Nazi Princesses – The Fates of Top N4zis’ Wives & Mistresses

They were the prominent women who once held absolute privilege in N4zi Germany—the wives, sisters-in-law, and mistresses of the regime’s highest-ranking leaders. They enjoyed gilded, extraordinarily luxurious lives built at the direct expense of the state, frequently leveraged as idealized symbols of German womanhood while quietly wielding immense personal influence behind the scenes.

When their husbands and partners fell from power during the catastrophic collapse of May 1945, their opulent existence dissolved into chaotic ruin. The Allies confronted the complex problem of how to handle these spouses, leaving behind a legacy of trial, escape, and internment that extended through the post-war decades into modern memory.

Among the innermost circle was Gretel Braun, sister to Eva Braun and eventual sister-in-law to Adolf Hitler. Gretel married SS Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein in June 1944 at Berchtesgaden, a high-profile ceremony witnessed by Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann before a lavish celebration at the Eagles’ Nest.

Gretel accompanied her sister to the heavily bombed Reich Chancellery in early 1945, but because she was pregnant, she soon returned to the safety of the Obersalzberg. In Berlin, her husband Fegelein attempted to desert during the final, desperate days of the Battle of Berlin, incurring the total wrath of the dictator.

Following the discovery of Himmler’s secret surrender negotiations with Western forces, Hitler ordered Fegelein’s execution despite Eva’s desperate pleas for her brother-in-law’s life. Fegelein was shot in the Chancellery garden, leaving Gretel widowed just days before Hitler married Eva and the couple committed suicide in their underground bunker.

Gretel gave birth to a daughter in Obersalzberg on May 5, 1945, naming the infant Eva in memory of her fallen sister. She had hidden vast archives of historical materials—photographs, letters between Hitler and Eva, and personal memorabilia—at Schloss Fischhorn, the headquarters of her late husband’s former division.

Shortly after the war, an American Counter Intelligence Corps agent disguised as a German refugee gained her trust and persuaded her to reveal the location of the documents. The material was promptly confiscated and sent to Washington, D.C., with many artifacts disappearing or remaining classified from the public eye for decades.

Gretel later rebuilt her life, marrying Munich businessman Kurt Berlinghoff in 1954. Her daughter Eva Tragically committed suicide in 1971 following the death of her fiancé in a car crash, while Gretel herself suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in her final years before passing away in October 1987.

The two witnesses at Gretel’s 1944 wedding—Heinrich Himmler and Martin Bormann—maintained equally complex and hypocritical domestic arrangements. Himmler, initially a quiet and fastidious man, married Margarete Boden in 1928, a nurse seven years his senior with whom he shared a deep interest in homeopathy and herbal remedies.

The marriage produced a daughter, Gudrun, born in 1929, and the couple later adopted Gerhard, the son of a deceased SS officer. Although Himmler was frequently absent running the apparatus of state terror, he remained devoted to Gudrun, taking her on official state visits and even to Buchenwald concentration camp.

Behind his public stance on traditional family morals, Himmler initiated an affair in 1938 with his young secretary, Hedwig Potthast. Because a high-profile divorce would undermine the strict ethical standards he demanded of the SS, Himmler kept Potthast as his long-term mistress, fathering two children with her during the war.

As the war ended, Himmler’s mistress was living quietly in Rosenheim with her children, while his wife Margarete served in a senior nursing position for the German Red Cross. Margarete and Gudrun fled their home ahead of advancing American troops but were eventually detained by Allied forces in Italy.

Margarete and Gudrun were held across a series of internment camps in Italy, France, and Germany before being brought to testify at the Nuremberg Trials. This harsh imprisonment deeply affected the young Gudrun, solidifying an unyielding, lifelong devotion to her father’s memory and his ideological legacy.

Margarete spent years fighting her denazification status through German courts, eventually being categorized as a beneficiary of the regime, which stripped her of pension rights and voting privileges. She spent her final years living in a small Munich apartment alongside Gudrun, eventually dying in 1967.

Gudrun grew into a prominent figure within post-war neo-N4zi networks, earned the moniker “N4zi Princess,” and actively supported Stille Hilfe (Silent Help), an organization providing legal and financial assistance to former SS war criminals. She remained an unrepentant defender of her father until her death in Munich in May 2018.

Himmler’s mistress, Hedwig Potthast, was arrested by the United States Army in July 1945 and subjected to extensive interrogation regarding her partner’s affairs. She eventually remarried, changed her name, and lived a quiet life in Baden-Baden until her death in September 1994, with her daughter pursuing a medical career.

Martin Bormann, Himmler’s fierce rival, similarly lived a life at odds with the public morality advocated by the Third Reich. In 1929, Bormann married Gerda Buch, the daughter of a senior N4zi official, in a ceremony witnessed by Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess.

The Bormanns produced ten children, forming a large family that was frequently filmed at their Obersalzberg residence neighboring Hitler’s Berghof estate. The children were named after key N4zi figures, including the eldest, Martin Adolf, whose godfather was Adolf Hitler himself, and another named after Heinrich Himmler.

Gerda Bormann was a committed fanatic who tolerated her husband’s systemic unfaithfulness and openly advocated for state-sanctioned parallel marriages to increase the Aryan birthrate. Bormann openly conducted an affair with film actress Manya Behrens, spending lavish sums on her while maintaining a stern, controlling presence over his household.

When the war reached its conclusion, Bormann remained in the Berlin bunker with Hitler until the end, disappearing during an escape attempt in early May 1945. Gerda fled to a mountain village in South Tyrol with her children, where she was apprehended and interrogated by American security forces.

During her detention, doctors discovered that Gerda suffered from advanced uterine cancer, and she passed away in a Merano hospital in April 1946. Her orphaned children were subsequently taken in and raised by a Roman Catholic priest in the post-war years.

Intriguingly, Bormann’s eldest son, Martin Adolf, initially became a Catholic priest before later leaving the priesthood to marry and start a family. He spent much of his adult life speaking openly about his father’s atrocities before his death in 2013, leaving behind several surviving siblings.

Another prominent figure whose family was caught in the collapse was Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Having lost his political influence to military commanders as the war progressed, Ribbentrop spent his final months attempting to preserve his personal wealth while remaining distant from the active leadership.

At the end of the conflict, Ribbentrop abandoned his family and hid in Hamburg under an assumed identity until British forces discovered and arrested him in June 1945. He was subsequently tried at Nuremberg for his role in planning aggressive warfare and was executed by hanging in October 1946.

His wife, Annelies von Ribbentrop, was the daughter of a wealthy sparkling wine producer and was widely described by contemporaries as a headstrong woman who exercised immense influence over her husband. She had aggressively encouraged his entry into high-level N4zi politics, maintaining a dominant presence in their high-society life.

Following the war, Annelies was arrested and held at the Dachau internment camp while Allied authorities attempted to seize her family’s considerable assets. She fought back vigorously in the German court system to retain her inherited property and published multiple books defending her late husband’s diplomatic legacy before dying in 1973.

Her eldest son, Rudolf von Ribbentrop, served as a highly decorated officer in the Waffen-SS, receiving the Knight’s Cross for combat actions before surviving the war and living until 2019. Several of Ribbentrop’s other children survived well into the 21st century, maintaining quiet private lives across Western Germany.

Perhaps the most public figure among the wives was Emmy Göring, the second wife of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. An accomplished stage actress during the Weimar era, Emmy married Göring in 1935 in an extraordinarily lavish state wedding that established her position as the undisputed “First Lady of the Reich.”

Emmy lived an exceptionally opulent life across Göring’s sprawling estates, including the grand Carinhall property northeast of Berlin, named after her husband’s deceased first wife. She routinely hosted foreign dignitaries, diplomats, and high society figures, surrounding herself with luxury and artworks looted from across occupied Europe.

Emmy maintained an openly frosty relationship with Eva Braun, treating the dictator’s hidden mistress with visible condescension. The friction became severe enough that Hitler eventually intervened, ordering Göring to ensure his wife showed proper respect to Eva during official visits to the Berghof.

In 1938, Emmy gave birth to her only child, Edda Göring, who was treated virtually like royal family within the regime’s elite circles. The Luftwaffe even financed the construction of a massive, small-scale replica of Sanssouci Palace as a playhouse for the young girl on the grounds of Carinhall.

As the Allied bombing campaigns destroyed German cities, Göring’s standing with Hitler collapsed, culminating in his house arrest in April 1945 after attempting to assume leadership of the declining state. SS troops evacuated Emmy, Edda, and Göring to Schloss Mauterndorf in Austria to await the final collapse.

Following Göring’s surrender to American forces in May 1945, Emmy and her daughter were separated from him and interned at Camp Ashcan in Luxembourg. Göring was tried at Nuremberg as the senior surviving N4zi official and committed suicide with smuggled cyanide the night before his scheduled execution in October 1946.

Emmy faced denazification proceedings in the post-war period, resulting in a one-year prison sentence and the confiscation of thirty percent of her personal property. Upon her release, she moved through various residences before acquiring a small apartment in Munich, where she authored a memoir in 1967.

Her daughter Edda studied law at the University of Munich and worked for many years as a laboratory technician, remaining unmarried and dedicated to caring for her mother until Emmy’s death in 1973. Edda remained a staunch, vocal defender of her father’s historical reputation throughout her entire life.

In her later years, Edda dated journalist Gerd Heidemann, who was centrally involved in the famous Hitler Diaries scandal of the early 1980s. She repeatedly petitioned the Bavarian government for the return of confiscated family properties, though her legal battles were consistently rejected by German courts.

Edda Göring passed away in Munich in 2018 at the age of 80, bringing an end to one of the most prominent direct family lines from the peak of the Third Reich. Her death marked the closing chapter for a generation of women whose lives were defined by absolute privilege, sudden collapse, and historical infamy.