In the news: Eva Braun’s home movies

Eva Braun’s birthday was a day or so ago, 6 February (1912) and, last week, an article about her and the movies she made appeared in the Guardian and Observer (Robert McCrum and Taylor Downing, 27 January 2013).

Eva and Adolf Hitler ‘discovered each other’ through the official Nazi photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. She was Hoffmann’s assistant in his shop in Munich, and (like much of the female population of Germany) she immediately fell for Hitler. She also developed a lifelong interest in photography—both still photos and movies. Her pictures record the Nazi elite at play in the Fuehrer’s Berghof home in Bavaria. (In her more fanciful moments, she saw herself as a movie star, akin to the ones in Hollywood).

In their newspaper article, McCrum and Downing recount how the American army seized Eva’s 16mm home movies after the war had ended. They were lost, but were eventually unearthed in a US National Archives repository in Maryland by film historian Lutz Becker.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Eva Braun—the woman who Hitler hid from  the world but married the day before their joint suicide—continues to fascinate the world 70 years later. Two recent biographies have appeared, one by Angela Lambert (2006) and the other by Heike B. Görtemaker (2011). Both relate the simple bourgeois life that Eva and Hitler spent together, mostly at their Berghof home in the mountains of Bavaria, and partly at the Chancellery in Berlin. Both books contain numerous pictures, some of which were taken by Hoffmann or were discovered in Eva’s photo album.