Did they defend their parents or did they feel ashamed/guily? Did they remain in Germany? Where any politically active?
There's a book on this subject called "My Father's Keeper - The Children of Nazi Leaders - An Intimate History of Damage and Denial: How Nazis' Children Grew Up with Parents' Guilt" written by a German journalist called Stephan Lebert. He did a series of interviews and general research on the children of high ranking Nazis. Also a film called "Hitler’s Children" made by Israeli director Chanoch Zeevi. It was quite diverse - Martin Adolf Bormann ended up being a quiet and peace-seeking priest. Edda Göring made public appearances, attending memorials for Nazis and took part in political events, Gudrun Burwitz (daughter of Himmler) was a neo-Nazi. Bettina Goering had herself sterilized so she "would not pass on the blood of a monster".
The most disturbing anecdote in the book was Hans Frank’s son Niklas Frank - apparently he masturbated on October 16th (the anniversary of his father’s death) with the image of his father hanging.
Edit: Thanks for the gold.
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This is diverging a bit because he father wasn't as high-ranking as Himmler or as Goebbels was, but Ursula Mahlendorf wrote an autobiography entitled The Shame of Survival: Working through a Nazi Childhood detailing her life under the Nazi regime and her participation in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Maidens, essentially the Hitler Youth for girls). Her father was actively involved in the SS in Silesia in 1935, and after his death Mahlendorf made the Jungmädel an active part of her life - partly to defy her mother, who hated the Nazis, and partly to reconnect with her lost father.
Mahlendorf's account is very pensive. She reflects openly and deeply on what the BDM meant to her, the hole it filled in her life, and how she, in her own words, "became a Nazi" :
Mine is a story of growing up in Nazi Germany in a small town of former Silesia, and of being trained in Nazi ideology and its practices. It tells how I experienced this training and how I unlearned Nazi ideology and attempted to undo its impact on my development…At this late stage of my life it seemed more import an to me than ever to write about my childhood and adolescence as a member of the Hitler Youth, and about its aftermath, because so few personal accounts of involvement in Hitler Youth exist. Even fewer seem to understand the implications of such a childhood, or to attempt to formulate the obligations that arise from it (2).
It's a fantastic resource for getting a look on the ground at the associational programs of the Nazi regime, particularly the ones targeting children. During the war, Mahlendorf has a change of heart about the Nazis, particularly when she is assigned to work as a nurse in a combat station, and the account is partly her attempt to come to terms with her involvement in the regime. Today, she's a Professor emeritus of German Literature at UC Santa Barbara.
Attention all commenters! The documentary Hitler's Children, which can be viewed in full on youtube, has been mentioned eighty gadzillion times enough already.
Thank you.
Also, do not just post a short comment with a link to Wikipedia or a news article about some Nazi's descendant. We are looking for in-depth and comprehensive answers.
Hmm, hi-ranking yes but how Nazi remains a question which is discussed today.
Manfred Rommel was the only son of General Erwin Rommel (the so-called Desert Fox). Manfred aged 15, was in some kind of youth anti-aircraft brigade but deserted after the suicide of his father. He then surrendered himself to the French.
He returned to Germany, studied law and became friends of Patton's son as well as Montgomery's. He then went on to enter politics and was a long serving mayor (Oberburgermeister) of Stuttgart (CDU Faction). He was famous for promoting the interests of immigrants (Stuttgart's industries needed them) and also for ensuring the correct burial of the Red Army Faction terrorists who committed suicide in Stammheim prison. So in terms of Germany's politics, a conservative, yes but definitely as far away from the "new right" as you can get.
Wikipedia gives a good overview.
How Nazi his father was, is something that is currently up for discussion. The original opinion looked something like this, that he was well regarded and considered on the edge, and was well regarded by his enemies. His participation, even if slight in the July plot (for which he was forced to commit suicide) was also a point in his favour. However, more recently he has been reevaluated. He is now portrayed more as a "main-chancer" with his reputation hitched to that of Hitler, the latter using Rommel for popularity (a Popstar General) and Rommel using Hitler for influence with command. The German book that broke this was listing high ranking Nazis of the area and controversially included a chapter about him:
A subsequent made for TV film: Rommel (2012) but heavily backed by historical evidence effectively made this main stream and led to a row involving the Rommel family. So yes, Manfred did try to defend his father.
What seems clear is that Manfred Rommel did not grow up with the image of "My Father the Nazi" (although Erwin was spending a lot of time in Hitler's company), rather he seemed to have an honourable picture and Manfred seemed to try to live up to it.
Edit: Erwin Rommel was forced to take poison otherwise he would be put on trial and executed and his family would lose everything.
This is a very specific example, relating to my particular subject of expertise; but it also speaks to how German society dealt with the Nazi legacy to some extent.
Gudrun Ennslin was the co-founder and co-leader of the Red Army Faction (also know as the Baader-Meinhof Gang). They were a proto-revolutionary urban guerrilla organization bent on kickstarting revolution in Germany throughout the 70s and 80s.
In the 1960s, Ensslin was a smart college student who was politically active in left-leaning causes. She met a young writer named Bernward Vesper, and they founded a small book publishing house together.
Vesper had a very notorious Father, Will Vesper. Will Vesper was often called "Hitler's Favorite Poet" because of his nationalistic (and anti-Semitic) poetry. The poetry is almost unreadable; it certainly is exactly what you'd imagine poorly written poetry designed to appeal to the emotions of one fanatic would read like.
Vesper was very popular nonetheless, (and equally reviled after the war) so after the war his name was a challenge for his son to live down (Bernward was born in 1938.)
Bernward got progressively more radical throughout the sixties; disillusioned by the left party's (the SPD) joining the hated right-wing party (the CDU) in a grand coalition government in 1966. Vesper later founded the Voltaire Pamphlets (and Edition Voltaire) which was a kind of leftist political and high minded literary journal.
His girlfriend, Ensslin, was at the protest in Berlin on June 2, 1967 when police beat the young protestors who were upset by the visit of the Shah of Iran. A young pacifist student was killed by the police and Ensslin, deeply shocked, found herself at the headquarters of the main student organization (the SDS) later that night. She screamed "This is the Auschwitz Generation (that killed that young man), there's no use talking with them. We must answer violence with violence."
Within a year she had graduated to bombing department stores, within a couple of years it was the murder of officials, American soldiers, kidnappings, etc.
But at this point she had left Vesper, for her new boyfriend Andreas Baader. Vesper ended up committing suicide in 1971. His autobiography, detailing his troubling relationship with his father's past and how he rebelled in the 1960s, was published in 1977.
It always interesting to me how some analyses of the Baader-Meinhof Era in the 70s and early 80s seems to ignore the centrality of the issue of anger over their (assumptions about their) parents collective crimes during the Nazi era. But it literally was a core reason why they fought their "war." They believed the Nazi's had never really left power; after the war they mostly just took up their old posts in society and were still running the government, industry, etc. (and Ensslin and others were NOT wrong on this point... But they were definitely wrong on their supposition that Germany had a this fascist underbelly, waiting to oppress the people. In the late 1960s West Germany was a modern, growing, progressive society. It was not a Nazi German 2.0).
Monika Hertwig is an interesting case. Her father was Amon Goeth, commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp who was depicted at length in "Schindlers List". She was 10 months old when Goeth was executed and was only made aware of who her father was in her late teens, her mother only having referred to him as a war hero. In 2006 she took part in a documentary, "Inheritance", in which she returned to Plaszow along with one of her fathers Jewish house maids. It is clear from the way she speaks that the sins of her father have shaped her life significantly and the meetings that she has with former camp inmates are incredibly moving. She cuts a really sad, troubled figure. Hertwig previously had a fling with a Nigerian man which resulted in a daughter, Jennifer Teege, whom she had adopted at birth, ostensibly to protect her from his legacy.
Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had 5 children. His son Klaus worked in Stuttgart and died in the 1980s in Australia. Three of his other children, Hans Jurgen, Heidetraud, and Annegret still live in Germany.
His other daughter Brigitte moved to Spain in the 50s to work as a model and married an American engineer in 1961. He didn't blame her for her father's actions. They traveled around for awhile before settling in the DC area in 1972. Brigitte worked for a German Jewish couple in their fashion salon for the next 35 years, who didn't have a problem with her background either. She still lives in the area and was the subject of a Washington Post magazine last September.
Brigitte is still afraid of facing hostility in Washington should her background be more widely known. She struggles to reconcile her memories of a loving father with the atrocities he committed. She does not acknowledge that millions of people were killed in the Holocaust.
Source: Haring, Thomas. Hiding in N. Virginia, a daughter of Auschwitz, from the September 2013 issue of the Washington Post magazine
It is probably worth noting that the issues brought up relate not only to the nazis children, but their grandchildren as well. Richard von Schirach, the son of Baldur von Schirach, the Reichsjugendführer (basically Head of the Hitler Youth) and later "governor" of Vienna was only three years old when WW2 ended and due to his father being locked up as a convicted war criminal, hardly knew him in his early years. When Baldur was released from prison, they apparently had a difficult relationship, with neither of the willing to relate to each other. Richard studied humanities and went into consulting. He wrote a book about the relationship to his father, "Der Schatten meines Vaters" (My Father's Shadow). His son, Ferdinand, became a criminal attorney and accomplished writer – you could say most of his work revolves around guilt and atonement. He also wrote an essay (only available in german as it seems http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-80266999.html ) in which he describes being 12 years old and attending a jesuit boarding school. On one day, he opened up a history book in class and read his own family name under a picture of his grandfather with title. Next to it was a picture of Claus von Stauffenberg, head of the group that tried to kill Hitler, description said "member of the resistance". The boy he shared his desk with was Stauffenberg's grandson. According to Ferdinand, neither of the knew about their family's history up to that point. He describes them being friends, up to this day. Apparently, at that school, there also were grandkids of Speer, Ribbentrop, Lüninck, all in the same grade, all offspring of either important Nazi figures or resistance.
I recently went on a tour at the Dachau concentration camp. It was a guided tour and, when it ended, the guide told us how his father had been a high-ranked nazi. He told how he never really talked about it for the rest of his life, and their relationship was always weird. This tour guide later joined the German army years later, studied German history to understand better his father, and ultimately became a guide at Dachau. Just though I'd share as it is a very specific example.