Most historians view Eva Braun as an apolitical appendage of Adolf Hitler's paltry private life. And yet, after having shared much of his time with her at the Berghof, his mountain retreat, he chose to marry her on the last day of his life, and she chose to die with him in his Berlin bunker.

Biographers have tried to infer from her proximity to Hitler a fuller picture of her personality. Why did she appeal to this dictator, regarded by the Nazi faithful as their savior, a man who publicly declared that he could not marry or enjoy the common pleasures of mortals because of his devotion to Germany?

In 1968, Nerin F. Gun was the first biographer to present a full portrait of Braun, but as Heike B. Görtemaker suggests, he relied too heavily on the testimony of the Braun family and of former Nazis who accorded Eva Braun the status of a naive, adoring mistress. In 2007, Angela Lambert provided a fitfully convincing portrait of Braun's milieu, showing how Braun -- a mere girl of 17 when she first met Hitler -- grew into the Führer's devoted mate. But Görtemaker strikes down Lambert's often fanciful reconstructions of history, including her reliance on a fragment of Braun's diary that Görtemaker suggests may be fraudulent.

Görtemaker herself sometimes stretches matters when she writes in the language of conjecture that suddenly becomes fact: "Despite the fact that he must have heard," for example. But she is also the first biographer to challenge the notion that Braun was a passive and guileless component of Hitler's entourage. On the contrary, Braun worked hard to keep herself at the center of power, even, Görtemaker suggests, staging at least one suicide attempt (there may have been another) to demonstrate that she could not live without Hitler's love.

Above all, Braun played the politics of personal loyalty, never objecting to any of Hitler's decisions. And she inspired others, like Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, who observed Braun's behavior and emulated it -- although Speer would later try to obscure his fawning. Most startling of all, a careful reading of Görtemaker's riveting account of the characters surrounding Hitler reveals that he spent more time with Eva Braun -- especially after 1935 -- than he did with even the highest ranking Nazis, such as Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler.

Braun may not have influenced Nazi policies, but thanks to Görtemaker's groundbreaking work, it is now clear how Braun catered to Hitler, fostering his reliance on cronies and lackeys and reinforcing his tendency to shut himself off from the awful reality of what was happening to Germany and to the world.

  • Carl Rollyson is a biographer and professor of journalism at the City University of New York's Baruch College.