“What happened to your second wife?” an interviewer once asked Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

He was referring to Sara Northrup, the woman who’d been at Hubbard’s side while he developed Dianetics and who later divorced him in a messy, public scandal. The whole world had watched their divorce fill the headlines of every paper. But still, when the question came, Hubbard just smirked and told the interviewer: “I’d never had a second wife.”

It’s an incredibly brazen lie—and a sign of just how much damage Sara Northrup could do to him. Her life is a story that the Church of Scientology is still trying to cover up because the amount of suffering she endured at Hubbard’s hands is nothing short of heartbreaking.

10 She Met L. Ron Hubbard In A Sex Magick Cult

Sara Northrup’s life was difficult from the start. When she met Hubbard, she was living at the home of physicist and occultist Jack Parsons. Both she and Hubbard were members of Aleister Crowley’s sex magick cult.

Northrup’s life was already filled with sexual abuse. She’d been molested by her father from a young age, a trauma that likely explains why she was already sleeping with Jack Parsons by age 13. However, he wasn’t just twice her age, he was her sister’s husband.

When Hubbard showed up, he must have seemed like a savior. Granted, he was every bit as strange as Parsons was. In fact, the two worked together to summon a Babylonian goddess, believing they could bring her to life by chanting, dabbing runes with animal blood, and masturbating on magical tablets.

But Hubbard was a war hero, injured in battle, or so he claimed. He won Northrup over by spinning stories about his heroism that most of the cult members wrote off as “tall tales.” But the young Northrup bought into them completely.

“I believed everything he said,” Northrup later said. “It just never occurred to me he was a liar.”^[1]

9 She And Hubbard Stole Jack Parsons’s Life Savings

Jack Parsons believed in free love. Bound by his own principles, he couldn’t do a thing but watch as his new friend, L. Ron Hubbard, started sleeping with his girlfriend, Sara Northrup. Parsons had to pretend to be okay with every bit of it.

Other lodgers at his house, though, could tell just how angry it made him. “There [Hubbard] was, living off Parsons’s largesse and making out with his girlfriend right in front of him,” one would later recall. “The hostility was almost tangible.”

Still, when Hubbard proposed that the two start a business together, Jack Parsons readily agreed to give him $20,000 to get things off the ground. Perhaps he just wanted to keep up appearances and pretend like it didn’t bother him. Either way, he was the only one who was surprised when Hubbard and Northrup took off to Florida with the $20,000 and a brand-new yacht, bought with Parsons’s money.

“He has given away both his girl and his money,” Karl Germer, one of Parsons’s friends, reported in a letter to Aleister Crowley. “It is the ordinary confidence trick.”^[2]

Parsons tried to sue them but quickly dropped the case. He accepted a few dollars of payment and, in exchange, let Hubbard and Northrup keep the yacht. It was a bad deal for Parsons, but he didn’t have much choice. If he didn’t comply, he was warned, Hubbard and Northrup would let the world know that Parsons had had sex with Northrup when she was 13.

8 Hubbard Was Still Married To His First Wife When They Got Married

Sara Northrup married L. Ron Hubbard because he threatened to kill himself. He’d asked her multiple times already, but she had refused every time until he made it clear: If she said no, his death would be on her conscience forever.

What Hubbard hadn’t told her, though, was that he was already married. Thirteen years earlier in 1933, he’d married Polly Grubb. She was the mother of his two children, and in exchange, Hubbard had taken off to New York to cheat on her with other women.

At this point, the two were so estranged that they hadn’t seen each other in about two years. But they were still married at Hubbard’s insistence. Polly had repeatedly asked for a divorce, but he kept turning her down.

Hubbard only agreed to a divorce after he’d been married to Sara for a good year and a half. But he still kept his marriage to Polly a secret. Instead, he took Sara with him to Polly’s house without explaining a thing, which forced her to try to figure out why these people were so hostile toward her.

It was his son, L. Ron Jr., who told her. Sara was devastated. She rushed out of the house crying and tried to get onto the next ferry that would take her as far away from Hubbard as possible.^[3]

In the end, she didn’t leave. Her new husband begged and pleaded until she stayed.

7 L. Ron Hubbard Brutally Abused Her

L. Ron Hubbard started beating his wife during summer 1946. It began when Sara’s father died. Despite her complicated feelings toward the man, Sara was overwhelmed with grief and sadness.

To Hubbard, her sadness was nothing more than an annoyance. When she cried, he would beat and strangle her into silence, complaining that she’d distracted him from his work.

Hubbard was losing his mind. He wrote a letter to Veteran Affairs (VA), begging them to help him pay for psychiatric treatment. But the VA never responded, and Hubbard got increasingly worse.^[4]

One morning, he woke up his wife by pistol-whipping her across the face. She’d been smiling in her sleep, he told her, and he was sure it was because she was thinking of someone else. Northrup fled into the night, nearly escaping her abusive husband again. But once more, she came back.

She felt sorry for him because she knew he was losing his mind. She later said, “I kept thinking that he must be suffering or he wouldn’t act that way.”

Staying only made it worse. By the time Northrup really did file for divorce, she’d gone through what the divorce proceedings described as “repeated” and “systematic torture.” He strangled her regularly. He threw her out of a moving car. He once kept her awake for four days straight and then tried to force her to overdose on sleeping pills.

Some of those scars would never heal. On Christmas 1950, Hubbard broke into such a rage that he deliberately ruptured her left eardrum. Her hearing would be impaired for the rest of her life.

6 Hubbard Tried To Beat Her Into A Miscarriage

None of those beatings, though, could compare to what he tried to do to her when she got pregnant.

One night, after Hubbard had gone into one his mad rages, he threw his pregnant wife onto the ground. They would not bring a child into this world, he had decided, and he would make sure of it. L. Ron Hubbard tried to make his wife miscarry by repeatedly stomping on her stomach.

By some strange miracle, the child survived. But this was hardly the first time that Hubbard had tried to beat an unborn baby to death.

His eldest son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., claims that, as a child, he had caught his father standing over his mother with a coat hanger in his hand. And Hubbard Jr. says that his own birth, nearly three months premature, was the result of a failed late-term abortion:

“I wasn’t born. This is what came out as a result of their attempt to abort me.”^[5]

Hubbard admitted to some of the abortions himself. In his private memoir, he wrote that he and Polly’s marriage had resulted in “five abortions and two children.”

5 He Reported Her To The FBI As A Communist

As Dianetics started to take off and Hubbard became worth a small fortune, his eye started to wander. As he’d done with his first wife, Hubbard started to cheat on Sara with a young woman: Barbara Klowden, his 20-year-old PR assistant.

Sara didn’t take it lying down. After Hubbard forced her to go on a double date with Klowden, Sara started a revenge affair with one of his employees, Miles Hollister.

But nobody could bite back as hard as L. Ron Hubbard. He wrote the FBI a letter reporting his wife and her lover as “active and dangerous” Communists, calling Hollister “outspokenly disloyal to the US.”

J. Edgar Hoover actually answered Hubbard’s letter and invited him to meet with an FBI agent—which Hubbard did. He told them that Hollister had brainwashed his wife and driven her insane. Then Hubbard went into a mad rant about how Dianetics could bring an end to communism and how people said he was crazy but he definitely wasn’t.

The agent nodded politely, quietly making a little note in his book that just read: “Mental case.”^[6]

They never tried to bring in Northrup or Hollister. Perhaps, in part, it was because this was hardly the first time that Hubbard had tried to turn someone in. The FBI’s dossiers were full of letters from L. Ron Hubbard, reporting every German person he saw as an undercover Nazi and a “menace to the state.”

4 Scientologists Tried To Brainwash Her Into Staying With Hubbard

In their own ways, Hubbard and Northrup tried to make the marriage work. Northrup went to a psychiatrist and tried to convince Hubbard to get treatment for the paranoid schizophrenia that was destroying his life. But he wouldn’t listen.

Hubbard told her that she was in league with devils. Then he put two of his men, Richard de Mille and Dave Williams, to work at brainwashing her. As John Sanborne, one of Hubbard’s former confidants, recalls:

“He made this stupid attempt to get Northrup brainwashed so she’d do what he said. He kept her sitting up in a chair, denying her sleep, trying to use Black Dianetic principles on her, repeating over and over again whatever he wanted her to do. Things like, ‘Be his wife, have a family that looks good, not have a divorce.’ ”^[7]

It didn’t work. Northrup still wanted a divorce. In the end, Hubbard told her that he didn’t want to be with her, either. He was just worried about his reputation. There was only way out.

“If you really love me,” Hubbard told her, “you should kill yourself.”

In November 1950, Sara Northrup tried to do just that. While L. Ron Hubbard was out, she downed a bottle of sleeping pills and lay down, hoping never to wake up again.

It didn’t work. She woke up alive in a hospital bed, registered under a fake name.

3 Hubbard Kidnapped Her Baby

It was 1:00 AM on February 24, 1951, when L. Ron Hubbard and two of his friends dragged Sara Northrup out of her bed, still dressed in her nightgown. Hubbard had taken her baby. “We have Alexis,” Hubbard told her, “and you’ll never see her alive unless you come with us.”^[8]

They threw Sara into the back of a car and drove her to Yuma, Arizona. Not long after, Hubbard had a change of heart. He kicked her out, forced her to go back home, and kept the baby with him.

She tried begging Hubbard to give her back the baby, but Hubbard refused time and time again. Then, out of the blue, he called her and told her the worst thing imaginable: Alexis was dead, and he had killed her.

“He had cut her into little pieces,” Sara says he told her, “and dropped the pieces in a river and that he had seen little arms and legs floating down the river and it was my fault. I’d done it because I’d left him.”

Hubbard was lying. But Sara must have felt unimaginable pain when he said it. A little while later, he sent her a letter. He admitted that Alexis was alive and tried to blackmail Sara into giving him full custody.

“My will is all changed. Alexis will get a fortune,” he wrote, “unless she goes to you as she would then get nothing.”

He signed his blackmail note: “Goodbye. I love you. Ron.”

2 Polly Hubbard Had Gone Through All The Same Things

Sara publicized everything on the advice of a lawyer, who told her that she couldn’t keep all of this a secret any longer. “Tell the truth,” he told her, “for the truth will bring back [your] baby, if alive.”

She filed for divorce, and the papers became filled with horror stories about the man who had tortured her and taken her baby. Yes, she’d put it off too long. But now, it was clear that there was no other way to ever see her child again.

Polly Hubbard, Ron’s first wife, contacted Sara for the first time after reading about the divorce. Every word written by Sara was terrifyingly familiar to Hubbard’s first wife. Polly wrote Sara a letter of complete support:

“If I can help in any way, I’d like to. You must get Alexis in your custody. Ron is not normal. I had hoped that you could straighten him out. Your charges sound fantastic to the average person. But I’ve been through it—the beatings, threats on my life, all the sadistic traits you charge—twelve years of it.”^[9]

“Please do believe,” she wrote. “I do so want to help you get Alexis.”

1 Sara Had To Absolve Hubbard Of All Guilt To Get Her Baby Back

In June 1951, Sara Northrup got to see her baby again. For months, Hubbard had been hiding their child in Cuba, but now they were back in Wichita. Ron was willing to talk.

He’d completely given into his paranoid delusions. There was no sense of reality for him. Sara had no choice but to play along. In her words:

“He told me that I was under the influence of this communist cell. And that they were dictating to me what to do, and that I was in a state of complete madness. I told him, ‘Yep, I think you’re right. The only thing I can do is to work through it and do whatever they say.’ ”

He made her sign a paper absolving him of all blame. It was the only way that he would give her back her child.

“The things I have said about L. Ron Hubbard in courts and the public prints have been grossly exaggerated or entirely false,” the paper said. “L. Ron Hubbard is a fine and brilliant man.” That was what he cared about—not his child and not his wife, just his reputation.

But all Sara cared about was getting her child back. She signed the papers, and in exchange, he drove her and Alexis to the airport.

Hubbard stopped the car a few feet away from the airfield. He’d had a last-second change of heart. Shaking his head, he told her: “I’m not going to let you go.”

Sara clutched her child, got out of the car, and ran. She left her suitcase and all her things behind. Alexis’s shoe fell off, but Sara didn’t stop. She just kept running toward the airplane, toward freedom, with her child in her arms for the first time in four months.

“It was the 19th of June,” Sara later said, “and it was the happiest day of my life.”^[10]

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.