Eva Braun

immediately and was dead on the spot. The Berchtesgaden district court later concluded that “the poison was tested out on the dog with a view to Eva Hitler’s death by poison, which had already been decided on.”⁸⁵ By now there was no longer a telephone connection between the bunker and the outside world. On April 30, the Soviet army reached the Reichstag grounds.⁸⁶ Soviet soldiers were expected to force their way into the “Fuhrer bunker” at any moment. That afternoon, between three and four o’clock, Hitler and Eva Braun died by their own hands. While she bit into a cyanide capsule and died before his eyes, he took a poison capsule into his mouth and simultaneously shot himself in the right temple.⁸⁷ Their bodies were then taken out to the Chancellery garden, doused in gasoline, and set on fire. The remains were buried that evening in a bomb crater in the garden.

^{The destroyed Old Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse, March 1945 (Illustration Credit 11.2)}

12. AFTER DEATH

Countless legends sprang up after the death of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. One reason for this is the fact that the direct witnesses to the burning of the bodies who survived the inferno in Berlin gave contradictory statements later about the exact circumstances of the double suicide. Another reason is that the Soviet Union concealed from its Western allies and the rest of the world, for years, the fact that Soviet troops had found the bodies of Hitler, Braun, and the Goebbels family in early May. Instead of passing the information along, Joseph Stalin, in a conversation with the American special envoy Harry Hopkins on May 26, 1945, spread the rumor that Hitler and Bormann were still alive and hidden abroad, possibly in Japan. It was known to Soviet intelligence, Stalin claimed, “that the Germans had three or four large submarines that traveled back and forth between Japan and Germany.” He had “ordered Soviet reconnaissance to locate these submarines, but for now they had not been found.” Stalin was trying to exploit the death of Hitler and his wife to suggest to the Western powers that their common struggle was not yet over and had to be continued in the war against Japan. He clearly struck a nerve with the Americans, as Hopkins’s reply reveals: he immediately told Stalin, according to the notes of the translator, Vladimir Nikolayevich Pavlov, that “Hitler absolutely must be found and put to death.”¹

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 cafe 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 Gunsche, who had just returned from being Soviet prisoners of war; Harri Mengershausen, a former detective in the Reichssicherheitsdienst (the German secret police); and Kathe 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

^{A wooden chest with human remains, like the one that held Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s remains until their ashes were burned again and scattered in a river near Magdeburg on April 5, 1970 (Illustration Credit 12.1)}

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 “Fuhrer” 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 “Fuhrer,” 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, Goring, 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