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Arts and Culture

Another Take on Eva Braun

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Posted on Feb 15, 2010
Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler
Wikimedia Commons / Deutsches Bundesarchiv

Reconsidering Eva: Braun with Adolf Hitler and canine companions in this photo from the early 1940s.

Eva Braun has been dismissed as an inconsequential figure (and, of course, a “dumb blonde”) in Adolf Hitler’s life, but a new biography of Braun by German historian Heike Görtemaker recasts Hitler’s lover as a more significant force who was relegated to the background out of necessity.  —KA

The Guardian:

Hitler first came across Braun in 1929, when he was 40 and she was 17. She worked in a Munich camera shop run by his official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. According to Hoffmann’s daughter, Hitler’s opening line was: “May I invite you to the opera with me, Fräulein Eva? You see, I’m surrounded by men and I know what a pleasure it is to enjoy female company.” Dates at the cinema and restaurants followed.

Braun was with him in his Berlin bunker as the city fell to the Russian forces in 1945 and shared his suicide on the afternoon of 30 April.

Görtemaker said recognising that Hitler had a “normal relationship” was a vital part of the process of seeing him as a recognisable product of German society in the first half of the 20th century. “He is mostly portrayed as incapable of having a private life,” she said. “He said he couldn’t marry because he was married to Germany.”

The German public was never meant to know of Braun’s existence and marriage was out of the question until the very end. He told Speer: “It’s just like an actor when he marries. For the women who have worshipped him, he is no longer their idol in the same way.”

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Night-Gaunt's avatar

By Night-Gaunt, May 8, 2010 at 10:19 am Link to this comment

It will give us a more rounded view, and more accurate, of the time. No cliches please.

Report this

By johannes, February 20, 2010 at 2:11 am Link to this comment

@ American observer,

In your history about woman who live with men like Hitler, yes they must be bad as he was.

But prostetuts, is something els, most of time born out of circomstances, not that nice, and they are easy pray for the stupid masses, and after their hair has growen back, hup in the bed with the Yankees.

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By American Observer, February 18, 2010 at 4:01 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)

A commonsensical analysis, it sounds like, to me, from the historian.  A person
isn’t that close to someone like Hitler without zealously supporting Naziism and
everything it meant.  She was no dummy, just a racist, vicious, fascist dog like the
rest of them.  The reason no one has fathomed her sinister intelligence is because
societies are ever sexist, across the board.  Being a woman doesn’t make you a
good person.  And when you’re evil, perhaps it makes you even worse.  They
didn’t parade the whores of Nazis through the streets of Paris with shaved heads,
for nothing.

Report this

By johannes, February 18, 2010 at 2:21 am Link to this comment

The Germans came out an very bad situation in their country, closed up by the France and English, the whole country in an turmoil, so their came somebody, like others prommesing and indeed stabilising the country, taken on the Jews, every body did know they had a big part of the riches, and wealth of Germany, so they looked the other way, and than came the moment they where to far in to the net, they could go back anymore, and where become fellow travellers from a system, they did not sympathise any more with, but they stood as one people against the enemy,
Das Deutsche Volk was born again, and took it as it came, humilated, by every one.

So this Eva Braun, was one of them, like Helen of Troy was one of them, our future is to be found in our history, its a coming and a going of humans and with them their history.

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By rollzone, February 17, 2010 at 5:53 pm Link to this comment

hello. this is reaching for a very peculiarly weird
woman to idolize. our Clyde had his Bonnie. the woman
has to agree with what the guy is about, or she is just
a golddigging fraud.

Report this

By johannes, February 16, 2010 at 3:24 pm Link to this comment

It are the woman, good or bad, beautiful or ugly who leth spinning the world, not the stupid men.

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By fwdpost, February 16, 2010 at 1:25 pm Link to this comment

Behind every greatest monster of the 20th Century is a woman?

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