Nazi Wives - James Wyllie
I couldn’t put this book down. I felt like I was compulsively reading a trainwreck of the rich and famous, heading for their own demise while stomping on as many people as they could along the way. Sadly, nowhere near enough of them got the punishments that they deserved in the end. My main takeaway from this book is that white women can be bad enough in “normal” times, but put us in a situation where money, fame, and an ascension to a throne are all a possibility, and we become downright evil. Never for one moment did I doubt that these wives of top ranking Nazi men knew exactly what was going on around them. There is no way on earth that they didn’t know. And for some reason they all seemed to get away with it, serving little to no prison time, in much more comfortable quarters than anyone their husbands sent to concentration and extermination camps did.
As the title states, this Nazi Wives focuses on the lives of famous Nazi officials’ wives, but it also provides ample information on the husbands, as well as Hitler himself. We are introduced to the families and entourages of Hitler, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, Hess, Heydrich, Bormann, as well as a few others, with the main focus on the wives and girlfriends: Carin Goering, Emmy Goering, Margaret Himmler, Magda Goebbels, Eva Braun, Ilse Hess, Lina Heydrich, and I have probably forgotten some. All of these women were absolutely despicable and vomit-inducing, but honestly not surprising. I’m sure they, and others, would do it all over again if they had the chance to. I could rattle off quite a few women like them who are alive right now… It isn’t surprising to me that those who survived the war and the aftermath maintained their innocence until their deaths, while continuing to promote the “greatness” of their husbands who were “just doing their jobs.”
James Wyllie obviously researched these individuals in great depth, and used all of this research to craft a highly readable book about their lives. Oftentimes these types of books end up getting bogged down in details, or a bit confusing, especially when they deal with multiple people over a long timeframe (over 20 years), but I never felt any of that reading Nazi Wives. I did jot down the wives full names at the beginning though, that helped me pair them to the correct husband, as the author does go by their first names for the most part of the book.
I love how the book is mainly timeline based and skips to different characters on a regular basis. It helped me map it all out in my head, and it also helped me to draw my own image of each woman, as well as my own conclusions on them. For the most part the author relies on existing documents (journals, interviews etc), to create portraits of these women and their lives, and we are left to make our own opinions about them.
What is quite chilling to me is that some of these people’s kids actually remained staunch Nazis/neo-Nazis for the rest of their lives, even after everything that their parents had been involved in was fully exposed to them. Gudrun, Himmler’s daughter, remained devoted to her father and his legacy right up until her death in 2018! How does one ignore genocide?!
Anyway, this is a very well researched and written book that will leave you with a sick feeling to your stomach, and a real yearning to ensure that real history is taught to our kids. These women should be exposed for who they were in the same way as their husbands have always been.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.