The women who shared the beds and the secrets of history’s most monstrous men did not vanish when the Third Reich collapsed in flames. They scattered across Europe, some clutching cyanide vials stitched into their coat linings, others posing as orphanage directors with stolen children in tow, and a remarkable number simply went home to live quiet lives in the Bavarian countryside. As American and Soviet troops hunted Nazi leaders for the Nuremberg tribunals in 1945, they repeatedly found only the wives, left behind by husbands who were dead, in hiding, or already in Allied custody.
A fierce debate erupted among the occupying powers over what to do with these women. Were they witnesses, innocent bystanders, accomplices, or perpetrators in their own right? Almost all of them claimed innocence, performing the role of devoted housewives concerned only with children and domestic life.
For a few, that performance was genuine. For most, the reality was far more sinister.
Gerda Bormann, born in 1909 in Constance to a family of committed Nazi enthusiasts, was arguably the first Nazi princess in history. Her father, Walter Buch, introduced her to Adolf Hitler personally, and by all accounts she became more fanatical than the man who raised her. She fell madly in love with Martin Bormann, a stocky, thick-necked relative latecomer to the movement who joined the party in February 1927 and married her in 1929.
When Hitler took power in 1933, Bormann rose to become chief of staff to Rudolf Hess and eventually Hitler’s personal secretary, the high point of his career. Gerda could not have been prouder, and she enjoyed every upgrade in lifestyle that came with such proximity to absolute power while bearing and raising nine children according to the Nazi ideal.
The Soviet invasion destroyed that dream. As the Red Army closed on Berlin in 1945, Gerda fled with her nine children, exploiting the chaos by posing as the director of a children’s home with four of her children disguised as orphans. The other five were taken by Martin Bormann to facilitate the escape.
Seeing no way out, Bormann took his own life by biting into a cyanide capsule, though his body would not be found for decades, leaving Allied investigators unaware of his demise. Gerda boarded a school bus with the children and crossed into Italy, stopping in the South Tyrol where the Nazi regional boss secured a place to stash her sensitive materials and found the family a home in a small village about thirty miles from Bolzano.
Safe for the moment, Gerda was in dreadful agony. Her sister-in-law, who had made the journey with her, observed that Gerda, usually a very quiet person, now complained endlessly about a pain in the lower part of her body. A local Italian doctor in Bolzano immediately recognized the seriousness of her condition.
Gerda was suffering from advanced ovarian cancer and needed surgery as soon as possible. By then the Allies were on her trail. Two intelligence agents tracked her down and informed the British unit stationed in the area.
After consulting the doctor who had diagnosed her, a British army major appeared on her doorstep. Gerda panicked, believing she was bound for a concentration camp, but the major assured her she was in no danger. She went instead to a hospital for prisoners of war in Merano.
Surgery was performed but without effect. Facing her imminent demise, Gerda sought solace in religion and converted to Catholicism. She died on March 23, 1946, a few months shy of her thirty-seventh birthday.
Magda Goebbels might have envied Gerda Bormann’s flight from the collapsing Reich. On May 1, 1945, she would never learn what happened to Gerda. Born Johanna Maria Magdalena Ritschel in 1901, she spent most of her childhood in Brussels but was repatriated to Germany when World War I broke out.
In 1921 she married a wealthy German industrialist named Günther Quandt, twice her age. In 1929, when Quandt discovered her infidelity, he ended the marriage, leaving her a small fortune and a luxurious flat in Berlin. In that city, it was impossible to ignore the daily clashes between the Nazis and their opponents.
Urged on by friends, Magda attended a large Nazi rally where the main speaker was Joseph Goebbels. Beyond Hitler, Goebbels was the Nazis’ most effective public speaker, whipping the audience into a frenzy, bristling with aggression. He was extremely intelligent and highly educated, holding a doctorate in literature from Heidelberg University, but he was also a small man with a club foot and a pronounced limp.
Magda paid no attention to this, feeling instead attracted to his voice and his ideas.
She immediately joined the party and bought copies of Mein Kampf and The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the rambling mishmash written by Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg. Magda quickly became leader of the local Nazi women’s group, but her presence caused friction with other members who objected to taking orders from such an overprivileged lady. Frustrated, she set her sights higher and applied for work in Goebbels’s propaganda department, where he could not fail to notice her.
Struck by her obvious class and beauty, Goebbels asked her to take responsibility for his private archive, hoping that close proximity would make it easier to seduce her. By late February 1931, Magda and Goebbels had begun sleeping together. A relationship developed, and by April they were making plans for their future.
Her apartment on Theodor-Heuss-Platz soon became one of the main meeting places for Adolf Hitler and other Nazi officials, which brought the Goebbelses problems, as Joseph became jealous of the attention Hitler gave Magda. The fact that Magda was also infatuated with Hitler did the couple no good, but it was also the main reason she married Goebbels, to be closer to the Führer.
On December 19, 1931, Goebbels and Magda, already pregnant, married in a civil ceremony followed by a church service. Hitler was best man. When Magda thanked him with a kiss, his eyes were full of tears.
On September 1, 1932, their first daughter, Helga, was born. It was a harrowing experience for Magda, who afterward felt exhausted and very weak. Her doctor explained that giving birth had aggravated a pre-existing heart condition, so she should be careful in the future.
Despite this, and before fully recovering, she became pregnant again but suffered a miscarriage in December. The couple spent that New Year’s Eve in Hitler’s cottage at Obersalzberg, a bad idea, as Magda had caught an infection and developed a terribly high fever. She survived, but from that point until the end of her life she would be seriously limited in her movements.
During the war, Magda trained as a Red Cross nurse despite her weak heart and delicate health, which forced her to spend long periods bedridden at home. When Soviet troops entered Berlin in late April 1945, the Goebbels family moved into a subterranean bunker connected to Hitler’s own. On the afternoon of April 30, they met with Hitler and Eva Braun for the last time.
Then Magda and Joseph retreated to their own bunker for a final supper together. The following day, May 1, SS dentist Helmut Kunz was instructed to inject their six children with morphine one by one to render them unconscious. After that, a capsule of cyanide was slipped into each child’s mouth and crushed.
When all the children were dead, Joseph and Magda walked out of the bunker into the Chancellery garden, where they too took their own lives. Goebbels had instructed an SS officer to shoot their bodies to ensure death and then douse them with gasoline and set them alight. Their charred remains were found the following day by Soviet troops.
Ilse Pröhl, young and wealthy, ran into one of her neighbors in Munich one evening, a tall young man in a tattered uniform who introduced himself as Rudolf Hess. She was immediately struck by his appearance, the thick eyebrows, the sunken eyes, the haunted expression, and she felt instantly attracted to him. Whether the twenty-six-year-old Hess had a similar reaction is impossible to say.
Of all the senior Nazis, Hess was the most enigmatic, and over his life it became clear he suffered from mental problems from a very early age. He was also a decorated war hero wounded twice in battle. Ilse decided to pursue him, and they began spending time together.
They became good friends, as their 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 was purely platonic. Still a virgin, Hess showed absolutely no interest in 𝒔𝒆𝒙. For the next few years their relationship lacked a physical dimension, which frustrated Ilse.
Instead they cultivated a spiritual connection based on their shared love of German culture, especially the romantic writers and composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ilse’s favorite writer was Friedrich Hölderlin.
By the autumn of 1920, Ilse had completed her secondary studies, begun a part-time university course in German and library science, and started work at an antiquarian bookshop. Aside from occasional trips to the countryside, she spent most of her spare time working for the Nazi movement, delivering leaflets, putting up posters, helping with the party newspaper, and acting as Hess’s secretary while he attached himself to Hitler and put his body on the line during frequent brawls between Nazi supporters and their left-wing opponents. In recognition of their efforts, Ilse and Hess were granted the privilege of being around Hitler during his free time.
Eventually Hess and Hitler became very good friends. In 1923, Hess was one of the loyal soldiers who fought alongside Hitler during the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Fearing capture, Hess telephoned Ilse to tell her he would attempt to cross into Austria, which he did.
Later he returned to Germany to visit her, but was captured and imprisoned together with Hitler and other instigators. Ilse never failed to show up every Saturday when Hess was allowed six hours of visiting time. Hess would value her loyalty his whole life.
After Hess’s imprisonment, Ilse and Rudolf married in 1927, and their only child was born in 1937. By then Hess had been appointed Reichsminister and spent long hours working. When the war started in 1939, he became increasingly paranoid and his mental health declined until, in 1941, he decided to fly solo to Scotland in hopes of negotiating a peace treaty directly with the British government.
The British authorities put him in a prison instead. After learning the news, Ilse took her son and retreated to a town called Hindelang to be away from Munich and from Hitler’s fury against Rudolf, who was considered a deserter. Rudolf Hess was one of the first Nazis prosecuted and sentenced at Nuremberg.
On June 3, 1947, Ilse Hess was arrested in Munich. Like all the wives of war criminals condemned or executed during the trials, she was transferred to an internment camp in Göttingen. On March 24, 1948, she was released and settled in the Bavarian Alps, where she opened a guest house in 1955.
Rudolf was serving a life sentence in Spandau Prison, which she visited on weekends. Ilse remained a dedicated Nazi until her death at the age of ninety-five, loyal to Hitler and his views. After the war she became a well-respected author, publishing a popular book in 1952 and following it in 1954 with a book titled Rudolf Hess: Prisoner of Peace, the first in a series of collections of her correspondence with her husband.
Upon his death in 1995, he asked to be buried next to her in Wunsiedel, Bavaria.
Margarete Boden met Heinrich Himmler during a three-hour train journey from Munich to Berlin. They struck up a conversation, and by the end of the ride a connection had been made. Having gone their separate ways, they began exchanging letters, an almost daily habit that continued throughout their relationship, largely because they were more often apart than together.
Margarete was eight years older than Himmler. From a comfortable landowning family, she was just old enough to join the German Red Cross in 1914 and become a nurse. After completing her training, she was deployed to a field hospital.
Soon after the war ended, she married Himmler. Their wedding plans depended on Margarete selling her share of inherited property and using the money to purchase a plot of land. They were going to become farmers, Himmler’s long-cherished ambition.
But Hitler had other plans for one of his most loyal associates.
Himmler went on to have a successful career in the Nazi party, becoming chief of police, leader of the Waffen-SS, and Minister of the Interior during Hitler’s presidency. He was also responsible for overseeing the extermination programs against the Jews. In May 1945, Himmler and Margarete parted ways and promised to meet again abroad.
Himmler was captured and bit into a cyanide capsule, dying almost instantly. Margarete and their daughter Gudrun left the town of Gmund as Allied troops advanced into the area. After the US Army invaded Bolzano, Italy, in May 1945, Margarete and Gudrun were arrested.
They were held in various internment camps in Italy, France, and Germany. During her internment, Margarete was interrogated, but it became clear she had not been informed of her husband’s official business. Later that year she was called to testify at the Nuremberg trials, where she also claimed innocence.
She and Gudrun were released in November 1946 from internment and took refuge for a time with the Bethel Institution in Bielefeld. Margarete maintained that while she had been Himmler’s wife, she remained far from the spotlight. Nevertheless, the Allied committee that monitored her was convinced she likely supported the goals of the Nazi party and endorsed her husband’s actions.
Her lawyer insisted during the follow-up appeals process that Margarete could not be responsible for the actions of her husband. Between 1948 and 1953, Margarete was involved in three different trials. The final outcome was that a judge decided she was not to be held accountable for her husband’s crimes, despite the fact that she had not been distant from them.
On January 15, 1953, she was classified as a beneficiary of the Nazi regime and sentenced to thirty days of punitive work. She also lost her pension rights and the right to vote. Their daughter Gudrun left Bethel in 1952, and from the autumn of 1955 onward Margarete lived with her sister Lydia in Heepen.
Margarete told Lydia that all she hoped for was a quiet life and that she was content to disappear into obscurity. That is exactly what she did. When she died on August 25, 1967, at the age of seventy-four, she took all her husband’s secrets with her, including all his affairs.
As Margarete Himmler once confessed to an American interrogator, her husband had never been very faithful. His most famous 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 was with his twenty-six-year-old secretary, Hedwig Potthast. Born on February 6, 1912, to middle-class parents who put her through a high-end secondary school where she learned English, Hedwig subsequently earned her degree at the Economics Institute for Interpreters in Mannheim.
Graduating in 1932, she ended up with a job as a clerk in a post office. Bored and seeking a challenge, Hedwig applied for a position with the Gestapo’s press department in autumn 1935. This was still not enough to satisfy her ambitions, and in January 1936 she became Himmler’s personal secretary.
Her friends called her Bunny because she was always friendly and upbeat, two things Margarete Himmler had never been. Hedwig enjoyed gymnastics and rowing and was popular with her colleagues. In October 1937, she joined other staff members for Himmler’s birthday at Lake Tegernsee and was welcomed into the SS family.
As they worked in close proximity, Hedwig and Himmler’s relationship developed, and sometime over Christmas 1938 they admitted their feelings for each other. Himmler discussed the 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 directly with Hitler, who was famously averse to marriage but also to divorce. He recommended Himmler continue the relationship, but secretly.
For some reason Himmler did not do this. Instead, in 1941 he told his wife he had a mistress and wanted to have children with her. Margarete was sorely bitter but nonetheless accepted the fact and continued being Himmler’s wife.
Hedwig had to resign her duties in 1941, and the Nazi party found her a place to live in the Mecklenburg forest about an hour north of Berlin. Hedwig and Himmler had two children, a boy and a girl. In 1944 he bought her a cottage near Berchtesgaden, where Hitler’s famous Eagle’s Nest was located.
There she led a bizarre life. Once she was visited by Gerda Bormann and her children. According to Gerda, after tea, Hedwig invited them all to the attic to see something special: furniture made from human body parts.
Hedwig explained in detail the process behind the construction of a chair whose seat was a human pelvis and whose legs were human legs resting on real human feet. Hedwig also had copies of Mein Kampf bound in human skin peeled from the backs of Dachau inmates. Gerda remembered that Himmler tried to give Bormann a similarly unique edition of Mein Kampf, but he refused to take it.
Gerda said it was too much for him.
After World War II, Potthast remarried and lived the rest of her life outside the public eye. In postwar interviews, she refrained from answering questions about Himmler’s involvement in war crimes or about her own knowledge of them. When she learned of Himmler’s death on the radio, she went into hiding, living temporarily with Eleonore Pohl in Rosenheim, Upper Bavaria.
She was arrested that same year by members of the US Army and interrogated for several days in Munich. She claimed complete innocence and was never prosecuted for the rest of her life. She remained quiet about her involvement with Himmler and away from the press.
When Himmler’s daughter Gudrun found out about her and about her half-siblings, she tried to make contact, but Hedwig refused. Little information about her postwar life is known, apart from the fact that she died on September 22, 1994, aged eighty-two, in the city of Bonn-Bad Godesberg.
Gudrun Himmler, the third Himmler girl, was Heinrich and Margarete’s only child. She was famous among her father’s acquaintances because everyone thought she embodied the ideal of the pure German race with her blonde braided hair and delicate facial features. As the only child of one of the most prominent families in the Nazi cabinet, she enjoyed a luxurious and happy childhood until the end of the war.
As did other Nazi princesses, she and her mother tried to sneak past the southern border into South Tyrol. But on May 13, 1945, Margarete and her daughter were discovered in the Tyrol and taken into custody by the Allies. They spent two nights at an American-run hotel near Bolzano, one night in Verona, flew to Florence, and ended their journey in a British-run camp and interrogation center near Rome, where they were the only female prisoners.
From Rome, she and Gudrun were transported to Nuremberg. On arrival, Margarete was strip-searched and a vial of potassium cyanide was found stitched into the shoulder padding of her coat. Margarete and Gudrun were placed in a bare cell with two planks for beds.
Recognizing that Nuremberg jail was not exactly an ideal environment for a teenage girl, Colonel Andress of the US Army attempted to make Gudrun’s time there as normal as possible. Nevertheless, Gudrun was interrogated on September 22, 1945. She was asked about her final meeting with her father and whether she had traveled a lot during the war years.
The disciplined, angel-like Gudrun replied that she had spent the last five years either at home or at school. She talked briefly about her tour of a Dachau herb plantation, and when questioned about whether her parents had ever discussed postwar plans or anything else of significance, Gudrun’s response was that they never told her anything at all. The interrogators believed her.
After the war, Gudrun married far-right propagandist and author Wulf-Dieter Burwitz, who later became a party official in the Bavarian section of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany, the NPD. Now a bona fide Nazi princess, Gudrun became an advocate for far-right causes. She found validation among the ranks of Silent Help, an organization that aided former SS members.
She worked tirelessly on its behalf for over forty years, and its members treated her with a degree of respect and admiration that bordered on reverence. At the same time, Gudrun helped set up a barely legal neo-Nazi group for her own generation called the Viking Youth.
In 1958, Gudrun attended a gathering of SS veterans and fellow travelers held in Austria near an ancient Celtic site deep in the Bohemian forests. She was the guest of honor at what would become an annual celebration of her father’s achievements. From 1961 to 1963, she worked under a 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 name as a secretary for West Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, the BND.
At the time the agency was headed by Reinhard Gehlen, an American-recruited general who hired ex-Nazis to work for the BND based on their connections and experience with Eastern Europe and anti-communist activities. Gudrun died in 2018, clinging to the belief that Himmler had done no wrong.
Not much is known about Hedwig Hensel, the wife of Rudolf Höss, commander of the death camps at Auschwitz, apart from the fact that she was always a very reserved and quiet woman. Her life came under scrutiny recently as the main topic of Jonathan Glazer’s award-winning film The Zone of Interest, in which she is portrayed as a typical German housewife in charge of a large household while her husband worked long hours. She was born in 1908 in Norkirchen, Germany, making her one of the youngest Nazi princesses of World War II.
At twenty-one she became forever entangled with one of the darkest chapters in human history through her marriage to Rudolf Höss. The couple settled down and had five children: Klaus, Annagret, Heidetraut, Inge-Brigitt, and Hans-Rudolf. While caring for the children, she accompanied her husband’s meteoric rise within the Nazi party, right until he was appointed commandant of Auschwitz in 1940.
The family moved into a villa located just a few kilometers from the camp, a stark contrast of domesticity and unimaginable barbarity.
For this reason, historians are still debating the extent to which she was actually aware of the horrors happening literally next door. Some claim she remained blissfully ignorant, sheltered by her husband and the trappings of a privileged life within the Nazi hierarchy. Others suggest cracks in this facade.
Many camp survivors testified to seeing Hedwig on horseback near the camp, and some accounts claim she received gifts of furs and jewelry potentially looted from victims. Whether she chose not to know or actively participated in willful ignorance to maintain a comfortable life is a question difficult to answer. As Allied forces closed in on Germany in 1945, Höss attempted to disappear.
Hedwig stayed behind with their children, thinking it would seem suspicious if she fled, and chose instead to stay at home and feign ignorance. She was eventually captured and interrogated by the British. Her testimony offers little insight, leaving historians to grapple with the extent of her knowledge.
This strategy evidently paid off, as Hedwig Hensel was never charged with any crimes. She did not even tell her own children that their father had been hanged at Auschwitz. Her daughter Inge-Brigitt Höss moved to Franco’s Spain, where she worked as a fashion model and met her future husband.
Together they moved to the United States and eventually settled in Arlington, Virginia. It was during a visit to Inge-Brigitt that Hedwig Höss died on September 15, 1989. She was buried under an anonymous tombstone that says only the word Mutti, meaning Mommy in German.
While Hedwig Höss had always been reserved about her political views, other Nazi princesses were far more vocal in their rejection of Jews and racially inferior peoples. One of the youths who flocked to Hitler’s banner in the early 1920s was the teenager Lina von Osten, whose older brother was already a confirmed Nazi supporter. He asked young Lina to accompany him to a party meeting, and that was all she needed to become convinced of the superiority of Hitler’s ideas.
She was especially interested in the fact that Hitler’s movement was geared toward the young, unlike the rest of ancient Prussian politics. She was also a notable anti-Semite. She decided to change her life and abandoned her family home on the island of Fehmarn, very close to Denmark.
Lina came from a wealthy family whose fortune dwindled during the hyperinflation of the early 1920s. Having decided to become a teacher, she headed to the mainland port of Kiel to complete her training at a technical high school, staying at a boarding house for female students.
As she neared the end of her course, Lina and a few friends attended a ball on December 6, 1930. It was during what was otherwise a dull evening that Lina met twenty-seven-year-old naval officer Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich was tall, blonde, with an athlete’s build, and no doubt impressive in uniform, but he also had an abnormally large head, narrow eyes, a small mouth, and jug ears.
Lina found him intriguing and agreed to a meeting the next day. Beyond the powerful physical attraction between them, Lina and Heydrich shared key characteristics. Both were fixed on escaping their backgrounds and forging a different destiny.
They were stubborn and extremely ambitious and felt that the majority of people were inferior beings. Lina was a fervent Nazi before meeting Heydrich and would frequently complain that her husband had not even read Mein Kampf. When he was discharged from the Navy on account of his relationship with Lina, she urged him to join the newly created SS.
After a meeting with Himmler himself, he was hired on the spot to act as chief of the SS’s intelligence service. He went on to have a successful career in the SS but was assassinated during the war for his role in the occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Lina Heydrich was interrogated after the war, but despite her obvious commitment to the Nazi cause, no crimes could be imputed to her, so she was cleared. She later filed a series of court cases against the government of West Germany in 1956 and 1959, winning the right to receive a pension. Because her husband, despite being a war criminal, had been a German police general killed in action, she was entitled to a substantial pension.
In Czechoslovakia, Lina was tried in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment, but this was never enforced. She remarried in 1965 to a Finnish playwright and theater director who died tragically four years later. Lina lived until 1985, having published several books and newspaper articles in which she defended her late husband.
Hermann Göring is the only man on this list to have married twice. Nazi officers had to follow a strict code of conduct, which meant keeping affairs private, and if they married someone, divorce was never an option. Because of Göring’s elite background, Hitler considered him a valuable asset.
He could open doors to the military elite and aristocracy, local power brokers who could help Hitler realize his immediate ambition of using Munich as the starting point of a national revolution. When they were introduced in late 1922, Hitler himself invited Göring to join the movement. Göring was not particularly convinced of Hitler’s ideas, but he was deeply moved by the Führer’s ability to mobilize the masses.
In this sense, the fledgling Nazi party offered Göring an opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond. But it was Göring’s new Swedish wife, Carin, who sealed the deal. Already a confirmed anti-Semite, Carin worshiped the ground Hitler walked on.
To her, Hitler was like a mythical superhero from a Norse legend. Carin did everything in her power to cement the relationship between the two men, and she succeeded, as Göring became one of the main Nazi party members, later creating the Gestapo and being appointed commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe.
Göring would always remember how supportive his first wife had been of his career in the Nazi ranks. Carin and Göring’s romantic love story was used by Goebbels’s propaganda machine, and the couple would show themselves together around the country to boost the popularity of the Nazi party. But Carin was sickly, suffering from tuberculosis by her early forties, when her mother Huldine Fock died unexpectedly in September 1931.
It came as a great shock to the forty-two-year-old Carin. Although her health was still fragile, she went to Sweden for her mother’s funeral but suffered a heart attack the very next day in Stockholm. Göring was informed and immediately joined her there, staying at her side until she died of heart failure on October 17, 1931, four days before her forty-third birthday.
Göring continued to ascend the ranks of the Nazi party, as it was what Carin would have wanted. During one of his tours, he met thirty-eight-year-old actress Emmy Sonnemann. Emmy was quite the opposite of Carin in everything but beauty.
Emmy liked to portray herself as an artist with no feeling for politics and claimed she did her best to avoid discussing Göring’s work. She was much happier talking to him about theater, books, paintings, and human relationships. She had wanted to be an actress ever since she saw a production of The Merchant of Venice at the age of twelve.
Her father, an affluent entrepreneur who owned a chocolate factory, was against her acting career, but her mother was more sympathetic.
Despite her pretended disinterest in politics, Emmy Göring was nicknamed the First Lady of the Third Reich. Thanks to Göring’s contacts and Goebbels’s propaganda machine, Emmy became one of the most respected and well-known actresses in the Reich. Like Göring and Carin before, now Göring and Emmy were the first couple of the Reich.
But this also sealed her destiny. Lina Heydrich may have been a convinced Nazi, but despite her disinterest in politics, Emmy’s high profile earned her a conviction to one year in jail after the war, and she had thirty percent of her assets seized by the Allied government. She was also banned from the stage for five years.
Some years after her release from jail, Emmy Göring settled down in a very small flat in Munich and remained there for the rest of her life.
In 1930, Adolf Hitler asked his close associate Martin Bormann to meet in secret. He had an important thing to ask him. Once alone, Hitler gave him a task requiring secrecy and discretion.
He asked Bormann to check out the ancestry of a seventeen-year-old girl Hitler had met at Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographic studio, where she worked as an assistant. Hitler had taken a shine to her and wanted to know if she was from good Aryan stock. After completing a thorough investigation, Bormann confirmed that Eva Braun did not have a drop of Jewish blood.
Hitler was relieved. The only problem was that Hitler already had a romantic, albeit toxic, relationship with his half-niece, Geli Raubal. Geli was only twenty-two at the time, while Hitler was twenty years older.
He was extremely protective of her, making Geli feel controlled and under surveillance. After 1927, when Hitler learned of an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 she had with a chauffeur, he determined that she would not be left alone with any man other than himself. This was devastating for poor Geli, who did not know what to do.
On the evening of September 18, 1931, while Hitler was in Nuremberg, Geli took the gun he had given her for protection, placed the muzzle against her chest, and fired. She fell to the floor, slowly bleeding to death.
Hitler felt devastated, but with Geli out of the picture he was free to pursue a relationship with Eva. Hitler had strong sentiments against marriage, so until the very end of their lives he denied this possibility to Eva, who requested marriage on multiple occasions. Eva embodied Hitler’s ideal of natural womanhood.
A true blonde, she was athletic and sporty. She practiced gymnastics and swimming and kept herself in shape. She had almost no interest in politics or the state of the nation.
She had few airs or graces and was refreshingly free-spirited. She was emotionally immature and easy for Hitler to manipulate. From her point of view, Hitler was courteous, often charming, indulgent, and attentive.
While his growing fame flattered and excited her, Eva had not yet grasped how cruel and indifferent Hitler could be toward those who dared get close to him. By 1932, she would be deeply aware of his disinterest. Having given herself to Hitler, Eva endlessly waited for him to pay her some attention.
But Hitler was barely in Munich that year. Even when he was, he had precious little time for her. Eva took his absences and silences personally, as a sign of rejection.
Anxiety turned to despair. Like Geli before her, she had her own pistol. Leaving a scribbled farewell note, she put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.
The bullet lodged in her neck, just missing the artery. Bleeding profusely, Eva managed to call a doctor who came immediately and got her to a hospital, where the bullet was successfully removed.
Whether this was a call for attention or an honest attempt to take her life, it worked. Hitler was shocked into action. He vowed that he would take better care of her.
Eva would suffer greatly from Hitler’s absences. He often forgot her birthday and canceled appointments at the last minute. Despite that, Eva remained at the Führer’s side until the bitter end.
After Eva’s suicide attempt, Hitler went out of his way to accommodate her. In August 1935, he rented a three-bedroom apartment for Eva and her sister. The following March, Hitler bought her a two-story villa and a new car.
More importantly for Eva, she was given the room adjoining Hitler’s at the Berghof. It took her a while, and there were continued restrictions on her freedom of movement, but at the Berghof she came into her own. During the final days of the war, as the Soviet army fast approached Berlin, Hitler, Eva, and other Nazi commanders retreated to underground bunkers.
Feeling the end draw near, and as a token of appreciation for Eva’s many years of unwavering support, Hitler conceded her long-standing wish. Hitler had his personal secretary, Martin Bormann, conduct a small civil ceremony in which he married Eva. The ceremony took place in an enclosed concrete environment.
It did not matter. The following day, they would be dead.
Eva spent the rest of her wedding day saying final goodbyes to those remaining in the bunker. As news of Mussolini’s public execution began to reach the bunker, there was no apparent escape. It was then that Hitler sat by Eva and discussed their final decisions.
They made a pact to end each other’s lives, to which she agreed. There was no point in living, she claimed, if he was not by her side. As is publicly known, the details surrounding the actual deaths of Hitler and Eva Braun are unclear.
It is commonly accepted that Hitler shot himself in the head after he witnessed Eva ingesting a cyanide capsule. SS soldiers had been instructed to carry the bodies outside, douse them in gasoline, and set them on fire. The remains were to be buried in a shallow pit in the Chancellery garden.
The following day, when Soviet troops stormed the bunker, they found the charred corpses and secretly carried them back to the Soviet Union without ever publicly confirming that they belonged to Hitler and Eva Braun. For this reason, it was long thought that both Hitler and Eva had somehow escaped Berlin and fled to South America or elsewhere. Only much later, in the 1970s, did the Soviets acknowledge having taken Hitler’s and Eva’s bodies, although by that time there were no more remains available to study, as they had been completely destroyed.
One of the last things Eva did before reaching the end of her life was to write a letter. In that letter, addressed to her sister Gretl, she reminisced on her life and concluded that it had been a happy life. Among the things that made her happy, she said, was to be able to die at the side of the Führer and to be spared the horrors that were to come.
Eva slipped the letter into an envelope and gave it to Hanna Reitsch, a heroic aviator who was also among the last persons to see Hitler alive, as she was married to his personal doctor.
Close to the end of the war in 1944, one of Himmler’s protégés, Hermann Fegelein, a dashing but sadistic SS cavalry officer, married a young woman named Gretl Braun. Six months later, as the Soviet army massed on the borders of the Reich, Fegelein deserted Gretl and was preparing to flee Berlin with another woman and some stolen gold bars when he was apprehended by the SS and executed. Gretl, heavily pregnant at the time, pleaded with Eva for her husband’s life, but to no avail.
Fegelein was executed just hours before Hitler and Eva committed suicide. Gretl had been part of Hitler’s inner circle since 1930, when she and her sister met the Führer. They immediately became frequent visitors to Hitler’s many residences.
Gretl’s early life had been comfortable. Her father, Friedrich Braun, was a school teacher, and the family enjoyed a middle-class existence. She always had a close relationship with her younger sister, Eva, and both were known for their beauty and outgoing personalities.
After the war, Gretl faced the harsh realities of a fallen regime. She was ostracized for her association with the Nazis and struggled to rebuild her life. She gave birth to a daughter, Eva Barbara, named after her deceased sister.
Gretl chose a life of quiet obscurity. She rarely spoke about her past, perhaps burdened by the weight of her family’s legacy. She worked as a secretary and eventually married again in 1958, taking the name Gretl Braun-Löbinger.
Her daughter Eva Barbara tragically lost her boyfriend in a car accident in 1971, after which she took her own life. Gretl Braun passed away in 1987, leaving behind a life forever marked, like many of the women on this list, by her proximity to some of history’s most monstrous figures.
As in the case of the other so-called Nazi princesses, it may be argued that they were young at the time and simply enjoyed the life of luxury attached to being close to powerful men. But this would be deceitful. The truth is that most of these women, Gretl and Eva included, were accomplices and many times collaborators in the Nazis’ criminal endeavors.
Far from being innocent housewives, these Nazi princesses were convinced anti-Semites and racial supremacists. They often supported their husbands, discussed with them the atrocities they were perpetrating on the battlefield and in the death camps, and even pushed them to go further. After the war ended, some, like Eva Braun and Magda Goebbels, took their own lives, while others faced imprisonment as accomplices to the many war crimes of Nazi officials.
Whatever the case, one thing is certain: these women were in part responsible for some of the worst crimes in the history of mankind, and the quiet lives many of them lived afterward stand as a chilling testament to how thoroughly the architects of the Holocaust were shielded by the very domesticity they later hid behind.