What would've happened to Eva Braun if she didn't commit suicide?

by FlandreHon

I guess it would be obvious why Hitler killed himself. But did his (newly-wed) wife commit any punishable crimes?

kieslowskifan

/u/commiespaceinvader has a good answer here to this question. The long and the short of it is that the postwar denazification procedures did not really consider wives as major accessories to their husbands' misdeeds. While this meant that wives of the Nazi elite certainly would lose property and other valuables, they were not in danger of prison terms or execution. Margarete Himmler went through several denazification classifications, ranging from minor offender to fellow-traveler (the least implicated Nazis) to the more serious implicated beneficiary in 1953. Such reclassifications not only speaks to the chaos of denazification, which differed by zone, but also the difficulties in charging the wives of Nazi war criminals with benefiting from position.

Even in the case of property, civil laws sometimes trumped the need for justice and some wives managed to keep their husbands' property. Emmy Göring and her daughter and Edda waged a long series of legal battles to regain some of Hermann art treasures back confiscated by the Federal and Bavarian governments, and they met with some mixed successes. Lina Heydrich was able to successfully use the wider amnesty policies of the FRG to gain access to her husband's pension, which was quite large since he held the rank of a German general killed in action.

The wives and children of the Nazi elite often managed to exploit their husbands' notoriety for their own benefit. Both Gundrun Himmler and Edda Göring became prominent in the postwar far-right as champions of their fathers' vision for Germany and Europe. Lina Heydrich used her husband's pension to help her open up an inn that became one of the main social gathering spots for SS veterans and other unsavory types. Ilse Heß managed to publish her letters to her imprisoned husband under the right-wing Druffel press. Likewise, Emmy Göring was able to publish her autobiography, a fawning apologia of both her husband and the Third Reich. Many of these immediate family members laid the foundations for postwar Holocaust denialism and other canards of Europe's postwar far right.

Whether or not Eva Braun would have followed the trajectory of her fellow wives is unknowable. While it is very unlikely she would have been charged with a formal crime, it would have been a certainty that she would have had to face a denazification court. Her father and mother went through a Munich denazification tribunal in 1947 as Category II offenders even though they were relatively minor figures. The more serious charge was likely because they were Hitler's in-laws and it was possible that they were beneficiaries of the dictator's largess. It is not outside the realm of possibility that denazification and other civil procedures against Eva Braun would have been more careful and thorough than similar undertakings directed at other wives. The notoriety of Hitler himself would have made it an public relations embarrassment in light of German division and the Cold War. The GDR often made great political hay out of unrepentant Nazis, including widows, making a new life in the FRG. The sight of Hitler's widow managing to draw some kind of pension or selling her memoirs to the highest bidder would have been far more embarrassing to Bonn than the Heydrich inn or even Gundrun's political activities.

AvantiSempreAvanti

If I could ask a follow-up question: Hitler killed himself as the Soviets were taking Berlin, and the record of Red Army soldiers of sexual violence and rape in Germany is well-recorded, was there a fear that had/when Berlin fell, Eva would have suffered such violence before being arrested by Allied forces?