The Lost Life of Eva Braun - Hardcover

Lambert, Angela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 031236654X ISBN 13: 9780312366544

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2007

Synopsis

Eva Braun is one of history’s most famous nonentities. She has been dismissed as a racist, feathered-headed shop girl, yet sixty-two years after her death her name is still instantly recognizable. 

            She left her convent school at the age of seventeen and met Hitler a few months later.  She became his mistress before she was twenty. How did unsophisticated little Fraulein Braun, twenty-three years his junior, hold the most powerful man in Europe in an exclusive sexual relationship that lasted from 1932 until their joint suicide? Were they really lovers, and what were the background influences and psychological tensions of the middle-class Catholic girl from Munich who shared his intimate life? How can her ordinariness and apparent decency be reconciled with an unshakeable loyalty to the monster she loved?  

            She left almost no personal material or documents but her private diary and photograph albums show that her life with Hitler, far from being a luxurious sinecure, caused her emotional torture. His chauffeur called her “the unhappiest woman in Germany.”  The Führer humiliated her in public while the top Nazis’ wives, living in his privileged enclave on a Bavarian mountainside, despised her. Yet Albert Speer said: “She has been much maligned. She was very shy, modest. A man’s woman: gay, gentle, and kind; incredibly undemanding . . . a restful sort of girl. And her love for Hitler---as she proved in the end---was beyond question.”

            Eva loved the Führer, not for his power, nor because, thanks to him, she lived in luxury.  His material gifts were nothing compared with the one thing she really wanted:  his child.  She remained invisible and unknown, a nonperson. They were never seen in public together and she never saw him alone except in the bedroom, yet their long relationship was a sort of marriage. 

            Angela Lambert reveals a woman the world never knew until the last twenty-four hours of her life. In the small hours of April 29, 1945, as Allied troops raced to capture Berlin and the bunker below the Reichskanzlei where the defeated Nazi leaders were hiding, Eva Braun finally achieved her life’s ambition by becoming Hitler’s wife. Next day they both swallowed cyanide and died instantly. She was young, healthy, and thirty-three years old. 

            Based on detailed new research, this is an authoritative biography, only the second life of Eva written in English.

About this title

About the Author:

Angela Lambert was born to a German mother and an English father and grew up bilingual. From 1947–50 she lived in Germany and met her surviving German relatives for the first time, though they never talked about their experiences in wartime Hamburg. She read philosophy, politics, and economics at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford and worked as a civil servant, journalist, and TV reporter until 1998. Her first book, Unquiet Souls: The Indian Summer of the British Aristocracy, 1880–1918, was one of three shortlisted for the 1986 Whitbread Prize. This is her tenth book and first biography. 

From The Washington Post:

Many biographies reveal as much about their authors as about their subjects, and this account of the life of Hitler's mistress can serve as Exhibit A. The British writer Angela Lambert is fascinated by Eva Braun for one key reason: Like Lambert's mother, Braun was born in Germany in 1912, grew up during Hitler's rise to power and never questioned what was happening in her country. Lambert's mother then married an Englishman and moved to Britain in 1936, but until the end of her life, she never acknowledged that her silence in the 1930s represented any kind of moral failure.

By painstakingly examining the thin trail of evidence left behind by Braun, Lambert wonders whether all German women, from the least famous to her infamous subject, should be condemned for the horrific deeds of their men. If Braun can be absolved of guilt, she suggests, so can most German women, including her mother. "Any verdict on Eva is, in microcosm, a verdict on the German people," she writes. And from there, it's a short step to this sweeping statement: "Women who love evil men need not necessarily be evil themselves."

Lambert insists that her minute examination of Braun's life proves that she has been unfairly caricatured "as a feather-brained non-entity" who partied and worried about her wardrobe while her lover set the world aflame. The woman who finally married Hitler right before committing suicide with him in his bunker in Berlin at the end of the war, Lambert argues, was caring, sensitive and, above all, loyal. She claims that the former photo shop assistant was smarter than is commonly assumed -- but "blissfully ignorant" of politics, which was considered men's business, and remained so throughout the war years she spent in Obersalzberg, Hitler's retreat in the Bavarian Alps. All she cared about was when "HE," as she referred to him in her letters, would visit.

Although Lambert concedes that even ordinary citizens couldn't be clueless about the fate of the Jews after Kristallnacht in 1938, she largely dismisses the notion that Braun and most other Germans could have known the full extent of the horrors of the deportations and the camps. She also argues that the widespread anti-Semitism of German women like her mother, who remained "unthinkably prejudiced against Jews" even after the war, didn't overshadow their positive traits, such as love of family.

As for Braun, Lambert portrays her as "blameworthy" -- not implicated in the suffering Hitler inflicted on the world, "but not innocent either." Then she adds a defense of Braun that is staggering in its implications. "It is not a crime to be shallow and fun-loving," Lambert insists, seemingly ignoring the context of such "fun": Hitler's orgy of mass murder. Even Braun's outburst against her sister, who dared to denounce Hitler near the end -- "You deserve to be lined up against the wall and shot!" -- is presented as an understandable product of blind love for her man. But Lambert is hardly doing her mother or other dangerously passive German women a service by equating their willful blindness with Braun's. This is a case of a daughter protesting too much, offering a damning indictment instead of an effective defense. After all, Hitler proved how easily willful blindness could serve the cause of blind destruction.

-- Andrew Nagorski, a senior editor at Newsweek International, is the author of the forthcoming "The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 031236654X
• ISBN 13: 9780312366544
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512