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Foreign News: More About Evi

3 minute read
TIME

Mr. Adolf Hitler has at least partly supported Miss Eva Braun for several years, and last spring she hopefully confided to intimates she expected him to marry her within a year (TIME, May 15). In November, first pictures of “Dolfi” and “Evi” sunning themselves on the terrace at Berchtesgaden appeared in LIFE. This week Satevepost features the query Is Hitler Married? in a piece put together by Richard Norburt* from “sources inside Germany which we have always found dependable.” The punch:

“In the closing days of last August the object of his affections—a blond Bavarian girl named Eva Helen Braun—moved into Hitler’s official residence in Berlin, the great Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse. There she occupies the honored position of typical German Hausfrau in the Hitler menage, and there she conducts herself as if she were the wife of the Nazi dictator. . . .”

Evi is 28, the daughter of a onetime professor. As a young girl she was apprenticed to Munich Photographer Heinrich Hoffman, the Führer’s old friend and official photographer, who was an acquaintance of the Braun family. A vivacious blonde, she used to mix cocktails and play the accordion for Hitler and the struggling Nazi group. “Today,” says the Post, “Evi considers her accordion undignified and plays only the mandolin. . . .

“When the Nazis finally achieved undisputed power over Germany, one of the first things Hitler did was obtain a house for Evi in a fashionable district in Munich. It was listed in the directory under her own name: ‘Wasserburgerstrasse 12; telephone 480844.’ The Nazis considered it natural that Evi’s years of faithful service should thus be rewarded, and her relationship to Hitler remained undefined. . . . She began referring to him as her betrothed. … He also built for Evi a small house adjoining his own great estate at Berchtesgaden, and made a point of paying for this with his own money instead of ordering it from party funds. . . .”

It took Evi one pseudo suicide, a flirtation with a storm trooper and plenty of family pressure on the Führer to get Evi into the Chancellery, on whatever footing she is there.

“Her chief interest is still in art of one sort or another,” according to the Post. “She has nimble fingers and her latest hobby is making rag dolls out of scraps of materials; also dogs and more fantastic animals. . . . Hitler also favors Evi’s special Thuringian potato dumplings. …”

*A pen name.

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