Eva Braun

Fresh out of convent school Eva Braun met Adolf Hitler the first time when she was working as the assistant of Hitler's personal photographer Hoffmann. A few weeks after this meeting she agreed to follow the Führer to his mountain retreat in the alps.

In 1936 she finally moved to Hitler's Berghof at Berchtesgaden where she acted as his hostess. Reserved, indifferent to politics and keeping her distance from most of the Führer's intimates, Eva Braun led a completely isolated life in the Führer's Alpine retreat and later in Berlin. They rarely appeared in public together and few Germans even knew of her existence.

Even the Führer's closest associates were not certain of the exact nature of their relationship, since Hitler preferred to avoid suggestions of intimacy and was never wholly relaxed in her company. Their attraction was immediate, and over the objection of her parents, she became his mistress. For the next sixteen years, she lived in luxury as millions suffered and died at the hands of her maniacal 'Wulf'.

A private film collection shows candid views of Eva Braun and Hitler in war and peacetime, chatting with children, conferring with subordinates, relaxing after victories and recovering after Stalingrad. 

At the same time over one million children under the age of sixteen died in the Holocaust - plucked from their homes and stripped of their childhoods, they lived and died during the dark years of the Holocaust and were victims of the Nazi regime. 

Eva Braun spent most of her time exercising, brooding, reading cheap novelettes, watching romantic films or concerning herself with her own appearance. Her loyalty to Hitler never flagged. After he survived the July 1944 plot she wrote Hitler an emotional letter, ending: 'From our first meeting I swore to follow you anywhere - even unto death - I live only for your love.'

Eva Braun, the young woman who had spent most of her life waiting for Hitler, would now be with him forever - she had agreed to share Adolf Hitler's fate. Shortly before his suicide, Hitler said of Eva: "Miss Braun is, besides my dog Blondi, the only one I can absolutely count on ..." 

A local magistrate married them early on the morning of April 29, 1945, as a crowning award for her loyalty to the end. The marriage document survived. Eva started to sign her name "Eva Braun" but stopped, crossed out the "B" and wrote "Eva Hitler, born Braun." Goebbels and Bormann signed as witnesses.

The next day shortly after 3 p.m. Hitler retired with Eva Braun to his private rooms. They bit into thin glass vials of cyanide. As he did so, Hitler also shot himself in the head with a 7.65 mm Walther pistol.

Those who entered Hitler's suite saw him lying on a blood-soaked sofa. Eva Braun lay on the sofa beside him, but she had made no use of the revolver at her side, preferring to take the poison instead. Hitler's body was wrapped in a blanket and carried, along with Eva Braun's, up four flights of steps and into the garden of the chancellery. Both bodies were doused with gasoline and burned.

On the evening of the following day Radio Hamburg announced that "our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler died for Germany in his command post in the Reich Chancellery this afternoon, fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism". He had founded the Third Reich 12 years and three months before. It would survive him for one week.

The rest of Eva Braun's family survived the war. Her mother, Franziska, who lived in an old farmhouse in Ruhpolding, Bavaria, died at the age of ninety-six, in January 1976.