Hitler's bride: Expert 'discovers' farewell letters Eva Braun wrote to friend days before her suicide in Hitler's bunker By Allan Hall and Allan Hall In Berlin As the Red Army smashed into the suburbs of Berlin in April 1945, the mood of Hitler's bride-to-be Eva Braun turned from fragile hope to black despair. Letters she is said to have written from the bunker hideout she shared with the Fuhrer and his henchmen reveal her growing sense of doom. In one, dated April 19, she writes that, despite the thud of artillery and falling bombs, she is "happy to be close" to Hitler and remains "convinced that everything will turn out all right." But three days later, as Soviet troops overwhelm the German capital's exhausted defence force - many of them old men and boys - her mood has changed. She says: "We are fighting here until the last but I'm afraid the end is threatening closer and closer." She also writes of preparing to die and her bewilderment at how God could let such things happen. Eight days later, 33-year-old Braun was dead, killing herself alongside her husband of only a few hours, Adolf Hitler. The letters are published this week in a book called The Women of the Nazis, by Third Reich expert Anna Maria Sigmund. The writer, whose books have been translated into more than 30 languages, insists the letters are genuine and were written by Braun to her friend Herta Schneider. "I have no doubt that the letters are genuine and Eva Braun has typed them, correcting her faults by hand," she said. She claims the descendants of Schneider, who died nearly 20 years ago, showed her the letters. She said she copied them down before they were sold on to a collector. In the second letter Braun says: "Greetings to all my friends, I'm dying how I've lived. It's not difficult for me. Demise: Eva Braun's sentiments change from positive to morbid in the letters Anna Maria Sigmund explained: "Eva Braun reflects the change of mood in the Fuhrerbunker over four days - the vague hope on the 19th and the despair of April 22." Thirty years ago the news magazine Stern in Germany became a laughing stock when it published diaries which it claimed were Hitler's. They were exposed within days as the work of a master forger. Mrs Sigmund said she is, however, convinced of the authenticity of the letters - and of the "normality" of the relationship between Hitler and Eva. "I think they had a pretty normal love and sex life," she added. Braun married Hitler just 40 hours before the pair died by taking cyanide. Hitler also shot himself in the head. She had been his partner for several years despite him being more than 20 years older than her. They met when Braun was just 17. Hitler kept Eva's existence secret from the German people during his rule, believing that the myth that he was "married to the nation" would serve him better. He met her when she worked as an assistant to Heinrich Hoffmann, the Munich photographer who went on to become the Fuhrer's personal cameraman. A diary of Hitler's close confidant and ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, has been recovered. The log could offer an insight into meetings Rosenberg had with the Nazi leader and his henchmen, including Heinrich Himmler and Herman Goering. His diary was held by US prosecutors at the Nuremberg war crime trials of late 1945 and has now been recovered by the US government. He was convicted at Nuremberg of crimes against humanity and hanged in 1946.