1. A: The Bunny comes from 17th century Germany; it has nothing to do with Eostre.=
   • the Easter Bunny has its roots in early modern Germany;
   • it came more from folklore than from religious traditions;
   • it could be any kind of smallish critter.
2. https://theconversation.com/the-very-strange-history-of-the-easter-bunny-56690

1. This article on The Conversation is written by an academic, a scholar of biblical reception at Sheffield, and she does claim to be writing the history of the Easter Bunny. But she goes even further than the Three Hares Project. She reckons that if there’s bunny imagery in 6th century China, 14th century Devon, 16th century Italian painting, and on the cover of Playboy, then that must all be the same imagery with the same meaning. This isn’t true technically. She makes several other blunders: she treats Jacob Grimm’s hypothesis of a proto-Germanic goddess called ‘Ostara’ as more real than an actual attestation of ‘Eostre’ in 8th century Northumbria; she claims to trace the earliest appearance of the Easter Bunny to a German text from 1572.
2. [8:40 PM]The earliest appearance of the Easter Bunny is in 17th century Germany. A 1682 book by Georg Franck von Franckenau reports that in southern Germany and Alsace, Easter eggs were called ‘di Hasen-Eier’ because of a folktale that the Easter Bunny (‘der Oster-Hase’) hid the eggs in the grass and bushes to be found by children:
3. [http://digital.wlb-stuttgart.de/sammlungen/sammlungsliste/werksansicht/?id=6&no_cache=1&tx_dlf%5Bid%5D=5216&tx_dlf%5Bpage%5D=6
4. It isn’t impossible that Easter eggs draw on pre-Christian traditions in some way. There’s a 1971 book by Victoria Newall, An egg at Easter: a folkloric study, which claims to have found an Easter Cuckoo in Switzerland, an Easter Chicken in the Tirol, and an Easter Rooster in Schleswig-Holstein.
5. There is one earlier link between rabbits and Easter in a 16th century English source: a tradition of hunting and eating a hare at Easter in southern and central England, mentioned in an 1892 article by Charles Billson.

For Eostre:

Philip A. Shaw has given a full discussion of this subject in Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World: Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons (Bloomsbury, 2011) and mentions further onomastic evidence that Eostre was a Germanic goddess, including place names in England including Eastry in Kent (which was attested in the 9th century CE in forms that are distinct from the directional “east, eastern”), as a theophoric element in personal names such as Eostrewine (borne by an abbot in the 7th century CE at the same monastery where Bede would later serve) and Aestorhild (whence the later name Estrild), and as a divine name in the 150 Romano-Germanic votive inscriptions dating to the second and third centuries CE dedicated to the matronae Austriahenae found in England and in Germany (centered around Cologne). Shaw rejects Grimm’s old theory connecting Eostre with a pan-Indo-European dawn goddess, attested in Lithuanian Aušra and Auštra, Greek Ἠώς “Eos” (from Proto-Greek Auhōs, compare the Aeolic form Αὔως), Latin Aurōra (<Ausōs-a with a feminine ending), and Sanskrit Uṣás. The Greek, Latin, and Indo-Iranian forms reflect a Proto-Indo-European h₂eu̯s-ōs “dawn” (from the rooth₂u̯es- “grow bright”), while the Lithuanian form reflects a different suffixed form, either h₂eu̯s-rom orh₂eu̯s-reh₂, which might be connected to the Germanic forms, though Shaw thinks they rather reflect the word for “eastern” (< *aus-t(e)ro) and represent a local deity (in the English context, centered around Kent).