The women who inhabited Adolf Hitler’s inner circle—wives, mistresses, and confidantes who enjoyed extraordinary privilege as the Nazi regime plundered Europe—scattered into the ruins of the Third Reich in May 1945, and their fates, along with those of their children, form a story that stretches across more than seventy-five years to the present day.
These were the so-called Nazi princesses, women who lived gilded, luxurious lives at the expense of the German state, held up as symbols of perfect German womanhood while wielding considerable influence behind the scenes. When their husbands and lovers fell from power so dramatically, the Allies confronted an uncomfortable question: what was to be done with the spouses of the top Nazis?
Among the most intriguing figures was Gretel Braun, sister of Eva Braun and therefore Hitler’s sister-in-law. She had been an important member of the court surrounding Hitler, and in June 1944 she married SS Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, Hitler’s liaison officer, in a ceremony at the Berghof attended by Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann as witnesses.
The wedding took place only three days before the D-Day landings in Normandy. Gretel later accompanied her sister to the bomb-battered Reich Chancellery in Berlin in January 1945 to see her husband, but returned to the Obersalzberg in February because she was pregnant. Eva went back alone to join Hitler in the bunker, which she would never leave alive.
Fegelein’s fate was sealed when he deserted the bunker during the final stages of the Battle of Berlin and was apprehended by Hitler’s bodyguards. Coming on the heels of Himmler’s secret surrender negotiations with the Western Allies, Hitler—egged on by Bormann—condemned Fegelein to death, and he was shot in the Reich Chancellery garden despite Eva Braun’s pleas. Hours later, early on April 29, 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun, making the widowed Gretel his sister-in-law.
Gretel gave birth to a daughter in the resort town of Zell am See on May 5, 1945, a week after Hitler and Eva’s suicides, naming the baby Eva after her sister. Her photo albums, jewelry, amateur film footage, letters—including many exchanged between Hitler and Eva Braun—and mementos had been hidden at Fischhorn Castle, headquarters of her husband’s old SS cavalry division.
Shortly after the war, Gretel was befriended by a German refugee who persuaded her to reveal the hiding place of this historically significant material. The refugee was in reality an agent for the U. S.
Counterintelligence Corps. The entire collection 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, Gretel Fegelein married businessman Kurt Berlinghoff in Munich. The marriage produced no children. Her daughter Eva committed suicide in June 1971 at the age of 26 following the death of her fiancé in a car crash.
In later life, Gretel 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 Gretel’s wedding, Himmler and Bormann, both had complicated family arrangements. Himmler, a shy and fastidious man, 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, and the marriage produced one daughter, Gudrun, born in 1929. The couple later adopted a boy named Gerhard, the son of an SS officer who died before the war.
Himmler saw little of his wife, maintaining two residences—a large villa in Berlin’s Dahlem district and a house at Gmund on the Tegernsee in Bavaria. Gudrun accompanied her father on many state occasions, including at least one visit to Buchenwald concentration camp. But in 1938, Himmler became attracted to one of his secretaries, Hedwig Potthast, twelve years his junior, and the two became romantically involved in 1939.
Himmler wanted to divorce his wife and marry Potthast, but such a move would have been hypocritical given that he demanded the highest moral standards from his SS subordinates. Potthast instead became his long-term mistress, living with him off and on in Mecklenburg. She bore him a son, Helge, in 1942, and a daughter, Nanette Dorothea, on July 20, 1944—the same day a conspiracy of army officers tried to assassinate Hitler 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 senior wartime nurse for the German Red Cross. His adopted son Gerhard saw combat against the Soviets in a Hitler Youth unit and was captured, but survived the war.
Margarete and Gudrun fled Gmund ahead of advancing U. S. troops and reached 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. The 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 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 a Category 2 beneficiary of the Nazi regime, receiving 30 days of punitive work and losing her pension rights and the right to vote.
She died in Munich in 1967 at the age of 73.
Gudrun became a vocal and visible neo-Nazi supporter in West Germany, dubbed the “Nazi princess of the right.” She married author and journalist Wolf-Dieter Burwitz, with whom she had two children. Burwitz was heavily involved with Germany’s right-wing NPD party, and Gudrun was involved with Stille Hilfe, or “Silent Help,” an organization that provided aid to former Nazi and SS officers, helping war criminals such 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 her home in Munich at the age of 88. Himmler’s mistress Hedwig Potthast was arrested by the U.
S. Army in July 1945 and interrogated. She later married and changed her surname, dying in Baden-Baden in September 1994 at the age of 82.
Her son Helge struggled all his life with poor health, while her daughter became a medical doctor and is believed to be alive today in northern Germany.
Martin Bormann, like his archrival Himmler, was a hypocrite concerning the family values officially espoused by the Nazi leadership. In 1929 he married 19-year-old Gerda Buch, whose father was a senior Nazi figure and who knew Hitler well. Hitler and Rudolf Hess were witnesses at their wedding.
The Nazi state encouraged large 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 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; Rudolf Bormann for Rudolf Hess, though his name was later changed to Helmut following Hess’s flight to Scotland in 1941; Heinrich Bormann for Heinrich Himmler; and Eva Bormann for Hitler’s girlfriend.
Gerda Bormann was a fanatical anti-Semite, but her marriage was not easy. The “Brown Eminence,” as Bormann was nicknamed, was constantly unfaithful, and Gerda—a tall woman who towered over her husband—was often humiliated by him in front of guests. She supported the idea of “parallel marriages” so that a man could produce more offspring for Hitler, and tolerated his affairs accordingly.
One of Bormann’s mistresses was the film star Manya Behrens.
At the 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 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, where it was discovered she had uterine cancer. She died in hospital in April 1946 at the age of 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 with a more limited role at Hitler’s court and with enriching himself.
Not well liked by the other leaders, he made himself scarce at the war’s end, abandoning his family to seek refuge in Hamburg, where he was eventually tracked down and arrested on June 14, 1945, in a squalid flat in the company of a young woman 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, and together they had five children. Anneliese, as she was known, evidently married beneath her aristocratic social status, at least according to her mother, who hated Ribbentrop.
She was noted by contemporaries as a stubborn, headstrong woman who controlled her husband. It was she who pushed him into joining the Nazi Party—even Hitler noted that Anneliese appeared to wear the trousers in their marriage.
At the war’s end, Anneliese was arrested and held at the Dachau internment camp, established on the site of the former concentration camp. 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 at the age of 98.
Longevity seems to be a Ribbentrop trait, as three of his children are still alive today: son Adolf von Ribbentrop, named after Hitler, is 85; daughter Ursula von Ribbentrop is 88; and daughter Bettina von Ribbentrop is 98.
Perhaps the most important Nazi wife was not Himmler’s, Bormann’s, or even Hitler’s, but Emmy Göring, the second wife of Luftwaffe chief and, since Hess’s flight to Scotland, Hitler’s designated deputy and successor, Hermann Göring. Born Emmy Sonnemann in 1893, she was an actress in Weimar. During World War I she had married a fellow actor, though they divorced on amicable terms.
In 1926 she met Hermann Göring.
Göring’s first wife, Karin, who was Swedish, had died in October 1931 of heart failure shortly before her 43rd birthday. Göring was devastated, and he perpetuated her name in his grand country estate outside Berlin, which he named Carinhall, and in two of his yachts. Her body remained on the site of Carinhall after the building was blown up on Göring’s orders as the Red Army approached in April 1945; her remains were discovered in 1991 and subsequently reburied 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 fully enjoyed 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 reportedly even banned from Hitler’s Berghof.
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 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. Bormann convinced Hitler that Göring was committing treason, and Hitler ordered him arrested and 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, believing 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 near 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, before his scheduled execution, Göring committed suicide with a concealed cyanide capsule.
Göring had amassed staggering amounts of wealth during the war, much of it illicit, but sorting out what belonged to him and what belonged to his wife and daughter proved very difficult. Emmy Göring was punished as part of the denazification process, 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.
Edda 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, an 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.