Eva Braun
Eva Anna Paula Hitler (née Braun; b. 6 February 1912 in München; d. 30 April 1945 in Berlin) was a German photographer and longtime companion as well as the later wife of Adolf Hitler.
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Life
Eva was from a Bavarian family, the second daughter of schoolteacher Otto Wilhelm Friedrich „Fritz“ Braun (1879–1964) and Franziska „Fanny“ Katharina, née Kronberger (1885–1976). At age 17 she took a job as a lab assistant and photographer's model for Heinrich Hoffmann. Hoffmann later became the official photographer for Hitler's National Socialist German Worker's Party.
It was at Hoffmann's studio where Eva Braun met Hitler in 1929. Clearly infatuated by Hitler, Eva would slip letters into his pocket. Gradually their relationship developed but would remain secret to others except for family members and Hitler's closest associates.
Eva Braun was a beautiful and intelligent woman, she liked sports and animals and intellectually was a real companion for Hitler, with whom he could well discuss everyday matters. Eva--as a photographer--prepared films of everyday life with Hitler in Berghof and elsewhere. In the night from the 28th to the 29th April 1945, shortly after 1 o'clock a.m., one day before their suicide, Eva Braun married her great love Adolf Hitler.
Death
As the war drew to a close, Eva Braun chose to travel to Berlin to join Hitler in his bunker underneath the Reichskanzlei. As the invading Red Army approached Berlin, Hitler told Eva to leave on the last plane out of Berlin piloted by famed female war ace Hanna Reitsch. Eva refused and chose to die alongside her husband. In her last letter to her sister Margarete Berta „Gretl“ (1915–1987),[1] at the time married to SS-Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, she wrote:
- "I must write you these words so that you will not feel sad over our end here in the shelter. It is rather we who are filled with sorrow because it is your fate to live on into the chaos that will follow. For myself, I am glad to die here; glad to be at the side of the Führer; foremost of all, glad that the horror now to come is spared me. What could life still give me? It has already been perfect. It has already given me its best and its fullest. Why should I go on living? This is the time to die; the right time. With the Führer I have had everything. To die now, beside him, completes my happiness. Live on well and as happily as you can. Shed no tears nor be regretful over our deaths. It is the perfect and proper ending. None of us would change it now. It is the right end for a German woman."[2]
In his memoirs, Heinz Linge stated that Hitler, two days before his suicide on 30 April with Eva Hitler, had confided his suicide plan and asked Linge to have their bodies wrapped in blankets and taken up to the garden to be cremated. On 2 May 1945, the badly burned remains of Hitler, Eva, and two dogs (thought to be Blondi and her offspring Wulf) were discovered in a shell crater by a unit of SMERSH. On 5 May 1945, they secretly removed the remains.
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