The decision came to her in the dark of the Berlin bunker, with Soviet artillery shaking the concrete overhead and the Reich she had served for twelve years dissolving into ruin. She had been summoned to die beside a man she had never been allowed to be seen with in public, and she had come willingly. Three days after arriving, with the Red Army fighting street by street through the city above, she married him. Less than forty hours later, she swallowed cyanide and was burned in the Chancellery Garden, her charred remains found by Soviet troops the next day.

Eva Braun had spent her entire adult life in the shadows of the most powerful and terrible man in the world, and in the end she chose to disappear with him rather than face the world he had unmade. She was born on February 6th, 1912 in Munich, the second of three daughters in a solidly middle-class Bavarian family. Her father, Friedrich Braun, was a school teacher, a proud and somewhat conservative man with no particular political leanings that anyone later remarked upon. Eva was educated by the English sisters, a Catholic order, and was by most accounts a lively, athletic, and rather ordinary young woman who loved skiing, swimming, gymnastics, and going to the cinema.

She had no intellectual ambitions and no great passion for politics. In 1929, at seventeen, she began working as an assistant at the photography and film studio of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s official photographer, who operated out of a shop on the Schellingstrasse in Munich. It was through Hoffmann that she met Hitler, then forty years old, who visited the studio regularly. The Führer was introduced to her simply as a Herr Wolf, and some time passed before she understood who this intense older gentleman actually was.

Their relationship developed slowly and was kept in absolute secrecy. Hitler visited her whenever he was in Munich, and while publicly he cultivated the image of a man married entirely to Germany and his cause, privately he established Eva in a comfortable apartment and later installed her at his Berghof retreat above Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. The arrangement was deeply unhappy, at least for her. Hitler was frequently absent, frequently distracted, and fundamentally uninterested in the domestic warmth or emotional reciprocity that any normal relationship requires.

Eva occupied a position of profound social invisibility. She was not permitted to appear at official events, was kept hidden from foreign dignitaries and from the German public, and was expected to make herself scarce whenever Hitler’s political responsibilities demanded his attention, which was essentially always. The loneliness of this drove her at least twice to desperate acts. In November 1932, she shot herself in the chest in what many historians have interpreted as a genuine suicide attempt.

In May 1935, she overdosed on sleeping pills. Both times she survived, and both times Hitler visited her during her recovery, and the relationship continued, deeper entangled despite his fundamental emotional unavailability. In the years that followed, she settled into the gilded cage of the Berghof with a kind of resigned acceptance, entertaining the wives of senior Nazi leaders, swimming in the outdoor pool, photographing the mountain scenery, and waiting for whatever attention Hitler had to spare. What did Eva Braun know about the crimes of the regime?

She was not a member of the party’s inner councils, attended no military briefings, and received no secret memoranda. But she was present at the Berghof during the years when the Holocaust was being planned and executed, and she moved in circles where the nature of that project was known and spoken about, at least in euphemistic terms. She never expressed any recorded concern for the victims of Nazi persecution, and her private correspondence suggests someone entirely absorbed in the immediate pleasures and frustrations of her own life, with little apparent awareness of the catastrophe unfolding beyond the garden walls. As the war turned disastrously against Germany, the Berghof became increasingly empty of its brilliant company as generals and ministers ceased their social visits and the reality of imminent defeat pressed in from all sides.

In April 1945, as Soviet forces closed on Berlin, Eva made the decision that would define her legacy. Against Hitler’s explicit instructions, she traveled to the capital to join him in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery Garden. She had no illusions about what this meant. She came to die.

On April 29th, 1945, in the early hours of the morning, with the Red Army fighting street by street through the ruins of Berlin above their heads, Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun in a brief civil ceremony in the map room of the bunker. Their witnesses were Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Eva wore a black silk taffeta dress, Hitler’s favorite, and reportedly wept with emotion during the ceremony. They held a brief wedding breakfast afterward, where Hitler’s secretaries later remembered his rambling monologues about the betrayal of the German people and the villainy of those who had surrendered to the enemy.

The following day, at approximately half past three in the afternoon, Hitler and Eva Braun took their own lives in his private rooms. He shot himself through the right temple with his service pistol. She chose cyanide. She was thirty-three.

Their bodies were carried to the Chancellery Garden, doused with petrol, and burned in accordance with Hitler’s instructions. If Eva Braun represents one kind of devoted loyalty to a monstrous man, then Magda Goebbels represents something even darker: a woman who not only chose death alongside the regime, but who took her own children with her. Johanna Maria Magdalena Behrend was born on November 11th, 1901 in Berlin, the illegitimate daughter of Augusta Behrend and a man whose identity was for years a matter of dispute. Her early life was marked by the upheavals that characterized German middle-class existence after the First World War.

She received an excellent education at a convent school in Belgium, learned French fluently, and developed the sophisticated social poise that made her such an effective hostess for the Nazi regime. In 1921, she married Günther Quandt, a wealthy industrialist considerably older than herself, with whom she had a son, Harald Quandt. The marriage was unhappy and ended in divorce in 1929, leaving Magda financially secure and socially well-established. It was in 1930 that she first attended a Nazi Party rally and heard Joseph Goebbels speak.

The effect was immediate and profound. She joined the party shortly afterward and began volunteering at the Berlin party headquarters, where she came to the attention of Goebbels himself, who was immediately captivated by her beauty, her intelligence, and her social confidence. Their relationship developed rapidly, and in December 1931 they married in a ceremony at which Hitler was best man. The Führer was deeply fond of Magda and made no secret of it, reportedly telling associates that if he had ever decided to marry, Magda Goebbels was the woman he would have chosen.

This closeness gave Magda a unique position in the Nazi hierarchy. She became the unofficial first lady of the Third Reich, the hostess at grand state functions, the face of the ideal German wife and mother that Nazi propaganda celebrated so tirelessly. She and Joseph had six children together: Helga, Hildegard, Helmut, Holdine, Hedwig, and Heidrun. All their names began with H in honor of Adolf Hitler.

The marriage was a tormented one. Goebbels was a serial womanizer whose affairs were so flagrant that Magda reportedly asked Hitler to intervene on at least one occasion. The most serious crisis came in 1938, when Goebbels fell violently in love with the Czech actress Lída Baarová and announced he intended to divorce Magda. She appealed directly to Hitler, who was furious with his propaganda minister and ordered the relationship ended immediately, threatening to expel Goebbels from the party if he pursued it further.

Goebbels obeyed, Baarová was driven from Germany, and the marriage limped forward. Magda is said to have never forgiven her husband, and to have continued the relationship more out of political calculation and ideological commitment than genuine feeling. And yet, at the end, she remained. When it became clear in April 1945 that the war was lost, Magda rejected every opportunity to escape or to send her children to safety.

She announced with a chilling calm that those around her found deeply disturbing that her children could not and would not live in a world without National Socialism. On the night of May 1st, 1945, she personally administered cyanide capsules to each of her six children as they slept in their bunker quarters, or in some accounts while they were sedated. She killed Helga, twelve; Hildegard, eleven; Helmut, nine; Holdine, eight; Hedwig, six; and Heidrun, four. She then went upstairs to the Chancellery Garden with her husband, where both of them died, Joseph by a combination of shooting and cyanide, Magda by cyanide alone.

She was forty-three. Only her eldest child, Harald Quandt, who was a Luftwaffe officer serving on the front, survived the war. From the Goebbels family’s terrible end, the story moves to one of the most tenacious of Nazi wives: Ilse Hess, the wife of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy Führer, who in one of the strangest episodes of the entire war flew solo to Scotland in May 1941 in what he claimed was a personal peace mission. Ilse Pröhl was born on January 2nd, 1900, and her path to the center of the Nazi movement began in the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic, when she was drawn to the rising tide of German nationalism.

She initially joined the Nazi Party in 1921, then rejoined in 1925 after the party was temporarily banned following the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. It was through the party that she met Rudolf Hess, but their courtship was not straightforward. Hess hesitated to commit for years, and it was Ilsa herself who played an unexpected role in bringing him closer to Hitler, introducing him through the social circles that wealthy Munich women maintained around the party’s rising star. Hitler took a deep personal interest in facilitating the match and encouraged Hess to formalize the relationship.

The couple married on December 20th, 1927 in Munich, and Hitler later stood as godfather to their only child, Wolf Rüdiger Hess, born in 1937. Ilsa was a genuine true believer who shared her husband’s fervent National Socialist convictions and remained loyal to them long after the evidence of the regime’s true nature became inescapable. That loyalty was tested dramatically on May 10th, 1941, when Rudolf Hess climbed into a Messerschmitt Bf 110 at Augsburg and flew alone across the North Sea to Scotland, where he parachuted into a Scottish field and was taken prisoner by a local farmer. His stated intention had been to negotiate a private peace agreement with Britain, bypassing Hitler entirely.

The reaction in Berlin was humiliation and fury. Hitler, who apparently knew nothing of the mission, declared Hess mentally ill and had him struck from the official succession. For Ilsa, the episode was devastating in its immediate consequences, but did nothing to shake her beliefs. She staunchly defended her husband’s intentions and continued to stand by both him and the party.

When the war ended, Ilsa was among those arrested and sent to an internment camp in Augsburg, where she remained before being released. Rudolf Hess, meanwhile, stood trial at Nuremberg, was convicted of crimes against peace and conspiracy, and sentenced to life imprisonment at Spandau Prison in West Berlin. Ilsa devoted the postwar decades to the campaign for his release, writing letters, giving interviews, lobbying politicians, and maintaining an unwavering public insistence on his innocence. She moved to the Allgäu region of Bavaria, and by 1955 had opened a boarding house there.

She remained a steadfast believer in National Socialism to the end of her life, becoming a supporter of Stille Hilfe, the secret organization founded to provide practical assistance to arrested, condemned, and fugitive members of the SS. In 1952 she published a controversial memoir and collection of letters titled England, Nuremberg, Spandau: A Fate in Letters, which presented her husband’s story entirely from a sympathetic Nazi perspective. Rudolf Hess remained in Spandau until August 17th, 1987, when he was found dead in his cell at the age of ninety-three, the apparent victim of suicide by asphyxiation using an electrical cord. The circumstances of his death have been the subject of conspiracy theories ever since, many promoted by Ilsa herself and by their son, who claimed the evidence pointed to murder by British intelligence.

Ilsa outlived him by eight years, dying on September 7th, 1995 at the age of ninety-five. She had never acknowledged any wrongdoing, had never expressed any regret, and had remained to the very last a committed adherent to the ideology that had caused the deaths of tens of millions of people. From the determined ideological loyalty of Ilse Hess, we move to the glittering and somewhat more complicated world of Emmy Göring, the woman who styled herself the first lady of the Third Reich and who made that claim with an imperial confidence that reportedly drove Eva Braun to fury. Emmy Johanna Sonneman was born on March 24th, 1893 in Hamburg, the daughter of a prosperous merchant family.

Unlike many of the women in this story, she had a genuine professional career before she entered the orbit of the Nazi leadership. She was an actress of real accomplishment, performing in theaters across Germany for over two decades and building a reputation independent of any political connection. It was in 1932 that she first met Hermann Göring, then one of the most powerful men in the Nazi party. Göring was a man of overwhelming presence, a war hero decorated with the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest military honor, a compulsive collector of art and luxury, and a man of appetites so enormous that observers sometimes struggled to process him as a real person.

His first wife, the Swedish Baroness Carin von Kantzow, had died in 1931, leaving him devastated. Emmy, elegant, professionally accomplished, and utterly comfortable in the grand social world Göring was beginning to construct, was exactly what he was looking for. They married on April 10th, 1935 in Berlin in a ceremony attended by Hitler himself and accompanied by a military flyover that Göring had arranged as a personal touch of theater. Interestingly, Emmy was not initially a member of the Nazi party.

This was remedied in 1938, when party membership was presented to her as a Christmas gift, a detail that captures something of the strange mixture of ceremony, coercion, and casual inclusion that characterized life in the Nazi elite. Emmy took to her role as first lady with genuine enthusiasm and considerable skill. She presided over state functions at Karinhall, the enormous estate north of Berlin that Göring had named for his first wife, a palace of looted art and extraordinary opulence that became one of the great social centers of the Nazi world. Her self-proclaimed status brought her into sharp and sometimes openly hostile conflict with Eva Braun.

Emmy openly disregarded her, treating her with a condescension that reflected the fact that, unlike Eva, Emmy was actually visible. Hitler was obliged on more than one occasion to intervene, instructing Göring to make his wife treat Eva Braun with the respect her position demanded. The consequence was that Emmy found herself excluded from the Berghof, where Eva was the unchallenged mistress of the household. When the war ended and Hermann Göring was taken prisoner by American forces, Emmy faced a dramatic reversal.

A German denazification court found her guilty of being an active Nazi and sentenced her to a year in prison, which she served. Upon release, she found that thirty percent of the wealth she had accumulated had been confiscated, and she was banned from performing on stage for five years. Hermann himself escaped the Nuremberg death sentence by swallowing a cyanide capsule on October 15th, 1946, the night before his scheduled execution, in an act of defiance that Emmy apparently regarded with mixed emotion. She wrote a memoir titled My Life with Göring, offering her perspective with the characteristic combination of self-justification and genuine loss that marked the memoirs of so many Nazi wives.

She died in Munich on June 8th, 1973, at the age of eighty. The story of Margarete Himmler, the wife of the man who built and commanded the apparatus of the Holocaust itself, begins with what might seem like an irony. Margarete Boden was born in 1893 and trained as a nurse, a profession dedicated to the preservation of life and the relief of suffering. After the First World War, she worked at the German Red Cross Hospital and, with financial support from her father, managed a private nursing clinic.

It was during one of Heinrich Himmler’s lecture tours in 1927 that she first encountered the man then beginning his rise through the SS hierarchy. Himmler was immediately attracted to her, captivated specifically by her blue eyes and blonde hair, which corresponded neatly to the racial ideals he would later help codify as state policy. Despite some initial family resistance, primarily from Himmler’s Catholic family, who objected to her Protestant faith, the age difference, and her status as a divorcee, they married in July 1928. Their daughter Gudrun was born on August 8th, 1929.

Margarete was far from a passive presence. She joined the Nazi Party in 1928 and threw herself into the social obligations of her position, regularly organizing gatherings for the wives of senior SS leaders. Despite her evident enthusiasm, she was notably unpopular among the other Nazi wives. At the 1938 Nuremberg Rally, she found herself in such open conflict with the other women that they collectively refused to follow her lead, a remarkable act of social defiance within a hierarchy that normally demanded perfect conformity.

By the end of 1939, she had taken on formal responsibilities within the Red Cross structure, overseeing hospitals throughout the Berlin-Brandenburg region. Her role took her on missions to occupied territories, and she documented what she saw there without the slightest apparent disturbance to her conscience. In a diary entry from March 1940, she described a trip through occupied Poland in terms that are as revealing as they are repellent, expressing disgust at the Jewish and Polish population she encountered and satisfaction with the German project of imposing order on what she described as indescribable dirt. The personal relationship between Margarete and Heinrich collapsed privately well before the public collapse of the regime.

In 1941, she discovered that her husband had been carrying on a secret affair with his personal secretary, Hedwig Potthast, with whom he would have two children. The marriage effectively ended, though Margarete continued to occupy her public role. In February 1945, she wrote to Heinrich’s brother Gebhard describing her husband with an admiration that now reads as wholly disconnected from reality. Himmler himself was captured by British forces after Germany’s surrender, disguised in civilian clothes and attempting to escape.

On May 23rd, 1945, in a British internment camp at Lüneburg, he bit down on a cyanide capsule concealed in his mouth and was dead within minutes. For Margarete, the postwar process of denazification was lengthy and initially inconclusive. She subjected herself to multiple investigations probing the extent of her knowledge of her husband’s activities and consistently denied any awareness of the crimes he had directed. The claim was difficult to sustain given her social involvement with the SS hierarchy, but after prolonged deliberation that stretched until 1953, she was ultimately classified as a profiteer of the Nazi regime and sentenced to thirty days of penal labor.

She was additionally stripped of her voting rights and her eligibility for a pension. After serving her sentence, she adopted the pseudonym Margarete Boden and spent the remainder of her life attempting to distance herself from her past. She died in 1967. Lina von Osten was born on June 14th, 1911 into a family with strong nationalist convictions, and she absorbed the politics of the German right from an early age through her brother Hans, an ardent member of both the Nazi Party and the SA.

In 1929 she attended a rally at which she heard Adolf Hitler speak for the first time. The experience transformed her. She joined the Nazi Party soon afterward, and it was through the social world of the movement that she attended a rowing club ball in Kiel in late 1930 at the age of nineteen, where she met a striking and intensely driven young naval lieutenant named Reinhard Heydrich. The attraction was immediate and mutual, and the couple became engaged on December 18th, 1930.

The path to their marriage was complicated almost immediately. In 1931, Heydrich was brought before a naval honor court on charges of conduct unbecoming an officer, arising from his treatment of a young woman to whom he had promised marriage before his engagement to Lina. The court dismissed him from the navy in April of that year, leaving him without career or income. It was Lina who, at this critical moment, pointed him toward the possibility of a future in the newly establishing SS.

She suggested he apply for a position, coached him on what to say when he met Heinrich Himmler, and effectively launched the career that would make Reinhard Heydrich one of the most feared men in Europe. His proposal for an SS intelligence service was adopted immediately, and Himmler appointed him to build and lead what would become the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the intelligence arm of the SS. Within a few years, Heydrich had accumulated enormous power, running not only the SD but also the Gestapo, and eventually serving as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, where his methods were so brutal that he was known as the Hangman of Prague. For her loyalty, Hitler personally rewarded Lina with a large estate in rural Bohemia, a grant of property confiscated from its previous owners.

At this estate, the evidence suggests Lina was not a passive beneficiary. Several prisoners were held there for forced labor, and credible accounts describe her physically abusing those workers, an accusation that has never been satisfactorily resolved in legal proceedings but which has formed a persistent part of her historical record. The family was still living in Bohemia in May 1942 when Heydrich was mortally wounded in an ambush by Czech resistance fighters trained by the British Special Operations Executive. He died of his wounds on June 4th, 1942, at the age of thirty-eight.

His assassins were subsequently hunted down and killed, and the Nazis took catastrophic revenge on the Czech village of Lidice, destroying it completely and murdering most of its male population. Lina evacuated Bohemia in April 1945 as Soviet forces approached. After the war, her case went through the denazification proceedings, and she emerged acquitted, a verdict that surprised and outraged many observers. Through persistent legal battles against the West German government in 1956 and again in 1959, she secured a widow’s pension, a deeply contentious outcome given that she was the widow of the man who had chaired the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, at which the final solution was officially coordinated.

Despite the fact that a Czechoslovakian court had convicted her in absentia and sentenced her to life imprisonment, she avoided serving that sentence by remaining in West Germany, which did not extradite its citizens to communist countries. In 1965, on a vacation trip to Finland, she met a Finnish theater director named Mauno Manninen and married him, a move she acknowledged was motivated primarily by the desire to change her surname and shed the identification with her first husband. She converted the former Heydrich summer house on the island of Fehmarn into a restaurant and inn, running it until an accidental fire destroyed the building. In 1976 she published a memoir, Life with a War Criminal, in which she simultaneously acknowledged Heydrich’s crimes through the title and then spent three hundred pages defending his reputation.

She died on August 14th, 1985, at the age of seventy-four, unrepentant to the last. Annelies Henkell was born on January 11th, 1896, and she came to her marriage with Joachim von Ribbentrop through a connection that shaped everything that followed. Her father, Otto Henkell, was the head of a prosperous sparkling wine business, one of the leading Sekt producers in Germany, and Annelies brought to her marriage not only a substantial inheritance but also the business connections and social polish that helped her husband establish himself in the elite circles of German society. She married Ribbentrop in 1920, and for the next decade the couple lived the life of prosperous wine merchants.

It was Annelies who, by most accounts, was the more politically engaged of the two in the early years of their Nazi involvement, and there is a credible historical tradition that it was she who brought her husband to the attention of the Nazi movement. Ribbentrop’s rise was remarkable. A man of limited intelligence who compensated with extraordinary social brazenness and a talent for self-promotion, he cultivated Hitler’s attention in the early 1930s by making his Berlin villa available for secret meetings between Hitler and establishment figures not yet ready to be seen publicly with the Nazi leadership. Hitler rewarded him with increasing diplomatic responsibilities, appointing him ambassador to Britain in 1936 and foreign minister in 1938, positions for which virtually all serious observers agreed he was catastrophically unsuited.

The British political establishment found him so insufferably arrogant and obtuse that he became one of the most disliked foreign representatives London had ever received. Winston Churchill described him as the most disagreeable foreigner he had ever encountered. Annelies accompanied him through all of this, sharing without apparent reservation her husband’s fanatical anti-Semitism and his absolute devotion to Hitler. She was, if anything, more rigidly ideological than he was.

What happened to Annelies after Germany’s defeat was a direct consequence of her husband’s fate. Ribbentrop was one of the twenty-one senior Nazi defendants tried at Nuremberg, and his trial was one of the most damning. He was convicted on all four counts: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. On October 16th, 1946, Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged, the first of the Nuremberg condemned to be executed that night.

Annelies herself was subjected to denazification proceedings and classified among those most deeply implicated in the regime. She was stripped of most of the considerable wealth the family had accumulated. She spent the postwar decades working on a lengthy campaign to rehabilitate her husband’s reputation, commissioning research, corresponding with historians and politicians, and writing defenses of his record. She died in 1973, having spent nearly three decades trying to rewrite a history that had already rendered its verdict with considerable finality.

The story of Gerda Bormann is among the strangest in this collection, because it is the story of a woman devoted to a man whose fate remained one of the great unresolved mysteries of the twentieth century for decades. Gerda was born on October 23rd, 1909, the daughter of Walter Buch, a senior Nazi official who served as chief judge of the Nazi Party Court. Her pedigree within the movement was therefore impeccable from the very beginning, and her marriage on September 2nd, 1929 to Martin Bormann, then a rising figure in the party hierarchy, cemented her position at the inner core of the Nazi world. Bormann was not a glamorous figure.

He was a thickset, uncharismatic bureaucrat whose power derived entirely from his extraordinary talent for administration, his total reliability as an executor of Hitler’s wishes, and his genius for positioning himself as the essential intermediary between the Führer and everyone else. By the end of the war, he was arguably the most powerful man in Germany after Hitler himself. Gerda was, by all accounts, genuinely devoted to her husband and to the ideology he served. The couple had ten children together, a fact celebrated in Nazi propaganda as a model of the Germanic family ideal.

Bormann himself was not faithful in the way ideology demanded of others, maintaining an open affair with the actress Manja Behrens that he somehow persuaded his wife to accept, at one point suggesting in extraordinary correspondence that Gerda and Manja should alternate living with him so that he could enjoy the benefits of both relationships simultaneously. Gerda appears to have responded with a disturbing compliance, explaining in letters to her husband that she understood his needs and wished him happiness, even in this unusual arrangement. Gerda contracted tuberculosis during the war years, and her health deteriorated severely. After Germany’s defeat, she was interned by Allied authorities along with several of their children.

Martin Bormann’s fate remained unknown for decades. He had been present in the Führerbunker until the last days, and eyewitness accounts described him attempting to flee through Soviet lines in the chaos of early May 1945. Some witnesses believed he had been killed. Others were convinced he had escaped to South America.

Gerda died in Merano, Italy in March 1946 of tuberculosis, before the mystery of her husband’s fate had been resolved. It was not until 1972, when construction workers in Berlin unearthed human remains near the Lehrter railway station, and not until 1998, when DNA analysis confirmed the identification, that it was established that Martin Bormann had died in Berlin in early May 1945, most likely by suicide when escape became impossible. Henriette von Schirach occupies a somewhat different position in this gallery, because her story includes something that most of the others conspicuously lack: a moment of genuine moral conscience that placed her in direct confrontation with Adolf Hitler himself. Henriette Hoffmann was born on February 3rd, 1913, the daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s official personal photographer and one of the most intimate members of the Führer’s personal circle.

She had known Hitler since early childhood, calling him Uncle Adolf, and she was one of the very few people in Germany with genuine personal access to him that predated and was independent of political calculation. She married Baldur von Schirach, the head of the Hitler Youth, in 1932, forming a union of two of the regime’s most prominent younger figures. He was appointed Gauleiter and Reich Governor of Vienna in 1940, and it was there, overseeing the deportation of Austrian Jews to the death camps in the East, that he added crimes against humanity to his record. But it was Henriette who created the extraordinary scene that defined her place in history.

In 1943, having witnessed the rounding up of Dutch Jews in Amsterdam during a trip to the Netherlands, she raised the subject directly with Hitler at the Berghof, describing what she had seen and expressing her distress at the treatment of the Jewish women she had watched being dragged from their homes. Hitler’s response was volcanic in its fury. He told her she was sentimental, that she did not understand the necessities of wartime, and he effectively expelled her from his social circle on the spot. She and Baldur were subsequently banished from the Berghof and never invited back.

Whether Henriette’s protest constituted genuine moral courage or a limited and belated response that falls well short of real resistance is a judgment different historians have reached differently. What is not disputed is that it cost her something real and that she paid a social price for saying what she said. At the war’s end, Baldur von Schirach was tried at Nuremberg and convicted of crimes against humanity for his role in the deportation of Viennese Jews. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison, which he served in full at Spandau, being released in 1966.

The marriage did not survive the decades of separation; they divorced after his release. Henriette spent the postwar decades writing about her experiences, publishing memoirs that attempted to present her own story as that of someone swept up in events beyond her understanding and control and who had, when the moment came, found the moral courage to speak. Critics noted that this self-presentation glossed over years of enthusiastic participation in and benefit from a regime whose crimes were not, by any honest reading of the evidence, unknown to those who moved in its inner circles. She died on January 27th, 1992, at the age of seventy-eight.

The case of Brigitte Frank, the wife of Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland known as the Butcher of Poland, illuminates the question of how women who benefited from extraordinary crimes managed to absorb and enjoy those benefits without apparently troubling themselves about their origins. Hans Frank was a lawyer by training who became one of Hitler’s most fervent supporters in the early days of the movement, and who was rewarded after the conquest of Poland with the governorship of the General Government. From his headquarters in the Wawel Castle in Krakow, Frank presided over an occupation characterized by savage brutality, mass starvation, forced labor, and the systematic murder of the Jewish population, who represented approximately ten percent of the territory’s population. He was an enthusiastic and vocal participant in the planning and execution of the final solution in his territory.

But he also created for himself and his family a life of extraordinary luxury amid the ruins, commandeering the royal apartments at Wawel, filling them with art looted from Polish collections, and hosting lavish parties while the people outside the castle walls were starving and dying. Brigitte Frank accompanied her husband to Poland and participated in this life of looted luxury with no apparent discomfort. She was known for her extravagance and her willingness to profit from confiscation of the property of the Jewish population. When Hans Frank was tried at Nuremberg, convicted on counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death, Brigitte faced the prospect of a postwar life stripped of everything.

He was hanged on October 16th, 1946. Brigitte was subjected to denazification proceedings and had a significant portion of whatever wealth remained seized. She spent the postwar decades in relative obscurity in Bavaria. Her son, Niklas Frank, born in 1939 and raised in the Governor-General’s household, later wrote a searing memoir titled In the Shadow of the Reich, in which he described his parents in terms of unsparing condemnation, calling his father a murderer and his mother complicit in his crimes.

The book caused considerable controversy in Germany. Brigitte Frank died in 1981, and the full measure of what she knew and when she knew it died with her. There were a very few who came to the Nazi world entirely from outside it, and Unity Mitford was certainly one of the strangest of them, drawn not by marriage or family obligation but by something that looked disturbingly like genuine ideological passion. Unity Valkyrie Freeman Mitford was born on August 8th, 1914 in London, the fourth of the six remarkable Mitford sisters whose various enthusiasms made them one of the most discussed families in pre-war Britain.

Unity’s passion was for Germany and for Adolf Hitler specifically. She traveled to Munich in 1934 with the explicit stated intention of meeting the Führer. She sat in the same restaurant as him, the Osteria Bavaria on the Schellingstrasse, day after day until he noticed her, which he did in February 1935, inviting her to join his table. What followed was a relationship of extraordinary intensity.

Hitler was genuinely fond of Unity, perhaps because she represented something he found deeply satisfying: a member of the British aristocracy who had come to worship him of her own free will, who shared his political worldview, and whose beauty and social position seemed to validate the attraction of National Socialism to minds of quality. He gave her extraordinary access for a foreign national, introducing her to senior Nazi officials, inviting her to official events, and spending considerable personal time with her. Unity attended the Nuremberg rallies, was present at the Anschluss celebrations in Vienna, and associated closely with figures including Julius Streicher, whose violent anti-Semitism she shared openly, writing letters to Der Stürmer praising the paper’s work. Her family in Britain was divided between horror and awkward acceptance.

Her sister Diana had married Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. When war between Britain and Germany became inevitable in September 1939, Unity was in Munich and faced a crisis her years of devotion had not prepared her to handle. On September 3rd, 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, she walked to the Englischer Garten and shot herself in the head with a small pistol that Hitler had given her as a gift. The attempt did not succeed.

She lay in a Munich clinic for months. The bullet lodged in her skull in a position surgeons deemed too dangerous to remove. Hitler visited her and arranged for her medical care, and in January 1940 he personally facilitated her repatriation to Britain via neutral Switzerland, paying for the entire operation himself. She arrived back a changed woman.

The bullet had caused significant brain damage, affecting her memory, her personality, and her capacity for social engagement. She moved back into her family’s care and spent the remaining years of her life in declining health. She died on May 28th, 1948, at the age of thirty-three, of meningitis brought on by the swelling around the bullet that had remained in her brain for nearly nine years. One of the most poignant and disturbing figures connected to Hitler’s personal world was Angelica Maria Raubal, known as Geli, Hitler’s niece.

Geli was born on June 4th, 1908 to Hitler’s half-sister Angela Raubal and her husband Leo. When Angela became housekeeper at the Berghof in the mid-1920s, Geli came to spend increasing amounts of time in her uncle’s company. The exact nature of the relationship has been debated for nearly a century. What is documented is that Hitler became intensely possessive of his niece, controlling her social life, her friendships, her movements, and her romantic relationships to a degree that even those within the Nazi circle found excessive and disturbing.

He moved her into an apartment in Munich adjacent to his own, financed her studies, and appears to have made her feel simultaneously privileged and imprisoned. On September 18th, 1931, Geli was found dead in Hitler’s Munich apartment with a bullet wound to the chest from Hitler’s own pistol. Hitler himself had left Munich the previous day. The death was ruled a suicide, the official explanation being that Geli had become despondent over her relationship with a man in Vienna whom Hitler had forbidden her to see.

The investigation was extremely brief. Rumors of murder circulated immediately and have never entirely disappeared, though the weight of serious scholarly opinion has generally accepted suicide. What is not disputed is that the death had a devastating effect on Hitler. He kept her room at the Berghof exactly as it had been during her lifetime, displayed her portrait in his private quarters, and spoke of her for the rest of his life.

The apartment where she died became a kind of private shrine. Perhaps the most powerful in terms of behind-the-scenes influence, yet among the least well-known, was Hedwig Potthast, Heinrich Himmler’s secretary and long-term mistress, who bore him two children. She was born on February 24th, 1912 in Cologne, began working as Himmler’s personal secretary in 1936, and by 1939 their relationship had moved well beyond the professional. Himmler, who publicly professed absolute fidelity to the ideals of the SS man, was conducting a sustained affair while remaining nominally married to Margarete.

When Margarete discovered the relationship in 1941, the marriage was effectively over, though Himmler chose not to formally divorce. Hedwig established a separate household and bore him a son, Helge, in February 1942, and a daughter, Nanette Dorothea, in July 1944. She was not a peripheral figure; she was his actual domestic partner for the final five years of his life. Her position gave her a kind of influence that was invisible but real.

She accompanied him on official travels and was present in his immediate circle during the final months of the war. She was not tried for any crimes, and the denazification process did not result in any significant penalty. She raised her two children in circumstances of genuine difficulty, having been stripped of whatever resources the relationship had provided. She died on December 1st, 1994, at the age of eighty-two, having spent nearly five decades building a quiet life far from the terrible center where she had once been so close to the heart of things.

The wife of one of the most ideologically extreme of all the senior Nazi leaders, Julius Streicher, publisher of the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, also faces our attention. Streicher’s first wife, Kunigunde Roth, had died in 1943, and in February 1945, with Germany already in its death throes, he married Adele Tapper, who had been his personal secretary. Adele was a committed ideological partner who shared her husband’s violent anti-Semitism and had worked alongside him for years. When Streicher was arrested by American forces in May 1945, found hiding in the Austrian Tyrol with a fake identity as a painter named Josef Sailor, Adele faced the consequences of having bound her fate to one of the most irredeemably vicious figures in the entire Nazi leadership.

Streicher was tried at Nuremberg, convicted of crimes against humanity for inciting genocide through his decades of published hatred, and hanged on October 16th, 1946, famously shouting Heil Hitler from the scaffold. Adele survived him, living with the burden of that legacy for decades in obscurity. The case of Margarete Speer, known as Annie, the wife of Albert Speer, is one of the most fascinating in this story because of what it reveals about the mechanisms of self-deception available to genuinely intelligent people who choose not to see. Albert Speer was the one senior Nazi official who at Nuremberg successfully presented himself as a reasonable, cultivated, essentially apolitical technocrat who had served the regime’s practical needs without knowledge of its criminal depths.

This defense was almost certainly a sustained and sophisticated lie. Speer was well aware of the deportation of Jewish workers for forced labor, was present at Himmler’s Posen speech in October 1943 in which the extermination of the Jewish people was explicitly described, and had every access to information about the Holocaust that his position and intelligence would have ensured he processed. But at Nuremberg he performed the role of the good German technocrat with such discipline and tactical intelligence that he was sentenced to twenty years rather than death. Annie, born in 1902, married Albert in 1928.

They had six children. Throughout the Nazi years she occupied the conventional role of senior Nazi wife with quiet efficiency, living in comfortable circumstances, moving in elite social circles, and raising her children in the world the Nazi leadership had constructed. After Speer’s conviction, she waited through his twenty years of imprisonment at Spandau. When he was released on September 30th, 1966, having served every day of his sentence, he emerged as a figure of considerable public interest.

His memoir, Inside the Third Reich, published in 1969, became a best-seller and maintained the fiction of the innocent technocrat with great literary skill. The marriage survived his imprisonment but was strained by the revelations of his postwar years, including an emotional relationship with a much younger woman. Annie died in 1987, having watched her husband’s carefully constructed postwar reputation begin to collapse under increasingly rigorous historical scrutiny. Historian Gitta Sereny, who spent years researching Speer’s life, reached the conclusion in Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth that Speer had known far more than he admitted, and had maintained his false position across decades with a discipline that amounted to a sustained lie.

Ingeborg Sauckel was the wife of Fritz Sauckel, appointed by Hitler in March 1942 as Plenipotentiary General for Labor Deployment, responsible for the forced conscription of millions of workers from occupied territories to serve as slave labor in German industry. Sauckel recruited or seized approximately five million foreign workers, the vast majority through methods that were coercive, brutal, and in most cases constituted crimes against humanity. Ingeborg had married Fritz in 1923 when he was an obscure sailor and party activist. Together they had ten children, and she committed herself fully to the domestic and public requirements of her husband’s position.

When Sauckel was tried at Nuremberg, he presented himself as a simple working man who had done his duty. The tribunal was not persuaded. He was convicted on all four counts and hanged on October 16th, 1946. Ingeborg was left with the burden of ten children and the knowledge of what their father had been convicted of doing.

The wives of Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl faced particularly pointed postwar circumstances because both men were found guilty on all four counts and executed on the same night, October 16th, 1946. Lisa Keitel had been married to the field marshal since 1919. Keitel was notoriously known among his own officers as Lackey Keitel, a contemptuous pun on the German word for lackey, reflecting their assessment of his subservient relationship with Hitler. He signed orders condemning prisoners of war and civilian hostages to death and transmitted the criminal orders of the regime to the Wehrmacht without resistance.

Lisa was spared formal criminal prosecution but lived with the weight of her husband’s conviction and execution. Luise von Benda, who had married Jodl in 1944, found herself widowed at the age of thirty-eight. She dedicated significant energy to the posthumous rehabilitation of her husband’s reputation and was largely successful within Germany, where a West German denazification court in 1953 posthumously acquitted him, a verdict that caused considerable international controversy and was never accepted by any of the Allied powers. The fate of Erna Gruhn, who became the wife of Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg in January 1938, precipitated one of the great scandals of the early Nazi military.

Blomberg was commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht and Reich Minister of War. Shortly after the wedding, the Gestapo discovered and reported to Göring and then to Hitler that Erna had a police record for prostitution and had appeared in pornographic photographs. The scandal destroyed Blomberg’s career on the spot and provided the pretext for the simultaneous dismissal of the army commander in chief, Werner von Fritsch, on trumped-up charges of homosexuality. The Blomberg-Fritsch affair allowed Hitler to restructure the German military command to his advantage, bringing the Wehrmacht directly under his personal control.

The entire edifice of this reshaping rested in part on the existence and discovery of a young woman’s past, which had been known to Göring before the marriage and had been, some historians argue, deliberately exploited to create exactly this crisis. Erna Blomberg was the unwitting instrument of a political maneuver whose consequences shaped the course of the Second World War. Ingeborg Weber-Dönitz, the wife of Karl Dönitz, had married him in 1916 when he was a young naval officer. She accompanied the entire arc of his remarkable career to supreme commander of the German navy and ultimately head of the Nazi state for the twenty-three days between Hitler’s death on April 30th and Germany’s final unconditional surrender on May 8th, 1945.

Dönitz was tried at Nuremberg, convicted of crimes against peace and war crimes, and sentenced to ten years imprisonment, which he served in full at Spandau. Ingeborg did not live to see his release. She died in May 1962, having spent the decade of his imprisonment without him and having watched two of their three children die during the war, one a victim of a British destroyer attack on his submarine, the other killed in the fighting in Italy. Louise Funk married Walter Funk in 1932, before he became the Reich’s Economics Minister and President of the Reichsbank.

Funk was a compliant personality who did exactly what was required, which in the case of the Reichsbank included accepting deposits of gold, jewelry, currency, and other valuables confiscated from murdered Jews and processed through the SS before being deposited in the National Bank’s vaults. This specific charge was among the most damning elements of the case against him, and he was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released in 1957 on grounds of ill health and died in 1960. Louise survived him by several years.

Anny Brandt, the wife of Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, brings us to one of the most disturbing chapters in the medical history of the regime. Karl Brandt was the senior official responsible for Action T4, in which an estimated two hundred thousand Germans with disabilities were killed in a program of involuntary euthanasia that began in 1939. He was additionally involved in brutal medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Anny, born in 1906, was an accomplished athlete before her marriage in 1934 and occupied her position with apparent comfort and without recorded protest.

Karl Brandt was tried before the American Military Tribunal in the Doctors’ Trial, convicted, and hanged on June 2nd, 1948 at Landsberg Prison. Anny survived him. Erika von Neurath, the wife of Konstantin von Neurath, former Foreign Minister and Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia before his replacement by Heydrich, came from the German aristocratic and diplomatic establishment. Neurath was a conservative nationalist rather than an ideological Nazi, but his service was substantial and his responsibility for events in occupied Bohemia was real.

He was convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to fifteen years. He was released in 1954 on grounds of ill health, having served eight. Erika managed the postwar circumstances of their family with the quiet dignity her background trained her to maintain. Winifred Wagner was not the wife of a Nazi official, but she was among the most significant female figures in Hitler’s personal social world.

Winifred Marjorie Williams was born in Hastings, England on June 23rd, 1897, orphaned at a young age and adopted by a German family with deep connections to classical music. She married Siegfried Wagner, son of the composer Richard Wagner, in 1915, and became director of the Bayreuth Festival. Her relationship with Hitler, whom she had known since 1923, was of such warmth and intimacy that contemporaries speculated about a romantic dimension never formally acknowledged. Hitler regularly attended the festival as her personal guest.

After the war, a denazification tribunal classified her as a major offender, the highest category, and sentenced her to ten years of labor, a fine, and forfeiture of control over the festival. In practice the sentence was reduced on appeal. Winifred never renounced her regard for Hitler. In 1975 she gave a lengthy interview in which she maintained, with a directness that shocked much of the German public, that if Hitler walked through the door she would still be glad to see him.

She died on March 5th, 1980, at the age of eighty-two. Paula Hitler, Adolf’s younger and only surviving full sibling, spent most of her adult life using the alias Paula Wolff to avoid the attention her surname would bring. She worked as a secretary and arts and crafts worker, and her relationship with her brother was cordial but distant. She attended his last birthday celebration on April 20th, 1945 at the Führerbunker, ten days before his death, in what proved to be their final meeting.

After Germany’s defeat she was subjected to interrogation by American intelligence officers, who found her a quiet, ordinary woman with limited insight into her brother’s psychology. She was detained briefly and released. She died on June 1st, 1960, at the age of sixty-four, the last surviving member of Hitler’s immediate family. Gerda Daranowski, one of Hitler’s personal secretaries, married General Eckhard Christian in 1943 and became Gerda Christian.

She remained in the bunker until the very end, escaping after Germany’s surrender and spending the postwar years in relative obscurity in Düsseldorf, where she worked in the fashion industry. She lived until 1997, giving very few interviews. Traudl Junge, another secretary who took down Hitler’s dictation of his final testament, spent decades wrestling with the question of her own moral responsibility. She wrote a memoir, Until the Final Hour, published in 2002, and expressed her regret and her inability to forgive herself for the years she had spent serving a man whose crimes she had chosen not to see.

She died on February 10th, 2002, the year her memoir was published, at the age of eighty-one. Gudrun Himmler, the daughter of Heinrich and Margarete, belongs to the next generation but illustrates how ideological devotion could persist and intensify across generations. She grew up as the pampered daughter of the Reichsführer SS, accompanying her father on official visits that sometimes included tours of concentration camps. After the war she became a leading figure in Stille Hilfe, providing practical assistance and moral support to convicted war criminals.

She married a man named Wolf Dieter Burwitz and became known as Gudrun Burwitz. She died in May 2018 at the age of eighty-eight, having spent her entire adult life in service to the ideology her father had built into a machinery of mass murder, never publicly acknowledging the nature of what that ideology had meant in practice. Among the less prominent figures, the wife of Arthur Greiser, Gauleiter of the Reichsgau Wartheland in occupied Poland, lived in a territory where her husband presided over some of the earliest and most systematic mass killings of Jews, including the Chelmno extermination camp. The wife of Erich Koch, Gauleiter of Ukraine, inhabited a world where her husband’s regime of terror was so extreme it helped drive millions of Ukrainians who had initially welcomed the Germans into the arms of the Soviet partisan movement.

These women were not sentenced to death and, in most cases, not formally tried at all. The case of Erna Petri is one of the most extreme in the record of female perpetration. She was the wife of an SS officer and plantation manager in occupied Ukraine, and in 1943 she personally shot dead six Jewish children, aged from three to eight, who had escaped from a transport and were sheltering near her estate. The case was uncovered in East German criminal investigations in the 1960s, and she was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

She was released in 1992. Dorothea Binz joined the SS Female Auxiliary and became one of the most senior and notorious female guards at Ravensbrück concentration camp, rising to deputy supervisor. She oversaw beatings, torture, executions, and the selection of prisoners for murder. She was tried by a British military tribunal in the Ravensbrück trial of 1947, convicted of war crimes, and hanged on May 2nd, 1947, at the age of twenty-six.

Maria Mandel, chief female warden at the Auschwitz-Birkenau women’s camp from 1942 to 1944, was known to prisoners as the beast. She selected prisoners for the gas chambers, participated in beatings, and was personally responsible for actions resulting in numerous deaths. She was extradited to Poland, tried before a Polish court in the Auschwitz trial of 1947, convicted, and executed by hanging on January 24th, 1948. Gertrude Scholtz-Klink held the extraordinary position of Reichsführerin, the leader of German women from 1934 until the war’s end, presiding over the Reich women’s service and the NS-Frauenschaft.

She articulated the role of German women as fundamentally domestic and biological and presided over programs to increase the birth rate of racially acceptable Germans. After the war she concealed her identity under a false name until discovered in 1948. She was sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment and faced denazification proceedings. She lived quietly in West Germany for decades, occasionally giving interviews in which she maintained her work had been aimed at improving the lives of German women.

She died in 1999 at the age of ninety-seven, one of the longest-lived and least repentant figures associated with the Nazi leadership. The women of the Nazi inner circle were not the primary architects of the catastrophe. That credit belongs to the men: Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, Heydrich, Ribbentrop. But the women who shared their lives shared something of their world and therefore something of their responsibility.

They were not passive. They were not entirely ignorant. They were not simply swept along by forces too powerful to resist. They were human beings who made choices in specific circumstances with specific consequences.

What they chose, most of them, most of the time, was to hold what they had and look away. And the world they were looking away from was burning. The jewels were stolen. The palaces were looted.

The labor that maintained the estates was forced from human beings stripped of their freedom and frequently of their lives. The women who wore those jewels and lived in those palaces knew enough, most of them, to know that the cost was too high if they had allowed themselves to count it. The fact that most of them did not allow themselves to count it is the central and disturbing fact about all of them. They were not monsters in the sense that their husbands were, but they were not innocent either.

They were people who chose repeatedly, and in full knowledge of the consequences for others, to be comfortable rather than good. And that choice, made at scale across an entire society, is part of what made the Third Reich possible.