On the twentieth of April 1933, Adolf Hitler, chancellor of Germany for only four months and a few days from his forty-fourth birthday, came out from his Bavarian residence, the Haus Wachenfeld near Berchtesgaden, to greet the well-wishers and curious onlookers who had gathered by the security gates. It was a custom for him on this day. The house at that time was still modest, and would only be rebuilt two years later into the Berghof, with security around the property greatly tightened. For now, public access to Hitler was far easier.

Among those gathered outside the gates that day was a mother with her little blonde-haired daughter. The child had turned six years old that very day. The mother told Hitler of the coincidence, and Hitler, evidently taken with both the happy accident of the date and the girl’s pleasing features, invited the two of them back to his house. There, his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann photographed Hitler together with the little girl.

So began a strange friendship between the dictator and the child, one that would last until 1938, and one that would stir trouble among Hitler’s closest advisers, because the little girl was in fact of Jewish descent. Because of the many photographs Hoffmann had taken, the public would soon speak of her as “the Führer’s child,” and Hitler was only forced to end the friendship years later, under pressure that he himself resented. Hitler was often photographed and filmed talking with young children. Eva Braun captured many such encounters with a home cine camera.

The children were mainly the sons and daughters of high Nazi officials, particularly those of Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels, as well as the children of his household staff. But the little girl he befriended on her sixth birthday, on the 20th of April 1933, was none of these. Her name was Bernile Nienau. Bernile was born in 1926.

Her father, Dr. Bernhard Nienau, had been a physician in Dortmund and had died shortly after his daughter’s birth. Her mother was Karolina, a nurse. In 1928, Karolina had moved to Munich, bringing her own mother with her.

And this is where the story becomes rather strange, because Karolina’s mother, Ida Voit, was a retired teacher. She was a Roman Catholic, but she had been born Jewish, her maiden name being Morgenstern. Under the Nazi racial laws that would only come into effect in 1935, Judaism was defined as a race rather than a religion. Little Bernile, as she was nicknamed, would have been considered racially impure because of her grandmother having been born a Jew.

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 issued complex classifications concerning a person’s percentage of Jewishness, determining who was a German citizen and who was an outsider liable to exclusion or even persecution. Under these rules, Bernile’s grandmother, born a Jew to Jewish parents, would be classified as a Jew and therefore be deprived of German citizenship. Her grandmother had converted to Roman Catholicism prior to 1935, but the Nazis decided that Jews who had converted were still Jews. Once again, it was not about religion.

Since the Nazis considered Judaism a race, anyone born of Jewish parents was a Jew. This posed a serious problem for Bernile and her mother, because under the Nuremberg Race Laws, which came into force while the friendship with Hitler was already underway, both would be categorized. Karolina, Bernile’s mother, was classified as mixed race of the first degree, meaning half-Jewish. Under the law of 1935 she only partly belonged to the German race and nation, but could still hold Reich citizenship.

Bernile herself was therefore one-quarter Jewish, mixed race of the second degree, and was likewise considered to only partly belong to the German race and nation, though she too remained a Reich citizen. Legally, she was approved. But for Hitler to be seen in the company of a child who was one-quarter Jewish by descent caused alarm bells to ring through the Nazi leadership. Despite the legal question, Hitler and Bernile met every so often throughout the 1930s.

Between 1935 and 1939, she sent at least seventeen letters to Hitler’s chief adjutant, SS-Gruppenführer Wilhelm Brückner. Hitler had been informed of his young friend’s Jewish ancestry as early as 1933, but he did not seem concerned. It was when Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful private secretary, became aware of the situation that steps were taken to curtail contact between the two. By then, Heinrich Hoffmann had published many official photographs of Hitler and Bernile together, and they were popular among the German public, attracting much interest and leading to Bernile being described as the Führer’s child.

Bormann informed Bernile’s mother that she was to stop bringing the child to the Berghof, as Hitler’s house was now called. Yet Hoffmann continued to publish images of Hitler and Bernile together, and the friendship, however reduced, went on. It was only in May 1938 that Bernile’s mother was officially told to stop all contact with high party officials. Hitler himself was reportedly upset by Bormann’s ban.

Hoffmann later recalled Hitler saying of Bormann: “There are people who have a positive genius for spoiling all my little pleasures. ”

Many people have tried to second-guess why Hitler maintained a relationship with the girl and her mother when he knew that she was one-quarter Jewish and the mother half-Jewish by descent. Several explanations were put forward at the time by Nazis, and later by historians and psychologists. To be honest, nobody really knows why.

Bernile’s grandmother died in 1942. Her mother survived the war and died in 1962. But Bernile herself did not live to see any of it.

She died of spinal polio in a hospital in 1943, at the age of seventeen, and is buried in Munich’s West Cemetery.