New York Post, Sunday, October 25, 2020nypost.comand the two married the next year. The
union would bring her mostly misery.
“She was an enigmatic woman,”
Wyllie said. “She was very closed off.
She was defensive and paranoid and
ultimately unhappy most of the time.
I think she wanted a more ordinary
husband than she got.”
She and Himmler dreamed of be-
coming farmers and bought a rural plot
of land outside of Munich where she
grew crops and tended to chickens,
geese and rabbits. She was often un-
well and was badly injured in a 1939 ac-
cident when her home’s water heater
exploded.
Despite Himmler’s initial aversion
to sex, he had trouble staying faithful.
In 1938, he fell “hopelessly” in love
with his secretary, 26-year-old Hedwig
Potthast — nicknamed Bunny.
Bunny and Himmler schemed to find
a way that they could be together.
When she gave birth to their son in1942, he rented a cottage outside Berlin
for her.
Margarete eventually found out
about her husband’s love child. “Some-
times I cannot believe what I live
through. We poor women,” she wrote
in her diary. “Surrounded by lies and
betrayal.”M
AGDA Goebbels, who was
known as the “First Lady of the
Reich,” was also deeply un-
happy with her husband.
She had been raised in a broken fam-
ily after her parents got divorced when
she was 3. She grew up in Brussels, at-
tending a Catholic school. She married
a businessman at 18 and got divorced
a few years later.
In 1930, she attended a Nazi rally and
was struck by the fiery propaganda
minister Joseph Goebbels. She soon
landed a job in his office, and they be-
gan a romantic relationship in February- “It’s like I’m dream-
ing,” Goebbels wrote. “So
full of satisfied bliss.”
There was one obstacle
to their growing relation-
ship: Hitler. Magda met the
Fuhrer in 1931 and she was
immediately entranced by
him. He returned the infat-
uation.
Hitler wanted to pursue
a relationship with her, but
in order to keep it secret,
he came up with a
strange proposition.
To keep her close,
he’d have Magda
marry Goebbels. She
enthusiastically ac-
cepted.
“Magda was intelli-
gent, very sophisti-
cated, very capable
and really fell tragi-
cally in love with Hit-
ler more so than her
husband, but under-
stood the only way to
be close to Hitler was
to embrace being the
first lady of the Third
Reich,” Wyllie said.
Magda and Goebbels married in De-
cember 1931, though he was uneasy
over her adoration of the Fuhrer. “She
loses herself a bit around the Boss,” he
wrote in his diary. “I am suffering
greatly. I didn’t sleep a wink.” (Histori-
ans think it’s unlikely Magda and Hitler
ever consummated their relationship.)
But Goebbels was also a dog in his
personal life. He pursued director Leni
Riefenstahl, and stuck his hand under
her dress once while sitting next to her
at the opera.
He struck up an affair in 1938 with
actress Lida Baarova. He confessed the
relationship to his wife over tea and
asked if the three might be able to co-
exist. Magda reluctantly agreed and
Goebbels soon booked a trip for the
three of them aboard a yacht.
An increasingly unhappy Magda
wanted a divorce, but Hitler forbade it.
“He was really touchy about the idea
that any of his close compatriots got
divorced,” Wyllie says, because it
would be bad for the party’s image.
Magda ultimately resigned herself
to her husband’s philandering. She
turned to Buddhism to combat her un-
happiness and amused herself by play-
ing tricks on his various mistresses.
She prank called one, telling her that
Goebbels would send a car for her at
a deserted crossroad at 11 p.m., then
left the woman waiting for an hour be-
fore telling her husband what she’d
done.
Of all the wives, Magda’s life had the
most tragic ending. In April
1945, she and her husband,
along with their six chil-
dren, were hiding in Hit-
ler’s Berlin bunker as So-
viet troops surrounded the
city.
Afraid of the fate that
awaited her, she poisoned
her children, then she and
her husband killed them-
selves.
Margarete Himmler, with
her daughter, es-
caped to the Austri-
an-Italian border re-
gion at the war’s end
and was later ar-
rested and held in in-
ternment camps. She
was released and
lived a quiet life in
Germany before dy-
ing in 1967.
Gerda Bormann es-
caped to South Tyrol,
fleeing Germany
with eight of her nine
children in a school
bus. She died of can-
cer in 1946 at age 36.
Ilse Hess was also captured and
spent time in an internment camp. She
was set free and opened a hotel in
southern Germany in the 1950s. She
spent much of the rest of her life fight-
ing to get her husband out of prison
and stayed an unrepentant National
Socialist till her death in 1995.
“What’s uncomfortable about her is
that if you wrote her life story without
saying the word ‘Nazi,’ you’d think she
was a remarkable woman who fought
for her beliefs and her husband her
whole life,” Wyllie said. “But she was
a Nazi and it’s terrifying.”Inside the twisted sex lives of Hitler’s top
Nazis — and the women who adored them
Sex both
scared
and
fascinated
him.
— historian James
Wyllie on Nazi big
Heinrich Himmlerfascinated
Heinrich Himmler (here
with wife Margarete)
remained a virgin till his
late 20s, believing he
could channel sexual
energy into more useful
pursuits, but he still had
an affair with his
secretary Bunny (inset).LOVE
Nazi propaganda minister
Joseph Goebbels married
Magda (together above), who
was in love with Hitler (inset)
— though it’s not believed they
ever consummated their love.Getty Images (2)Alamy