Eva Braun’s Last Letter Sold for $8,000

MUNICH, West Germany — The last known letter written by Adolf Hitler’s wife, Eva Braun, was auctioned Saturday for $8,000.

Braun’s last passport was also auctioned for $8,000, an oil portrait of her sold for $3,500 and small items of jewelry brought another $3,000, according to officials at Munich’s Hermann Historica Auction House.

A spokesman for the Munich auction house said bidding for both the letter and the passport opened at $2,900. The auction house declined to identify any of the buyers.

There were no bids for a book of speeches from Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s one-time deputy.

Braun wrote the letter to her sister, Gretl, on April 23, 1945, just seven days before she and Hitler committed suicide. In the two-page, typewritten note, Braun wrote:

“Our end can come any minute and I want to make use of my last opportunity to tell you a few things. You must take the necklace that the Fuehrer gave me for my last birthday. . . . The Fuehrer himself no longer believes a happy end is possible. . . . But naturally we do not intend to let ourselves be captured alive.”

Braun was Hitler’s girlfriend for years. She and the Nazi dictator were married the day before the two took their lives in Hitler’s underground bunker in Berlin as advancing Soviet troops closed in on the area.