As World War II ended across Europe, many high-ranking Nazis and members of Hitler's inner circle fled for their lives. They knew capture could mean arrest, a war crimes trial, and possibly the gallows. Some were caught in the mountains of Bavaria trying to keep a low profile.
Far less documented is what happened to the wives these men left behind. Many of these women were seen as enthusiastic supporters of the regime, and some remained loyal to the Third Reich until their dying days. They had also benefited enormously from their husbands' positions.
One example was the wife of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz. She lived in a huge villa inside the camp complex, where the smoke from the crematoria could be seen for miles. Yet she had the audacity to claim she did not know what was truly happening there.
After the war, the Allies launched an initiative to rid German and Austrian society of Nazi ideology. Known as denazification, it removed members of the SS and others involved in running Germany from their positions and outlawed Nazi organizations.
Through vigorous interviews, the wives of high-ranking Nazis, including war criminals, were placed into one of five categories. These were major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, followers, and persons exonerated. Because many had accumulated huge wealth and profited from the suffering of the persecuted, some were classed among the most serious offenders.
Eva Braun was, of course, the wife of Adolf Hitler. Within 40 hours of their marriage inside the Führerbunker in Berlin, both husband and wife lay dead next to each other in Hitler's study.
Eva had lived in the shadows for years. Hitler wanted to project a chaste lifestyle and feared that appearing to be in a relationship would damage his appeal to women in Nazi Germany.
Braun had worked as a photographer's assistant, and her relationship with Hitler was complex. She had attempted to take her own life a couple of times to gain his attention. She held significant power inside the inner circle and at Hitler's mountain retreat, the Berghof.
By all accounts she was vibrant and rather positive, if sometimes childish, and she enjoyed the life Hitler provided. All of that wealth was stolen from those being persecuted. Eva remained loyal to Hitler and declared she would stay by his side.
She traveled to the bunker in April 1945 and refused to leave, despite Hitler urging her to do so, as the Soviet Red Army encircled Berlin. On the evening of April 28, 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun married in a small civil ceremony inside the bunker, witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann.
The couple had a small wedding breakfast and celebration, and Eva changed her name to Eva Hitler on the marriage document. At around 3:30 p.m. on April 30, 1945, a gunshot was heard from Hitler's study.
When Hitler's SS adjutant entered, he saw the lifeless bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Braun had allegedly bitten into a cyanide capsule, while Hitler died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the right temple.
The corpses were wrapped in a rug, carried up through the bunker's emergency exit, placed in a bomb crater, doused in petrol, and ignited. The story then becomes incredibly complicated.
The remains of Eva Braun, except for dental remains, have never been found. The remains may have been moved after cremation, with ashes buried somewhere else.
There was allegedly a dental bridge identified by her dentist, said to have a gold filling as Braun did. But this bridge was never actually fitted, and controversy surrounds it. It is not known whether her remains were found and they could technically still be buried somewhere in Berlin soil.
Margarete Himmler was the wife of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. She was slightly older than him and had trained and worked as a nurse during World War I, specifically in a German Red Cross hospital.
She had been married before she met Himmler in 1927. The pair shared an interest in many things, including herbal medicine. They married in June 1928.
Himmler struggled to reveal the relationship to his parents because his wife was seven years older, divorced, and a Protestant. None of Himmler's family attended the wedding. They had a daughter named Gudrun, born in August 1929.
Margarete benefited greatly from her husband's rise to power, and the family had many huge houses. She saw her duty as the wife of the head of the SS as hosting coffee and tea afternoons with other high-ranking Nazi wives. She was not the most popular, and some Nazis even claimed Himmler was dominated by his wife at home.
As the war began, Margarete operated a military hospital affiliated with the German Red Cross and led missions into lands being conquered by the Wehrmacht. She was very antisemitic and wrote terrible things in her diaries. She reached the rank of colonel in the German Red Cross.
Himmler had taken a mistress, his private secretary Hedwig Potthast, with whom he had two children. By the end of the war, Himmler and Margarete were living apart. They last saw each other in April 1945.
After the war, Margarete and her daughter Gudrun left Gmund and were seized by the US Army in May 1945. They were held in different camps in Italy and Germany. Margarete was interrogated, and it was evident she had not been informed about the deadly business of the SS.
She continued to be interrogated, including at the Nuremberg trials. In 1948 she was categorized under denazification as a lesser offender. She challenged this, claiming her Nazi Party membership was nominal and that she was more loyal to the Red Cross.
It was ruled that she supported the Nazis and endorsed her husband's work. There were even images of Himmler taking his daughter to a concentration camp. In 1951 her classification was lowered.
Margarete Himmler was said not to be accountable for her husband's crimes, but she did benefit from his rise. In 1953 she was reclassified yet again into the second-highest category, as an activist, militant, or profiteer. She was sentenced to 30 days of punitive work and lost her pension rights and her right to vote.
She lived with her sister in the years after the war, along with her adopted son. Her final days were spent with her daughter in Munich. Margarete Himmler died on August 25, 1967, at the age of 73.
Martin Bormann was Adolf Hitler's private secretary, and many in the inner circle called him the "Brown Eminence" because he controlled direct access to Hitler. Bormann later stabbed a number of high-ranking Nazis in the back and brought about their downfalls.
He was married for many years to a woman named Gerda Buch, later Gerda Bormann. She married Martin on September 2, 1929, with Hitler and Rudolf Hess acting as witnesses. Together they had 10 children, the first disturbingly named after his godfather, Adolf Hitler.
Gerda shared her husband's political views and supported him. She believed a new social order could help spread Nazism and held strange beliefs about monogamy. She wanted rid of it and believed every male, like her husband, should have the right to legally marry many different women.
Under her idea, the husband would visit the first wife every two weeks and be encouraged to have as many children as possible. Her husband was known for having many affairs, and Gerda proposed a marriage based on this principle, giving him free rein to sleep with whoever he wanted and have children with them.
She also wanted equal treatment of illegitimate children in law and wanted the word adultery banished. Gerda believed every German woman should be obliged to have at least four children with one man, after which the man could have four children with another woman. Her views were shocking and aimed at populating the Reich for Hitler.
She benefited hugely from her husband's position, and the family had great wealth and power. Before the Third Reich collapsed, Gerda fled the family home in South Tyrol while her husband was in the Führerbunker in Berlin.
A few weeks later she was taken to a military hospital and diagnosed with uterine cancer. She would never see her husband again. Martin Bormann remained in Hitler's bunker and then disappeared during a breakout attempt.
Gerda Bormann died on March 23, 1946, from the effects of mercury poisoning contracted during chemotherapy. She left her children to be raised by a priest named Theodor Schmitz, who later adopted them.
Hermann Göring, the flamboyant Reich Marshal and head of the Luftwaffe, was married twice. His first wife, Carin, was the daughter of a Swedish aristocrat. She met Göring at a castle while visiting her sister, where he was working as a commercial pilot for a Swedish airline.
Göring had been an experienced World War I flying ace, and the pair fell in love and continued to meet. They married on January 3, 1923, and lived together at a hunting lodge. As her husband mixed with the Nazis, Carin joined the party too.
When Göring was shot in the groin during the Munich Putsch, she smuggled him out of Germany to Austria and Italy, where he recovered. Their story was turned into a powerful propaganda tool for Hitler, but it did not end well.
In her 40s, Carin was not well and suffered from tuberculosis. After her mother's death she was struck with grief, which made her even more ill. She traveled to Sweden for her mother's funeral but then had a heart attack.
Göring was by her side as she died of heart failure on October 17. After her death, Göring created a huge hunting lodge named Carinhall after her and interred her remains in a mausoleum on the grounds. Her corpse was later recovered in the 1990s, and her remains were sent to Sweden for DNA testing, which confirmed they were Carin Göring's.
Hermann Göring remarried on April 10, 1935, to Emmy, who was referred to as the first lady of the Reich. She was given Nazi Party membership in 1938. The couple had a daughter named Edda, named after Mussolini's daughter.
Emmy hosted many state functions at the Göring residences before the war, creating an intense rivalry with Hitler's girlfriend Eva Braun. The pair did not get on, and Hitler even ordered Göring to get Emmy to treat Eva with more respect, though Eva was very jealous.
Emmy received a lot of attention, and her husband was one of the most prominent and ruthless art thieves and looters of the war. The family became incredibly wealthy. Her husband even celebrated their daughter's birth by flying 500 planes over Berlin.
Hermann Göring was captured at the end of the war and brought to the Nuremberg trials before taking his own life hours before the hangman would have dispatched him. Emmy was brought to a denazification court, convicted of being a Nazi, and locked up in prison for a year.
She had 30 percent of her property confiscated and was banned from the stage for five years. After her release, Emmy was given a small flat in a building in Munich and wrote her autobiography. She suffered with muscle problems in her final years and died on July 8, 1973, at the age of 80. She is buried in Munich's Waldfriedhof.
Reinhard Heydrich was one of the most disgusting Nazis of the inner circle, and Hitler referred to him as the man with the iron heart. He was ruthless and brutal and became a central figure overseeing agencies such as the SD and Gestapo.
His wife Lina was a big influence on his life. She attended a Nazi rally in 1929, saw Hitler speak, and joined up. At the age of 19, in December 1930, she met Reinhard Heydrich for the first time at a rowing club ball.
The pair were engaged a few weeks after meeting. She stuck by him as he was charged with breaking an engagement promise to a woman he had known before Lina. Admiral Erich Raeder actually sacked Heydrich from the Navy.
It was Lina who persuaded Heydrich to join the SS, and she helped him meet Heinrich Himmler, who favored Heydrich from their very first meeting. He rose quickly through the SS ranks. The pair had two sons.
As Heydrich's work took him away for long periods, he and his wife did not spend much time together, and the strain almost ended in divorce. They had another child, a daughter, in 1939, then another daughter later. Their final daughter was born shortly after Heydrich died in 1942, assassinated by Czech agents in Prague.
Following this, Lina was made a widow, but there was more horror. Her son Klaus died on October 24, 1943, after cycling in the courtyard of their castle, riding onto the street, and being hit by a truck. He died from his injuries, but Lina wanted everyone in the truck, including helpless passengers, shot.
She received the largest estate in Bohemia following her husband's death and sold further properties. She kept a number of prisoners of war working on her estates as forced laborers and physically abused them, beating them if they did not want to do something she wanted.
At the end of the war, the Heydrich family moved to the island of Fehmarn. She was cleared during denazification proceedings, and somehow also won the right to receive a pension. She claimed that as her husband was a German police general, she was entitled to his substantial pension too.
The government had refused to pay this, but during court proceedings Lina Heydrich won. In the meantime, she was tried as a war criminal in absentia in Czechoslovakia and sentenced to life in prison. She later married a Finnish theater director and changed her name.
Lina ran the former Heydrich home as a restaurant, and it burned down in 1969. She was made a widow again following her second husband's death the same year, and she then published her memoirs. She continued to defend Reinhard Heydrich's reputation and denied his involvement in the Holocaust.
She claimed, "One day Heydrich told me that a decision had been made in Hitler's headquarters to create a big reservation for the Jews in Russia which could be developed into a Jewish State. Considering the great advancement of the German troops in Russia, everything looked positive. A resettlement of such magnitude appeared possible."
She remained completely in denial until Lina Heydrich died at the age of 74 on August 14, 1985. She died an unrepentant Nazi.
One of the most well-known Nazi wives was Magda Goebbels. When she met her future husband, the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Magda had already been married to a wealthy industrialist and had a son.
The pair met at a Nazi meeting, and she worked at the party headquarters in Berlin. She and Goebbels became romantically involved from there. During a holiday they formed a relationship, and Goebbels claimed, "We have made a solemn vow to each other. When we have conquered the Reich we will become man and wife. I am very happy."
The pair had many relationship issues. Joseph was sometimes very jealous, and Hitler grew very close to Magda. Goebbels was concerned that the Führer was a romantic threat to him.
They married on December 19, 1931. Magda was very ambitious and became a close confidante of Adolf Hitler, speaking with him at length about their marriage problems. In 1936 the Czech actress Lída Baarová had an affair with Joseph Goebbels, and Magda spoke to Hitler about it. The dictator was furious with his friend and ordered Joseph to break it off.
The Goebbels had six children. During the war years, Magda benefited from her close association with Hitler and her husband's position as propaganda minister and Gauleiter of Berlin. In private she criticized Hitler, believing he no longer listened to voices of reason, and she knew he was leading the German people down a dark path toward defeat.
Magda Goebbels suffered with her health through periods of the war and was known for having a weak heart and neuralgia. In late April 1945, the Goebbels family moved into the upper parts of the Führerbunker, known as the Vorbunker. They would never leave the Reich Chancellery region again.
Magda wrote a farewell letter to her son Harald from her first marriage. She claimed, "By now we've been in the Führerbunker for 6 days already, daddy, your six little siblings and I, for the sake of giving our national socialistic lives the only possible honorable end. You should know I stayed here against Daddy's will, and that even on the last Sunday the Führer wanted to help me get out. You know your mother, we have the same blood. For me there was no wavering. Our glorious idea is ruined and with it everything beautiful and marvelous that I've known in my life. The world that comes after the Führer and national socialism is not any longer worth living in, and therefore I took the children with me, for they are too good for the life that would follow, and a merciful God will understand me when I will give them salvation."
With this, Magda Goebbels had made arrangements for the slaughter of her children. She had them injected with morphine to knock them out and then crushed cyanide ampules into their mouths in the days following Hitler's death in the bunker. She did not want her children living in a world without Hitler, despite many offers to get them to safety. She had pre-planned this, showing her brutal and horrific side.
After the death of the Goebbels children, Joseph and Magda made their way out of the bunker into the garden of the Reich Chancellery, where they died. There are different accounts of what happened. One is that Joseph Goebbels shot his wife as she consumed cyanide, and then an SS officer riddled both bodies with bullets.
The bodies of the Goebbels were then doused in a small amount of petrol and set on fire, but there was not enough to burn them properly, and they were only partially burned. They were later found by the Soviets on May 2, 1945, and Magda's body was more unrecognizable than her husband's. Later the remains of the Goebbels family were buried in secret in a facility in Magdeburg before being exhumed in 1970, burned, and scattered once and for all.
Rudolf Hess was the strange deputy Führer and loyal friend to Adolf Hitler, involved in the creation of the Nuremberg Laws and in writing Mein Kampf. During World War II he took a bizarre flight to Scotland on a peace mission, then spent the rest of the war as a British prisoner of war.
He was married to Ilse Hess, and the pair met in 1920. He was reluctant to enter a marriage and relationship with Ilse, and she actually introduced Hess to Hitler. Hitler pushed Hess into marriage, which occurred on December 20, 1927, in Munich. Hitler was godfather to their son.
During the war, her husband's work often left Ilse alone. She left Munich following Hess's flight and arrest and his subsequent shaming in Nazi Germany, moving to Hindelang. At the end of World War II, Ilse was arrested and subjected to denazification proceedings, held in a detention camp.
She was released in 1948 and settled down and opened a pension. She remained a devoted and dedicated Nazi until the day she died. Ilse spoke out significantly about her husband and remained loyal to Hitler.
She visited her husband, who was locked up inside Spandau Prison for the rest of his life. She also supported the secret Stille Hilfe group, which helped provide support to Nazis. On September 7, 1995, at the age of 85, Ilse Hess died still a Nazi in her final moments.
Albert Speer was Adolf Hitler's architect, and the Führer loved spending time with him. Speer was given huge commissions and constructed the Reich Chancellery and other huge Nazi installations.
In 1922 Speer began to court a lady named Margarete Weber, the daughter of a craftsman. Their relationship attracted criticism from Speer's mother, who believed he was marrying beneath his station and class. The two married in Berlin in August 1928, and Margarete won over the Speer family.
The couple had six children together. But as the Nazis rose to power, Speer became very distant from his family and wife, spending more time schmoozing with Nazis than playing with his children or seeing his wife. Even after his release from Spandau Prison in 1966, he remained distant.
Speer died in London in the company of a woman he had been having a relationship with. He had remained married, but the marriage was nothing, and he had not seen his wife for many years.
Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp, who oversaw the construction of the site that became the deadliest camp of mass slaughter in World War II. Höss married Hedwig Hensel on August 17, 1929, and they had five children.
He moved his wife and family into Auschwitz, where they lived in a huge villa and had servants in the form of prisoners ordered to serve the commandant's family. Hedwig later claimed she never knew what was happening inside the camp, but she and her children were known for treating their servants terribly.
Hedwig received the final letter from her husband. They had been partially separated because he had an affair with, allegedly, a prisoner of Auschwitz, which led to his removal from power. This final letter, sent days before his death, said:
"Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day. And so my actions in the service of the ideology were completely wrong, even though I faithfully believed the idea was correct. Now it was very logical that strong doubts grew within me, and whether my turning away from my belief in God was based on completely wrong premises. It was a hard struggle, but I again found my faith in God."
That was Höss's final letter to his wife. In the years before, Hedwig Höss had been instrumental in her husband's arrest. Höss had gone on the run following the end of the war and was one of the most wanted war criminals.
His wife gave over information that he was living secretly as a gardener in Gottrupel. Their wedding ring, which had their names intertwined engraved within it, was the evidence that brought Höss into custody. Hedwig Höss later moved to America and changed her name following her husband's execution. She lived the rest of her life very quietly, dying in 1989.
The wives of the top-ranking Nazis benefited greatly during their husbands' time in power alongside Adolf Hitler. They were gifted huge sums of money and large properties. In the years after World War II, many lived quiet lives, still secretly devoted to the regime that granted them so much wealth.
They remained loyal to their husbands despite the fact that many of those men had affairs and were involved with other women. The fates of the Nazi wives were certainly varied, but some lived very long lives and died unrepentant Nazis, just like their husbands. For them, Nazism was a way of life, and it did not die with them.