Fresh out of convent school Eva Braun
met Adolf Hitler the first time when she was working as the
assistant of Hitler's personal photographer Hoffmann. A few weeks
after this meeting she agreed to follow the Führer to his mountain
retreat in the alps.
Their attraction was immediate, and
over the objection of her parents, she became his mistress. For
the next sixteen years, she lived in luxury as millions suffered
and died at the hands of her 'Wulf'.
In 1936 she finally moved to Hitler's Berghof
at Berchtesgaden where she acted as his hostess. Reserved,
indifferent to politics and keeping her distance from most of the Führer's intimates, Eva Braun led a completely isolated life in
the Führer's Alpine retreat and later in Berlin. They rarely
appeared in public together and few Germans even knew of her existence.
Even the Führer's closest associates were not certain
of the exact nature of their relationship, since Hitler preferred
to avoid suggestions of intimacy and was never wholly relaxed in
her company.
In his Memoirs Inside The Third Reich Albert Speer tells about her relationship with Hitler:
"Eva Braun was allowed to be present during visits from old party associates. She was banished as soon as other dignitaries of the Reich, such as cabinet ministers, appeared at the table .. Hitler obviously regarded her as socially acceptable only within strict limits. Sometimes I kept her company in her exile, a room next to Hitler's bedroom. She was so intimidated that she did not dare leave the house for a walk .. Out of sympathy for her predicament I soon began to feel a liking for this unhappy woman, who was so deeply attached to Hitler."
Gitta Sereny tells in her book Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth how Speer had been discomfited by Hitler's conduct toward Eva Braun. One night at the Berghof he heard Hitler say, as the young woman sat next to him at the table, that a highly intelligent man should always choose 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 .. I could never marry. Think of the problems if I had children! In the end they would try to make my son my successor."
A secret, private film collection shows candid views of Eva Braun and Hitler in war and peacetime, chatting with children, conferring with subordinates, relaxing after victories and recovering after Stalingrad.
At the same time over one million children under the age of sixteen died in the Holocaust - plucked from their homes and stripped of their childhoods, they lived and died during the dark years of the Nazi genocide.
Hitler and Eva Braun enjoying life - and two Holocaust victims ..
Eva Braun spent most of her time exercising, brooding, reading novelettes, and watching romantic films. But her loyalty to Hitler never flagged. After he survived the July 1944 plot she wrote him an emotional letter, ending: 'From our first meeting I swore to follow you anywhere - even unto death - I live only for your love.'
Eva Braun, the young woman who had
spent most of her life waiting for Hitler, would now be with him
forever. Eva Braun had agreed to share Adolf Hitler's fate. A
local magistrate married them early on the morning of April 29,
1945. The next day at a little after 3:30 p.m., they bit into
thin glass vials of cyanide. As he did so, Hitler also shot
himself in the head with a 7.65 mm Walther pistol.
Those who entered Hitler's
suite saw him lying on a blood-soaked sofa. Eva Braun lay on the
sofa beside him, but she had made no use of the revolver at her
side, preferring to take the poison instead. Hitler's
body
was wrapped in a blanket and carried, along with Eva Braun's, up
four flights of steps and into the garden of the chancellery.
Both bodies were doused with gasoline and burned.
Adolf Hitler had founded
the Third Reich 12 years and three months before. It would
survive him for one week.
There is footage from May 1945 of Soviet troops searching for Adolf Hitler in the ruins of the Reich chancellery in Berlin. In an adjacent garden, near the emergency exit to Hitler's bunker, lie the charred bodies of the propaganda minister, Dr Joseph Goebbels, and his wife, Magda. The bodies of their six children were in the bunker, their poisoning ordered by their mother.
The Soviet troops were led to the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and took the bodies with them as they moved west with the Soviet's Third Army. Each night the remains were buried, often in the woods, and then dug up when it was time to move on. Finally, Hitler and Braun were buried behind Smersh's East German headquarters in Magdeburg, and remained for 25 years under a yard later owned by a waste-disposal firm.
It was not until 1970 that the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were dug up from Magdeburg and destroyed.
The rest of Eva Braun's
family survived the war. Her mother, Franziska, who lived in an
old farmhouse in Ruhpolding, Bavaria, died at the age of
ninety-six, in January 1976.
sources:
Robert Wistrich: Who's Who In Nazi Germany
www.auschwitz.dk
www.oskarschindler.com www.emilieschindler.com
www.shoah.dk
Louis Bülow All Rights Reserved © 2009-11
