DESPOTS' WIVES CLUB: Melania Trump and Eva Braun
You can view the clip of Eva Braun at the beach here. Compared to the nude and racy photos of Melania available online the clip of Eva is rather chaste. Even the now pro-Trump New York Post featured a naked Melania on their cover before she married Trump, not once when it was titled “The Ogle Office,” but another time with the title “Menage a Trump” of her snuggling another naked woman
Yesterday SemDem compared Melania Trump to Michelle Obama in “After her defense of Trump mocking an autistic child, Melania earns her title as Ugliest First Lady” an essay prompted by her husband’s bullying of Greta Thunberg.
EXCERPT: #UglyMelania was a top trend on Twitter, only followed by the ironic #BeBest hashtag for her ugly behavior. Never in our history have we had such a clueless and classless First Lady.
Once again, Melania, in front of millions, actually condoned her husband’s bullying of a child with Asperger's Syndrome. Melania said Greta had it coming to her, just like a violent bully would say about the victim. According to Melania, her husband’s jealous attack was just “communicating differently”, and Greta’s concern for her generation doesn’t warrant her being treated with any kind of respect.
I don’t think it could be more ironic if I witnessed Nancy Reagan justify her husband selling crack after tweeting #JustSayNo. Or someone visiting a child detention facility with a message literally written on a coat saying how much they don’t care.
I got to wondering whether there was another First Lady in history that we could compare Melania Trump to. Since I don't know enough about American First Ladies to consider them I do know who Eva Braun was. I wondered how involved she was in NAZI politics. I thought I might be able to write a piece with the title “Melania Trump and Eva Braun: At least Eva Braun Didn’t get involved in politics.”
I found the perfect article to enlighten me on HistoryNet:
HistoryNet’s Richard Ernsberger Jr. interviewed Heike Görtemaker who is a German historian and author. She wrote Eva Braun: Life With Hitler. Here are a few excerpts from reviews:
- “Hitler could not have wished for a better girlfriend. . . . A highly readable and consistent portrait of an ordinary woman who was, without a doubt, utterly devoted to the man history has seen as ‘evil incarnate.’” —The New York Times
- Her latest biographer comes perilously close to portraying poor, empty-headed Braun as the spidery femme fatale at the heart of Hitler’s malign web, but the evidence falls way short of this inflated conception of her role. Instead, the book is an instructively intimate peek at a man who, like some black star, destroyed all those he touched. Eva was only one of millions of his victims – but a willing one. From The Telegraph (read review)
- “Ms. Görtemaker finally gives Braun her place in the dark history of the Third Reich.” —Wall Street Journal.
Cutting to the chase, I’ve copied are the salient excepts from the interview about whether we can dismiss Braun as merely Hitler’s companion and possibly his mistress — their sexual intimacy is only a matter of speculation. The couple only married a day or two before the Red Army entered Berlin. In an ultimate demonstration of loyalty all reports indicate that she willingly took the cyanide capsule just before Hitler killed himself with his pistol.
As you read the following I think you can see the glaring similarities between her and the current First Lady. I’ve noted in bold those I thought were the most relevant.
So she was much more than just a simple-minded blonde?
Oh, yes. This notion of the dumb blonde was created after the war in the memoir literature by all these Hitler cronies, who hated her. And we later were told that she was unintelligent and totally uninterested in politics. The Nazi women said after the war that they had nothing to do with politics at all. Even Ilse Hess, who was an early campaigner for the National Socialists and a member of the party since 1921, said after the war that she had nothing to do with politics—and as a woman had always been passive. But that was not true—and not true for Eva Braun. Braun became part of the Nazi propaganda machinery. She served not just as decoration; she took pictures and films portraying Hitler at his Berghof retreat as a likeable caring person and family man, fond of children. But he wasn’t a family man. And she sold these so-called private pictures to Heinrich Hoffmann, and in doing so earned a lot of money—she got 20,000 marks for one of her [home] movies. She was very rich. It cannot be said how many pictures published by Hoffmann in his famous picture books about the private life of the führer were actually taken by Eva Braun.
Should she be considered a collaborator?
Over the 14-year [span] of her relationship with Hitler, Braun developed a very important role within the inner circle. She changed from a rather shy and insecure person into a determined woman—a capricious, uncompromising champion of absolute loyalty to the dictator. As early as 1936, nobody in the inner circle could challenge her position. Even Albert Speer and the powerful Joseph Goebbels and others sought her company in order to get a closer personal [connection] to Hitler. So within the hierarchy of Hitler’s inner circle, Eva Braun had a strong position. As one female guest later said, to be invited to the Berghof it was absolutely necessary to get on well with Braun. If you couldn’t get along well with her, you weren’t invited.
Was Braun interested in politics or the war, or aware of the atrocities?
Yes. It is true that Braun did not belong to the [Nazi Party]. But that fact does not mean that she rejected the Nazi state or was opposed to it in any way. On the contrary, her life, like that of everyone else around Hitler, was shaped by his worldview—by his charisma and his power. The members of the so-called Berghof circle, men and women, identified with the anti-Semitic, racist worldview and aggressive expansionist policies of the Nazi regime. So the collaboration, withn the scope of what was possible for her, was unmistakable. It cannot be verified that she knew about the Holocaust, but she certainly was informed about the persecution of Jews and the deprivation of their rights. It is also clear that she supported this policy. Despite the fact that she did not appear in public, she was not a passive bystander.
There are parts of Braun’s role described above which may not be the same at Melania’s in the White House. For example, people curried favor with her to get close to Hitler. It is possible that Ivanka has this role, or shares this role, in the Trump White House.
Of course there is much we don't know about whether Melania has had a mediating with her husband to soften his cruelest instincts, or has had a humanizing influence on him at all. If she has such influence one can only imagine the atrocities he might have committed without her. What we do know is that since his election he has been the cruelest, most unfeeling, and devoid of empathy president since Andrew Johnson.
We could ask the same question about Eva Braun’s influence on Hitler. We will never know if he could have been even worse without her, although that is hard to imagine.
I can’t say who I think is more of an enabler of a despotic husband so I must keep this as comparison since we can never know everything about Eva Braun’s influence in try to make Hitler less of a monster. I doubt it is possible she could have had any moderating influence. Unless some long lost letters or papers turn up we will never know if she tried.
It is far more likely that at some point these questions will be answered about Melania. They may come from sources who observed her interaction with Trump, or from those she confided in. Ideally these revelations will come directly from her if she divorces him, although I wouldn’t put it past Trump from forcing her to sign a non-disclosure clause as part of a pre-nuptial agreement.
