wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

Discussions on the role played by and situation of women in the Third Reich not covered in the other sections. Hosted by Vikki.
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Marcus
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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#61

Post by Marcus » 09 Aug 2008, 12:19

A nonsense post by Penn44 was removed, if you don't have anything worthwhile to say, don't post.

/Marcus

J. Duncan
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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#62

Post by J. Duncan » 09 Aug 2008, 12:44

I think I read somewhere that the Bouhler's never had any children....this is a bit strange since one couldn't really gain promotion in the SS without being married and having children (in addition to having to pay extra taxes for the deficiency.)
It could also be that the Bouhler's were unable to have children. A note on Nazis with children: Strangely, for a Nazi elite which promoted the begetting of children, quite a few of the bonzen did not have large families...Hess had only one child (a son Wolf), Göring only one (daughter Edda), Himmler for quite a few years had only one with his wife (daughter Gudrun) although Himmler later "adopted" a son or allowed this "son" to live with him (a kid who marga himmler always complained about in many letters - see katrin himmler's book..one gets the impression she couldn't stomach this kid) Himmler also very much later had twins with his mistress...Goebbels and Bormann lived up to Nazi standards with 6 and 10 kids each. just an observation. (Duncan)


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Adam Carr
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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#63

Post by Adam Carr » 22 Aug 2008, 11:36

Franz Xaver Schwarz was never Finance Minister. He was Treasurer of the NSDAP. Von Neurath's wife was not Frau von Neurath. He was a Freiherr so she was Marie Auguste Freifrau von Neurath.

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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#64

Post by ladycplum » 23 Aug 2008, 04:46

Bouhler and his wifey committed suicide at the end of the war, if I'm not mistaken.
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mty
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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#65

Post by mty » 23 Aug 2008, 07:22

J. Duncan wrote:I think I read somewhere that the Bouhler's never had any children....this is a bit strange since one couldn't really gain promotion in the SS without being married and having children (in addition to having to pay extra taxes for the deficiency.)
It could also be that the Bouhler's were unable to have children. A note on Nazis with children: Strangely, for a Nazi elite which promoted the begetting of children, quite a few of the bonzen did not have large families...Hess had only one child (a son Wolf), Göring only one (daughter Edda), Himmler for quite a few years had only one with his wife (daughter Gudrun) although Himmler later "adopted" a son or allowed this "son" to live with him (a kid who marga himmler always complained about in many letters - see katrin himmler's book..one gets the impression she couldn't stomach this kid) Himmler also very much later had twins with his mistress...Goebbels and Bormann lived up to Nazi standards with 6 and 10 kids each. just an observation. (Duncan)
I don't think that it really mattered in case of such senior officers as Bouhler. We must distinguish between the SS rank and file which was to be the "Nordic gene pool of the next generation" and the officer corps, especially those with honourary and highest positions in terms of requirements for membership. Certainly every SS member had to be able to produce an Ahnentafel showing Aryan ancenstry to 1750/1800 but many other minor details which might have resulted in regular applicant being denied membership, seemed to have been ignored. Especially if an officer held such an important standing in the party hierarchy as Bouhler, the requisite to have children might well have been overlooked.

Many senior officers did not pass the minimum height. Some, like Otto Dietrich or Rudolf Diels, had brown eyes or clearly non-Nordic posture (such as Heydrich, K.H. Frank and many many others) if we take the concurrent definitions of Hans F.K. Günther as a guideline. Some where visibly overweight like Alfred Arnold or Christian Weber. Others were admitted 'en masse' such as the core of the Diplomatic Corps under Ribbentrop. This proves that Himmler certainly knew the society value of his Black Corps and every now and then skipped the strictest RuSHA standards applied to normal applicants in order to get his SS represented in all walks of life.

Remember that it was not the current SS but the "next-generation SS" which was to be the true SS. The historical SS was only the first step towards the ultimate millennial goal of Himmler. Or as he himself put it, "in the 1950s there will be no state officials who don't have blond hair and blue eyes" (open citation from Höhne).

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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#66

Post by Adam Carr » 23 Aug 2008, 08:33

As someone (I forget who) said about Himmler: "If I had a face like that I wouldn't talk about race at all."

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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#67

Post by Vikki » 23 Aug 2008, 17:55

mty wrote:I don't think that it really mattered in case of such senior officers as Bouhler. We must distinguish between the SS rank and file which was to be the "Nordic gene pool of the next generation" and the officer corps, especially those with honourary and highest positions in terms of requirements for membership. Certainly every SS member had to be able to produce an Ahnentafel showing Aryan ancenstry to 1750/1800 but many other minor details which might have resulted in regular applicant being denied membership, seemed to have been ignored. Especially if an officer held such an important standing in the party hierarchy as Bouhler, the requisite to have children might well have been overlooked.
Thanks for that, mty. I'd wondered about that myself.

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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#68

Post by mty » 24 Aug 2008, 01:38

Well, my account of this is not an academic one but based on observations over long period of time. Going a bit off-topic, but I would like to present some more of my thoughts on this subject. :)

To try to understand how the SS viewed the racial concept, we have to familiarize ourselves with the concurrent views. In general terms, SS was to be the stronghold of the Nordic blood, the new racial elite. But what indeed was that "Nordic concept", this I have not yet been able to completely understand in its SS context.

If we take the "scientific" definitions of a Nordicist anthropologist like Hans F.K. Günther or his contemporaries who perhaps held a slightly more objective view such as Lundman or Coon, there's a strict list of characteristics required to declare someone completely or mostly Nordic. After studying dozens of examples from their books, I proceeded to comb through hundreds of photographs of senior SS personalities, front, 3/4 and profile photos if possible.

What I found out was that most of them appeared to me as very ordinary central European people of their era, not differing much from those I spent couple of hours "observing" in a Munich street cafe :) . Most had brown hair, blonde hair and fair complexion was more a rarity than a norm. As I stated earlier, some had clearly darker, almost Mediterranean characteristics such as Rudolf Diels, Emil Maurice, Karl Brandt (he was described by his biographer as being brown eyed with almost black hair...) or Otto Dietrich, where others lacked the required height or were notably overweight (although that was not very common). Few had more distinctly Dinarid facial features (Daluege, Frank & Heydrich to some degree) where the Reichsführer himself came closest to textbook definition of Alpinid type with a receding jawline and deep-set eyes. Also some clearly Baltid (that is to say, something quite common here in Finland for example) individuals came across, Martin Sandberger of RSHA perhaps is the best example of this trait. On the other hand, some of the SS top cadres must have taken these issues very seriously - perhaps the best evidence is Jürgen Stroop who apparently still in his prison cell, awaiting for the execution kept worrying that his head is slightly too wide to be perfectly in line with the Nordic ideal! :?

To me, it now appears that Himmler stressed the importance of accepting only the "purest noble blood" mostly for propaganda reasons, to set his SS aside from other organizations of the party and the state. He may never have stood in front of a mirror meticulously studying his own facial features and build - perhaps he saw himself as sort of a godfather and grand arbiter for the "re-awakening" of the pseudo-historical Nordic tribes in contemporary Germany. He was the lecturer but the not the ideal poster-boy of his ideas. Nevertheless, he apparently liked to style himself as Nordic-like as possible, the very peculiar haircut which he favoured in the mid-1930s suggests that it was to emphasize his (only mildly) projecting occiput, a feature typically affiliated to Nordic morphology. It seems that he was genuinely interested in contemporary scientific views of racial classification but was not prepared to go all the way for the strictest possible policy.

IIRC, during the review of an SS applicant by the "racial commission", not only his appearance and body structure were vetted but also his behaviour, how he spoke and presented himself. I think there is a clear connection between this odd procedure and Günther's thesis of alleged spiritual characteristics of Nordic race. Interestingly, almost no one in the highest SS officer corps seem to have gone through the officially sanctioned checkpoints of acceptance. That is naturally understandable since the growing organization had to get the best paramilitary leadership talent available and was especially emphasized during the raising of the Waffen-SS under the guidance of Berger. Still, it is fundamentally against the very own principles of Himmler who kept on stressing that nobody should be admitted who doesn't meet all the standards and that the standards were being raised all the time.

In my opinion, this aspect of the "SS culture" is one of the least researched. Many authors simply reprint the official view of the SS itself instead of trying to dig deeper into the issue.
Last edited by mty on 25 Aug 2008, 12:10, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#69

Post by ladycplum » 24 Aug 2008, 23:40

I think Gerda Boorman really did live up to the "barefoot and pregnant" Nazi ideal for most women. I haven't seen many pics of her when she isn't pregnant! Makes me wonder just how many children Martin actually had, b/c I know she actually told him that when he got her pregnant, he needed to make sure he didn't get one of his lovers pregnant at the same time!
"The more I see, the more I know. The more I know, the less I understand"-Paul Weller

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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#70

Post by J. Duncan » 25 Aug 2008, 00:14

More correctly, if you read "The Bormann Letters" which are the letters of MB to his wife, she actually encouraged him to get Manja Behrens (his mistress) pregnant but only on the condition to alternate the pregnancies so that both women weren't pregnant at the same time. It was Bormann who didn't like the idea of getting his mistress pregnant.

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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#71

Post by ladycplum » 19 Sep 2008, 15:37

There are a lot of these women who were very beautiful women, stunningly beautiful some. Inga Ley, Karl Frank's wife. Margret Speer looked so vivacious in the Berghof footage I've seen. Henriette von Schirach was so fresh-faced. Eva Braun was just so full of life and zest, I can't help but feel a great amount of sympathy for her. She didn't care for politics or any of that. She was in love. Emmy Göring wasn't beautiful as to the "normal" standards of beauty, but she carried herself with dignity and looked to have great confidence. But I have to say, I don't see anything beautiful at all about Magda Goebbels. I thought Corinna Harfouch was better looking in Downfall than the real Magda was!
"The more I see, the more I know. The more I know, the less I understand"-Paul Weller

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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#72

Post by J. Duncan » 20 Sep 2008, 11:12

I think in the case of Magda Goebbels, a life of selfishness and self-will led to a neurotic temperment which affected her emotionally, physically, and spiritually, not to mention her living with a man who by all intents and purposes was driven by resentment and hate for everyone, including his own wife (Dr. Goebbels). She also had six children which were mainly children of duty rather than children of love. Magda is a case study of the affects of what a fanatical NS attitude (coupled with an extreme self-centeredness) can have on a woman, corroding a person from within to the point of causing unpleasant appearance without. It's hard to look upon her images and not know the evil which simmers beneath the surface and what is to come later (the killing of her kids). One does not have that same impression with Gerda Bormann, who was just as fanatical an NS (probably more so as her many letters to "MB" indicate), but her mentality was that of a child's but she was completely devoted to the raising of her own children...by most accounts she was a simpleton and a "plain Jane" type, not overtly attractive but rather ordinary, but most persons who knew her say she was a very good mother who played guitar and sang folk songs to her children. She was someone that her children came to for comfort after "MB" would kick them over a trifle. I guess one's view of people can also be affected by what a person learns about them.
Marga Himmler is another person whose neurotic temperment affected her looks over a period of time. She was a very miserable person given to fits of whining and nagging. I frankly find her to be quite ugly in the photos.

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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#73

Post by ladycplum » 20 Sep 2008, 18:16

J. Duncan wrote:Marga Himmler is another person whose neurotic temperment affected her looks over a period of time. She was a very miserable person given to fits of whining and nagging. I frankly find her to be quite ugly in the photos.
Amen to that. She was very...dowdy, frumpy, dressed in black all the time, very matronly. I think the only picture I have ever seen her smile was one taken of her and Heinrich holding Gudrun in their garden when she was an infant.
"The more I see, the more I know. The more I know, the less I understand"-Paul Weller

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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#74

Post by J. Duncan » 20 Sep 2008, 19:14

Lina Heydrich said of Marga Himmler (in an interview to author Willi Frischauer): "Size 50 knickers. That's all there was to her. She nagged her husband and could twist him around her little finger." Himmler's marriage to Marga was a train wreck. She was 8 years older than him and it seems that possibly she was the first woman who Himmler ever slept with...actually, we know Himmler was very late in having sexual relations through Gregor Strasser, who told Kurt Ludecke upon hearing of Himmler's laison with Marga that it was "about time!" (Ludecke: "I Knew Hitler"). I think Himmler was rather dominated by this woman to the point of actually being stuck and not having the personal integrity or courage to call it quits, although he may have been concerned with the welfare of his daughter Gudrun and stayed married to Marga for her sake. The marriage began ok, with both Marga and Heinrich sharing interests in homeopathic remedies, herbs, and buying a small farm in Waltrudering with the proceeds from the sale of her nursing facility. His parents didn't really like her and said she was a constant nag and whiner (Katrin Himmler: "The Himmler Brothers")...she was also protestant whilst the himmler's were catholics...she was also of Polish ethnic background which wasn't really a problem but it's strange considering Himmler's fanaticism with Germanness and Germanic / Aryan blood and what he later did in Poland with the SS. Her incessant nagging about his not being around, the failure of those chickens to lay eggs, constant worries about money led to the eventual coldness and breakdown in their marriage although Gudrun's birth and growth brought moments of bliss. Himmler simply kept Marga at bay by providing for her needs as best he could through loans and carried on his relationship with Hedwig Potthast on the side.

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Re: wives and girlfriends of Third Reich officials

#75

Post by Annelie » 20 Sep 2008, 19:36

Got to hand it to Himmler then, staying in a marriage in which he from what Mr. Duncan says was
probably not the most happy. Lots of people stay in marriages even then for the sake of their children.
Then of course from what I remember Hitler didn't agree with divorce?

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