Henriette von Schirach was born Henriette Hoffmann on February 2, 1913, in Munich, then part of the German Empire. Her father, Heinrich Hoffmann, was a photographer, and her mother, Therese Baumann, was a former singer and actress who died suddenly in 1928, when Henriette was only 15.
In 1919, Henriette's father met Adolf Hitler, and in April of the following year he joined the Nazi Party. After Hitler took control of the party in 1921, he named Hoffmann his official photographer two years later.
No other photographer was allowed to take pictures of Hitler. Hoffmann tried to portray Hitler as the epitome of the German people, a difficult task because the future Führer lacked the racial profile of the Nordic race. As a result, Hoffmann focused more on Hitler's eyes, which many found dreamy and hypnotic.
Henriette was eight or nine years old when she first met Hitler, who frequently came to the Hoffmann house in Munich for dinner. She later recalled that Hitler may have made a pass at her when she was 17. She said he finally asked her, with a very serious air, "Will you kiss me?" She said no, and he turned around and left, closing the door behind him. When her father returned home and she told him what had happened, he laughed in her face and declared that she was imagining things.
As Hitler's personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann made millions selling images of Hitler. His photographs were published as postage stamps, postcards, posters, and picture books. By 1943, at their peak, Hoffmann's companies employed 300 people and had a turnover of 58 million Reichsmarks, equivalent to almost 550 million US dollars today.
In 1930, alongside her studies at the University of Munich, Henriette Hoffmann worked as Hitler's secretary. She got to know powerful people in the Nazi Party, as well as Hitler's niece Geli Raubal, who presumably committed suicide in 1931, and her father's former apprentice Eva Braun, who later became Hitler's wife.
Henriette met Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Nazi student league and the youngest member of Hitler's entourage. The couple married on March 31, 1932, in Munich, with Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm, the leader of the SA, as witnesses. The reception took place in Hitler's private apartment, and Henriette's wealthy father paid for them to move into a luxurious apartment in Munich.
Between 1933 and 1942, Henriette gave birth to four children: Angelica, Benedicta, Claus, and Robert. After her marriage, Henriette von Schirach became a member of the Nazi Party, though she did not hold a position in the party apparatus. Baldur von Schirach, together with his father-in-law, produced several propaganda books that sold hundreds of thousands of copies, earning Schirach and Hoffmann substantial royalties.
Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power in January 1933. On June 17 of that year, Baldur von Schirach was named the youth leader of the German Reich, with responsibility for all youth organizations in the nation. He appeared frequently at rallies together with Hitler, rousing Hitler Youth audiences.
The largest gatherings usually took place annually at Nuremberg, where Hitler Youth members from all over Germany converged for the annual Nazi Party rally. Since the Hitler Youth and its female section, the League of German Girls, were considered fully Aryan organizations by Nazi officials, premarital sex was encouraged in their ranks. At the 1936 Nuremberg rally, where some 100,000 participants of youth organizations were present, 900 girls between the ages of 15 and 18 returned home pregnant.
Both organizations, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, were led by Baldur von Schirach and became the primary tools the Nazis used to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology, shaping the beliefs, thinking, and actions of German youth. Henriette identified herself with the goals of her husband and the Nazi Party.
In March 1936, the Schirachs purchased Castle Aspenstein in Gmunden, which they soon renovated. The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
On August 8, 1940, Baldur von Schirach became Reich governor and Nazi Party Gauleiter in Vienna, Austria, in the position of Vienna's district leader, which he retained until the end of the war in 1945. Schirach was responsible for the deportation of Vienna's Jews, which he described in a speech on September 14, 1942, saying that if he were reproached for deporting tens of thousands of Jews from the city to the eastern ghetto, he had to answer that he saw it as an active contribution to European culture. During Schirach's tenure, 65,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps.
Schirach moved to Vienna together with his family, and Henriette was delighted with the move. The Schirachs continued to live luxuriously and had no qualms about stealing public money and the property of Jews. Their house was decorated with furniture, artworks, rugs, and tapestries stolen from Jews. The house in which they lived had belonged to a Jew who had fled the country.
One stolen painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder was bought by Schirach with special permission from Hitler for 30,000 Reichsmarks. Another painting by Peter Bruegel the Younger was stolen from Jews who were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where they died. It was purchased by Schirach for 24,000 Reichsmarks, again with permission from Hitler. In all, the Schirachs bought paintings for hundreds of thousands of Reichsmarks, selling most of them for a profit.
In 1943, Henriette was invited to the occupied Netherlands by friends in the German occupation forces. She later claimed she heard screams outside the hotel late at night and went out to investigate. She said she saw Jewish women and children being bundled into transportation to be deported. She then asked a German soldier what they were doing, to which he replied that what Hitler was doing in Holland was wrong, that they had turned the friendly Dutchman into bitter enemies, which was a big mistake, and that she should make sure to tell Hitler this the next time she visited.
Henriette broke off her visit to the Netherlands and telephoned the Berghof, Hitler's mountain residence on the Obersalzberg in the mountains of Bavaria, to make an appointment with Hitler. Years later, Henriette explained what had happened. She told him what she had seen. Hitler's reply was that she was sentimental.
She said Hitler stood up, she stood up, and she told him he should not be doing that. She thought she could allow herself to say so because she had known him for so long. She said she had hurt him deeply, especially in front of other men who were there. Hitler then said she was sentimental and asked how the Jewish women in Holland concerned her. He called it nothing but sentimentality and humanitarian nonsense, saying that every day 10,000 of his best soldiers died on the battlefield while the others carried on living in the camps, meaning the biological balance in Europe was no longer right.
Henriette turned away, letting him shout, and then ran down the staircase separating the big room from the hall. She and her husband Baldur were never invited again after the incident. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary in 1943 that the Schirachs had only discovered their compassion after almost 60,000 Jews had been deported from their doorstep, so to speak.
On July 16, 1944, Schirach's mother, Emma, burned to death when a plane crashed into her house in Wiesbaden as she attempted to rescue her dog. Schirach then became notoriously anxious about Allied air attacks and sent his children away to Castle Aspenstein, followed by Henriette in late autumn 1944. Their art collection was shipped separately.
On April 2, 1945, Vienna came under attack by the Red Army, which by April 9 was approaching the city center. On that day, Schirach broadcast a final call for citizens to fight to the last man. However, Baldur himself did not fight but instead departed his headquarters and fled westward with the Sixth Panzer Army toward Tyrol, where on May 2 he discarded his uniform and went underground under the assumed name Richard Falk in the Austrian town of Schladming.
On June 5, von Schirach unexpectedly revealed his true identity, as he was officially considered dead, and surrendered to the American town commandant. He was arrested by the 103rd Counter Intelligence Corps. Schirach was then tried at the Nuremberg trials held against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany. At the trial, Baldur von Schirach was one of the few defendants to denounce Hitler. He was sentenced to 20 years in Spandau prison in Berlin.
The life full of luxury and privilege also ended for Henriette and her children. Their Castle Aspenstein was confiscated in 1946. According to her memoirs, Henriette von Schirach was imprisoned by the US Army for more than a year and was given the daily task of cleaning the prison's toilets. To do so, she was handed Hitler Youth flags by the prison guards. She recalled being mistreated and held in contempt by the white American guards and said it was only the black soldiers who were decent to her.
Her father, Heinrich Hoffmann, was also arrested and imprisoned, so the von Schirach children were left with no parents or grandparents to look after them. They were taken in for some time by farming families in southern Bavaria and attended local schools.
In July 1949, Henriette von Schirach filed for divorce from her husband, who was still in prison. The divorce was finalized the following year, and she sent Baldur a damning letter in which she wrote, asking whether he had at any time, instead of sitting in his cell studying philosophy, Latin, and French, writing poetry, and thinking how to straighten out his position in history as he called it, actually faced reality and wondered where the next meal was coming from for his wife and children.
Nevertheless, in 1958 she traveled to London to lobby for a reduction of his prison sentence. She described her former husband as in no way a criminal but an idealist and much too good for politics. The journey, however, was unsuccessful, and Baldur von Schirach was released from prison on September 30, 1966, after serving his full sentence. He was blind in one eye and suffering from thrombosis.
In the meantime, Henriette decided to get her former life filled with money and privilege back. In 1955, she bought back their former home, Castle Aspenstein, and after 10 months she sold it for twice the purchasing price.
Obtaining back her father's art collection was the next step. During the war, many artworks looted from persecuted Jewish collectors passed through Henriette's father, Heinrich Hoffmann. After the war, he was arrested and classified by the Allies' art looting investigators as a major offender in Nazi art plundering of Jews. As both art dealer and collector, he was called one of the greediest parasites of the Hitler plague, and his art collection, which contained many artworks looted from Jews, was ordered confiscated by the Allies. Hoffmann, whose collection numbered 278 works, died in 1957 at the age of 72.
After World War II, American officials entrusted more than 10,000 confiscated artworks to the Bavarian state to return them to their rightful owners, many of them Jews whose property had been plundered. Among them were 278 works that had been confiscated from Heinrich Hoffmann. Henriette von Schirach and her family pleaded with officials of the Bavarian State Painting Collections to turn over these works, including a small landscape named "View of a Dutch Square" by the Dutch artist Jan van der Heyden, considered one of the leading architectural painters of the Dutch Golden Age.
Before the war, the painting had been owned by Gottlieb and Mathilde Kraus, Jews who had fled their Vienna penthouse, leaving behind a carefully packed collection of art that was then confiscated by the Gestapo in 1941. Henriette von Schirach persuaded the Bavarians, who made no attempt to return the work to the Kraus family, to give it back to her for a pittance of 300 Deutschmarks. One year later, Henriette sold it at auction for 16,100 Deutschmarks, 50 times what she had paid for it.
In the end, she managed to get back 118 objects of her father's collection by presenting sales records of them. Of those, 92 were simply given back to her and 26 she bought back. Most of them she later resold, in some cases with a large profit margin. Instead of returning the artworks to their rightful owners, they were being handed back to the families of Nazi war criminals such as the von Schirachs.
After divorcing Baldur von Schirach, Henriette once again married and divorced, and wrote three books: "The Price of Glory" in 1956, "Anecdotes about Hitler" in 1980, and "Women Around Hitler" in 1983. When she died on January 18, 1992, she was 78 years old.
Later in her life, Henriette described Hitler as a cozy Austrian who wanted to make himself and others a little bit happy, an interesting opinion about a dictator who will forever be remembered as the man who orchestrated and implemented one of the worst crimes in history.