What Happened to Himmler's Mistress After the War?

Added: 2026-06-10

[00:00:00]1945, the ruins of the Third Reich.

[00:00:03]The war that had consumed tens of millions of lives was finally drawing to a close.

[00:00:09]The men who had built the machinery of murder were either dead, captured, or running.

[00:00:14]And the women who had stood beside them, who had written them loving letters, hosted their dinners, managed their households, and in many cases shared their ideology without question, those women were now scrambling to survive the collapse of the world their husbands had made. Among them was one woman whose situation was more extraordinary than most. She was not a fanatical party ideologue in any public sense. She had never given speeches or commanded troops. She had spent much of the war attending to a modest household, raising a daughter, visiting hospitals, and managing a private life that looked from a distance almost ordinary.

[00:00:49]But the man she had married, the man she had loved and written tender letters to throughout the years of slaughter, was Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, the architect of the concentration camps, one of the central engineers of the Holocaust, and arguably the most powerful man in Nazi Germany after Adolf Hitler himself.

[00:01:09]Her name was Margarete Himmler.

[00:01:12]And when the war ended, the world had questions it wanted answered. To understand what came after, it is necessary to understand what she had been before.

[00:01:21]Margarete Boden was born on the 9th of September, 1893, in the village of Gąsiorowo, near the city of Bromberg, a place that today falls within Polish territory and carries the name Bydgoszcz, though at the time of her birth it was part of the German Empire.

[00:01:38]She was one of five children raised by a landowner named Hans Boden and his wife Ilfrieda.

[00:01:43]Her upbringing was comfortable, bourgeois, and provincial in the best and worst senses of that word.

[00:01:50]She trained as a nurse and served in that capacity during the First World War, which consumed Europe from July 1914 to November 1918.

[00:01:59]After the armistice, she continued her nursing work at a German Red Cross Hospital.

[00:02:03]Her first marriage produced no children and ended quickly. With financial backing from her father, she eventually acquired and ran a private nursing clinic in Berlin, giving her a degree of independence and professional standing unusual for women of her generation.

[00:02:18]It was in 1926 at a hotel in the Bavarian resort town of Bad Reichenhall that she first encountered the man who would define the rest of her life.

[00:02:28]Heinrich Himmler was, at that moment, a largely unremarkable figure within the still rising Nazi movement. Ambitious but awkward, ideologically fervent but personally timid.

[00:02:40]He was immediately taken with Margarete.

[00:02:43]Her blonde hair and blue eyes matched the racial ideal he had already begun to worship as doctrine.

[00:02:49]Beyond physical appearance, the two discovered they shared a great deal, a passionate anti-Semitism, a mutual interest in homeopathy, medicinal herbs, and agricultural life, and a shared devotion to the kind of rigid domestic order that would come to define their household. According to the former Nazi politician Otto Strasser, Margarete, who was nearly 7 years older than Himmler, was the one who made the decisive first move.

[00:03:14]Himmler apparently confided to Strasser that she was the first woman with whom he had ever been intimate.

[00:03:20]His difficulty with women had been lifelong, rooted in a painful self-consciousness about his own appearance.

[00:03:26]The relationship with Margarete offered him something he had long been denied, genuine connection.

[00:03:33]They married in July 1928.

[00:03:36]The wedding was a quiet and awkward affair.

[00:03:39]Himmler had struggled to tell his own family about the relationship, troubled by the fact that Margarete was older, that she was a divorcee, and above all that she was Protestant rather than Catholic as his own family was.

[00:03:52]None of his relatives attended the ceremony.

[00:03:55]His groomsmen were Margarete's own father and brother. In time, Himmler's parents came around to accepting her, but they maintained their distance throughout the years that followed. In August 1928, Margarete joined the Nazi Party. In August of the following year, the couple welcomed their only biological child, a daughter they named Gudrun.

[00:04:15]They also took in a foster son named Gerhard von Ahe, the child of an SS officer who had been killed in Berlin in the violent early years following the Nazi seizure of power.

[00:04:26]After the wedding, Margarete sold her share of the Berlin clinic for 12,000 Reichsmarks, and the couple used the proceeds to purchase a house in Waldtrudering near Munich.

[00:04:36]They attempted, without much success, to supplement Himmler's modest party salary by selling agricultural produce and operating a small chicken farm.

[00:04:44]In the years that followed, as Himmler's power grew with terrifying speed, the couple's financial circumstances improved dramatically. Enriched in no small part through property and valuables taken from Jewish victims of the regime he now commanded, the marriage was never what Margarete had perhaps imagined. Himmler rose rapidly through the ranks of the Nazi state. By the early 1930s, he commanded the SS. By the mid-1930s, he controlled the German police. By the early 1940s, he was overseeing one of the most comprehensive systems of organized murder the world had ever witnessed. Throughout all of this, Margarete remained in the background, hosting coffee mornings for the wives of SS officers on Wednesday afternoons, attending the occasional formal function, visiting the Heydrich household, and attempting with limited success to assert her position as the most senior wife in the SS social hierarchy. That hierarchy proved deeply hostile to her.

[00:05:39]Lina Heydrich, the wife of Reinhard Heydrich, who was himself one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, openly resented Margarete and made no effort to conceal it. Lina considered herself superior and bristled at being expected to defer to a woman she regarded as her inferior.

[00:05:56]The contempt became personal and vicious.

[00:05:59]Lina mocked Margarete's appearance in terms that were humiliating and deliberately chosen.

[00:06:05]Others in Himmler's circle were little better.

[00:06:08]The German journalist Bella Fromm, who saw Margarete at the Nuremberg Rally of 1938, described her in terms that were dismissive in the extreme, suggesting that domestic pleasures were her only visible consolation in a marriage that had long since grown cold. And cold it had certainly become.

[00:06:27]In 1936, Himmler hired a young woman named Hedwig Potthast as his personal secretary.

[00:06:33]By 1938, she had become his mistress.

[00:06:36]The relationship was no secret within certain circles, though Margarete herself appears not to have confirmed the full extent of it until February 1941.

[00:06:45]Together, Himmler and Hedwig Potthast went on to have two children, a son named Helge and a daughter named Nanette Dorothea. Margarete was humiliated. She responded with bitterness, as one might expect. But the couple did not divorce.

[00:07:00]They remained legally married, bound together by convention, by the needs of the regime's public image, and perhaps by something more complicated than either of them could easily articulate.

[00:07:11]Himmler continued to visit his wife and daughter at their home in Gmund, a Bavarian town on the shores of the Tegernsee. Though by most accounts, his principal reason for these visits was the daughter he adored. He had nicknamed Gudrun Puppi, meaning Dolly, and telephoned her every few days when he could not visit in person. During the Second World War, which began in September 1939, Margarete returned to the work she had first undertaken during the previous war.

[00:07:38]She took up a position with the German Red Cross, and by December 1939 was supervising Red Cross hospitals across the Berlin-Brandenburg military district. Her role required her to travel to countries that had fallen under German occupation.

[00:07:52]It was during one of these journeys, a trip to occupied Poland in March 1940, that she wrote words in her diary that reveal, more clearly than any official statement could, exactly what kind of woman she was and what kind of views she held.

[00:08:06]She described what she had seen in Posen, Lodz, and Warsaw in terms of absolute contempt. Contempt for the Jewish population, contempt for the Poles, contempt filtered through the same ideological lens her husband had spent years constructing around her.

[00:08:21]She expressed no horror at the conditions she observed.

[00:08:25]She expressed only irritation. Margarete eventually rose to the rank of Oberstführerin, the equivalent of a colonel, within the German Red Cross.

[00:08:35]But persistent conflicts with the doctors under her authority caused her to relinquish the position, and she retired to the quieter life she had maintained in Gmunden for much of the war, withdrawn and increasingly isolated. She knew more than she would ever admit. That much became clear not through documents or testimony from others, but through her own movements.

[00:08:55]Of all the senior wives connected to the highest levels of the SS, Margarete Himmler was the only one known to have personally visited the concentration camp system. She went to Dachau on multiple occasions, drawn by the camp's large herb garden, a project that had been established under her husband's orders as part of his wider interest in alternative medicine and self-sufficiency.

[00:09:16]She also toured Ravensbrück, the camp established specifically to hold female prisoners.

[00:09:21]She saw what was there.

[00:09:23]She chose not to speak of it.

[00:09:25]The silence was deliberate. In February 1945, with the war already collapsing around her, Margarete wrote to Himmler's brother Gebhard in terms that still managed to ring with pride. She described her husband as a great man called to great tasks and equal to them.

[00:09:41]A man to whom all of Germany looked.

[00:09:44]It was a remarkable statement from a woman who had seen what she had seen, who had read what her husband had written to her across the years, who had visited the camps and come home and said nothing. In April 1945, she saw her husband for the last time. With the assistance of SS personnel, Margarete and her daughter Gudrun fled southward as Allied forces closed in from every direction. They made their way to South Tyrol, the German-speaking region of northern Italy that was at that moment still nominally under German control.

[00:10:13]They settled in Bolzano, the provincial capital, and went into hiding. They did not remain hidden for long. The Second World War in Europe ended on the 8th of May, 1945.

[00:10:24]Heinrich Himmler, having attempted to flee disguised as a common soldier, was captured by British forces and died on the 23rd of May, 1945, having bitten down on a cyanide capsule concealed in his mouth before his captors could prevent it. He had evaded justice. He had denied the world the trial that might have forced him to account for what he had overseen. He left behind him the ruins of a genocide, two families, and a wife who would now have to face the consequences of everything that carried his name. On the 13th of May, 1945, 5 days after the German surrender, Margarete Himmler and her daughter Gudrun were arrested in Bolzano. They were taken into custody and held, initially in Italy and then in France, as Allied authorities worked to determine what, if anything, each of them knew and what role, if any, each of them had played. The interrogations that followed were extensive. Margarete sat across from Allied investigators and answered their questions. Or rather, she answered some of their questions in the ways that suited her.

[00:11:21]Those who questioned her formed an assessment of her that was consistent and unsparing.

[00:11:27]She was described as possessing a narrow provincial mentality that had remained entirely unchanged throughout the process of questioning.

[00:11:35]She showed no awareness of having done anything wrong.

[00:11:38]She showed no awareness that the world viewed her husband's work as among the greatest crimes in human history.

[00:11:44]She maintained that she had known nothing of her husband's official activities.

[00:11:49]"Whatever he had done," she said, "he had only been following the orders that came down to him from Adolf Hitler. The responsibility lay elsewhere. It always lay elsewhere." This position was, of course, impossible to fully sustain.

[00:12:04]The visits to Dachau were on record.

[00:12:06]The diary entries from occupied Poland were recoverable.

[00:12:10]The letters she had exchanged with her husband across the years, letters filled with shared ideology, shared contempt, shared language, would eventually become historical documents studied by scholars.

[00:12:22]Her own words, written in her own hand, made clear that her anti-Semitism had been genuine and deep-seated, not something she had absorbed passively or accepted only in silence.

[00:12:33]She had expressed it actively.

[00:12:35]She had meant it. And yet she was not charged. She was not put on trial.

[00:12:40]The legal determination made by Allied authorities was that she had not been sufficiently informed of her husband's official conduct to be held criminally accountable for it.

[00:12:49]The phrase used to describe her, "a small-town mentality," encapsulated how investigators had come to see her. A woman whose world view was limited, whose understanding of her husband's work was fragmentary, and who had chosen not to ask the questions that might have led to answers she could not bear to receive. Whether this assessment was accurate or whether it was convenient has been debated by historians ever since. Margarete and Gudrun were required to appear before the Nuremberg trials.

[00:13:18]The proceedings at Nuremberg were the most significant judicial undertaking in modern history, an attempt to hold the architects of Nazi Germany accountable before an international tribunal.

[00:13:29]Mother and daughter gave testimony, submitted to the legal process, and eventually were released in November 1946, more than a year after the war had ended.

[00:13:40]Margarete afterward voiced her grievances with characteristic directness.

[00:13:44]She complained that she and her daughter had been held in various camps, a word whose irony appears to have been entirely lost on her, and treated as though they bore personal responsibility for things her husband had allegedly done.

[00:13:57]The word "allegedly" itself speaks volumes.

[00:14:01]Even at this stage, years after the liberation of the camps, with the evidence of what had occurred already established beyond any reasonable dispute, Margarete Himmler maintained a posture of aggrieved denial. What came next was a kind of half-life.

[00:14:17]Margarete settled into the quiet anonymity available to her in post-war West Germany.

[00:14:22]She had no public role, no platform, no position.

[00:14:26]The world that had given her husband his power had been dismantled and discredited.

[00:14:31]The social circles she had navigated with such difficulty, given the contempt directed at her by the likes of Lina Heydrich, no longer existed in any functional sense.

[00:14:41]The women who had mocked her waistline and her personality were themselves scattered, widowed, arrested, or struggling to rebuild lives stripped of the status the Third Reich had granted them. Gudrun, meanwhile, became one of the most visible and stubborn of the post-war generation of Nazi loyalists' children. She remained devoted to her father's memory throughout her life, joining an organization called Stille Hilfe, "silent help", which worked to provide support and legal assistance to convicted war criminals.

[00:15:09]She never recanted. She never distanced herself from what her father had represented. She carried his photograph in her wallet for decades.

[00:15:17]It was a devotion that Heinrich Himmler had cultivated through those regular telephone calls, those visits to Gmund, those expressions of tender fatherly affection he had directed at his daughter, even while directing something else entirely at millions of others.

[00:15:30]Margarete kept a diary. It ran from 1937 to 1945 and extended to 122 pages.

[00:15:39]It was not a diary that grappled with moral complexity.

[00:15:42]It was not a document of reckoning or reflection.

[00:15:45]It was the diary of a woman recording the texture of her daily life, complaints, observations, domestic matters, and the occasional glimpse of the ideological convictions she had always carried without apparent discomfort.

[00:15:58]The original is now held in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where it serves as a historical record of what ordinary complicity looked like when filtered through one specific and particular life. Lina Heydrich, who had spent years despising Margarete, survived the war and eventually gave interviews in which she continued to direct contempt at the woman she had always considered beneath her.

[00:16:20]She described Margarete to a reporter from the German news magazine Der Spiegel as narrow-minded and devoid of humor, a woman who suffered from agoraphobia severe enough to keep her effectively confined to her home for extended periods. She also claimed that Margarete had dominated her husband at least up until 1936.

[00:16:39]Baldur von Schirach, the former leader of the Hitler Youth, made a similar observation in his memoirs, writing that the man who commanded the SS and exercised the power of life and death over millions was, within his own household, entirely under his wife's control.

[00:16:56]"He always had to give in," von Schirach wrote.

[00:16:59]He was a nobody at home. It is one of the stranger ironies that history occasionally produces.

[00:17:04]This image of Heinrich Himmler, one of the most feared men who ever lived, retreating into meekness the moment he stepped through his own front door.

[00:17:13]His own brother Gebhard described Margarete as cold and hard, a woman who radiated no warmth and spent a great deal of time complaining. Yet, Gebhard also conceded that she had been, by any measure, a devoted wife and exemplary homemaker. She had loved her husband.

[00:17:30]The devotion, such as it was, had not been returned in the ways she had perhaps expected or deserved. In one of her letters to Heinrich Himmler, Margarete had written something that has stayed in the record as a kind of epitaph for everything their marriage represented.

[00:17:45]She wrote that she was fortunate to possess such a good, evil man.

[00:17:49]One who loved his evil wife as much as she loved him.

[00:17:53]The phrasing was apparently affectionate, a private joke between two people who had built their relationship partly on shared contempt for the world around them.

[00:18:02]But read in the context of everything that followed, the millions of deaths, the industrial machinery of genocide, the letters sent home from concentration camps, the herb garden at Dachau, the words become something else entirely.

[00:18:16]They become a document of how thoroughly ideology can corrupt even the most intimate corners of a human life.

[00:18:21]Margarete Himmler died on the 25th of August, 1967, in Munich, West Germany.

[00:18:26]She was 73 years old. She died without having been convicted of any crime. She died having spent more than two decades living quietly in the country that her husband had helped to lead into catastrophe.

[00:18:38]She died, by most accounts, without ever having meaningfully acknowledged the full weight of what had been done in the name she had carried.

[00:18:45]She had visited the camps. She had written the letters.

[00:18:48]She had shared the ideology. She had stayed silent when silence was the most comfortable choice available to her.

[00:18:55]And in the end, the world moved on. And she faded from it.

[00:19:00]The bitter, overlooked, and self-pitying woman who had stood beside the man responsible for millions of deaths and called him good. History has rarely been kind to those who chose convenience over conscience. In Margarete Himmler's case, the question of what she knew, when she knew it, and what she chose to do with that knowledge does not resolve cleanly into any satisfying answer.

[00:19:20]It sits instead in the uncomfortable space that history so often occupies.

[00:19:24]The space where ordinary human beings, with ordinary human emotions, made choices that were anything but ordinary in their consequences.

[00:19:32]She is buried in Munich.

[00:19:34]There is no monument. There is no memorial.

[00:19:37]There is only the diary held in Washington, and the letters scattered across archives, and the testimony of those who knew her.

[00:19:45]All of it adding up to a portrait of a woman who was, in the end, exactly as responsible for the world she lived in as she chose to be, which was, as far as the historical record can determine, rather more than she ever admitted.