Eva Braun had been at Hitler’s side since 1929, when she worked as an assistant to the Nazi photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. She was twenty-three years younger than the Führer, who had a known weakness for young women. Her path into his inner circle was not smooth. After Hitler’s half-niece Geli Raubal died in 1931 in what was ruled a suicide, Eva’s own attempt to shoot herself with her father’s pistol the following year drew Hitler’s full attention.
By the end of 1932, they were lovers. A second suicide attempt in May 1935, this time with sleeping pills, came after she felt neglected. Hitler responded by giving her an apartment in Munich, which she shared with her sister Gretl, and later a villa in Bogenhausen. From then on, she divided her time between Munich and the Berghof.
Eva’s family reflected the tensions of the Nazi world. Her father, Friedrich, was a schoolteacher and reserve army officer; her mother, Franziska, had worked as a seamstress before marriage. Her older sister Ilse worked first as an assistant to a Jewish surgeon and later in Albert Speer’s architectural office in Berlin. Ilse kept her distance from politics and generally stayed away from Obersalzberg, dying childless in Munich in 1979.
Gretl, the youngest, was the opposite. She worked for Hoffmann as well, was an enthusiastic photographer, and threw herself into the glamorous life that Eva’s relationship with Hitler made possible, flirting with officers and enjoying the parties. Her first serious romance was with Fritz Darges, an SS adjutant who fought in France and Russia. Despite Hitler’s pressure, Darges refused to marry Gretl, and the relationship ended badly.
The fallout came on 18 July 1944, two days before the famous bomb plot at the Wolf’s Lair. During a military conference, a fly buzzed around the room and landed on Hitler’s shoulder. Annoyed, Hitler told Darges to shoo it away. Darges, perhaps joking, replied that since it was a fly, that was a matter for the Air Force, and suggested that Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Colonel Nicolaus von Below, should handle it.
Hitler immediately dismissed Darges and sent him to a combat post on the Eastern Front. The real cause may have been Darges’s refusal to marry Gretl Braun. Darges survived the war and died in 2009 at the age of ninety-six. Gretl next became involved with Walther Hewel, an old Nazi and popular member of Hitler’s inner circle.
Hewel was a diplomat under Joachim von Ribbentrop and served as Ribbentrop’s liaison at the Führer’s headquarters. He was around forty, unmarried, and the life of the party, and Hitler wanted him settled down. Hewel first wanted to marry Sigrid von Laffert, a match Hitler approved, but she married a German aristocrat serving in Madrid instead. Despite Hitler’s urging, Hewel showed little interest in marrying Gretl.
According to a contemporary report, Hitler told Hewel he would make him ambassador to Rome if he married her. Hewel married someone else, prompting Hitler to expel him from his circle before later forgiving him. Hewel stayed with Hitler until the end in Berlin. After Hitler’s suicide on 30 April 1945, Hewel joined a group trying to break out of the bunker but failed to escape the ruined city.
Surrounded by Red Army soldiers at a brewery on 2 May, he shot himself. Gretl then fell for Hermann Fegelein, an SS general who served as Heinrich Himmler’s liaison officer at Hitler’s headquarters. Fegelein came from a cavalry background, rising from pre-war jockey to high rank under the Nazis. During the invasion of Poland in 1939, his regiment participated in the massacre of 1,700 civilians in the Kampinos Forest.
He was formally reprimanded for looting, having shipped stolen goods from Poland to the SS Cavalry School, including trucks, a Mercedes-Benz, a Škoda cabriolet, food, coffee, clothing, and expensive furs. Himmler shielded him from prosecution. During the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Fegelein’s regiment fought extensively and was also tasked with hunting and killing Jews, partisans, and undesirables in Belarus. His unit killed 13,788 Jews and another 3,500 men categorized as partisans.
After being wounded by a sniper in December 1941, he took command of the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer on the Eastern Front. Wounded again in October 1943, he was appointed Himmler’s SS liaison at Hitler’s court. Fegelein was popular, arrogant, handsome, and decorated with the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves. He was blunt and direct, and he became close to Martin Bormann, joining his regular drinking sessions.
Eva Braun noticed him too, confiding to a friend that she had fallen in love with him, but she was too shrewd to challenge Hitler. Fegelein, who always flirted with the Braun sisters, was careful to maintain the right relationship with the Führer. Before long, he was involved with Gretl. A womanizer, he cheated on Gretl before and after the wedding and even tried to seduce Hitler’s female secretaries.
Many in Hitler’s circle disliked the arrogant SS general; Albert Speer called him one of the most repulsive people in Hitler’s entourage. Fegelein performed his duties well and showed deep respect for Hitler, but he did not hide that he felt overqualified for the job and was bored by it. Despite all this, Fegelein decided to marry Gretl, almost certainly because it placed him in an unrivaled position of power and influence right beside the Führer. He was a pragmatist with a strong survival instinct.
The wedding on 3 June 1944 was the biggest social event in the inner circle’s calendar. Eva planned it meticulously. The ceremony took place in the Marble Hall of Mirabell Palace in Salzburg, conducted not as a Christian rite but in a pagan style favored by senior SS officers. Himmler himself officiated, and Martin Bormann was among the witnesses.
The couple then drove to the Berghof to pay respects to Hitler, followed by a reception in the Great Hall with its famous picture window overlooking the valley and mountains. Afterward, the party, minus Hitler, took a limousine driven by Bormann to the mountain and rode Hitler’s luxurious elevator up to the Eagle’s Nest, where they celebrated for three days. The party ended abruptly on 6 June 1944, when word arrived that the Allies had landed in Normandy. Hitler left the Berghof on 14 July for the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia and never returned.
His staff, including Fegelein, went with him. Six days later, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in the conference room at the Wolf’s Lair. Hitler survived by chance. Fegelein was present at the explosion and suffered a minor wound to his left thigh.
As the regime collapsed, Fegelein remained on Hitler’s staff, moving between Führer headquarters and rarely seeing his pregnant wife. By January 1945, after the failure of the Ardennes offensive and the massive Soviet winter attack in the east, Hitler moved to his final headquarters in Berlin. On 19 January, Gretl arrived at the Reich Chancellery with Eva Braun. To keep the women safe from the besieged city, Hitler sent them to Berchtesgaden on 9 February, but Eva returned to stay with Hitler, and Gretl went back to Obersalzberg.
By late April 1945, with Soviet troops encircling Berlin, Fegelein’s situation became desperate. Trapped in the Führerbunker with a mentally unstable Hitler who had ruled out any escape from the capital, he decided to save himself. On 27 April, three days before Hitler’s suicide, Fegelein tried to flee Berlin without permission. When Hitler called for him during a conference, Fegelein was nowhere to be found in the bunker or the Reich Chancellery.
Hitler’s bodyguards went to an apartment in the city and found the general drunk in bed with his mistress. The young woman escaped through the bathroom window, but Fegelein was arrested and brought back to the bunker, along with a suitcase full of cash, civilian clothes, and false identity papers. Eva Braun pleaded for him, asking Hitler to forgive the father of her sister’s unborn child. Hitler apparently did forgive him, at least for the moment.
The next evening, 28 April, news arrived that Himmler had been secretly negotiating peace with the Western Allies. Hitler flew into a rage and ordered Himmler’s arrest. Himmler was safely in northern Germany, but Hitler could exact revenge on Fegelein, Himmler’s SS liaison, who was believed to be complicit in his boss’s betrayal. Fegelein was brought before a hastily convened court-martial in the bunker, convicted of desertion, and sentenced to death.
His medals and decorations were stripped from his uniform, his shoulder boards were torn off, and Hitler’s SS bodyguards dragged him upstairs in disgrace. In the garden of the Reich Chancellery, amid Soviet shelling, an SS officer shot him in the neck. His body was kicked into a shell crater and hastily covered with dirt and debris. The day after Fegelein’s execution, 29 April 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun were married in a small ceremony in the bunker.
The following afternoon, both took their own lives. On 5 May 1945, Gretl Fegelein gave birth to a daughter in Obersalzberg, named Eva in memory of her sister. Gretl later married a businessman named Kurt Berlinghof in 1954 and lived quietly in Munich. Her daughter Eva died by suicide in 1975 after her boyfriend was killed in a car accident.
Gretl Berlinghof died in Steingaden, Bavaria, in October 1987 at the age of seventy-two.