Women of the Third Reich

IRMA GRESE (1921-1945)
Irma Ilse Ida Grese, twenty-one year old concentration camp guard, after initial training at Ravensbrück, served at Auschwitz and later at Belsen where she was arrested by the British. Condemned to death at the Belsen Trial, held at 30 Lindenstrasse, Lüneberg, she was hanged at Hamelin Goal on Friday, December 13, 1945, by the British executioner, Albert Perrepoint. As she stood composed on the gallows, she spoke one last word as the white hood was pulled down over her head, "Schnell (Quick)" she whispered. Once when home on a short leave from Auschwitz, she was beaten and turned out of the house by her father for proudly wearing her SS uniform. A cruel sadist, she was said to have had love affairs with Dr.Josef Mengele and the Belsen camp commandant, Josef Kramer.

 

Ah yes Good ol Irma, a truly nasty piece of work indeed!

 

And yet she was "small fry" in terms of her position as a cog in the system.Many of her type gave the excuse that they were forced into the role on conscription.But once they found themselves in a position of power where they could decide whether or not a prisioner lived or died,the worst of human nature prevailed.

These were the people who enacted the terror of the regime within the camps,which without their participation,the regime would have not been able to inflict the terror it did to those incarcerated.

There were a large number of Kapos of both sexes who were converted into a similar role and who inflicted terror on their fellow prisoners.In the end,some received severe penalties,others did not.

 

ILSE KOCH (1906-1967)
Called the 'Bitch of Buchenwald'. In 1936 she married to SS-Standartenführer Karl Koch, the camp commandant of Sachsenhausen and later of Buchenwald. In 1944, Koch was sentenced to death by an SS tribunal after being found guilty of racketeering and murder. He was hanged in 1945. His wife, Ilse, was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment by an American military tribunal in 1947. The sentence was reduced to four years by General Lucius Clay the US Zone commander. On her release she was re-arrested in 1949 and tried by a German court, this time again sentenced to life. On September 1, 1967, when she was sixty one years old, she committed suicide by hanging herself in her cell in Aichach Prison in Bavaria. Her son, Uwe, born in prison in 1947, received her last letter, in it she wrote "I cannot do otherwise. Death is the only deliverance".

 

And who was Uwe's father?

 

VALENTINA BILIEN
A German national, at one time married to a Russian and formally a teacher in Russia. In 1944, she was appointed to the post of matron at a newly established children's home in Velpke, a village near Helmstedt, Germany. She had no previous experience whatever in running a children's clinic. Assisted by four Polish and Russian girls, the health of the infants soon deteriorated to the extent that within months more than eighty children died through gross negligence. The infants had been forcibly removed from their Polish mothers (who were working on farms as slave labour) at four months old. At a British Military Court, held at Brunswick in March/April, 1946, Frau Valentina Bilien was found guilty of a war crime and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.

 

And who was Uwe's father?

Ilse Koch was recorded by psychiatrists as a perverted, nymphomaniacal,hysterical,power-mad demon when she was examined after receiving a life sentence in January 1951 from a West German court.

Uwe's father was said to be a US prison guard.

 

HERMINE BRAUNSTEINER
Female guard in various camps, and one-time supervisor of the Ravensbrück concentration camp and later served in the extermination camp of Maidanek in Poland. In 1949, she served three years in prison in Austria for infanticide. After her release she was granted an amnesty from further prosecution in that country. In 1959 she married an American electrical engineer named Russell Ryan and settled in New York. An Austrian citizen, born in Vienna in 1919, she was granted US citizenship in 1963, this was revoked in 1973 when a warrant for her arrest was issued in Dusseldorf, her real identity being discovered by the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Arrested by US marshals she was held without bail before being sent back to Germany. At her trial in Germany she was sentenced to life imprisonment, the first US citizen to be extradited for war crimes. Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan was released from prison in 1990 and died in April 1999 from diabetes

 

ILSE KOCH (1906-1967)

Wasn't she the one who had lampshades made of prisioner skins with tatoos?

 

Supposedly! I think that was myth Za. (Could be wrong though)

 

UNITY MITFORD (1914-1948)
'Bobo' to her friends, and one of six children of the second Baron Redesdale (David Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford). She was introduced to Hitler in 1935 while studying art in Munich. This 21-year-old British aristocrat became his frequent companion and supporter and together with Eva Braun, often stayed at Winifred Wagner's house during the Bayreuth Festival. She often discussed with Hitler the need for good relations between their two countries. When Britain declared war on Germany, Unity's dreams were shattered and she tried to commit suicide by shooting herself in the head. Found severely wounded in the Englisher Garten in Munich, she was hospitalized on Hitler's orders and for months lay in a state of coma. Hitler visited her twice in room 202 in the Nussbaumstrasse Clinic but she showed no sign of recognition. On April 16, 1940, she was sent back to England in a special railway carriage via Switzerland. Back in England she was subsequently operated on but nothing more was heard of Unity Valkyrie Mitford till the end of the war. She died on May 19, 1948, never having fully recovered from the wound. She is buried in the graveyard of St. Mary's Church in the village of Swinbrook.
Unity's sister, Diana, married Brian Guinness of the Irish brewing family. When later they divorced, Diana studied fascism and joined the British Union of Fascists. There she met and married its leader, Sir Oswold Mosley

 

MAGDA GOEBBELS (1901-1945)
Johanna Maria Magdalena Goebbels, First Lady of the Third Reich and wife of Propaganda Minister and Gauleiter of Berlin, Joseph Goebbels. In 1930 she divorced her first husband, millionaire Gunter Quandt, from whom she was granted the custody of their son, Harald, four thousand marks monthly allowance and fifty-thousand marks to purchase a house. She eventually leased a seven room luxury top floor apartment at 2, Adolf Hitler Platz, (now Theodore Heuss Platz) in Charlottenburg, West Berlin. She became secretary to Goebbels whom she married on December 12, 1931. In the Bunker with Hitler during the last days of the war, she committed the unpardonable sin of poisoning her six children, Helga, Hilda, Helmut, Holde, Hedda and Heide. She and her husband then committed suicide in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. A great admirer of Hitler, she decided to name all her children with a name beginning with H. Earlier, Magda had confided to her trusted friend, her sister-in-law, Ello Quandt, "In the days to come Joseph will be regarded as one of the greatest criminals Germany has ever produced. The children will hear that daily, people would torment them, despise and humiliate them. We will take them with us, they are too good, too lovely for the world which lies ahead".
Madga's stepfather, Richard Friedlaender, whom her mother, Auguste Behrend, had divorced when she was young, was Jewish. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp where he died a year later, in 1939

 

It is really hard to watch the scene where Magda poisons her children in "Downfall"

 

EMMY GÖRING (1893-1973)
Born in Hamburg as Emmy Sonnemann she became a well known actress at the National Theatre in Weimar. She divorced her first husband, actor Karl Köstlin, and became Hermann Göring's second wife on April 10, 1935. Adolf Hitler acted as best man. In 1937 she gave birth to a daughter and named her Edda, believed to be after Mussolini's daughter, Countess Ciano, who had spent some time at their home Karinhall, a hunting lodge north of Berlin. In 1948, a German denazification court convicted her of being a Nazi and sentenced her to one year in jail. When she was released, thirty percent of her property was confiscated and she was banned from the stage for five years. She was unable to revive her acting career so she moved to Munich with her daughter Edda and lived in a small apartment until she died on June 8, 1973. Edda, believing that her father was wrongly judged by the Allies, became active in the neo-Nazi movement and attends many of their meetings and reunions.

 

ILSE HIRSCH
Born in the industrial town of Hamm in 1922 she joined the BDM at age sixteen and soon became one of its principle organizers in the town of Monschau. She trained at Hülchrath Castle for her part in Operation Carnival, the assassination of the American appointed Burgermeister of Aachen, the first German city to fall to the Allies. Dropped by parachute near the outskirts, the five man and one woman team made their way into the city guided by Hirsch who knew the area well.
At 251, Eupener Strasse, lived Franz Oppenhoff, a forty-one year old lawyer, his wife Irmgard and their three children. Oppenhoff had recently been appointed chief Burgomeister by the Americans and by accepting this appointment he had signed his own death warrant. Regarded as a traitor by the Nazi resistance movement, the so-called Werewolves, he was a prime candidate for assassination. Guided by Hirsch to the house, the actual murder was carried out by the leader of the team, SS Lt. Wenzel and their radio operator, Sepp Leitgeb, who fired the fatal shot as Oppenhoff stood on the steps of his residence. Ilse Hirsch took no part in the actual assassination but acted only as guide and lookout. Making their escape from the city, Hirsch caught her foot on a trip-wire attached to a buried mine which severely injured her knee and killed her companion, Sepp Leitgeb. Spending a long time in hospital she eventually returned to her home in Euskirchen. After the war, the survivors of the assassination team, with the exception of SS Lt. Wenzel, were tracked down and arrested. At the Aachen 'Werewolf Trial' in October, 1949, all were found guilty and sentenced to from one to four years in prison. Ilse and one other team member were set free. In 1972, Ilse Hirsch was happily married, the mother of two teenage boys and living only a score of miles from the scene of the most momentous event in her life

 

KITTY SCHMIDT (1882-1954)
Owner of Berlin's top brothel the Pension Schmidt located at 11, Giesebrecht Strasse. It was later renamed "Salon Kitty" when taken over by the S.D. (Secret Service). It became the very epitome of relaxation for high ranking officers and visiting diplomats. Fitted out with hidden microphones, this sophisticated surveillance system became the main source of Gestapo intelligence. Twenty women were specially trained for work in Salon Kitty. During a bombing raid in 1944, Salon Kitty was badly damaged and was moved down to the ground floor. Kitty Schmidt died in Berlin in 1954 at the age of seventy two. Next door, at No. 12, was the apartment of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the SD.
In 1988, the former "Salon Kitty" was in use as a Guitar Studio!

 

GERDA BORMANN
Wife of Martin Bormann, head of Party Chancellery. A fanatical adherent to Nazi ideology, she bore her husband ten children, the first being named Adolf, after his god-father. Of her husbands mistress, Manja Behrens, she wrote "See to it that one year she has a child and next year I have a child, so that you will always have a wife who is serviceable". After the war, the search for Gerda Borman ended when she was located in the village of Wolkenstein, twenty kilometres north east of Bolzano. With her were fourteen children, nine of her own and five who were kidnapped by her husband in order that his wife could travel posing as the director of a children's home.
In her final days Gerda converted to the Catholic faith and when found was ill from cancer and was operated on in Bolzano Civil Hospital. She died in March 1946. The five kidnapped children were returned to their parents and her own children placed in Roman Catholic homes. Her husband, Martin Borman, committed suicide during his attempt to escape the bunker and his remains were discovered in 1972. His family refused to have anything to do with the bones so they lay in a cardboard box in the cellar of the District Prosecutor in Frankfurt for years. In 1999 the remains (still unclaimed) were cremated and scattered in the Baltic Sea outside German territorial limits. The cremation and burial cost the German Government $4,700.

 

GERTRUUD SEYSS-INQUART
Wife of the Nazi Reichskommissar for Holland, Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart. She fled Holland on September 3, 1944, a day before her husband made it an offence for anyone to leave. She was last seen leaving The Hague with five suitcases, bound for Salzburg in Austria.

 

ERNA GRUHN
A shorthand typist with the Reich Egg Marketing Board, she married Hitler's Minister of War, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg. The Führer and Göring were witnesses at the wedding on January 12, 1938. When the police reported that Erna had worked as a prostitute and had posed for pornographic pictures, Hitler flew into a rage and sacked von Blomberg on the spot. The disgraced Field Marshal and his wife retired to the Bavarian village of Weissee where they lived out the war and where the Field Marshal now lies buried in the local cemetery.

 

MARGARETE BODEN
Daughter of a West Prussian landowner, blonde and blue eyed, Marga, as she was called, worked as a nurse in the first World War, then went to live in Berlin. There she met and married Heinrich Himmler on July 3, 1928 and set up a chicken farm at Waldtrudering, near Munich. Eight years older then Himmler, their marriage ran into financial problems and they started to live apart. They had one child, a daughter named Gudrun.
HEDWIG POTTHAST
Attractive daughter of a Cologne businessman, she became secretary to Himmler and later his mistress when he lost all affection for Marga, his wife. In 1942, Hedwig gave birth to her first child, her second was born in 1944, another daughter. Himmler, not wishing the scandal of a divorce, borrowed 80,000 marks from the Party Chancellery and built a house for Hedwig at Schonau, near Berchtesgaden. They called it 'Haus Schneewinkellehen'. There she became friends with Bormann's wife Greda, who lived nearby.
INGE LEY
A ravishing blonde and much admired by Hitler. Wife of the drunkard Robert Ley, head of the Arbeitsfront, with whom she was very unhappy. An actress and ballerina by profession, she once took refuge from her husband in the Obersalzberg. After writing a letter to Hitler, which left him very depressed, she attempted suicide in 1943 by jumping out of a window. On October 24, 1945, her husband committed suicide in his cell while awaiting trial at Nuremberg. His suicide note stated that he could "no longer bear the shame." The villa of Robert and Inge Ley still stands on the Mehringdamm in Berlin's suburb of Templehof.