A lake on the Austrian Bavarian border, a radio broadcast, a file stamped secret now held in an archive at Cornell University. Three authorities made predictions about what would happen to the woman who had lived closest to Heinrich Himmler. Allied investigators at the Seventh Army Interrogation Center calculated that his private secretary, the woman who had lived inside the SS leadership circle for nearly a decade, who had spoken with him by telephone almost every day through the final weeks of the Reich, would one of the most valuable
intelligence subjects they could question. They interrogated her for several days in Munich in the summer of 1945. They stamped the file secret. Then they released her without charges. Himmler’s official wife Margarete and his daughter Gudrun expected that when the regime fell, they could finally reach the woman who had given him two children they had not known existed until after the surrender.
They sent word. Pothast refused all contact permanently. And historians who documented the collapse of the Third Reich assumed that Himmler’s mistress would eventually break her silence. [music] The wives and widows of the SS leadership gave interviews across the following decades. Memoirs circulated. Testimony accumulated.
Hedwig Pothast gave nothing. She married, took a new name, settled in Baden-Baden, and spent [music] 50 years in an obscurity so complete that most people who could identify Himmler’s face could not have told you what he called her in private. He called her Häschen, little rabbit. She died in 1994 at 82 years old. The secret file outlasted her.
Hedwig Pothast was born February 5th, 1912 in Cologne. She trained as a bilingual secretary and found her way to Berlin through Kurt von Schroeder, a Cologne banker and founding member of the Friends of the Reichsfuehrer SS. By 1934, she was employed at Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. In 1936, she became Himmler’s private secretary.
Her function was administrative intimacy, not policy work. She handled his personal sponsorships, his award decisions, the private correspondence of a man who ran the most powerful police apparatus in Europe while maintaining the public image of a disciplined SS family man. She held that position for 5 years.
>> [music] >> But, here is what the Allied interrogators found when they opened the file on Himmler’s mistress. At Christmas 1938, Himmler confessed his feelings to her. The relationship deepened through 1939 and was fully established by 1940. This was the same man who had denied senior SS officers permission to divorce, who had lectured the leadership on the sanctity of the family unit, [music] who had made the integrity of the SS household a matter of institutional policy, and enforced it without exception on
everyone below him. In February 1941, his wife Margarete found out. Potthast resigned from her secretarial position the same month. She moved to Berlin-Grunewald, then from 1943 to Brueckentin in Mecklenburg, near the estate of SS General Oswald Pohl, whose wife Eleonore was among her closest friends.
Her social circle included Lina Heydrich and Gerda Bormann, the inner SS wives network, not the public-facing world of the regime. Lina Heydrich observed in post-war testimony that Himmler became more relaxed because of Potthast, more human. Biographer Peter Padfield recorded testimony from a woman who had worked on Himmler’s private train.
She remembered that he kept Potthast’s photograph in his desk [music] and would take it out to look at it while he worked. On February 15th, 1942, Potthast gave birth to a son at the Hohenlychen Sanatorium. She named him Helge. On July 20th, 1944, a daughter was born in Berchtesgaden. She named her Nanette Dorothea.
That same year, Himmler arranged for a house to be built for Potthast near Schönau am Königssee >> [music] >> at the foot of the Bavarian Alps. He borrowed 80,000 Reichsmarks from the Nazi Party Chancellery itself to finance it. The man who administered the Reich’s moral apparatus borrowed party funds to build his mistress a house.
She was living in it when the war ended. The final in-person meeting between them took place in mid-March, 1945. After that, telephone almost every day. Through the collapse of the Eastern Front, the Allied advances from the West, the disintegration of everything he had spent 12 years building. The last documented call was April 19th, 1945.
19 days before Germany surrendered. Potthast [music] was at the Achensee when it ended. On May 23rd, 1945, she heard on the radio that Himmler had died in British captivity. She learned it the same way the rest of the world did. She went immediately to Rosenheim and stayed with Eleonore Pohl. The SS wives network held even in collapse.
In June or July of 1945, US Army personnel arrested her in Rosenheim. She was taken to Munich. The Seventh Army interrogation center processed her case and produced a document stamped secret. It’s formal title in the archive, Hedwig Potthast, Reichsführer Himmler’s mistress. That document is now held at Cornell University Law Library as part of the Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection.
What the post-war record confirms about her posture in that interrogation room is consistent with everything that followed. She declined to answer questions about Himmler’s involvement in the crimes of the regime or about her own knowledge of them. She was released without charges. When Himmler’s official wife, Margarete, and his daughter, Gudrun, tried to reach her after the war, Potthast refused all contact.
She chose instead to maintain a different network entirely. And that choice tells you something the interrogation transcript does not. She stayed connected through the 1950s with Karl Wolff, Himmler’s former chief of staff, with Lina Heydrich, with Gerda Bormann, with the family of Himmler’s brother, Gebhard. She refused the official family.
She kept the unofficial one. The distinction was deliberate. At some point in the post-war period, Potthast married a man named Hans Stack and became Hedwig Stack. According to Katrin Himmler’s 2007 book, The Himmler Brothers, her first post-war husband died relatively soon after the marriage.
His name gave her and her children a new legal identity. She settled in Baden-Baden, a spa city in the southwestern corner of West Germany, far from Munich, far from Berchtesgaden, far from the geography of the war years. She raised her children there in complete public obscurity. No memoir, no interviews, no testimony beyond what was required, no public statements of any kind across 50 years.
Her daughter, Nanette Dorothea, trained as a physician. She died September 18th, 2019 in Wedel, Germany at age 75. Her son Helge’s later fate remained unclear in the documented record. The private archive on him has never been publicly confirmed. Hedwig Potthast died September 22nd, 1994 in Baden-Baden. She was 82 years old.
No major obituary marked the event. She had spent 50 years making herself unmarked. She had been alive for the Nuremberg trials. Alive when Eichmann was captured in Argentina and tried in Jerusalem. Alive through 50 years of the Federal Republic’s reckoning with its own history. Alive while the postwar generation of historians built the documentary record of the SS apparatus she had lived inside for nearly a decade.
She said nothing across any of it. The official record on the other women in this channel’s archive shows a consistent pattern. The woman eventually speaks. Kay Summersby finished her book in the final months of her life. Lucy Mercer wrote one last letter to Eleanor Roosevelt. Even Lena Heydrich gave interviews, defended Reinhard publicly, and fought German courts for his estate.
Potthast wrote nothing. Defended nothing. Denied nothing. Confirmed nothing. She was not discarded by Himmler while he lived. He kept her photograph in his desk. He borrowed party money to build her house. He called her nearly every day until the Reich had weeks remaining. The discard came from a different direction entirely.
Not from the man, but from the silence she chose herself when the regime ended. The women who served powerful men and were discarded by them eventually found ways to make the record acknowledge that they existed. Potthast had not been discarded. [music] She chose the eraser anyway. What she knew about the private world of the man who ran the SS, the Gestapo, and the concentration camp system across 12 years of Nazi rule went with her to Baden-Baden.
The file at Cornell is still stamped secret on its cover page. She was the last person alive who had called him Hessian. She made sure that was the last thing history would confirm.
