Women of the Third Reich Trivia Quiz

Answer: Yes

Of course the story is true! Hitler married Eva Braun on the 29th of April, 1945, in his Berlin bunker, with the Russians only some hundred yards away. The next day the 'newly weds' committed suicide.

Answer: Carin (or Karin) von Fock

Karin (or Carin) von Fock belonged, in spite of her name, to the Swedish aristocracy. She died in 1931. Goering had in 1933 a great manor built, which he named "Carinhall", and which he destroyed in 1945. Magda Ritschel became after her first marriage Magda Quandt, and after a second marriage, Magda Goebbels. Emmy Sonnemann, an actress, was Goering's second wife.

Answer: Employee in a photo store

The photo store in Munich belonged to Heinrich Hoffmann, who already had connections with high ranking Nazis, and who would, in the Third Reich, become a sort of "court photographer" to Hitler.

Answer: Winifred Wagner

Winifred Williams was English by birth, but married to Siegfried, son of Richard Wagner. In spite of the fact that she was nearly 30 years younger than her husband, she soon became the "ruler" of Bayreuth, the Festspiele, in short, of the whole Wagner scene.

She germanized and nazified herself very quickly, and became a close friend of Hitler. It is interesting to note that two other members of the Wagner-clan were non-German in origin, but molded themselves into extreme German nationalists: Richard Wagner's wife Cosima, daughter of Liszt, and his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of the two most notorious racial theorists of the 19th century (the other one was the Comte de Gobineau - not a typical German name either).

Answer: Triumph des Willens

"Triumph des Willens" ("Triumph of the Will") is a documentary about the Nazi Party Rally that took place in Nuremberg in 1934. Another famous/notorious one is her documentary of the Olympic Games of 1936. Leni Riefenstahl used all sorts of cinematographic innovations, which greatly influenced this genre. Technically speaking, they belong to the best ever made.

But is it appropiate to use the word "documentary" in this context? In fact her products of this time can justly be regarded as unashamed Nazi propaganda, and had as such a certain impact beyond the German-speaking lands.

Answer: Josef Goebbels

The Goebbels stayed in Hitler's bunker till the very end, 1 May 1945. Then Magda poisoned first her little children, afraid as she was that otherwise they would fall in the hands of the Russians. Then Josef and Magda committed suicide.

Answer: Henriette von Schirach

She was married to the leader of the Hitlerjugend, Baldur von Schirach. There are quite a lot of testimonies about the incident. It did however hardly change her positive attitude towards Hitler and National Socialism, even decades after the war. For Emmy Goering, see note on Question 2.
Lina Heydrich was the wife of the head of the Gestapo Reinhardt Heydrich, who was assassinated by Czech patriots in 1942.

Answer: Hanna Reitsch

In Hitler's very last days, in April 1945, when he lived in his bunker in Berlin, Hanna Reitsch and a high-ranking Luftwaffe officer flew to Berlin to see Hitler. They promised to commit suicide just as their beloved Führer planned to do, but one day before the latter occurred, they managed to fly out of burning Berlin.

They survived it, although it must have seemed a most suicidal flight. Hannah Arendt was an historian. Amongst other things she wrote, after the war, the famous book: "The Origins of Totalitarianism". Before the war she became a friend, and as rumours will have it, also a mistress, of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was, however, not exactly a hero of resistance against Hitler.

The two other characters were made up by me. You could have guessed that!

Answer: Unity

Yes, one of the four sisters in the Mitford family. Nancy and Jessica were talented authors, and Jessica was besides that an avowed Communist. Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Unity apparently was more inclined to National Socialism, as you see, but I have my little doubts whether she really was interested in the ideology, or had a profound understanding of this doctrine (but then, it applied to most other followers, too).

Answer: Yes

Yes, an easy question, wasn't it? There indeed was a Reichsfrauenführerin (Reich Women Leader), named Gertrud Scholtz-Klink. She headed a vast organization, whose importance equalled her own importance: namely nearly zero. She was a devout Nazi, but sometimes in publications of her organization voiced ideas that were not in accordance with the general Nazi conceptions about the role of women in society. No harm done: apparently no male Nazi read her boring stuff.