The real housewives of the Third Reich: Wealth, power and petty rivalries

WHO among us hasn’t felt that schadenfreudian thrill of wondering, “How on Earth can she be married to him?” (Apologies, Ms Chao!) At once superior and voyeuristic, the question assumes that the woman is perfectly nice, even charming, while her husband is – by dint of affect, arrogance, offensive opinions or lack of appropriate social inhibition – actively repellent.

The mystery of any marriage becomes more mysterious still when the character flaws of one half of the couple are so disproportionate to the apparent rectitude of the other.

What brought them together? Why does she stay? Is he really a different and more appealing person than the one who is talking with his mouth full at dinner?

Thus, the mere title of James Wyllie’s new book, Nazi Wives: The Women at the Top of Hitler’s Germany, promises a delicious opportunity to answer a few of those more intimate questions about a group of towering figures in the canon of male monstrosity.

They are so well-known that their surnames are all we need to summon the epochal evils of Hitler’s regime: Goebbels, the minister of propaganda; Goering, the Luftwaffe commander and second-most-powerful Nazi; Heydrich, Gestapo chief and “final solution” architect; Himmler, the SS chief and Holocaust implementer; Hess, deputy Führer; and Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary.

All of them had their specific remit of horrors, and all of them were committed to Adolf Hitler and the anti-Semitic, racist, xenophobic and totalitarian values of his regime.

In seeing the dynamics of their married lives, do we learn something more about these men – their motivations, their petty jealousies, their messy and repugnant humanity – that could shed light on what they did?

For years, the role of women in Nazi Germany was eclipsed by the preoccupation with the actions of prominent men. Then, as Wyllie notes, in the 1980s feminist scholarship began to examine this world. In her book Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (a 2013 finalist for National Book Award), despite Hitler’s well-known bachelorhood (until his hasty, pre-suicide marriage to Eva Braun), his leadership was required to be married, never divorce and have many children.

Magda Goebbels for many years claimed the title of “first lady of the Reich” for her blonde beauty and for the six