I see there’s a previous topic about this but it’s 16 years old and only got 10 replies which don’t seem to answer anything and the mods tend to kill zombie threads so I felt this is safer.
Basically why is it in popular culture to refer to her as Eva Braun and not Eva Hitler? I understand she was only technically married to him for the last 24 hours of her life, but she’s universally called Eva Braun when you would think people would refer to her as Eva Hitler for the sheer name recognition.
I always assumed she was more famous under the name Eva Braun, since that’s what she went by her entire public life.
Only fairly recently might people forget her name and need the reminder of who she is, and then those who still so know her wouldn’t know it was her, unless you have her three names. Plus, well, did she actually take on her husband’s name?
Well, in the US a marriage isn’t fully recognized until a marriage certificate is issued.
The license and ceremony are the first steps.
Germany may have similar laws. I doubt there was any opportunity to complete the paperwork. Hitler and Eva were in a bunker surrounded by approaching Russian troops.
According to her Wiki page, she was indeed Eva Hitler for a few hours before her death:
That looks to me like she was a bit confused. Isn’t the name that goes on the marriage certificate the maiden name?
You’re married once you exchange vows before a celebrant (and have complied with any other legal requirements, like giving notice, etc.). The certificate confirms that you have been married, just like a birth certificate confirms that you have been born; in both cases the event attested to occurs before the certificate is issued.
She starts to sign the certificate “Eva B…” before crossing out the “B” and completing her signature thus: “Eva Hitler geb. Braun” (meaning “. . . born Braun”) reflecting the fact that moments before she signed the certificate she had married Adolf Hitler.
In the text of the certificate, as opposed to the signature, she is named as “Fraulein Eva Braun”.
There is no such thing as a marriage license in Germany. That’s because German law doesn’t distinguish between the act of issuing a marriage license (which is a governmental act, confirming that secular law does not object to a marriage between these two people) and the act of the actual wedding (which may be performed by a religious minister). In German law, the wedding itself is invariably performed by a government official (“Standesbeamter”, typically of the local municipality where the wedding takes place). Religious weddings also exist, but they have no relevance under secular law (only under the religious law of the faith involved), and until a few years ago it was actually unlawful for religious communities to perform a wedding where there hasn’t previously been a secular ceremony.
To my knowledge, the wedding between Hitler and Braun was, in fact, performed by a “Standesbeamter” who was brought into the Führerbunker for precisely this purpose.
Yes, but the point remains. The marriage is contracted by each of the couple declaring before the civil registrar, in the presence of one another, that they intend to marry the other and by the registrar then declaring that they are now, by operation of law, lawfully joined spouses. He then records the marriage in the register - the record kept by the state - and it is possible to obtain a certificate that the marriage has been registered, setting out the details that have been registered.
But it is the verbal declarations of the parties, and of the celebrant, that constitute the marriage. The registration and the certification are events that follow the marriage; they are not the marriage itself.
All this marriage license stuff is mildly interesting and irrelevant. She’s popularly known as Eva Braun because that’s the name she was known by up until the day of her death.
That’s precisely what I said. The lack of a marriage license and related paperwork does not affect the validity of the marriage that aceplace57 had doubted.
The only remotely possible reason to doubt the validity of the marriage that I see would be that until the 1990s, German marriage law required banns of marriage, i.e. a public announcement of an upcoming wedding in advance. I doubt that this was complied with in the case we’re talking about. I would think, however, that failure to publish the banns would at best lead to a voidability of the marriage rather than outright nullity.
And of course, TriPolar’s point remains: Ultimately, the fact whether the marriage was valid for this one day under secular German law is not very relevant for the question of the name Eva is commonly known under to posterity.
Aye; which means that all contemporaneus writing about her would have referred to her as Braun not Hitler. She’s known as Eva Braun today because she was known as Eva Braun then.
Eva Braun was a fixture in the social court of Nazi leadership for ten years. All Eva Hitler ever did was commit suicide.
Why did they get married? So that she could get his survivor pension, life insurance and medical benefits?
She seemed to want to have been Hitler’s wife for a long time. Earlier in life she attempted suicide apparently to get attention from her Dolphy-poo. Hitler wanted to remain single because he thought it made him more popular among women. With the Russians closing in, even if she hated him with a burning passion, marrying him was far less of a concern than what the Russians would do to her if they were captured.
I don’t know if she had any opportunity to get away, she wasn’t with him until near the end, but if she wasn’t a virtual prisoner and didn’t try to head west and escape the Russian advance voluntarily then I think it must have been love. Wasn’t there a musical about that?
Well, it was April, so it WAS springtime for Hitler, and Eva, (and Germany).
Yeah I’ve never seen any evidence Braun had any serious doubts about Hitler or his work, and was anything other than committed. I suspect she likely had means to escape if she really wanted to, as a prominent person in Nazi Germany she would have been able to move around in ways most could not, and could have likely leveraged that to get out of the country before anyone knew any better, especially in the chaotic end months.
He also wanted to hold up the facade that “I don’t have time for a wife, and Germany is my only bride”.
She didn’t have to be at Berlin anyway, but traveled there from the relative safety of Berchtesgarden on her own will and against recommendations of others, including Hitler.
Once a name is ingrained in the consciousness there is little point in changing it, and many good reasons not to.
Of course, sometimes a person change their name in the midst of fame… Muhammad Ali, for instance, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, or Caitlyn Jenner (I guess I’m only thinking of athletes for some reason.) In such cases to refer to them by their chosen name is just polite, and so they end up becoming famous under that name. Eva Braun was never known by anyone as Eva Hitler, not even Adolf Hitler.
It should perhaps be noted that Eva Braun was not a well-known person while she lived. The UPI wire service ran a feature noting her existence in June 1942, after which but few mentions of her appear in the American press. She was even less known in Germany; as William L. Shirer put it, “Very few Germans knew of her existence and even fewer of her relationship to Adolf Hitler.”
After Hitler’s death, the first report that Eva was with him at the end appeared on May 15 in an interview with Hitler’s stenographer, Gerhardt Herrgeselle. Herrgeselle left before the end and wasn’t aware of the last-minute marriage. (So naturally he called her Eva Braun.) The first report of the marriage occurred on June 9 based on Soviet officers reading captured diaries. Nobody was sure whether to believe them until British intelligence corroborated the marriage in late November.
In 1947 Hugh Trevor-Roper, one of the British intelligence officers, published The Last Days of Hitler, and it was only then that Eva became the household word that she has been ever since. Trevor-Roper called her Eva Braun because, for most of the story he was telling, she was Eva Braun. And so she has remained in popular consciousness.
Her much more well known brother-in-law was shot for trying to escape to Switzerland.