Certainly the answer does not lie in Eva's upbringing, for it was entirely conventional. Daughter of a middle class Catholic school teacher and the second of three girls, Eva was born in Munich on February 6, 1912. She went to a regular public school for the bulk of her education and seems to have been a perfectly ordinary girl with friends, average grades and a talent for athletics. When she finished school at 16 Eva went as a boarder to a convent school run by English nuns. Her studies included bookkeeping and economics.
When the blonde, pretty Eva returned home in 1929 she took a job as office assistant to the photographer Heirich Hoffman, official photographer of the Nazi Party. She eventually became a lab worker, processing and developing films and generally acting a photographic assistant. It was there that she met Adolph Hitler, she was seventeen years old.
It is not known when Eva Braun and Hitler began dating, became lovers or even exactly when she moved into his Munich flat. What is known is that the relationship was strongly opposed by both families. Eva's father disapproved of the arrangement on both personal and political grounds, it was neither a moral nor an ethical liaison. Angela, Hitler's sister was so violently disapproving that she and her brother remained on very bad terms for a number of years. It was noted that she never addressed Eva in the respectful mode of speech, but only in the familiar, as one might do to one's social inferiors or a person one wished to insult.
Hitler does not seem to have been an attentive lover. In 1932 Eva shot herself in a suicide attempt, apparently prompted by the fact hat Hitler had no time for her. He was, of course, busy with politics and becoming Chancellor of the still democratic Germany. He claimed he couldn't marry Eva because a family would interfere with his commitment to building the Third Reich. It was also felt that becoming a married man would cost him a portion of female votes that he needed to attain his goals.
