They were the women who had it all: the wives and mistresses of Nazi Germany's leaders. They lived gilded, luxurious lives at the expense of the state, were held up as symbols of perfect German womanhood, and often wielded considerable influence 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 more than 75 years from the defeat of Nazi Germany to the present day.
One of the most interesting figures was Hitler's sister-in-law: Gretl Braun, Eva Braun's sister. Hitler married Eva the day before they died, a reward for her many years of loyalty. Gretl had been an important member of the inner circle around Hitler.
In 1944, Gretl married Hitler's SS liaison, Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein. The ceremony took place in the Berghof garden, with Himmler and Martin Bormann as witnesses. The couple 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. The wedding took place only three days before the D-Day landings in Normandy.
Gretl accompanied her sister to the Reich Chancellery in bomb-battered Berlin on January 19, 1945, to see her husband, but returned to the Obersalzberg on February 9. Eva went alone back to Berlin to join Hitler in the bunker, which she would never leave alive. Gretl stayed on at the Obersalzberg because she was pregnant.
Things unraveled for Gretl and Hermann when Fegelein deserted the bunker during the final stages of the Battle of Berlin and was apprehended by Hitler's bodyguards. Coming on the back of Heinrich Himmler's betrayal, 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 April 29, 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun, making the widowed Gretl his sister-in-law.
Gretl gave birth to a girl at the resort town of Zell am See on May 5, 1945, a week after Hitler and Eva's suicides. She named the baby Eva after her sister. Her photo albums, jewelry, amateur film footage, letters, and many mementos had been hidden at Fischhorn Castle, the headquarters of her husband's old SS cavalry division, 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. The refugee was in reality an agent for the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps. All the material was seized and sent to Washington, D.C., 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. 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, Margarete, in 1927. She was a nurse, and they shared an interest in homeopathy and herbal medicine.
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 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 am Tegernsee in Bavaria. Himmler was able to spend more time with Gudrun, who 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 named Hedwig Potthast. Potthast and Himmler became romantically involved in 1939, after Himmler declared his love for her.
Himmler wanted to divorce his wife and marry Potthast, but such a move would have been hypocritical, since he demanded the highest moral 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 a son, Helge, born in 1942, and a daughter, Nanette Dorothea, born on July 20, 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. He survived the war.
Himmler's wife and mistress remained loyal to him right up to the end. Margarete and Gudrun fled Gmund just ahead of advancing U.S. troops and made it to Bolzano in Italy, where they were arrested. The Americans held them in a series of internment camps in Italy, France, and Germany before taking them 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. She received 30 days' punitive work and lost her pension rights and the right to vote.
She lived with her sister and adopted son in a small apartment in Heppenheim, and her last years were spent with her daughter Gudrun in Munich, where she died in 1967 at the age of 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 Burwitz, having two children with him.
Burwitz was heavily involved with Germany's right-wing NPD party, and Gudrun was also involved with Stille Hilfe, or "Silent Help," an organization that provided aid to former Nazi and SS officers, helping such war criminals as Klaus Barbie, 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 Burwitz died in May 2018 at home in Munich, aged 88.
As for Himmler's mistress, she was arrested by the U.S. Army in July 1945 and interrogated. Hedwig Potthast lived in Taisendorf 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 surname. Her son Helge struggled all his life with poor 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 had married 19-year-old Gerda Buch. Her father was a senior Nazi figure, and she knew Hitler well. Hitler and Rudolf Hess were the 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 manner. She supported the idea of so-called "parallel marriages," so a man could produce more offspring for Hitler, and tolerated his affairs accordingly. One of Bormann's mistresses was the film star Manja Behrens, though they had no children together.
At war's end, 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 U.S. forces and moved to Merano. It was discovered that she had uterine cancer. She died in hospital in April 1946, aged 37. Her children were adopted by a Catholic priest.
Interestingly, Bormann's elder son, Martin Adolf, later became a Roman 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 still alive today.
A top Nazi who fell into disfavor before the end of the war was Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, 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 with it 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, where he was eventually tracked down and arrested in a squalid flat in the company of a young woman on June 14, 1945, by the Belgian section of the British SAS. He was subsequently hanged following trial at Nuremberg.
This vain and ambitious man had married Anna Henkell in 1920, when he was a dashing cavalry officer. Anna was the daughter of a wealthy wine producer from Wiesbaden. Together they would have five children. Anneliese, as she was known, evidently married beneath her aristocratic social status, at least according to her mother, who hated Ribbentrop.
Anneliese was noted by contemporaries as a stubborn, headstrong woman who controlled her husband. It was she who pushed him into joining the Nazi Party, with even Hitler noting that Anneliese appeared to wear the trousers in their marriage. At war's end, Anneliese was arrested and held at the Dachau internment camp, where the former concentration camp was located.
She and her husband had grown fabulously wealthy, and though the Allies tried to strip her of her wealth, she fought back vigorously through the courts. Much of her fortune actually derived from inheritances from her father. 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 in action. He died in 2019, aged 98. Longevity seems to be a Ribbentrop trait, as three of von Ribbentrop's children are still alive today: son Adolf von Ribbentrop, named after Hitler, is 85; daughter Ursula von Ribbentrop is currently 88; and daughter Bettina von Ribbentrop is 98.
Perhaps the most important Nazi wife was not Himmler's, Bormann's, or even latterly Hitler's. It was Emmy Göring, the second wife of Luftwaffe chief and, since Hess's flight to Scotland, Hitler's named deputy and successor, Hermann Göring. Born in 1893, Emmy Sonnemann was an actress in Weimar. In World War I she had married a fellow actor, though they divorced on amicable terms.
In 1926 she met Hermann Göring. In the early 1930s, Hermann's first wife, Karin, who was Swedish, had died in October 1931 of heart failure shortly before her 43rd birthday. Göring was devastated by her death and perpetuated her name in the name of his grand country estate outside Berlin, which he named Carinhall, and two of his yachts. Her body remained on the site of Carinhall after the building was blown up on Göring's order as the Red Army approached in April 1945, and her remains were discovered in 1991. She was subsequently re-buried in Sweden.
Göring married Emmy in 1935 at a lavish wedding in Berlin. In 1938 a daughter was born, named Edda after Mussolini's daughter, Countess Edda Ciano, Emmy and the countess being good 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, treating her in a patronizing and contemptuous way. The friction became so bad that Hitler had to intervene and order Göring to have his wife treat Eva with respect. Later, Emmy was apparently even banned from Hitler's house, the Berghof, though the Görings maintained a lavish house just behind Bormann's property, just one of many houses, castles, and hunting lodges Göring owned, all decorated with the finest things, including art looted from Jewish collectors and Paris museums.
Göring's daughter Edda was treated like a princess and, though noted to be courteous and well-mannered, 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 mistresses, remaining completely faithful to his wife.
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 died, Göring unwisely attempted to succeed him as leader, believing that Hitler, trapped in his bunker, was no longer able to exercise control of what remained of the Reich. Bormann convinced Hitler that Göring was committing treason, and Hitler ordered him arrested.
Held under house arrest with his family at his home on the Obersalzberg, they survived the heavy RAF bombing raid that destroyed or damaged most of the Nazi buildings. The SS then evacuated them to Göring's castle at Mauterndorf. Freed on May 5 as the war was almost over, Göring attempted to reach U.S. lines, as he believed he could negotiate the German surrender personally with General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
He and his family and staff were apprehended by a special U.S. intelligence mission and taken to Fischhorn Castle on May 7, 1945. From there, Göring was taken to U.S. headquarters and formally arrested as a war crimes suspect. Emmy and Edda remained at Fischhorn before being interned at Camp Ashcan in Luxembourg.
Released, they moved into one of their castles, Burg Veldenstein, a new house close to Nuremberg. Hermann Göring was the star defendant at the Nuremberg trials, and Emmy and Edda were allowed to visit him in the court prison. On the night of October 15, 1946, the night before his execution, Göring committed suicide with a concealed cyanide capsule.
Göring had amassed truly staggering amounts of wealth during the war, much of it illicit, but sorting out what was Göring's property and what belonged to his wife and daughter was very difficult. Emmy Göring was punished as part of the denazification process. She was convicted of being a Nazi and sentenced to one year in prison. She also suffered the confiscation of 30 percent of her remaining property.
She and her daughter lived in several places after the war while Edda completed her schooling, and Emmy eventually purchased a small flat in a modern block in Munich, publishing her autobiography in 1967. The daughter grew into an attractive young woman, studying law at the University of Munich. She worked as a law clerk and in a hospital laboratory but never married, caring for her mother until Emmy's death in 1973.
Edda became romantically involved with German journalist Gerd Heidemann, who apparently discovered the infamous Hitler diaries in the 1970s and bought and refurbished Hermann Göring's yacht, Carin II. Edda was his girlfriend for five years, introducing him to her Nazi friends, including former SS generals Karl Wolff and Wilhelm Mohnke, the officer responsible for defending the Reich Chancellery and the Führerbunker during the final battle in Berlin.
Edda petitioned the Bavarian government for compensation concerning the expropriation of her father's huge estate, but without success. Edda Göring, unrepentant defender of her father's memory, died the same year as Himmler's daughter, in 2018, and is buried in Munich. She was 80 years old.