When people think of Adolf Hitler, the first thing that usually comes to mind is that he was one of the most evil men in history, responsible for the deaths of over six million Jewish people. They don’t tend to think that he was a man who inspired the love and often fanatical devotion of quite a few women. Sadly, he did.

But who were these women? Some of them have achieved a degree of infamy in their own right, but others have remained hidden in the shadows of history. Here is a list of some of the women in Hitler’s inner circle.

10 Eva Braun

You can’t write a list about the women in Hitler’s inner circle without including Eva Braun. She was 17 years old when she met Hitler. He was 40. She’d been working as an assistant to a photographer. Deeply troubled, her relationship with the Nazi leader was fraught with jealousy, and Eva attempted suicide at least twice. Nonetheless, Eva and Hitler apparently enjoyed a normal sex life. When Eva showed friends a photograph she had taken of British prime minister Neville Chamberlain sitting on a sofa in Hitler’s Munich flat, she apparently laughed and said, “If only he knew what goings-on that sofa has seen.”

Despite being so entwined in Hitler’s life, Eva wasn’t very well-known to the German people at the time. She acted as hostess at Hitler’s private mountaintop retreat at Obersalzberg, but she did not play a public role.

Loyal to Hitler to the end, Eva Braun joined him in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, and on April, 29, 1945, the two were married in a short ceremony. Several hours later, the newly married couple committed suicide. Eva bit down on a cyanide capsule and killed herself beside her new husband.^[1]

9 Magda Goebbels

Magda Goebbels was the wife of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. They probably married for reasons of mutual self-advancement rather than love, but Magda gave her husband six children. The marriage was troubled. Goebbels was almost pathologically unfaithful to Magda and was also jealous of her closeness with Hitler. Equally, Magda herself had at least two lovers.

While it has always been supposed that Magda was a fervent supporter of the Third Reich up until the very end, there is some evidence to suggest that she had started to have doubts about Hitler when the war started to go wrong. During one of the fuhrer’s radio broadcasts, she apparently switched off the radio in frustration, saying, “What a load of rubbish.”

Nevertheless, following Hitler’s suicide in the bunker, Magda and Joseph also chose to take their own lives. They murdered their six children, first by giving them morphine to make them sleep and then by breaking a cyanide capsule in each of their mouths.^[2] Their deaths were avoidable because Magda was given ample opportunities to have them spirited out of Berlin. Magda and Joseph killed themselves that same day.

8 Geli Raubal

Geli Raubal was Hitler’s half-niece through his sister, Angela. When Geli enrolled at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich to study medicine, she moved into Hitler’s apartment. Hitler immediately became somewhat domineering and covetous of young Geli. When he discovered that she was in a relationship with his chauffeur, Emil Maurice, Hitler forced them to break it off.^[3] He fired Maurice and insisted that Geli be chaperoned everywhere thereafter.

In late 1931, when Hitler refused to let Geli travel to Vienna, she apparently took a pistol and killed herself.

Historians still debate whether Hitler’s relationship with Geli was a sexual one. Rumors circulated at the time that the girl was either infatuated with her step-uncle or was the victim of his abusive attentions. Either way, the connection was certainly an unhealthy one.

Hitler apparently later declared that Geli was the only woman he ever really loved. He maintained her bedroom at the Berghof just as she had left it and hung portraits of her in the Chancellery in Berlin.

7 Unity Mitford

Not all the women in Hitler’s inner circle were German. The Honorable Unity Mitford was a beautiful English aristocrat, one of the “Mitford girls,” socialites of the 1930s, several of whom had curious and troubling marriages. Unity was probably the strangest of them all.

Obsessed with meeting Hitler, she traveled to Germany in 1934 and practically stalked him, finally meeting him in a Munich restaurant. Firmly established in his inner circle, Unity became a supporter of the Nazi regime. Hitler offered her an apartment in Munich, including one still being lived in by a Jewish couple. Apparently, Unity went to the apartment to size it up for refurbishment while the soon-to-be-dispossessed couple wept in the kitchen.

When war was declared, Unity attempted suicide by shooting herself in the head. She survived and was returned to England. Incapable of looking after herself, Unity spent the rest of the war being cared for by her family. The bullet was deemed too close to her brain to remove. In the end, that’s what killed her. In 1948, she died from meningitis caused by cerebral swelling around the bullet.^[4]

6 Emmy Goering

Emmy Goering was a German actress and the second wife of Hitler’s Luftwaffe commander in chief, Hermann Goering. She became known as “First Lady of the Third Reich” because she served as hostess for many state functions before World War II. In her capacity as “first lady,” she engendered the jealousy of Eva Braun, whom Emmy disliked. It was because of Eva’s jealousy that Emmy was never invited to the Berghof.

Despite this, Emmy received a great deal of public attention from the German media. She lived a lavish lifestyle and was often featured in magazines and newsreels. To populate her many mansions with works of art, she and her husband received countless paintings which had been confiscated from Jews.

When the war ended, Emmy was convicted of being a Nazi and sentenced to prison. She was released after serving a year-long sentence. Thereafter, she was prevented from returning to the stage to earn a living, and she ended up residing in a small apartment in Munich. She died in 1973.^[5]

5 Margarete Himmler

Margarete was a nurse who was divorced from her first husband when she met Heinrich Himmler. She was also seven years older than him. But these weren’t the main objections Himmler’s family had when he told them he wanted to marry her. Margarete was also a Protestant.

Characterized by her in-laws as something of cold fish who preferred being a housewife, Margarete still dutifully fulfilled her social obligations as the wife of an important figure in the regime. However, the wives of the SS officials didn’t warm to Margarete, with whom she was often antagonistic. Lina Heydrich and Margarete loathed each other.

After the war, Margarete was arrested along with her daughter, Gudrun, and held at various internment camps. Her interrogators soon realized that she knew little of her husband’s work, and the two were eventually released. Margarete resumed her life in Munich with her family. Despite her protestations that she was ignorant of the Nazis’ plans to exterminate the Jewish people, she nevertheless remained a committed National Socialist.^[6]

4 Lina Heydrich

Lina was the wife of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo, Kripo, and SD and one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Considered one of the most brutal members of the Nazi regime, Heydrich earned the dubious appellation of being “the man with the iron heart” from Hitler himself.

Lina’s marriage to Heydrich immediately presented a problem because her new husband was dismissed from his former position in the Navy when he was accused of breaking an engagement promise to another woman. Lina took matters into her own hands and suggested that Heydrich apply for a job in counterintelligence. Himmler suggested a meeting with Heydrich but sent a message cancelling it at the last minute. Lina ignored this message and sent her husband anyway. Her efforts proved successful when Heydrich was hired on the spot. Her husband was assassinated by British-trained Czech and Slovak soldiers in 1942.

After the war, Lina, controversially, was able to claim a German pension from the West German government because her husband had been a colonel who died in action.^[7] She defended her husband until her own death in 1985.

3 Eleonore Baur

Trained a nurse, Eleonore gave birth to two illegitimate children in her youth, worked in Cairo, and married and divorced twice before finding herself in Munich in 1920. A close friend of Hitler, she was a founding member of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. She was arrested several times for making anti-Semitic speeches. She was also the only woman to take part in the infamous Beer Hall Putsch.

Baur played a significant role in establishing and administering the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich. Accused of using the prisoners there to renovate the villa Hitler had given her, Baur developed a reputation within the camp as a thoroughly unpleasant bully.^[8] Other prisoners accused her of whipping them while at her home.

Baur was arrested for her alleged crimes immediately after the war. However, it wasn’t possible to convict her due to insufficient evidence, and Baur was released. However, she was sentenced to ten years in prison by the denazification court in Munich. Like several Nazi wives, she successfully claimed a pension after her release. She never renounced National Socialism. Baur died in 1981.

2 Elsa Bruckmann

A Romanian aristocrat, Elsa Bruckmann was born Princess Cantacuzene of Romania, daughter of Prince Theodor of Romania. She was married to German publisher Hugo Bruckmann. Both of them were devotees of Hitler and helped finance his early career before and after his failed coup in 1923.

Elsa was devoted to Hitler. She established a high society salon through which she able to bring Hitler into contact with important and wealthy people, including industrialists who might be able to finance his party. Elsa also published the philosophical writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose two-volume work The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century became an influential tract for the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime.^[9] Elsa died in 1946.

1 Winifred Wagner

Winifred was the English-born daughter-in-law of the famous German composer Richard Wagner, and she ran the Bayreuth Festival after husband’s death. Her friendship with Adolf Hitler stemmed from the early 1920s. It was Winifred who provided the paper on which Mein Kampf was written during Hitler’s incarceration after the Beer Hall Putsch.^[10]

In 1933, it was widely believed that the Wagner widow was about to marry Hitler, and although this did not happen, the two retained a deep friendship. Historians and members of the Wagner family have maintained that Winifred was disgusted by Hitler’s views regarding the Jews, but they also acknowledge that she remained entirely devoted to Hitler even after the war.

Although she was forbidden from running the Bayreuth Festival after the war, Winifred still resumed her position as an influential political hostess, and she often entertained former high-ranking Nazis. Alas, like so many other women from Hitler’s inner circle, she remained unrepentant about her association with him. She died in 1980.

R J Kennedy is a writer and filmmaker.

From the mysterious icy opening of the original Frankenstein novel, written by Mary Shelley, to the arctic horror of John Carpenter’s The Thing, it’s no secret that the desolate, desert tundra biome makes for an excellent horror story backdrop. The yawning, chilling snowscapes found at the top and bottom of the planet are scary enough, should one find themself stranded in them.

But what if something supernatural dwelt out there in the winter wonderlands? Ghost stories are quite plentiful in the far north if the legends are to be believed. And though some believe that Antarctica also has its haunted nooks, this list will cover ten different stories from above the Arctic Circle.

10 King William Island Zombies

While the first entry on this list steers a bit away from a classic ghost story, the Natsilik Inuit people who lived on King William Island tell stories of invasions from another sort of undead being: zombies. Originally named “Quikiqtak,” King William Island can be found in the province of Nunavut and was first found by British explorers in 1830. However, the Indigenous people had lived there for far longer.

Being this far north, the Natsilik Inuit had never come across other indigenous before, let alone white European explorers. So when people reported witnessing shambling, blue-skinned shells of men, legends of the undead walking once more arose. Indeed, many expeditions above the Arctic Circle were ill-fated, and many explorers, most notably the 1845 British Franklin expedition, were often grisly to behold as men froze to death. These “Death Marches” were real, though some were reported when no expeditions were documented to have taken place in the area. Perhaps these doomed explorers became ghosts after all.^[1]

9 Kola Superdeep Borehole

Though many Soviet accomplishments were once obscured in Cold War secrecy, it was a known fact that the nation succeeded in digging the world’s deepest man-made hole on the Kola Peninsula, a project that went on from 1970 to 1994. The hole itself was able to breach 40,230 feet (12,262 meters) into the Earth’s crust, a depth deeper than the Mariana Trench. Although such a feat also came with a plethora of rumors.

It is widely accepted that the project was abandoned due to a lack of funding, but some rumors speculate that the drill had breached into an extremely hot cavern unexpectedly. The microphone picked up alleged “screams of the damned,” driving the scientists to madness. Some allege that the scientists had indeed dug all the way to Hell itself, though this entry on the list is by far the most likely to be a mere urban legend.^[2]

8 Ghosts of Tromsø

With a population of over 70,000 people as of 2022, the Norwegian city of Tromsø is the third most populated area above the Arctic Circle. Though it is far from the oldest town in Scandinavia, the city of Tromsø was officially founded in 1838, which leaves more than enough wiggle room for those trying to find a deep enough history to find ghost stories.

Tales are often told of sea trolls and wraith-like wights prowling the beaches on the oceans, searching for victims in the night, and ghosts have been witnessed haunting each and every building downtown. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the city center was built on an ancient graveyard. Local historian Aesgir Johansen even hosts a Tromsø Ghost Walk through the chilly city.^[3]

7 Arctic Circle Hot Springs Resort

Though the specific hot springs in question are just shy of being able to claim to be above the Arctic Circle, parts of the land first claimed by Franklin Leach in 1906 would reach northerly enough. The community of Circle Hot Springs was a boomtown for the local Yukon Gold Rush, after having been inhabited by the Athabascan people, and would eventually become a ghost town as the gold ran dry.

A resort would open far later in history, and in the nineties particularly, the owners of the establishment would report a slew of poltergeist activity. Objects would fly across the room, footsteps would be heard when no guest was present, and the translucent, gossamer-like visage of a woman would often be seen. It is thought to be the spirit of Emma Leach, Franklin Leach’s wife, who is buried at the property.^[4]

6 The SS Baychimo

This next entry takes us to the Arctic Ocean itself, as it is claimed that a ghost ship sometimes haunts the waters near the Sea Horse Islands near Point Barrow in Alaska. After twenty years of operation, the Swedish cargo steamer known as the SS Baychimo was trapped in the ice and forced to be abandoned in 1931. It dislodged and floated about the Arctic before anyone could return to salvage it.

Unlike most ghostly vessels, sightings of the SS Baychimo were indeed real sightings of an abandoned ship, and some people were even able to get on board throughout the 1930s. Sightings of the vessel would continue up to 1969, either coming from Inuit people living in the area, or other explorers, though none dared to board or salvage the ship ever again. Though the ship’s wreckage was never discovered, even after a concentrated effort to locate it in 2006, some claim that the apparition of the SS Baychimo still glides silently on the icy waters of the Arctic.^[5]

5 Salekhard-Igarka Railway

From 1947 to 1953, gulag prisoners of the Soviet Union were forced into the arduous task of building more than eight-hundred miles of railway track in the frigid North of Siberia. Only around half of the track would succeed in being built, the project grinding to a halt after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, but the Salekhard-Igarka railway project wouldn’t end before leading to the deaths of over 300,000 people.

In time, the incomplete railway would achieve another name, “Stalin’s Railway of Death,” and the deaths didn’t just stem from overworking and exhaustion. It is said that many prisoners bled out due to the massive swarms of mosquitoes in the area. Many of the abandoned, dilapidated structures still stand to this day, and some urban explorers claim to hear tormented, ethereal screams, sounds of labor, and other ghostly activity amongst the ruins.^[6]

4 Qivittoq

The next legend on this list can be found on the less-than-aptly named Greenland. The legend of the Qivittoq pertains more to multiple beings than a single ghost, but it is a haunting figure nonetheless. The people of Greenland claim that large, brooding, spectral figures prowl the icy tundra, hunting after people unlucky enough to cross paths with them.

The word “Qivittoq” also pertains to people who are banished from communities and effectively left to freeze to death with little chance of survival. Over time, however, people claim to see these banished folks, nonetheless, somehow surviving in the tundra against all odds. Perhaps this is where their penchant for hunting people comes from; dire survival instincts. The legend of the Qivittoq was made famous by a 1956 Danish film titled simply Qivitoq, dropping one of the “T’s” in its name.^[7]

3 The Ghost of Augustus Peers

In 1853, a fur trader by the name of Augustus Peers tragically passed away in his thirties due to natural circumstances. However, before his passing, Peers made it very clear that he didn’t want to be buried where he worked; Fort McPherson. And so, a colleague and dogsled runner by the name of Roderick Macfarlane offered to transfer Peers’s body down the Mackenzie River to a new location.

What occurred during the trek, however, would leave Macfarlane very unlikely to ever agree to such a task again. According to his journal, the dogsled driver reported hearing a commanding voice ring out from nowhere, telling the dogs to protect the body from wild scavengers. The dogs complied, but this would be far from the only harrowing occurrence. A spectral form would float outside of Macfarlane’s tent during the night, frightening the man beyond words. ^[8]

2 The Myling

Harrowing tales of the Myling are told all across Scandinavia, as they are certainly in the upper echelons of Norse legend notoriety. However, unlike Thor and Loki, stories of these spirits really took off the more Christianity made its way into Scandinavia. The Mylingar are said to be the ghost of a child born out of wedlock, in which the mother leaves the child out in the wilderness to die, lest both the mother and child get punished by the church.

Many believed that since the child would be unbaptized, there was little to stop them from a doomed fate as a ghost. Unlike most ghosts, however, the Myling does a bit more than simply haunt a location. It constantly cries out for years and years and pesters passers-by, begging them to give the spectral child a name. More vengeful mylingar actively try to disclose their mothers’ secret to anyone who will listen, sometimes manifesting during her wedding day.^[9]

1 The Phantom Trapper of Labrador

A ghost haunts the snowy fields of the Canadian province of Labrador, and he goes simply by the name of “Smoker” to those who tell his tale. Sticking it out in the frigid north, the man, whose real name was allegedly Esau, first started off his entrepreneurship as a trapper. But meeting little success, he turned to brewing moonshine instead. This got him into trouble with the Mounted Police quite often, which prompted Smoker to double down on his plan.

He fastened a suit of all-white furs, adopted an all-white husky dog-sledding team to blend in with the snow, and escaped persecution. He met with success for a while, but a drunken fall prompted the bootlegger to break his back in the snowy north, where he shortly died. However, some claim to see a snowy, spectral trapper continuously sled through the snow in North Canada. It is even claimed that the man cried out to God himself before dying, begging to become a ghost out of fear that he’d be sent to Hell.^[10]