Heinrich Himmler

But while Hitler was known for assembling a notoriously sadistic band of male lieutenants, history tells us that women in the Third Reich played a key role in the sickening war crimes .Just yesterday, a 99-year-old Nazi known as the 'Secretary of Evil' failed in her bid to overturn a conviction for being an accessory to over 10,000 murders at the infamous Stutthof concentration camp. Irmgard Furchner joins a long line of women infamous for the cruelty they inflicted upon their victims. From a nymphomaniac 'hyena' who took sexual pleasure from watching women undergo surgery with no anaesthetic, to the 'Red Witch' who carefully selected prisoners to kill in order to turn their skin into ornaments, MailOnline takes a look at the cruellest women to thrive in the Third Reich.

The story of Ravensbruck, the only Nazi concentration camp exclusively for women, has long remained on the margins of Nazi history. 56 miles north of Berlin and surrounded by a pine forest and the shimmering blue water of a lake, Ravensbruck was concealed by 15 foot tall walls topped with barbed wire.  For six years, the camp's inmates were subjected to some of the most sadistic human experiments one could imagine, and treated as human guinea pigs for some of history's most depraved war crimes.

As the true scale of the Nazi's crimes against humanity became clear, attention soon turned to the capture of war criminals. Some were successfully apprehended and tried, while many escaped justice - either by suicide or by fleeing the continent. Several of these evil men left families behind in their wake, and had young children who would later learn of the crimes of their ancestors. Today, their surviving children are well into their 80s. They have children of their own, and some had passed away themselves. Here, MailOnline looks at what the descendants of Nazi Germany 's most infamous officials have said of their dark family history.