2007 paperback with 332 pages in good secondhand condition. Tape to the cover top by a previous owner.

Once upon a time the Himmlers were just a normal German familymiddle-class, hard-working, well-educated. There were three brothers, Gebhart, Heinrich, and Ernst. Heinrich grew up to become the head of Hitlers SS, mastermind of the concentration camp system, and chief perpetrator of the Holocaust. When Katrin Himmler, Heinrichs great-niece, was 15, one of her classmates asked during a history lesson if she was related to the Himmler. "Yes," she stammered, at which there was a deathly hush in the classroom and the teacher, embarrassed and unsure, quickly moved the lesson on. As she grew older, Katrin gave her family history a wide berth, but married to an Israeli whose family was confined to the Warsaw Ghetto and with a young, half-Jewish son, she realized that she could not evade the past so easily. Katrin Himmlers cool but meticulous examination of the Himmler story revealsin all its dark complexitythe gulf between the "normality" of bourgeois family life and the horrors perpetrated by one member. A more nuanced portrait of Heinrich himself emergesnot a lone evil executioner, but a middle-class family man, loved and fully supported by his respectable German family.