He was the lonely "Leader" married to Germany. This was the narrative promoted by Nazi propaganda. However, Adolf Hitler actually had a secret lover: Eva Braun. Heike Görtemaker has tracked down all the remaining pieces of their story and assembled them into the first scientifically grounded biography. This also provides a different perspective on Hitler. Who was the woman by the side of the "Leader," whose existence was kept secret until the last hour of the "Third Reich"? She is usually regarded as a politically naive, superficial young girl who played an insignificant supporting role in Munich and in the false idyll of the "Berghof." But how accurate is this image? With a detective's intuition, the author reconstructs the life story of Eva Braun, who rose from a lower-middle-class household to the inner circle of the Nazi ruler.