Allied intelligence officers interrogating Nazi officials after the fall of the Third Reich identified one woman as potentially their most valuable source: Hedwig Potthast, Heinrich Himmler’s private secretary and longtime mistress. She had lived inside the SS leadership for nearly a decade and had spoken with Himmler by phone almost daily during the final weeks of the war. They questioned her for several days in Munich in the summer of 1945. They stamped their dossier on her as secret.
Then they released her without charge. Himmler’s official wife, Margarete, and his daughter, Gudrun, reached out to Potthast after the regime collapsed, hoping to make contact with the woman who had borne two of Himmler’s children. Potthast refused all contact with them, permanently. Historians who documented the collapse of the Third Reich assumed Himmler’s mistress would eventually break her silence.
The wives and widows of the SS leadership gave interviews in the decades that followed. Memoirs circulated. Testimonies accumulated. Hedwig Potthast gave nothing.
She married, took a new name, settled in Baden-Baden, and spent 50 years in an anonymity so complete that most people who recognized Himmler’s face could not have said what he called her in private. He called her Häschen, little rabbit. She died in 1994 at the age of 82. The secret dossier outlived her.
Potthast was born on February 5, 1912, in Cologne. She trained as a bilingual secretary and reached Berlin through Kurt von Schröder, a Cologne banker and co-founder of the Friends of the Reichsführer-SS. In 1934 she worked at Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. In 1936 she became Himmler’s private secretary.
Her role was administrative intimacy, not policy work. She handled his personal sponsorship, his decisions on decorations, and the private correspondence of a man who led the most powerful police apparatus in Europe while publicly maintaining the image of a disciplined SS family man. She held that position for five years. What Allied interrogators later found when they opened the dossier on Himmler’s mistress was this: at Christmas 1938, Himmler confessed his feelings to her.
The relationship deepened through 1939 and was fully established by 1940. This was the same man who had refused higher SS officers permission to divorce, who had lectured the leadership on the sanctity of the family, and who had made the integrity of the SS household an institutional policy enforced without exception on everyone beneath him. In February 1941, his wife Margarete found out. Potthast resigned from her secretarial position that same month.
She moved to Berlin-Grunewald, then from 1943 to Brookenteen in Mecklenburg, near the estate of SS General Oswald Pohl, whose wife Eleonore was among her closest friends. Her social circle consisted of Lina Heydrich and Gerda Bormann, the inner network of SS women, not the public world of the regime. Lina Heydrich noted in postwar testimony that Himmler became more relaxed through Potthast, more human. Biographer Peter Padfield recorded testimony from a woman who had worked on Himmler’s private train.
She remembered that he kept a photograph of Potthast in his desk and would take it out to look at it while he worked. On February 15, 1942, Potthast gave birth to a son in the Hohenlychen sanatorium. She named him Helge. On July 20, 1944, a daughter was born in Berchtesgaden.
She named her Nanette Dorothea. That same year, Himmler had a house built for Potthast near Schönau am Königssee, at the foot of the Bavarian Alps. He borrowed 80,000 Reichsmarks from the Nazi Party chancellery itself to finance it. The man who managed the moral apparatus of the Reich borrowed party funds to build a house for his mistress.
She was living in it when the war ended. Their last personal meeting took place in mid-March 1945. After that, they spoke by telephone, almost every day, during the collapse of the eastern front, the Allied advance from the west, and the disintegration of everything he had built in 12 years. The last documented telephone call was on April 19, 1945, 19 days before Germany surrendered.
Potthast was at the Achensee when it ended. On May 23, 1945, she heard on the radio that Himmler had died in British captivity. She learned of it the same way the rest of the world did. She immediately went to Rosenheim and stayed with Eleonore Pohl.
The network of SS women remained intact even after the collapse. In June or July 1945, the American army arrested her in Rosenheim. She was taken to Munich. The Seventh Army Interrogation Center handled her case and produced a document stamped secret.
The formal title in the archive: Hedwig Potthast, mistress of Reichsführer Himmler. That document is now held in the law library of Cornell University as part of the Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection. What the postwar dossier confirms about her attitude in that interrogation room is consistent with everything that followed. She refused to answer questions about Himmler’s involvement in the regime’s crimes or about her own knowledge of them.
She was released without charge. When Himmler’s official wife, Margarete, and his daughter, Gudrun, tried to reach her after the war, Potthast refused every contact. Instead, she chose to maintain a very different network. Through the 1950s, she stayed connected with Karl Wolff, Himmler’s former chief of staff, with Lina Heydrich, with Gerda Bormann, and with the family of Himmler’s brother Gebhard.
She rejected the official family. She kept the unofficial one. That distinction was deliberate. At some point in the postwar period, Potthast married a man named Hans Steck and became Hedwig Steck.
According to the 2007 book “The Himmler Brothers” by Katrin Himmler, her first husband died relatively soon after their marriage. His name gave her and her children a new legal identity. She settled in Baden-Baden, a spa town in the southwestern corner of West Germany, far from Munich, far from Berchtesgaden, far from the geography of the war years. She raised her children there in complete anonymity.
No memoirs, no interviews, no testimony beyond what was required, no public statement of any kind in 50 years. Her daughter, Nanette Dorothea, trained as a physician. She died on September 18, 2019, in Wedel, Germany, at the age of 75. The later fate of her son Helge remained unclear in the documented archives.
No private archive about him was ever publicly confirmed. Hedwig Potthast died on September 22, 1994, in Baden-Baden. She was 82 years old. No major obituary noted the event.
She had spent 50 years erasing her traces. She lived through the Nuremberg trials, lived when Eichmann was captured in Argentina and tried in Jerusalem, lived through five decades of the Federal Republic’s confrontation with its own history, lived while the postwar generation of historians assembled the documentary evidence of the SS apparatus within which she had lived for nearly a decade. Through all of that time, she said nothing. The record of other women in this channel’s archive shows a consistent pattern.
The woman eventually speaks. Kay Summersby completed her book in the final months of her life. Lucy Mercer wrote a final letter to Eleanor Roosevelt. Even Lina Heydrich gave interviews, publicly defended Reinhard, and fought German courts over his legacy.
Potthast wrote nothing, defended nothing, denied nothing, confirmed nothing. She was not repudiated by Himmler while he lived. He kept her photograph in his desk. He borrowed party money to build her house.
He called her almost daily until the Reich had only weeks left. The repudiation came from a very different direction. Not from the man, but from the silence she chose for herself when the regime ended. The women who served powerful men and were repudiated by them eventually found ways to make the archive acknowledge their existence.
Potthast was not repudiated. She chose erasure anyway. What she knew about the private world of the man who led the SS, the Gestapo, and the concentration camp system for twelve years of Nazi rule, she took with her to Baden-Baden. The dossier at Cornell still bears the stamp secret on its front page.
She was the last living person who had called him Häschen. She made sure that was the last thing history would confirm.