(light dramatic music)
(ominous music)
(people chanting in foreign language)
(man speaks foreign language)
- [Narrator] What sort of woman falls in love
with a murderous dictator?
Adolf Hitler's private relationships with women
were a ferociously guarded secret.
He wanted the world to see him as a man
of high moral character, a perfect gentleman.
In reality, he was anything but.
- He doesn't want a woman who will threaten him,
who will challenge him.
A best woman for a man is a young woman
that you can mold and shape.
- [Narrator] The greatest loves of Hitler's life
were so corroded and diminished by him
that they saw only one way out.
- He patently had a very, very potent,
traumatizing and almost desolating effect on
women to cause them to try and kill himself.
- [Narrator] His beloved niece turned lover,
shot herself with his pistol.
- He's controlling her as much as he controls anything else
and she's starting to see aspects of him that are,
to her, frankly horrifying.
- [Narrator] A German film star lover fell
from a hospital balcony.
- It's my belief that she was pushed outta the window
and didn't jump.
- [Narrator] And Nazi insiders gave jaw dropping accounts
of how and why these women died.
Revealing Hitler as a controlling sexual psychopath.
- Undoubtedly, something very,
very traumatic was being done to her at that time.
- [Narrator] Was suicide their only way out?
- I think it's simply a case of the terrible power
that he had over them and the realization
that they could never escape it.
(light dramatic music)
(people chanting in foreign language)
(ominous music)
- [Narrator] In April, 1889 inside a tiny apartment
above a brewery in a small Austrian village,
Klara Hitler gave birth to Adolf Hitler.
After bearing three children who died young,
Klara poured all her affections into her young son.
He was the light of her life.
To young Adolf, his mother was a saint
and his father, a monster
Hitler's father, Alois, was a heavy drinker and violent.
- His father was a pretty angry guy and would take
that anger out on Adolf and on his brother,
he would take that out physically by beating them with some
kind of a whip or an object.
And it apparently took place on a daily basis.
- [Narrator] Klara would hear her boys' screams.
And when the beatings were over,
Adolf would run to his mother
and they formed a secret alliance.
- Hitler's relationship with his mother was extremely close.
It would seem that a mother who's lost three children
and then has a child who survives is bound
to be extremely devoted to the child.
His mother would line up to protect Adolf from his father.
- [Narrator] For Klara, this extremely close bond
with her son may have helped Adolf deal
with his father's cruelty,
but there are those that claim this attention
by Adolf Hitler's mother would war his view
of female intimacy and would play out
in his distorted sexual relationships with women.
- If you're virtually an only child
with a completely devoted mother,
you really do believe you're the center of the universe.
Hitler was the greatest narcissist in history.
A narcissist is somebody totally self-obsessed.
Everybody around them either has to make them feel better
or be punished for not doing that.
- [Narrator] The teenage Hitler was already showing
the first signs of a dark and dangerous
obsession with women.
(light dramatic music)
When he was 16 and living in Linz,
Hitler was very taken with a well to do blonde
music student, Stefanie Isak.
She was a little older than Hitler,
tall, elegant, and Jewish.
Hitler's childhood friend, August Kubizek,
claims he saw firsthand Hitler's infatuation.
Stefanie would walk with her mother in the early evening
and every day Hitler would wait on the street corner
to watch her pass by.
Because they hadn't been formally introduced,
Hitler could only look.
He would never actually speak to her.
From the first time he saw her Hitler could
not take his eyes off Stefanie.
- The relationship with the woman that he did follow around
for four years but as a very distant figure
and never daring to make any contact with her
fits in with a number of features.
Firstly, at that stage, he was completely socially inept.
He just didn't know how to deal with people at any stage.
- [Narrator] He was deeply fixated on the young woman
and according to Kubizek, would become enraged
at the male attention she attracted
particularly from young Austrian army officers.
- Hitler was a person of extremes,
so he either loved totally or he hated totally.
So you can see that this devotion from afar
would drive him round following her,
but never daring to break the spell by approaching her.
- [Narrator] When Stefanie didn't respond
to Hitler's brooding intense stares,
his rage led him to hatch a deadly plan.
He told his friend Kubizek that he wanted to kidnap Stefanie
and marry her.
After thinking it through and realizing
he couldn't support her,
he instead plotted to jump off a bridge into the Danube
with Stefanie in a horrifying murder-suicide pact.
- His threat, if this relationship doesn't come to pass,
had a couple of elements.
The first one is of course it was very operatic,
and he was crazy about Wagner,
but I really think it's possibly the first indication
we have of his deep and pervasive obsession with death,
and death comes as a part of every act that he plans.
And this is an absolute recurring theme his life,
particularly the idea of if things don't work out,
I will kill myself.
The world must come to me, otherwise I go.
- [Narrator] Although Hitler didn't go through
with his evil plan, according to August Kubizek,
in the four years Hitler stalked Stefanie Izak,
they never spoke a single word.
But this obsession with love and death gave a disturbing
glimpse of the fate of other women who came into his life.
His stalking of Stefanie Izak came to an end in 1907.
In December, a few days before Christmas,
his beloved mother Klara died of cancer.
Hitler was bereft.
He worshiped his mother and they were very close
and now she had abandoned him.
(light dramatic music)
In 1908 he moved from Linz to Vienna
and struggled to survive.
At one point, living in a men's shelter.
He had ambitions to become an artist,
but was rejected from art school twice.
He scraped by selling postcards
he'd painted of German landmarks.
in 1915, having him been rejected by the Austrian army
on health grounds, he joined the German army
to fight against the western allies.
At war's end lance corporal Adolf Hitler
was devastated by Germany's loss.
- There's no question there's bitterness and there's anger.
And he comes up with this idea of the stab in the back.
That is that Germany was not going to lose
in the First World War,
Germany was doing very well in the First World War
but for the fact that we were stabbed in the back by Jews,
by socialists, by this undercurrent of people
who do not have German interests at heart,
even if they are Germans.
- [Narrator] Hitler's hatred found a cause
in the vicious antisemitism of Germany's political right.
He joined a small band of disaffected German nationalists
known as the Workers Party, the future Nazi party.
- I think there's a lot of delusion going on there.
And when you are working in those radical right circles,
you can talk publicly in racist terms
and there's a lot of racist literature and there's a lot
of pseudoscience about what the racists are.
Hitler himself has consumed a lot of this.
Among his earliest letters in 1919,
he talks about the fact that the first point of agenda
for any German government needs to be
get rid of the Jews altogether.
(ominous music)
- [Narrator] As Hitler solidified his position
in the Nazi party, he sought out new maternal figures
to replace his beloved mother.
Like Winifred Wagner, the daughter-in-law
of the famous composer Richard Vagner.
Another influential older woman in Hitler's life
was the wealthy socialite Helene Bechstein.
She lavished Hitler with love, attention and money.
And once again, he became the adored son.
- These are people who are rich Munich society women,
so they have two things.
They had money and they had influence in society.
He needed influence and he needed money
and he found it very easy to charm them.
- [Narrator] Otto Strasser, a former confidant of Hitler's,
claimed Helene and Hitler where abnormally close.
She called him her little wolf and stroked his head
as he sat at her feet.
Wolf was Hitler's pet name used only by those close to him.
- Helene Bechstein referred to him as like a son,
and he was frightfully good at playing on that.
I mean, that's what he'd been doing.
He'd spent a lot of his time being the beloved son
of an adoring mother.
And here he had this whole group of women who were adoring
this young man and they flattered him.
And it sort of worked on that level
of people flattering a young man who was used
to getting his way with his mother.
- We can see a pattern in his life as he
was advancing towards his leadership.
He developed strong relationships with older women
like Bechstein and Wagner,
and I think that fitted in with the underlying pathology
of never being able to let go of his mother and needing
maternal figures who weren't threatening,
but we're cosseting and supporting him.
- [Narrator] But there may also have been
a more primal agenda at work.
Hitler's bodyguard, Brunp Gesche,
later claimed Helene Bechstein's relationship with Wolf
was more than maternal.
In a 1974 interview, Gesche claimed that in return
for their patronage Hitler poured on the charm
thick like glue and the rich ladies ate it all up.
And that he may even have had sex with Helene
occasionally to keep the cash flowing.
(light dramatic music)
While Hitler was courting mother figures,
he was also gaining rockstar status with younger women.
At Hitler's early rallies,
female supporters were given front row seats.
Their adoration for Hitler was plain for all to see.
Hitler's love life was a hot topic of much speculation
and people were curious why Hitler wasn't married.
His answer was always "My bride is my motherland."
By 1923, Hitler was the undisputed leader to the Nazi party
and its growing popularity gave Hitler confidence.
Impatient with political posturing,
he ordered his storm troopers to ferment armed insurrection
from a beer hall in Munich and to seize power by force.
- The Beer Hall Putsch was a statement of intent rather
than a desire to really seize control in Southern Germany.
It shows Hitler being the risk taker
that he was always going to be.
- [Narrator] His grand plan was to seize control
of Munich's state government,
then march on Berlin and overthrow the federal government.
Hitlers plan failed.
(light dramatic music)
He was arrested and sentenced to nine months
in jail for treason.
- Going to jail was something that he was well aware
could be the outcome of his endeavors
to seize power locally.
But he was willing to accept that.
Time spent in prison would give oxygen to his ideology
and indeed it would be in prison
that he would write "Mein Kampf"
and further refine his political thinking.
- [Narrator] After his release from prison,
Hitler returned to his mountain top retreat,
the Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden.
It was here in this mountain village
where he first saw Maria Reiter.
Pretty blonde Maria was working at her family's clothing
store in Berchtesgaden when she first met Adolf Hitler.
She was a vulnerable young woman as her mother
had died just two weeks earlier.
- Maria Reiter, later known as Mimi Reiter,
was a young woman who actually Hitler
knew when she was about 16.
He was obsessed with her.
Hitler once wrote that the ideal woman would be young,
pretty and as pliable as wax.
(light dramatic music)
- [Narrator] After a chance meeting in a park,
Hitler was persistent in his attentions and visited her
several times in the store.
Finally, against her older sister's wishes,
Maria agreed to accompany him to a local Nazi party rally.
She was 16 years old.
Hitler was 37.
- As a narcissist, he would've liked very attractive
young women that made him look better.
So you've got this older man who's becoming a high flyer.
So he doesn't want a woman who will threaten him,
who will challenge him.
- [Narrator] Watching him speak, Mimi as Hitler called her,
was captivated by his oratory and his hypnotic
effect on his audience.
She felt he was speaking just to her.
He just kept fixing his eyes on her.
His stare was intense.
She said she would never forget how unsettled
and exposed it made her feel.
Afterwards, they shared an intimate dinner for two.
For young Mimi Reiter, it was intoxicating.
Hitler knew exactly what he was doing when he turned his
attention to a girl young enough to be his own daughter.
- Hitler didn't make firm relationships
with the women at his own age,
and I think that was for a number of reasons.
Firstly, he was very socially inept.
The second issue is he was threatened,
and I think that this plays into deeper issues.
If you have somebody your own age,
you are supposed to have a relationship,
you're supposed to expose yourself to them,
and that really threatened him.
- [Narrator] Over the course of 1926,
Hitler would often visit Mimi when he was at Berchtesgaden.
On one visit, he picked her up in his car and insisted
that she go for a walk with him alone in the nearby forest.
According to Mimi, it was here they had their first kiss.
She said Hitler was forceful and pressed her tightly.
Three months after her 17th birthday,
Hitler and Maria had sex for the first time
in his Munich apartment.
She was besotted.
In the coming days, Hitler returned to Munich.
They wrote to each other and Mimi kept all
their correspondence that detailed their affair.
Hitler wrote how ardently he desired her
as if it were the first time.
But the letters stopped coming.
Once he had shaped her into his devoted slave,
Hitler had quickly tired of her and Maria was distraught.
She couldn't bear the thought of life without him.
She took a clothes line,
tied it around her neck and tried to hang herself.
But her brother found her in time.
Maria Reiter's suicide attempt had failed.
- He patently had a very, very potent, traumatizing,
and almost desolating effect on women
to cause them to try and kill themselves.
And nothing we know about Maria Reiter suggests
that she had any kind of suicidal tendencies.
- I think he was fundamentally a destructive character.
I think at his core, there was an emptiness.
He was not capable of loving.
He was a man who needed to possess
and a man who cared little about other people.
- [Narrator] But one young woman,
perhaps the only woman he really did care about,
was his niece Geli Raubal.
Like Maria Reiter, Geli was just 16
when she came into contact with the rising political star.
And like Maria, Geli would be at first flattered,
then utterly consumed by the suffocating attentions
of her uncle turned lover.
Unlike Maria, for Geli there would be no escape.
She was under Hitler's guardianship
and completely controlled by his all seeing eye.
As infatuation turned to obsession and ultimately
to self destruction.
Most historians believe Geli was the only deep love affair
of Hitler's life, and that when she died, age just 23,
something broke within him.
- Geli Raubal was without any doubt,
the most important woman in Hitler's life after his mother.
She was his half niece, daughter of his half sister,
and she came to Munich at the age of 17 to lodge with him.
She was, we know, extrovert.
She wanted to be on stage.
She wanted to be an opera singer.
So she was the kind of person that loved to perform.
She was in her element amongst young men.
She wanted a proper boyfriend.
She was fun.
If you look at the photos of her
she's got a laughter spilling out of her.
She must have thought I'm going to the big city
and life is gonna be a ball.
(light dramatic music)
- [Narrator] But once Geli moved in,
Hitler became obsessed with her.
A former close friend of Hitler's,
Ernst Hanfstaengl, claimed she cast a spell over Hitler.
He called her an empty headed little slut
with no brains or character.
Saying she never gave any impression of reciprocating
Hitler's twisted tenderness.
- What came into my mind was what's called
the Lolita Syndrome, and you only have to look
at the fictional character.
Lolita was flirtatious, she was seductive,
she was not promiscuous, but she certainly
had an awareness of her sexuality.
Now we know Geli was promiscuous and she was not exactly
a deep thinker, she just was a fun girl.
So she slides into this relationship.
Her Uncle Wolf, who's a big man in Germany,
going places is very impressive.
- [Narrator] Uncle Wolf and 17-year-old Geli rode horses
through the mountains, visited cafes and cinemas.
Wherever he went, she was always at his side.
As a family member, it was the perfect cover
for a more intimate relationship.
In 1929, Hitler purchased a nine bedroom
luxury apartment in Munich.
He moved Geli into a separate bedroom adjoining his.
- To begin with, presumably Geli saw Hitler as a benevolent
patriarch of the family who was going to look after her
and maybe enable her.
But as she must rapidly have realized it was not gonna be
that kind of relationship.
It was going to be intensely controlling.
And the rows about where she went,
who she saw, were not what she dreamed of.
- [Narrator] Hitler wanted to control Geli
and was crazy with jealousy
when she went out with other men.
As their relationship developed,
it seems there were echoes of his obsession with Stefanie
all those years earlier.
He wanted Geli all to himself and kept
a very close eye on her.
- We know that he became infatuated with her.
She was much younger than him,
significantly younger than him,
and she wanted to go out and she started an affair
with his chauffeur, who was her boyfriend,
and Hitler was outraged at this, furious,
and balled her out with terrible argument.
- And then slowly it starts sinking in.
He's controlling her as much as he controls anything else.
This is totally what she didn't want.
And she's starting to see aspects of him
that are, to her, frankly horrifying.
- [Narrator] The most disturbing account
of Hitler's relationship with Geli
came from his own inner circle.
Geli confided in Otto Strasser,
a one time Nazi insider who had been close to Hitler.
Years later, under oath, Strasser was interrogated by
the U.S. Office of Strategic Services
where he revealed intimate details of Hitler
and Geli's sexual relationship.
Strasser said Geli revealed in a tearful conversation
that Hitler loved her,
but she couldn't stand it anymore.
She was repulsed by what he wanted her to do.
Hitler made her undress and stand over him naked
and then urinate on him to give him sexual pleasure.
She said everything about Hitler's demands
was extremely disgusting to her.
(man speaks foreign language)
If Uncle Alfie, as Geli called him,
was debasing his young niece in such a way,
then this had the potential to destroy
Hitler's relentless rise to power.
On the 19th of September, 1931,
Geli Raubal was found dead in her bedroom
in Hitler's apartment.
A lethal bullet lodged in her chest
and Hitler's pistol by her side.
Hitler and Geli had been in a relationship for six years.
Why did Hitler's 23-year-old niece die?
- Undoubtedly, something very, very traumatic
was being done to her at that time
and the enormous conflict that she must have felt between
responding to Hitler as a dutiful niece
and what he was asking her to do led her
to this incredibly dark place.
- If you took Geli as she was before Hitler, you'd say,
this is not a person who commits suicide.
She's a superficial, good time fun girl.
She bounces around without any problem.
And I think that tells you how desperate a state
she'd got into then.
The realization, at some level,
he will not let me get away.
- She was obviously at the vortex of terrible
and conflicting emotions that made her feel
there was no way out.
- [Narrator] In the following days,
questions and rumors swirled around the scandalous death
over Hitler's niece.
Newspapers reported that the day before Geli's death,
she had argued with her uncle.
Geli wanted to go to Vienna,
where she intended to become engaged.
A furious Hitler stormed out of his apartment.
Journalists wrote that Geli's body
was only meters from Hitler's bedroom.
Her nose bone was shattered,
and there was evidence of other serious injuries.
Speculation was rife that Hitler
may have murdered his niece.
He claimed it was all lies and attempted
to refute all the claims.
It seems astonishing that he felt he needed to go to those
lengths to try and stop the rumors flying around.
It begs the question:
Did Hitler have something to hide?
Certainly, investigative journalist
Fritz Gerlich thought so.
He believed Hitler murdered Geli
and continued to pursue the story.
In March, 1933, just as Gerlich was about to publish
an expose, he was beaten up, his manuscripts destroyed,
and he was arrested.
Gerlich was executed at the Dachau concentration camp
in July, 1934.
The scandal that had the potential to ruin Hitler
was no more, but to those closest to the seat of Nazi power,
Geli's death had exposed Hitler's disturbed sexual psyche.
- I think it's simply a case of the terrible power
that he had over them and the realization
that they could never escape it.
And that's typified by the story of Geli.
She started complaining to everybody.
He won't let me do this, he won't let me do that.
And I think she just saw no way out.
(light dramatic music)
- [Narrator] The year after Geli Raubal died,
Hitler began courting a new lover,
a woman who could match his powerful status.
26-year-old Renate Muller was
a much admired actress and singer,
one of the most famous of her day.
The Nazi party saw her as the embodiment of aryan ideals,
and Goebbels was keen for her to appear
in his propaganda films.
- Renate Muller was one of many actresses actually,
who were invited back to the Reich Chancellery
for an intimate dinner with Hitler.
He did that a couple of times with other women
and he loved actresses, he was interested in actresses.
And she was a gossipy actress who regaled people
after this particular dinner with
what had passed between them.
- [Narrator] Her friend, producer Alfred Zeisler,
claimed Renate told him an unsettling story of
Hitler's behavior behind closed doors.
And once again, they point to a man whose sexual preferences
were way out of the ordinary.
Muller related to Zeisler how on one particular night
in Hitler's room, he demanded they both undress
and lie on the floor.
Hitler then begged Muller to kick him, which she refused,
but he was so persistent that she eventually agreed.
She kicked and beat him, verbally abusing him
while he declared himself her slave.
Hitler then masturbated.
Muller told Zeisler that once this violent encounter
with Hitler was over, they put on their clothes,
sat down and chatted.
At the end of the evening, Hitler stood up,
kissed her hand and thanked Muller for a pleasant evening
as though nothing out of the ordinary had taken place.
- The rumors about Hitler engaging
in extreme sadomasochistic practices fits perfectly
in with his personality.
He internalized everything that he didn't like,
that the losses in his life.
And he sadistically projected his rage out on everybody.
And it's quite feasible that somebody like that would have
these kind of sexual practices.
- She might just have been a chatty actress
who liked to kind of play up the excitements
of an evening with Hitler,
or she might have been telling the truth about these very
unusual perversions that she suggested took place.
The gossip that Renate Muller was alleged to have spread,
it was that he was a coprophiliac and that
he enjoyed other debasing sexual activities.
- Inside the masochist, outside the sadist.
- [Narrator] It appears it may not have been wise
to talk about what went on behind closed doors.
The Gestapo had Renate Muller
under round the clock surveillance.
In 1937, she sought treatments in a sanitarium
and asked to see Hitler, but he refused.
It seems this was to be one of her last requests.
From an upstairs window, Renate Muller saw four SS officers
approach the sanatorium.
Shortly after she fell her death.
- Renate had a terrible end in that she was being treated
as in a clinic for quotes, depression,
and fell out of a window.
But falling out of a window was a way that very many enemies
of the regime met their end.
It wasn't an unusual way actually,
to be murdered in the Third Reich.
It's my belief that she was pushed outta the window
and didn't jump.
She had caused embarrassment and the things that
she was alleged to have said
she had embarrassing and scandalous.
So I think that was why she met her end.
- [Narrator] Renate Muller was just one more casualty
in the intimate life of Adolf Hitler.
Of all the tragic stories of the women in Hitler's life,
the most enduring was that of Eva Braun.
Hitler first met Eva in October, 1929,
when Geli Raubal was living in his Munich apartment.
Despite his relationship with Geli,
Hitler became obsessed with another much younger woman.
- Eva Braun was a young, pretty blonde assistant
at the photographic studio of Heinrich Hoffman in Munich.
And she was up a ladder at the back of his shop
one day when Hitler came in.
And he walked in and he saw this pair of legs,
which belonged to a 17 year old girl,
and he asked her to the opera.
- [Narrator] Hitler introduced himself as Herr Wolf,
not revealing his true identity.
Like Renate Muller, Eva initially rejected Hitler.
At their first meeting,
she wasn't at all interested in the old man paying her
compliments and devouring her with his eyes.
She refused the offer of a lift in his Mercedes,
worried what her father's reaction would be..
But Hitler persisted, and Eva, like those before her,
fell for Adolf Hitler and fell hard.
In 1935, when she was just 23 years old,
Eva wrote in her diary that she was the mistress
of the greatest man in Germany and the world.
But very few people knew she existed.
Hitler kept their relationship
a closely guarded secret from all but his inner circle.
- Eva was the hidden girlfriend.
It was important to Hitler that nobody knew
that he had a relationship because he had always said,
"I must be married to Germany."
It would've been, he believed,
kind of death to his public persona if he were to marry.
And you have to remember, this was somebody who actually
received more fan mail than all the Beatles
and the Rolling Stone combined.
Wherever Hitler went, he was surrounded by women
like throwing themselves at him.
You know, sometimes they'd jump in front of his car
and take their blouses off and things.
So he thought it would be a bad move
should he be seen to be coupled up.
So consequently, Eva was kept very,
very much under wraps and this didn't accord with her view
of what a normal relationship should be.
- [Narrator] Like Geli, Eva Braun's diary entries indicate
the traumatic effect Hitler was having
on her state of mind.
She wrote she was miserable and wished
she'd never set eyes on him.
- A couple of times, apparently,
that she was with other people in the inner circle
and he would walk by, walk up to her,
give her an envelope of money and then walk
by without saying a word.
And that happened more than once.
And she cringed with humiliation at this.
- Very early on in their relationship
she would write that Hitler would take her out to dinner
and he wouldn't talk to her all evening.
And then at the end of the evening,
he would slip her an envelope of money
and she went away feeling dirty like prostitute.
And she hated the way that he made her feel.
- [Narrator] One shocking entry in her diary
indicated how fragile was Eva's state of mind.
She planned to take 35 pills,
which she was sure would be enough to kill her.
- Eva had attempted suicide twice in the early years.
And in a sense, he was then trapped,
because after Geli, if he had a partner
who killed themselves again, his public image would be shot.
- She first attempted suicide very early on
in their relationship.
She shot herself with a pistol, not very well,
and it was a kind of cry for help.
She tried to commit suicide again,
this time with Phanodorm, the sleeping pills.
Her suicide attempts did actually win her a bit of reprieve
in that they took her closer to Hitler
because of the potential scandal.
But I think she must have realized as time went on that this
happy idea that they were one day gonna live together and be
a family was never going to never going to pan out.
- [Narrator] Like Geli and Mimi before her,
a young woman's relationship with Hitler
led her to take desperate and tragic measures.
There has been much speculation about Eva
and Hitler's sexual relationship,
and it seems that things weren't satisfactory
in that department either.
According to Hitler's physician,
Dr. Theodor Morell, Braun became so sexually frustrated
she asked him to give Hitler hormone injections
to increase his libido.
- Albert Speer was very fond of Eva,
and one evening he came across her in tears
and asked what was wrong.
And she said, well, Hitler has told me to go
and find someone else because he said
that he could no longer fulfill me.
Which Speer interpreted is that he was no longer
able to fulfill her sexually.
- [Narrator] In April, 1945, Eva Braun moved into
the Fuhrerbunker under the Reich's Chancellory
to be with Hitler.
As the end neared, he told everyone
they should leave, including Eva.
- When the news came through that they had to surrender.
Hitler said to the women around him,
"You must leave, you must go."
At which point Eva went up to him and she says,
"You know I'm not going to leave you.
Why do you ask me?"
And at this point,
Hitler went across to her and did something
that nobody had ever seen before
and he kissed her on the mouth.
- [Narrator] In the dying days of the war,
Eva Braun finally achieved her life's ambition;
to become the wife of Germany's fuhrer.
In the underground bunker,
Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun married.
- What Hitler did in marrying Eva right at the end,
it's a way of saying you've served me loyally,
and here is your reward.
So yet again, he's failed to see the person in front of them
and to understand them.
And of course it's what she had always craved.
And she decided to tell herself that it was great.
So it was a kind of death wish, but in a way,
her entire relationship with Hitler had been a death wish.
- [Narrator] 36 hours later, on April the 30th, 1945,
the newly weds sat together on a small couch
in the Fuhrerbunker,
beneath the bombed out Reich's Chancellery.
They both swallowed a capsule of cyanide
and Hitler also shot himself in the head,
just to be certain.
Eva Braun became the last of Adolf Hitler's women to die.
- What you make of the suicide of Eva Braun,
I think it had a lot to do with her obsession
about being recognized as the fuhrer's wife.
Remember he said he was married to Germany
and could never have a wife.
And she was so determined to kind of trump that.
She just couldn't see any life for herself
away from Hitler.
So what else do you do?
You join him in the bunker,
you have a marriage for one day, and you kill herself.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] It's hard to say what part
Hitler's romantic attentions and sexual perversions played
in compelling these young women to take their own lives.
But we can say that Hitler's narcissistic controlling
personality almost certainly played a significant part.
- I think that any woman coming into the picture would start
to pick up the sheer horror of what he represents.
And I think that's what pushes them along that line.
I mean, Hitler was not a guy that you could
write a Dear John letter to and go on with your life.
They simply could not escape.
Every relationship with Hitler was characterized by despair,
leading to attempted suicide.
(Adolf speaking foreign language)
- I would say that almost all the relationships
that Hitler had with women were abusive and coercive ones.
He had a very kind of potent depressing effect on people.
When this big, powerful, destructive figure enters
their universe and takes it over,
there isn't any way out.
(light dramatic music)
(eerie music)