I have long had an interest in Eva Braun, but have never made the considerable investment in her color home movies that are available over the Internet. Occasionally, snippets, usually taken on the Berghof’s terrace above Berchtesgaden, pop up on PBS. Eva rarely made black-and-white photos or movies after she discovered the expensive Agfa color film. She comes across, pretty much, in my eye, as the ‘girl next door.’
I wonder how the Allies would have treated her, had she survived the war and been taken into custody? How much guilt could they have ascribed to the girl, who, barely out of the convent, had become Hitler’s mistress? Would she have been charged with being an active accomplice, or at the least been deemed guilty for having profited from her relationship?
Eva was definitely no Madame la Pompadour, although she wasn’t the nitwit her enemies, particularly Martin Bormann, said she was. She’s undoubtedly better known today than she was during her lifetime—most ordinary Germans didn’t know of her existence and her name probably never cropped up in newspapers of either side.
I have done quite a bit of reading about her and have never come to any decision concerning her relationship with Hitler. Was it some sort of bizarre sexual affair, even platonic, or just boringly heterosexual? Since the participants are long gone, we’ll never know what happened when those bedroom doors closed.
I haven’t done much research on the other top Nazis’ wives. I do know that Emmy Göring was interned for a few months. I always thought Frau Göring virulent anti-Semitic, but changed my mind when I read she wasn’t—in fact, at her insistence, the Reichsmarschall even secured safe passage for some Jews, not many, perhaps, out of the Reich.
For the most part, I am wondering, also, how much influence wives exercised over their husbands? The social-climbing Anna Elisabeth von Ribbentrop dominated her husband, but after the war got underway, the foreign minister’s influence over Hitler waned anyway.
Other than these ladies, I haven’t done much checking. I do know, though, as an afterthought, that Leni Refienstahl was imprisoned for nearly four years after the war—although, of course, she wasn’t married to anyone who committed war crimes. I guess the Allies ascribed her guilt to her Führer-glorifying films.
