Eva Braun met Adolf Hitler in 1929, when she was seventeen and working as a model and assistant to Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. He was forty. Within two years they were seeing each other regularly, and by 1936 she had moved into the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat in Bavaria. She became a fixture in his inner circle, but her political influence was virtually nonexistent.
Whenever official business was conducted, she was asked to leave the room. Hitler wanted to appear as a single man living a chaste lifestyle, believing that a visible partner would dampen his appeal to women in Nazi Germany and discourage them from joining the party. As a result, Eva lived largely in the shadows, and the couple was never seen together in public until 1944. The arrangement took a mental toll.
Eva attempted suicide on more than one occasion, apparently hoping that Hitler would pay her more attention and take her seriously as a partner. She stayed loyal to him regardless, and in 1945, as the Soviets closed in on Berlin, she followed him into the Führerbunker despite his urging her not to. On April 28, 1945, they married inside the bunker in a small civil ceremony witnessed by Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels. She signed the marriage document and officially took the name Hitler.
They held a modest breakfast celebration. The marriage lasted roughly forty hours. On April 30, a gunshot echoed from Hitler’s study. When an SS member entered the room, both Hitler and Eva were dead.
Eva had allegedly swallowed cyanide; Hitler had shot himself. Their bodies were carried up through the bunker to ground level and burned in a bomb crater. Hitler was fifty-six. Eva was thirty-three.
Eva’s remains have never been conclusively identified. Soviet investigators reported dental remains, but they did not entirely match her records. Two colleagues of Hitler’s dentists confirmed that a metallic dental bridge and a gold filling belonging to Eva were found, yet they noted that the bridge had never actually been fitted in her mouth, and suggested the Soviets may have discovered it in the dental office of the Reich Chancellery. Soviet reports also counted eleven teeth at the time of death, while Hitler’s dentist had recorded that she had twenty-six remaining.
The inconsistencies fueled lasting speculation about whether the remains were truly hers. Emmy Göring led a very different life as the wife of Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe commander-in-chief and Hitler’s eventual second-in-command. She was a German actress who met Göring in the early 1930s, after his first wife, Karin, died of heart failure in 1931 at the age of forty-two. The couple married in 1935, and their daughter Edda was born in 1938, named after Mussolini’s daughter, who was a friend of Emmy’s.
That same year, Emmy was given Nazi Party membership as a Christmas present, rather than joining on her own initiative like many other Nazi wives. She came to host important Nazi functions and adopted the self-proclaimed title of First Lady of the Third Reich. This created open animosity between Emmy and Eva Braun, whom Emmy treated with contempt. Hitler eventually told Hermann to get his wife in order and treat Eva with proper respect, yet Emmy was ultimately banned from the Berghof because of her attitude.
Emmy enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle throughout her marriage, owning expensive estates in Germany, Austria, and Poland and amassing considerable wealth, largely derived from Göring’s confiscation of property and art from Jews and others the Nazis deemed undesirable. After the war, Göring was convicted at Nuremberg and sentenced to death, but he cheated the hangman by swallowing cyanide. Emmy was found guilty by denazification courts of being a Nazi and benefiting from the regime. She was sentenced to a year in prison, stripped of thirty percent of her wealth and assets, and banned from performing on stage for five years after her release.
She eventually bought a small apartment in Munich, where she died in 1973 at the age of eighty, having written an autobiography titled My Life with Göring. Magda Goebbels was the wife of Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister and one of Hitler’s most loyal followers. The pair met at a Nazi meeting in 1930, where Magda was impressed by one of the speakers, who happened to be Joseph. She joined the party in September 1930, became the leader of a local Nazi women’s group, worked at party headquarters in Berlin, and eventually became Joseph’s private assistant.
They became romantically involved and married in December 1931, going on to have six children between 1932 and 1940. Hitler grew very fond of Magda, which made Joseph jealous enough to worry that the Führer was a romantic threat. Magda became a close confidante of Hitler, speaking with him regularly about their marriage difficulties. When a Czech actress, Lída Baarová, had an affair with Joseph in 1936, Magda turned to Hitler, who was furious and ordered Joseph to break it off.
Despite their closeness to Hitler, Magda began privately criticizing him from 1942 onward as the war turned against Germany, saying he no longer listened to voices of reason and was leading the country down a path most likely to end in defeat. Her loyalty to the Führer and National Socialism remained intact, however. In 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed, the Goebbels family did not attempt to flee. They moved with their six children into the Führerbunker in Berlin.
After Hitler took his own life on April 30, Magda carried out what many consider one of the most horrendous acts of the war. She helped poison all six of her children as they slept. According to one account, she sedated them first and then crushed cyanide capsules into their mouths. Whatever the exact method, all six children were murdered by their parents.
Joseph and Magda then moved up through the bunker to ground level, where, in the garden of the Reich Chancellery, they were either shot or swallowed cyanide, possibly both. Their bodies were burned, just as Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s had been the day before. In letters she left behind, Magda said she did not want her children to grow up in a world without National Socialism, believing Germany would never recover and that her children’s lives would not be worth living after the regime’s fall, burdened by the shame of their father’s legacy. Lina Heydrich was married to Reinhard Heydrich, the high-ranking SS and police official who planned the Final Solution under Heinrich Himmler.
In 1929, Lina attended a Nazi rally and was captivated by one of Hitler’s speeches, prompting her to join the party. Soon after, the nineteen-year-old met Heydrich, then a naval lieutenant, at a rowing club ball. They hit it off and became engaged in December 1930, but the following year Heydrich was charged with conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman and dismissed from the Navy, because his engagement to Lina broke a promise he had made to another woman months before meeting her. Out of work, Lina encouraged him to apply for a role in the newly established SS.
Himmler was immediately impressed with Heydrich and his ideas for an SS intelligence service, and appointed him chief of a new unit that became known as the SD. The couple had four children between 1933 and 1942, though Heydrich’s party duties kept him away from home for long hours, leaving Lina to run the household alone and straining the relationship. Following Reinhard’s assassination in Prague in 1942, Hitler gifted Lina a large estate in Bohemia in recognition of her husband’s dedication. There she kept prisoners who worked as her slaves and allegedly abused them physically and mentally.
She and her children fled from the estate in April 1945 as Soviet forces approached. After the war, Lina was cleared of charges by a denazification court and even won the right to a pension in hearings between 1956 and 1959, a right initially denied because of Heydrich’s role in the Holocaust. She was also sentenced to life in prison in Czechoslovakia but evaded serving any time. In 1965 she married a theater director during a holiday in Finland and changed her name.
She converted an old summer house into a restaurant and ran it until it burned down in 1969. That same year her husband died. In 1976 she published a book titled Life with a War Criminal, in which she vigorously defended Heydrich, claiming he was not involved in the Holocaust and that the Final Solution was merely a resettlement of Jews to the east. She died in 1985 at age seventy-four.
Margarete Himmler was the wife of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and chief architect of the Final Solution. She was a nurse seven years older than him and had been married once before. They met during one of his lecture tours in 1927 and stayed in written contact afterward. He was attracted to her at first sight, captivated by her blue eyes and blonde hair, and regarded her as the ideal Aryan woman.
They married in July 1928, despite his doubts that his Catholic family would approve of the age difference, her previous marriage, and her Protestant faith. None of his family attended the wedding, though they eventually accepted her. Their daughter Gudrun was born in August 1929. Margarete was far from a passive observer of her husband’s activities.
She joined the Nazi Party in 1928, regularly praised Hitler, admired the Nazi elite, and supported her husband’s role within the regime, even without knowing the full extent of his work. She arranged gatherings for the spouses of senior SS officials, though her domineering manner made her unpopular in those circles. By the end of 1939 she was overseeing Red Cross hospitals throughout Berlin and Brandenburg, and her role sent her on missions to occupied regions. She and Himmler saw little of each other, and the marriage became strained.
In 1938 Himmler took an interest in one of his secretaries, Hedwig Potthast, twelve years his junior, and by 1939 they were romantically involved. He wanted to divorce Margarete and marry his mistress, but such behavior would have violated the moral standards he imposed on his SS subordinates, so Hedwig became his long-term mistress and bore him two children between 1942 and 1944. Margarete learned of the affair in 1941. She and Himmler were already living apart, and she decided to tolerate the relationship for the sake of their daughter.
In April 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed, the couple saw each other for the last time. Himmler attempted to escape justice under a fake name, disguised as a regular soldier, but he was captured by the British and took his own life by swallowing cyanide. Margarete went into hiding in northern Italy and was arrested in May 1945. The Allies regarded her not as an innocent Nazi wife but as someone who had promoted Nazi ideals and supported one of the regime’s most ruthless men.
Held in several internment camps, she was processed by a denazification court in 1948, where she insisted she had never been politically involved, had not known the full scope of her husband’s role, and had simply lived as a nurse and mother. Wartime letters contradicted that account. The court labeled her a major offender and sentenced her to four years in prison, though she served only one because time in Allied internment counted toward the sentence. After release, she changed her name, moved to Munich, and lived quietly and in isolation until her death in 1967 at age seventy-three.
Ilse Hess was the wife of Rudolf Hess, one of Hitler’s earliest supporters and his deputy Führer until 1941. The pair met in the early 1920s as the Nazi Party was gaining traction. Ilse joined the party in 1921 and rejoined in 1925 after it was temporarily banned following the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. She was immediately attracted to Rudolf, but he hesitated to enter a serious relationship.
She introduced him to Hitler, who regularly attended functions hosted by wealthy women. Hitler pressured Rudolf into the marriage, and the couple wed in 1927. In 1937 they welcomed their only child, Wolf, and named Hitler as his godfather. In 1941, as World War II raged, Rudolf made the bizarre decision to fly solo to Scotland in an attempt to broker peace between Germany and Britain.
He failed, was arrested and imprisoned by the British, and Hitler, enraged, condemned him as a madman and stripped him of all party ranks. After the war Rudolf was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty of crimes against peace and conspiracy, and sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau prison in West Berlin. He remained there until his death more than forty years later at age ninety-three. Ilse left Munich after his flight and settled in Hindelang.
She was arrested in 1947 like many other women connected to high-ranking Nazis and served roughly nine months in detention, though she was eventually considered a lesser offender in denazification hearings. After release in 1948 she moved to southern Germany and opened a boarding house in 1955. She remained a fanatical believer in Hitler and National Socialism for the rest of her life, providing support to Silent Help, a secret group that assisted Nazi fugitives and gave financial aid to convicted war criminals. She never stopped trying to clear Rudolf’s name, insisting his flight was not treason but a brave attempt to avoid further bloodshed.
Even after he died in 1987, officially by suicide, she continued her campaign until her own death in 1995 at age ninety-five.