In 1929, Eva Braun was a sweet 17-year-old, naive but ambitious, from a
respectable Bavarian Catholic family, and well aware of her attractiveness
to men. She had just begun her first job in a photographic shop in Munich’s
bohemian quarter. One October day, Adolf Hitler walked into her life.
Later, she told her sister Ilse what happened: “I had climbed up a ladder to
reach the files that were kept on the top shelves of the cupboard. At that
moment the boss came in, accompanied by a man of a certain age with a funny
moustache, a light-coloured English overcoat and a big felt hat in his hand.
They both sat down on the other side of the room opposite me. I tried to
squint in their direction and sensed that this character was looking at my
legs.”
Their future, fateful liaison was already prefigured in that brief encounter.
The former convent schoolgirl, enjoying the attention, was only embarrassed
because she had just shortened her skirt by hand and “wasn’t sure that I had
got the hem even”.
The stranger had indeed noticed the pretty girl on the ladder. Hitler was
introduced to her (as “Herr Wolf”, his usual alias) by her boss, Heinrich
Hoffmann, who was both his photographer and a friend. The man who became her
nemesis — and humanity’s — seems to have made an instant impression: Eva
decided there and then to marry him. He was equally determined to remain
single and childless. But neither would let the other go.
Eva was not Hitler’s first mistress: that dubious privilege belonged to his
niece, Geli Raubal, who had shared his bed while her mother kept house for
him. Not only was this an incestuous relationship, but when Geli tried to
escape by taking other lovers, Hitler suffocated her with his jealousy. It
was a revolting tale of beauty and the beast.
In 1931, when Geli realised that Hitler would neither marry her nor let her
marry anybody else, she shot herself. Foul play was suspected, but nothing
was ever proved. His grief seems to have been genuine: her room remained a
shrine to the end of his life.
Eva saw her chance to comfort the stricken Führer; within weeks they were
lovers. Thereafter, Eva saw off all competition. Unity Mitford appealed to
Hitler’s snobbery, and he used her to impress guests in prewar Berlin, but
she was too unbalanced and too English to be a serious rival. Magda Goebbels
ruthlessly established herself as Hitler’s hostess when he needed to
entertain. Eva was always kept in the background on official occasions. To
her chagrin, she never met visiting celebrities such as the Duke and Duchess
of Windsor. But at the Berghof, Hitler’s country house, Eva was deferred to
by the Nazi hierarchy. Behind her back, they called her the “silly cow”.
Despite endless rumours, there is no evidence that Hitler was sexually
abnormal, though he was certainly shy and probably a virgin into his
thirties. Unlike the affair with his niece, this was not an abusive
relationship, but emphatically consensual. Yet it must be significant that
all the important women in Hitler’s life committed suicide: beginning with
the failed attempt of an early girlfriend, Mimi Reiter, there followed Geli
and Unity (who shot herself on the day Britain declared war). In the end,
Eva had the satisfaction of seeing her hysterical rival Magda Goebbels
kicked out by Hitler minutes before their double suicide.
What is less well known is that, much earlier, Eva twice tried to kill
herself: in November 1932, she shot herself in the throat, but missed the
jugular. Then, in 1935, she tried again, this time with sleeping pills. Her
reason, both times, was Hitler’s neglect. Although he expected her to give
up her career and all hope of marriage or children, he might see her only
every three or four weeks. While away, he often didn’t write or phone. Just
before her second suicide attempt, she wrote: “If only I had never set eyes
on him!” Yet however unhappy she was, her devotion was a fact of life. When
they finally married, she seems to have considered her life fulfilled for
the 36 hours during which she was addressed as “Mrs Hitler” — though her
husband still referred to her as “Miss Braun”.
Angela Lambert’s lively and readable biography tries hard to make Eva’s “lost
life” more than a footnote in history. But her relationship with Hitler was
kept too private even for family, friends and servants to do more than guess
what made them tick. As she admits, we know more about her days in the
Berlin bunker than all the rest of her life, and that last phase is all too
familiar.
To make Eva more three-dimensional, Lambert has resorted to various
questionable devices. First, she writes a parallel narrative about her own
German relations, especially her mother, whose background bore some
resemblance to Braun’s. This is harmless but distracting. Then she
speculates about what X might have said to Y — what Hitler and Eva might
have said as they committed suicide. This is positively irritating. Finally,
she tries to place Eva’s life in the context of the historical drama around
her. This is fine, but she is out of her depth. She admits that until she
embarked on her research, she knew little about the period, and I am afraid
that it occasionally shows. For example, she greatly overestimates Hitler’s
fame and success when he met Eva in 1929, claiming that the Nazi party then
had “a million members” (the true figure was less than a fifth of this), or
that Mein Kampf was already selling “millions” in 1927 (two years later,
both volumes together had sold only 40,000 copies).
Lambert identifies so far with her subject that she tries to show that Eva was
not an anti-semite and knew nothing about what was happening to the Jews. It
is impossible to prove a negative, but no reputable historian is likely to
be persuaded. (It is not clear from the footnotes whether David Irving, whom
Lambert interviewed for this book, encouraged her to turn it into an
apologia.) The fact that Eva was a nice Catholic girl who had never joined
the Nazi party does not exonerate her. The only thing that gave her life
meaning was Hitler, and she knew better than most what gave his life its
meaning. She had him all to herself only in death, but that seems to have
been enough.
Dinner with Adolf
The relationship between Hitler and Braun was often awkward in public,
particularly in the early years. Hitler would sometimes treat her with
indifference, or ignore her completely. On 1 April, 1935, she complained to
her diary about a recent dinner at a hotel: “I sat near him for three hours
and could not exchange a single word. By way of goodbye he handed me, as he
has done before, an envelope with money in it. It would have been much nicer
if he had enclosed a greeting or a loving word.”
The Lost Life of Eva Braun by Angela Lambert
Century £20 pp495
Available at the Books First price of £18 including p&p on 0870
165 8585
