Traudl Junge, the secretary whose book about the last weeks of the Third Reich was turned into the award-winning film Downfall, has reawakened our interest in fascist women. Angela Lambert has now written a biography, The Lost Life of Eva Braun, which sets out to explore what motivated Eva Braun to devote herself to such a man and what he saw in her, the woman he would keep secret from the German nation for 17 years.
Lambert's subject is not an easy one. The Eva Braun who has until now only made sporadic and brief biographical appearances comes across as someone whose most remarkable quality was her emptiness, which is possibly why she is so difficult a figure to judge: was she morally culpable or a childlike innocent?
There is no suggestion, as there is with those weird women who become engaged to murderers in prison, that she wanted to "change" Hitler. In Downfall, it is Eva's vacuity which is represented as evil; she feverishly dances the night away as Berlin crumbles. She attempted to supplement this inner vacuum by a seemingly endless desire to acquire.
Her love of shopping and collection of shoes is one of the only things Braun shares with other famous consorts of dictators. Putting aside the total absence of ethical responsibility which characterised Germany as a whole, Eva Braun seems to have started out a nice enough girl.
She was no partner in crime like Myra Hindley, says German historian Richard Overy, for the simple reason that she did not see her Adolf as a criminal.
He was a hero, the saviour of Germany. But this is the problem with Eva: it is her bland indifference to the world her boyfriend was destroying that makes her such a sinister figure. Eva Braun first met Hitler in October She was 17, chestnut haired and fresh-faced, one of three sisters from a conventional Roman Catholic family in Munich.
She liked dancing, gymnastics, Hollywood movies, and romantic novels, and had the potential required for the ideal Nazi woman: kids, kitchen and church. After leaving her convent school, she began working for Heinrich Hoffman, official photographer to the Nazi party, and it was here that she met the year-old Hitler. As the door opened, Eva happened to be standing on a ladder which gave them both a good vantage point: he looked at her legs, she looked down at his face, they each liked what they saw.
He was introduced by Hoffman as Herr Wolf, which was good enough for Eva who had never heard of Hitler anyway. To her, he seemed "a gentleman of a certain age with a funny moustache and carrying a big felt hat". It is now published in its fifth edition and translated into 17 languages. After all, the name of Eva Braun is still present in the public arena around the world.
More than 65 years after committing suicide, her life and death continues to stimulate the thoughts and fantasies of many people. Since, with respect to Eva Braun, the primary sources are so scarce, it was my aim not to add new speculations to the already existing ones, but first of all to deconstruct the story of Eva Braun, asking who said what, when and why.
Sign in. Back to Main menu Virtual events Masterclasses. Oh, yes. This notion of the dumb blonde was created after the war in the memoir literature by all these Hitler cronies, who hated her. And we later were told that she was unintelligent and totally uninterested in politics. The Nazi women said after the war that they had nothing to do with politics at all. Even Ilse Hess, who was an early campaigner for the National Socialists and a member of the party since , said after the war that she had nothing to do with politics—and as a woman had always been passive.
But that was not true—and not true for Eva Braun. Braun became part of the Nazi propaganda machinery. She served not just as decoration; she took pictures and films portraying Hitler at his Berghof retreat as a likeable caring person and family man, fond of children. And she sold these so-called private pictures to Heinrich Hoffmann, and in doing so earned a lot of money—she got 20, marks for one of her [home] movies.
She was very rich. Should she be considered a collaborator? Over the year [span] of her relationship with Hitler, Braun developed a very important role within the inner circle.
She changed from a rather shy and insecure person into a determined woman—a capricious, uncompromising champion of absolute loyalty to the dictator. As early as , nobody in the inner circle could challenge her position. Even Albert Speer and the powerful Joseph Goebbels and others sought her company in order to get a closer personal [connection] to Hitler.
For her show of loyalty, Hitler agreed to marry Braun. The couple wed on April 29, The following day, on April 30, , they committed suicide. Braun died from ingesting poison while Hitler poisoned and shot himself. Their bodies were brought to the bombed-out garden behind the Reich Chancellery, where they were burned. German film historian and artist Lutz Becker, who'd lived through the horrors of Berlin as a child during the war's final days, eventually discovered a collection of films that Braun had created.
She had recorded millimeter home movie footage in color during her time at Berghof, with some of the imagery standing in stark contrast to the Nazi propaganda machine. Other images, in the form of photographs that were held by the U. National Archives and unearthed by Reinhard Schulz, have surfaced of Braun as well. The pictures range from family and school portraiture to snapshots with friends, to Braun in blackface imitating Al Jolson. The first comprehensive biography on Braun was written by Heike B.
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