BERLIN - One black-and white photo shows
Heinrich Himmler on an idyllic family outing, holding his wife's hand
while his blond, pigtailed daughter is picking flowers. Others show the
SS Nazi leader feeding a little fawn or taking a bath at Lake Tegernsee
near his home in Bavaria.
The family-friendly, intimate scenes are
part of a previously unseen collection of photos, recipe books and
hundreds of letters and notes believed to be written by Himmler, one of
the Nazis most responsible for the Holocaust.
Excerpts from the collection appeared in
seven full pages of German paper Welt am Sonntag on Sunday. They
contained large-sized images of Himmler surrounded by his family and
excerpts from his love letters to wife Magda, calling her "my sweet,
beloved little woman."
str,AP
FILE
- The undated file photo shows German Nazi party official and head of
the SS, Heinrich Himmler. at unknown location in Germany.
The newspaper said the material is part of an eight-part series it plans to publish.
Welt said it was approached three years
ago by Israeli film director Vanessa Lapa, whose family had the
documents in its possession. Welt said the documents' authenticity has
been independently verified by historians.
The paper said two U.S. Army soldiers
found the trove right at the end of the war in May 1945, inside a safe
in Himmler's home in Bavaria.
Decades later, in the 1980s, the papers
surfaced in Israel in the hands of Holocaust survivor Chaim Rosenthal.
Welt says it is not clear how he obtained the papers. Rosenthal kept
them until 2007, when he sold the documents to Vanessa Lapa's father,
who then gave them to his daughter.
Lapa will debut a documentary she
directed on the Himmler files at next month's Berlin International Film
Festival.
Almost 70 years after the end of the
Third Reich, the documents provide an unprecedented glimpse into the
private life of Himmler and evidence of his radical anti-Semitism. The
writings trace his career from the early beginnings and rise of the
Nazis in the 1920s, all the way to the genocide of Europe's Jews in the
1940s.
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