to death along with 11 others at the Nuremberg trials in 1946, but he committed suicide by swallowing a poison pill in his cell the night before his scheduled execution.

Ms Goering said her father, who died in 1981, never spoke about the Holocaust, nor about his notorious uncle. 'But my grandmother was less evasive - she adored him,' she said.

'Another hard part for us is that they thought they were the descendants of heroes. And they were not. We are now the descendants of criminals and mass murderers.'

Monika Hertwig cannot accept anything about her own father. As commandant of the Auschwitz sub-camp of Plaszow, he was hanged in 1946 for the murder of tens of thousands of people, 500 of them by his own hands.

'He liked to shoot women with babies in their arms from the balcony of his house, to see if one bullet could kill two,' she said. 'How far do you separate the murderer from the father? How much of the murderer is in me? These are the things that torment me.'