room.

Was that not the turn of fortune we awaited so

anxiously? The next morning Krosigk
telephoned Goebbels with his “congratulations”— he affirms
it proudly in his diary—and,as if this were not
enough, followed it witha letter in whichhe hailed
Roosevelt’s death, he says, as “a divine
judgment … a gift from God.”
In this atmosphere of a lunatic
asylum, with cabinet ministers long in power and
educated in Europe’s ancient universities, as
Krosigk and Goebbels were, grasping at the readings
of the stars and rejoicing amidst the flames of
the burning capital in the deathof the American
President as a sure sign that the Almighty would
now rescue the Third Reichat the eleventh hour from
impending catastrophe, the last act in Berlinwas played
out to its final curtain. Eva Braun had arrived
in Berlinto join Hitler on April 15. Very few Germans
knew of her existence and even fewer of her relationshipto
Adolf Hitler. For more than twelve years she had been
his mistress. Now in April she had come, as Trevor-
Roper says, for her wedding and her ceremonial death.
She is interesting for her role in the last chapter of
this narrative but not interesting in herself; she was
not a Pompadour or a Lola Montez. *
Hitler, although he was undoubtedly extremely fond of
her and foundrelaxation in her unobtrusive company, had
always kept her out of sight, refusing to allow her
to come to his various headquarters, where he
spent almost all of his time during the war years,
and rarelypermitting her even to come to Berlin. She
remained immured at the Berghof on the
Obersalzberg, passing her time in swimming and skiing,
in reading cheap novels and seeing trashy
films, in dancing (which Hitler disapproved of) and
endlessly grooming herself, pining away for her
 absent loved one. “She was,” says Erich Kempka, the
Fuehrer’s chauffeur, “the unhappiest woman in Germany.
She spent most of her life waiting for Hitler.”8 Field
Marshal Keiteldescribed her appearance during an
interrogation at Nuremberg. She was very slender,
elegant appearance, quite nice legs—one could see that
—reticent and retiring and a very, very nice person, dark
blond. She stood very much in the background and one
saw her very rarely.9

The daughter of lower-middle-class Bavarian parents, who

at first strenuously opposed her illicit relation with
Hitler, even though he was the dictator, she had
been employed in the Munich photographshop of Heinrich
Hoffmann, who introduced her to the Fuehrer. This was
a year or two after the suicide of Geli Raubal,
the niece of Hitler, for whom, as we have seen,
he had the one great passionate love of his life. Eva
Braun too, it seems, was often driven to
despair by her lover, though not for the same reasons
as Geli Raubal. Eva, though installed in a suite in
Hitler’s Alpine villa, couldn’t endure the long
separations when he was away and twice tried to kill
herself in the early years of their friendship. But
gradually she accepted her frustrating and ambiguous role
— acknowledgedneither as wife nor as mistress—content
to be sole woman companion of the great man and
making the most of their rare moments together.
She was now determined to sharehis end. Like Dr. and Frau
Goebbels, she had no desire to live in a
Germany without Adolf Hitler. “It would not be
fit to live in for a true German,” she told Hanna
Reitsch, the famed German woman test pilot, in
the shelter just before the end.10 Though Eva
Braun had a birdlike mind and made no intellectual
impression on Hitler at all—perhaps this is one
reason he preferred her company to that of
intelligent women—it is obvious that his influence on
her, as on so many others, was total.