Mrs Adolf Hitler: The Eva Braun Photograph Albums 1912-45
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About this ebook
Blaine Taylor
Blaine Taylor is the American author of 22 histories on war, politics, automotives, biography, engineering, architecture, medicine, photography, and aviation. The well-read historian is a former Vietnam War soldier and Military Policeman under enemy fire, political and crime newspaper reporter, award-winning medical journalist, international magazine writer, winner of four political campaigns as a press secretary, and a US Congressional aide on Capitol Hill, Washington, 1991-92.
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Reviews for Mrs Adolf Hitler
4 ratings1 review
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5full of hateful lies. Hitler was herterosexual. The writer of this book is leftist- homosexual. I hate them as much as they hate Hitler's Germany and the white race. fake news fake books, psychopathic liars feeding a cowardly white majority!
Book preview
Mrs Adolf Hitler - Blaine Taylor
INTRODUCTION
This was reportedly Hitler’s favorite picture of 1938. The hairstyle seen here is a permanent, with braid across the top of the head. (Inset at upper right: How Eva used this same picture in notes to her friends. The bottom hand-written inscription by her reads, To dear Helgerl/Helga, heartfelt wishes, Eva, 26 November 1938.
) (Both EBHA.)
This is an illustrated biography of a dead 33-year-old white German woman of the main defeated nation of the Second World War by a 66-year-old white American man, a child of one of the major powers that beat her country in the greatest war in recorded human history to date.
The work is illustrated primarily – but not entirely – from her personal photographic albums captured by the United States Army at the end of the war. I began reading about the former Eva Braun mainly in 1960 with the publication of the late William L. Shirer’s landmark work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when I was but 13 years old.
Seven years later – in the fall of 1967, just out of combat service in the US Army in the Vietnam War overseas – I went through each and every page of her very own albums, which were then in the US National Archives Building in downtown Washington, DC, but which for the last several years have been located at its new facility at College Park, Maryland, USA.
By the time that I finished going through her albums, I’d determined that there was, indeed, enough material to do a full-scale illustrated biography on her, but the textual data was then lacking.
Then came the late author Nerin E. Gun’s 1967 groundbreaking biography, Eva Braun: Hitler’s Mistress, followed in 1973 by author Glenn B. Infield’s work, Eva & Adolf, then many more volumes that mentioned her by name. I thus made the decision to meld the twin aspects of her saga – words and pictures – to produce the current work, the very first of its comprehensive kind, using all available picture resources, not just hers alone, to more fully round out her overall life.
In producing this work for a new, as well as past, and future generations, I have forced myself to remember always that it is HER biography, and not that of the other main character in the drama: Adolf Hitler, her husband of but 39½ hours. I, of course, recognize that without him, there would, indeed, be no story to tell, beyond that of an ordinary – yet brave – young woman very much like those both you and I know today in our own lives.
Beyond telling the engaging and fascinating saga in a fair, balanced, straightforward, frank, factual, and informative manner, it has been my intention to relate the story of this young woman – known to history still as Eva Braun – as the person she also became shortly before her tragic death by suicide: Mrs. Adolf Hitler, and, thus, also EBH.
In 1945, American Newsweek magazine reporter James P. O’Donnell – assigned to cover postwar, defeated Nazi Germany – was asked in a cable from his New York editor who one Eva Braun was. Who, indeed?
It was by that name that she first entered world history when German Radio Hamburg announced her death at the side of Nazi Party Führer/Leader Adolf Hitler on 1 May 1945, the day after her suicide. Even to this very day, writers across the globe continue to use her maiden name instead of the one that she acquired when she legally married Hitler in his underground air raid shelter in Berlin, referred to as the Bunker,
on 29 April 1945, and then spent the remaining 39½ hours of her life as his new bride.
I assert here that she deserves to be known by her married name of Eva Braun Hitler, or, in the German practice, as Eva Hitler-Braun. In these pages, she shall be Eva Braun, Eva Braun Hitler, EBH, and Mrs. Adolf Hitler in the American fashion. It is time at last that she had her true identity in world history.
Eva was a young woman of the type that all of us have known in our own daily lives: she has waited on us many thousands of times across the counters of area shops and stores. She was athletic, loved movies, animals, and dancing; read the gossip tabloids of her day, was concerned about her weight and physical appearance, and was what many of us would term, a teenage drama queen.
In no way at all was she a bad person, but one of whom we all most likely would’ve been fond. Her main claim to fame – but there were, indeed, others – was that she, at age 33, married one Adolf Hitler, 56.
Why she did is the substance of this book, and it is, again, mainly her biography, not his. At the end of their lives, they entered world history together. She was a person in her own right as well, as I reveal in these pages. Their joint private lives are here revealed as much as possible, some parts for the very first time. In addition, I have shown that she was, in all ways, a citizen of Nazi Germany, a patriot who loved her country, and – through Hitler – was deeply involved in almost all aspects of the Nazi Party and the German government for the very simple reason that she met many of their leading figures on an almost daily basis for a dozen years.
Previous writers have, in a way, treated Eva as if she were, somehow, not a part of Nazi Germany. I, however, have shown her as she truly was – a fully integrated figure within all major aspects of the regime: people, organizations, and policies, and a far more complex person than anyone thus far has supposed, with the possible exception of her late biographer, Angela Lambert, whom I regret not having met. That wrong-headed view is thus, here and now, altered forever.
I’ve also tried to provide you, the reader, with a look into the world of the two Hitlers as they saw it, from the inside looking out, and not from the prism of their Allied enemies, from the outside looking in.
Finally, I am acutely aware that I have written her story as the child of the victory that defeated her country in 1945; also, that I am a man writing about a much younger woman of a different time, belief, and culture than my own. That having been said, I believe that I have fairly represented her life in the following pages – but you will make your own judgments. I welcome them.
Again, who was this woman called Mrs. Adolf Hitler? Let us see!
Blaine Taylor
Towson, MD/USA
1 March 2013
PART 1
MUNICH
MUNICH
HER 1912–29
ENTER EVI: 6 FEBRUARY 1912
Eva Anna Paula Braun was born on 6 February 1912 in the city of Munich, Bavaria (Southern Germany) as the middle child of Franziska ‘Fanny’ Katherina Kronburger Braun (born 12 December 1885 at Geiselhoring in Oberpfalz) and Otto Wilhelm Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Braun (born 17 September 1879), a local schoolteacher. Later, Fanny would assert that theirs was a cloudless marriage, although she may have separated for a time from him after World War I. Neither, apparently, were ever interested in anyone else, however.
HER WORLD IN 1912
Munich was and is the capital of the second largest state in the new German Reich after Prussia. Kaiser Wilhelm II had been on his thrones for the past 24 years, and Europe had been in a general peace since the defeat of Napoleon I in 1815 at Waterloo, almost a century before.
The following April, the British ocean liner RMS Titanic sank on its maiden voyage, and a little over two years later, the entire European Continent was engulfed in the Great War of 1914–18, today known as the First World War in Europe, and World War I in North America.
THE BRAUN FAMILY CIRCLE
But all of that was in the future for the happy, prosperous, and upwardly mobile Braun family that also then included older sister Ilse (born in 1909). A third daughter – Margarete, or Gretl for short – completed the clan in 1915, in the second year of the war that destroyed the old, monarchical Europe that had existed for centuries past.
Papa Braun was a Protestant by religion, while Mama Braun was Catholic. There were no sons, and Fritz had hoped that little baby Evi would be a boy instead. Fanny had married Fritz with the understanding that all their children would be raised in the Catholic faith, and they were, the family living in a modest apartment at #45 Isabellastrasse, where Eva was born, as a typical, middle class unit of the Wilhelmine Era and the Second Reich. The house was a five-story building on the west side of the street.
WORLD WAR AND DOMESTIC COMMUNIST REVOLUTION: 1914–1919
Politically, they were conservative, royalist, and nationalistic. World War I broke out when Evi was two, and took her father away from home, where he served on the Western Front with the Imperial German Army. He survived the war that Germany unexpectedly lost. The overthrow of all the German monarchies led to the Red revolution of 1918–19 causing Munich to be occupied for a time by radical German Communists, until right-wing militia forces and the regular Army defeated and massacred them. Economically, times were hard. During these years, Eva was ages six and seven.
CATHOLIC COMMERCIAL GIRLS
Nevertheless, all three Braun daughters graduated from commercial or secretarial school at the Catholic Convent of the English Sisters at Simbach on the Inn River near their home, from a course lasting a year.
THE HOUSE OF THE THREE YOUNG GIRLS
In 1925, the family moved to a larger apartment at #93 Hohenzollernstrasse after Fritz received a small inheritance that also allowed them to buy a car, and even to hire a maid, which was rare in those days. This home, too, was in a five-story building. The Braun daughters also took music, painting, and dancing lessons, and the local boys soon started gravitating to their popular home, known as ‘The House of the Three Young Girls’, in the neighborhood.
THE SIMBACH CONVENT SCHOOL
At the convent school, Effie (one of the many nicknames that she would have in life) and her sisters received both religious training and their secular educations. She studied typing, bookkeeping, French, homemaking, music, and drawing, but the growing tomboy’s real passions, during those early years, were sports and clothes. She excelled at the former all her life, and, indeed, became world-renowned for the latter.
As young girls, Ilse did better at school than both her younger sisters, while Eva got by on her charm, and was always closer to Gretl than Ilse which continued until her death. Still, all three looked out after each other, and it was Ilse who cleared Eva’s name after World War II by filing suit against the false, so-called Eva Braun Diaries
put forth by actor Luis Trenker.
IDEALISTIC BRAUN FAMILY LIFE
Aside from having a good home and loving parents, the Braun girls were taken by Fanny to the theater, movies, and operettas, and she saved her money to buy them all toys, while Papa Fritz built for his Evamierl a miniature dollhouse that had its own furniture, and even cooking utensils in its kitchen.
By all accounts, she was a happy, healthy child who rarely got sick, except for the headaches and cramps brought on by her monthly menstrual periods. As she grew older, Eva lost interest in school, concentrated more on sports, and became the class troublemaker. As an athlete, Eva followed on her mother’s path. Fanny had been a skiing champion in 1905, and was also a good swimmer, whose rescue of a person’s life had made the local newspapers during her girlhood.
THE GREAT WAR’S IMPACT ON EVI: 1914–18
At only two years old, Evi of course, was far too young to understand what World War I was all about, but she knew enough to realize that she sorely missed her doting, loving Father, Fritz, who had been taken by the Kaiser’s Imperial Army to the Western Front, where hundreds of thousands of men were fighting and dying. One of these surviving soldiers was an unknown Austrian, also serving in the Royal Bavarian Army, Adolf Hitler.
Did it occur to the Braun women that their beloved husband and father might never return? We don’t know. They did know, however, that they were having trouble making ends meet on the embattled German home front, being starved as it was by the iron blockade of the Fatherland by the mighty British Royal Navy.
DEFEAT ABROAD AND REVOLUTION AT HOME: 1918–19
In the end, the Kaiser was overthrown, the empire fell, and Germany lost the war, greatly reducing the Braun family’s quality of life, even despite the fact that Papa Fritz came home safely, and returned to his teaching job in the local school system.
Despite the lost war and the resultant poverty and hard times afterward, Mrs. Braun did her best to make a normal life for her husband and their three girls. She made Army uniforms and table lamp shades for extra money, dismissed their maid, and even took in a lodger. Since butter was scarce, Fanny spread it sparsely over their daily bread, leading the girls to place it under the lamps to see which side was buttered. This became a favorite family story that was also later repeated in the many rooms of Hitler’s Berghof on the Obersalzberg.
THE WILLFUL MIDDLE CHILD
Both her parents tried hard to rein in their middle daughter’s growing willfulness during her happy childhood, but a streak of obstinacy emerged that carried over later into her teenage years, and still later on into her adulthood. It was out of this that her decision was made to start and continue to the end the relationship with Hitler, of which neither her parents nor Ilse Braun ever fully approved, even at the very height of his worldwide fame, and power over all of Continental Europe.
Little Eva and the other girls were lucky in that their mother took them to the local entertainments, while saving up their money to buy them the toys that they – like all children – craved. Eva loved her sisters and her parents all her life, even though the Hitler years were hard for, and on, all of them by the end of the Second World War.
In the mid-to-late 1920s, teenager Eva swam, skied, and ice-skated, the latter sport being the one in which she hoped someday to compete in a future Winter Olympics, the first of which had been held in the year of her birth – 1912 – but she never did, alas. Intelligent, bright, and sharp, Evi was quick to seize upon the essential points of any subject, and thought for herself as well.
She also read books that interested her, such as the famed cowboy and Indian novels of the time by Karl May, a pastime that she shared with Hitler as well. Surprisingly, a literature professor inspired her with the works of the English author Oscar Wilde, a homosexual whose writings were later banned as decadent by Hitler throughout the Third Reich.
Her mother loved opera (as did, also, the future Nazi Party Leader, Hitler), but young Evi preferred American jazz music – which was then all the rage – and musicals, while her favorite Silent Screen stars were the American John Gilbert and the Swedish Greta Garbo. She also followed German film star Brigitte Helm of famed German director Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis, whom her father thought she resembled.
The girls loved to play in both Munich’s Luitpold Park and the famous English Gardens that had a lake, playgrounds, and horseback riding, although she never rode, so far as is known. Neither did Hitler, ever.
THE STUPID COW
The other two girls sometimes ganged up on the middle child, nicknaming her, ‘The Stupid Cow,’ that carried over later somewhat into the leadership corps of the Nazi Party, though not within hearing of Hitler!
Teenager Eva had blonde, braided hair, was on the plump side, wore lipstick, and modest looking, schoolgirl clothes, all of which she made herself. Ilse persuaded Evi to discard her checked coat and schoolgirl’s cape in favor of a little brown suit and beret – her favorite color. She also taught her how to improve on her usage of makeup, while the mere sight of her slimmer, elder sister convinced Evi that she needed to lose weight.
She did, too, by eating less, and exercising more. While she could never have Ilse’s svelte shape, Eva gradually began to resemble Gretl more and more, to the point that they looked and dressed very much alike, leading several previous authors to misidentify the pair in their photographs.
Eva’s first date was with a male, and that is worded as such because – although there is no evidence that Eva was ever a lesbian or had lesbian tendencies – she grew up in the Roaring Twenties era in ultra-liberal German society where such existed. Later, during all the months and even years that the Führer left her alone on the Obersalzberg, Eva was thrown together with all the other mainly young women whose men were also away at the fighting fronts of the Second World War. Anything is possible.
Certainly lesbian love wasn’t unknown in Eva’s day, and thus it is not impossible that she may have had a female lover – or more than one – although I personally consider it unlikely, and none my own extensive research has introduced any evidence of such.
Eva’s first outing with a male was a blind date arranged for her by Ilse and was with a young man who wanted to take her dancing at a Ladies’ Night event at the Hotel Regina, where the girls had to pay for the tickets. Without enough money, her date paid the tab. She danced but once, broke into tears, and went home. It’s possible that there were later dates with him, and her albums do show a young man named Hans
on boating and hiking trips, without any further information.
Eva was characterized by one of the Catholic nuns who taught her at the Simbach convent school as ambitious, intelligent, and with a pretty voice; a superb amateur theatrical performer, who also went to church services regularly. However, she was a loner, and had no close friends there.
GOOD CATHOLIC GIRL EVI
Both Eva and Hitler were life-long, baptized and confirmed Catholics until the day they died. She attended Sunday Mass throughout their entire relationship, although he did not. According to the teachings of Holy Mother Church, both died outside of the required State of Grace needed to enter Heaven because they committed suicide.
While at Simbach, Eva went to confession twice weekly, belonged to the Children of Mary, and was occasionally allowed to decorate the altar where Mass was celebrated. Gretl followed in her footsteps to the Simbach Convent School, a pattern that continued until Evi’s death in 1945. Eva left the convent school in July 1929 with a diploma. At 17, Fraulein Eva Braun was still a virgin, and had never been kissed, either. As she rode the train home to Munich, Evi wondered what the future held in store for her.
EVA AS ETHEL SKAKEL KENNEDY
Her secret ambition as a young girl was to become a famous film star in Hollywood, and possibly a dancer. Like many girls, both then and now, Eva collected pictures of the stars of the era and saw as many of her favorite films as she could. These hidden ambitions were also at the core of her mania for physical perfection and feminine beauty, but in a tomboy sort of way; no one has ever accused her of being prissy. In many ways, she reminds this author of a young Ethel Skakel Kennedy in the United States, although Hitler was certainly no Bobby Kennedy, unless one counts mobs of adoring females.
In the mornings before school, Evi knelt in front of a chair, combing her hair with one hand, while she did her English homework with the other. She pined for the good things in life – and why not? She was also showy, flashy, and seeking approval all round. Having once borrowed a friend’s motorcycle, she cut to the chase with the pointed notation that she preferred limousines – and not just because of the comfort.
A social climber and one easily impressed by status symbols, thus it was, perhaps, that Eva was somewhat predisposed for her fateful meeting in Munich’s busy Schellingstrasse with one Adolf Hitler, who provided most of what she wanted – and enduring fame to boot. Now, she was about to enter the real, working world, after life as a sheltered student.
WORKING SHOP GIRL EVA
Her first job after she graduated from Simbach proved unsatisfactory. It was for a doctor, because her elder sister Ilse was the receptionist for the Jewish surgeon, Dr. Martin Marx. Ilse remained in his employment for eight years, until he fled to the United States, where author Nerin E. Gun interviewed him near New York City in 1968.
Eva’s medical employer was Dr. Gunther Hoffmann, but after a few weeks, she was bored with it: sitting many hours in his waiting room, wearing a white nurse’s uniform, answering irritating patient questions and, above all, hating the sight of blood. In later years, however, she used this brief employment to lord it over Hitler as a medical expert!
She stayed even less time at her second job, however, as a typist, quitting again. Ironically, it was Papa Fritz Braun who found the newspaper advertisement that brought Eva Braun to the Heinrich Hoffmann Photography Shop at #50 Schellingstrasse, close to where her family lived. Even more quite by chance was the fact that the headquarters of the young Nazi Party was located in the rear of the very same building, within walking distance of where she would be working.
Later, both she and Hoffmann himself would assert that Eva knew none of the political significance of her new job, and that she had no idea who Hitler was, but I am inclined to at least doubt this story somewhat. It seems too pat; although sometimes that’s the way things really do happen in life.
That having been said, it is also entirely possible that Evi took the job specifically to meet this man, Adolf Hitler, who was then the most famous political figure in Bavaria, as well as a rising star with whom to reckon in the German Reich as a whole. If this is true, Miss Braun would not have been the first young woman to arrange such a ‘chance’ meeting, and she will most certainly not be the last, either.
Whatever the real truth of the matter, that Fall of 1929 – as the Great Depression debuted around the world – Effie was employed in accounting, sales, bill payment, general office, and even darkroom work, at which she proved herself adept and capable. Of it all, she liked darkroom work the best, became quite good at it, and developed all her own film herself.
Bookkeeper Evi excelled, too, as a salesgirl in the shop itself, selling prints, film, and cameras over the coun-tertops to the customers and many enjoyed looking at this very attractive young woman with the pleasant, airy personality. It is the same today in shops around the world.
She remained – on and off, over the years – on Hoffmann’s employment rolls until the very day of her death – but who was this Heinrich Hoffmann, and how was it that he came to play the matchmaking role in one of modern history’s greatest duos?
ENTER HEINRICH HOFFMANN
Heinrich Hoffmann was born 12 September 1885 in Fürth, Franconia, Germany, four years before Hitler, and had begun in his own father’s photography service in 1897 at the Bavarian Royal court. Later, he worked in London, and began publishing art books. By 1910, he had opened his own studio in Munich. By the time he’d first met Hitler there in 1920, Hoffmann was already a famous and wealthy photographer in his own right, eventually having many branch shops in other cities as well. In 1937, Hitler honored Hoffmann with the title of Professor, and had him judging the annual art shows for the national House of German Art in Munich as well.
Although he never tried to influence Hitler politically, Hoffmann did try to intervene in his personal life, even introducing his own daughter Henriette to the Führer, in hopes of a possible wedding. When Hitler failed to respond, Henny married the handsome Hitler Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach instead, but that’s getting ahead of our story a bit.
It was in Hoffmann’s Munich studio one evening in October 1929 that Eva, then 17 years old, met the man who would both change and dominate her young life forever, just as he did, indeed, an entire generation of German and Austrian youth.
His name was Adolf Hitler, and he was already 40 years old.
MUNICH: HIM 1889–1929
Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889, the son of an Imperial Austrian customs official and his much younger wife. He was a poor student in school and so, after the death of his father in 1903, young Adolf went to Vienna to become an artist, but failed to gain admittance to the art academy. Following the death of his mother from breast cancer in 1907, Hitler lived off his inheritances until his money ran out, and painted picture postcards for a living afterwards. He resided in homeless shelters, until going to Munich in Germany in 1913 to avoid the Austrian military draft. Brought back to Austria by the police, Hitler failed his military physical examination, and returned to Germany.
GAY ADOLF?
While in Linz, Austria, prior to going to Vienna, Hitler had initially lived with a young man named August Kubizek, who may, or may not have been a homosexual. Gustl and his friend Adolf refrained from all contact with both male and female prostitutes. Hitler got drunk in his life exactly once, and swore off drinking ever again after being awakened on a country road by Austrian milkmaids on the way to make their deliveries.
Hitler’s later military hero was the homosexual King Frederick the II (the Great) of Prussia. Both Hitler’s architect and armaments minister, Dr. Albert Speer, and his favorite SS commando chief – Col. Otto Skorzeny – met him many times, and asserted in their postwar memoirs that Hitler was not a homosexual.
In a top secret report for the US government in 1943, Boston psychoanalyst Dr. Walter C. Langer concluded that Hitler had two separate, distinct personalities: one soft, sentimental, and indecisive; the other hand, cruel, decisive, and energetic. Indeed, Adolf Hitler was both men combined in one.
HIS FIRST LOVE
WAS JEWISH
One of Hitler’s German biographers – the historian Dr. Werner Maser – believed that Hitler was heterosexual, but further admitted that there was no evidence of Hitler being close to any woman at all except his mother. Then came Kubizek’s alleged Hitlerian infatuation from afar with a Jewish-Austrian girl in Vienna named Stephanie Isak/Jansten. Hitler never even spoke to her, nor did he ever contract syphilis, noted Dr. Maser.
Thus, Kubizek’s Stephanie stands alone as the sole woman in Hitler’s young life during the 25-year-long-period of 1889–1914. Writer Robert G.L. Waite believed that Hitler was a repressed homosexual, while Dr. Langer asserted that Hitler was a sexual masochist who enjoyed having a woman defecate or urinate (the latter so-called golden showers
) on his head.
HOMOSEXUAL, BISEXUAL, OR ASEXUAL?
In his 1971 American Playboy magazine interview with writer Eric Norden, Dr. Speer denied that he and Hitler were homosexual lovers. In 1998, German author Anton Joachimsthaler concluded that Hitler lived without women – at least in the sexual sense – that he had no sexual relations with any woman ever, not even with Eva Braun, and in this view, I tend to concur.
Thus, while it is possible that Hitler may have been bisexual, I believe that, in fact, he was, instead, homosexual, or else celibate altogether. The women in his life provided him with diversion, friendship, companionship, adoration, and – most of all – a respectable ‘cover,’ but not sex, as testified to by nearly all the women in his life. His niece Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal claimed that she defecated and urinated on him, too, but never that they had sex together.
For her part, Eva played coy, and was always secretive about virtually every aspect of their relationship that wasn’t observed by the other people in their immediate circles.
HITLER’S GAY WHORE IN THE GREAT WAR: 1914–18
When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Hitler enlisted in a Bavarian infantry regiment and served as a trench messenger for most of the intensive fighting on the Western Front until the Armistice of 11 November 1918. He won both classes of the coveted Iron Cross – first and second – for bravery under enemy fire. In his truly