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 arrested in the mountains of Bavaria while trying to keep a low profile. But the fate of the wives of these high-ranking Nazis is less well documented.
Many of these women were left behind as their husbands went on the run. They were widely seen as 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 Hedwig Höss, wife of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, who lived in a huge villa inside the camp complex. The smoke from the crematoria could be seen for miles, yet she later claimed she did not know what was truly happening.
After the war, the Allies launched an initiative to rid German and Austrian society of Nazi ideology. Known as denazification, it removed former SS members and those involved in running Germany from their positions and outlawed Nazi organizations.
Through interviews, the wives of high-ranking Nazis, including war criminals, were placed into one of five categories: 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 were 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 in a relationship would damage his appeal to women in Nazi Germany.
Braun had worked as a photographer's assistant. Her relationship with Hitler was complex, and she had attempted to take her own life more than once 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 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 traveled to the bunker in April 1945, refusing to leave despite his appeals 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. She signed her marriage document as Eva Hitler.
At around 3:30 p.m. on April 30, 1945, a gunshot was heard from Hitler's study. Hitler's SS adjutant entered and saw the lifeless bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. She 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 ashes may have been moved and buried elsewhere. There was allegedly a dental bridge identified by her dentist, with a gold filling, but the bridge was never actually fitted, and controversy remains over whether her remains were ever found.
Margarete Himmler was the wife of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. She was slightly older than him and had trained as a nurse during World War I in a German Red Cross hospital.
She had been married before she met Himmler in 1927. The pair shared an interest in herbal medicine and married in June 1928. Himmler struggled to reveal the relationship to his parents because his wife was seven years older, divorced, and Protestant. None of his family attended the wedding.
They had a daughter, Gudrun, born in August 1929. Margarete benefited greatly from her husband's rise to power, and the family had many large 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 claimed Heinrich 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 conquered by the Wehrmacht. She was very anti-Semitic and wrote terrible things in her diaries, reaching 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, he and Margarete were living apart and last saw each other in April 1945.
After the war, Margarete and Gudrun left Gmund and were seized by the US Army in May 1945. They were held in 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, a classification she challenged, 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 did benefit from his rise. In 1953 she was reclassified as an activist, militant, or propagandist, sentenced to 30 days of punitive work, and stripped of her pension rights and right to vote.
She lived with her sister 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 Hitler's private secretary and was referred to by some in the inner circle as the "Brown Eminence" because he controlled direct access to Hitler. He later betrayed several high-ranking Nazis and brought about their downfalls.
He was married for many years to Gerda Buch, later known as Gerda Bormann. They married on September 2, 1929, with Hitler and Rudolf Hess as witnesses.
The couple had 10 children, the first disturbingly named after his godfather, Adolf Hitler. Gerda shared her husband's political views, supported him, and believed a new social order could help spread Nazism.
She held strange beliefs about monogamy, wanting it abolished. She believed every male, like her husband, should have the right to legally marry many women, visiting the first wife every two weeks and having as many children as possible.
Her husband was known for having many affairs. Gerda proposed a marriage based on this principle, giving him free rein to sleep with whomever 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 never saw her husband again. Martin Bormann remained in the bunker and disappeared during a breakout attempt on March 23, 1946.
Gerda Bormann died 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, when he was working as a commercial pilot for a Swedish airline.
Göring had been a World War I flying ace, and the pair fell in love and continued to meet. They married on January 3, 1923, and lived at a hunting lodge. Carin joined the Nazi Party as her husband mixed with Nazi circles.
When Göring was shot in the groin during the Munich Putsch, Carin smuggled him out of Germany to Austria and Italy to recover. Their story became a powerful propaganda tool for Hitler.
In her 40s, Carin was unwell 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 7. After her death, Göring created a huge hunting lodge named Carinhall in her honor 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. They were confirmed to be Carin Göring.
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. Hitler even ordered Göring to get Emmy to treat Eva with more respect, but 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, making the family 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 Göring 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, referred to by Hitler 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 the party. 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 sacked Heydrich from the Navy.
It was Lina who persuaded Heydrich to join the SS and helped him meet Heinrich Himmler, who favored Heydrich from their 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 spent little time together, and the strain almost ended in divorce. They had a daughter in 1939, another daughter later, and their final daughter was born shortly after Heydrich died in 1942.
Heydrich had been assassinated by Czech agents in Prague. Following this, Lina was made a widow. There was more horror when 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.
Lina wanted everyone inside the truck, including helpless passengers, shot. She received the largest estate in Bohemia following her husband's death, sold further properties, and kept a number of prisoners of war working on her estates as forced laborers.
She 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. Lina was cleared during denazification proceedings.
Somehow she also won the right to receive a pension, claiming that as her husband was a German police general she was entitled to his substantial pension. The government had refused to pay, 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, but 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 her husband's involvement in the Holocaust. She claimed Heydrich once told her 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.
She remained completely in denial until she died at the age of 74 on August 14, 1985. She died an unrepentant Nazi.
One of the most well-known wives of the Nazis was Magda Goebbels. When she met her future husband, the future 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 during a holiday.
Goebbels claimed they made a solemn vow to each other that when they had conquered the Reich they would become man and wife. The pair had many relationship issues, and Joseph was sometimes very jealous.
Hitler grew very close to Magda, and Joseph Goebbels was concerned that the Führer was a romantic threat. 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 suffered with her health throughout 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 said they had been in the bunker for six days and that for the sake of giving their national socialist lives the only possible honorable end, she had stayed against her husband's will.
She wrote that their glorious idea was ruined and that the world after the Führer and national socialism was not worth living in. She said she took the children with her because they were too good for the life that would follow, and that a merciful God would understand her when she gave them salvation.
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. Accounts differ on what happened.
One account is that Joseph Goebbels shot his wife as she consumed cyanide, and then their bodies were shot by an SS officer who riddled both with bullets. The bodies 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. The remains of the Goebbels family were later buried in secret in a facility in Magdeburg before being exhumed and burned in 1970.
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. The pair met in 1920, and he was reluctant to enter a marriage and relationship with her. She actually introduced Hess to Hitler, who pushed him 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 and held in a detention camp. She was released in 1948 and settled down, opening a pension.
She was a devoted and dedicated Nazi until the day she died. Ilse spoke out significantly about her husband and remained loyal to Hitler, visiting her husband, who was locked up in 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 woman 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.
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 with whom he had been having a relationship. 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 her children and she 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, allegedly with a prisoner of Auschwitz, which led to his removal from power.
His final letter, sent days before his death, said that based on his present knowledge he could see clearly and bitterly that the entire ideology in which he believed so firmly was based on completely wrong premises and had to collapse. He wrote that his actions in service of the ideology were completely wrong, even though he faithfully believed the idea was correct.
He wrote that doubts grew within him and that he again found his faith in God. It 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 after 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, with their names intertwined engraved inside, 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 husbands had affairs and were involved with other women.
The fates of the Nazi wives were 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.