Real Wives of Dictators | Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler's Wife

What was life like as Adolf Hitler's other half? Although their marriage came (very) late in their lives, Eva Braun was with Hitler from the earlier days in his political career, and was a confidant to him through the rise (and fall) of the Nazi Party. How complicit was she in the evil ideologies Hitler set out? Was she in any way a victim? And what was it like to be part of the inner circle? Joining Kate in the second episode of our limited series, Real Wives of Dictators, is Clare Mulley, historian and author of books including The Women Who Flew For Hitler, and recently, Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka. This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. If you'd like to get in touch with the show you can contact us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 1:44Kate Lister?

  Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am me, you are you, and this is Betwixt the Sheets. But before we can keep going together, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And if you've been lysted into this show for long enough now, you must know the drill by now. For any newbies, if you're a sensitive position, just bugger off now. We don't need you around here. Right, on with the show.

• 2:15Kate Lister?

  They say that behind every great man, there's a great woman. Hmm, I've never really believed that. But what about evil men? Are there crap and evil women behind them too? And whilst it's the men in these horror stories that seem to get the most attention, in this brand new mini-series, we are exploring the lives of four of the wives of some of history's most bloody and notorious dictators. Were they victims?

• 2:41Speaker 05

  She was certainly young at the beginning. She was drawn to the flame, absolutely.

• 2:45Kate Lister?

  Or were they enablers?

• 2:47Speaker 05

  She famously defied the judges, calling them fascists. And she said, "I was Mao's dog. I bit who he told me to bite." She's aware of the antisemitism. It's not that she looks the other way. She doesn't think it's a problem. She doesn't need to look the other way.

• 3:06Kate Lister?

  What was their life like behind closed doors?

• 3:10Speaker 05

  She's grown up in a revolutionary family.

• 3:12Kate Lister?

  And she married a revolutionary. So you can assume that she's on the revolutionary side. And were any of these women thirsty for power themselves?

• 3:20Speaker 05

  The rest of the leadership was dead set against it. They sensed her ambition. They had an instinct about her.

• 3:28Kate Lister?

  I'm Kate Lister and these are The Real Wives of Dictators.

• 3:35Kate Lister?

  Episode two, Eva Braun, Wife of Adolf Hitler.

• 3:42Kate Lister?

  What do you look for in a man?

• 3:43Speaker 06

  Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Darren.

• 4:10Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Life sure does throw you some crazy twists and turns, doesn't it? For example, one moment you're a 17-year-old photographer's assistant in Munich, and the next minute, you're swallowing cyanide in a bunker with the Fuhrer. That's a hell of a plot twist, not to mention a very chilling thought. But who was the woman who was romantically involved with Hitler throughout his rise through German politics? Well, it was Eva Braun, but how did she handle being kept out of the spotlight as much as she was? Was she in any way complicit, supportive even, of Hitler's evil ideologies? Well, joining me today is Claire Mullie, and she is going to help us get to know Eva

• 4:55Kate Lister?

  Braun a little bit better, as if anybody wants to know her. But here we go, anyway.

• 5:04Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Claire Mullie. How are you doing?

• 5:10Speaker 05

  Very happy to be betwixt the sheets with you, Kate.

• 5:14Kate Lister?

  Betwixt the sheets with me and Eva Braun.

• 5:16Speaker 05

  Oh, not so good. I'm not so happy about that bit.

• 5:19Kate Lister?

  What a place to be. We are talking today about this woman who, I think it's fair to say the most famous thing she did was marry Hitler. But before we even get on to her, you are the author of such books as The Women Who Flew for Hitler and Agent Zoe, The Untold Story of Fearless WWII Resistance Fighter Elisabetta Zawacka. So as a question before we even get to Eva, what brought you to WWII history?

• 5:48Speaker 05

  Just going to nip in and say El Spietat Zawacka. But pleasingly, her codename is Zoe, Z-O, and that's what she's known as throughout the book, so no worries there.

• 5:56Kate Lister?

  Amazing.

• 5:57Speaker 05

  I was, my first book was actually a woman in, sort of, whose story touches on the First World War, who was really remarkable. And she was a woman from Shropshire, and I was interested in her when the British bank, the main bank, said, right, we're going to have a new £20 note and a new £2 coin, and we want to put women on there. I was like, oh, fantastic. And they were asking the public for suggestions. So I said, Egintine Jebb, this fantastic woman I'd written about. And when the new currency came out, there was Jane Austen on both. I love Jane Austen, but it's like saying there are no other women worth celebrating or mentioning. So I thought, damn, this, you know, we need to do some work. So I I wrote a biography of Egintine called The Woman Who Saved the Children, my first book. And it's just been option for films. I'm very happy this week.

• 6:41Kate Lister?

  Congratulations. That's amazing.

• 6:44Speaker 05

  It is amazing. She is amazing. But there weren't very many people who I could interview who had known her. She was born in eighteen seventy six, died in nineteen twenty eight. So I moved forward a war to talk about all these untold stories of women at the heart of the Second World War, again, who've been pretty much written out of history. Or when these stories are told, they're told quite romantically. Seems to be a lot of focus on appearance and not much focus on achievements. So I'm trying to do something about that.

• 7:10Kate Lister?

  Oh, I thank God you are, because when you actually go looking for these stories, they're almost embarrassingly abundant. Like, you you kind of have this idea of, well, women's stories aren't told that much because they probably weren't, they just there weren't that many of them doing these this stuff. Yes, there were. Yes, there absolutely was.

• 7:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. There there are loads of them. But women do get, often deliberately, but a lot of the time just from, you know, misogyny, written out. So when I was doing my research for for one of my books called The Women Who Flew for Hitler, there were only two test pilots who were female for the Third Reich. So conde in, they were civilians, they weren't actually in the Luftwaffe. Lots of women did work in the Luftwaffe, actually, but in admin, you know, secretarial roles, whatever. But these two women served as test pilots, and one was a development engineer, which is really amazing stuff. And one of them tried to save Hitler's life, and the other one actually tried to kill him. There are only two of them. And they knew each other. They, not surprisingly, actually loathed each other. They kind of knew there was something off. But they didn't know all each other's secrets, but they knew each other. Anyhow, so I was researching

• 8:11Speaker 05

  that. And the the famous one is the Nazis, quite a lot of stuff on her. But the other one, I went to find her family, and very kindly, they brought out a load of information and files. And I said, why, why aren't these files in the military archives, where the men's files, who, you know, she was involved in the most famous plot? To kill Hitler and all the guys files are in the military archives and Freiburg and so on. And they showed me a word on the outside of the file and someone had written back in the day had written domestic. So basically, because she's a woman, they sent the files back to the family. They thought, well, she can't possibly have a role. So women get written out even at the archive stage, not just the struggle it takes sometimes to get a publisher to take it on or the interest in it. So, yeah, so there's lots of reasons. But yeah, like you say, there are lots of stories.

• 8:54Kate Lister?

  One woman who probably would quite like to have been written out from history is probably Eva Braun. Like, she would probably wish that, like, we didn't know anything about her with what happened in the end.

• 9:06Speaker 05

  No, I completely disagree, actually. I think she'd still be believing that the Third Reich will rise again and she will be recognised as a great heroine. I think she went out of her way to make sure that she would be in history as much as possible. And Hitler obviously kept her quiet for a long time. Talk a bit more about that if you like. But she's constantly, she's, you know, she loves photography, she is taking photographs, she's taking cinefilm and she is making sure that she has a role and she was always hoping that ultimately it would be shown that always behind the scenes, there's this evidence that she was there all along, silently supporting the great man as she saw him. And so, yeah, no, she was, she was very determined to be that great heroine of the Third Reich as she felt it was.

• 9:48Kate Lister?

  God almighty, trying to unpick this mindset. But before we get to, I suppose that's kind of where she ended up. I don't even know where she started from. Where did Eva even come from?

• 10:00Speaker 05

  Eva Braun, well, she is a Munich girl. She's sort of middle class. Her father was a teacher, Franz, Fanny. Her mother, Franziska, was a seamstress. They had three daughters. She's the middle one. Elsa is the eldest. She actually married a Jewish doctor. Amazing, eh? He was expatriated. She was never part of the inner circle. But the younger two, Eva and her sister Gretel, were very close. They were confidants and they were just, they were good fun girls. Eva liked sport, she liked dogs, she liked fashion. She liked going to the cinema with her girlfriends. She liked photography. She was working at a photography studio in Munich, Heinrich Hoffman studio, and Hoffman became Hitler's personal photographer.

• 10:44Speaker 05

  And so that's where they met, actually. She was introduced to Herr Wolf, as Hitler was known to her at first, over a plate of sausages at the photography studio. And he was much older than her and she was, I think she thought he was an impressive older man. He was forty and she was seventeen, over twenty years between them.

• 11:06Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  And but he was already getting a lot of attention, you know, he was a bit of a, he was an impressive figure for her. And she appealed to him too. She was, I think, young, malleable, probably not that bright, admiring, giving him a bit of an ego boost in that way. And so they both provided something for the other.

• 11:25Kate Lister?

  What year was this? I'm trying to get a sort of sense of what the hell was happening in Germany when they met, because she's very young, seventy. Like, when you think of what you were like at seventeen, what I was like at seventeen.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  Oh, I'd love to know. And she.

• 11:39Kate Lister?

  I wasn't, I wasn't flirting with dictators, I like to think, but still, like, you know, you make bad choices, right?

• 11:44Speaker 05

  But he wasn't then a dictator, although he was on the way up. It was nineteen twenty nine, late nineteen twenty nine that they met. So, um, ten years before the war and four years, three, three years really, before he became chancellor. And so he's on the up, he's big in Munich, and she is definitely sort of drawn to this, in as he's got a circle around him of adoring people, including her boss. And she, you know, she started off at the photography studio just as a secretary, and she ends up, you know, taking photographs, developing photographs. Here is a great subject for her. Great, she can be in there taking pictures. And taking photographs of Hitler is quite a large part of what she does.

• 12:20Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 12:21Speaker 05

  And selling them, you know, taking private pictures and then selling them for large amounts of cash, but also thereby helping to create his profile, his, the image of Hitler. So she will take photographs of him with her girlfriends and their children later on, and present him as a caring, fatherly figure.

• 12:40Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 12:40Speaker 05

  And get paid a lot of money for it and help his career.

• 12:45Kate Lister?

  So they meet just as, just as things are start, he's on the up, as you said, things are changing in Germany, there's a buzz around this man and it's only a few years before he is Chancellor of Germany. Did they stay in touch the whole way through this? Or did they sort of like meet up a little bit later on?

• 13:05Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, they kind of stayed in touch because she's working. He's often at Hoffman's Studios. Hoffman, Hitler had a very terrible family himself and he, throughout his life, you see him trying to build kind of alternative families. And one of his close families that he liked to hang out with was the Hoffmans. So he could kind of relax in that company without having a family of his own. So he would see her, but they aren't seeing each other in that sense of a relationship for a couple of years. He's got his half niece, Gilly Raubel, in his apartment. Yeah. So, so he is exceedingly fond of her and we don't know if it was more than that. It seems that she didn't want it. He was very domineering. He was definitely controlling and manipulating.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  And she ends up with a room in his apartments and she wants to have a friendship with his driver. He sacks the driver and he, you know, says she can't go out anywhere, even if she goes to the cinema, she's escorted. It is appalling behaviour. And eventually she shot herself with her father's pistol in the lung. And it's the next year that Hitler starts his affair with Eva Braun.

• 14:16Kate Lister?

  What, I know that we'll never know what was going on between him and Gilly, but what, what's your take on it? What do you think?

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Well, he was definitely controlling and manipulating. It was a deeply unhealthy relationship. It wasn't a relation, a true relationship between uncle and niece. And it, I mean, we won't know. I mean, there are all sorts of stories that perhaps she was pregnant, this, that and the other. We don't know. We can speculate, but that's, you know, that's not my game. I'm a non-fiction writer.

• 14:43Kate Lister?

  Yes, I know. I know. I'm forever trying to push people to like, you know, come down on one side or the other, but we just don't have, what we can say, I think, is it was weird.

• 14:51Speaker 05

  Definitely unhealthy, domineering, controlling relationship that ultimately led her to take her own life. So, yeah.

• 15:00Kate Lister?

  Wow. And then the year after that is when he starts, what would we even say, dating, courting? What?

• 15:07Speaker 05

  That sounds quite romantic, doesn't it? I don't think we need to to dress it up. He begins a a more physical relationship with Eva. She becomes more important in his life. So, yeah, and and her parents are against it because she's still quite young at this point. And he's a, you know, much older man with a lot of power. So they're they're initially against it. I mean, later they come on side and enjoy all the the side benefits, the fringe benefits of of that relationship. But it's difficult at first. I mean, they they really get together in thirty two. And in August nineteen thirty two, that's when she attempts to kill herself the first time. She actually had three attempts to kill herself in her life and was successful, of course, in the last. So, yeah.

• 15:48Kate Lister?

  Do we have any idea why? What was what was going on there?

• 15:52Speaker 05

  Well, it's there's a lot of pressure on her. She wants the relationship. Her parents are against it. Hitler's in favour of it, but he's not in favour of it in any public sense. She's not that important to him at this point. She's she's useful, she's fun, she's comfort, she helps him relax. But she wants a bit more than that and she's not getting it. So, I mean, it's I don't know if she really intended to actually kill herself if it was a cry for help. I mean, even that phrase, I don't really like that much. But she certainly, I mean, this is it's important that we do talk about these suicide attempts because they're one way of showing that she actually had agency. This is not someone who is just tagging along all the time, doing whatever she's told.

• 16:35Speaker 05

  Here, she is making a really significant move. And as a result, she she it works. She gets Hitler's attention. And after that, she gets a sort of recognition within the inner circle. I mean, albeit completely privately, this is totally off the public sphere. But, yeah, she gets she gets a room. He provides her then a house. She stays at his place when he comes to Munich. And and they it becomes this, you know, she's demonstrated devotion and loyalty to him. And he gets her checked out by Doctor C. Oh, do you think? And it could have killed her. So, yes, he thinks, yeah, she's she's really demonstrated something here. But as well, slightly more cynically, I think we need to take him back. He's already had one young woman die of suicide in his care.

• 17:21Speaker 05

  And so he really can't afford the scandal of another young woman dying, having shot herself. So he there begins to take more care of her. And that's when the relationship really becomes sort of confirmed.

• 17:33Kate Lister?

  Yeah. So what's weird about this is The Nazi party, one of their many things that they thought was really important was the nuclear family and being married and having lots of little Aryan babies. And there was like this whole big, we should all get married and have babies, babies, babies. But why was Hitler hiding a relationship then? Why wasn't it like, look, this is our leader and he's married and having babies? Why was he keeping her a secret?

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Well, you know, this, I always think is a bit like Elizabeth I. I don't think any other historians have ever said that, but in a minor way, he's married, he's married to Germany. You know, he is, he has got this image of being the father of the nation. And so he is, he wants to maintain this myth of self-sacrificing devotion. I mean, he would love to have a family, but obviously the, the country comes first. He's the great leader. So it's partly that, it's partly, as you say, she's not really the type that they're flagging up. You know, she's much younger than him. I don't suppose that matters so much, but she's, she's quite sporty. She smokes, which she disapproves of. She likes to wear makeup. She likes parties. She drinks champagne. You know, he's a teetotaller. She doesn't

• 18:40Speaker 05

  have, well, is it, or is he just a hypocrite, you know, in his private life? This is someone he's keeping quiet. So it's, she's not on the public radar. I mean, had she been seen out there, it might have been hypocritical. But I think, so it's partly that, he doesn't want to expose himself as a hypocrite with this young, pretty, young, flippity-gibbity, not the classic Germanic, mothery type. But partly it's just that, that image thing. And he, he really felt that a lot of women, a lot of women did vote for him as well as men. And I think they actually voted for him for the same reasons as the men did. Doesn't seem to be a particularly big gender divide on, on voting reasons. You know, it's economy and stability and fear of communism, all these big issues. But he felt very much that

• 19:22Speaker 05

  women, you know, like, women adored film stars. And when the film star came out as married, their appeal would go down. And he really much saw himself as this idol figure that women adored. And there are some examples, you know, women writing devoted letters to him, all that sort of thing. If only we met, dear Fuhrer, we'd get together, sort of thing. And he thinks, so they're all voting for me. This is great. Keep it going. So he's keeping that whole thing going as well.

• 19:47Kate Lister?

  Was she popular amongst his, because you know, if he's the Fuhrer and like, and access to him is kind of, it's sort of sacred within this world because you know, the closer you are to him, the more important you're going to be, Hitler's right hand man.

• 20:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:01Kate Lister?

  And now he's got this side piece, because he doesn't marry her for ages, does he? She's sort of there. And I'm wondering how people viewed her within his, like, did they view her as a threat? Did they think that, oh, she's just, just very nice and good for him? Like, what?

• 20:15Speaker 05

  Well, everyone is viewing everyone strategically in the inner circle. You're absolutely right. She has got closer access to Hitler than just about anyone, including many in, in the highest echelons of the party. So she's a gatekeeper in, in a sense. And she does have some influence there. I mean, I don't think she had huge political influence. I think that is minimal. But there are occasions where she does have influence and she does have influence over access to him. So she's petitioned, she's given gifts, she's praised. As the relationship is consolidated, people like Goebbels, you find he's writing in his diary, ridiculous sort of praises of her, saying that she's a very sensible girl, very clever, very, very good eye for art or whatever, you know, she, he gives her this sort of,

• 21:00Speaker 05

  he's readjusting because if the Fuhrer likes her, he is trying to kind of take on that mindset. But a lot of people were just sort of lobbying. So when Hess flew to Scotland, there's a belief that perhaps the only reason why his wife wasn't arrested and sent to prison after that was because Eva Braun put a good word in for her. So she has sort of minimal level of influence in that way. Yeah. I mean, she did have friends up there. She was friends with some of the, especially when she's at the Berghof, she's sort of the society hostess at the Berghof, which is Hitler's retreat in the mountains where he increasingly goes to do business. And yeah, she's friends with some of the wives. She's friends with some of the Nazis, like Speer felt he was very close to her, a few of the others as well.

• 21:41Speaker 05

  Others, like Martin Bormann said, you know, if I die, you're going to be in trouble, you know, make, told his wife to kind of make some preparations because Eva didn't like him and that, you know, if there was a chink of weakness, she might have some influence there. So that's mixed feelings. She got on with some of the secretaries and she had lots of parties there. So in some ways, she's quite fun and she enables Hitler to relax. And that's quite good for everyone in the Nazi party, if not for everyone else.

• 22:08Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Claire and Eva after this short break.

• 22:13Kate Lister?

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• 25:26Kate Lister?

  Was she politically ambitious? Because part of this series has been trying to work out, like, what was the attraction? How much did these women know about what their husbands were going on? How did you block it out? I mean, was this just a case of, like, I'm just going to ignore all of this awful stuff because I get nice parties and nice frocks? Or was she more politically ambitious than that?

• 25:49Speaker 05

  No, I don't think that she was politically ambitious or particularly deeply questioning at all. But having said that, I also think that she shared his worldview. So this is not a nice woman, but likes her dresses, prepared to turn a blind eye. This is someone who goes along with it. I mean, she's very aware of the antisemitism. She's definitely aware of the violence on the streets. I mean, she's got limited knowledge, but she has enough knowledge that we can be quite sure that she was very happy to share his worldview. Certainly never, no hint. Int of ever questioning that in any way. No.

• 26:25Speaker 05

  So, yes, she knew about the racist ideology. What she wouldn't have been party to is party business. She wasn't a member of the Nazi party, although that's really neither here nor there. I mean, lots of Nazis like Hannah Reisch. Lots of women weren't members but were still Nazis, you know. Some Nazis were not actually members of the party. So that's that's a moot point, I think, is often made too much of. But Hitler kept his private and public life, business life separate. She wouldn't have been party to any of the conversations about military strategy or Nazi party policy. So she wouldn't have done that. Having said that, he he could be quite indiscreet at times. So there's some of his secretaries mentioned that he's talking about stuff and they kind of get a bit of an idea of what's going on. And just, you know, she would have known something before the war.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  There's plenty of violence on the streets from nineteen thirty three onwards, plenty of people disappearing, persecution. Yeah. And Hoffman Studios taking photographs of Jewish men being held down and shaved. And we don't know which photograph she saw and which she didn't. She's taking her own photographs, which are different, and she keeps photograph albums. And the annotations under the photos in there show that she has some level of interest. So she puts in photographs of the preparations for the invasion of Poland and what the Poles know and don't know. She says, um. Poland still does not want to negotiate, or, you know, Rip and Trop left for Moscow with a photograph. So she's she's not completely ignorant. No. And I think if we say, oh, she's a woman, she was taken out of that sphere, then that's just ridiculous sexist apologist stuff. It's, you know.

• 27:54Speaker 05

  She had, she wasn't there in the key meetings, absolutely. But she was definitely aware of the basic things that are going on through the war. And I think what we can't say is that she knew about the Holocaust. Okay. There's no evidence that she did. She could have been deliberately kept apart from that. Although there are occasions where, there's there's a famous occasion when one of the wives tackles Hitler and says, I've seen all these Dutch women being put on a train to go east. Where are they going? What's going on? This is bad. Yeah. And he just screams at this woman and says, who, what do you care? What do you care about Jewish women? What do you care? Shut your mouth. And she's no longer welcome. And and this stuff, all of this stuff would have been talked about. There's no doubt that she'd have heard, you know, hints. And gossip and some stories around it.

• 28:35Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 05

  More than that, I think it's hard, hard to say. I mean, they talked about the daily news. It's what's going on, but the extermination camps and cells were never discussed or mentioned in Hitler's presence. And that's mainly where she is.

• 28:46Kate Lister?

  Could she have left if she wanted to? She doesn't seem like she wanted to, to be completely honest. But would this have been a situation that if, you know, in a theoretical world? Yeah, left, I don't know.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  I think it would have been quite tricky for her to go across borders. No, I mean, she never, she never showed any signs of wanting to, quite the reverse, actually. So she, towards the end of the war, I mean, she, she doesn't ever go to Hitler's frontier output. She, she's never at the Wolf's Lair. The only women that go to these places are the secretaries who are actually doing work. And she doesn't ask to go there, but she does insist on going to the bunker at the end. And Hitler's kind of against this actually as a, as a policy. She insists on going and she was there for a while. And she actually, she takes shooting lessons outside the bunker, among other things, walks her little terrier dogs and all sorts. But she doesn't leave, even as the Red Army are coming in and Hitler saying, right, you should, you should hop it now. And she insists on remaining with him.

• 29:39Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 05

  So quite the reverse, really. She wants to be at the heart of it. And I think, you know, I think she has agency and I think it's really important. We're not talking about a childhood. Yes, she's younger and she meets him. But she's now a grown woman. She makes her decisions. She's aware of the political climate. She's aware of the antisemitism. It's not that she looks the other way. She doesn't think it's a problem. She doesn't need to look the other way. You know, she accepts this and I think she's got this idea that she is the great leader. I mean, she had hoped that after the war, after Germany's victory in the war, when the Third Reich has influence across Europe and the world, that the truth will come out, they will be married, she'll be recognised as this great force behind the scenes.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  And she'd even hoped to play herself in a film, a biopic of Hitler post-war. You know, she thought they would retire to Linz where he'd have his art collection and it would just be this wonderful. So she, she doesn't want to leave him. She thinks even if it goes wrong, I'd rather be with him right to the end, to keep this fairy tale fantasy going that she envisages her great role in.

• 30:42Kate Lister?

  So I think we can absolutely put to one side the idea that she was some kind of naive young moth drawn to the flame and all of this stuff. She was.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it can be all of these things, can't you? I think she started naive. She was certainly young at the beginning. She was drawn to the flame, absolutely. But she wasn't without agency. She wasn't outside of history. She's not some pretty thing with no knowledge. She may not have known about the Holocaust, but she certainly knew the discrimination, the antisemitism of Nazi racial policy and practice. You know, from thirty three onwards, then the Nuremberg laws, there is children being taken out of schools, that the literature, the newspapers, that, you know, she is not unaware of all of this. And actually, she is, she's helping Hitler because she is a bomb. And he, when the war starts going badly,

• 31:31Speaker 05

  she is there to calm him down and look after him and show some care and show some love and let him relax. And we know he didn't want to talk politics all the time. He wanted to relax in that kind of happy, family, loving environment. And so she probably sustained him and thereby the war. So, yeah, she played, she played a role.

• 31:50Kate Lister?

  They didn't get married for ages. And before we get to the bunker, and we will get there, this might be another speculative question, but I'll just see what you think of it. Do you think they were having sex if they weren't married?

• 32:01Speaker 05

  Oh, I knew this was going to come up. I mean, people have been speculating then, and they're still speculating. I don't think it's the most important question here, but I think that their sex life was probably quite normal. And there's, you know, there's, there's lots of chat about it from the time. So the head of the Nazi main publication, Max Admin, I mean, he said that they occasionally had intimate relations. But one of the secretaries, Krista Schroeder, who survived the war, thought the relationship was just a pretense. I mean, you can go either way. The valet, Heinz Lins, he recognized that they had connecting rooms at the Berghoff, so they could go separately because she's kept secret theoretically. And those rooms did connect. And Hoffman, the photographer that she worked for, he said that the relationship started platonic when, when he first introduced them,

• 32:44Speaker 05

  but took a definite shape many years later when Hitler indulged her in the usual way, he said. So Hitler's maid said the man was not. Strongly sex. So there's all sorts. Braun herself, there's this one occasion where she's giggling with her girlfriends over a nineteen thirty eight photograph of Chamberlain, when Chamberlain came to meet Hitler for discussions pre-war. And he's sitting on the sofa in Hitler's Munich flat. And she said to her friends, oh, if only he knew the going ons that that sofa has seen. So that suggests something. But I think probably they just had a fairly normal physical relationship. And certainly, Dr. Thea Morell, who was his last personal doctor, um, who was known for sort of, it was like the Harley Street doctor for STDs of Germany, you know.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  Um, and at the end, among the drugs he's giving him are aphrodisiac drugs, and they tend to be before we spend a night with Eva. So, yeah. I suspect they were having sex.

• 33:36Kate Lister?

  He was taking a lot of drugs, wasn't he, Hitler, especially towards the end? It's a miracle he could have had sex with anyone at all, really.

• 33:42Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, he did have a large number. I mean, he was being injected with vitamins, all sorts of things, actually. And, you know, he was obviously ill and shaking, so there was real medications in that bundle as well.

• 33:57Speaker 05

  I'll be back with Claire and Eva after this short break.

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• 35:22Kate Lister?

  So we need to kind of take this, I guess we've got to take it to its inevitable place, which is the bunker. Like, how did they end up there? And you've already said that Eva had the opportunity to to leave and didn't. But just talk us through, when did they get married in amongst all this?

• 35:40Speaker 05

  Okay, so they get married really at the very end. It's his throwing her a bone for her loyalty, sort of thing. Sorry, not literally. And so they get married just after midnight, 28th, 29th of April, in the bunker. So the year before, June before, in 44, her sister Gretel, her younger sister, who she was particularly close to, had got married to Fagelin, who was, you know, lower level in a in a group. And they had had this incredibly flamboyant wedding with, you know, fields, cut of their flowers to bring in, and so much rivers of champagne and dancing. And Eva was very keen. She saw it as a test run for her own wedding. She wanted this big, you know, all across the papers, everything.

• 36:25Speaker 05

  And this was her younger sister. She was given it a bit of an organizational go, actually roughly the same time as D-Day, so it all didn't go too well. But it was this huge event. And she she wanted that for her own. Of course, her wedding was very different because it's in the bunker. So that is under the ground, deep down there, 50 foot below ground. And it's in this, you know, encased in concrete in the earth. It's dank. They're under bombardment. So these thick walls, 18 inch thick walls are shaking, and the plaster is falling off them. And there's problems with the latrines being blocked. So the whole place stinks. And it's got the general BO anyhow of about 20 staff down there. So it's a pretty grim atmosphere. And they got problems with the damp and with diesel fuels to keep

• 37:08Speaker 05

  the generator going. And essentially, it's incredibly, intolerably claustrophobic. Hannah Wright Pilot, that I wrote about, she went down there just before they got married, and remembers the the building shaking, and she heard deep sobbing coming down the corridor. So this is not a joyous Event. And it's only when Hitler absolutely knows he's got nothing left to lose. I mean, God knows, had he have won the war, I don't know if he'd have married her or not. But he knows.

• 37:35Kate Lister?

  I don't think he would.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  Here he knows the end is coming. And so he, she has been completely loyal and stayed there to the end. So he says, it is my wish that she goes with me into death as my wife to avoid the shame of flight or surrender. What a joyful thing for your future husband to say. Um, so that's, that's the deal. And that's, you know, that's what she chose. So then they have this civil ceremony, of course. He has to certify that he's an Aryan under his own laws. So that's what he does first. Then they have the, the ceremony. She writes her name. She has to sign her new name, Eva Hitler, but she starts writing Braun. So in the document, you can see the B crossed out and then Hitler, she hadn't quite got her head around it. And then they have Goebbels and Bormann, they witness it. And then they have a small champagne reception because they're, they're well stocked down there. So they have some drinks.

• 38:22Kate Lister?

  But do they all know they're going to die at this point? They're the weirdest wedding ceremony ever.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  They don't all die. There are survivors. It is, it is grim as. So, yeah, one of them says it was a rather ghostly experience. So, you know, ghostly, of course, hints of the death that they must have all felt all around them. So, yeah, I mean, pretty grim actually. But I guess she was saying, thinking it's still my self sacrifice to such a level. I'm still with a great man. And they kill themselves the next day.

• 38:48Kate Lister?

  How do they do it? So I'm being very morbid now, but like, how did they, what was the?

• 38:53Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, it, it was in the afternoon. They had their own private quarters in there with a sofa. Um, they sat on the sofa next to each other. Hitler shot himself in the head and she bit onto a cyanide tablet. I mean, she told a friend that she wanted to be a beautiful corpse. So she didn't want to shoot herself and create some mess. She had put on her favorite dress, or at least Hitler's favorite dress, the ones you had down there. And then she, she sat on the sofa and she took this. And then she was worried about it. So they tested the cyanide on Blondie, Hitler's dog, Alsatian dog. Um, just before. So they knew it was going to work. So then she could, you know, I mean, she wasn't, she, she was beautiful for a second or two, I suppose. They, they then they, they dragged the bodies upstairs. They doused them with petrol in the garden around the back of the bunker.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  As the Red Army's approaching and they, they tried to cremate them there and then. And it's pretty gruesome. Do you want the gruesome?

• 39:44Kate Lister?

  I'm afraid I do, yes.

• 39:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, the chauffeur left an account, he survived, he got out then and he survived. He said that Hitler's untidy hair fluttered in the wind and Eva's bronze dark blue dress with white frills moved in the wind until finally drenched by the fuel. And other eyewitnesses said that as Hitler shriveled up and burnt, her corpse slowly moved into a sitting position in the heat of the flames. Pretty disgusting. Anyhow, there, yes, so could you say she's a victim then? Possibly, but if she is, she's a willing victim. She's not like one of the victims of the, the real victims of Nazism. She chose death on her own terms in her pretty dress, having drunk champagne and married the man she'd loved.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  You know, other people are dying very slowly during appalling, degrading labour, knowing that their families have been murdered, you know. She's, she's a willing victim at the very most, but I think she's on that scale somewhere, you know, victim perpetrator collaborator, certainly, she's on that, she's on the wrong side of that axis.

• 40:50Kate Lister?

  God, that's just, and I know that I would just speculate now, but it doesn't sound to me like he would have married her if the war had gone through, because, you know, there's an old expression within dating and it's that if they wanted to, they would. And it's sort of like, if the only way that he's married her is with this suicide pact, that's just.

• 41:08Speaker 05

  Well, it's hard to know, isn't it? I mean, did he love her? Was Hitler capable of love?

• 41:13Kate Lister?

  I was gonna ask you that.

• 41:14Speaker 05

  I think we do need to remember, he is a human being. And evil is not innate. It doesn't help us in any way to say, to other him from us. This is something we have to think about, what motivated him. You know, if we're gonna think lessons from history and learning them, let's, let's say he is a human being. So I think he certainly cared about her in the way that he could. So the reports of when, when she's bored and tetching, he's talking about something else, he'll pat her hand to comfort her. Um, certainly when, when she would be laid back, if she'd gone out for some sporting thing, or she'd gone out and there'd been a raid, he would be very concerned and make sure that, um, they were in touch with each other. He'd be very concerned until he heard from her. So he was agitated, he wanted to know she was okay.

• 41:54Speaker 05

  Um. He left quite early on, he wrote his first will and he made sure that she was left a significant pension so that she'd be all right if anything happened to him. And of course, after the most famous plot on him, the twentieth of July nineteen forty four bomb plot, the Valkyrie operation, um Klaus von Stauffenberg and and the gang. He sends her his trousers, which were all shredded from the force of the explosion, and apparently she nearly fainted. So they do have this bond. I mean, he didn't, he sent them to her because he wanted her to keep them for posterity to show how brave he was and all the rest of it. But there is a real bond between them. I think, did he love her? Depends how you define love. I mean. For me personally, if someone's gonna love me, they need to respect me. That is a fundamental part of it. I don't think he respected her. He didn't love her in that way.

• 42:37Speaker 05

  He loved her in the way of which he was capable, I think. I mean, he would constantly be saying, a woman gets absolutely nothing from me. I can't pay attention to any of that. He's using her, but he doesn't see women as equals, obviously. So he's not expecting that. He's, he loves her like a pretty doll, like a support, like a. A soothing balm at the end of the day, like a family atmosphere. She affirms to him his sense that he is a decent, good person. So, and he loves that, which is part of her package, an important part of it. And, you know, Spear said she was infinitely thoughtful of Hitler and a restful sort of girl, and he, he loves all of that. That's what he wants in a woman.

• 43:16Speaker 05

  So I think he did love her in that sense, but he would also tell people, he told Spear that a highly intelligent man should always choose a primitive and stupid woman. And he said that in front of her.

• 43:26Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 43:27Speaker 05

  So, is it love? Well, you know, it's as much love as I think he could show or was possible of showing within his mindset.

• 43:37Kate Lister?

  So as a final question then, does, does Eva have any kind of legacy? Is she just like. A weird sad story that happened? Did she have any kind of impact on Germany going forward, or is it just something everyone would rather forget?

• 43:52Speaker 05

  Not going forward, no. I think she is significant. It is worth our looking at her. I think she had minimal political impact. She had no military influence at all. But she did. Have a role of significance of value to Hitler and therefore of value to the Third Reich. Partly early on, she is helping Hoffman to form his public persona with her photography. And that is, that is something. But most significantly, I think it's her greatest influence was serving as a barn for Hitler, particularly when the war turned the worst for him. And he was deeply agitated. She's another drug, if you like, one of the cocktail. She calms him, helps him to rest and relax and recuperate his energies.

• 44:37Speaker 05

  And therefore keeps him going. And I think she did play a role in that. Beyond that, not much. Spear said Eva Braun will prove a great disappointment to historians. I mean, of course, they're all, they're all sexist anyhow, but I, I think that's because she wasn't particularly political and she probably wasn't even that bright. Not that that's the most important thing. And I think her story does tell us that. And I, I think what it says is that it reminds us that often in history, women are said, and we do it, we do it about Trump's wife as well. Is she kidnapped? Let's rescue her. Like, these women had no agency, no authority of themselves. And they did. This is an adult woman who made choices. She chose to remain with Hitler. She chose to be with him.

• 45:22Speaker 05

  She knew what his worldview was. She knew about his discrimination, his antisemitism. Um. She knew about the violence on the streets on his watch. She knew about the war. She might not have known about the Holocaust and she probably didn't know all the finer details, but basically she shared his worldview. She was a part of that. And I think, you know, obedience, support like that is an enabling requirement for dictators. And she therefore played a role in sustaining and supporting the Third Reich. And that is significant.

• 45:55Kate Lister?

  Claire, you have been fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much. You really fleshed out this woman and where she fitted into Hitler and the, the Third Reich. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 46:08Speaker 05

  I have a website, www.claremullie.com, no I in Claire. Um. So yeah, please come and say hello on all the socials, people.

• 46:14Kate Lister?

  Fabulous. Thank you so much. You've been fascinating.

• 46:18Speaker 05

  It's been great, Kate. Really enjoyed talking with you.

• 46:25Kate Lister?

  Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Claire for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. We've got episodes on the private life of Lewis Carroll, and the third episode in our limited series about Stalin's wife, all coming your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheet, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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