A SINISTER group of Nazi sympathisers is aiding a former death-camp guard, tracked down by a British historian, to avoid prosecution.

Last month, the historian Guy Walters revealed he had traced Erna Wallisch, 85, who lives alone in a flat outside Vienna.

She looks like a harmless old grandmother, but is wanted for beating prisoners to death at the Majdanek extermination camp in Poland during the Second World War, when she worked as an SS guard.

She is on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list as one of the top surviving war criminals still at large - but now it has emerged she has been supported in recent years by Stille Hilfe - Silent Help - which numbers the daughter of former SS overlord Heinrich Himmler among its members.

Wallisch has told neighbours she had received "warnings" that journalists would try to get her to speak - and that she needed to keep a "low profile" if she wanted to avoid prosecution.

When contacted by phone she confirmed: "I do not speak to journalists. I do not want anything to do with reporters. It is all in the past." She hung up.

After the war, an organisation called ODESSA was said to have been formed by former SS personnel to help the Third Reich's most notorious criminals to flee. It is unclear if it still exists - but Silent Help does.

Silent Help, which claims to be a charity, is partly run by Himmler's daughter, Gudrun Burwitz. It has helped some of the Third Reich's most prominent officers, including Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie - "the Butcher of Lyons" - and Erich Priebke, the slaughterer of Italian civilians and partisans.

Burwitz, now aged 77, does not deny her involvement with Stille Hilfe, describing herself in one of her rare interviews as simply one of the few members in a dying organisation: "It's true I help where I can, but I refuse to discuss my work."

She is the only child of Himmler - the architect of the Final Solution. He nicknamed her "Puppi" - little doll.

The group was established in 1951 and branded by the Wiesenthal organisation as an organiser of the "ratlines" - secret escape routes out of Germany to South America and the Middle East for former Nazis, and later of helping those that remained to evade discovery and prosecution for their crimes.

Now it is accused of helping Wallisch.

Walters, who tracked Wallisch for a book on a history of Nazi- hunting, said: "It is obvious that the fugitive Nazis could not have escaped without a significant amount of assistance.

"To my mind, those who knowingly helped these criminals are not only criminals themselves, but are also condoning some of the foulest crimes of the last century.

"There is no doubt that Stille Hilfe has been providing aid and advice to help keep criminals like Wallisch under the radar of the authorities. Not that Austria wants to be bothered in prosecuting her anyway."

Recently, the Austrian newspaper Heute demanded the government reopen the case against Wallisch and that it refute allegations that links with groups like Silent Help were behind the decision to take no action.

The Austrian justice ministry spokesman, Thomas Geiblinger, told the paper: "We will not give up and will examine every piece of new evidence in the Wallisch case."

That latest evidence includes eye-witness accounts collated by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles of Wallisch beating prisoners to death in Majdanek.

Stille Hilfe, which operates out of Munich, gets most of its cash from Third Reich sympathisers both within and without Germany.

Burwitz, who reveres the memory of her father despite the fact that he has the blood of six million on his hands, is fêted by SS veterans and has attended one of their rallies in Austria.

Like the children of Martin Bormann and Hermann Göring, she knows the infamy attached to having such a man as a father. Unlike them, she keeps alive the memory of her father - the architect of history's greatest industrial-scale mass murder.

Himmler killed himself with a cyanide pill minutes after capture by British soldiers in 1945. It has fallen to "Puppi" to keep his memory, and his fanatical ideals, alive among the monsters the group still aids.

She, like Wallisch, is grandmotherly in her appearance. But when she attended the rally in Austria in the 1990s, no-one who saw her was not in awe of her.

"They were terrified of her," said Andrea Ropke, an authority on neo-Nazism who attended the rally in Ulrichsberg, northern Austria, with Frau Burwitz.

She lives in the Munich suburb of Furstenried with her husband and student daughter. She carried her family surname until she married in her late thirties.

'NICE' TRIP TO DACHAU
GUDRUN Burwitz, née Himmler, was born in 1929.

When she was 12, she was treated to a trip to Dachau, outside Munich, upon which all concentration, labour and death camps were modelled.

More than 30,000 inmates perished there, many in experiments.

In her diary, Gudrun wrote: "Today we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvellous. And afterwards we had a lot to eat... it was very nice."

scotsman.com