Andrew Roberts - The Book Beast, Nov 10, 2011
A new biography comes closer than ever to capturing the story of Eva Braun, Hitler’s infamous lover and wife. Andrew Roberts on what she tells us about the dictator—and what their private life might have been like.
Can one fall in love with the most evil man in history and yet not be evil oneself? What was it like effectively to be Adolf Hitler’s mistress for 13 years? Did Hitler and Eva Braun have sex, or might she have just been his “beard’? Did she have any appreciable influence on him, and thus on history? Was she anti-Semitic, and did she know about the Holocaust? Who was this woman, about whom there are so many conflicting theories but next to no actual evidence, who died—the day after their wedding—as Mrs. Hitler?
These are just a few of the fascinating questions that the diligent and fluent historian Heike Görtemaker addresses in easily the best biography of Eva Braun so far written, yet even she cannot do more than make informed guesses at their answers, because all the correspondence between the two lovers was destroyed at the time of their joint suicide in the Reichschancellery bunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945. The couple had few surviving intimates and confidants, most of whom were unlikely to be truthful in post-Nazi Germany anyhow. Moreover, the only biography written with the help of Eva’s parents and siblings, by a Turkish journalist named Kerin Gun in 1968, provided no sourcenotes.
In that Eva was hausfrau of Hitler’s Bavarian home, the Berghof at Berchtesgaden in the Obersalzburg Mountains, from 1935 onwards, she knew all of the Nazi hierarchy. She showed utter loyalty to the man she loved, taking the deliberate decision on March 7, 1945 to go from Munich to Berlin to die with him (though not against his orders, as had been previously thought). She tried to keep his spirits up right to the end, throwing parties for his birthday and their wedding day. Yet at the heart of this book is a massive void, where Eva Braun’s personality should be. Small wonder that the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper dubbed her “a historical disappointment.”
Because her existence was a state secret until the very end of the war, there is next to nothing publicly written about Braun in her lifetime, and Hitler’s utter devotion to his vertiginous career meant that she actually saw relatively little of the führer in their decade and a half or so as a couple. He insisted that when foreign dignitaries visited the Berghof she stay in her room upstairs, and even when the couple visited Rome in 1938 they stayed in different hotels. This book could have been subtitled “Life without Hitler.” Only publicly acknowledged as one of his secretaries, Eva sometimes had to join crowds in order to get a glimpse of him and he would studiously avoid being seen speaking to her in public, although he would sometimes pass her envelopes full of cash.
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