Nazi Wives

The Women at the Top of Hitler's Germany

James Wyllie

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780750997508
  9780750991223
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750993623
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

'[Wyllie] recounts their stories with a bracing combination of scholarship and an almost cinematic approach to spinning a compelling narrative.' - Washington Post

'Highlighting similarities in the women's backgrounds, Wyllie provides a distinctive prism through which to view the period.' - The Guardian

'Wyllie's study of the other halves of the Third Reich is exhaustive and studded with fascinating detail.' - The Tablet

Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Bormann, Hess – names synonymous with power and influence in the Third Reich. Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margaret, Lina, Gerda and Ilse … These are the women behind the infamous men who were captivated by Hitler and whose everyday lives were governed by Nazi ideology.

Throughout the rise and fall of Nazism these women loved and lost, raised families and quarrelled with their husbands and each other, all the while jostling for position with the mighty Führer himself. And yet they have been treated as if they were unaware of their husband's murderous acts, despite the evidence that was all around them: the stolen art on their walls, the slave labour in their homes, and the produce grown in concentration camps on their tables.

Nazi Wives explores these women in detail, interweaving their stories through years of struggle, power, decline and destruction into the post-war twilight of denial and delusion.

Part One

Reaching the Summit

1

Early Runners

In the spring of 1920, Ilse Pröhl moved into a respectable student hostel on the outskirts of Munich, determined to benefit from the educational opportunities opening up for German women. In 1900, the year Ilse was born, women were admitted to university for the first time. Eight years later, the first female versions of the Gymnasium – exclusive fee-paying high schools that trained their pupils for the university entrance exam known as the Abitur – opened their doors.

These Gymnasia were restricted to daughters of wealthy families, but this wasn’t a problem for Ilse: her father was a respected doctor who treated members of the Prussian court in Berlin and became a chief military surgeon at the elite Potsdam garrison. Aged 14, Ilse took up a place at one of these prestigious high schools. A bright, energetic and popular pupil, she was particularly keen on music and literature. She also enjoyed hiking and camping, outdoor pursuits that were extremely popular among middle-class adolescents seeking to escape the soullessness of urban life. This back-to-nature movement began as an all-male activity but by the time Ilse got involved it was thoroughly mixed.

Her carefree teenage years were overshadowed by the First World War. Though a firm supporter of the armed forces and a convinced patriot, the full reality of the catastrophe occurring in northern France was brought home to her when her father, who had been posted to a relatively quiet sector of the front, was killed in the spring of 1917.

This painful loss was compounded by the shock of defeat and the upheavals that threatened to break Germany apart. Then, during her last year at the Gymnasium, her mother remarried – to a museum director – and the family moved to Munich before Ilse could complete the Abitur. Rather than stay at her new home, Ilse signalled her desire for independence by taking a room at the hostel.

One evening, Ilse ran into a fellow lodger, a tall young man wearing a threadbare, tattered uniform, who gruffly introduced himself as Rudolf Hess. She was immediately struck by his gaunt appearance: the thick eyebrows that seemed destined to meet in the middle, the sunken eyes and haunted expression. Despite his curt manner, she was instantly attracted to him. Whether the 26-year-old Hess had a similar reaction is impossible to say. Of all the senior Nazis, Hess was the most enigmatic. Dozens of experts, from psychiatrists to historians, have struggled to make sense of him. Hess even puzzled himself. In a letter to a friend he confessed that he felt torn between two opposing sides of his personality: one craved an almost monk-like existence contemplating the mysteries of the universe, while the other was a bloodthirsty barbarian hungry for battle.

Yet it was precisely this combination of the thinker with the man of action that appealed to Ilse. The frayed uniform he was wearing that fateful evening – which Ilse instantly recognised – belonged to the notorious von Epp Freikorps regiment that he’d joined in 1919 during the violent overthrow of Munich’s left-wing government.

Hess was also a decorated veteran – with an Iron Cross for valour – who’d been wounded twice. At the hellish Battle of Verdun, during which he witnessed ‘every horror of death imaginable’,¹ he was hit by shrapnel; while leading an infantry charge in Romania he was shot in the chest. His recovery complete, Hess trained as a pilot, satisfying a long-held urge to fly, but the war was over before he could test himself in combat.

When the conflict began, Hess had been at a critical juncture in his life. He wanted to go to university, but his father wanted him to enter the family business, an import-export firm based in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria where Hess grew up in a palatial villa on the edge of the desert, an environment that contributed to his sense of otherworldliness. His father was a strict disciplinarian who thought the most important day of the year was the Kaiser’s birthday. Hess felt closer to his mother, a gentle, intelligent woman who encouraged his early interest in astrology.

In 1908, when Hess was 14, the family returned to Germany; having only spent summers there, Hess was thrilled by his first sight of snow. Packed off to boarding school, he remained an outsider. A hard-working pupil, he passed the Abitur and reluctantly enrolled on a business course; his poor performance provoked a clash with his father that was only resolved when Hess enlisted in the army.

With the war over – and his father’s business requisitioned by the British – Hess was free to pursue a degree in history and economics. While he flirted with the Thule Society (a semi-secret group interested in Aryan mythology and prehistoric Nordic civilisations) Hess’s main intellectual influence was the 50-year-old geo-politics professor Karl Haushofer, who had managed to combine a military career with academic study: Haushofer developed the concept of Lebensraum after visiting Japan and concluding that a nation’s chances of success depended on the amount of living space available to it. Though Haushofer didn’t think Hess was particularly intelligent, he admired his strength of character. The professor – and the rest of his family – treated Hess like an adopted son. This close friendship, which included Ilse, endured for decades, with mixed results for all concerned.

Despite Hess’s aversion to fun, Ilse decided to pursue him and they began spending time together. It was a platonic affair. Still a virgin, Hess showed absolutely no interest in sex: for the next few years, their relationship lacked a physical dimension. Instead, they consciously cultivated a spiritual connection based on their shared love of German culture, especially the writers and composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Their favourite was the poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin: his early work worshipped nature, his later work worshipped God. Ilse gave Hess a copy of Hölderlin’s metaphysical novel Hyperion and added a lyrical inscription; their love was ‘full of power and yet tender as their spirit’, while their ‘hearts beat stronger waves even than the trident of the Sea God who is ruler of the waves’.²

However, it was their shared response to Hitler that forged an unbreakable bond between them, both convinced they’d stumbled on the man destined to drag Germany out of the abyss and set it on the road to glory. Soon after they first met, Hess heard Hitler speak at a tiny gathering. Unable to contain his excitement, Hess ran back to the hostel and burst into Ilse’s room, raving about this amazing man and his electrifying message. A few weeks later, Ilse accompanied him to another Nazi gathering and was equally impressed. Her unquestioning enthusiasm for Hitler’s poisonous ideology is evident in a letter she wrote to a schoolfriend, in which she made no attempt to soften her views; ‘we are anti-Semites. Constantly, rigorously, without exception. The two basic pillars of our movement – national, and social – are anchored in the meaning of this anti-Semitism.’³

By the autumn of 1920, Ilse had completed her Abitur, begun a part-time university course in German and library science, and started work at an antiquarian bookshop. Asides from occasional trips outside Munich to ramble in the countryside, she spent the majority of her spare time working for the Nazi movement; delivering leaflets, putting up posters, helping out with the party newspaper and acting as Hess’s secretary while he attached himself to Hitler and put his body on the line during the frequent brawls between Nazi supporters and their left-wing opponents.

In recognition of their efforts, Ilse and Hess were granted the privilege of being around Hitler during his downtime, unwinding with his most trusted companions. Ilse – and many others – described how much Hitler enjoyed a good laugh; not one for telling jokes, Hitler did impressions and liked nothing better than listening to a well-told funny story as long as it wasn’t about him.

Shy and sensitive, Gerda Buch was a dreamy, artistic child on the verge of adolescence when she first met Hitler, who promptly took her under his wing. ‘Uncle Adolf’ had a special interest in young people – girls in particular – and was keen to adopt a quasi-guardian role, taking responsibility for their cultural, political and moral welfare. At the time, his main focus was Henriette Hoffmann, the 9-year-old daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann, one of Hitler’s closest associates who would become his personal photographer. Every afternoon, while Henriette practised the piano, Hitler would test her knowledge of German myths and folklore. Though he spent less time with Gerda, Hitler lavished her with attention whenever he visited her home.

The reason Hitler was such a regular presence in Gerda’s life was her father, Walter Buch, a career soldier. Buch was 19 years old when he joined the army in 1902. Gerda was born in 1909, a year after Buch married her mother. By 1914 he was a first lieutenant, one of the small number of officers who wasn’t from an aristocratic background. Serving on the Western Front, Buch gained one promotion after another until he commanded a whole battalion. In 1918, he resigned his commission – disgusted by the Allied peace terms that reduced his beloved army to a meagre 100,000 men – and joined the other disgruntled ex-soldiers milling round Munich, licking their wounds after the disbandment of the Freikorps and the collapse of the Kapp Putsch, a military coup launched in spring 1920 and defeated by the largest general strike in German history. Pointed in the direction of Hitler, Buch quickly fell under his spell, declaring that Hitler ‘had been sent to the German people by the grace of God’.⁴

Buch was exactly the kind of recruit Hitler was looking for; a representative of the officer class with an untarnished reputation. Buch’s natural home in the movement was the Sturmabteilung (SA), better known as the Brownshirts. Hitler needed experienced men like Buch to transform this undisciplined mob of street fighters into an effective paramilitary force. During the summer of 1923, Buch took charge of the 275 SA men based in Nuremberg – some 100 miles from Munich – and began preparing them for action. Once again, Buch would be away from home. Reflecting on her childhood, Gerda complained that her father was ‘merely a visitor. He never stayed with us for any length of time.’⁵ Ultimately, Buch’s most significant contribution to his daughter’s young life was introducing her to Hitler.

Before Buch took over in Nuremberg, the Brownshirts acquired a new overall leader, the ex-flying ace and war hero Hermann Goering, whose aerial exploits – he was awarded the prestigious Blue Max for twenty confirmed kills and took over the elite Richthofen squadron after the Red Baron’s death – had won him considerable fame. Fighter pilots were genuine celebrities; portrayed as knights of the air engaged in chivalric duels, they excited the public’s imagination, offering relief from the grim unglamorous reality of trench warfare. Hermann was in the top rank, a household name. Even though he’d been in Stockholm for the past few years, his reputation still preceded him.

Hitler certainly understood what a potential asset he was. Goering could open doors to the military elite and aristocracy; local power brokers who could help Hitler realise his immediate ambition, to use Munich as the starting point of a national revolution. When they were introduced in late 1922 – shortly after Goering had arrived there and seen Hitler perform at a rally – Hitler invited him to join the movement.

Over the years, Goering made various statements about his decision to align with Hitler. Whether it was a deeply felt act of submission to the chosen one or a calculated gamble on Hitler’s ability to mobilise the masses, there’s no doubt the fledgling Nazi party offered Goering an opportunity to be a big fish in a small pond. But it was Goering’s new Swedish wife Carin who sealed the deal. Already a confirmed anti- Semite, Carin worshipped the ground Hitler walked on. To her, Hitler was like a mythical superhero from a Norse legend: Carin did everything in her power to cement the relationship between the two men.

The first encounter between Carin and her future husband resembled something out of a romance novel. It was a wild stormy night. An icy blizzard was raging. Yet Count Eric von Rosen – a wealthy Swedish explorer – was intent on finding somebody to fly him from Stockholm to his medieval-style castle around 60 miles away where his wife and her sister, the 31-year-old Countess Carin von Foch, were waiting for him. The only pilot prepared to risk such a hazardous journey was Goering. The hair-raising flight tested his skill and nerve to the limit; with visibility almost zero, he managed to land the plane on the frozen lake that lay by the castle. Once Goering had entered its imposing interior – adorned with Aryan-themed tapestries, Nordic sculptures, antique weapons and two huge wrought iron swastikas – and settled by a roaring fire with a brandy, he felt completely at home.

Goering spent much of his childhood at two castles (one in Bavaria, the other in Austria) owned by his godfather and guardian angel Hermann Ritter von Eppenstein, a respected physician. In 1893, while on a trip to Africa, von Eppenstein met Goering’s father, a colonial governor, whose young attractive and pregnant wife was suffering from a high fever. With Goering ready to drop, the situation was critical: von Eppenstein stepped in and saved the day. After Goering’s father had retired on a barely adequate civil service pension, von Eppenstein offered to take the family in. His motives weren’t entirely altruistic: he was having an affair with Goering’s mother. Under his castle roofs, she split her time between her rapidly ageing husband and her benefactor.

Von Eppenstein was extremely proud of his noble status – born Jewish, he’d become a Christian to further his medical career, thereby gaining access to influential members of the Prussian elite – and flaunted it whenever possible; fond of pageantry and playing lord of the manor, he hosted baronial banquets accompanied by minstrels in medieval garb.

Carin grew up in similarly baroque surroundings. Her father was an aristocratic colonel, her Anglo-Irish mother came from a brewing dynasty. Carin had four sisters and with the other female members of the family they combined to form their own pantheistic Christian ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Reaching the Summit
• Part Two: High Society
• Part Three: A Long Way Down
• Part Four: Holding On
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography