The single gunshot echoed through the concrete corridors of the Führerbunker at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon of April 30th, 1945. For a few minutes, no one moved. Then Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, accompanied by SS adjutant Otto Günsche, opened the door to the small sitting room. They found Adolf Hitler and Eva Hitler—the woman who had been Eva Braun until less than forty hours earlier—lifeless on a small sofa beneath a portrait of Frederick the Great.
Hitler had shot himself in the right temple with his Walther PPK. Eva, her legs curled beneath her, had bitten into a cyanide capsule and died within seconds. Her lips were blue from the poison, but otherwise she was unmarked, still elegant in one of her favorite dresses with her hair carefully styled. How Eva Braun came to die beside the man she had loved for sixteen years began more than two decades earlier, in October 1929, when a seventeen-year-old girl from a middle-class Munich Catholic family took a job as an assistant and model for Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer.
Born on February 6th, 1912, Eva Anna Paula Braun was the middle of three daughters of Friedrich Braun, a schoolteacher and decorated First World War sergeant, and Francisca Kronberger, a former seamstress. By all accounts she was a typical teenager—more interested in clothes, boys, and makeup than politics. She attended convent schools, excelled at gymnastics and swimming, and loved to ski in the Bavarian Alps. Nothing in her early life suggested the role she would play in the history of the twentieth century.
It was in Hoffmann’s studio on Schellingstrasse that Eva first encountered the man who would come to dominate her life. She was introduced to him as “Herr Wolf,” a pseudonym he occasionally used. He was forty years old, twenty-three years her senior, and he had come to pick up photographs. Eva was struck by his piercing gaze and later told her sister she had met a gentleman of a certain age with a funny mustache.
Hitler, for his part, was immediately attracted to the young woman’s freshness, though his affections at that time were directed elsewhere. At this crucial juncture, Hitler was deeply involved with his half-niece, Geli Raubal, the daughter of his half-sister Angela, who lived with him in his Munich apartment. Hitler was possessive and controlling to an extreme degree, restricting Geli’s social life and blocking her ambition to pursue a singing career. When he discovered her attachment to his chauffeur, Emil Maurice, he dismissed the man from his personal service.
The relationship ended tragically on September 18th, 1931, when Geli was found dead in her room with a gunshot wound to the chest from Hitler’s own Walther pistol. The death was ruled a suicide, though the circumstances have fueled conspiracy theories for decades. Hitler was devastated—he refused to eat, threatened suicide himself, and became a vegetarian around this time, later claiming he could not bear to eat meat because it reminded him of Geli’s corpse. Geli’s room was preserved as a shrine, and Hitler reportedly carried her photograph with him for the rest of his life.
It was in the aftermath of Geli Raubal’s death that Hitler began to spend more time with the young Eva Braun. Their relationship developed slowly, complicated by Hitler’s obsessive need for secrecy. Hitler drew much of his political support from German women who saw him as an eligible bachelor devoted wholly to Germany, and he was determined to maintain that illusion at all costs. Eva was relegated to the shadows, forbidden from appearing at his side at official functions and denied any public acknowledgement of their relationship.
Eva struggled desperately with the limitations Hitler placed on their relationship. On August 10th or 11th, 1932, she attempted suicide by shooting herself in the chest with her father’s pistol. The bullet struck near her neck but missed vital organs, and she survived after treatment at a Munich clinic. Most historians believe the attempt was a bid for Hitler’s attention rather than a genuine desire to end her life.
The attempt worked—Hitler became more committed to her, providing increased attention and financial support. By the end of 1932, they had become lovers. Three years later, in May 1935, she made another suicide attempt by taking an overdose of sleeping pills, again succeeding in securing Hitler’s attention. This time his response was more substantial.
He purchased a villa for Eva and her sister Gretl in Munich, complete with servants and a car. More significantly, Hitler gradually began to integrate Eva into his household at the Berghof, his mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. She became a fixture there from 1936 onward, though she remained invisible to the German public. Eva’s position at the Berghof was peculiar.
She lived there much of the time, supervised the household staff, selected menus, and played hostess to Hitler’s inner circle. Yet when important visitors arrived—dignitaries, generals, foreign leaders—she was expected to disappear into her room, forbidden from joining the official functions. She was a ghost in her own home, present but unseen. During the war years, Eva lived a sheltered life of extraordinary leisure.
While the conflict killed millions across Europe, she spent her days reading romance novels, exercising, sunbathing nude in the Berghof’s secluded gardens, and indulging her passion for photography. Many of the surviving color photographs and home movies of Hitler and his inner circle were taken by her with her Leica cameras and 16mm movie camera. She documented Hitler relaxed and even playful, playing with the Goebbels children, throwing sticks for his German Shepherd Blondi, hosting tea parties and picnics as if the world were not burning around them. As the war turned decisively against Germany in late 1944 and early 1945, Eva made a choice that would define her legacy.
In early April 1945, against Hitler’s explicit orders, she traveled from Munich to Berlin to be with him in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. The journey was dangerous—roads clogged with refugees fleeing the advancing Soviet forces and the constant threat of Allied air attack. She could have stayed in Munich or fled to Switzerland or Argentina as so many other Nazi wives and functionaries would do in the coming weeks, but she chose instead to join the man she had loved for sixteen years. The Führerbunker was a cramped, claustrophobic complex of rooms buried beneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery.
Construction had begun in 1944, and the conditions were grim. The air was stale, recycled through mechanical ventilators that could not entirely eliminate the smell of diesel generators, sweat, and fear. The walls vibrated constantly as Soviet artillery pounded the city. The mood oscillated between manic optimism as Hitler convinced himself that phantom armies would arrive to save Berlin, and deep despair.
Yet Eva appeared almost cheerful during these final weeks, maintaining her appearance with careful attention to her hair, makeup, and clothing, changing outfits several times a day. She organized small parties with champagne and dancing in a surreal attempt to create normalcy amid the apocalypse. On April 23rd, 1945, she wrote her last letter to her sister Gretl, who had given birth to a daughter just days earlier. She wrote that she was happy to be near Hitler and asked Gretl not to worry about her.
She signed it “Eva B. ” and added a postscript asking her sister to destroy her personal correspondence and expressing hope that they would meet again in Valhalla. On the evening of April 28th into the early morning hours of April 29th, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were married in a brief civil ceremony in the bunker’s conference room. A minor Nazi official named Walter Wagner was located in Berlin, where he was serving with the Volkssturm, and brought to the bunker to perform the ceremony.
Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann served as witnesses. When it came time to sign the certificate, Eva began to write the letter B for Braun before crossing it out and replacing it with Hitler. After sixteen years as his hidden companion, she was finally legally his wife. She was thirty-three years old.
She would be Eva Hitler for less than forty hours. After the brief ceremony, Hitler hosted a modest wedding breakfast with champagne and sandwiches, then retired to dictate his last will and political testament to his secretary, Traudl Junge. In his testament, he blamed the Jews for starting the war, claimed he had never wanted conflict with Britain or France, named Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor, and expelled both Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler from the party for their attempts to negotiate with the Allies. On the afternoon of April 30th, after a final lunch, Hitler and Eva said their farewells to the members of the inner circle who remained in the bunker.
The parade of handshakes and embraces took on a funeral quality, with many saying goodbye in tears. Hitler appeared calm but exhausted. Eva was composed and even gracious, thanking the staff for their service and expressing hope that they would survive the coming days. Hitler had given final orders for their remains to be burned after their deaths, not wanting his body to be displayed by the Soviets as Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci had been by Italian partisans just days earlier.
The photographs of Mussolini’s corpse hanging upside down at a gas station in Milan had made a profound impression on Hitler. After the gunshot, their bodies were wrapped in blankets and carried up the stairs to the Reich Chancellery Garden by Linge, Günsche, and several SS guards. In a shallow trench under constant bombardment, the bodies were doused with approximately 200 liters of gasoline and set ablaze. The cremation was incomplete due to the ongoing shelling.
After several hours, the partially burned remains were buried in a nearby shell crater. Soviet troops discovered them several days later, initially misidentified them, then correctly identified them through dental records, and subjected them to autopsy. In 1970, Soviet authorities exhumed the remains for the last time, cremated them completely, and scattered the ashes into the Biederitz River to ensure that no grave could ever become a shrine. Much of the German public did not learn of Eva Braun’s existence until after her death.
She had been kept so thoroughly hidden that even some of Hitler’s closest associates were uncertain about the exact nature of their relationship. Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary who spent the final weeks in the bunker with Eva, later described her as friendly and kind, someone who tried to lighten the oppressive atmosphere with her warmth and humor, remembering birthdays and sharing her rationed chocolates. Others saw her as shallow and trivial, a woman with no understanding of or interest in the great events happening around her. Her sister Ilse, interviewed after the war, expressed frustration with Eva’s political naivety and her refusal to use whatever influence she might have had with Hitler for positive ends.
While Eva Braun chose to end her life alongside Hitler, other Nazi wives faced very different fates. Magda Goebbels, the wife of Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister and a woman often referred to as the unofficial first lady of the Third Reich, would prove even more horrifying. Johanna Maria Magdalena Behrend was born on November 11th, 1901 in Berlin, the illegitimate daughter of a housemaid and a building contractor. When her mother married a Jewish businessman named Richard Friedländer in 1908, the seven-year-old Magda was adopted by him and took his surname.
Friedländer was a kind and generous man who treated Magda as his own daughter, providing for her education and introducing her to a life of middle-class comfort. This fact would later prove deeply ironic given Magda’s fervent commitment to the violently antisemitic Nazi ideology that would eventually kill her stepfather in a concentration camp. After her mother and stepfather divorced, Magda struggled to find her place in a society convulsed by defeat and economic collapse. In 1921, at age nineteen, she married Günther Quandt, an industrialist nearly twice her age and one of the wealthiest men in Germany, who had made his fortune manufacturing uniforms and equipment for the German army during the First World War.
The marriage produced a son, Harald, born in November 1921, but was otherwise deeply unhappy. Magda later described feeling like a prisoner in a gilded cage. The divorce came in 1929 after eight years, leaving her comfortably wealthy, beautiful, educated, and financially independent. During this period of searching, Magda had a brief but intense romantic involvement with Victor Arlosoroff, a young Zionist activist.
The relationship ended dramatically when Arlosoroff discovered that Magda had become involved with a Nazi party official. According to some accounts, Arlosoroff confronted Magda with a gun, though the bullet went wide. He immigrated to Palestine, where he became a prominent leader in the Zionist movement before his assassination on a Tel Aviv beach in 1933—a mystery that remains unsolved. Magda found her new purpose at a Nazi party rally in 1930, where she was captivated by the fiery oratory of Joseph Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin.
Despite his unprepossessing appearance—he was barely five feet tall with a club foot from a childhood bout of osteomyelitis—Goebbels possessed a charisma and rhetorical power that drew Magda irresistibly. She joined the Nazi party on September 1st, 1930, receiving membership number 297,442, and quickly rose through the ranks of the local women’s organization. The relationship between Magda and Joseph developed rapidly, fueled by shared ideological passion and mutual ambition. Goebbels recorded in his diary: “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. ” Adolf Hitler himself took an interest in the couple, recognizing in Magda the social polish and maternal image the Nazi movement needed. The marriage would serve the interests of all three parties—Goebbels gained a beautiful and sophisticated wife, Magda gained access to power, and Hitler gained a proxy family representing the movement’s ideals.
Magda and Joseph were married on December 19th, 1931, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, with Hitler serving as a witness. Over the next decade, Magda gave birth to six children: Helga (born September 1st, 1932), Hildegard (April 13th, 1934), Helmut (October 2nd, 1935), Holdine (February 19th, 1937), Hedwig (May 5th, 1938), and Heide (October 29th, 1940). All their names began with H, supposedly as a tribute to Hitler. The Goebbels family became a centerpiece of Nazi propaganda, with Magda frequently photographed with her husband and children, presenting an image of Aryan domestic perfection.
Behind the carefully crafted public image, however, the Goebbels marriage was deeply troubled. Joseph was a notorious womanizer, pursuing actresses, secretaries, and society women. His diaries, discovered after the war, reveal a man obsessed with sexual conquest. The most serious affair began in 1936 with the Czech actress Lída Baarová, and by 1938 Goebbels was contemplating leaving Magda entirely.
He approached Hitler to request permission for a divorce. Hitler was furious, demanding that Goebbels end the relationship immediately. The affair was broken off—Baarová was banned from German films and expelled from the country—but the trust between Magda and Joseph had been permanently damaged. Magda herself had affairs during this period, most notably with Karl Hanke, her husband’s state secretary.
Despite these difficulties, Magda remained committed to the Nazi cause with a fervor that sometimes exceeded her husband’s. What is not open to question is Magda’s treatment of her own Jewish stepfather. Richard Friedländer, the man who had adopted her, given her his name, and treated her as his own daughter, was eventually arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he died in 1939. There is no record that Magda or her husband made any effort to save him.
As the war drew to a close, Magda faced a choice that would define her legacy. Unlike many Nazi wives who fled or surrendered, Magda chose to bring her children into Hitler’s bunker and die alongside the regime. She refused numerous offers to send her children to safety, including one from Albert Speer. Magda explained her reasoning in her final letter to her surviving son Harald, who was a prisoner of war of the British.
The world that would come after the Führer and National Socialism, she said, was not worth living in. Her children were too good for the life that would follow the regime’s defeat. Better to spare them this fate by ending their lives before it began. On May 1st, 1945, the day after Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide, Magda put her terrible plan into action.
Earlier in the day, she prepared her children for what she claimed would be routine vaccinations. She had her hair done and dressed carefully. As the hours passed, the children were given morphine injections, administered under the pretext that they were preventive inoculations. The morphine rendered them unconscious.
What happened next has been the subject of conflicting testimony. According to some accounts, Magda herself crushed cyanide capsules between her children’s teeth. Other accounts suggest that Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler’s personal physician, performed the act while Magda watched. Still others maintain that SS dentist Helmut Kunz administered the poison.
The truth may never be known with certainty. What is certain is that all six children died that evening. Helga, the eldest, was twelve. Hildegard was eleven.
Helmut was nine. Holdine was eight. Hedwig was six. And Heide, the baby, was just four years old.
According to Soviet forensic examinations, Helga may have struggled against her death—bruises were found on her body suggesting she had partially awakened and resisted before the poison took effect. The other children apparently died peacefully in their drugged sleep. After her children were dead, Magda emerged from their room and joined her husband. Together they climbed the stairs to the Reich Chancellery Garden.
By most reconstructions, an SS orderly shot both Magda and Joseph at their request, and their bodies were then set ablaze with gasoline, though the burning was less thorough than that of Hitler and Eva Braun. Soviet troops discovered their partially burned remains the following day. Harald Quandt, the only one of Magda’s children to survive the war, learned of his family’s fate while still in British captivity. He returned to Germany and became one of West Germany’s wealthiest industrialists, maintaining silence about his childhood until his death in a plane crash in 1967.
From the depths of the Berlin bunker, consider the story of a woman who survived the war and spent decades grappling with her husband’s legacy. Ilse Hess, the wife of Rudolf Hess, who served as Hitler’s deputy Führer until his bizarre solo flight to Scotland in May 1941, was born Ilse Pröhl on June 22nd, 1900 in Hanover into a conservative and nationalist family. Her father, a physician, was killed in action during the First World War. Ilse was one of the first women to study at the University of Munich in the early 1920s, and it was there that she first encountered Rudolf Hess in April 1920, when they both rented rooms in the same boarding house.
Rudolf was a war veteran who had served in the List Regiment alongside a young corporal named Adolf Hitler. Ilse joined the Nazi party in 1921, and in a decision that would prove fateful, it was she who introduced Rudolf Hess to Hitler. After the Beer Hall Putsch, when both men were imprisoned in Landsberg prison, their bond deepened. Rudolf served as Hitler’s secretary and confidant, helping to type the manuscript of Mein Kampf.
Hitler played an active role in facilitating the marriage between Ilse and Rudolf, which took place on December 20th, 1927 in Munich. Hitler served as godfather to their only child, Wolf Rüdiger Hess, born on November 18th, 1937. Throughout the 1930s, as Rudolf rose to become deputy Führer, Ilse enjoyed the privileges and prestige that came with her husband’s position, organizing women’s events and playing the model Nazi wife. Her loyalty was tested most severely in May 1941, when Rudolf Hess undertook his solo flight to Scotland in an unauthorized attempt to negotiate peace with Britain.
On the evening of May 10th, 1941, Hess climbed into the cockpit of a Messerschmitt Bf 110 at Augsburg airfield and flew over the North Sea at low altitude, then parachuted near his target, injuring his ankle on landing. He was captured by a Scottish farmer and turned over to the Home Guard. Hitler was furious, and the official Nazi response was to declare Hess insane. Martin Bormann had Ilse and her son arrested and interrogated about their knowledge of the flight.
Ilse was shocked—she had known Rudolf was planning something but not the details. The family’s possessions were confiscated, and Ilse was socially ostracized. She and her son moved to the remote village of Hindelang in the Allgäu region. Yet Ilse remained loyal to Hitler even after the regime’s public repudiation of her husband.
She remained convinced that Rudolf’s flight had been motivated by genuine idealism, a sincere desire to end the war and spare further bloodshed. She rejected the official narrative of insanity, insisting her husband had acted rationally in pursuit of peace. When the war ended, Ilse was arrested on June 3rd, 1947, and transferred to an internment camp in Augsburg. After her release on March 24th, 1948, she settled in the Allgäu region and opened a boarding house in 1955.
Unlike many former Nazis who sought to distance themselves from the regime, Ilse remained a dedicated National Socialist until her death. She continued to support Stille Hilfe, a relief organization established in 1951 to provide assistance to arrested, condemned, and fugitive SS members. Her 1952 book, England, Nuremberg, and Schicksal in Briefen, compiled letters exchanged with Rudolf during his imprisonment and portrayed his flight to Scotland as a sincere peace initiative. She maintained correspondence with other unrepentant admirers of Hitler, including Winifred Wagner.
Ilse’s later years were dominated by her tireless advocacy for Rudolf’s release from Spandau prison, where he was held from 1947 until his death. By 1966, Rudolf was the sole remaining inmate, and various proposals were made to release him on humanitarian grounds, but the Soviet Union consistently vetoed them. Rudolf Hess died in Spandau prison on August 17th, 1987 at the age of 93. The official cause of death was suicide by hanging with an electrical cord.
Ilse never accepted the verdict, believing her husband had been murdered by British intelligence because he knew too much about secret negotiations during the war. This conspiracy theory, though unsupported by credible evidence, has persisted in certain circles to the present day. Ilse survived her husband by eight years, dying on September 7th, 1995 at the age of 95. She was buried alongside Rudolf, and the grave bore the epitaph “Ich hab’s gewagt”—“I have dared”—a reference to his flight that had defined both their lives.
For years, the grave at Wunsiedel became a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis who gathered every August on the anniversary of Rudolf’s death. The situation was finally resolved in 2011 when the lease on the grave site expired. The parish council refused to renew it, and Rudolf’s remains were exhumed, cremated, and his ashes scattered at sea. The gravestone with its provocative epitaph was destroyed.
From a woman who spent her life defending her husband’s memory, turn to one who harbored a more complicated relationship with her spouse and his legacy. Margarete Himmler, the wife of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, was born Margarete Siegroth on September 9th, 1893 in Gonchorz, West Prussia, the daughter of a landowner. During the First World War, she trained and worked as a nurse, and after the war she operated a private nursing clinic in Berlin. She met Heinrich Himmler in 1927 during one of his lecture tours, and they married on July 3rd, 1928 in Berlin.
None of the Himmler family attended the wedding—Heinrich worried about introducing Margarete to his devoutly Catholic parents, who would object to her age (she was seven years older), her status as a divorcee, and her Protestant faith. Their only biological child, Gudrun, was born on August 8th, 1929. Heinrich doted on his daughter, whom he nicknamed “Püppi,” meaning Dolly, phoning her every few days and writing letters regularly. Margarete joined the Nazi party in 1928 and attempted to play the role expected of the wife of a high-ranking SS leader, organizing Wednesday afternoon gatherings for the wives of other senior SS men.
Despite her efforts, she remained unpopular in these circles. Baldur von Schirach wrote in his memoirs that Himmler was constantly henpecked by his wife. The animosity between Margarete and Lina Heydrich, the wife of Reinhard Heydrich, was particularly intense. During the Nuremberg rally in 1938, Margarete had such serious conflicts with the wives of other top SS leaders that they collectively refused to take directions from her.
When war began in 1939, Margarete threw herself into service with the German Red Cross, and by December 1939 was supervising Red Cross hospitals throughout military district 3. Her surviving diary contains a chilling entry from March 1940 describing a trip to German-occupied Poland: “Then I was in Posen, Warthegau, and Warsaw. This Jewish rabble, most of them don’t look like human beings and the dirt is indescribable. It’s an incredible job trying to create order there.
” As late as February 1945, with Germany’s defeat increasingly certain, she wrote to her brother-in-law expressing her continued admiration for 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. ”
What Margarete could not have known, or perhaps chose not to acknowledge, was that her marriage had effectively ended years before. In 1938, Heinrich began an affair with his young secretary Hedwig Potthast, who bore him two children.
Margarete discovered the relationship sometime in 1941 and decided to tolerate the situation for the sake of her daughter, and perhaps for practical reasons as well. Divorce from the Reichsführer-SS would have been socially devastating and potentially dangerous. The couple’s final meeting occurred in April 1945 at their home in Gmund. Within weeks, Heinrich was dead, having committed suicide by biting a cyanide capsule while in British custody.
After the war, Margarete and Gudrun were arrested by American forces while attempting to flee through Italy toward Switzerland. During interrogation, Margarete presented herself as a simple housewife far removed from her husband’s official duties. Interrogators concluded she had likely been ignorant of Himmler’s most terrible secrets. The denazification process was prolonged and contentious.
In 1948, she was initially categorized as a lesser offender, then finally reclassified in 1951 as a “fellow traveler,” a category 4 classification meaning she was not held legally accountable for her husband’s crimes. After her release, Margarete attempted to fade into obscurity, living under the pseudonym Margarete Siegroth, reverting to her maiden name. A 1947 article in the New York Tribune entitled “Widow of Heinrich Himmler lives like a gentle woman” highlighted the perceived injustice that the wife of one of history’s greatest mass murderers should enjoy any comfort while so many of his victims lay in unmarked graves. Margarete died on August 25th, 1967.
Her daughter Gudrun, however, took a very different path. Rather than distancing herself from her father’s legacy, she embraced it, becoming a prominent figure in neo-Nazi circles and working for decades with Stille Hilfe to provide support to former SS members. She married a man named Wulf Dieter Burwitz and became known as Gudrun Burwitz, maintaining until her death in 2018 that Heinrich Himmler had been a good man whose reputation had been unfairly besmirched by Allied propaganda. She disputed the circumstances of his death, insisting he had been murdered rather than committing suicide.
Consider also the story of a woman who presided over one of the most extravagant households in Nazi Germany. Emmy Göring, the wife of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, was born Emma Sonnemann on March 24th, 1893 in Hamburg. The daughter of a chocolate manufacturer, she became a successful stage actress before her marriage, performing with the Hamburg State Theater and later with the German State Theater in Berlin under the direction of Max Reinhardt. She was divorced from the actor Karl Köstlin when she became romantically involved with Göring in the early 1930s.
They married on April 10th, 1935, in a lavish ceremony at the Berlin Cathedral that underscored Göring’s status within the Nazi hierarchy. Hitler served as the groom’s witness. Emmy was forty-two; Göring was one of the most powerful men in Germany. The Görings’ lifestyle was one of extraordinary opulence.
Karinhall, the vast hunting lodge Göring built in the Schorfheide forest north of Berlin, became a center of lavish entertainment. The estate featured priceless art, a personal railway station, and even a private film theater. Göring amassed one of the largest private art collections in history, much of it looted from museums and Jewish families across occupied Europe. Emmy presided over this world with relish, playing hostess to diplomats, generals, and visiting dignitaries, choosing her own extensive wardrobe and maintaining a separate household staff.
The marriage produced one child, Edda, born on June 2nd, 1938. Hitler served as godfather. Emmy’s relationship with Magda Goebbels was strained, reflecting the rivalry between their husbands. As the war drew to its catastrophic conclusion, Emmy and Edda fled Karinhall ahead of the advancing Soviet forces.
Before leaving, Göring ordered the destruction of the estate, and on April 28th, 1945, the buildings were blown up. Göring surrendered to American forces on May 7th, 1945. At Nuremberg he was convicted on all four counts and sentenced to death by hanging. On October 15th, 1946, less than two hours before his scheduled execution, he cheated the hangman by biting into a cyanide capsule.
The source of the poison has never been definitively established. Emmy herself faced denazification proceedings that resulted in her conviction as a category 2 offender in 1948, a designation reserved for activists, militants, and profiteers. The tribunal found she had used her position to acquire property belonging to Jews and others persecuted by the regime. She was sentenced to one year in prison, which she had effectively already served, and was banned from working in the theater for five years.
She retained substantial assets, however, and lived comfortably in Munich. In 1967, Emmy published her autobiography, My Life with Göring, presenting a sympathetic portrait of Hermann as a loving husband and devoted father, claiming ignorance of the Holocaust. Historians have generally dismissed the autobiography as unreliable. Emmy died on June 8th, 1973 in Munich at age eighty.
Her daughter Edda remained devoted to her father’s memory, never apologizing for or acknowledging his crimes, spending years attempting to recover art and property she believed had been wrongfully taken from her family. Another woman whose influence extended far beyond the domestic sphere was Annelies von Ribbentrop, the wife of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister from 1938. Born Annelies Henkell on July 25th, 1896 in Wiesbaden into one of Germany’s wealthiest families—her father had built a champagne empire—she met Ribbentrop through mutual social connections in the early 1920s when he was a wine and spirits merchant. They married on July 5th, 1920, and the union transformed his prospects, providing financial security and social credibility.
From the beginning, Annelies was the dominant partner—more intelligent, more ambitious, and more politically engaged than her husband, whom observers consistently described as vain, shallow, and easily manipulated. She pushed him to seek ever higher positions, using her social position to introduce him to Hitler and other senior Nazis. Annelies joined the Nazi party herself on May 1st, 1933, and was a true believer who shared the movement’s goals. When Ribbentrop was appointed ambassador to Britain in 1936, she accompanied him to London, where the Nazi salute she gave upon presenting her credentials to King George VI caused a minor scandal.
Ribbentrop’s reports to Hitler reinforced the Führer’s belief that Britain would not fight to defend Poland, a miscalculation that contributed to the outbreak of war. As foreign minister, Ribbentrop was responsible for the diplomatic maneuvering that preceded the war, and Annelies remained his closest adviser, reading his correspondence and offering her opinions on policy questions. When the war ended, both were captured by Allied forces. Ribbentrop was convicted at Nuremberg and hanged on October 16th, 1946, the first of the condemned men to mount the gallows.
Annelies was held at the former Dachau concentration camp, which the Americans had converted into an internment facility. She complained bitterly about the conditions. After release, she faced denazification proceedings that classified her as a fellow traveler, a relatively lenient designation. Unlike some Nazi widows, Annelies remained active in defending her husband’s legacy, writing several books presenting Ribbentrop as a peace-seeking diplomat who had been misunderstood and unfairly condemned.
She died on October 29th, 1973 in Wuppertal. From a woman who shaped foreign policy from behind the scenes, consider one who witnessed the inner circle from a unique vantage point. Henriette von Schirach, the wife of Baldur von Schirach, was born Henriette Hoffmann on February 3rd, 1913 in Munich, the daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer. Growing up in the Hoffmann household meant growing up in Hitler’s shadow.
She knew him not as a political figure but as “Uncle Adolf,” a kindly presence who showed up with chocolates and stories. Henriette met Baldur von Schirach in 1931, and they married on March 31st, 1932 in Munich, with Hitler serving as a witness. She was nineteen, beautiful and idealistic. In June 1943, while staying in Amsterdam, Henriette witnessed something that would change her understanding of the Nazi regime forever.
She saw a group of Jewish women being rounded up in the streets, herded together by SS men for deportation to the east. The women were terrified, crying, pleading for help. In a decision that would have profound consequences, Henriette chose to confront Hitler directly about what she had seen. At a dinner party at the Berghof shortly after her return, she raised the subject of the deportations, asking Hitler to stop the persecution.
The other guests fell silent. Hitler’s face darkened with rage. According to Henriette’s later accounts, he exploded at her, screaming that she was sentimental and did not understand the necessities of the struggle. His fury was terrifying.
The dinner party ended in disaster, and Henriette and Baldur were effectively banished from Hitler’s inner circle. Some historians see this confrontation as evidence that Henriette was genuinely disturbed by Nazi crimes. Others are more skeptical, noting that her protest came relatively late and that she had benefited from the Nazi system for over a decade. Whatever her motivations, the confrontation had real consequences.
Baldur was eventually removed as Reich Youth Leader and sent to Vienna as Gauleiter, where he oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews from the Austrian capital. After the war, Baldur was convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against humanity and sentenced to twenty years in prison. His testimony included an acknowledgement that the persecution of Jews had been wrong, making him one of the few defendants to express any remorse. Henriette divorced him in 1949.
She later wrote several books about her experiences, including memoirs describing her childhood friendship with Hitler and her confrontation with him. Critics argue her accounts were self-serving. Henriette von Schirach died on January 27th, 1992 in Munich. The final subject—a woman whose story ended before the war did—is Gerda Bormann, the wife of Martin Bormann, who served as Hitler’s private secretary and became one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany.
Gerda Buch was born on October 23rd, 1909 in Munich, the daughter of Walter Buch, a major figure in the Nazi party who served as chairman of the Supreme Party Court. She met Martin Bormann through party connections in the late 1920s, and they married on September 2nd, 1929, with Hitler serving as witness. Gerda was a prolific mother, bearing ten children between 1930 and 1943, two of whom died in infancy. She took motherhood as a patriotic duty, a service to the Reich as important as any battlefield sacrifice.
The Bormann marriage operated on unusual terms. Martin conducted numerous affairs, and Gerda was aware of them and accepted them, even encouraging him in letters to have children with other women, viewing this as a contribution to the expansion of the German race. Most remarkably, Gerda befriended one of Martin’s mistresses, an actress named Manja Behrens, and welcomed her into the family circle, suggesting she should come live with them so their children could be raised together as siblings. Gerda’s letters revealed the depth of her ideological commitment—she wrote enthusiastically about the elimination of Jews from Europe.
As the war drew to its conclusion, Gerda and the children were evacuated to South Tyrol. She developed cancer and died on March 23rd, 1946 in Merano at age thirty-six, less than a year after the end of the war she had believed would bring German triumph. Martin Bormann’s fate was the subject of decades of speculation. He was last seen in the early hours of May 2nd, 1945, attempting to escape from the Führerbunker.
In 1972, construction workers discovered skeletal remains near the Lehrter railway station in Berlin, and DNA testing in 1998 provided definitive identification. Gerda’s eldest surviving child, Martin Adolf Bormann, became a Roman Catholic priest. The story of the Nazi wives also includes a woman who died before the war even began, yet whose shadow extended over the regime. Karin Göring, the first wife of Hermann Göring, was born Karin Axelina Hulda Maria Baroness von Fock on October 21st, 1888 in Stockholm into an aristocratic family.
She married Niels von Kantzow, a Swedish army officer, in 1910, and they had a son named Thomas. The marriage was respectable but passionless. Her meeting with Hermann Göring came in 1920, when he was working as a commercial pilot in Sweden and was forced to land near Rockelstad Castle, the Fock family estate, due to bad weather. The attraction was immediate and mutual.
Karin abandoned her husband, her son, and her comfortable life to follow Göring back to Germany. She married Göring on February 3rd, 1923, and immediately threw herself into his political activities. When the Beer Hall Putsch was suppressed by police gunfire, Göring was shot in the groin, and Karin helped smuggle him across the border to Austria. The years that followed were difficult—Göring became addicted to morphine, the family was poor, and Karin’s own health was fragile, suffering from heart problems and tuberculosis.
She died on October 17th, 1931 in Stockholm at age forty-two. Göring was devastated, naming his grand hunting lodge Karinhall in her memory and creating an elaborate mausoleum there where her body was eventually interred. When Emmy Sonnemann entered Göring’s life a few years later, she was stepping into a role Karin had defined, with the shrine at Karinhall serving as a constant reminder that she was the second wife. The wives of Nazi leaders were not passive victims swept up in forces beyond their control.
They were participants in a regime that committed unprecedented crimes against humanity. Some, like Eva Braun, chose death alongside their partners. Others, like Magda Goebbels, took their devotion to such extremes that they murdered their own children rather than allow them to live in a post-Nazi world. Others still, like Ilse Hess and Emmy Göring, survived for decades, defending their husbands’ memories.
What did these women know about the crimes their husbands committed? The question admits no simple answer. Some, like Gerda Bormann, were clearly aware of and supportive of the Holocaust. Others may have maintained a willful ignorance.
But knowledge and complicity are not the same thing. Even those who knew nothing specific about the death camps benefited from the Nazi system, enjoyed privileges built on the suffering of others, and provided emotional support to men who were organizing mass murder. Their complicity was structural rather than direct, a matter of enabling and benefiting rather than planning and executing. This makes their guilt harder to define, but no less real.
They planned dinners and raised children, worried about their husbands’ health and careers, competed for social position, and fretted about their wardrobes. In these respects, they were not so different from millions of other women of their era. But they were also complicit in genocide, beneficiaries of plunder, and supporters of a regime that sought to remake the world through conquest and murder. They were not monsters in the sense of being fundamentally different from the rest of humanity.
They were ordinary people who made choices, or failed to make choices, that led them to participate in monstrous events. Understanding how this happened—how wives and mothers could stand by men who organized mass murder—is essential to understanding how the Holocaust itself was possible. Their fates after the war were as varied as their lives during it. Some died in the bunkers of Berlin.
Others lived for decades, never renouncing the beliefs that had defined their youth. A few expressed regret. Most simply tried to rebuild their lives amid the ruins of everything they had known.
The lesson of their lives is not that evil is banal, but that evil is participatory—that it requires the support and complicity of many people playing many roles, from the planners and executioners to the bystanders and beneficiaries.
