Sleeping With the Devil

Was Hitler's lover a vapid dupe or an accomplice to evil?

THE LOST LIFE OF EVA BRAUN

By Angela Lambert

St. Martin's. 495 pp. $29.95

Many biographies reveal as much about their authors as about their subjects, and this account of the life of Hitler's mistress can serve as Exhibit A. The British writer Angela Lambert is fascinated by Eva Braun for one key reason: Like Lambert's mother, Braun was born in Germany in 1912, grew up during Hitler's rise to power and never questioned what was happening in her country. Lambert's mother then married an Englishman and moved to Britain in 1936, but until the end of her life, she never acknowledged that her silence in the 1930s represented any kind of moral failure.

By painstakingly examining the thin trail of evidence left behind by Braun, Lambert wonders whether all German women, from the least famous to her infamous subject, should be condemned for the horrific deeds of their men. If Braun can be absolved of guilt, she suggests, so can most German women, including her mother. "Any verdict on Eva is, in microcosm, a verdict on the German people," she writes. And from there, it's a short step to this sweeping statement: "Women who love evil men need not necessarily be evil themselves."

Lambert insists that her minute examination of Braun's life proves that she has been unfairly caricatured "as a feather-brained non-entity" who partied and worried about her wardrobe while her lover set the world aflame. The woman who finally married Hitler right before committing suicide with him in his bunker in Berlin at the end of the war, Lambert argues, was caring, sensitive and, above all, loyal. She claims that the former photo shop assistant was smarter than is commonly assumed -- but "blissfully ignorant" of politics, which was considered men's business, and remained so throughout the war years she spent in Obersalzberg, Hitler's retreat in the Bavarian Alps. All she cared about was when "HE," as she referred to him in her letters, would visit.

Although Lambert concedes that even ordinary citizens couldn't be clueless about the fate of the Jews after Kristallnacht in 1938, she largely dismisses the notion that Braun and most other Germans could have known the full extent of the horrors of the deportations and the camps. She also argues that the widespread anti-Semitism of German women like her mother, who remained "unthinkably prejudiced against Jews" even after the war, didn't overshadow their positive traits, such as love of family.

As for Braun, Lambert portrays her as "blameworthy" -- not implicated in the suffering Hitler inflicted on the world, "but not innocent either." Then she adds a defense of Braun that is staggering in its implications. "It is not a crime to be shallow and fun-loving," Lambert insists, seemingly ignoring the context of such "fun": Hitler's orgy of mass murder. Even Braun's outburst against her sister, who dared to denounce Hitler near the end -- "You deserve to be lined up against the wall and shot!" -- is presented as an understandable product of blind love for her man. But Lambert is hardly doing her mother or other dangerously passive German women a service by equating their willful blindness with Braun's. This is a case of a daughter protesting too much, offering a damning indictment instead of an effective defense. After all, Hitler proved how easily willful blindness could serve the cause of blind destruction.

--Andrew Nagorski, a senior editor at Newsweek International, is the author of the forthcoming "The Greatest Battle: Stalin, Hitler and the Desperate Struggle for Moscow That Changed the Course of World War II."