Even at the Potsdam Conference, which took place from July 17 to August 2, 1945, in Cecilienhof Palace, Stalin flatly denied to Truman and Churchill knowing anything about Hitler’s whereabouts.2 The Americans were working to shed light on the matter by having everyone who had been close to Hitler questioned by their secret service, including Eva Braun’s family and friends. But an undercover agent—apparently disguised as a member of the SS—who tracked down Gretl Braun and Herta Schneider on the evening of September 23, 1945, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, learned hardly anything from them about the fate of Eva Braun and Hitler. Gretl Braun only repeated various rumors, and finally explained that she did not think it was impossible that Hitler, her sister, and Hermann Fegelein had left Berlin at the last moment.3
None of them suspected that the charred remains of Hitler and Eva Braun had been in the Soviets’ hands for months. The Red Army had learned of Hitler’s suicide as early as April 30, from General Krebs, Hitler’s closest military adviser at the end, and had immediately informed Stalin.4 Additional members of Hitler’s staff and employees of the Reich Chancellery were quickly discovered among the prisoners of war and questioned about Hitler’s final days. Soviet officers scoured Hitler’s air-raid bunker under the garden of the Chancellery, where they found the dead bodies of the six Goebbels children. They discovered the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels in front of the bunker entrance on May 2, and Hitler’s and Braun’s bodies on May 5. A few days later, an autopsy was performed in the Russian Surgical Army Field Hospital #496 in Berlin-Buch, on the orders of the Soviet secret service, SMERSH counterpropaganda division, and eventually, in February 1946, the bodies were buried at a military site in Magdeburg.5
In the West, on the other hand, countless rumors and speculations circulated for years about the Nazi leader’s whereabouts. An anonymous letter sent to the American general Dwight D. Eisenhower on November 22, 1948, for example, said that Hitler was living under a false name, together with Eva Braun and Martin Bormann, as the owner of a café in Amsterdam. The U.S. secret service took all such reports extremely seriously and investigated them thoroughly.6 Former members of Hitler’s staff, including Erich Kempka, were also arrested and questioned in the Western occupation zones directly after the end of the war, and they reported Hitler’s death and the burning of the bodies, but there was no material evidence to prove these claims.
In 1952, the district court in Berchtesgaden launched “legal proceedings to establish the death and time of death of Adolf Hitler.” During the course of the investigation, “all persons still living from Hitler’s environment in the last days in Berlin”—forty-two witnesses in total—were interrogated.7 Among them were his valet, Heinz Linge, and his personal adjutant, Otto Günsche, who had just returned from being Soviet prisoners of war; Harri Mengershausen, a former detective in the Reichssicherheitsdienst (the German secret police); and Käthe Heusermann, who was the last person to work at the dental clinic in the Reich Chancellery and was the assistant to Hitler’s dentist in Berlin, Prof. Dr. Hugo Blaschke.8 In its final report on August 1, 1956, the court concluded that there was “neither concrete evidence” nor any “finding of fact arising” immediately after the “event in the vicinity of the deed,” but “merely the statements of numerous persons.” Nonetheless, since Hitler’s personal dentist, Dr. Blaschke, and his assistant Heusermann “had been shown Adolf Hitler’s complete lower jaw and bridge of the upper jaw as well as the artificial bridge from Eva Braun’s lower jaw by Russian officers, repeatedly and in various places,” and since both Blaschke and Heusermann had “recognized them as coming from Adolf and Eva Hitler without any doubt,” “decisive proof” for the identification had been supplied from the Russian side.9 Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were therefore officially declared dead in West Germany, in 1956 and 1957 respectively. Thirteen years later, on April 5, 1970, the KGB burned their remains again and scattered their ashes in a river near Magdeburg, in what was then East Germany.10
CONCLUSION
Due to her life and death with Hitler, Eva Braun is forever tied to the National Socialist regime that, driven by radical anti-Semitism and marked by utter contempt for humanity, brought about, in Ian Kershaw’s words, “the steepest descent in civilized values known in modern times.” Therefore Eva Braun remains a public figure and is present in the media to this day. That is what she wanted, and why she single-mindedly worked toward a joint death with her “Führer” when the Nazi state’s downfall and catastrophic defeat in the war were assured. She took her own life with the notion that she died a “hero’s death.”1
In the fourteen years of her intimate relationship with Hitler, Eva Braun developed from an ordinary girl far from the center of power, from a lower-middle-class family whose father believed “to the end” in the “Führer,” into a capricious, uncompromising champion of absolute loyalty to the dictator.2 It is true that she did not belong to the NSDAP, but this fact does not mean that she rejected the Nazi state or was opposed to it in any way. On the contrary: her life, at least as much as those of everyone else around Hitler, was shaped by his worldview, his charismatic attraction (however difficult it may be to explain what that consisted in), and the extent of his power. He, in turn, recognized in her someone from a similar background, and with a similar education, outside of traditional elites, who was more ready than any of his other fanatical supporters to live her life on his terms.
Eva Braun’s position in Hitler’s innermost circle was thus unassailable, by 1935 at the latest. Many of the people who tried to get close to Hitler, including Speer, Göring, and Goebbels, thus found it necessary to pay court to her as well. They even had to be nice to her dog, who crawled “unnoticed and abandoned” through the rubble of the Berghof after the death of his mistress. When Eva Braun was still there, “everyone had been nice to the spoiled, vicious animal,” Christa Schroeder later recalled.3
In any case, Eva Braun’s life was decidedly different from the image of the woman’s world as presented by National Socialist propaganda. In this, Hitler’s girlfriend was like most of the wives of high-ranking Nazi politicians. She led a privileged existence, with trips, expensive clothes, and occasional professional activities in the service of the NSDAP, in her case working for Hitler’s personal photographer and delivering supposedly private pictures of the “Führer” and his life at the Berghof to him. For that reason alone, she cannot be seen as someone with no involvement in the regime, an entirely apolitical young woman, as Albert Speer among others later claimed. Her collaboration, within the scope of what was possible for her, is unmistakable, and she clearly acted without any sense of guilt. Furthermore, Eva Braun was neither a housewife nor a mother, and it is extremely unlikely that she wanted to be. Precisely for that reason, she fit the needs of a man twenty-three years older than she, afraid of commitment and with eccentric habits. Since her existence so blatantly contradicted the officially propagated “Führer image,” Eva Braun was not allowed to appear in public—just as Hitler’s other inappropriate proclivities were kept largely hidden, such as his being a teetotaler, a vegetarian, a nonsmoker, that he did not drink coffee, that he popped an enormous number of pills, especially before the war, and that, like his girlfriend, he was obsessed with personal cleanliness.