Hermann Goering's great-niece: 'I had myself sterilised so I would not pass on the blood of a monster'



'Monster': Luftwaffe head Hermann Goering, shown here in 1936

Descendants of the leaders of the Nazi regime have spoken on camera for the first time about the feelings of pain and revulsion they have for their ancestors.

They include Bettina Goering, great niece of Adolf Hitler's second in command Hermann Goering, who says she has had herself sterilised so she would 'not pass on the blood of a monster'.

Adolf Eichmann's son Ricardo says he simply cannot find a way to explain why his father became the chief architect of the Holocaust.

While Hitler himself had no offspring, many others at the heart of the Reich had families and some of the children can remember being patted on the head by the Fuhrer.

One is Hitler's godson Niklas Frank, whose father Hans was Nazi governor of occupied Poland responsible for the death camps in which six million Jewish people were killed.

He says in the documentary Hitler's Children, by Israeli director Chanoch Zeevi, that he 'despises' his father's past and describes him as 'a slime-hole of a Hitler fanatic'.

The film also shows Monika Hertwig, daughter of Amon Goeth - the death camp commandant played in the movie Schindler's List by Ralph Fiennes --meeting a man who tells her how her father shot women and babies 'for sport'.

Zeevi 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.

Uncle Adolf: Hitler pictured having his ear tugged by his god-daughter Edda Goering, daughter of Field Marshall Hermann Goering in 1939

Frank lectures about his infamous father to young people in the former East Germany in a bid to prevent them from straying into the far-right 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.'

Bettina Goering lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she practices herbal medicine.



'Either side of me live Jewish neighbours,' she says, 'and they are always quarrelling. It's left to me to sort them out!'

The defendants at the Nuremberg Nazi war crimes trials. Pictured in the front row are: Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel and Ernst Kaltenbrunner

Bettina told the programme 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. I look like him for a start - the eyes, the cheekbone, the profile. I look more like him than his own daughter,' she said.

The 53-year-old Goering said her father Heinz was adopted by his infamous uncle after his own father died and became a fighter pilot for 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 fortunes were 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.

Goering said her father, who died in 1981, never spoke about the Holocaust, or about his notorious uncle. 'But my grandmother was less evasive - she adored him,' she said.

Children of Hitler: Adolf Hitler is pictured doing a Nazi salute on a balcony in Berlin in 1939. With him are (left to right) Ribbenntrop, Count Ciano, and Hermann Goering

'As head of the Red Cross in Nazi Germany she hobnobbed with the regime's other top leaders and had many pictures of herself alongside Hitler.

'We would be watching a documentary on TV together about the Holocaust and she would yell 'it's all lies, it didn't happen,'' she added.

'The hardest part is admitting that I could have liked him. I was so shocked by that,' she said. 'Now I am accepting myself more for who I am, whatever that encompasses - the good, the bad and the ugly.'

'The film is due to be completed later this year.



