INSIDE GERMANY: The following inside story of Eva Braun, Hitler’s last-minute wife, was given to “Globe’s” correspondent by Arthur Kanneberg, Hitler’s former butler. “Adolf Hitler loved Eva Braun — a woman with a thick provincial accent — passionately and faithfully from the moment that he met her in the house of his greatest friend, the photographer Heinrich Hoffman,” said Kannenberg.

“In private, he called her ‘Evi’”, according to Kannenberg, who said “Hitler was a normal man who sought peace in the arms of the woman he loved, and was abnormal only in that he disciplined his love.”

Eva was kept secret from the German people and visiting celebrities, and official photographers did not dare take her picture. She was not clever and not particularly gay, but had a strange attraction. … Hitler gave her a handsome annual allowance. She would have liked to use make-up, but this was forbidden by Hitler. After 1932, when Hitler carried her off from her second-rate job as secretary to the photographer Hoffman, Eva Braun’s permanent home was the Berghof at Berchtesgaden ... She liked Scotch Whisky and champagne. Kannenberg says that Hitler and Eva were “always correct and undemonstrative in front of him”.

Published in Dawn, June 14th, 2020