Love is famously blind; if Eva Braun and Martha Dodd are any indication, it is also willfully ignorant. Both women were afflicted with a chronic romanticism that warped their logic and inured them to the catalog of abominations taking place around them. Blame it on their dizzy blondness. Blame it on an excess of devotion — always becoming in a woman. Dodd went on to write about her years in Berlin and seems to have chalked up her attitude to immaturity; Braun has been written off as an innocent bystander. In fact, their solipsism was part of a larger scheme, in which matters of government and war were the province of men, and being oblivious to them was a woman’s prerogative. It ratified their femininity, this capacity to look the other way. What I Did for Love — that’s a list that many if not most women would just as soon forget. Braun and Dodd outdid themselves in this division.

In the final weeks of the war, the party that had been sequestered at the Berghof moved to the bunker in Berlin, 2,150 damp square feet carved into 15 poorly ventilated rooms. Braun reveled in her role as hostess. “Very happy to be near him, especially now,” she wrote to a friend.

She might easily have escaped, as Hitler urged her to do. Instead, she insisted on dying with him. She was 33. In letters to friends, she embraced her fate, as if a place in history alongside a failed despot whose name would become synonymous with evil were the finest outcome she could imagine for herself. Hitler married her there in the bunker, followed by a brief Champagne reception.

They poisoned the dog first, to see if the pills worked. By this time, telephone connection to the outside world was lost and the Soviet army had reached the Reichstag. Hitler took poison and shot himself in the temple. Braun chose cyanide over a bullet, she explained, because she wanted to be a beautiful corpse. Their bodies were doused with gasoline and burned, buried in a bomb crater in the garden. (via Romancing the Reich)