On April 30, 1945, hidden in an underground bunker and waiting for the armies of the Soviet Union to fall upon them, Adolf Hitler took his own life—and, alongside him, that of his new wife, Eva Braun.

Eva Braun usually gets nothing more than a passing mention treating her as little more than a mistress who happened to present at Hitler’s death. She has even been famously written off as a “great disappointment to historians“—as someone with no real importance to the history of the world.

Regardless of her impact on politics, however, her story is fascinating. She was a woman who was truly and completely in love with the fascist leader of Nazi Germany and who suffered for that love over and over again. The story of Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler is a love story every bit as heartbreaking as a Shakespearean tragedy. It just happens to involve the evilest man who ever lived.

10She Was Truly In Love With Hitler

It’s easy to question where Eva Braun’s heart really lay. When a 17-year-old girl decides to shack up with a powerful 40-year-old, most will assume that the girl is in it for something other than his charm and good looks.

For Eva, though, it really was true love. In fact, when she met Hitler, she had no idea who he was. It was 1930, and Hitler’s rise to power was only just beginning, so he was not the recognizable face he is today. More than that, though, she received a fake name—she was told his name was “Herr Wolff.”

The two were attracted immediately. Hitler was reportedly “devouring her with his eyes” when they first met, and by the end of the day, offered her a ride home. Braun, trying on a little modesty, refused but spent the next days asking around about this “Herr Wolff.”

Hitler started inviting her everywhere he could—to movies, meals, and operas until he broke her down. Braun was charmed to pieces by the future dictator. Talking to a friend about Hitler’s affections, she asked, “Who could withstand that?”

Hitler, with his thin mustache and shrieking voice, was an absolute ladykiller—even when the girls didn’t know who he was. And their love—for Eva Braun, at least—was true love.

9Hitler Was In Love With Someone Else

When Eva and Hitler’s relationship started, Hitler was already living with another woman—Geli Raubal, who, incidentally, was his niece. Every indication suggests that Hitler loved Geli more than he loved anyone in the world, but Geli doesn’t seem to have felt the same.

In September 1931, she announced that she was leaving to Vienna to marry another man, infuriating Hitler. The two fought bitterly all through the night, and the next day Geli was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.

Eva, already the other woman, consoled the heartbroken Hitler. Their relationship really started then. But this really should have been a warning sign. Hitler was with another when they met, and he drove her to suicide.

This pattern followed through all of Hitler’s life and all of his relationships. Hitler was romantically linked with eight different women—and every single one of them attempted suicide at least once. He had a terrible impact on the women he dated, and Eva Braun would suffer from it more than anyone.

8Hitler Cheated On Her Rampantly

Hitler was terrible to the women that loved him. Only one of those eight women he drove to suicide came before Eva—the rest came after. Hitler cheated on her, and he did it a lot.

Perhaps his most notable affair was with Renate Muller, one of Germany’s top stars of the silver screen. Hitler lured her into making propaganda films in the mid-1930s and then into a little bit more. According to one account, which Renate allegedly told directly to Adolf Zeissler, Hitler threw himself onto the floor and begged Renate to abuse him. Soon, at his demand, she was beating Hitler with a whip and cursing him out while he masturbated.

It’s impossible to know if that really happened or if it’s just propaganda—but they certainly did have an affair, and Eva Braun knew about it. And in 1937, Renate followed the path of all of Hitler’s lovers: she jumped out of a window and ended her life.

7Eva Braun Shot Herself In The Chest For Attention

Eva Braun was not the type of woman who accepted open relationships. When she saw Hitler running around with other women and leaving her in the lurch, she was heartbroken—and she decided to do something about it.

Eva got ahold of her father’s pistol, turned it to her own heart, and fired. The only thing she’d ever seen truly move Hitler was Geli’s death, and if he couldn’t take care of her, he’d have to go through the whole thing again.

Eva missed the heart, either because she wasn’t really ready to die or because she didn’t understand human anatomy. When she realized she was still alive, she called Hitler’s personal doctor.

The general assumption is that this was all a plea for attention and that she’d called Hitler’s doctor to make sure the message got passed on. If it was, it worked. The message was passed on, and Hitler showed up at the hospital with flowers and promised that he would take care of her from then on.

6Hitler Hid Their Relationship

Promises aside, Hitler never became a great boyfriend. Nobody was allowed to know that Eva Braun was his mistress—and he made her go through some humiliating experiences to hide it.

When Hitler’s old friends were at his home, he’d let Eva linger about. But if a dignitary or cabinet minister showed up, she was hidden in a private room next to Hitler’s bedroom so that no one would see her. Stuck alone in a room like a private shame, she was described by Hitler’s colleagues as deeply unhappy and deeply in love.

He would openly disrespect her as well. In front of bother her and his friends, he reportedly said, “A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman. Imagine if, on top of everything else, I had a woman who interfered with my work! In my leisure time, I want to have peace.”

Over time, Hitler came up with a few excuses to be with her. In time, he named her his “private secretary” to keep her around. But even then, she was forced to sneak into the house through the back door where no one would see her.

As terrible of a man as it was that she was in love with, she loved him—and he tucked her away where no one could see her as a private shame.

5She Tried To Overdose On Sleeping Pills

In 1935, Eva Braun went a full three months without hearing a single word from Hitler. Word had gotten out that he was spending his time with another woman, and Eva realized that shooting herself had done nothing. He hadn’t changed.

This time, she decided she would make it stick. In her diary, she wrote, “God, I’m afraid he won’t answer today. I’ve decided on 35 pills this time and it’s going to really be a ‘dead certain’ business. If only he would have somebody call.” Then she took a bottle of sleeping pills, downed them all, and waited for darkness to overcome her.

Again the suicide failed, and again, Hitler showed up at her home with flowers. He begged for forgiveness and, according to her diary, promised to buy her a house. It was only the second of three suicide attempts—but it was, at least, the last one she would do alone.

4Hitler’s Family Hated Her

Eva Braun’s life still didn’t improve that much. Another problem in their relationship lived in Hitler’s home—Angela Raubal, the mother of his first love Geli. The whole time their affair was growing, Hitler kept his ex-lover’s mother in his home, where she watched the man who had driven her daughter to suicide cavort with his mistress.

Angela Raubal hated Eva Braun. She did not even try to keep her contempt a secret. It was an open hatred, as she let anyone who cared to listen know that this Eva woman had no place in Hitler’s life.

Alone except for people who hated her, Eva Braun spent most of her time reading books and watching movies by herself. Reportedly, she would even stare at photographs of Hitler during mealtimes to content herself with the imagined thought that he was there with her.

Her victory didn’t come until she tried to overdose on pills. Only when the risk of another dead lover was on Hitler’s hands did he get Angela Raubal moved out of Hitler’s home, and Eva got a rare win—she was allowed to move into Hitler’s home.

3She Refused To Leave His Side

As the war raged on and the Allied armies advanced on Germany, it soon became clear that Germany would fall. The Soviets were getting closer, and there was no question that when they arrived, Hitler would be killed, along with all associated with him.

Eva was in peril, and those around her knew it. In 1943, Henriette von Schirach, the wife of the Reich’s Youth Leader, tried to persuade her to flee Germany and Hitler’s side—but Eva Braun refused.

This wasn’t just naivete. Even as the situation grew dire, she stayed, and in 1944, she drafted up a will indicating her intention to kill herself if Hitler died. Reportedly, she said, “Do you think I would let him die alone? I will stay with him up until the last moment. I’ve thought it out exactly. No one can stop me.”

She went through with her promise. When the time came, she joined Hitler in an underground bunker, prepared to die by his side.

2Hitler Had Her Brother-In-Law Shot

With only hours of life left to live, Eva Braun still found ways to go through tragedy. From the bunker, Hitler sent for Eva’s brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein. Fegelein had married Eva’s sister in a ceremony, with Hitler himself signing as the witness.

When they found him, though, he was drunk, carrying a suitcase, filling it with the loot he stolen from around Berlin, and getting ready to get as far from Germany as he possibly could. A strange woman who was not his wife was with him, and she made a quick escape out the window when the Nazis arrived.

Fegelein was dragged to the bunker on Hitler’s orders. He had picked a bad day to desert—Himmler had just betrayed Hitler by trying to surrender Germany behind his back. Hitler became convinced that the woman who’d escaped was a spy and that Fegelein was committing treason—and so Eva’s brother-in-law was dragged out and shot.

Eva and Hitler were married just a few short hours after. On the marriage certificate, perhaps overcome by nerves, she wrote the first “B” of “Braun” as her last name before scratching it out and replacing it with “Hitler.”

1The Dog’s Death Upset More People Than Eva’s

In the bunker with Eva were a few of Hitler’s most trusted men—and his dog, Blondi. Blondi had been a mortal enemy of Eva’s already. Eva, who must have directed some of her frustration over the coldness of the man she loved onto his dog, complained that Hitler gave it affection she never received. When the dog snuck under the dinner table, she would kick it as hard as she could and delight over Hitler’s confusion.

Even in the end, though, she would suffer in the limelight next to the dog. A nurse who was in the bunker, talking about it years later, said that Eva was dismissed by everyone there as a “young girl who had no meaning.”

When the group decided to end it, Hitler gave a cyanide capsule to Blondi first to make sure it would work. When the dog died, he let out howls of grief and was completely inconsolable. When Eva took her cyanide capsule and ended her life, according to the nurse, not a soul in the place was as upset as they were when the dog died.

And so the short and tragic life of Eva Braun ended with much the same heartache that filled it. She was hidden under the ground and unloved, following a man she was willing to die for.

Mark Oliver is a regular contributor to . He writing also appears on several other sites, including The Onion’s StarWipe and Cracked.com. His website is regularly updated with everything he writes.

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.

Roughly 150,000 men of Jewish descent fought in Hitler’s army. While their families back home were being corralled into ghettos and sent off to death camps, these men were in Poland, France, or Russia, spreading the fascist system that was killing their people across Europe.

It’s hard to understand, but many Jewish Germans signed up for military service. Each man had his own reason to do it—often one of necessity. Told together, their stories give an incredible insight into life for a German Jew at the break of World War II.

10 Werner Goldberg

There was a face you could find plastered on the walls of Nazi Germany: a swastika at his chest, standing proud over a proclamation that this was “The Ideal German Soldier.” But the ideal German soldier wasn’t a member of Hitler’s master race. He was half-Jewish.

Werner Goldberg had joined the army after years of struggling with his own identity. His father never told him he was Jewish; instead, Werner found out when he was 14 in the most humiliating way possible. His principal declared that their school would be Jew-free—and then publicly singled Goldberg out as the school’s Jewish problem.

In an instant, Goldberg found himself on the outside, and he was desperate to fit back in. He signed up for the army the first chance he could, getting in early enough to fight in the first invasion of Poland.

But back at home, his father struggled through the horrors of the Holocaust, and Goldberg was forced to use his influence to save his father more than once. At one point, after learning that his father was going to be sent to Auschwitz, Werner snuck into the building they were using as his prison and broke his father out.^[1]

It worked. At the end of the war, all but one member of his family had died. The only one left to greet Werner was the Jewish father he had saved from the death camps.

9 Nachemia Wurman

It has long been debated just how well the soldiers of the Nazi army understood what was happening behind the concentration camp walls, but among the Nazis’ 72nd Infantry, there was one man who definitely knew it firsthand: Nachemia Wurman.^[2]

Wurman was a Holocaust survivor. He was a Polish Jew who had been sent to labor camps in 1944, where he’d endured every horror imaginable. He’d seen his own father executed, and he’d even been forced to bathe using soap made from the bodies of his campmates.

In time, he managed to escape. He fled west, hoping to find the Soviet army—but instead, he ran directly into a Nazi battalion. Wurman knew he wouldn’t be able to sneak past them, so instead, he walked straight up to them, shook their hands, and introduced himself as “Marion Schmidt,” German-born chef.

Soon, Wurman was a part of the Nazi battalion. From then on, he spent the war with a swastika on his arm, feeding the soldiers and praying that nobody would realize who he really was. “The best hiding place,” Wurman said, “was in the mouth of the wolf.”

8 Arno Spitz

One of the more decorated men in the Nazi army was Arno Spitz. By the end of the war, he’d won three Iron Crosses, the highest award a Nazi could earn for bravery.

He was a paratrooper, one beloved by the Nazi army—even if they absolutely loathed his father. Spitz’s father was Jewish, and he’d suffered from such fierce persecution back home that, early on during the rise of Nazi Germany, he fled the country for the United States.

Spitz, however, stayed and made such an impression on his superiors that he didn’t even have to hide his parentage. In 1940, under Himmler’s orders, the Nazis kicked every half-Jewish soldier out of the army, but Spitz was such an effective soldier that he was allowed to stay.

To the end, he insisted that, by fighting with the Nazis, he did nothing wrong. He fought for Germany, not for Hitler, he told Dateline NBC in 2002, declaring: “There is a difference.”^[3]

Not everyone in his family, however, sees it the same way. Spitz said that his daughter has accused him of participating in the Nazis’ crimes against his own people. But despite her rebukes, Spitz refused to hide or apologize for his time fighting in Hitler’s military. “I don’t have to,” he said. “I didn’t do anything that is a crime.”

7 Hans-Geert Falkenberg

“I did not want to join the army,” Hans-Geert Falkenberg said. “I had to join the army.”

He joined the German army as soon as war was declared. Jews were already starting to see their shops destroyed and being harassed in the streets, and Falkenberg felt a need to connect himself to the German side of his identity to stay alive.

He’d heard his teachers tell his classes that the Jewish race was inferior, and, desperate to prove his equality, he’d spent his teenage years trying to be the best at everything the Nazis valued. Joining the army was just a natural next step for him.

But as he fought in France, his grandmother was sending him letters, letting him watch the Holocaust slowly unfold back home.^[4] Then, one day, the letters stopped. His grandmother, he would soon learn, had been sent to a concentration camp.

It was a shock—not just for him but for those who cared about him, as well. One friend of his wrote to him, with dismay: “I believe that the Jews are Germany’s misfortune, but that has nothing to do with grandmother!”

The rest of his family had already fled to England, and Falkenberg considered joining them. Trapped in the middle of Europe, surrounded by the Nazi army, however, he just didn’t know how it could be done. “The safest thing was to stay in the army,” Falkenberg would later say. “No question.”

6 Helmut Kopp

Helmut Kopp was the son of a German man and Jewish woman, but it was the Jewish side of his family that left him feeling persecuted.

As a boy, Kopp said, his maternal grandfather would openly disrespect him, refusing to view him as a part of his family. When he was chided by his wife and reminded that this was their daughter’s son, his grandfather snapped back that, no, this wasn’t his grandson—this was their son-in-law’s goy. “After how my grandfather had treated me,” Kopp said, “I didn’t want to own up to my Jewish past.”

When the war started, he signed up for the Wehrmacht, and when they handed him his papers, he marked himself down as “full Aryan.” For years, he fought with a Nazi artillery unit. Kopp was aware of the concentration camps, but he justified what he was doing by simply not thinking about it. “You didn’t think about the Fuhrer or the nation,” he said.^[5] “I thought only about myself—that either my tank or something will be hit and then I’ll be gone anyway, or I’ll make it through.”

5 Friedemann Lichtwitz

“In the German army, I was in a pretty good situation,” Friedemann Licthwitz said. “It was a good bunch of guys. I felt comfortable there.”

Litchwitz claimed that, when he joined up with the Nazi army, he had no idea how bad the persecution against the Jews in Germany was becoming.^[6] He only knew that, in the army, he was accepted and treated as an equal and that, when he was home in Germany, he was not.

After he was kicked out in the 1940 military purge, however, Litchwitz found out exactly how bad it was. He was sent to a forced labor camp and then, after a failed attempt to escape, into Dachau: one of Germany’s deadliest concentration camps.

An NBC reporter asked him how he felt, having gone from the inside of the Nazi army to a death camp. “I can’t say,” was all Lichtwitz could reply. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

4 Major Leo Skurnik

Major Leo Skurnik was working as a doctor in the Finnish 53rd Infantry. He was a Jew, but he was also a Finn—and that meant that, in the Soviet Union, he and the Nazis had a common enemy. That put him side by side with a German SS division, fighting against a Russian invasion and trying to help every man who was injured by the Russian shells, whether he was a Finnish soldier or a member of the SS.

“He had taken the Hippocratic oath,” Skrunik’s son told the National Post.^[7] “He wouldn’t turn away an injured man, whatever his nationality.” Skurnik, however, took it further than that. He helped clear paths for the German army to attack and, when a German soldier was in need, would rush into no man’s land, risking his own life to save wounded Nazis.

He saved the lives of more than 600 men, many of them members of the SS, by organizing an evacuation of a field hospital that was being bombarded by Russian shells. Skrunik led the wounded Germans across 8.9 kilometers (5.5 mi) of bogland and, when it was all over, was awarded with an Iron Cross.

Skurnik turned it down. He claimed that as soon as he got word that the Germans wanted to present him with their highest honor, he told his commanding officer: “Tell your German colleagues that I wipe my arse with it!”

3 Harry Matso

“We’ve been called ‘fascist,’ ” Harry Matso said, “which is a lie.”^[8]

He was a member of the Finnish army, a man who fought for a force allied with the Nazis. If the war had ended in their favor, his race—the Jewish race—would have been exterminated. Still, Matso insists that he was no fascist.

“Finnish Jews fought for Finland’s independence,” he said. “Not for Germany’s war aims.”

He’d joined the war after being conscripted by his nation. He answered their call—even though he knew that his nation was allied with the Nazis and though, by 1942, he’d started hearing rumors of the systematic extermination of Jews in Germany.

But Matso feared life under Soviet rule every bit as much. Caught between two tyrants, he sided with the one nation he believed would take care of him: his homeland of Finland. Still, Matso fought, rebelling in his own small, quiet way. When he saw a German soldier, he said, he would staunchly refuse to salute.

2 Emil Maurice

One of the founders of the SS was, by Heinrich Himmler’s standards, a Jew. His name was Emil Maurice, and he was classified as SS Member #2—second only to Adolf Hitler himself.

Maurice had been a part of the National Socialist Party from the start. He joined up with Hitler in 1919 and soon rose up to be the supreme leader of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung. He joined in the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed coup d’etat in 1923, and sat with him in prison, where he even helped Hitler write Mein Kampf.^[9]

Maurice couldn’t have been closer to Hitler. The two even shared a lover: Geli Raubal, Hitler’s niece, had affairs with both men, a fact that would create the only split between them. Still, the bond between Hitler and his SS Member #2 was so strong that when Heinrich Himmler publicly exposed Maurice’s Jewish ancestry and demanded that he be expelled from the SS, Hitler had Maurice declared an “honorary Aryan” and saved his life.

1 Erhard Milch

There are Jews who fought for Hitler even though they knew the horrors of the Holocaust, but Erhard Milch went even further. He didn’t just fight for Germany despite the atrocities—he joined in. He was a member of the German War Cabinet and the Nazi Air Force’s chief of staff. Few were higher up in the Nazi party than he was, even though it was public knowledge that his father was Jewish.

Milch, however, had friends in powerful places. Hermann Goering saw him as his protege, and to keep his friend safe, he had Milch’s mother sign a statement saying that Erhard wasn’t truly his father’s son so that Goering could have him registered as “full Aryan.”

No part of Milch ever seems to have felt sympathy for his father’s people. During the Nuremberg trials, he was charged with experimenting on Jewish prisoners in Dachau. They accused him of playing a role in human experiments that sent Jewish prisoners into dangerous altitudes to see how high they could go before they died, as well as others that tested how cold water had to be before the temperature would kill someone.

Milch never apologized. When the trials came, he stayed true to his mentor, speaking out in Goering’s defense. In the end, he was prosecuted as a Nazi war criminal.^[10]