On April 30, 1945, in the Führerbunker beneath the ruins of Berlin, Eva Braun ended her life beside the man she had loved for sixteen years. The woman who had once been a seventeen-year-old shop girl in a photography studio, who had twice tried to kill herself when the war grew unbearable, had finally succeeded with cyanide and a pistol shot. Almost no one in Germany had known that she and Hitler had married. She had been the Führer’s only known lover, and she would be dead before the world learned her name.

She had met him in 1929, when she was seventeen and he was forty. The sympathy that arose between the middle-aged politician and the young girl was immediate. At every opportunity, Hitler paid her pleasant signs of attention, coming to the photography studio where she worked. One day he offered: “Let me invite you to the opera.

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Eva replied, “You see, there are always men around me, so I know how to appreciate the happiness of being around the lady. ”

Despite his obvious affection for the girl, Hitler ordered that she be checked for belonging to the Aryan race. Only after receiving confirmation that Eva Braun indeed belonged to the purebred Aryans did the future Führer calm down and continue the relationship. The affair remained almost entirely hidden from the German public.

As the situation on the front worsened, Eva tried twice to commit suicide, but to no avail. On the final day of April 1945, however, she made her last and successful attempt, dying alongside the man who had first courted her in that Munich studio. Eva Braun was not the only woman connected to Hitler, though the others remain far less known. There was Renate Müller, a gifted actress, oddly enough Hitler’s mistress, about whom little is known.

It is not certain where the Führer met her, but by 1935 there was at least one case of what might be called adultery between the lovers. Hitler, a pronounced psychopath, often found pleasure not in the act itself, but in something stranger. According to the memoirs of a certain Zesler, to whom Müller told everything shortly before her death, the process looked quite original. The two undressed and were about to go to bed when Hitler threw himself on the floor and demanded that she step on him.

The scene was unbearable for her, but in the end she gave in to his desires and began to stomp on him with her feet. This made him very excited. He asked for more and more, and at the same time said all the time that he did not deserve this, that he was not even worth being in the same room with her. The more she stamped on him, the more excited he became.

By the way, in the same way, the Führer was quite often satisfied by his official wife Eva Braun. Apparently he believed that real leadership could be fully understood only by being trampled personally. Renate Müller committed suicide in 1936, jumping out of a window on Hitler’s orders. Other women at the top of the Third Reich lived very different lives.

Emma Göring, a well-known theater and film actress in pre-war Germany, married Hermann Göring in 1935. Since Hitler’s wife was never introduced to the world, Emma Göring quickly won the title of First Lady of the Reich. The couple had a daughter, Edda, and Adolf Hitler himself became her godfather. After the surrender of Germany and during the denazification trials, Emma Göring was sentenced in 1948 to one year in prison and deprived of a third of all her property.

In addition, she was banned from performing in theater and cinema for five years. In 1967, Göring’s wife published a book with her memoirs. She died after a long illness in 1973. Magda Goebbels, Hitler’s favorite, had a truly Aryan appearance and became the face of the Ministry of Education and Propaganda.

Hitler himself insisted on this. She marked the work in the ministry led by her husband, traveled to hospitals, took part in all public events, consoling widows and mothers who had lost their sons. It is interesting that Magda was already married before her marriage to Goebbels. That husband was twenty years older, and his children from his first marriage were practically the same age as nineteen-year-old Magda.

Moreover, the husband had adopted the three sons of a deceased friend, and Magda also had to take care of them. As a result, the girl managed to get a divorce, taking with her the son born in that marriage. When she married Goebbels, Magda gave birth to six children. After Hitler committed suicide, Magda wrote her last letter to her son from the first marriage, Harold Quandt: “The world that comes after the Führer is not worth living in, and therefore I am living and taking the children with me.

It is a pity to abandon them to live in the life that will come. Merciful God will understand why I decided to take on my own salvation. ”

On May 1, 1945, all the children of the Goebbels couple died as a result of an injection of morphine and poison. Who exactly did it—the doctor or the parents themselves—remained unknown.

After the death of the children, Magda Goebbels committed suicide along with her husband. Gerda Bormann, the wife of Martin Bormann, was unlike other wives on the top of the Third Reich. She was almost originally a convinced Nazi. Her father also supported the ideas of the National Socialist Party.

The beautiful Gerda shocked everyone by choosing Bormann as her husband. Her parents had hoped that their daughter would marry a prominent figure in the NSDAP, but not the inconspicuous Bormann, who at that time had not reached any special heights and even had a criminal record for causing bodily harm. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, Gerda and Martin actually sincerely loved each other. It was Gerda who in 1944 called on German women to abandon monogamy.

Gerda herself had experience in this. For example, she did not pay attention to Bormann’s flirting with other women in her presence. Moreover, when Bormann began a fairly serious relationship with actress Manja Behrens, he always asked Gerda for advice and even shared his experience. His faithful wife helped as much as she could.

After the surrender of Germany, Martin Bormann fled. Gerda was admitted to a military hospital with a diagnosis of carcinoma. She died a few weeks later from mercury poisoning, which was used in a course of chemotherapy. Lída Baarová, a Czech actress, was invited to work in Germany and managed to win the sympathy of Hitler himself.

Not surprisingly, she became a frequent guest at receptions, and the girl’s career as an actress went up very quickly. Once, in an apartment next door to the Goebbels couple, Lída very soon attracted the attention of the Minister of Propaganda. Goebbels lost his head so much that he was even ready to divorce his wife. The Minister of Propaganda submitted his resignation in order to be able to divorce officially and leave with his beloved.

However, Hitler did not accept the resignation and categorically forbade Baarová to meet with Goebbels. After that, her career collapsed. After the war in Czechoslovakia, she was convicted of collaborating with the Nazis. But already in prison, Baarová started a new romance, got married, and later returned to her acting career.

It was no longer possible to reach for the stars, and the published memoirs, in which the woman spoke about her connection with the Goebbels, did not bring her fame. Anneliese von Ribbentrop, unlike the others, met her husband herself. When Ribbentrop had five children, and when he himself wore only the shoulder straps of a lieutenant, Anneliese managed to get a meeting with Hitler. It was thanks to this that the Führer soon drew attention to Ribbentrop, appointing him to the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Anneliese was not convicted after the war. She lived quite calmly and comfortably, publishing memoirs after her husband. She also sued for property with her relatives but lived a completely eventful and prosperous life. Inga Ley, wife of Labor Front leader Robert Ley, had three children with her husband.

The couple, despite the war, adored entertainment and an idle lifestyle. Prominent figures of science, art, and letters of the Third Reich often visited the Ley house. After her last birth, Inga became addicted to morphine, explaining this by the pain she experienced. Despite addiction treatment, the craving for the drug persisted.

As a result, unable to withstand the next course of treatment after the abolition of morphine, Inga shot herself in 1942. Ilse Hess was famous not only for being the wife of Hitler’s Deputy Rudolf Hess but also for being Hitler’s personal secretary. It was Ilse who typed the famous Mein Kampf. Fully supporting Nazi ideology, Ilse Hess took part in all events, was the secretary of her husband, and was, in modern terms, a media person.

After the fall of Nazi Germany, she was imprisoned for about a year. Then she was in charge of a boarding school, and she published letters and correspondence with her husband, which are of considerable value to researchers. Until her death, Ilse Hess remained faithful to the ideology of Nazism. The wives and mistresses of the Third Reich’s leaders lived lives that could not have been more different.

Some disappeared along with their criminal husbands. Some tried to hide the fact of their relations with murderers. And some, like Inga Ley in her morphine haze or Renate Müller in her brief, tragic fame, were themselves consumed by the regime they had married into.

In the end, only a few, like Anneliese von Ribbentrop and Ilse Hess, survived to old age, carrying with them the memory of what they had witnessed and, in some cases, the ideology they refused to abandon.