Eva Braun is one of history's most famous nonentities. She has been dismissed as a racist, feather-headed shop girl, and yet six decades after her death her name is still instantly recognizable. She left her convent school at the age of seventeen and met Hitler a few months later. She became his mistress before she was twenty. How did unsophisticated little Fräulein Braun, 23 years his junior, hold the most powerful man in Europe in an exclusive relationship that lasted from 1932 until their joint suicide? Were they really lovers, and what were the background influences and psychological tensions of the middle-class Catholic girl from Munich who shared his intimate life? How can her ordinariness and apparent decency be reconciled with an unshakeable loyalty to the monster she loved?