Nazi Princesses – The Fates of Top Nazis’ Wives & Mistresses
They were the women who had once seemed to have everything: the wives and mistresses of Nazi Germany’s most powerful men. They lived gilded, luxurious lives at the expense of the state, promoted as symbols of ideal German womanhood while often exercising considerable influence behind the scenes. But when their husbands and lovers fell from power in the ruins of May 1945, what became of them—and of their children?
How did the Allies treat the spouses of the Third Reich’s elite? What happened to the families who had lived at the center of dictatorship when that world collapsed overnight? Many of the children of Hitler’s inner circle are still alive today, and their stories stretch across more than seventy-five years, from the defeat of Nazi Germany to the present.
Let us begin with one of the more unusual cases: Hitler’s sister-in-law. That title belonged to Gretl Braun, the younger sister of Eva Braun. Because Hitler married Eva the day before they both died, Gretl briefly became, by law, Adolf Hitler’s sister-in-law.
Gretl Braun had long been part of the inner circle around Hitler. In 1944, she married Hitler’s SS liaison officer, Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein. The ceremony took place in the garden at Berchtesgaden, with Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann acting as witnesses.
After the wedding, the newlyweds visited Hitler at the Berghof, his private house on the Obersalzberg, before hosting a wedding breakfast at the Eagle’s Nest high atop the Kehlstein mountain. The timing was remarkable: this lavish celebration took place only three days before the D-Day landings in Normandy. Even then, the collapse of the Nazi world was already moving toward them.
On 19 January 1945, Gretl accompanied her sister to the Reich Chancellery in bomb-scarred Berlin to see her husband. She returned to the Obersalzberg on 9 February, while Eva went back alone to Berlin to join Hitler in the bunker, a place she would never leave alive. Gretl stayed behind because she was pregnant.
By then, events had already begun to unravel. During the final stages of the Battle of Berlin, Fegelein deserted the bunker and was caught by Hitler’s bodyguards. Coming just after Himmler’s betrayal—his secret attempt to negotiate surrender with the Western Allies behind Hitler’s back—this was too much for Hitler.
Urged on by Bormann, Hitler condemned Fegelein to death. He was shot in the garden of the Reich Chancellery despite Eva Braun’s pleas. In the bitter chaos of the regime’s final hours, even family ties carried little weight.
In the early hours of 29 April 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun, making the widowed Gretl his sister-in-law. A week later, on 5 May 1945, Gretl gave birth to a daughter in the resort town of Zell am See. She named the child Eva after her dead sister.
Before the war’s end, Gretl had hidden an extraordinary cache of materials at Fischhorn Castle, the headquarters of her husband’s former SS cavalry division, Florian Geyer, where his brother served as chief of staff. The hidden collection included photo albums, jewelry, amateur film footage, personal letters—including correspondence between Hitler and Eva Braun—and many other mementos.
Shortly after the war, Gretl was befriended by a German refugee who persuaded her to reveal the hiding place. In reality, he was an agent of the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps. The entire cache was seized and sent to Washington, D.C., where some of it disappeared and some of it has never been shown publicly.
In 1954, Gretl Fegelein married businessman Kurt Berlinghoff in Munich. The marriage produced no children. Her daughter, Eva Fegelein, committed suicide in June 1971 at the age of twenty-six after her fiancé was killed in a car crash.
In later life, Gretl suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. She died in October 1987 in the town of Steingaden, Bavaria, at the age of seventy-two. Her story, shaped by privilege, violence, and ruin, ended in obscurity.
The two men who had stood as witnesses at Gretl’s wedding—Himmler and Bormann—had family arrangements of their own, each revealing the gap between Nazi moral posturing and private reality.
Heinrich Himmler had been a late bloomer, shy and meticulous by temperament. He met his future wife, Margarete, in 1927. She was a nurse, and the two shared an interest in homeopathy and herbal medicine.
They married in July 1928. Margarete was seven years older than Himmler, and the marriage produced one child, a daughter named Gudrun, born in 1929. Later, Himmler also adopted a boy named Gerhard von Ahe, the son of an SS officer who had died before the war.
Himmler saw relatively little of his wife. The family maintained two residences: a large villa in Berlin’s Dahlem district and a house at Gmund on the Tegernsee in Bavaria. He was, however, able to spend more time with Gudrun, who accompanied him on many official occasions.
She appeared with her father on state visits and even, on at least one occasion, during a visit to Buchenwald concentration camp. It was a chilling reminder of how deeply normalized power and horror had become within the private lives of the Nazi elite.
But Himmler, for all his official moral strictness, found love elsewhere. In 1938, he became attracted to one of his secretaries, Hedwig Potthast, a woman twelve years younger than him. Their relationship became romantic the following year.
Himmler considered divorcing his wife to marry Potthast, but such a move would have exposed his hypocrisy. He demanded rigid moral conduct from his SS subordinates while secretly violating the standards he publicly championed. So Potthast remained his long-term mistress.
They lived together on and off in Mecklenburg. Potthast bore him two children: a son, Helge, born in 1942, and a daughter, Nanette Dorothea, born on 20 July 1944—the very day officers of the German army attempted to kill Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair.
By the end of the war, Himmler’s mistress was living in Rosenheim with her children and with the wife of SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, one of Himmler’s top commanders and a major war criminal. Meanwhile, Himmler’s wife was serving in a senior wartime position with the German Red Cross.
His adopted son, Gerhard von Ahe, saw combat against the Soviets as part of a Hitler Youth unit. He was captured, later released, and survived the war. Himmler’s wife and mistress both remained loyal to him until the end.
Margarete and Gudrun fled Gmund just ahead of advancing American troops and reached Bolzano in Italy, where they were arrested. The Americans held them in a series of internment camps in Italy, France, and Germany before taking them to Nuremberg to testify during the famous trials.
The experience deeply affected Gudrun. It helped transform her into a lifelong defender of her father. Released in November 1946, Margarete also emerged bitter and determined to fight her official denazification classification.
Her classification was based largely on her senior rank in the German Red Cross. In 1951, her category was reduced to the lowest level, meaning she was not held personally responsible for her husband’s crimes. But in 1953, she was reclassified again, this time as a Category II beneficiary of the Nazi regime.
She received thirty days of punitive labor and lost both her pension rights and the right to vote. She later lived with her sister and adopted son in a small apartment in Hütten, and spent her final years with Gudrun in Munich. Margarete Himmler died there in 1967 at the age of seventy-three.
Gudrun Himmler became one of the most visible and vocal neo-Nazi sympathizers in postwar West Germany. Sometimes called the “Nazi princess” of the far right, she married author and journalist Wulf-Dieter Burwitz and had two children with him.
Burwitz was heavily involved with Germany’s right-wing NPD party, and Gudrun herself became active in Stille Hilfe, or “Silent Help,” an organization that supported former Nazis and SS officers. The group aided notorious war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” and Martin Sommer, known as the “Hangman of Buchenwald.”
Because she was Himmler’s daughter, she held a near-symbolic status in the neo-Nazi world. Gudrun Burwitz remained committed to that cause for the rest of her life. She died in Munich in May 2018 at the age of eighty-eight.
As for Himmler’s mistress, she was arrested by the U.S. Army in July 1945 and interrogated. Hedwig Potthast later lived in Traunstein and remained in contact with the family of Himmler’s older brother Gebhard, as well as with SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, former chief of Himmler’s personal staff.
Potthast eventually married and changed her surname. Her son Helge suffered poor health throughout his life and continued to live with his mother. Her daughter became a medical doctor and is believed to still be alive in northern Germany today.
Hedwig Potthast died in Baden-Baden in September 1994 at the age of eighty-two.
Martin Bormann, like his rival Himmler, was deeply hypocritical when it came to the family values publicly promoted by Nazi leaders. In 1929, Bormann married nineteen-year-old Gerda Buch, the daughter of a senior Nazi official. Hitler and Rudolf Hess served as witnesses at their wedding.
The Nazi state glorified large families, and the Bormanns certainly embodied that ideal. They had ten children between 1930 and 1943. Their family was often filmed with Hitler at the Berghof, since the Bormann villa stood next door to Hitler’s house on the Obersalzberg.
One child died in infancy. Many of the others were named after powerful godparents. Their eldest son, Martin Adolf Bormann, was named after Adolf Hitler himself. Another son was named Rudolf after Rudolf Hess, though that name was later changed to Helmut after Hess flew to Scotland in 1941.
Other children reflected the same pattern: Heinrich after Himmler, Eva after Hitler’s companion. The family was not merely private—it was symbolic, carefully woven into the visual mythology of the regime.
Gerda Bormann was a fanatical anti-Semite. Yet her marriage to Bormann was deeply troubled. The so-called “brown eminence” was chronically unfaithful, and Gerda, a tall woman who physically towered over her husband, was frequently humiliated by him in front of guests.
In private, however, Bormann could be sentimental and affectionate. Gerda supported the bizarre notion of “parallel marriages,” in which men could take additional partners in order to produce more children for Hitler’s Reich. She tolerated his affairs accordingly.
One of Bormann’s mistresses was the film actress Manja Behrens, though they had no children together. The contrast between official morality and private conduct was, once again, impossible to miss.
At the end of the war, Martin Bormann remained in the Berlin bunker with Hitler to the very end. In early May 1945, during a breakout attempt by the surviving bunker personnel, he disappeared. His ultimate fate became one of the most persistent mysteries of the postwar years.
Gerda and the children fled to Wolkenstein, a mountain village near Bolzano in Italy. There she was arrested and interrogated by U.S. forces. Later moved to Merano, she was found to be suffering from uterine cancer.
She died in hospital in April 1946 at the age of thirty-seven. Her children were adopted by a Catholic priest. It was a remarkable turn for the family of one of the Reich’s most powerful anti-Christian fanatics.
Interestingly, Bormann’s eldest son, Martin Adolf, later became a Roman Catholic priest himself. He eventually left the priesthood, married a former nun, and had children. He died in 2013. Six of Martin Bormann’s children are still alive today.
Another top Nazi who had already fallen from favor before the end of the war was Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. During the 1930s, he had been highly influential as Hitler used diplomacy to expand German power across Europe. Once war came, diplomacy lost much of its value, and so did Ribbentrop’s importance.
He clung to a diminished role at Hitler’s court and continued enriching himself. Deeply disliked by many of the regime’s other leaders, he made himself scarce at the end of the war, abandoning his family and fleeing to Hamburg. There, on 14 June 1945, he was tracked down in a squalid flat in the company of a young woman by the Belgian section of the British SAS.
He was later hanged following the Nuremberg trials.
This vain and ambitious man had married Anna Henkel in 1920 when he was still a dashing cavalry officer. Anna was the daughter of a wealthy wine producer from Wiesbaden. Together they had five children.
Anneliese, as she was commonly known, was said to have married beneath her social rank—at least according to her mother, who despised Ribbentrop. Contemporary observers described her as stubborn and headstrong, a woman who dominated her husband.
It was she, in fact, who pushed him into joining the Nazi Party. Hitler himself reportedly remarked that Anneliese seemed to “wear the trousers” in the marriage.
At war’s end, Anneliese was arrested and interned at Dachau, the former concentration camp now repurposed by the Allies. She and her husband had accumulated enormous wealth. Although the Allies tried to strip much of it away, she fought back aggressively through the courts.
A large portion of her fortune, however, came through inheritance from her father. She also wrote several books defending her husband’s actions. She died in 1973 at the age of seventy-seven, largely unrepentant.
Her eldest son, Rudolf von Ribbentrop, had been a highly decorated Waffen-SS captain during the war and received the Knight’s Cross for bravery in combat. He had once been educated at Westminster School in London, while his father served as German ambassador. Wounded five times in action, he lived to the age of ninety-eight, dying in 2019.
Longevity seems to have run in the Ribbentrop family. Three of von Ribbentrop’s children are still alive today. Adolf von Ribbentrop is in his mid-eighties, Ursula von Ribbentrop is in her late eighties, and Bettina von Ribbentrop has reached an even older age.
Perhaps the most politically important Nazi wife was not Himmler’s, Bormann’s, or even Hitler’s eventual bride. It was Emmy Göring, the second wife of Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring—at one point Hitler’s deputy and designated successor after Hess’s flight to Scotland.
Born in 1893, Emmy Sonnemann had been an actress during the Weimar period and had once married another actor before divorcing amicably in 1926. She met Hermann Göring in the early 1930s.
Göring’s first wife, Carin, a Swede, had died in October 1931 from heart failure just before her forty-third birthday. Göring was devastated and immortalized her memory by naming his grand estate outside Berlin Carinhall. He also named two of his yachts after her.
When the Red Army approached in April 1945, Göring ordered Carinhall blown up. Yet Carin’s remains, still buried on the estate, were discovered in 1991 and later reburied in Sweden.
Göring married Emmy in 1935 at a lavish Berlin ceremony. In 1938, their daughter Edda was born, named after Mussolini’s daughter, Countess Edda Ciano, who was a close friend of Emmy’s. Emmy soon came to be described as the “First Lady of the Reich.”
She was an elegant hostess who thoroughly enjoyed the decadent and extravagant lifestyle her husband provided. Interestingly, she had no time for Hitler’s companion Eva Braun, treating her with patronizing contempt. The friction grew so intense that Hitler had to intervene and instruct Göring to make his wife treat Eva with more respect.
At one point, Emmy was reportedly even banned from Hitler’s house, the Berghof. Still, the Görings maintained a lavish home just behind Bormann’s property, one of many houses, hunting lodges, and castles they controlled.
These residences were filled with the finest objects, including works of art looted from Jewish collectors and museums in Paris. Their daughter Edda was treated like royalty. Although described as polite and well-mannered, she was showered with luxury.
She had clothes, toys, and lavish playhouses, including a fifty-meter-long replica of Frederick the Great’s Sanssouci Palace, paid for by the Luftwaffe. Edda was Göring’s only child, and he adored her.
Unlike several of the other Nazi leaders, Göring did not maintain mistresses. He appears to have remained faithful to Emmy. Yet as the war turned against Germany, Göring’s prestige declined sharply. His Luftwaffe could no longer protect German cities from relentless Allied bombing.
A few days before Hitler’s death, Göring made the fatal mistake of attempting to assume leadership, believing that Hitler, trapped in his bunker, was no longer capable of command. Bormann persuaded Hitler that Göring was committing treason. Hitler responded by ordering his arrest.
Göring and his family were placed under house arrest at their home on the Obersalzberg. They survived the heavy RAF bombing raid that destroyed or damaged much of the Nazi complex there. The SS then moved them to Göring’s castle at Mauterndorf.
Freed on 5 May, with the war effectively over, Göring tried to reach American lines. He believed he could personally negotiate Germany’s surrender with General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Instead, he and his family were intercepted by a special U.S. intelligence mission and taken to Fischhorn Castle on 7 May 1945.
From there, Göring was transferred to U.S. headquarters and formally arrested as a war crimes suspect. Emmy and Edda remained at Fischhorn before being interned at Camp Ashcan in Luxembourg.
After their release, they moved into one of their castles, Burg Veldenstein near Nuremberg. Hermann Göring became the star defendant at the Nuremberg trials, and Emmy and Edda were permitted to visit him in the prison attached to the court.
On 15 October 1946, the night before he was due to be executed, Göring killed himself with a concealed cyanide capsule.
During the war, Göring had accumulated immense wealth, much of it acquired by illicit means. Untangling which property belonged to him personally and which might legally belong to his wife and daughter proved extremely difficult.
As part of the denazification process, Emmy Göring was convicted of being a Nazi and sentenced to one year in prison. She also lost thirty percent of her remaining property.
After the war, she and Edda lived in several locations while Edda completed her education. Eventually, Emmy bought a small flat in a modern block in Munich and published her autobiography in 1967.
Edda grew into an attractive young woman. She studied law at the University of Munich and worked both as a law clerk and in a hospital laboratory. She never married and instead cared for her mother until Emmy’s death in 1973.
Later, Edda became romantically involved with German journalist Gerd Heidemann, who would eventually become notorious in connection with the so-called Hitler Diaries. Heidemann bought and restored Hermann Göring’s yacht, *Carin II*, and Edda was his companion for five years.
Through her, he gained access to a network of old Nazi associates, including former SS generals Karl Wolff and Wilhelm Mohnke, the officer responsible for defending the Reich Chancellery and Führerbunker during Berlin’s final battle.
Edda petitioned the Bavarian government for compensation over the expropriation of her father’s enormous estate, but she was unsuccessful. She remained an unrepentant defender of his memory for the rest of her life.
Edda Göring died in 2018, the same year as Gudrun Himmler, and was buried in Munich. She was eighty years old.
These women had once lived close to the center of power, privilege, and terror. Some were punished, some adapted, some remained defiantly loyal to the men whose names had become synonymous with dictatorship and war. Their children, in many cases, carried those legacies forward in ways both public and deeply troubling.
The collapse of Nazi Germany did not simply destroy a regime. It scattered a ruling caste into prisons, courtrooms, apartments, memoirs, and silence. And in the long shadows that followed 1945, the wives, mistresses, and children of the Nazi elite continued to live with names the world had not forgotten.
