01x03 - Suicidal Maidens

[bunniefuu]

(light dramatic music)

(ominous music)

(people chanting in foreign language)

(man speaks foreign language)

- [Narrator] What sort
of woman falls in love

with a murderous dictator?

Adolf Hitler's private
relationships with women

were a ferociously guarded secret.

He wanted the world to see him as a man

of high moral character,
a perfect gentleman.

In reality, he was anything but.

- He doesn't want a woman
who will threaten him,

who will challenge him.

A best woman for a man is a young woman

that you can mold and shape.

- [Narrator] The greatest
loves of Hitler's life

were so corroded and diminished by him

that they saw only one way out.

- He patently had a very, very potent,

traumatizing and almost
desolating effect on

women to cause them to
try and k*ll himself.

- [Narrator] His beloved
niece turned lover,

shot herself with his p*stol.

- He's controlling her as much
as he controls anything else

and she's starting to see
aspects of him that are,

to her, frankly horrifying.

- [Narrator] A German film star lover fell

from a hospital balcony.

- It's my belief that she
was pushed outta the window

and didn't jump.

- [Narrator] And n*zi insiders
gave jaw dropping accounts

of how and why these women died.

Revealing Hitler as a
controlling sexual psychopath.

- Undoubtedly, something very,

very traumatic was being
done to her at that time.

- [Narrator] Was suicide
their only way out?

- I think it's simply a
case of the terrible power

that he had over them and the realization

that they could never escape it.

(light dramatic music)

(people chanting in foreign language)

(ominous music)

- [Narrator] In April, 1889
inside a tiny apartment

above a brewery in a
small Austrian village,

Klara Hitler gave birth to Adolf Hitler.

After bearing three
children who died young,

Klara poured all her
affections into her young son.

He was the light of her life.

To young Adolf, his mother was a saint

and his father, a monster

Hitler's father, Alois, was
a heavy drinker and violent.

- His father was a pretty
angry guy and would take

that anger out on Adolf
and on his brother,

he would take that out physically
by beating them with some

kind of a whip or an object.

And it apparently took
place on a daily basis.

- [Narrator] Klara would
hear her boys' screams.

And when the beatings were over,

Adolf would run to his mother

and they formed a secret alliance.

- Hitler's relationship with
his mother was extremely close.

It would seem that a mother
who's lost three children

and then has a child who survives is bound

to be extremely devoted to the child.

His mother would line up to
protect Adolf from his father.

- [Narrator] For Klara,
this extremely close bond

with her son may have helped Adolf deal

with his father's cruelty,

but there are those that
claim this attention

by Adolf Hitler's mother
would w*r his view

of female intimacy and would play out

in his distorted sexual
relationships with women.

- If you're virtually an only child

with a completely devoted mother,

you really do believe you're
the center of the universe.

Hitler was the greatest
narcissist in history.

A narcissist is somebody
totally self-obsessed.

Everybody around them either
has to make them feel better

or be punished for not doing that.

- [Narrator] The teenage
Hitler was already showing

the first signs of a dark and dangerous

obsession with women.

(light dramatic music)

When he was 16 and living in Linz,

Hitler was very taken
with a well to do blonde

music student, Stefanie Isak.

She was a little older than Hitler,

tall, elegant, and Jewish.

Hitler's childhood friend, August Kubizek,

claims he saw firsthand
Hitler's infatuation.

Stefanie would walk with her
mother in the early evening

and every day Hitler would
wait on the street corner

to watch her pass by.

Because they hadn't been
formally introduced,

Hitler could only look.

He would never actually speak to her.

From the first time he
saw her Hitler could

not take his eyes off Stefanie.

- The relationship with the
woman that he did follow around

for four years but as
a very distant figure

and never daring to make
any contact with her

fits in with a number of features.

Firstly, at that stage, he
was completely socially inept.

He just didn't know how to
deal with people at any stage.

- [Narrator] He was deeply
fixated on the young woman

and according to Kubizek,
would become enraged

at the male attention she attracted

particularly from young
Austrian army officers.

- Hitler was a person of extremes,

so he either loved totally
or he hated totally.

So you can see that
this devotion from afar

would drive him round following her,

but never daring to break
the spell by approaching her.

- [Narrator] When Stefanie didn't respond

to Hitler's brooding intense stares,

his rage led him to hatch a deadly plan.

He told his friend Kubizek that
he wanted to kidnap Stefanie

and marry her.

After thinking it through and realizing

he couldn't support her,

he instead plotted to jump
off a bridge into the Danube

with Stefanie in a horrifying
m*rder-suicide pact.

- His threat, if this
relationship doesn't come to pass,

had a couple of elements.

The first one is of course
it was very operatic,

and he was crazy about Wagner,

but I really think it's
possibly the first indication

we have of his deep and
pervasive obsession with death,

and death comes as a part
of every act that he plans.

And this is an absolute
recurring theme his life,

particularly the idea of
if things don't work out,

I will k*ll myself.

The world must come to me, otherwise I go.

- [Narrator] Although
Hitler didn't go through

with his evil plan,
according to August Kubizek,

in the four years Hitler
stalked Stefanie Izak,

they never spoke a single word.

But this obsession with love
and death gave a disturbing

glimpse of the fate of other
women who came into his life.

His stalking of Stefanie
Izak came to an end in 1907.

In December, a few days before Christmas,

his beloved mother Klara died of cancer.

Hitler was bereft.

He worshiped his mother
and they were very close

and now she had abandoned him.

(light dramatic music)

In 1908 he moved from Linz to Vienna

and struggled to survive.

At one point, living in a men's shelter.

He had ambitions to become an artist,

but was rejected from art school twice.

He scraped by selling postcards

he'd painted of German landmarks.

in 1915, having him been
rejected by the Austrian army

on health grounds, he
joined the German army

to fight against the western allies.

At w*r's end lance corporal Adolf Hitler

was devastated by Germany's loss.

- There's no question there's
bitterness and there's anger.

And he comes up with this
idea of the stab in the back.

That is that Germany was not going to lose

in the First World w*r,

Germany was doing very
well in the First World w*r

but for the fact that we were
stabbed in the back by Jews,

by socialists, by this
undercurrent of people

who do not have German interests at heart,

even if they are Germans.

- [Narrator] Hitler's hatred found a cause

in the vicious antisemitism
of Germany's political right.

He joined a small band of
disaffected German nationalists

known as the Workers Party,
the future n*zi party.

- I think there's a lot of
delusion going on there.

And when you are working in
those radical right circles,

you can talk publicly in r*cist terms

and there's a lot of r*cist
literature and there's a lot

of pseudoscience about
what the racists are.

Hitler himself has consumed a lot of this.

Among his earliest letters in 1919,

he talks about the fact that
the first point of agenda

for any German government needs to be

get rid of the Jews altogether.

(ominous music)

- [Narrator] As Hitler
solidified his position

in the n*zi party, he sought
out new maternal figures

to replace his beloved mother.

Like Winifred Wagner, the daughter-in-law

of the famous composer Richard Vagner.

Another influential older
woman in Hitler's life

was the wealthy socialite
Helene Bechstein.

She lavished Hitler with
love, attention and money.

And once again, he became the adored son.

- These are people who are
rich Munich society women,

so they have two things.

They had money and they
had influence in society.

He needed influence and he needed money

and he found it very easy to charm them.

- [Narrator] Otto Strasser, a
former confidant of Hitler's,

claimed Helene and Hitler
where abnormally close.

She called him her little
wolf and stroked his head

as he sat at her feet.

Wolf was Hitler's pet name used
only by those close to him.

- Helene Bechstein referred
to him as like a son,

and he was frightfully
good at playing on that.

I mean, that's what he'd been doing.

He'd spent a lot of his
time being the beloved son

of an adoring mother.

And here he had this whole
group of women who were adoring

this young man and they flattered him.

And it sort of worked on that level

of people flattering a
young man who was used

to getting his way with his mother.

- We can see a pattern in his life as he

was advancing towards his leadership.

He developed strong
relationships with older women

like Bechstein and Wagner,

and I think that fitted in
with the underlying pathology

of never being able to let
go of his mother and needing

maternal figures who weren't threatening,

but we're cosseting and supporting him.

- [Narrator] But there may also have been

a more primal agenda at work.

Hitler's bodyguard, Brunp Gesche,

later claimed Helene Bechstein's
relationship with Wolf

was more than maternal.

In a 1974 interview, Gesche
claimed that in return

for their patronage
Hitler poured on the charm

thick like glue and the
rich ladies ate it all up.

And that he may even
have had sex with Helene

occasionally to keep the cash flowing.

(light dramatic music)

While Hitler was courting mother figures,

he was also gaining rockstar
status with younger women.

At Hitler's early rallies,

female supporters were
given front row seats.

Their adoration for Hitler
was plain for all to see.

Hitler's love life was a hot
topic of much speculation

and people were curious
why Hitler wasn't married.

His answer was always "My
bride is my motherland."

By 1923, Hitler was the undisputed
leader to the n*zi party

and its growing popularity
gave Hitler confidence.

Impatient with political posturing,

he ordered his storm troopers
to ferment armed insurrection

from a beer hall in Munich
and to seize power by force.

- The Beer Hall Putsch was
a statement of intent rather

than a desire to really seize
control in Southern Germany.

It shows Hitler being the risk taker

that he was always going to be.

- [Narrator] His grand
plan was to seize control

of Munich's state government,

then march on Berlin and
overthrow the federal government.

Hitlers plan failed.

(light dramatic music)

He was arrested and
sentenced to nine months

in jail for treason.

- Going to jail was something
that he was well aware

could be the outcome of his endeavors

to seize power locally.

But he was willing to accept that.

Time spent in prison would
give oxygen to his ideology

and indeed it would be in prison

that he would write "Mein Kampf"

and further refine his political thinking.

- [Narrator] After his
release from prison,

Hitler returned to his
mountain top retreat,

the Eagle's Nest in Berchtesgaden.

It was here in this mountain village

where he first saw Maria Reiter.

Pretty blonde Maria was working
at her family's clothing

store in Berchtesgaden when
she first met Adolf Hitler.

She was a vulnerable
young woman as her mother

had died just two weeks earlier.

- Maria Reiter, later
known as Mimi Reiter,

was a young woman who actually Hitler

knew when she was about 16.

He was obsessed with her.

Hitler once wrote that the
ideal woman would be young,

pretty and as pliable as wax.

(light dramatic music)

- [Narrator] After a
chance meeting in a park,

Hitler was persistent in his
attentions and visited her

several times in the store.

Finally, against her
older sister's wishes,

Maria agreed to accompany him
to a local n*zi party rally.

She was 16 years old.

Hitler was 37.

- As a narcissist, he
would've liked very attractive

young women that made him look better.

So you've got this older man
who's becoming a high flyer.

So he doesn't want a woman
who will threaten him,

who will challenge him.

- [Narrator] Watching him speak,
Mimi as Hitler called her,

was captivated by his
oratory and his hypnotic

effect on his audience.

She felt he was speaking just to her.

He just kept fixing his eyes on her.

His stare was intense.

She said she would never
forget how unsettled

and exposed it made her feel.

Afterwards, they shared an
intimate dinner for two.

For young Mimi Reiter,
it was intoxicating.

Hitler knew exactly what he
was doing when he turned his

attention to a girl young
enough to be his own daughter.

- Hitler didn't make firm relationships

with the women at his own age,

and I think that was
for a number of reasons.

Firstly, he was very socially inept.

The second issue is he was threatened,

and I think that this
plays into deeper issues.

If you have somebody your own age,

you are supposed to have a relationship,

you're supposed to
expose yourself to them,

and that really threatened him.

- [Narrator] Over the course of 1926,

Hitler would often visit Mimi
when he was at Berchtesgaden.

On one visit, he picked her
up in his car and insisted

that she go for a walk with
him alone in the nearby forest.

According to Mimi, it was here
they had their first kiss.

She said Hitler was forceful
and pressed her tightly.

Three months after her 17th birthday,

Hitler and Maria had
sex for the first time

in his Munich apartment.

She was besotted.

In the coming days,
Hitler returned to Munich.

They wrote to each other and Mimi kept all

their correspondence that
detailed their affair.

Hitler wrote how ardently he desired her

as if it were the first time.

But the letters stopped coming.

Once he had shaped her
into his devoted sl*ve,

Hitler had quickly tired of
her and Maria was distraught.

She couldn't bear the
thought of life without him.

She took a clothes line,

tied it around her neck
and tried to hang herself.

But her brother found her in time.

Maria Reiter's suicide attempt had failed.

- He patently had a very,
very potent, traumatizing,

and almost desolating effect on women

to cause them to try and k*ll themselves.

And nothing we know about
Maria Reiter suggests

that she had any kind
of suicidal tendencies.

- I think he was fundamentally
a destructive character.

I think at his core,
there was an emptiness.

He was not capable of loving.

He was a man who needed to possess

and a man who cared
little about other people.

- [Narrator] But one young woman,

perhaps the only woman
he really did care about,

was his niece Geli Raubal.

Like Maria Reiter, Geli was just 16

when she came into contact
with the rising political star.

And like Maria, Geli would
be at first flattered,

then utterly consumed by
the suffocating attentions

of her uncle turned lover.

Unlike Maria, for Geli
there would be no escape.

She was under Hitler's guardianship

and completely controlled
by his all seeing eye.

As infatuation turned to
obsession and ultimately

to self destruction.

Most historians believe Geli
was the only deep love affair

of Hitler's life, and that
when she died, age just 23,

something broke within him.

- Geli Raubal was without any doubt,

the most important woman in
Hitler's life after his mother.

She was his half niece,
daughter of his half sister,

and she came to Munich at the
age of 17 to lodge with him.

She was, we know, extrovert.

She wanted to be on stage.

She wanted to be an opera singer.

So she was the kind of
person that loved to perform.

She was in her element amongst young men.

She wanted a proper boyfriend.

She was fun.

If you look at the photos of her

she's got a laughter spilling out of her.

She must have thought
I'm going to the big city

and life is gonna be a ball.

(light dramatic music)

- [Narrator] But once Geli moved in,

Hitler became obsessed with her.

A former close friend of Hitler's,

Ernst Hanfstaengl, claimed
she cast a spell over Hitler.

He called her an empty headed little sl*t

with no brains or character.

Saying she never gave any
impression of reciprocating

Hitler's twisted tenderness.

- What came into my mind was what's called

the Lolita Syndrome, and
you only have to look

at the fictional character.

Lolita was flirtatious, she was seductive,

she was not promiscuous, but she certainly

had an awareness of her sexuality.

Now we know Geli was promiscuous
and she was not exactly

a deep thinker, she just was a fun girl.

So she slides into this relationship.

Her Uncle Wolf, who's
a big man in Germany,

going places is very impressive.

- [Narrator] Uncle Wolf and
17-year-old Geli rode horses

through the mountains,
visited cafes and cinemas.

Wherever he went, she
was always at his side.

As a family member, it
was the perfect cover

for a more intimate relationship.

In 1929, Hitler purchased a nine bedroom

luxury apartment in Munich.

He moved Geli into a separate
bedroom adjoining his.

- To begin with, presumably
Geli saw Hitler as a benevolent

patriarch of the family who
was going to look after her

and maybe enable her.

But as she must rapidly have
realized it was not gonna be

that kind of relationship.

It was going to be intensely controlling.

And the rows about where she went,

who she saw, were not what she dreamed of.

- [Narrator] Hitler wanted to control Geli

and was crazy with jealousy

when she went out with other men.

As their relationship developed,

it seems there were echoes of
his obsession with Stefanie

all those years earlier.

He wanted Geli all to himself and kept

a very close eye on her.

- We know that he became
infatuated with her.

She was much younger than him,

significantly younger than him,

and she wanted to go out
and she started an affair

with his chauffeur, who was her boyfriend,

and Hitler was outraged at this, furious,

and balled her out with terrible argument.

- And then slowly it starts sinking in.

He's controlling her as much
as he controls anything else.

This is totally what she didn't want.

And she's starting to see aspects of him

that are, to her, frankly horrifying.

- [Narrator] The most disturbing account

of Hitler's relationship with Geli

came from his own inner circle.

Geli confided in Otto Strasser,

a one time n*zi insider who
had been close to Hitler.

Years later, under oath,
Strasser was interrogated by

the U.S. Office of Strategic Services

where he revealed
intimate details of Hitler

and Geli's sexual relationship.

Strasser said Geli revealed
in a tearful conversation

that Hitler loved her,

but she couldn't stand it anymore.

She was repulsed by what
he wanted her to do.

Hitler made her undress
and stand over him naked

and then urinate on him to
give him sexual pleasure.

She said everything about Hitler's demands

was extremely disgusting to her.

(man speaks foreign language)

If Uncle Alfie, as Geli called him,

was debasing his young
niece in such a way,

then this had the potential to destroy

Hitler's relentless rise to power.

On the 19th of September, 1931,

Geli Raubal was found dead in her bedroom

in Hitler's apartment.

A lethal b*llet lodged in her chest

and Hitler's p*stol by her side.

Hitler and Geli had been in
a relationship for six years.

Why did Hitler's 23-year-old niece die?

- Undoubtedly, something
very, very traumatic

was being done to her at that time

and the enormous conflict that
she must have felt between

responding to Hitler as a dutiful niece

and what he was asking her to do led her

to this incredibly dark place.

- If you took Geli as she
was before Hitler, you'd say,

this is not a person who commits suicide.

She's a superficial, good time fun girl.

She bounces around without any problem.

And I think that tells
you how desperate a state

she'd got into then.

The realization, at some level,

he will not let me get away.

- She was obviously at
the vortex of terrible

and conflicting emotions
that made her feel

there was no way out.

- [Narrator] In the following days,

questions and rumors swirled
around the scandalous death

over Hitler's niece.

Newspapers reported that
the day before Geli's death,

she had argued with her uncle.

Geli wanted to go to Vienna,

where she intended to become engaged.

A furious Hitler stormed
out of his apartment.

Journalists wrote that Geli's body

was only meters from Hitler's bedroom.

Her nose bone was shattered,

and there was evidence of
other serious injuries.

Speculation was rife that Hitler

may have m*rder*d his niece.

He claimed it was all lies and attempted

to refute all the claims.

It seems astonishing that he
felt he needed to go to those

lengths to try and stop
the rumors flying around.

It begs the question:

Did Hitler have something to hide?

Certainly, investigative journalist

Fritz Gerlich thought so.

He believed Hitler m*rder*d Geli

and continued to pursue the story.

In March, 1933, just as
Gerlich was about to publish

an expose, he was beaten up,
his manuscripts destroyed,

and he was arrested.

Gerlich was ex*cuted at the
Dachau concentration camp

in July, 1934.

The scandal that had the
potential to ruin Hitler

was no more, but to those closest
to the seat of n*zi power,

Geli's death had exposed
Hitler's disturbed sexual psyche.

- I think it's simply a
case of the terrible power

that he had over them and the realization

that they could never escape it.

And that's typified by the story of Geli.

She started complaining to everybody.

He won't let me do this,
he won't let me do that.

And I think she just saw no way out.

(light dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The year
after Geli Raubal died,

Hitler began courting a new lover,

a woman who could match
his powerful status.

26-year-old Renate Muller was

a much admired actress and singer,

one of the most famous of her day.

The n*zi party saw her as the
embodiment of aryan ideals,

and Goebbels was keen for her to appear

in his propaganda films.

- Renate Muller was one of
many actresses actually,

who were invited back
to the Reich Chancellery

for an intimate dinner with Hitler.

He did that a couple of
times with other women

and he loved actresses, he
was interested in actresses.

And she was a gossipy
actress who regaled people

after this particular dinner with

what had passed between them.

- [Narrator] Her friend,
producer Alfred Zeisler,

claimed Renate told him
an unsettling story of

Hitler's behavior behind closed doors.

And once again, they point to
a man whose sexual preferences

were way out of the ordinary.

Muller related to Zeisler
how on one particular night

in Hitler's room, he
demanded they both undress

and lie on the floor.

Hitler then begged Muller to
kick him, which she refused,

but he was so persistent
that she eventually agreed.

She kicked and beat him,
verbally abusing him

while he declared himself her sl*ve.

Hitler then masturbated.

Muller told Zeisler that
once this violent encounter

with Hitler was over,
they put on their clothes,

sat down and chatted.

At the end of the
evening, Hitler stood up,

kissed her hand and thanked
Muller for a pleasant evening

as though nothing out of the
ordinary had taken place.

- The rumors about Hitler engaging

in extreme sadomasochistic
practices fits perfectly

in with his personality.

He internalized everything
that he didn't like,

that the losses in his life.

And he sadistically projected
his rage out on everybody.

And it's quite feasible that
somebody like that would have

these kind of sexual practices.

- She might just have
been a chatty actress

who liked to kind of
play up the excitements

of an evening with Hitler,

or she might have been telling
the truth about these very

unusual perversions that
she suggested took place.

The gossip that Renate Muller
was alleged to have spread,

it was that he was a coprophiliac and that

he enjoyed other debasing
sexual activities.

- Inside the masochist,
outside the sadist.

- [Narrator] It appears
it may not have been wise

to talk about what went
on behind closed doors.

The Gestapo had Renate Muller

under round the clock surveillance.

In 1937, she sought
treatments in a sanitarium

and asked to see Hitler, but he refused.

It seems this was to be
one of her last requests.

From an upstairs window, Renate
Muller saw four SS officers

approach the sanatorium.

Shortly after she fell her death.

- Renate had a terrible end
in that she was being treated

as in a clinic for quotes, depression,

and fell out of a window.

But falling out of a window was
a way that very many enemies

of the regime met their end.

It wasn't an unusual way actually,

to be m*rder*d in the Third Reich.

It's my belief that she
was pushed outta the window

and didn't jump.

She had caused embarrassment
and the things that

she was alleged to have said

she had embarrassing and scandalous.

So I think that was why she met her end.

- [Narrator] Renate Muller
was just one more casualty

in the intimate life of Adolf Hitler.

Of all the tragic stories of
the women in Hitler's life,

the most enduring was that of Eva Braun.

Hitler first met Eva in October, 1929,

when Geli Raubal was living
in his Munich apartment.

Despite his relationship with Geli,

Hitler became obsessed with
another much younger woman.

- Eva Braun was a young,
pretty blonde assistant

at the photographic studio of
Heinrich Hoffman in Munich.

And she was up a ladder
at the back of his shop

one day when Hitler came in.

And he walked in and he
saw this pair of legs,

which belonged to a 17 year old girl,

and he asked her to the opera.

- [Narrator] Hitler introduced
himself as Herr Wolf,

not revealing his true identity.

Like Renate Muller, Eva
initially rejected Hitler.

At their first meeting,

she wasn't at all interested
in the old man paying her

compliments and devouring
her with his eyes.

She refused the offer of
a lift in his Mercedes,

worried what her father's
reaction would be..

But Hitler persisted, and
Eva, like those before her,

fell for Adolf Hitler and fell hard.

In 1935, when she was just 23 years old,

Eva wrote in her diary
that she was the mistress

of the greatest man in
Germany and the world.

But very few people knew she existed.

Hitler kept their relationship

a closely guarded secret from
all but his inner circle.

- Eva was the hidden girlfriend.

It was important to
Hitler that nobody knew

that he had a relationship
because he had always said,

"I must be married to Germany."

It would've been, he believed,

kind of death to his public
persona if he were to marry.

And you have to remember,
this was somebody who actually

received more fan mail
than all the Beatles

and the Rolling Stone combined.

Wherever Hitler went, he
was surrounded by women

like throwing themselves at him.

You know, sometimes they'd
jump in front of his car

and take their blouses off and things.

So he thought it would be a bad move

should he be seen to be coupled up.

So consequently, Eva was kept very,

very much under wraps and this
didn't accord with her view

of what a normal relationship should be.

- [Narrator] Like Geli, Eva
Braun's diary entries indicate

the traumatic effect Hitler was having

on her state of mind.

She wrote she was miserable and wished

she'd never set eyes on him.

- A couple of times, apparently,

that she was with other
people in the inner circle

and he would walk by, walk up to her,

give her an envelope
of money and then walk

by without saying a word.

And that happened more than once.

And she cringed with humiliation at this.

- Very early on in their relationship

she would write that Hitler
would take her out to dinner

and he wouldn't talk to her all evening.

And then at the end of the evening,

he would slip her an envelope of money

and she went away feeling
dirty like prost*tute.

And she hated the way
that he made her feel.

- [Narrator] One shocking
entry in her diary

indicated how fragile
was Eva's state of mind.

She planned to take 35 pills,

which she was sure would
be enough to k*ll her.

- Eva had attempted suicide
twice in the early years.

And in a sense, he was then trapped,

because after Geli, if he had a partner

who k*lled themselves again,
his public image would be shot.

- She first attempted
suicide very early on

in their relationship.

She shot herself with a
p*stol, not very well,

and it was a kind of cry for help.

She tried to commit suicide again,

this time with Phanodorm,
the sleeping pills.

Her suicide attempts did actually
win her a bit of reprieve

in that they took her closer to Hitler

because of the potential scandal.

But I think she must have
realized as time went on that this

happy idea that they were one
day gonna live together and be

a family was never going
to never going to pan out.

- [Narrator] Like Geli
and Mimi before her,

a young woman's relationship with Hitler

led her to take desperate
and tragic measures.

There has been much speculation about Eva

and Hitler's sexual relationship,

and it seems that things
weren't satisfactory

in that department either.

According to Hitler's physician,

Dr. Theodor Morell, Braun
became so sexually frustrated

she asked him to give
Hitler hormone injections

to increase his libido.

- Albert Speer was very fond of Eva,

and one evening he came
across her in tears

and asked what was wrong.

And she said, well,
Hitler has told me to go

and find someone else because he said

that he could no longer fulfill me.

Which Speer interpreted
is that he was no longer

able to fulfill her sexually.

- [Narrator] In April,
1945, Eva Braun moved into

the Fuhrerbunker under
the Reich's Chancellory

to be with Hitler.

As the end neared, he told everyone

they should leave, including Eva.

- When the news came through
that they had to surrender.

Hitler said to the women around him,

"You must leave, you must go."

At which point Eva went
up to him and she says,

"You know I'm not going to leave you.

Why do you ask me?"

And at this point,

Hitler went across to
her and did something

that nobody had ever seen before

and he kissed her on the mouth.

- [Narrator] In the dying days of the w*r,

Eva Braun finally achieved
her life's ambition;

to become the wife of Germany's fuhrer.

In the underground bunker,

Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun married.

- What Hitler did in marrying
Eva right at the end,

it's a way of saying
you've served me loyally,

and here is your reward.

So yet again, he's failed to
see the person in front of them

and to understand them.

And of course it's what
she had always craved.

And she decided to tell
herself that it was great.

So it was a kind of
death wish, but in a way,

her entire relationship with
Hitler had been a death wish.

- [Narrator] 36 hours later,
on April the 30th, 1945,

the newly weds sat
together on a small couch

in the Fuhrerbunker,

beneath the bombed out
Reich's Chancellery.

They both swallowed a capsule of cyanide

and Hitler also shot himself in the head,

just to be certain.

Eva Braun became the last of
Adolf Hitler's women to die.

- What you make of the
suicide of Eva Braun,

I think it had a lot to
do with her obsession

about being recognized
as the fuhrer's wife.

Remember he said he was married to Germany

and could never have a wife.

And she was so determined
to kind of trump that.

She just couldn't see any life for herself

away from Hitler.

So what else do you do?

You join him in the bunker,

you have a marriage for one
day, and you k*ll herself.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] It's hard to say what part

Hitler's romantic attentions
and sexual perversions played

in compelling these young
women to take their own lives.

But we can say that Hitler's
narcissistic controlling

personality almost certainly
played a significant part.

- I think that any woman coming
into the picture would start

to pick up the sheer horror
of what he represents.

And I think that's what
pushes them along that line.

I mean, Hitler was not
a guy that you could

write a Dear John letter to
and go on with your life.

They simply could not escape.

Every relationship with Hitler
was characterized by despair,

leading to attempted suicide.

(Adolf speaking foreign language)

- I would say that almost
all the relationships

that Hitler had with women
were a*usive and coercive ones.

He had a very kind of potent
depressing effect on people.

When this big, powerful,
destructive figure enters

their universe and takes it over,

there isn't any way out.

(light dramatic music)

(eerie music)