Eva Braun in private. NOT one of the photographs "discovered" by the German television company. See our footnote at bottom of this page.

Monday 4 December 2000

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[All pictures are added by this website]

Album reveals the secret life of Eva Braun

By Hannah Cleaver

THE secret life of Hitler's wife, Eva Braun, was revealed last night after the discovery of a private photo album depicting her in playful poses, relaxing in a swim suit and receiving a kiss on the hand from the Fuhrer. The leather-bound album of about 100 pictures, traced by the German ZDF television company, is believed to be one of five made by Braun as Christmas presents in 1941.

Braun, Hitler's lover for a decade until their suicide in the Fuhrer's bunker in Berlin, lived largely hidden away at Berchtesgaden, the dictator's hideaway in the Austrian Alps. When important political guests came to visit, she was banished to her room.

Braun betrays the bitterness of her isolation in a mocking message on one of the pictures. The photo shows Italian officials visiting Hitler on behalf of Mussolini and catches Braun peeping out from an upstairs window. Next to it she wrote: "Up above is something forbidden to see - me!"[*]

The album mostly reflects the happier times of Braun's life. They depict an active young woman who followed fashion. In a domestic scene she is presented serving soup, or in a more adventurous image sunbathing and posing in a two-piece swimsuit.

The pictures, some of which Braun took herself, include a photo of Hitler bending down to kiss her hand, but he is largely absent from the album. Stefan Brauburger, deputy head of the ZDF contemporary history department, said: "Eva made five albums for her best friends. This one was for a family in Munich for Christmas 1941 and she signed it."

By 1941 Braun was a member of Hitler's closest circle, a life she described to Walter Frentz, an official Nazi cameraman, as a "golden cage". She had already tried twice to kill herself. She complained that Hitler did not spend enough time with her and that he was refusing to make her his official companion or marry her.

Germany was struggling in the war when the pictures were taken yet the albums were bound in leather and embossed with the initials EB, an indication of how far removed Braun was from the reality of what was happening to her country.

Ernst Baumann, a professional photographer who took some of the commissioned pictures, was punished by being posted to the front line when Hitler decided that some of the pictures were too intimate. Most of his are not in the album.

A team led by Mr Brauberger worked on the album for months in the United States, verifying the photos and carrying out research on the photographer. Some of the photographs were included in a programme called Eva's Pictures broadcast in Germany last night.

Mr Brauberger said that in return for access to the pictures he had promised not to disclose the identity of the person in America who allowed the station to examine the album. He added: "I do not know where the other four are. They are perhaps in private ownership. There are more than 100 pictures in this album. There are some she took herself and there are some she took of Hitler."

Braun's relationship with the Fuhrer, which lasted for more than a decade, started in 1929 when, at the age of just 17, she slipped a love letter into his pocket. The despair that followed as she vainly tried to gain more of his attention came to a head in 1932 when she tried to shoot herself and again three years later when she took an overdose of sleeping pills.

She died in 1945 next to the man she loved, shortly after Hitler married her in his Berlin bunker as the Allies closed in.

Hitlers letzte Habe gefunden

 

[*] David Irving writes:

I WONDER if those Eva Braun photographs can be the same as those which I located in the US National Archives in the 1970s and referred to on page 234 of my book The War Path (published London and New York, 1978). In fact I quoted the identical caption: "Up above is something forbidden to see - me!" The album in short is not newly discovered, let alone secret, but is one of the famous Eva Braun albums (file number 242-EB) in the National Archives in Washington DC; its "discovery" is, uh, rather old hat. They have been known of for fifty years or more, being part of the cache retrieved in Schloss Fischhorn, Austria, by CIC agent Robert A Gutierrez. On which see our own file.

Far more important were the photos in the album which Eva gave her friend Herta Schneider (now deceased), which I filmed for a Hard Copy television programme in the late 1980s.

At the top of this article, and lower down in the text, we reproduce not the spurious "discoveries" referred to in the Daily Telegraph article but genuinely unknown prints from a roll of film of 20 Eva Braun snapshots in the possession of American collector Richard Atwood, of Fort Worth (to whom our acknowledgements are due).

ZDF Online

August 11, 2000

Evas Cousine

[Excerpt:]

Eva Braun: 14 Jahre lang war sie die heimliche Geliebte Adolf Hitlers und lebte versteckt in seinem Privatdomizil auf dem Obersalzberg. Erst nach dem gemeinsamen Selbstmord 1945 erfuhr die Öffentlichkeit von diesem Verhältnis. Noch heute beschäftigt uns das erschreckende Faszinosum, dass es tatsächlich eine junge Frau gab, die Hitler liebte, ihm bis in den Tod bedingungslos ergeben war.

Was für ein Mensch war Eva Braun, warum hielt sie bis zum Schluss zu ihrem "Führer"? Eine der letzten lebenden Verwandten Eva Brauns, ihre Cousine Traudl, verbrachte 1944 mehrere Monate mit Eva auf dem Berghof. Ihre Erlebnisse hat sie der Autorin Sibylle Knauss geschildert. Die machte daraus einen aufschlussreichen Roman. "Evas Cousine" erscheint im Claassen Verlag und liefert ein spannendes Psychogramm zweier Frauen, die die ländliche Idylle genießen, während im Rest der Welt Millionen auf Schlachtfeldern und in Konzentrationslagern sterben. Gertraud Weisker ist heute 77 Jahre alt. Jutta Louise Oechler sprach mit "Evas Cousine" vor Ort am Obersalzberg.