Eva Braun and Adolf

There is an enduring interest in the history of the Third Reich that has spawned innumerable books on the subject and upon its dramatis personae. My own interest is that, indirectly, it affected my life as it did so many others of my era.
Thus when I saw that there was a new book entitled “The Lost Life of Eva Braun,” I ordered a copy.
It arrived on my desk with a thump, a paperback running to an incredible 636 pages.
I had once contemplated a book on the same subject but, on reviewing the subject and the available material, figured that I would be hard pressed to get more than a hundred pages. If, as is often said, Josef Goebbels was the only truly interesting character in the Nazi hierarchy, Eva Braun must rank as the least. About as significant a figure in the history of that epoch as my Aunt Fanny.
Angela Lambert, the author of this new tome, is a successful novelist, with tenuous links to the Germany of that era, and she has produced an alarmingly overweight biography of an alarmingly underweight subject.
Perhaps a clue to the problem lies in her admission that, until she started work on the book, she was “in a state of comparative ignorance about the Third Reich and the Second World War.”
As one would expect from a novelist, the book is an easy read. Where it fails is that, possibly due to her crash course in the history of the period, her story primarily covers the ground trodden by rather more knowledgeable historians. It becomes an easy read primer for the story of the Nazi party and of Adolf Hitler, Braun has merely a walk-on part.
Even worse, it has led her into perpetrating errors, some simple, some more serious. Although she has clearly spent a lot of time researching aspects of the story, she mentions spending hours in the dusty auction house of Hermann-Historica, searching for proof that Eva Braun had never been a member of the Nazi party, some rather more obvious details have escaped her.
At the wedding of Eva's sister to Hermann Fegelein, she says, “In the official wedding photograph, Hitler for once in civilian dress (he had sworn to wear uniform, like his soldiers, until the war was over), smiles thinly through narrowed lips.” As I write, I have this picture in front of me. Hitler is in his regular war-time garb and, if that's “a thin smile upon his narrowed lips,” clearly I need a new pair of glasses. But then, I don't have the imagination of a novelist.
The book has more footnotes than I have ever seen in one volume, some of them running to nearly a full page, always a deterrent to easy reading. And some are grossly incorrect. She states that Hitler's doctor, Theodore Morell was “cross-examined, found guilty and hanged after the Nuremberg Trials in 1948.” In fact, Morell was never charged with any crime and died of a stroke in 1948.
Possibly she was confusing him with another of Hitler's doctors, Karl Brandt, who was executed for his part in the Holocaust.
But it's these sort of crass errors that undermine the value of her book, which largely goes to prove that indeed, Eva Braun, barely merits more than a hundred pages.

Mein Gott, Mein Kampf!

News that a publisher in Poland had been contemplating a re-issue of Mein Kampf, came as something of a surprise. News that the Austrian authorities objected on the grounds that they held the copyright, was even more surprising.
I would have thought that the prospective readership of Polish Neo Nazis was barely into double figures and that the Austrians would have done better to disclaim all knowledge of the book and its author. A. Hitler Esq., hardly ranks among that nation’s favourite sons, one would have thought.
Now when A.H. was the bloke running the rather over-optimistically named 1000 year Reich, it was a runaway best seller. Even the least bookish house would have one on display in case the Gestapo should come a-calling. It was sold rather on the same basis as a Prudential insurance policy.
Keen students of history will no doubt be aware that, on the death of A.H., sales took a bit of a dive and I would have thought that market research should have warned the Polish chap that it was going to be a tough sell.
It was, in any case, a tough read. My father had a copy and, although he could usually manage the most abstruse works, he gave up before the halfway mark. I never got much past the first chapter initially although, years later, I did drag myself through to the end. It was a sovereign remedy for insomnia, I found.
As you know, much of it was dictated to his mate, Rudolph Hess, while they were holed up in the Landsberg slammer and this soul-searing experience might account for Hess’s later touch of madness, culminating in his madcap venture when he flew to England, thereby becoming one of Britain’s most celebrated illegal immigrants. His timing was off. Had he waited fifty years or so, he could have collected a pension, social benefits and probably a nice little council house from the State.
Mein Kampf should have been of great interest to historians if only because few of the Nazi hierarchy put pen to paper, only Joseph Goebbels recording much of any interest. Most of the others were too busy beating up on Jews and Gypsies to pay much attention to literary stuff, until later, when it might come in handy at any War Crimes trial.
Hitler’s only other recorded thoughts, other than his speeches, come from transcripts of his “table talk,” secretly recorded by Bormann, and these are only interesting inasmuch as they demonstrate just what a shallow thinker he was.
But I’m still puzzling why the Austrian authorities should be preserving the copyright. Surely they can’t be expecting a second coming?