IT is chilling enough watching a documentary about Himmler and the Holocaust.
But it is another level of horror realising that the woman described as the Nazi monster’s lover staring out at you from the screen – is actually your grandma.
Yet that’s what happened to 47-year-old couples counsellor and part-time pastor Henrik Lenkeit when he turned on the telly.
The man he thought was his grandfather growing up – was not.
Instead, the German national’s real grandfather was one of the most notorious mass murderers in modern history – Heinrich Himmler.
Himmler – Hitler’s right-hand man and the architect of the Holocaust that killed six million Jews – had an affair in the 1930s, and Henrik’s world would come crashing down when he browsed the Nazi’s Wikipedia page, only to see his grandmother’s face staring back at him.
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Henrik told The Sun: “I was in shock. It was like being in a vacuum, in a black hole. My grandfather was a monster.”
“But even monsters fall in love.”
The shock discovery came after a video online piqued his interest. He was tired and had felt like watching some football at his home on the Costa del Sol, but there was none on.
“I saw this documentary on Himmler and I thought: ‘Interesting’. I remembered him from my history classes a long time ago, but I didn’t realise how powerful he was. After a while I thought: ‘Let’s Google him,’ says Henrik.
“It said he was married, but it also said that he had a mistress. I saw the photo and thought: ‘She looks like my grandmother’.
“Then I saw her name was Hedwig – my grandmother’s name.”
At first, he thought there had been a mistake because the surname, Potthast, did not match his grandmother’s, which was Staeck.
But it slowly dawned on him that other members of his extended family were surnamed Potthast, meaning it could have been her maiden name.
“It took me a while. You don’t get it in the moment, that shock of seeing your grandmother on the internet and then finding out she’s got her own Wikipedia… Your brain kind of protects you,” says Henrik.
“Then it said she had children with him and I saw my uncle’s and my mother’s names. I went: ‘Am I this guy’s grandson?’
“I felt everything and nothing. I felt dizzy.”
Hedwig Potthast met the evil commander of the SS when she began working as his private secretary in 1936, and by the start of WW2 they had become lovers, with Himmler giving her the pet name ‘Bunny’.
Himmler fathered her two children while operating Nazi Germany’s machinery of terror – ordering the construction of concentration camps, overseeing gas chambers and forming death squads that carried out mass executions across occupied Europe.
In fact, their daughter – Henrik’s mother, Nanette-Dorothea – was born the same day as the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler during Operation Valkyrie.
There was even a rumour that Hedwig owned furniture made from human skinthough this has never been confirmed.
By contrast, Henrik has warm memories of his grandmother and of childhood summers spent at her house in southern Germany before she died in 1994.
“We had a good relationship, she was friendly. We called her Mutti which means ‘Mummy’,” he says.
He remembers not being overly close with her husband, Hans Staeck. “Now I understand why – he wasn’t really my grandfather.”
It has taken Henrik a year to process the revelation, especially since his own parents have died and are unable to explain the cover-up.
“Everybody knew. Finding out felt like being the fifth wheel of a car. What more did they have to hide?
“The strange thing is that my father and my mother spoke about history with us. They spoke about the Second World war, they spoke about my grandparents on my father’s side who were Nazis. We even went to see Schindler’s List when I was a bit older.
“History was always a topic of conversation, as in Germany especially we have to deal with our history.
“But they just didn’t tell me that I was Himmler’s grandson. That little detail was left out. It’s a joke.”
“It’s basically been a mourning process, because I lost my identity of 47 years,” he says. “I felt depression, anger, fear, shame and guilt. I felt broken. Was I a monster too because this was my DNA?”
His feelings are a common symptom amongst descendants of Third Reich war criminals. Studies have noted the transgenerational guilt and self-torment felt by many, sometimes with extreme consequences.
“It’s a very heavy burden having someone like that in the family. It’s something that just keeps hanging over you,” Katrin Himmler, who shares Henrik’s family history, told the BBC.
Some, including Hitler’s half-nephew, changed their names in a bid for anonymity, while others, like Niklas Frank whose father governed Nazi-occupied Poland, have made it their life’s work to speak out against the atrocities committed by their ancestors.
He even carries a photo in his wallet of his father’s corpse after his execution during the Nuremberg trials “to be sure that he is really dead”.
Bettina Goering, the great-niece of Hermann Goering, and her brother went one step further and chose to be sterilised so as to not continue the family lineage.
Henrik says: “My grandfather is a curse. But I have actually discovered that it is a blessing for me to know, because I can actually do something.”
He has appeared on television shows warning against the rise of neo-Nazism in Europe and has connected with the descendants of Holocaust victims.
“I know now that I don’t need to bear the guilt. But we do have a responsibility for the future.”
Part of Henrik’s “mission” is also to try and help others come to terms with their Nazi trauma.
“I lost my identity in this process, and now I’m finding it again. We are not victims – to call ourselves that would be to dance on the graves of victims. But if this is your situation you have to understand that you are not broken. Go through your healing process.”
Learning the real identity of his grandfather has left Henrik with more questions than answers.
Did his family hide it to protect him or to protect them? If he could ask his grandmother one thing it would be: “How could you?”
Himmler committed suicide with a cyanide capsule in 1945 after being captured by the British.
Asked what he would say to his grandfather if he could raise him from the dead, Henrik says: “I probably wouldn’t say anything to him.”
Then he makes a punching motion.