We study the secrecy capacity of a helper-assisted Gaussian wiretap channel with a source, a legitimate receiver, an eavesdropper and an external helper, where each terminal is equipped with multiple antennas. Determining the secrecy capacity in this scenario generally requires solving a nonconvex secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem. To deal with this issue, we first reformulate the original SRM problem into a sequence of convex subproblems. For the special case of single-antenna legitimate receiver, we obtain the secrecy capacity via a combination of convex optimization and one-dimensional search, while for the general case of multi-antenna legitimate receiver, we propose an iterative solution. To gain more insight into how the secrecy capacity of a helper-assisted Gaussian wiretap channel behaves, we examine the achievable secure degrees of freedom (s.d.o.f.) and obtain the maximal achievable s.d.o.f. in closed-form. We also derive a closed-form solution to the original SRM problem which achieves the maximal s.d.o.f.. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed schemes.