KEY POINTS:
Eva Braun was an attractive and impressionable young woman pulled into the orbit of an ambitious and powerful man, 23 years older than her. Last night's documentary on Prime, Adolf and Eva, focused on Eva after Adolf Hitler walked into the photography studio where she worked, and a
relationship began.
Suicide ran through their story. Hitler forced Germany into a suicide attempt, launching attacks on both east and west, when a glance at a map should have told anyone how that would end.
By then Hitler had taken Eva into a world of head-turning power, deference, influence, freedom from material want, and the possibility of living out her fantasies.
Eva, from a sedate lower-middle-class family, dreamed of being a Hollywood actress, something she planned after Hitler conquered the world.
Her dreams crashed on the reality that powerful, or rich, men have great demands on them, and a primary relationship must find its place, and not necessarily first, in their world. That drove Eva into two suicide attempts, each a clear cry for help.
The documentary, well worth repeating, was founded on the recollections of Eva's maid who, as maids do, knew everything.
She tracked Eva's desperate loneliness as she was excluded from Hitler's official life and then, as the war raged, from proximity.
It was not until the last that the depth of her love was revealed. There was a chance to save herself by fleeing, or rushing to Hitler's side, and certain death. She chose Hitler.
She would realise one of her dreams, marrying Hitler. That lasted just 36 hours. Then it was a squalid end in a dark, grim Berlin bunker. Hitler shot himself in their suicide pact. Eva chose poison, wanting to leave a nice-looking corpse.
She didn't get it. Their bodies were wrapped in blankets, tossed into a bomb crater, petrol poured over them and burned to keep them from becoming trophies for the fast-closing Russian Army.
The documentary also introduced us to other women around Hitler. Eva was not the only suicide attempt. Mimi Reiter, who preceded Eva, would try and fail. Much darker were the allegations around Geli Baubal, Hitler's cousin, who did not survive. Hitler built a secret shrine to her in the house he moved Eva into, doing nothing to dampen whispers of obsessive incest.
The programme did not mention Unity Mitford, of the literary family, part of Hitler's circle and who would shoot herself, living out a semi-viable existence before dying at 33.
Rumours flew that these women were escaping Hitler's perversions. Eva's maid crushed this, remembering Hitler as sexually prosaic, with the suicide attempts coming less from deviancy than from betrayal by someone with power, described by Henry Kissinger as "the ultimate aphrodisiac".
The documentary kept the re-enactments to a minimum.
It didn't need them. It had Eva's home movies, skilfully editing them from a cheery young woman flirting with her lover and the camera, to a poignant sequence of her ice-skating, utterly alone, a metaphor for women hoping for love from men ignoring them for wealth or power.
