Hedwig Poast and Lena Hyrich: Women and Lovers of SS Leaders.

The officers of the German secret service are well-known, but they also had wives and lovers who are less recognized.

Two of them are Hedwig Poast and Lena Hyrich.

Poast was a woman who was a member of the League of German Girls.

After finishing high school, she enrolled in the Mannheim business school to train as a bilingual secretary.

There, she met Heinrich Himmler in 1934, who offered her a job in Berlin in the state offices of the secret police.

Eventually, in 1938, she became his lover.

For a man of such importance to be openly unfaithful was an affront to German society at the time.

In an attempt to clean up his image, Himmler tried to justify his extramarital relationship with Poast by allowing SS men to have children outside of marriage, including himself.

German society and the upper echelons also condemned this, but that did not stop Poast from having several children with Himmler.

By 1941, Himmler took Hedwig Poast out of the rented apartment where she lived and installed her in a villa that the SS had built for her in Grünwald, financed by an 880,000 mark loan that Himmler took out.

There are differing opinions on whether Poast, who was Himmler’s secretary, or even his wife Margarete, had any knowledge of his involvement in the final solution.

The course of the war limited contact between Himmler and Hedwig, as they managed to see each other for the last time in mid-March of 1945.

From then on, they kept in touch through phone calls.

Himmler was arrested by the British on May 21st and committed suicide two days later.

When Poast found out, she left her home in Arany and went with her children to the Pole family’s house in Rosenheim, where she was arrested at the end of June by the United States Army.

However, she was soon released after claiming she had nothing to do with Himmler’s affairs or ideology.

She then moved to Tys andorf, adopted a different name, and lived discreetly until she passed away in Baden-Baden in 1994.

Another partner of the great SS leaders is Lena Matilda Von Austin, a vocal National Socialist activist who eventually married Reinhard Heydrich, who until then had little interest in Nazism.

That same year, Lena convinced him to join the SS.

Heydrich joined the Nazi party on June 1st, 1931, and secured an interview with Heinrich Himmler, during which he was offered a job.

By August 1st, just 15 days after joining the SS, Heydrich was promoted to head of the Seeker Heights de Ice Fur’s SS, the SS intelligence service.

By the end of the year, he was again promoted to Stanfura, commander of the assault unit.

Later, the couple set out to form the typical German family with four children, as the Reich aspired to.

If Himmler gave the Reich a bad image because of his infidelity, Lena gave it a bad image for allowing her own infidelities.

It is said that Reinhard Heydrich was a workaholic to the point that he completely neglected his marriage and rarely slept at home.

It is also said that Lena Heydrich was unfaithful to him with Walter Schellenberg and the painter Wolfgang Wilr.

On July 4th, 1942, Heydrich died from wounds sustained on May 27th during an assassination attempt carried out by Czech commandos in Prague on his way to his office.

Lena was pregnant with their daughter Marta.

Because of her husband’s death in action, Lena, who had become something of a Reich widow, received a lifetime pension from the government.

She continued to enjoy her residence on the outskirts of Prague and was given a palace as a permanent residence in Fean at the end of the war.

Lena was arrested and denied having any knowledge of the infamous acts her husband had been involved in.

After her release, she moved to Fean with her four children.

Germany’s first lady, the life of Magda Goebbels, one of the most influential women in the National Socialist Party, was Johanna Maria Magdalena—better known as Magda Goebbels.

At the age of 17, Magda met Günther Quant, a widowed and wealthy German industrialist who had two young children.

Quant courted Magda until they married on January 4th, 1921.

Ten months later, on November 1st, their first child, Harald, was born.

However, the luxurious life she led with Quant was not enough.

Constant arguments and accusations of adultery, which were never proven, led to the end of their relationship in 1929.

Quant filed for divorce, leaving a generous amount of money in the settlement for his now ex-wife.

Afterward, Magda and her son Harald moved to Berlin.

Thanks to her youth, beauty, and financial position, she had no trouble integrating into Berlin’s upper class.

On September 1st, 1930, she attended an electoral rally of the National Socialist Party at Berlin’s Sports Palace, where Joseph Goebbels delivered a speech.

Goebbels’ oratory and rhetoric impressed Magda, leading her to join the party that same month.

She volunteered for some time and quickly became a local leader.

This caught the attention of the National Socialists, who decided to move her to headquarters as the secretary to Deputy Hans Mous, who was close to Goebbels.

There, Goebbels asked Magda to organize his newspaper article archives.

Soon they began a relationship.

On December 19th, 1931, Magda married Goebbels, and they subsequently had six children: Helga, Hildegard, Helmouth, Holder, Heder, and Haider.

Each name began with “H,” something attributed to the reverence that both Magda and Goebbels had for the leader of the Reich.

By 1938, Magda was practically the first lady of the Reich.

Despite being married to Goebbels, Magda earned the honor of being awarded the newly created Mother’s Cross of Honor of the German Mother.

From this point, she became a role model promoted by the Nazis for all women of the Reich.

In 1942, she and her children were filmed and photographed during the regime.

They were the ideal Aryan family.

Her popularity was so high that her children appeared 34 times in the news that same year.

However, this was only a facade, as the marriage between Goebbels and Magda was falling apart.

Both had lovers and were adulterous.

Goebbels almost moved to Japan to live with his lover.

The Chancellor himself forced them to reconcile, as a divorce of the model family would have been disastrous for Germany.

When the July 20th, 1944 assassination attempt, also known as Operation Valkyrie, occurred, Magda was at her country house on Lake Schwanen Verda, a residence she had since the bombings in Berlin began.

Upon learning of the assassination attempt, she had a nervous breakdown and telephoned Hitler to swear eternal loyalty to him and declare her willingness to die for him.

Her devotion to the Führer was so great that on April 22nd, 1945, she moved with her six children to the bunker where Hitler was, joining her husband and preparing to fulfill the promise she made to her idol.

In a letter dated May 1st, 1945, addressed to her eldest son Harald, who was imprisoned in Africa, Magda Goebbels wrote: “May God help me and give me strength to carry out the last and most difficult act.

We have only one goal: loyalty to the Führer, even in death.

Harald, my dear son, I want to leave you with what I have learned in life: Be loyal.

Loyal to yourself, loyal to the people, and loyal to your country.

Be proud of us and remember us.

“That same night, Magda killed her children, and shortly afterward, she committed suicide with her husband in the gardens of the Chancellery as a testament to her loyalty to Hitler.

The family’s tragic end became a symbol of the twisted devotion to the Nazi ideology.

Magda Goebbels, like many others, was willing to sacrifice her children and herself in the name of her beliefs.

Germany’s Husband, The Women Who Loved Hitler.

Just like Magda Goebbels, another figure loyal to the Führer until the end was Hannah Reitsch.

Reitsch was a pioneering German aviator and one of the few women to be a close confidante of Hitler.

She crossed Berlin with Robert Ritter von Greim through Soviet artillery fire solely to see Hitler in his final hours.

Hitler personally handed each of them a cyanide capsule and informed them of the fate of the loyal Germans present: They were to sacrifice themselves with him to avoid falling alive into Russian hands.

Hannah Reitsch and von Greim decided to swallow the poison and detonate a grenade at the same time, just before the Russians arrived.

However, on Saturday, April 28th, Hitler ordered Hannah and von Greim to leave Berlin and take command of the Air Force to carry out a bombing raid that would liberate the Chancellery and stop Himmler, who had committed an act of betrayal.

Despite Soviet troops being outside, Hannah and von Greim obeyed the Führer’s orders.

When they reunited with Carl Düritz, they learned from him that Hitler had committed suicide and that the war was nearing its end.

Upon hearing this news, Reitsch and von Greim surrendered to the Allies on May 9th, two days after Germany’s surrender.

Both were interrogated by the Americans, who had yet to recover Hitler’s body.

When asked about the order to leave the Führer bunker on April 28th, they both gave the same response: “It was the blackest day.

We could not die alongside our Führer.

” Hannah added, “We must all kneel in reverence and prayer before the altar of the Fatherland.

” Later, in 1970, during the only interview she gave after the war, Hannah Reitsch stated that she was not ashamed to say she still believed in National Socialism.

She also confessed that she continued to wear the Iron Cross with diamonds that Hitler had given her.

The devotion that Reitsch and Magda Goebbels felt for the Führer was not an exception but more common than one might think.

In fact, Hitler often said that his wife was Germany as an excuse not to marry.

However, it is very likely that he avoided marriage to maintain the image of being eternally single, thus remaining the platonic love of millions of women.

It was normal for women to gather around Hitler’s home whenever he left, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, even for just a few seconds.

This became a daily security issue for the Führer.

It was also common for women to write him letters on all sorts of topics, but they often escalated into erotic letters.

Hitler believed that being an unattainable leader helped maintain the devotion and love that women had for him.

This is why he did not marry Eva Braun until 1945, just one day before his death, although their relationship dated back to before the Nazi party won the elections in 1932.

Gertrud Schultz-Klink: The Woman Who Shaped Other Women During Nazism.

So far, we have mentioned that the family was very important for Nazism and that women were considered the pillar of the family.

It is time to delve deeper into this topic.

To begin with, we must mention the five rules or commandments for modeling the role of the German woman according to Nazism:

Remember, you are German.

If you are genetically healthy, your duty is to marry.

Keep your body pure.

Keep your mind and spirit pure.

As a German, choose only a spouse from your country or countries with Nordic blood.

The Women’s School was founded in the year 1934, and its main function was the training and courses in subjects considered of special interest by Nazi leaders: domestic economy, household management, child education, or the preservation of traditional customs and practices.

One of the most influential women within the Women’s School was Gertrud Schultz-Klink, who in 1930 held her first position as head of the National Socialist Women’s Union (NSF).

During the 1932 electoral campaign, she established ties with other women’s organizations.

Schultz-Klink was known for providing jobs to the unemployed, securing food and clothing for the poor, and creating a group of volunteers to help girls with few resources.

Her performance led her friend Robert Wagner to introduce her to the Ministry of the Interior, where she became the head of the women’s labor department.

A month later, on February 24th, 1934, she was appointed by Hitler as president of the National Socialist Women’s League, where she took charge of all German women’s organizations.

In 1936, Schultz-Klink reached an agreement with Himmler to create a bride school aimed at selecting young women who were going to marry members of the SS.

In 1937, in Schwanen Verda, very close to Berlin, the first bride school was established.

A group of 20 young women attended a six-week course on domestic skills, ranging from ironing, cooking, or childcare to concepts of gardening, livestock, and agriculture.

Even interior design was included.

Additionally, they were taught manners to behave properly at social events, rules for maintaining proper conversation, and basic knowledge of race and genetics.

Once the training was completed, the young women were granted an essential certificate for marriage, along with a book titled The Tree of Life, which was considered an essential guide for their lives.

By May of 1944, women had taken on new roles in factory jobs and as military auxiliaries due to the exhaustion caused by the war and the need for labor in German society.

This prompted Schultz-Klink to change her rhetoric.

It was no longer about women as the foundation of the home, as it had been at the start of the war, but now they had a greater obligation that required combining the well-known household duties with a contribution to the war effort, both in the army and in heavy industry.

The SS Kittens, Spies, and Prostitutes in the Third Reich: We’ve already discussed the role of women as wives of SS members, but what about the women who were directly members of the organization commanded by Himmler? Every prospective SS woman had to belong first, of course, to the League of German Girls.

Recruitment ads in the newspapers were quite convincing, telling women there was no better way to show their love for the Reich than by joining the SS.

Naturally, many women signed up for the recruitment drives.

These were generally women from middle or lower-class backgrounds, with various professions such as midwives, hairdressers, tram conductors, opera singers, or retired teachers.

Those who joined as SS recruits in 1938 were trained in Lenburg, Germany, attending courses that lasted between four and six weeks, with training as rigorous and demanding as that of the men.

Starting in 1939, women began the induction phase at Ravensbrück Camp, a model concentration camp where they were transformed into feared killers.

Upon completing their training, the new soldiers were incorporated into the SS GFGA, the female branch of the SS, which was limited to voluntary work in the Nötin emergency service.

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