Eva Braun Born: Hitler's Hidden Companion

Eva Braun spent over a decade as Adolf Hitler's secret companion, kept almost entirely hidden from the German public and the world. Born on February 6, 1912, in Munich, she was working as an assistant in the photography studio of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler's personal photographer, when she met Hitler in 1929. She was 17; he was 40. The relationship developed slowly and was conducted with extreme secrecy. Hitler believed a partner would undermine his political image as a man wholly devoted to Germany, and Braun was systematically excluded from public events and official functions. She attempted suicide at least twice during the early years of the relationship, apparently driven by Hitler's neglect and her isolation. She lived at the Berghof, Hitler's mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps, where she functioned as a hostess for private gatherings but disappeared whenever important political figures arrived. She was an avid amateur photographer and filmmaker, and her color home movies provide some of the only informal visual documentation of Hitler's inner circle. By the final months of the war, she insisted on joining Hitler in the Berlin bunker despite his attempts to send her to safety. Their marriage took place in a brief civil ceremony in the bunker on April 29, 1945, with Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann as witnesses. She signed the marriage register as "Eva Hitler, née Braun." The next day, April 30, they both committed suicide. She took cyanide; he shot himself. Their bodies were carried to the garden above the bunker and burned. She was 33. Her story reveals the deeply insular nature of the Nazi inner circle and the personal costs of proximity to absolute power.