Women of the Third Reich

Discussion in 'The Women of WW2' started by Peter Clare, Nov 28, 2006.

  1. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]EVA BRAUN (1912-1945)
    At twenty-five minutes past two on the morning of February 7, 1912, Eva Anna Paula Braun was born in Munich. Later in life she was to become the mystery woman of Hitler's Third Reich. Wife of Hitler for one day and his mistress for twelve years, she first met Hitler in 1929 while she was assistant to the beer-loving Heinrich Hoffmann the Third Reich's official photographer who had his shop at No 50 Schellingstrasse, Munich. He had already joined the Nazi party with party card number 427. Eva Braun committed suicide with Hitler on April 30, 1945, in his underground bunker in the Reich Chancellery gardens in Berlin. It was her third attempt, the first having been in November 1932 when she was found, with a bullet in her neck. On May 28, 1935, Eva, who often complained of Hitler's neglect, decided to take thirty-five sleeping pills just to 'make certain'. Late that night she was found unconscious by her sister, Ilse, who called a doctor just in time to save her life. After her recovery, Hitler bought her a villa in Wasserburgerstrasse, Munich, and supplied her with a car and chauffeur. Although she knew about the persecucution of the Jews there is no evidence that she knew of what went on inside the concentration camps.
    It is interesting to note that Eva never became a Nazi Party member and never appeared as a couple with Hitler in public. Outside of Hitler's close circle of cronies she was completely unknown to the general public until after the war.
    Eva's mother, Franziska Braun, lived to the ripe old age of 96 and died in Ruhpolding, Bavaria, in January, 1976. Her father, Fritz Braun, died on January 22, 1964.
     
  2. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]GRETL BRAUN
    Youngest of the three daughters of Fritz and Franziska Braun, her real name was Margarethe and was born three years after Eva. They lived in an apartment on the second floor of No. 93 Hohenzollernstrasse, in Munich, (the house still stands). An adventurous and carefree girl, Eva nicknamed her 'Mogerl' because she was often sulking. She spent considerable time with her sister at the Berghof, which Eva loved to call the Grand Hotel. She married Hans Georg Otto Hermann Fegelein (37) a lieutenant general in the Waffen SS, on June 3, 1944, in the Salzburg town hall. The reception was held at the Berghof and later at Hitler's mountain retreat on the Kehlstein (The Eagles Nest) the only real party ever held there.
    During the last days of the Third Reich, Fegelein, concerned for his own safety, tried to escape from Berlin but was discovered and arrested soon after he left his apartment at 10/11 Bleibtreu Strasse, Charlottenburg. Next day, Hitler ordered him shot and he was taken out into the Chancellery garden and executed. An effort was made by Eva Braun to save him but to no avail. His body has never been found. Gretl survived the war and gave birth to a daughter, Eva, named after her aunt Eva Braun, on May 5, 1945. The name Fegelein was never mentioned again in the Braun household. (Eva Fegelein committed suicide in 1975 after an unhappy love affair)
     
  3. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]WINIFRED WAGNER
    Born Winifred Williams in 1894 at Hastings, England, to an English father and German mother. When her parents died she was brought up by distant relatives in Germany. In 1915 she married Siegfried Wagner, twenty-five years her senior, and son of composer Richard Wagner. She became entranced with Hitler and his Nazi movement in the early 20s. When Siegfried died in 1930, she became a close friend and staunch supporter of Adolf Hitler whom she first met in 1923. It was rumoured that a marriage between Adolf and Winifred was in the offing, but nothing came of it. Such an event would have solicited great support from the German people. The Führer himself entertained such thoughts believing that a union of the names Hitler and Wagner would ensure the adulation of the masses for time immemorial. In fact he once proposed marriage to her but on becoming Chancellor in January, 1933, he felt there was no need now for him to marry. He felt himself already 'married' to his adopted country, Deutschland.
    A frequent visitor to her home, the 'Villa Wahnfried', where her three children knew him by the nickname 'Wolf', Hitler was often seen with her at various performances during the Bayreuth Festival, the last time in the late summer of 1940 when they attended a performance of 'Götterdämmerung'. Winifred Wagner died in Uberlingen on March 5, 1980, unrepentant of her relationship with Hitler.
     
  4. Gerard

    Gerard Seelow/Prora

    Peter, Excellent thread and very informative. Is there an entry for Leni Riefenstahl or Hanna Reistch coming up??
     
  5. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    Peter, Excellent thread and very informative. Is there an entry for Leni Riefenstahl or Hanna Reistch coming up??


    Thanks Gotthard. Both names will be posted in the near future.
     
  6. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]PAULA HITLER
    Born in 1896 in Hartfeld, Austria, younger sister of the German Führer and the fifth and last child of Alios and Klara Hitler. At one time she worked as a secretary for a group of doctors in a military hospital but kept her identity a secret. When she would see a small chapel when travelling in the mountains, she would go in and say a silent prayer for her brother. Each year Hitler would send her a ticket to the impressive Nuremberg Rally. In March, 1941, Hitler was staying at the Imperial Hotel in Vienna and it was here that Paula met him for the last time. It was always her opinion that it was a pity her brother had not become the architect he always wanted to be. Paula was seven years younger than her brother, but he never mentioned her in his writings because of his embarrassment at her weak mental state.
    Until the last weeks of the war, Paula Hitler lived in Vienna where she worked in an arts and craft shop and when the war ended was interviewed by US Intelligence officers in May, 1945. Reluctant to talk she said tearfully, "Please remember, he was my brother". She lived under the name of Frau Wolf (Hitler's nickname) a name he asked her to adopt after the Anschluss with Austria in 1938. After the war, it was discovered that she was once engaged to an Austrian, Dr. Erwin Jekelius, one of the Third Reich's euthanasia doctors, but when he approached Hitler for permission to marry he was promptly arrested and sent to the Russian front where he was reportedly killed. Paula lived unmarried in a two bedroom flat near Berchtesgaden, her main interest being the Catholic Church. She died on June 1, 1960 without ever being invited to the Berghof. Her grave is in the Bergfriedhof in Berchtesgaden.
     
  7. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]HANNA REITSCH (1912-1979)
    Born in Hirschberg, Silesia, (now Jelenia Góra, Poland) she became Germany's leading woman stunt pilot and later in 1937, chief test pilot for the Luftwaffe. She worshipped Hitler and the Nazi ideology and became the only woman to win the Iron Cross (First and Second class). Hanna Reitsch spent three days in the Bunker just before Hitler's suicide on April 28, then flew out with the newly appointed Chief of the Luftwaffe, General Robert Ritter von Greim, whose orders were to mount a bombing attack on the Russian forces who were now approaching the Chancellery and the Führerbunker. Hanna Reitsch survived the war and resided in Ghana from 1962 to 1966 where she founded and ran a gliding school. She died on August 24, 1979, aged 67, in Frankfurt from a heart attack. Von Greim was arrested and while awaiting trial committed suicide in a Salzburg hospital on May 24, 1945. (The graves of Von Greim and Hanna Reitsch can be seen in the Kommunal Friedhof in Salzburg)
     
  8. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]LENI RIEFENSTAHL (1902-September 8, 2003)
    Born Leni Helene Bertha Amalie Riefenstahl on August 22, 1902. Ballet dancer, actress, film director and producer, she was born in Berlin and founded her own film company in 1931 to produce 'The Blue Light'. She was appointed by Hitler to produce films for the Nazi Party such as 'The Triumph of the Will' and her masterpiece 'Olympia', the famous documentary of the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin. She has always insisted that she was never a member of the Nazi party but neither was she an opponent of Hitler. Before the war her films received all the international awards but after the war Leni was castigated because of it and spent almost four years in Allied prisons. Boycotted and despised, she has never been able to make another feature film. Editing the film she says, 'nearly ruined my health'.
    In 1952 she was cleared of war-crimes charges by a German court. In 1962 she travelled to Africa and spent eight months living with the Nuba tribe. At the age of 70 she undertook an underwater scuba diving course and for the next 18 years filmed hundreds of undersea documentaries. At age 90, Leni Riefenstahl became a member of Greenpeace. She regreted ever having made 'Triumph of the Will'.
     
  9. Weinrich

    Weinrich Junior Member

    Guido Knopp, a kind of (contested) super star in German history television, made an excellent documentary about Hitlers Frauen (Hitler's Women): Marlene Dietrich, Eva Braun, Zarah Leander, Magda Goebbels, Winifred Wagner, Leni Riefenstahl. Includes great archive footage but I am afraid the DVD does only have a German commentary.
     
  10. Za Rodinu

    Za Rodinu Hot air manufacturer

    What can you tell us about Beate Uhse?
     
  11. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]GERTRAUD (TRAUDL) JUNGE (1920-2002)
    Born Gertraud Humps in Munich. For two years and four months she was the youngest of Hitler's three secretaries. In late 1942, she applied for a secretarial job in the German Chancellery in Berlin. Soon she was short listed for a position as personal secretary to Hitler. At the age of 22 she worked at Hitler's HQ at Rastenburg in East Prussia. In June 1943, she married Hans Junge, Aide-de-Camp to the Führer, who was killed a year later when a Spitfire strafed his company on the Normandy front. On January 15, 1945, Hitler and his staff moved into the underground bunker in the grounds of the Berlin Chancellery. Frau Junge survived the last chaotic days in Berlin typing Hitler's last Will and Testament, an assignment that assures her name in history books.
    She was arrested by the Russians and then the Americans and interrogated for hours. Exonerated as a 'youthful fellow traveller' by Germany's denazification commission she then worked as a secretary and journalist for various publishing companies. In 1954, her mother, Hildegard, emigrated to Australia but stayed only two years before returning to Munich where she died in 1969. Traudl Junge visited Australia several times but her application for permanent residency was rejected. She last visited Australia in 1992 and again in 1995 for a family wedding. Alone, unmarried and childless, Traudl Junge died of cancer on February 10, 2002, at the age of 82 in a hospital in her native city. She died wracked with guilt for having expressed a liking for 'the greatest criminal who ever lived'. In 2004, her memoirs 'Bis Zum Letzen Stunde' (Until the Final Hour) was published. (Traudl Junge is buried in the Nordfriedhof cemetery in Munich)
     
  12. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]LUCIE WOLF
    Conscripted into the Luftwaffe in 1939 and owing to her secretarial skills became personal secretary to Reich Marshal Göring for a period of five weeks during the closing stages of the war. She knew at that time that Göring's art treasures were stolen but was afraid to talk to anybody about it. While at Brechtesgaden she was issued with a pistol and a cyanide pill with instructions to shoot as many Russians as possible before taking the poison pill. (It was believed that the Red Army would reach Brechtesgaden before the Americans) Placed under house arrest by the Gestapo when they came to arrest Göring, she was then arrested again when the Americans arrived. All her belongings were taken from her and placed in a heap, doused with petrol and set alight. She was then interned in a P.O.W. camp for the next ten days from which, with the help of an American guard, she escaped and started out on the long walk of around 1,000 kms to her home on the shores of the Baltic Sea, a journey which took her seven weeks.
    Some years after the war, Lucie Wolf emigrated to Australia and became an Australian citizen
     
  13. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]MARLENE von EXNER
    In May, 1943, an electrocardiogram revealed no improvement in Hitler's heart condition. A stomach ailment also troubled him and he discussed this at a meeting with Romania's Marshal Antonescu who recommended to him a well-known dietitian from Vienna, Frau Marlene von Exner. She took up her duties to cook exclusively for the Führer with an inducement of a 2,000 Reichsmark cash payment and a tax free salary of 800 marks a month. While serving at Hitler's headquarters she became engaged to an SS adjutant and it was through this that Hitler learned that her great grandmother was Jewish. Hitler had no option but to sack her immediately 'I cannot make one rule for myself and another for the rest' he explained
     
  14. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]VERA WOHLAUF
    Resident of Hamburg, married Captain Julius Wohlauf on June 29, 1942. Captain Wohlauf was the commanding officer of First Company, Police Battalion 101, at that time conducting mass executions of Jews in eastern Poland. After the first major killing action in the town of Józefów, Frau Wohlauf joined her husband for a delayed honeymoon. During the next few weeks, Vera Wohlauf, now pregnant, witnessed several killing operations at her husband's side. Accompanied by Frau Lucia Brandt, wife of Lieutenant Paul Brandt, also of Police Battalion 101, they were witnesses to the day-long massacre and deportation of the Jews in Miedzyrec on August 25. Other wives of officers were party to all this as were a group of Red Cross nurses.
    After the killings, the wives and their husbands sat outdoors at their billets, drinking, singing and laughing and discussing the day's activities. This was how Frau Vera Wohlauf spent her honeymoon.
     
  15. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]MARGARET WHITE
    Born in Manchester, England, and at age 26 married William Joyce, the leader of the British National Socialist League and became the League's assistant secretary. In August, 1939, she accompanied her husband to Germany and made her first broadcast from Berlin on November 10, 1940 under the name Lady Haw Haw (her husband was already well known as Lord Haw Haw) In 1942 she appeared under her real name with weekly talks about women's economic problems. Both were arrested on May 28, 1945 and taken to London for trial on charges of treason. William Joyce was found guilty and hanged in 1946. Margaret Joyce was spared a trial on the basis that she was a German citizen (her husband having become a naturalized German citizen in 1940). She was deported to Germany and interned as a security suspect for a short while. After her release she returned to London where she died in 1972.
     
  16. spidge

    spidge RAAF RESEARCHER

    What can you tell us about Beate Uhse?

    In the final days of the war she flew the last plane out of Berlin, landing in the northern region of Schleswig Holstein where she set up her business and died at age 81 in 2001.

    You already know what the business was ........don't you?
     
  17. David Layne

    David Layne Well-Known Member

    In the final days of the war she flew the last plane out of Berlin, landing in the northern region of Schleswig Holstein where she set up her business and died at age 81 in 2001.

    You already know what the business was ........don't you?



    Sexual aids.
     
  18. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    Sexual aids.


    Didn't know that.
     
  19. Peter Clare

    Peter Clare Very Senior Member

    [​IMG]ELENORE BAUR (1922-1981)
    Born in Augsburg, Germany. A fervent follower of the Reich leader she was the only woman to march with Hitler through the streets of Munich during the Putsch of November 9, 1923. Trained as a nurse, she tended the wounded that day and later joined the SA becoming the first Brown Shirt sister. She served as a nurse during the war years as Sister Pia of Munich and in 1944 joined the staff at the Dachau concentration camp supervising medical experiments conducted by SS doctors. Arrested after the war she spent five years in interment by the Allies as a Nazi sympathiser. She died at Oberhaching in 1981 aged 95 never having renounced her belief in Nazism.
     
  20. Za Rodinu

    Za Rodinu Hot air manufacturer

    In the final days of the war she flew the last plane out of Berlin, landing in the northern region of Schleswig Holstein where she set up her business and died at age 81 in 2001.

    You already know what the business was ........don't you?


    Of course I know, that's why I was aking :p It's all here! Beate Uhse - Wikipedia

    It's in German but Babelfish will help you. A magnificent flying career, after the war she went on to create a first class lingerie business (later quoted in the stock exchange), don't ask me how I know ;)

    She died 5 years ago, flying by herself till very old age. Damn!
     

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