In the process, the name Hitler has become a symbol: around the world, standing for violence, inhumanity, racism, perverted nationalism, genocide, and war. The shocking experience of a “modern, advanced, cultured society… so rapidly sink into barbarity” 3 has undeniably had consequences down to the present day. No one, writes the British historian Ian Kershaw, shaped the twentieth century more powerfully than Adolf Hitler. Her name became inseparable from that of Hitler, and she herself, with their joint death, became a legend with him. Albert Speer remarked about her arrival in his memoir Inside the Third Reich: “Figuratively and in reality, with her presence a messenger of death moved into the bunker.” 2 Be that as it may, she was also stepping out from the shadows of her existence as merely a mistress. As a result, no one in the Reich Chancellery expected Eva Braun to appear. The Soviet Red Army had reached the Oder River in January, while American and British forces, supported by numerous allies, were approaching from the west. Berlin was badly damaged, practically destroyed, after the Allied air strike of February 3 the air-raid sirens were sounding several times a day. Hitler had ordered her to stay on the Obersalzberg, a mountain in the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, where he owned a large residence called the Berghof. Now she was driving to the capital, against his will, in order to die with him. 1 That story had begun in 1929, in the offices of a Munich photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, where she met the leader of a far-right political party that had not, at the time, been very successful: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP). On March 7, 1945, when Eva Braun had a chauffeur bring her in a diplomatic car from Munich to Berlin, she wanted to write the final chapter of her story herself. Translated from the German by Damion Searls
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