Adolf Hitler would not have been amused. At a fancy dress party his lover, Eva Braun, broke taboos that would have put less privileged Germans in jail: she had herself photographed as the blacked-up American singer Al Jolson, who was in fact a Lithuanian-born Jew.
Rarely seen photographs from the US National Archives show Braun – who married Hitler shortly before they committed suicide in their Berlin bunker in 1945 – in playful mood.
In some images she twirls a parasol, and exercises scantily clothed on the shores of the Königssee in Bavaria: in others, she is seen holding a cigarette.
All the indications are that Hitler did not get to see the photographs.
The Jolson impression, in particular, would have upset the Führer. It was taken in 1937 when she was virtually a full-time resident in Hitler’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden.
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She was bored, and amused herself and her sister by inventing costumes. Yet in the same year the Nazi campaign against the Jews was intensifying. And across Germany, a racist show, the “Afrika Schau”, was touring cities, presenting black people as sub-human.
Jolson had been born Asa Yoelson, a white Lithuanian Jew, who became a star in the United States and Europe when he blackened his face and sang deep-timbred renditions of songs such as Swanee River.
During the Second World War he became an entertainer for US troops but even before the war Nazi leaders such as Joseph Goebbels were adamant that Jolson should be banished from German popular culture.
About 25,000 black people lived in Nazi Germany, many of them actually of mixed race, the offspring of liaisons between French-African troops in the occupied Rhineland and German women.
They were known as “Rhineland bastards” and were often forcibly sterilised to uphold Nazi ideas of racial purity. So a ruling was issued by the Nazi censorship offices: no black people should be celebrated on film or in theatres.
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The Afrika Schau was taken over by the SS in 1940 as part of their drive to demonstrate the superiority of the Aryan race.
Perhaps Braun was unaware of what was going on; perhaps she felt free to flout the Nazi conventions. The pencilled inscription under the photo says simply: “Me as Al Jolson”.
The photographs were taken from Hitler’s mountain lodge by US intelligence.
“They came to us via the Army,” said Edward McCarter, the head of the Still Pictures Division at National Archives.
They have been sitting in the archives since 1947, seen mainly by the research community.
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Some of the images – especially those of Braun’s lakeside stretching exercises – have become well known. But the Jolson image has taken even some historians by surprise, raising questions about what else Braun might have been up to when Hitler was elsewhere, planning war.
The Braun files
•Born in 1912, Eva Braun, right, met Hitler in 1929 while working at a photographic business run by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s photographer, who took the newly released pictures.
•After the suicide of Geli Raubal, Hitler’s half-niece and lover, Braun became his mistress. He bought her a small house in Munich and, in 1936, created an apartment for her in the Berghof, his residence in the Bavarian Alps.
•Though Braun was in love with Hitler, he rarely acknowledged her in public or introduced her to his high-powered visitors. She spent hours swimming, shopping and grooming herself.
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•As Allied troops closed in, Braun moved into the Führerbunker in Berlin. In the early hours of April 29, 1945, in a rushed civil ceremony witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann, she and Hitler married.
•Thirty-six hours later, when Soviet troops were just a few hundred metres from the Reich Chancellery, she bit into a cyanide capsule and Hitler shot himself in the head. German soldiers burnt their bodies outside the bunker.
Source: Times research