“Do you know how many people your father cremated at Dachau?” a British officer asked young Gudrun Himmler during a postwar interrogation in 1945. “Or how many he gassed at Oranienburg? Of course you do. You’re Herr Himmler’s daughter, after all.”

She sat silently, according to an account in the 2000 book “My Father’s Keeper,” by Norbert and Stephan Lebert, giving no indication of whether she believed that her father — Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the final solution to exterminate the Jews of Europe — was capable of the genocidal horrors of which he was being accused in 1945.

Indeed, whatever she might have known as a youngster, or as an adult, about her father’s actions, she did not say publicly. She long contended that the family had not discussed German politics or the “Jewish question.”

But what was never in doubt was her adoration of her father. Even after marrying and becoming Gudrun Burwitz, she continued to take pride in her family name and made it her life’s mission to rehabilitate her father’s.