When Margaret Himmler, frumpy wife of Gestapo chief Heinrich, decided to host a weekly tea party for SS wives, she reckoned without the rivalry of her husband’s deputy, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich.

Nazi Wives
JAMES WYLLIE
(The History Press, 288 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

When Margaret Himmler, frumpy wife of Gestapo chief Heinrich, decided to host a weekly tea party for SS wives, she reckoned without the rivalry of her husband’s deputy, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich’s wife, Lina, promptly organised a VIP women’s calisthenics group at her own home to clash with Frau Himmler’s gatherings. In retaliation, Frau Himmler persuaded her husband to order Heydrich to divorce Lina. When Lina found out she confronted Himmler, and he meekly backed down.

Why should these trivial feuds trouble historians? Perhaps because they oblige us to see the wives of the Third Reich as genuine human beings, rather than cartoon monsters. The female gaze is now a significant part of academic history, and the question of what went on in the mind of a woman married to a figure like Himmler, Heydrich or Goebbels can be key to understanding the public man.

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