Due to her life and death with Hitler, Eva Braun is forever tied to the National Socialist regime that, driven by radical anti-Semitism and marked by utter contempt for humanity, brought about, in Ian Kershaw’s words, “the steepest descent in civilized values known in modern times.” Therefore Eva Braun remains a public figure and is present in the media to this day. That is what she wanted, and why she single-mindedly worked toward a joint death with her “Führer” when the Nazi state’s downfall and catastrophic defeat in the war were assured. She took her own life with the notion that she died a “hero’s death.”1
In the fourteen years of her intimate relationship with Hitler, Eva Braun developed from an ordinary girl far from the center of power, from a lower-middle-class family whose father believed “to the end” in the “Führer,” into a capricious, uncompromising champion of absolute loyalty to the dictator.2 It is true that she did not belong to the NSDAP, but this fact does not mean that she rejected the Nazi state or was opposed to it in any way. On the contrary: her life, at least as much as those of everyone else around Hitler, was shaped by his worldview, his charismatic attraction (however difficult it may be to explain what that consisted in), and the extent of his power. He, in turn, recognized in her someone from a similar background, and with a similar education, outside of traditional elites, who was more ready than any of his other fanatical supporters to live her life on his terms.
Eva Braun’s position in Hitler’s innermost circle was thus unassailable, by 1935 at the latest. Many of the people who tried to get close to Hitler, including Speer, Göring, and Goebbels, thus found it necessary to pay court to her as well. They even had to be nice to her dog, who crawled “unnoticed and abandoned” through the rubble of the Berghof after the death of his mistress. When Eva Braun was still there, “everyone had been nice to the spoiled, vicious animal,” Christa Schroeder later recalled.3
In any case, Eva Braun’s life was decidedly different from the image of the woman’s world as presented by National Socialist propaganda. In this, Hitler’s girlfriend was like most of the wives of high-ranking Nazi politicians. She led a privileged existence, with trips, expensive clothes, and occasional professional activities in the service of the NSDAP, in her case working for Hitler’s personal photographer and delivering supposedly private pictures of the “Führer” and his life at the Berghof to him. For that reason alone, she cannot be seen as someone with no involvement in the regime, an entirely apolitical young woman, as Albert Speer among others later claimed. Her collaboration, within the scope of what was possible for her, is unmistakable, and she clearly acted without any sense of guilt. Furthermore, Eva Braun was neither a housewife nor a mother, and it is extremely unlikely that she wanted to be. Precisely for that reason, she fit the needs of a man twenty-three years older than she, afraid of commitment and with eccentric habits. Since her existence so blatantly contradicted the officially propagated “Führer image,” Eva Braun was not allowed to appear in public—just as Hitler’s other inappropriate proclivities were kept largely hidden, such as his being a teetotaler, a vegetarian, a nonsmoker, that he did not drink coffee, that he popped an enormous number of pills, especially before the war, and that, like his girlfriend, he was obsessed with personal cleanliness.
Eva Braun’s life with Hitler thus gives us deep insight into the dictator’s personal life, which was carefully concealed in the Nazi state and whose very existence was officially denied. Contrary to the later protestations from members of Hitler’s “royal court,” this personal life was not and could not be separated from his political life. There was no private sphere in which politics was not discussed and Nazi ideology played no part. The idea, spread by Speer in particular, that Hitler never touched on political topics in his private circle and especially when women were present, has to be considered a myth. Rather, not only the men but also the women around Hitler identified with the anti-Semitic, racist worldview and aggressive expansionist politics of the Nazi regime, laid out in full view during long evening conversations (or monologues) by the fire.
This is especially true for Eva Braun. Why would she, less educated than the others, doubt that Hitler’s explanations and arguments were justified when even an officer such as Nicolaus von Below, an educated aristocrat, was convinced by Hitler’s explanation of the “constant threat” of “Jewish Bolshevism” hanging over the German People?4 Every member of the inner circle was at least familiar with the “Führer’s” basic ideas about the world situation, not least the secretaries to whom Hitler often expressed “his innermost fears” after the war started during their “usual coffee breaks,” for example that “Russia seemed monstrous and uncanny to him, kind of like the ghost ship in The Flying Dutchman.”5 Finally, the idea that no one could “influence or convince” Hitler of anything—that even Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler were weak and helpless against him—primarily served former committed National Socialists as a tool to exculpate themselves after the war. That does not mean it was true.6
Hitler does seem to have prevented his girlfriend from the start from intervening openly in political debates—an attitude that makes him not essentially different from other men of his time. Nor was there any question of Eva Braun’s joining the NSDAP—the same as with any of Hitler’s relatives. It is hard to determine from the available sources whether Eva Braun, in these circumstances, “consciously” refrained from expressing herself on political matters, as her sister Ilse claimed before the court after the war, or whether her silence merely indicated a lack of interest on her part.7 Likewise, the question of whether she knew about the Holocaust remains finally unanswered.
But there can be no doubt that Eva Braun, at twenty years old, presumably with the vigorous support of her boss Heinrich Hoffmann, used self-inflicted violence to fight her way to a place at Hitler’s side that many envied her for. She had “very many opponents,” according to a later statement by her friend Herta Schneider.8 Indeed, the opinion was widespread among Hitler’s followers that Eva Braun was not good enough for the “Führer”—that she lacked the stature to appear publicly at his side. This opinion, which comes up frequently among the memoirs of the surviving parties, later found its way—astonishingly—into the accounts written by professional historians. In truth, it was largely Hitler himself who assigned this thankless role to his girlfriend, a fact that reveals less about her inadequacies than about his own anxieties and lack of self-confidence as a parvenu. Caught between power and powerlessness, but in the end acting decisively—vain and in no way a victim—Eva Braun assured herself of a place, even if a questionable place, in history.