Margarete “Gretl” Braun Fegelein, the younger sister of Eva Braun and therefore the sister-in-law of Adolf Hitler for roughly forty hours at the very end of the Second World War, died in obscurity in Bavaria in 1987, taking with her the last untold secrets of the Nazi inner circle she had inhabited for more than a decade.
She passed away on October 10, 1987, at the age of seventy-two, in the small town of Steingarden near Munich, where relatives had tracked her down in the late 1970s suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She had never once spoken publicly about Hitler, her sister, or the regime she had moved within since her teenage years.
Born on August 31, 1915, in Munich, Gretl was the youngest of the three Braun sisters. She dropped out of school at sixteen and took a clerical job at the photography studio of Heinrich Hoffmann, the official photographer of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s personal cameraman. It was there that her sister Eva also worked, and it was through that studio that the Braun sisters were first drawn into Hitler’s orbit.
Hitler, already the rising leader of the Nazi movement, took an immediate interest in Eva. He paid for a three-bedroom flat in Munich where Eva and Gretl lived together, and he visited frequently. The arrangement infuriated the sisters’ father, who wrote to Hitler directly to complain that a man far older than his daughters was inserting himself into their lives.
Inside that flat, the Braun sisters hosted parties attended by senior Nazis. Gretl remained in the background, but she became a near-constant presence at Hitler’s residences, including the Berghof on the Obersalzberg, his mountain retreat above Berchtesgaden. Witnesses described the sisters as charming young women who tipped generously, sometimes handing cigars even to postmen.
Hitler was openly irritated by Gretl’s heavy smoking. According to accounts from the inner circle, he once told her, “Give up cigarettes and I’ll give you a villa.” Gretl reportedly replied, “My Führer, a villa would be a great joy to me, but only one, whereas smoking gives me twenty little satisfactions every day, satisfactions that last and multiply.”
What followed was an extraordinary sequence in which Hitler appeared to take it upon himself to arrange marriages for the sister of his mistress. He first considered Heinrich Hoffmann’s son, but Gretl found him unattractive. She then began a relationship with an American diplomat, which ended quickly, before she became involved with Hitler’s adjutant, Fritz Darges.
One of Hitler’s secretaries later recalled that Gretl was genuinely in love with Darges, but that the 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 was too dangerous and too public for the young officer, who could not make up his mind. Darges was abruptly sent to the Eastern Front to fight the Red Army, a posting widely interpreted as Hitler’s punishment for the relationship.
Hitler then attempted to persuade his close friend Walter Hewel to marry Gretl, allegedly promising him the post of ambassador in Rome as an inducement. Hewel rejected the idea outright. When he married someone else, Hitler was furious and banished him from his presence, though he eventually forgave him and allowed him back into the inner circle.
Gretl ultimately became involved with Hermann Fegelein, Heinrich Himmler’s SS liaison officer to Hitler. Fegelein was a decorated cavalryman, a holder of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, and a man described by contemporaries as witty, blunt, and ruthless. He was also, by the assessment of historians, one of the most serious SS war criminals of the entire conflict.
Fegelein oversaw mass atrocities and slaughter on the Eastern Front, and his record of brutality was well documented. His attraction to Gretl appears to have been driven at least in part by her proximity to power. As the sister of Hitler’s longtime companion, she offered a path toward the ultimate prize: becoming the Führer’s brother-in-law.
The couple married on June 3, 1944, in a ceremony at the Berghof that was celebrated as one of the last great Nazi Party occasions before the tide of war turned irrevocably against Germany. The wedding took place on the Obersalzberg and in the tea house on the Kehlstein, with the regime’s senior figures in attendance.
Even at the celebration, Fegelein made little effort to hide his nature. He danced intimately with his new sister-in-law, Eva Braun, and observers noted that Eva appeared to hold romantic feelings toward him. Fegelein had numerous affairs, and the marriage was never a happy one.
Three days after the wedding, the Normandy landings began.
Within a month, Hitler had left the Berghof for his military headquarters and never returned to the mountain retreat. In January 1945, Gretl accompanied Eva to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and to the Führerbunker, the underground complex where Hitler would spend the final months of his life.
On February 9, 1945, Eva and Gretl returned to the Berghof, but Eva later went back to Berlin alone. Gretl, now pregnant, remained at Hitler’s mountain retreat for months, taking it easy until the birth of her child. Eva stayed at Hitler’s side in the bunker as the Red Army closed in on the capital.
On April 23, 1945, Eva Braun wrote a final letter to her sister. In it, she asked Gretl to destroy all of her papers relating to Nazi state business, along with her personal letters, or to bury them. Those documents have never been found, and their fate remains one of the enduring mysteries of the regime’s final days.
Gretl’s husband, Hermann Fegelein, was also in Berlin as the war reached its end. On April 28, 1945, he was arrested after fleeing the Führerbunker and was found blind drunk. Hitler, who had just learned that Himmler was attempting to surrender to the Western Allies, ordered Fegelein shot for desertion.
Fegelein was executed in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. His body was never found. His death came just one day before Hitler married Eva Braun in a brief civil ceremony inside the bunker, a marriage that technically made Gretl the sister-in-law of Adolf Hitler for approximately forty hours.
On April 30, 1945, both Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler died by suicide in Hitler’s study inside the Führerbunker. Gretl was informed of her sister’s death and understood that when she returned to Berlin, she would never see her again. The regime she had spent her adult life inside had collapsed around her.
On May 5, 1945, five days after Hitler’s death, Gretl gave birth to a daughter. She named the child Eva Barbara Fegelein, after her beloved sister. The infant was, by blood, the niece of Adolf Hitler, born into a ruined country and a family name that would become synonymous with atrocity.
In the years that followed, Gretl Braun cut off contact with her family. She remarried in February 1954 in Munich, to a man named Kurt Berlinghoff, and returned to live quietly in Bavaria as the Nazi Reich was dismantled and its architects were tried, imprisoned, or executed.
Her father later spoke publicly about his opposition to his daughters’ involvement with Hitler and the inner circle. He accused the Führer of taking advantage of Eva and Gretl, describing a process that amounted to grooming, and of drawing them into a dangerous world from which they could not escape.
Tragedy continued to follow the family. In 1971, Gretl’s daughter, known as “Little Eva,” died after ingesting poison following a dispute with her boyfriend, in an echo of the fate that had befallen her namesake. The death devastated Gretl, who had already lost her sister, her husband, and her place in history.
By the late 1970s, relatives had located Gretl living in Steingarden, close to Munich. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and had withdrawn entirely from public life. She had never granted an interview, never published a memoir, and never commented on the crimes of the men she had once dined and danced with.
Whether she felt remorse for her association with a regime responsible for the Holocaust and the deaths of tens of millions remains unknown. She left no public statement, no apology, and no explanation. Historians have been left to reconstruct her life from letters, testimony, and the recollections of those who knew her.
Gretl Braun died on October 10, 1987, at the age of seventy-two. She was buried in the Neuer Friedhof in Ruhpolding, Bavaria, in a grave that also holds the remains of her daughter and her second husband. The plot is modest and unremarkable, a quiet end for a woman who once moved through the corridors of absolute power.
Her life spanned the rise and fall of the Third Reich, from a Munich photography studio to the Berghof, from the Führerbunker’s shadow to decades of silence in provincial Bavaria. She was present at the creation of the Nazi myth and survived its destruction, outliving Hitler by more than four decades.
Yet she remains one of the least examined figures of the period. Unlike other members of Hitler’s inner circle who fled, wrote memoirs, or faced trial, Gretl Braun chose disappearance. She took the secrets of the bunker, of her sister’s final letters, and of her own role to the grave.
Historians note that her silence was itself a kind of statement. She never defended the regime, but she never condemned it either. She lived comfortably in the knowledge that the documents Eva had asked her to destroy were never recovered, and that whatever she knew would die with her.
Her grave in Bavaria receives little attention. There are no memorials, no plaques, and no public commemorations. The woman who was briefly the sister-in-law of Adolf Hitler rests in a small plot beside the daughter named for the aunt who died in a bunker beneath Berlin.
The story of Gretl Braun is a reminder that the Nazi elite was not composed solely of ideologues and generals. It included young women drawn in through family connections, seduced by proximity to power, who lived lavishly in Hitler’s palaces and retreats while the machinery of genocide operated across Europe.
She was, by all accounts, charming, generous with tips, and fond of cigarettes. She was also present at parties where war criminals toasted one another, and she married a man responsible for mass murder on the Eastern Front. Her postwar life of quiet respectability raises questions she never answered.
For decades after 1945, Gretl Braun Berlinghoff lived in Bavaria as the world gradually learned the full extent of the horrors committed by the regime she had inhabited. She read the newspapers. She knew what Fegelein had done.
She said nothing.
Her death in 1987 closed the final chapter of the Braun family’s entanglement with Adolf Hitler. Eva’s letters were never found. Fegelein’s body was never recovered.
The bunker was destroyed and its site became a parking lot and a memorial. Only the silence remained.
Today, Gretl Braun is remembered, when she is remembered at all, as a footnote to her sister’s story. But her life offers a window into the private world of the Nazi leadership, a world of mountain retreats, tea houses, arranged marriages, and casual brutality, where the sister of a dictator’s mistress could marry a war criminal and dance with him while Europe burned.
She died at seventy-two, having never spoken publicly about any of it. The secrets she carried, about her sister, about Hitler, about the final days in the bunker, and about the documents Eva asked her to destroy, were buried with her in Ruhpolding. Whatever she knew, and whatever she felt, remains beyond the reach of history.