Adolf and Eva
By DOROTHY GALLAGHER
Published: November 16, 2011
Hitler could not have wished for a better girlfriend. In this first full-scale biography of Eva Braun, the German historian Heike B. Görtemaker examines the known sources for Braun’s life and emerges with a highly readable and consistent portrait of an ordinary woman who loved sports, fashion and jazz; and who was, without a doubt, utterly devoted to the man history has seen as “evil incarnate.”
In “Eva Braun: Life With Hitler,” Görtemaker asks whether it is useful for a nuanced picture of Hitler to show him in his off-hours, a man like other men, putting on his trousers one leg at a time. She thinks that it is, and that the “demonization” of Hitler has been an impediment to a fuller understanding of him and of the Nazi phenomenon. Through Braun, she believes, a new perspective on Hitler will open. And she writes that Braun’s “ ‘normality’ at the center of this atmosphere of ‘evil’ is like an anachronism that brings this evil into relief and shows it in a new light.” One wonders if the quotation marks are strictly necessary.
One day in 1929, in Munich, 40-year-old Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, paid a visit to the shop of his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. It was here that he first met Hoffmann’s new employee, pretty, blond, blue-eyed, 17-year-old Eva Braun. Hitler was quite taken; Eva was naturally impressed with the leader of this up-and-coming national movement.
Eva was a lower-middle-class girl, one of three sisters, of purely Aryan descent (Hitler had her family investigated for Jewish taint). Probably Eva wished for marriage, but this was not to be, at least not for 16 years. Hitler had another bride: “I am married to the German people and their fate! . . . No, I cannot marry, I must not,” he often said in one form or another. A secret girlfriend was another matter.
But what about the sex? It has been theorized that Hitler was heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, impotent. A coprophilia fetish has been mentioned. In fact, no one really knows. Görtemaker believes that Hitler’s sexuality was in the conventional range. There is a 20-page diary fragment attributed to Braun, but Görtemaker, a cautious historian who never claims more for her subject than the evidence will bear, warns us that the diary may not be authentic. Still, she quotes an entry in which Braun mentions “two marvelously beautiful hours with him until midnight.”
In those years of the Nazis’ rise to power, Hitler didn’t have much time for Eva; he had a lot on his mind. There were the Reichstag elections to win, the chancellorship to obtain, the masses to whip up, the Jews to persecute. (Just by the way, Hitler’s rise to absolute power was thanks, in part, to the Soviet Comintern policy of pitting German Communists against Social Democrats, thus splitting the vote on the left.)
While Hitler was away from Munich, Eva lived with her parents, worked at Hoffmann’s photo studio and waited for her admirer’s occasional visits. She was not always patient. There is evidence, Görtemaker says, that she tried to kill herself in 1932, and tried again three years later when she feared that Hitler’s interest was flagging. Braun’s first attempt reminded Hitler that his half-niece, Geli Raubal, who had lived with him and to whom he had been devoted in some way, actually did kill herself in 1931. He was moved to remark about Braun, “Now I must look after her” because something like this “mustn’t happen again.” Braun’s second attempt in 1935 spurred Hitler to provide her with her own apartment in Munich, and give her permission to spend more time in his presence.
Did Braun “share the political positions and basic worldview of her lover”? Görtemaker asks. The question is rhetorical. Why wouldn’t she? If only by osmosis, why wouldn’t this young, quite ordinary girl accept the opinions of her lover, of her boss and of her father, who was also a Nazi Party member? What Hitler believed, large numbers of Germans came to believe: that Germany could not live in peace unless the traitorous Jewish Bolshevik bankers were exterminated, and that Germany’s hegemony had to be extended to the west and to the east. As Rudolf Hess’s wife, Ilse, wrote in the early days of the Nazis: “To put it in the clean and plain and negative terms appropriate to the movement, we are anti-Semites. Consistently, rigorously, without exceptions!” In September 1935, Braun, who was generally left in Munich, was allowed to attend the Nazi Party convention in Nuremberg, where she witnessed the passing of the Nuremberg laws depriving Jews of German citizenship and forbidding their participation in civic life.
Görtemaker is often compelled to phrases like “we can only speculate,” “no authenticated information about,” “the final truth, however, remains unknown.” It is true that all personal letters and documents between Braun and Hitler were destroyed on Hitler’s orders in the last days of the war, and that specific information is to be found only in the memoirs and testimony of those who served him — and who, when the war was lost, served themselves. But Görtemaker shows that by early 1936 Braun’s position with Hitler was “unassailable.” At the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat in the cloud-swirled Bavarian Alps, she had her own little apartment, next to Hitler’s bedroom, and was accepted by his intimates as mistress of the house. At meals, she sat at Hitler’s left. She felt secure enough to rebuke Hitler for being late to dinner, and to indicate when she thought he had talked enough. She enjoyed swimming and skiing. She loved fashion and changed her clothes several times a day. She took photographs and home movies of Hitler and his guests (which can be seen on YouTube) and generally behaved as though she were at home.
And then, on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Görtemaker is in no doubt that Braun knew of his plans. He seems to have talked freely about them at the Berghof. During the course of the conflict, at least until close to the end, she seems to have been unconcerned, taking her annual trip to Italy while Hitler was conducting the war on the Eastern Front. Even as the war turned against Germany, Hitler, according to Goebbels, was praising his companion’s “calm, intelligent and objective way of being.” Not until 1944, when the Red Army had reached Warsaw, did Braun make her will.
Eva Braun loved Hitler; of that there can be no doubt. In the spring of 1945, when the war was clearly lost, she rushed to Berlin to be with him in his bunker, to marry him, to commit suicide with him at the moment when the Red Army reached the Reichstag. But knowing that there was genuine love in Hitler’s life, even a sort of domestic existence, do we see Hitler’s “evil” in a new light, as Görtemaker suggests we will? Or do we know, as we have always known, that evil walks among us; that no monster (or his friends and lovers) thinks himself monstrous, no madman thinks himself mad; and that, as the filmmaker Jean Renoir once said: “The really terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.”
Dorothy Gallagher’s biography of Lillian Hellman will be published next year.
A version of this review appeared in print on November 20, 2011, on page BR24 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Adolf and Eva.
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