Kim Kardashian: The Lost Life Eva Anna Paula Braun

The Lost Life Eva Anna Paula Braun 1

In 1929, Eva Braun was 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."

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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.

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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.

Eva Anna Paula Braun

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".

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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).

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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.

Eva Braun has long been associated with one of the darkest chapters in 20th century history, but some newly-released photographs are revealing new dimensions of the woman who was Adolf Hitler's longtime mistress and, in their last, frantic hours together, his wife.

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Showing Braun, a former model, relaxing with friends at home and posing glamorously in a swimsuit while on vacation, this collection of previously unreleased photographs comes from a cache of images confiscated by the U.S. Army in 1945 and brought to light by collector and curator Reinhard Schulz exclusively for LIFE.