1943, German-occupied Europe. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and one of the most feared men in Nazi Germany, is at the height of his power. He oversees the concentration camps, controls the police, and answers only to Adolf Hitler himself. His name alone spreads terror across the continent and under his authority, millions of Jews have already been murdered as the machinery of genocide runs at full speed.
But while he directs the Holocaust, he still writes intimate letters to his wife. She shares her husband’s hatred of Jews and never once questions the morality of his work. Yet behind the scenes, due to her appearance, she is mocked by the wives of senior SS officers and tolerates her husband’s affair with a young secretary who bears him two children.
She is the bitter, angry, and forgotten woman at the side of the most powerful killer in the Third Reich. Her name is Margarete Himmler. Margarete Himmler, one of 5 children of landowner Hans Boden and his wife Elfriede, was born as Margarete Boden on 9 September 1893 in the village of Goncarzewo near the city of Bromberg, today’s Polish Bydgoszcz, then part of the German Empire.
Margarete trained and worked as a nurse during the First World War, which lasted from July 1914 to November 1918, followed by a stint at a German Red Cross hospital after the war ended. Her first marriage was short and produced no children. With financial support from her father, Margarete was able to operate and direct a private nursing clinic in Berlin.
In 1926, she met Heinrich Himmler, in a hotel lobby at the Bavarian resort of Bad Reichenhall. He immediately saw her as his ideal woman and was particularly attracted to Margarete’s blonde hair and blue eyes. The two were united not only by antisemitism, but also by a shared interest in homeopathy, medicinal herbs, and agriculture. According to some historians, Heinrich Himmler had great difficulty finding girlfriends as he lacked confidence. His timidity was likely based largely on his awareness of his looks.
Otto Strasser, a former Nazi politician, claimed that Margarete, aged 34 and therefore almost 7 years older than Himmler, seduced him. Himmler told Strasser that she was the first woman with whom he had sexual relations. Margarete and Himmler shared an excessive love of efficiency and neatness, longed for strict domesticity, and both preferred a frugal lifestyle.
Margarete received from her husband a steady stream of anti-Semitism and rants against Communists and Freemasons. Her hatred of Jews was evident in a letter to Heinrich Himmler dated 22 June 1928, in which she made insulting remarks about the co-owner of the private clinic in Berlin, a gynaecologist and surgeon named Bernhard Hauschildt. She said: “That Hauschildt! Those Jews are all the same!” Heinrich and Margarete married in July 1928.
Initially, Himmler struggled to reveal his relationship with Margarete to his parents, partly because she was so much older than him, also because she was a divorcee and, above all, because she was a Protestant. None of Himmler’s family members attended the wedding, so his groomsmen were the father and brother of the bride.
Ultimately, Himmler’s parents accepted Margarete, but the family kept their distance from her throughout the rest of the relationship. Just like her husband, Margarete was captivated by Adolf Hitler and his beliefs, and in August 1928, she joined the Nazi Party. In August of the following year, the couple had their only child, a daughter named Gudrun.
They were also foster parents to Gerhard von Ahe, the son of an SS officer who had been shot and killed in Berlin shortly after the Nazis seized power. After the marriage, she sold her share in the private clinic for 12,000 Reichsmarks and moved from Berlin to Waldtrudering, near Munich, where the couple bought a house with the proceeds from the sale.
To supplement Himmler’s modest income as a party employee, they unsuccessfully attempted to sell their own agricultural products and operated a small chicken farm. In the years that followed, however, the couple enriched themselves through property and valuables stolen from murdered Jews. The Himmlers occasionally attended social functions together and were frequent guests at the home of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust.
Margarete saw it as her duty to invite the wives of senior SS leaders over for coffee and tea on Wednesday afternoons. Despite her best efforts, she remained unpopular in SS circles. Thanks to her husband, Margarete was the most senior wife, and she was determined to make sure everyone in the SS clan respected that.
Lina Heydrich, however, resented playing second fiddle to a woman she considered her inferior. At one point, Margarete allegedly tried to force her husband to persuade Heydrich to dump Lina, but Himmler avoided the issue, unwilling to jeopardize his working relationship with Lina’s husband. Some have claimed that Himmler was ashamed of his own wife, especially compared to the attractive wives of two men under him, Reinhard Heydrich and Karl Wolff, who served as Himmler’s chief of staff. Lina Heydrich mocked Margarete’s appearance, once sneering:
“Size 50 underwear, that’s all there was to her.” In July 1937, the German journalist Bella Fromm saw Himmler with his wife and later commented that she was “dirty-blonde, dull, and fat” and that the pleasures of the table were apparently the only pleasures she got, since Himmler kept her at home.
During the Nuremberg Rally in 1938, Himmler had conflicts with most of the wives of the highest-ranking SS leaders, who as a group refused to take any directions from her. Lina Heydrich, in particular, harboured a “violent dislike” of Margarete Himmler, a feeling that was mutual. After the war, Lina Heydrich made insulting comments to a reporter from Der Spiegel, a German news magazine, describing Margarete as a “narrow-minded, humourless, blonde-haired woman” who suffered from agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces that kept her trapped inside
her home. Lina also said that Margarete Himmler had “dominated her husband until at least 1936.” Baldur von Schirach, the former Hitler Youth leader, wrote in his memoirs that Heinrich Himmler was completely under his wife’s thumb. He wrote: “The chief of police and the SS was a nobody at home. He always had to give in.
” These testimonies suggest a striking contrast between Himmler’s public role as one of the most feared men in Nazi Germany — together with Hitler responsible for the deaths of millions during the Second World War — and his apparently submissive position within his own marriage, where he seemed deeply intimidated by his wife in private life.
Gebhard Himmler, Heinrich Himmler’s older brother, characterized Margarete as a cool, hard woman with extremely delicate nerves who radiated no warmth at all and spent too much time moaning. Yet he admitted that she had been an exemplary housewife who devotedly loved Heinrich and remained true to her husband. Her devotion, however, was not reciprocated.
In 1936, Heinrich Himmler hired a young secretary named Hedwig Potthast and by 1938 she had become his mistress. Together they had two children, a son named Helge and a daughter named Nanette Dorothea. Margarete learned of the affair at the latest by February 1941. She felt humiliated and responded with bitterness, but the couple did not divorce.
The marriage was already broken, but they remained legally bound. Unlike Margarete, Himmler adored his daughter Gudrun. He nicknamed her Püppi, which means dolly, and phoned her every few days while visiting as often as he could. Himmler continued to visit his wife and daughter at their home in the Bavarian town of Gmund, mostly to maintain his close relationship with Gudrun.
During the Second World War, which started in September 1939, Margarete worked for the German Red Cross. Beginning in December 1939, she supervised Red Cross hospitals in the Berlin-Brandenburg military district. In this role, she travelled to countries occupied by the German army.
In March 1940, during a business trip to German-occupied Poland, she wrote in a diary entry: “I was in Posen, Lodsch and Warschau. This Jewish rabble, the Poles, most of them don’t look like human beings, and the dirt is indescribable. It is an incredible job trying to create order there.” Margarete reached the rank of Oberstführerin, or colonel, in the German Red Cross, but frequent conflicts with the doctors she supervised eventually led her to give up the position. She then returned to live a withdrawn life in Gmund.
In February 1945, in writing to Gebhard Himmler, Margarete said of Heinrich: “How wonderful that he has been called to great tasks and is equal to them. The whole of Germany is looking to him.” Margarete last had contact with her husband in April 1945, shortly before the end of the war. Assisted by SS personnel, she fled with her daughter to South Tyrol, a region of northern Italy then under German control, where they went into hiding in the provincial capital, Bolzano.
The Second World War in Europe ended on 8 May 1945. Five days later, on 13 May 1945, Margarete Himmler and her daughter were arrested in Bolzano and held in Italy and France. During her internment, Margarete was interrogated, but it became clear that she was not informed of the official business of her husband and was described as having a “small-town mentality” which persisted throughout her questioning.
When interrogated, Margarete chose to put all the blame on Hitler’s shoulders. Whatever her husband may or may not have done, she said, he was just following the Führer’s orders. After the war, Margarete Himmler said that she did not have any knowledge of Nazi crimes. Yet her own visits to the camps suggested she knew far more than she admitted as she was the only leading wife to have seen the inside of the concentration camp system.
Margarete visited Dachau several times to inspect its huge herb garden and also toured Ravensbrück, the women’s camp. Rather than comment on the experience, she chose to stay silent. Margarete and Gudrun had to also testify at the Nuremberg Trials and were eventually released in November 1946.
Margarete later complained that she and her daughter had been held in various camps and treated as though they had to atone for the alleged sins of her husband. Margarete Himmler was 73 years old when she died on 25 August 1967 in Munich, West Germany. She kept a diary from 1937 to 1945, which today consists of 122 pages. The original is held in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
In one of her letters to Heinrich Himmler, Margarete wrote: “I am so lucky to possess such a good, evil man, who loves his evil wife as much as she loves him.” One can only wonder how someone could love a person responsible for the deaths of millions of people and still call him a good man. Thanks for watching the World History Channel.
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