卡特琳•希姆莱，1967年生于德国丁斯拉肯市，德国纳粹党卫队头目海因里希•希姆莱的侄孙女。大学期间主修政治学，并参与了现代史研究的多个项目，包含种族主义和跨文化交际等题目的研究。丈夫为以色列犹太人，其祖辈在波兰遭到过德国纳粹的迫害。

Katrin Himmler's cool but meticulous examination of the Himmler story reveals in all its dark complexity the gulf between the 'normality' of bourgeois family life and the horrors perpetrated by one member. This riveting family memoir provides essential new information on the private life and background of one of the twentieth- century's most notorious killers not a lone evil executioner, but a middle-class family man, loved and fully supported by his respectable German family. It also offers a unique account of one women's courageous attempt to deal with her chilling inheritance. 'It is part of the creeping discomfort in reading her book to realise the incredibly ordinary middle-class background of these three sons of a rather pompous provincial headmaster and to see how, right until the end, he was almost able to convince himself it hadn't happened like it had' Sunday Times 'You get a vivid sense of a particular kind of German conservatism - Roman Catholic, monarchist - and of how, weirdly, it found an outlet in the upstart, part-pagan thuggery of Nazism' Independent 'One can only admire her bravery ...In a way, Katrin Himmler's book is not a story about the past, but one about the present. The most interesting details are the ones she gives of her own quest' Daily Telegraph