From one of Germany’s leading young historians, the first comprehensive biography of Eva Braun, Hitler’s devoted mistress, finally wife, and the hidden First Lady of the Third Reich. In this groundbreaking biography of Eva Braun, German historian Heike Görtemaker reveals Hitler’s mistress as more than just a vapid blonde whose concerns never extended beyond her vanity table. Twenty-three years his junior, Braun first met Hitler when she took a position as an assistant to his personal photographer. Capricious, but uncompromising and fiercely loyal—she married Hitler two days before committing suicide with him in Berlin in 1945—her identity was kept secret by the Third Reich until the final days of the war. Through exhaustive research, newly discovered documentation, and anecdotal accounts, Görtemaker turns preconceptions about Eva Braun and Hitler on their head, and builds a portrait of the little-known Hitler far from the public eye.

Eva Braun is one of history's most famous nonentities. She has been dismissed as a racist, feathered-headed shop girl, yet sixty-two years after her death her name is still instantly recognizable. She left her convent school at the age of seventeen and met Hitler a few months later. She became his mistress before she was twenty. How did unsophisticated little Fraulein Braun, twenty-three years his junior, hold the most powerful man in Europe in an exclusive sexual relationship that lasted from 1932 until their joint suicide? Were they really lovers, and what were the background influences and psychological tensions of the middle-class Catholic girl from Munich who shared his intimate life? How can her ordinariness and apparent decency be reconciled with an unshakeable loyalty to the monster she loved? She left almost no personal material or documents but her private diary and photograph albums show that her life with Hitler, far from being a luxurious sinecure, caused her emotional torture. His chauffeur called her "the unhappiest woman in Germany." The Führer humiliated her in public while the top Nazis' wives, living in his privileged enclave on a Bavarian mountainside, despised her. Yet Albert Speer said: "She has been much maligned. She was very shy, modest. A man's woman: gay, gentle, and kind; incredibly undemanding . . . a restful sort of girl. And her love for Hitler---as she proved in the end---was beyond question." Eva loved the Führer, not for his power, nor because, thanks to him, she lived in luxury. His material gifts were nothing compared with the one thing she really wanted: his child. She remained invisible and unknown, a nonperson. They were never seen in public together and she never saw him alone except in the bedroom, yet their long relationship was a sort of marriage. Angela Lambert reveals a woman the world never knew until the last twenty-four hours of her life. In the small hours of April 29, 1945, as Allied troops raced to capture Berlin and the bunker below the Reichskanzlei where the defeated Nazi leaders were hiding, Eva Braun finally achieved her life's ambition by becoming Hitler's wife. Next day they both swallowed cyanide and died instantly. She was young, healthy, and thirty-three years old. Based on detailed new research, this is an authoritative biography, only the second life of Eva written in English.

A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2017 One of NPR Fresh Air's "Books to Close Out a Chaotic 2017" NPR's Book Concierge Guide To 2017’s Great Reads “How lucky for us readers that Shapiro has been listening so perceptively for decades to the language of food.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR Fresh Air Six “mouthwatering” (Eater.com) short takes on six famous women through the lens of food and cooking, probing how their attitudes toward food can offer surprising new insights into their lives, and our own. Everyone eats, and food touches on every aspect of our lives—social and cultural, personal and political. Yet most biographers pay little attention to people’s attitudes toward food, as if the great and notable never bothered to think about what was on the plate in front of them. Once we ask how somebody relates to food, we find a whole world of different and provocative ways to understand her. Food stories can be as intimate and revealing as stories of love, work, or coming-of-age. Each of the six women in this entertaining group portrait was famous in her time, and most are still famous in ours; but until now, nobody has told their lives from the point of view of the kitchen and the table. What She Ate is a lively and unpredictable array of women; what they have in common with one another (and us) is a powerful relationship with food. They include Dorothy Wordsworth, whose food story transforms our picture of the life she shared with her famous poet brother; Rosa Lewis, the Edwardian-era Cockney caterer who cooked her way up the social ladder; Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady and rigorous protector of the worst cook in White House history; Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, who challenges our warm associations of food, family, and table; Barbara Pym, whose witty books upend a host of stereotypes about postwar British cuisine; and Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan, whose commitment to “having it all” meant having almost nothing on the plate except a supersized portion of diet gelatin.

When the fake Hitler diaries were taken up by The Sunday Times, it was accompanied by all the the razzmatazz of the modern media. Yet in 1949, when Eva Braun's diary was published, there was no such circus in a world already tired of the war.

Of the many aspects of Adolf Hitler's life, one that has never been really fully documented is his romantic connection with Eva Braun as well as women who came before her in Der Führer's shadowy love life. Despite the thousands of books written about the mad genius, none has thoroughly explored and reliably documented his connection to Eva Braun, including their notorious suicides in the Führerbunker during the last days of the war in Germany. This book explores this and his other relationships in detail, including the shocking suicide of his half-niece Geli Raubal, whom Hitler doted upon, and his subsequent devastation--all thoroughly verified by thousands of pages of research from earlier sources and interviews. Only two women have emerged from most historical accounts: Hitler's niece "Geli" Raubal, his half-sister's daughter, and of course Eva Braun. (There were considerably more). It is Geli's and Eva's violent deaths, though, that captured the world's imagination in a gruesome way.Many readers and moviegoers / TV viewers are somewhat familiar with the last days in the bunker, with Hitler and his intimate circle far below ground while Soviet artillery shells were reducing Berlin to rubble, but that said, many particulars have gone unreported. Adolf and Eva mean to fill the gaps in this macabre yet exciting tale of the last hours of The Third Reich. It covers in detail the suicides of Goebbels and his wife after they had horrifically poisoned their children, the emotions and panicky infighting of those trapped underground, the attempted breakout of a handful of Nazi leaders, the last-minute marriage between Hitler and Eva, as well as the carefully-documented details of their suicides and disposal of the bodies.One key validating element, for example, is a narrative of the events in the bunker provided to his Soviet captors by Otto Günsche, a high-ranking Nazi that Hitler gave permission in writing to attempt a breakout. Three others that included Martin Bormann, who went with him were killed by the Soviets while Günsche somehow miraculously survived capture and the war and lived until 2003. Everything he told the Russians was later fully acknowledged, and the story is fascinating, including Günsche's up-close-and-personal account of Adolf's and Eva's last hours.Like a cheap parody of a Wagnerian opera finale, the two newlyweds were dispatched to "Valhalla," and that was the end of The Third Reich. What happened up to that point and afterwards makes for spellbinding reading.