Albert Speer
is said to have once opined that generations of future historians would be “disappointed”
by Eva Braun. Hitler’s wife, he implied,
was a nobody: someone who – for all her proximity to great events – had exerted
no influence, for good or ill, upon them.
I was
reminded of this comment when I finally got around to reading Beate Görtemaker’s
biography of Eva Braun last week: “Eva Braun: Life with Hitler”, which was
first published a couple of years ago.
Görtemaker touted her biography as the first serious study of Braun’s
short life (she died aged 33) and in this respect she is absolutely
correct. Previous studies by Angela
Lambert and US journalist Nerin Gun cannot boast the integrity and the rigorous
approach of Görtemaker’s. So, in that
respect, the book is most certainly to be welcomed.
The book tells
the story of Braun’s life well: her rise from middle-class Munich shop girl to Hitler’s mistress, her attempted suicides, her shadowy role as the ‘lady of
the house’ at the Berghof above Berchtesgaden and her sordid death at Hitler’s
side in the Reich Chancellery bunker in Berlin in 1945. Görtemaker appears as an assiduous researcher,
who is evidently keen to submit existing accounts and persistent myths to vital, critical scrutiny.
However, the
book makes some rather grander claims: most notably that Braun was not the
passive, “see no evil – hear no evil” character that history has thus-far perceived.
This is an interesting suggestion, and
Görtemaker does well to analyse the various memoir accounts of those in Hitler’s
entourage – such as his secretary Christa Schroeder and his architect Albert Speer
– in trying to prove this point. Many of
those accounts, like Speer’s, are patently self-serving, dissembling and
self-exculpatory – not least in claiming that life in the Third Reich’s inner
circle was an interminable round of boring vegetarian lunches where no political matters were
ever discussed.
Yet, though
the point about self-serving memoirs is well-made, Görtemaker fails to convince
with her wider point about Braun’s possible knowledge of and involvement in
Nazi politics. Essentially, though it is
well-written and engaging, the book is feeding off scraps. Due to Hitler’s order at the end of his life
that all his personal correspondence was to be destroyed, the evidential base
for Görtemaker’s study is extremely thin.
Consequently, she is forced to rely far too much on speculation and
guesswork, and as a result the book reads – at times – like a retreaded brief history
of the Third Reich with a somewhat unconvincing ‘Eva Braun twist’.
This is a
shame, but is perhaps inevitable given the lack of available material. Despite the book’s shortcomings, this is
still the best and most serious biography of Eva Braun that is available. Yet, that said, it is hard to disagree with
Speer’s alleged comment – Eva Braun does appear
as a disappointment to history.
© Roger Moorhouse
2013
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