Even Heinrich Himmler was afraid of her – The Queen of the SS: Margarete Himmler

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 very name 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.

Yet, while directing 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 actions. But behind the scenes, she is mocked for her appearance by the wives of high-ranking 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 murderer in the Third Reich. Her name is Margarete Himmler. Margarete Himmler, one of five children of landowner Hans Boden and his wife Elfriede, was born Margarete Boden on September 9, 1893, in the village of Goncarzewo near the city of Bromberg, now Bydgoszcz, Poland, which at the time belonged to the German Empire.

During the First World War, which lasted from July 1914 to November 1918, Margarete trained as a nurse and worked in that profession, followed by a position in a German Red Cross hospital after the war. Her first marriage was short and childless. With financial support from her father, Margarete was able to own and manage a private nursing clinic in Berlin.

In 1926, she met Heinrich Himmler in a hotel lobby in the Bavarian spa town 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 their antisemitism, but also by a shared interest in homeopathy, medicinal herbs, and agriculture. According to some historians, Heinrich Himmler had great difficulty finding female companionship due to his lack of self-confidence. His shyness likely stemmed largely from his self-consciousness about his appearance.

Otto Strasser, a former Nazi politician, claimed that Margarete, who at 34 was almost seven years older than Himmler, had seduced him. Himmler told Strasser that she was the first woman with whom he had sexual relations. Margarete and Himmler shared an exaggerated love of efficiency and orderliness, yearned for strict domesticity, and both preferred a frugal lifestyle.

Margarete received a constant stream of antisemitism and tirades against communists and Freemasons from her husband. Her hatred of Jews was clearly evident in a letter to Heinrich Himmler dated June 22, 1928, in which she spoke contemptuously of the co-owner of the private clinic in Berlin, a gynecologist and surgeon named Bernhard Hauschildt. She wrote: “That Hauschildt! These Jews are all the same!” Heinrich and Margarete married in July 1928.

At first, Himmler found it difficult to reveal his relationship with Margarete to his parents, partly because she was so much older than him, partly because she was divorced, and above all because she was Protestant. No one from Himmler’s family attended the wedding, so his witnesses were the bride’s father and brother.

Ultimately, Himmler’s parents accepted Margarete, but the family maintained a distance from her for the remainder of the relationship. Like her husband, Margarete was fascinated 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 also fostered Gerhard von Ahe, the son of an SS officer who had been shot in Berlin shortly after the Nazis seized power. After their marriage, she sold her share of the private clinic for 12,000 Reichsmarks and moved from Berlin to Waldtrudering, near Munich, where the couple used the proceeds to buy a house.

To supplement Himmler’s modest income as a party employee, they unsuccessfully tried to sell their own agricultural produce and ran a small chicken farm. In the following years, however, the couple enriched themselves with real estate and valuables stolen from murdered Jews. The Himmlers occasionally attended social events together and were frequent guests at the home of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust.

Margarete considered it her duty to invite the wives of high-ranking SS officers for coffee and tea on Wednesday afternoons. Despite all her efforts, she remained in SS-Kr

Margarete was unpopular. Thanks to her husband, Margarete was the highest-ranking wife, and she was determined to ensure that everyone in the SS clan respected this.

However, Lina Heydrich resented having to play second fiddle to a woman she considered inferior. Margarete is said to have once tried to force her husband to get Heydrich to leave Lina, but Himmler avoided the subject, not wanting 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 his command: Reinhard Heydrich and Karl Wolff, who served as Himmler’s chief of staff. Lina Heydrich mocked Margarete’s appearance, once quipping, “Size 50 underwear, that was all she had to offer.” In July 1937, the German journalist Bella Fromm saw Himmler with his wife and later remarked that she was “dirty blonde, dull, and fat,” and that the pleasures of the dinner table seemed to be the only pleasures she received, as Himmler kept her at home.

During the 1938 Nazi Party Rally, Himmler had conflicts with most of the wives of the highest-ranking SS officers, who as a group refused to take any instructions from her. Lina Heydrich, in particular, harbored a “fierce dislike” for Margarete Himmler, a feeling that was mutual. After the war, Lina Heydrich spoke disparagingly to a reporter from the German news magazine Der Spiegel, describing Margarete as a “narrow-minded, humorless, blonde woman” who suffered from agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces that kept her confined to her home. Lina also said that Margarete Himmler “had dominated her husband until at least 1936.” Baldur von Schirach, the former Reich Youth Leader, wrote in his memoirs that Heinrich Himmler was completely under his wife’s thumb. He wrote: “The Chief of the Police and the SS was a nobody at home. He always had to give in.”

These accounts point to a stark contrast between Himmler’s public role as one of the most feared men in Nazi Germany—responsible, along with Hitler, for the deaths of millions during World War II—and his evidently subservient position in his own marriage, where he appeared to be deeply intimidated by his wife in private.

Gebhard Himmler, Heinrich Himmler’s older brother, described Margarete as a cold, hard woman with extremely fragile nerves who radiated no warmth and spent too much time complaining. Nevertheless, he admitted that she had been an exemplary housewife who loved Heinrich devotedly and remained faithful 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 no later than February 1941. She felt humiliated and reacted with bitterness, but the couple did not divorce.

The marriage was already broken, but they remained legally bound to each other. Unlike Margarete, Himmler adored his daughter Gudrun. He called her “Püppi” (a Bavarian term of endearment) and spoke to her on the phone every few days, while visiting her as often as possible. Himmler continued to visit his wife and daughter at their home in the Bavarian town of Gmund, primarily to maintain his close relationship with Gudrun.

During World War II, which began in September 1939, Margarete worked for the German Red Cross. From December 1939, she oversaw Red Cross hospitals in the Berlin-Brandenburg military district. In this capacity, she traveled to countries occupied by the German Wehrmacht.

In March 1940, during a business trip to German-occupied Poland, she wrote in a diary entry: “I was in Poznań, Łódź, and Warsaw. This Jewish rabble, the Poles, most of them don’t look human, and the filth is indescribable. It’s an incredible amount of work trying to restore order there.” Margarete rose to the rank of Colonel in the German Red Cross, but frequent conflicts with the doctors she supervised eventually led her to resign. Afterward, she returned to live a secluded life in Gmund.

This Jewish rabble, these Poles, most of them don’t look human, and the filth is indescribable. It’s an unbelievable amount of work trying to bring order to the place. In February 1945, Margarete wrote to Gebhard Himmler about Heinrich: “How wonderful that he has been called to great tasks and has risen to them. All of Germany is looking to him.” Margarete last had contact with her husband in April 1945, shortly before the end of the war. Supported by SS personnel, she fled with her daughter to South Tyrol, a region then under German control.

Northern Italy, where they hid in the provincial capital of Bolzano.

World War II in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. Five days later, on May 13, 1945, Margarete Himmler and her daughter were arrested in Bolzano and detained in Italy and France. During her internment, Margarete was interrogated, but it became clear that she was unaware of her husband’s official business, and she was described as possessing a “small-town mentality,” which persisted throughout her questioning.

During the interrogations, Margarete chose to place all the blame on Hitler. Whatever her husband may or may not have done, she said he was merely following the Führer’s orders. After the war, Margarete Himmler declared that she had no knowledge of the Nazi crimes. However, her own visits to the camps suggested that she knew far more than she admitted, as she was the only prominent wife to have seen the concentration camp system from the inside.

Margarete visited Dachau several times to inspect its vast herb garden and also toured Ravensbrück, the women’s camp. Instead of commenting on these experiences, she preferred to remain silent. Margarete and Gudrun were also forced to testify at the Nuremberg Trials and were finally released in November 1946.

Margarete later complained that she and her daughter had been held in various camps and treated as if they were atoning for her husband’s supposed sins. Margarete Himmler was 73 years old when she died on August 25, 1967, in Munich, West Germany. She kept a diary from 1937 to 1945, which today comprises 122 pages. The original is housed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

In one of her letters to Heinrich Himmler, Margarete wrote: “I am so happy to have such a good, evil man who loves his evil wife just as much as she loves him.” One can only wonder how someone can love a person who is responsible for the death of millions of people and still call him a good man.