Margarete Bordon was forty-two years old in the spring of 1945, and she had no intention of being found. The war was collapsing around her, the Third Reich crumbling into rubble, and her husband—the man whose name had made Europe tremble for years—was somewhere in the chaos, unreachable. She had her daughter Gudrun with her, and she had the assistance of SS personnel who helped her slip across the border into South Tyrol, the northern Italian region still under German control. They made their way to Bolzano, the provincial capital, and there they went into hiding.

Five days after the war in Europe ended, on the 13th of May 1945, the hiding was over. Margarete and Gudrun were arrested in Bolzano and taken into custody. They would be held in Italy and then in France, interrogated, moved from camp to camp, and treated—as Margarete would later bitterly complain—as though they had to atone for the alleged sins of her husband. Sins.

She preferred that word. Alleged sins. It was a strange fate for a woman who had once been the most powerful wife in the SS, the woman who had presided over Wednesday afternoon coffee for the wives of senior leaders, the woman who had inspected the herb gardens at Dachau and toured the women’s camp at Ravensbrück. Her name was Margarete Himmler.

She had been born Margarete Bordon on the 9th of September 1893, in the village of Gonczewo, near the city of Bromberg, then part of the German Empire and today the Polish city of Bydgoszcz. She was one of five children of the landowner Hans Bordon and his wife Elfriede. She trained as a nurse and worked through the First World War, from July 1914 to November 1918, then took a position at a German Red Cross hospital. A first marriage was brief and childless.

With financial support from her father, she opened and directed a private nursing clinic in Berlin. In 1926, in the lobby of a hotel at the Bavarian resort of Bad Reichenhall, she met Heinrich Himmler. She was thirty-four, almost seven years older than him, blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and he saw in her his ideal woman. The former Nazi politician Otto Strasser later claimed that Margarete had seduced Heinrich, and that Himmler had told him she was the first woman with whom he had ever had sexual relations.

The young Himmler had always struggled with women, his timidity rooted largely in his awareness of his own looks. But with Margarete, the connection was immediate and deep. They shared not only anti-Semitism but also a genuine interest in homeopathy, medicinal herbs, and agriculture. They both loved efficiency, neatness, strict domesticity, and a frugal way of life.

They seemed, on the surface, a perfect match. In June 1928, Margarete wrote to Heinrich with casual venom about the co-owner of her Berlin clinic, a gynecologist and surgeon named Bernhard Hauschildt. “That Hauschildt,” she wrote, “those Jews are all the same. ”

They married in July 1928.

Heinrich had difficulty telling his parents about her at all. She was much older than him, a divorcee, and above all a Protestant—three strikes that made the match deeply unwelcome in the Himmler household. None of his family attended the wedding. In their place, the groomsmen were the father and brother of the bride.

Heinrich’s parents eventually accepted Margarete, but the family kept its distance from her for the rest of the marriage. Margarete, like her husband, was captivated by Adolf Hitler. In August 1928 she joined the Nazi Party. The following August, she gave birth to their only child together, a daughter named Gudrun.

They also took in a foster son, Gerhard von Ahe, whose father—an SS officer—had been shot and killed in Berlin shortly after the Nazis seized power. For the early years of their marriage, the Himmlers were far from wealthy. Margarete sold her share of the Berlin clinic for 12,000 Reichsmarks, and the couple used the money to buy a house in Waldtrudering, near Munich. To supplement Heinrich’s modest income as a party employee, they tried to sell their own agricultural products and ran a small chicken farm.

Both ventures failed. In the years that followed, however, the Himmlers enriched themselves through property and valuables stolen from murdered Jews. As Himmler rose through the ranks of the SS, Margarete rose with him, at least formally. She saw it as her duty to host the wives of senior SS leaders for coffee and tea on Wednesday afternoons.

But she remained unpopular in those circles. She was, by virtue of her husband’s position, the most important wife in the SS—and she was determined that everyone in the SS clan respect that fact. Many of them refused. Lina Heydrich, wife of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, particularly resented playing second fiddle to a woman she considered her inferior.

At one point, Margarete allegedly tried to force her husband to persuade Heydrich to leave Lina. Himmler avoided the issue, unwilling to jeopardize his working relationship with Reinhard Heydrich. Some have claimed that Himmler was ashamed of his wife, especially when he compared her to the attractive wives of the two men directly beneath him: Heydrich and Karl Wolff, his own chief of staff. Lina Heydrich mocked Margarete’s appearance openly.

“Size 50 underwear,” she once sneered, “that’s all there was to her. ”

In July 1937, the German journalist Bella Fromm saw the Himmlers together and later recorded her impression of Margarete: dirty blonde, dull, fat, a woman whose only pleasures were the pleasures of the table, since her husband kept her at home. During the Nuremberg rally in 1938, Himmler clashed with most of the wives of the highest-ranking SS leaders, who as a group refused to take any direction from her. Lina Heydrich harbored a violent dislike of Margarete—a feeling that was entirely mutual.

After the war, Lina would describe her to a reporter from Der Spiegel as a narrow-minded, humorless, blonde-haired woman who suffered from agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces that kept her trapped inside her home. Lina also claimed that Margarete had dominated her husband until at least 1936. Baldur von Schirach, the former Hitler Youth leader, wrote in his memoirs that Heinrich Himmler was completely under his wife’s thumb. “The chief of police and the SS was a nobody at home,” von Schirach wrote.

“He always had to give in. ”

Gebhard Himmler, Heinrich’s older brother, characterized Margarete as a cool, hard woman with extremely delicate nerves who radiated no warmth and spent too much time moaning. But he also admitted that she was an exemplary housewife who devotedly loved Heinrich and remained true to him. Her devotion was not reciprocated.

In 1936, Heinrich hired a young secretary named Hedwig Potthast. By 1938, she had become his mistress. Together they had two children: a son, Helge, and a daughter, Nanette Dorothea. Margarete learned of the affair at the latest by February 1941.

She was humiliated, and she responded with bitterness. But the couple did not divorce. The marriage was already broken; they remained legally bound. Heinrich, meanwhile, adored his daughter Gudrun, nicknaming her Puppi—Dolly.

He phoned her every few days and visited as often as he could. He continued to visit his wife and daughter at their home in the Bavarian town of Gmund, mostly to maintain his close relationship with his daughter. During the Second World War, which began in September 1939, Margarete Himmler worked for the German Red Cross. From December 1939, she supervised Red Cross hospitals in the Berlin-Brandenburg military district, a role that took her to countries occupied by the German army.

In March 1940, on a business trip to occupied Poland, she wrote in her diary: “I was in Posen, Lodz, and Warsaw. This Jewish rabble, the Poles, most of them don’t look like human beings, and the dirt is indescribable. It is an incredible job trying to create order there. ”

She rose to the rank of Oberstführerin—colonel—in the German Red Cross, but frequent conflicts with the doctors she supervised eventually forced her to give up the position.

She withdrew to Gmund, where she lived a quiet, secluded life. In February 1945, with the war clearly lost, she wrote to Gebhard Himmler about her husband: “How wonderful that he has been called to great tasks and is equal to them. The whole of Germany is looking to him. ”

Her last contact with Heinrich came in April 1945, just before the war’s end.

Then he was gone. Shortly after, she fled with Gudrun to South Tyrol, where they were arrested in Bolzano. During her internment, Margarete was interrogated repeatedly. It became clear that she had not been informed of her husband’s official business.

Her interrogators described her as having a small-town mentality, a quality that persisted throughout her questioning. She chose to place all the blame on Hitler’s shoulders. “Whatever her husband may or may not have done,” she said, “he was just following the Führer’s orders. ”

After the war, Margarete claimed she had no knowledge of Nazi crimes.

But her own movements suggested she knew far more than she admitted. She was the only leading wife to have seen the inside of a concentration camp system. She had visited Dachau several times to inspect its huge herb garden, and she had toured Ravensbrück, the women’s camp. On those experiences, she chose silence.

Margarete and Gudrun were required to testify at the Nuremberg trials. They were released in November 1946. Margarete later complained that she and her daughter had been held in various camps and treated as though they had to atone for the alleged sins of her husband. She kept a diary from 1937 to 1945.

Today it consists of 122 pages, and the original is held in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D. C. In one of her letters to Heinrich, she had written: “I am so lucky to possess such a good, evil man who loves his evil wife as much as she loves him. ”

Margarete Himmler died on the 25th of August 1967 in Munich, West Germany.

She was seventy-three years old.