RELAXING at Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat, Eva Braun plays happy families with her lover at the height of the war.
The previously unseen photos show the girlfriend few people at the time knew existed smiling and cosying up to the man she dated for 14 years.
Throughout the Second World War Braun lived a sheltered life at Hitler’s holiday home in the Alps. But there were few records of her private life with the German leader.
Now photos from her personal albums, which were confiscated by the US Army in 1945, have been released for the first time.
Some show her unwinding round the estate in her bikini.
In others she sunbathes naked – something which apparently infuriated Hitler. Her rebellious streak is also apparent in one shot where the party girl poses with friends at a carnival in 1938 in a see-through lace top.
The images of Hitler show hints there was a man beneath the monster as he plays with the young daughter of a friend, pets Eva’s Scottish terrier dogs and enjoys his birthday bash.
However, it is the personal images of Braun and her lover which are the most revealing.
She was 17 when she first met him through photographer Heinrich Hoffmann in 1929 when Hitler was an artist. Hoffmann was also the Fuhrer’s personal photographer.
Within two years Hitler and Braun had become a couple and by 1936 she was a part of his household at the Berghof, near Berchtesgaden, in Germany.
Braun stayed loyal to him throughout the war and the couple finally married on April 29, 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed. Less than two days later they were both dead, having committed suicide by taking cyanide capsules as the Russian army closed in on Berlin.
Reinhard Schulz, a collector and curator of photography, stumbled across the images while researching records for an exhibition on Hoffmann.