On April 20, 1933, Adolf Hitler had been chancellor of Germany for less than four months. He was weeks away from his 44th birthday, and as was his custom he came out of his Bavarian residence near Berchtesgaden to greet the well-wishers and admirers gathered at the security gates.
The house would be rebuilt two years later into the famous Berghof, and security around the property would be tightened considerably. For now, public access to Hitler was much easier.
On that day, a little blonde-haired girl caught the Führer's eye. Her mother told Hitler that it was also her daughter's sixth birthday. Hitler was evidently taken with both the coincidence and the child's pleasing features, and he invited mother and daughter back to his house.
There, Hitler and the girl were photographed together by his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. So began a strange friendship between the dictator and the little girl that would last until 1938.
It was a relationship that troubled Hitler's closest advisers, because the girl was in fact of Jewish descent. She would often be referred to as the Führer's child until Hitler was forced to end the friendship.
Hitler was often photographed and filmed talking to young children. Eva Braun captured many such encounters with a home cine camera. The children were mainly the sons and daughters of high Nazi officials, particularly those of Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels, along with the children of his household staff.
But the little girl he befriended on her sixth birthday on April 20, 1933, was neither. She was born Bernile Nienau in 1926. Her father was Dr. Bernhard Nienau, a Dortmund physician who died shortly after his daughter's birth. Her mother was Karolina, a nurse.
Karolina had moved to Munich in 1928, bringing her mother with her. This is where the story becomes rather strange. Karolina's mother, either Voit, was a retired teacher. She was a Roman Catholic but had been born Jewish, her maiden name being Morgenstern.
Under the Nazi racial laws that would come into effect in 1935, Judaism was defined as a race rather than a religion. Little Bernile, as she was nicknamed, would have been considered racially impure because her grandmother had been born a Jew.
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws issued complex classifications concerning the percentage of Jewishness and then decided who was a German citizen and who was an outsider liable to exclusion or even persecution. Under these rules, Bernile's grandmother, born a Jew of Jewish parents, would be classified as a Jew and therefore deprived of German citizenship.
Bernile's grandmother had converted to Roman Catholicism before 1935, but the Nazis decided that Jews who had converted were still nonetheless Jews. Once again, it was not about religion, as the Nazis considered Judaism to be a race. Anyone born of Jewish parents was a Jew.
This posed a serious problem for Bernile and her mother. Under the later Nuremberg race laws, which came into force while she was friendly with Hitler, they would also be categorized. Bernile's mother Karolina was classified as mixed race of the first degree, that is, half Jewish.
Under the law from 1935, Karolina only partly belonged to the German race and nation but could have Reich citizenship. Bernile was therefore one-quarter Jewish, that is, mixed race of the second degree, and was considered to be only partly belonging to the German race and nation, but was nonetheless a Reich citizen.
The problem was that she may have been legally approved, but for Hitler to be seen in the company of a child who was one-quarter Jewish by descent caused alarm bells to ring through the Nazi leadership. Despite the legal questions, Hitler and Bernile met every so often throughout the 1930s.
She sent at least 17 letters between 1935 and 1939 to Hitler's chief adjutant, SS Gruppenführer Wilhelm Brückner. Hitler had been informed of his young friend's Jewish ancestry in 1933 but did not seem concerned.
However, once Martin Bormann, Hitler's powerful private secretary, was made aware of the situation, he took steps to curtail contact between the two. Heinrich Hoffmann had by now published many official photographs of Hitler and Bernile, which were popular among the German public, attracting much public interest and leading to Bernile being described as the Führer's child.
Bormann informed Bernile's mother that she was to stop bringing the child to the Berghof, as Hitler's house was now called. However, Hoffmann continued to publish images of Hitler and Bernile together.
In May 1938, Bernile's mother was officially told to stop any contact with high party officials. Many people have tried to second-guess why Hitler maintained a relationship with the girl and her mother when he knew that she was one-quarter Jewish and the mother was half Jewish by descent.
Many explanations have been put forward, both at the time by Nazis and also by historians and psychologists later. To be honest, nobody really knows why. Hitler was reportedly upset by Bormann's banning of Bernile from the Berghof.
Hoffmann recalled that Hitler said of Bormann, "There are people who have a positive genius for spoiling all my little pleasures." Bernile's grandmother died in 1942.
Bernile's mother survived the conflict and died in 1962. But Bernile herself did not. She died of spinal polio in a hospital in 1943 at the age of 17 and is buried in Munich's West Cemetery.