They were the women who had had it all: the wives and mistresses of Nazi Germany’s leaders. They had lived gilded, luxurious lives at the expense of the state, being used as symbols for perfect German womanhood, and often wielded considerable influence and power behind the scenes. So what happened to them and their children when their husbands and boyfriends fell from power so dramatically in May 1945?
How did the Allies treat the spouses of the top Nazis?
Many of the children of Hitler’s inner circle are alive today, in a story that spans over 75 years from the defeat of Nazi Germany until the present day. In examining their fates, we begin with an interesting one: Hitler’s sister-in-law. That’s right, sister-in-law.
Of course, I am referring to Gretl Braun, Eva Braun’s sister. Hitler married Eva the day before they died, a reward for her many years of loyalty. Gretl Braun had been an important member of the inner circle, or the court, around Hitler.
In 1944, Gretl had married Hitler’s SS liaison, Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein. There had been a marriage ceremony in Berchtesgaden, at which Himmler and Martin Bormann were the witnesses. The happy couple had then visited Hitler at the Berghof, his private house on the Obersalzberg, before hosting a wedding breakfast at the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s famous reception house high on the Kehlstein Mountain.
This wedding took place only three days before the D-Day landings in Normandy.
Gretl had accompanied her sister to the Reich Chancellery in bomb-battered Berlin on the 19th of January 1945 to see her husband, but returned to the Obersalzberg on the 9th of February. Eva went alone back to Berlin to join Hitler in the bunker, which she would never leave alive. But Gretl stayed on at the Obersalzberg because she was pregnant.
Things had unraveled for Gretl and her husband when Fegelein had deserted the bunker in the final stages of the battle of Berlin. He was apprehended by Hitler’s bodyguards, and this incident came on the back of Heinrich Himmler’s betrayal. The Reichsführer had been secretly negotiating a surrender with the Western Allies behind Hitler’s back.
Hitler, egged on by Bormann, condemned Fegelein to death, and he was shot in the Reich Chancellery garden, despite Eva Braun’s pleas, early on the 29th of April 1945.
Hitler then married Eva Braun, making the widowed Gretl his sister-in-law. Gretl gave birth to a girl in Zell am See on the 5th of May 1945, a week after Hitler and Eva’s suicides. She named the baby Eva after her sister.
All of her photo albums, jewelry, amateur film footage, letters, including many letters written between Hitler and Eva Braun, and many mementos, had been hidden at Fischhorn Castle, the headquarters of her husband Herman’s old SS cavalry division, the Florian Geyer, and where his brother was chief of staff.
Shortly after the war, Gretl was befriended by a German refugee who persuaded her to show him the hiding place of this valuable and historically significant material. However, the refugee was in reality an agent for the US Counterintelligence Corps. All of the material was seized and sent to Washington, DC, though some of it has disappeared and some has never been shown to the public.
In 1954, Gretl Fegelein married businessman Kurt Berlinghoff in Munich. The marriage produced no children. As for her daughter, Eva Fegelein committed suicide in June 1971 at the age of 26, following the death of her fiancé in a car crash.
In later life, Gretl suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and died in October 1987 in the town of Steingaden, Bavaria, at the age of 72.
The two witnesses at Gretl’s wedding in June 1944, Himmler and Bormann, both had interesting family arrangements. Himmler had been a late bloomer, a shy and fastidious man. He met his future wife, Margreta, in 1927.
She was a nurse, and they shared an interest in homeopathy and herbal medicine. They married in July 1928. Margarete was seven years older than Himmler.
The marriage produced only one child, a daughter named Gudrun, born in 1929. Later, Himmler adopted a boy named Gerhard von Aha, the son of an SS officer who had died before the war.
Himmler was a very busy man who saw little of his wife. The couple maintained two residences, a large villa in Berlin’s Dahlem district and a house at Gmund on the Tegernsee in Bavaria. Himmler was able to spend more time with Gudrun, and she accompanied her father on many state occasions and official visits, including at least once during a visit to Buchenwald concentration camp.
But Himmler was to find love with a younger woman in 1938. He took a fancy to one of his secretaries, a woman 12 years his junior, Hedwig Potthast. Potthast and Himmler became romantically involved in 1939 after Himmler had declared his love for her.
He wanted to divorce his wife and marry Potthast, but such a move would have seemed hypocritical since Himmler demanded the highest moral behavior and standards from his SS subordinates and officially frowned on the very behavior he was secretly practicing.
So Potthast became Himmler’s long-term mistress. They lived together off and on in Mecklenburg, and Potthast bore him the sons Helge, born in 1942, and a daughter named Nanette Dorothea, born on the 20th of July 1944. The same day a conspiracy of army officers blew up Hitler with a bomb at the Wolf’s Lair.
At the end of the war, Himmler’s mistress was living in Rosenheim with her children and the wife of SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, one of Himmler’s top commanders and a major war criminal.
Himmler’s wife had been working as a wartime nurse for the German Red Cross in a very senior position. His adopted son, Gerhard von Aha, saw combat against the Soviets as part of a Hitler Youth unit and was captured but later released, surviving the war. Himmler’s wife and mistress remained loyal to him right up to the end.
Margarete and Gudrun fled Gammund just ahead of the advancing US troops and made it to Bolzano in Italy, where they were arrested by the Americans. They were held in a series of internment camps in Italy, France, and Germany before being taken to Nuremberg to testify at the famous trials. This experience deeply affected Gudrun, turning her into a devout defender of her father for the rest of her life.
Released in November 1946, Margarete was also bitter and legally challenged her denazification classification, largely based on her high rank in the German Red Cross. In 1951 her category was changed to the lowest, meaning she was not held responsible for her husband’s crimes. But in 1953 she was reclassified again as Category 2, a beneficiary of the Nazi regime, and received 30 days of punitive work, lost her pension rights, and lost her right to vote.
She was in retirement with her sister and adopted son in a small apartment in Heepen, and her last years were spent with her daughter Gudrun in Munich, where she died in 1967 at age 73.
Gudrun became a vocal and visible neo-Nazi supporter in West Germany. The Nazi princess of the right. She married author and journalist Wolf-Dieter Berwitz, having two children with him.
Berwitz was heavily involved with Germany’s right-wing party, the NPD, and Gudrun was also involved with Stille Hilfe, or Silent Aid, an organization that provided aid to former Nazi and SS officers, helping out such war criminals as Klaus Barbie, aka the Butcher of Lyon, and Martin Sommer, the Hangman of Buchenwald. Because she was Himmler’s daughter, she was held in very high regard in the neo-Nazi community. Gudrun Berwitz died in May 2018 at home in Munich, aged 88.
As for Himmler’s mistress, she was arrested by the US Army in July 1945 and interrogated. Hedwig Potthast lived in Meissendorf and remained in contact with the family of Himmler’s older brother Gebhard and with SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, former chief of Himmler’s personal staff. Potthast later married and changed her last name.
Her son, Helge, struggled all his life with weak health and lived with his mother, while her daughter became a medical doctor and is believed to be alive today living in northern Germany. Hedwig Potthast died in Baden-Baden in September 1994 aged 82.
Martin Bormann was, like his archrival Himmler, a hypocrite concerning the family values officially espoused by the Nazi leadership. In 1929 Bormann married 19-year-old Gerd Buch. Gerd was the daughter of a senior Nazi figure, and she knew Hitler well.
Hitler and Rudolf Hess were witnesses at their wedding.
The Nazi state officially encouraged big families, and Bormann’s family was huge: ten children born between 1930 and 1943. This large brood was often filmed with Hitler at his home, as the Bormann villa was located next door to Hitler’s house, the Berghof, on the Obersalzberg. One child died as a baby.
Many of the children were named for their godparents. The eldest, Martin Adolf Bormann, was named for his godfather Adolf Hitler. Rudolph Bormann was named for Rudolf Hess, though his name was later changed to Helmut following Hess’s flight to Scotland in 1941.
Heinrich Bormann was named for Heinrich Himmler, and Eva Bormann for Hitler’s girlfriend.
Gerda Bormann was a fanatical anti-Semite, but her marriage to Bormann was not easy. The Brown Eminence, as Bormann was nicknamed, was constantly unfaithful. Gerda, a tall woman who towered over her husband, was often humiliated by him in front of guests, while in private Bormann behaved in a loving and sentimental way toward her.
She supported the idea of something called parallel marriages, so that a man could produce more offspring for Hitler, and she tolerated his affairs accordingly. One of Bormann’s mistresses was the film star Manja Behrens, though they had no children together.
At the end of the war, Martin Bormann stayed in the Berlin bunker with Hitler to the bitter end and disappeared in early May 1945 during a breakout attempt by the surviving bunker personnel. Gerda and her children sought refuge in Wolkenstein, a mountain village near Bolzano in Italy. She was arrested and interrogated by US forces, and moved to Merano, where it was discovered that she had advanced uterine cancer.
She died in hospital in April 1946, aged 37.
Her children were proposed by a Catholic priest. Interestingly, Bormann’s elder son, Martin Adolf, later became a Catholic priest himself, though he left the priesthood, married a former nun, and had children. He died in 2013.
Six of Martin Bormann’s children are believed to be alive today.
A top Nazi who fell into disfavor before the end of the war was Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. He was a highly influential figure during the 1930s as Hitler used diplomacy to expand his influence in Europe. With the coming of war diplomacy fell by the wayside, and so did Ribbentrop’s position.
He contented himself by continuing to play a more limited role at Hitler’s court and in enriching himself.
Not well-liked by the other leaders, he managed to make himself scarce at war’s end, abandoning his family to seek refuge in Hamburg. He was eventually tracked down and arrested in a squalid flat in the company of a young woman on the 15th of June 1945 by the Belgian section of the British SAS. He was subsequently hanged after trial at Nuremberg.
This vain and ambitious man had married Anneliese Henkell in 1920, when he was a dashing cavalry officer. Anneliese was the daughter of a wealthy wine producer from Wiesbaden. Together they would have five children.
Anneliese, as she was known, evidently married above her aristocratic social status, at least according to her mother, who hated Ribbentrop.
Anneliese was noted by contemporaries as a stubborn, head strong and woman. She controlled her husband. It was she who pushed him into the Nazi party, and even Hitler noted that Anneliese appeared to wear the trousers in their marriage.
At war’s end, Anneliese was arrested and held at the Dachau internment camp, the former concentration camp.
She and her husband had accumulated enormous wealth, but though the Allies turned their eyes on it, she fought them to keep it through the courts. Much of her fortune actually came from her father’s inheritance, and she fought it with that. She also wrote several books defending her husband’s actions, and died in 1973, fairly unrepentant, at the age of 77.
Her eldest son, Rudolf von Ribbentrop, was a highly decorated Waffen-SS captain during the war, earning the Knight’s Cross for gallantry in combat. Educated at Westminster School in London when his father was German ambassador, he was wounded five times. He became a writer and died in 2019, aged 98.
That longevity seems to be a trait of the family, as three of Ribbentrop’s children are still alive today. Son Adolf von Ribbentrop, named after you know who, is 85. Daughter Ursula is currently 88, and daughter Bettina is 98.
Perhaps the most important Nazi wife after 1938 was not Himmler’s, Bormann’s, or even Hitler’s. It was Emmy Göring, the second wife of the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, and since Hess’s flight to Scotland, Hitler’s named successor, Hermann Göring.
Born in 1893, Emmy Sonnemann was an actress in Berlin. During World War I she had married a fellow actor, though they divorced amicably. In 1926 she met Hermann Göring in the early 1930s.
Göring married her in 1935 at a lavish wedding in Berlin.
In 1938, a daughter was born, named Edda after Mussolini’s daughter, Countess Edda Ciano, since Emmy and the Countess were friends. Emmy was soon described as the First Lady of the Reich, an elegant hostess who enjoyed to the full her husband’s decadent and lavish lifestyle.
Interestingly, Emmy had no time for Hitler’s girlfriend, Eva Braun. She treated her in a generally dignified but distant way, and the friction became so great that Hitler had to intervene and order Göring to have his wife treat Eva with more respect. Apparently, Hitler attempted smooth relations, but Emmy showed no deference, and Göring ordered her around like a chattel.
According to some accounts, Emmy had complained that she wanted to be presented to Hitler as a proper wife, but Hitler, of course, had more time for his successor as his confidant.
Göring’s daughter Edda was treated like a princess. Though courteous and well-mannered, she was spoiled with clothes, toys, and lavish playhouses, including a 50-meter long replica of Frederick the Great’s palace of Sanssouci, paid for by the Luftwaffe. Edda was Göring’s only child, and he doted on her.
Unlike the other Nazi leaders, Göring did not take a successor and remained
faithful to his wife in most respects.
In the latter part of the war, Göring gradually fell from grace as his air force failed to stop the Allied air raids that were destroying city after city in Germany. A few days before Hitler killed himself, Göring attempted to succeed him as leader, believing that Hitler, trapped in his bunker, was no longer the determining factor of life. Bormann convinced Hitler that Göring was digging a pit beneath him, and Hitler ordered his arrest.
Göring was held under house arrest with his family at the Obersalzberg. They survived the RAF bombing raid that destroyed or damaged most of the Nazi leadership’s buildings. The SS then evacuated them to Göring’s castle at Mauterndorf.
On the 5th of May, with the war almost over, Göring attempted to reach the US lines, having surrendered to them. He and his family and staff were indeed challenged by a special US mission, which I have made a video about, and taken to Camp Ashcan in Luxembourg. From there, Göring was taken to the US Army headquarters and then to Nuremberg to stand trial.
Emmy and Edda remained at Mauterndorf and later moved into one of their castles, Burg Veldenstein, in the Franconian forest, near Nuremberg. Hermann Göring was the star defendant at the Nuremberg trials. Emmy and Edda were allowed to have a farewell visit with him in prison.
On the 15th of October 1946, the night before her execution, Göring committed suicide with a cyanide capsule.
Göring had amassed staggering amounts of wealth during the war, much of it illicit, but sorting out what was his property and what was his wife’s and daughter’s was extremely difficult. Emmy Göring was tried as part of the denazification process, convicted of being a Nazi, and sentenced to one year in prison. She also suffered confiscation of 30 percent of her property.
After the war, she and her daughter struggled. Edda completed her schooling, and Emmy purchased a flat in a modern Munich block. She published her autobiography in 1967.
Edda grew into an attractive young woman, studied law at the University of Munich, worked as a law clerk and in a hospital laboratory, but never married, caring for her mother until Emmy’s death in 1973.
Her later years were as complex as her father’s reputation. She died in 2018, the same year as Himmler’s daughter, at the age of 80. She remains buried in Munich, one of the longest-lived and final direct survivors of the old Nazi court.
