EVA BRAUN

A German historian coaxes from history’s shadows the woman who for 14 years was the companion, lover and, near the end, wife of Adolf Hitler.

Görtemaker doesn’t spend much time with the childhood of Eva Anna Paula Braun (1912–1945), who began her life in middle-class obscurity and ended it in Hitler’s Berlin bunker as the Soviet army swept through the city. Not much is known about her girlhood, but as a teenager she went to work in the Munich photography studio of the Nazis’ official photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. Braun probably began as a shop clerk, then gradually learned the trade and became an active amateur. In 1929, it was through Hoffmann that she met Hitler, whose Munich background, dramatic rise and fall Görtemaker swiftly chronicles—only rarely allowing the larger story to eclipse the smaller one. Because of the lack of documentation, the author often has to qualify with words like “probably” and “likely,” but she is a serious critic of others who have told Braun’s story and manages to keep out even a dash of compassion for the young woman who vigorously supported her lover, accepted and shared his vicious anti-Semitism, believed in the imperialist goals of the Reich and partied hard while the party lasted. Görtemaker shows how Hitler, who wished to portray himself as the selfless image of the Reich, a man with no low animal needs, kept Braun well hidden, rarely appearing with her in public (never alone) or allowing her to travel with him or his inner circle. Braun emerges as bright but vapid, energetic but soulless. As thorough and clear a look of a monster’s lover as we are likely to get.