Margarete Himmler - the wife of the Reichsführer SS. Part three of three. Life after 1945

In parts one and two, we saw how Margarete Siegroth married Heinrich Himmler and how they set up a home and a business using funds from the sale of her share of a Berlin clinic. The Himmler couple had a daughter and then adopted a son but Heinrich Himmler was not loyal to his wife who he ignored and appeared only to visit on account of his daughter. Heinrich Himmler had two children by another woman who was 19 years younger than Margarethe Himmler. Frau Himmler had kept a low profile when compared to other Nazi wives but nonetheless she realised that she could fear the wrath of the victims of her husbands crimes.
Gmund was liberated at the beginning of May 1945 by the 3rd U.S. Army. The Himmler family had been living at the house "Lindenfycht" since 1934. Marga and Gudrun had fled at the end of April 1945 as the Americans pushed towards Munich. U.S. soldiers ransacked the big house, taking anything they could as souvenirs. It was probably the Americans who opened the safe and helped themselves to the contents. It is possible that they got help from one of Himmler’s employees, who was still living on the sprawling grounds.
As two soldiers left the house with their booty, they met an American intelligence officer who had heard of the discovery of Himmler’s estate. By order of the Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, it was among his duties to obtain evidence for the planned criminal trials against the leadership of the Nazi regime. So he tried to persuade the two soldiers to hand over the material or at least to sell it to him.
He successfully convinced only one of the GIs and received six notebooks containing the Himmler diaries from the years 1914 to 1924. The officer noted that these documents contained nothing useful for the forthcoming trial. Little is known about what happened to the second soldier’s material after he took it with him. It included parts of Marga Himmler’s private diary, her NSDAP membership book, an album with photos of their baby daughter Gudrun, a handwritten recipe book, household books, numerous private photos - and negatives of Heinrich’s letters to his wife from the years 1927 to 1933 and 1939 to 1945.
Mother and daughter fled south. The reason why they fled south was because the Americans were advancing from the north and west and the Soviets from the east. The area Margarethe Himmler came from near Bydgoszcz was occupied as were places where she may have found family such as Stargard or Berlin. The route took her through Austria to the South Tyrol – a route taken by many Nazi war criminals. Once things got more organised, some could rely on the offices of certain people in the Catholic church but that would be later. Margarethe Himmler, it would appear, needed to rely on SS officers who were fleeing south. In view of the regard that they held for her husband, they would protect her. At least that is what she might have thought. So therefore she fled with them into the German speaking area of Italy, a part of Italy that had been granted to that country after WW1, a place she hoped she would find sanctuary and could possibly disappear into the crowd.
Margarete Himmler was last in contact with her husband in April 1945 before she left Gmund with her daughter. Accompanied by SS men, she and her daughter reached South Tyrol , where they both went into hiding in Bolzano .
After the US Army liberated Bolzano in May 1945, captured SS men showed their loyalty to Himmler and the SS by revealing where Himmler’s wife was hiding. On 13 May 1945, Margarete Himmler was arrested with her daughter. She was interned initially in Italy and then in France.
She was questioned. During the interrogation, however, it became clear that her husband had kept her very much in the dark about what he was doing. During the Nuremberg Trials, both mother and daughter were held in the Ludwigsburg 77 internment camp . Since they were not accused and the Allies had no further use for them, mother and daughter were released from internment in November 1946. They were both initially accommodated in the Bodelwickelhsch Foundation Bethel in Bielefeld . This was – and still is – an institution that cares for people with disabilities, mental impairments, epilepsy, the elderly and those in need of care, the sick, young people with social problems and the homeless.
Here, mother and daughter filled their days by weaving and spinning. The Himmlers' board and lodging were partly financed through donations received by the foundation, so that they had enough to keep them alive in modest comfort, although of course worlds apart from the luxury that they had enjoyed during the Third Reich.