National Socialist propaganda put forth an official image of women that implied a single standard model for women’s lives. Countless brochures, textbooks, proclamations, and speeches constructed the ideal of a woman’s world completely restricted to the domestic and social realms. In a speech before the National Socialist Women’s League at the NSDAP convention in Nuremberg on September 8, 1934, for example, Adolf Hitler explained: “If we say that the world of the man is the state, the world of the man is his struggle, his readiness for battle in the service of the community, then we might perhaps say that the world of the woman is a smaller world. For her world is her husband, her family, her children, and her house.”1 As the speech continued, Hitler referred to “nature,” “God,” and the “Providence” that had “assigned women to their ownmost world” and made them, in this clearly demarcated realm, “man’s helper” and his “most faithful friend” and “partner.”2
The “Reich Women’s Leader” Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, only thirty-two years old at the time, spoke to the members of her sex at the same event. Although she was to push for the Gleichschaltung[5] of the women’s unions and the establishment of a women’s labor service in the coming years, she implored the women in her audience to become a part of the People—and part of History—by “being a mother.” At the same time, though, she also appealed to women working in industry or farming, by declaring: “Clear the path from yourself to other women, and never let your first question be what National Socialism brings us, but rather ask first, and over and over again: What are we prepared to bring to National Socialism?”3 Clearly the “Reich Women’s Leader”—unlike Hitler himself—was concerned not to exclude working women, who numbered more than a million by that point, but instead to integrate them, as well as housewives, into the Nazi “Volksgemeinschaft.”[6] 4
In actual fact, the image that Hitler and the Nazi propagandists presented of the lives of women and girls in Germany had little to do with reality. In 1932, during the worst phase of the economic depression in Germany, a higher percentage of women than men were fully employed.5 After Hitler came to power, the number of women in industry rose steadily from 1,205,000 in 1933 to 1,846,000 in 1938.6 The actual lives of women in the “Third Reich” beyond the “cult of the mother” was thus significantly more multilayered and complex than is generally assumed.
There were, however, many professions that women were no longer allowed to practice after 1933. Hitler had personally forbidden women from being licensed as judges or lawyers in the German Reich, and decided that “women were categorically not to be used as high government officials.” Exceptions would be made only “for positions especially suited to women, in the areas of social work, education, and health services.”7 At the Party convention in 1936, Hitler declared once again to “all the literary know-it-alls and equal-rights philosophizers” that there were “two worlds in the life of a People: the world of the woman and the world of the man.”8 However, economic constraints such as the shortage of labor in the country, as well as Nazi political goals including the rearmament program under way since 1936 and the concomitant need for workers, made it harder to carry out a unified ideological political program for women and families based on racist/biologist principles.9
The realities of women’s lives in the National Socialist state were increasingly studied as a topic of historical research only from the late 1970s on. Until then, scholars of National Socialism concentrated primarily on analyzing the structures of power and thus women, who were excluded from important political, economic, and military roles in the Nazi state, were typically seen as insignificant and their influence was little examined. This approach was likewise—in fact, above all—to be found in the biographical portraits of the leading National Socialists—Hitler, Speer, Himmler. The journalist Gitta Sereny was an exception: for her biography of Speer, she also made sure to talk with Speer’s wife, Margarete, who had, after all, “for years seen Hitler as a private man day after day” and, Sereny believed, could hardly have “remained in total ignorance” of the Nazi crimes.10 Joachim Fest, on the other hand, as late as the early 1990s, maintained that the cult of Hitler among his early female supporters from the “better circles of society” (for example, Helene Bechstein, Elsa Bruckmann, and Viktoria von Dirksen) had its cause in the “exuberance of feeling among a certain type of older woman, who sought to awaken the unsatisfied drives inside them in the frenzy of nighttime mass rallies around the ecstatic figure of Hitler.” There is no talk of these women having any possible political motives or well-thought-out antidemocratic or anti-Semitic positions, though Fest does discuss their moral decay, world-weariness, “muffled covetousness,” and a “maternal concern” projected onto Hitler.11
The memoir literature by Hitler’s more or less close collaborators, which seeks to explain his mass popularity, encourages such interpretations. Moreover, in such texts the wives, girlfriends, and female family members are usually on the margins, mentioned only as passive bystanders. “Eva Braun had no interest in politics,” wrote Albert Speer, for example. “She scarcely ever attempted to influence Hitler.” Speer likewise claimed about his own wife that she was “not political.” In general, he almost entirely excludes his family from his postwar reminiscences, in which, as his youngest daughter complained, his wife and children are “practically nonexistent.”12 The women’s own writings, in turn, retrospectively give the impression that these women were occupied exclusively in the private sphere during the twelve years of Nazi rule, casting the authors as devoted but politically passive companions to their men. They deny any personal responsibility or guilt, since they were, they say, to a large extent unaware of what was going on around them. Margarete Speer, for example, kept silent her whole life about her role in the Berghof inner circle as well as about her relations with Eva Braun and Anni Brandt (the wife of Hitler’s attending physician, Karl Brandt), and was thus described by her children “as always completely apolitical.”13 Maria von Below’s husband, Nicolaus von Below, worked in Hitler’s immediate surroundings as air force adjutant from 1937 to 1945 and developed an increasingly close “relationship of mutual trust” with him over the course of those years; she later said that at the time, when she belonged to the circle of women on the Obersalzberg, she had been “not all that pleased to come into that political world”—she and her husband were, she said, “entirely apolitical.”14
In fact, most women claimed after the war that they had had nothing to do with politics in the years before 1945. The widespread claim of “feminine innocence” was, not least, part of the strategy of exoneration in a debate about the past that took place in Germany in the 1950s. Even decades later, the psychoanalyst Margarete Mitscherlich reaffirmed, in a much-noticed book called The Peaceable Sex, that anti-Semitism is intrinsically masculine—a “social disease” that stands in close relation to “typical male development.” Women, on the other hand, are inclined to conform to “male prejudices” out of a “fear of loss of love.” In the Nazi period, she writes, women, “like all weak and oppressed members of a society,” thus identified with the “aggressor.”15 To this day, the fact that a woman like Eva Braun did not take part in any of “the decisions that led to the worst crimes of the century” is taken as proof of her exclusively private existence, “outside of history.”16 But is uncritically sharing Hitler’s worldview and political opinions not enough to transform someone from a victim into a collaborator? Doesn’t the danger of a dictatorship consist precisely in such blind obedience?
It has thus become more and more common to no longer see the wives of Nazi Party leaders or functionaries as mere dependents or conformists, but to understand them as active agents, “complicit” or even “perpetrators” in their own right. This new perspective has already led to studies centered on female propagandists of the NSDAP, or on women who were active in the SS system. But it also illuminates the hitherto unnoticed lives of SS men’s wives, and their significance for the SS “clan-community.” The conclusions were as could have been predicted: these women actively or passively consented to the “murderous reality” surrounding them every day, and at the very least lacked a sense of guilt. It was apparently socially acceptable “normal behavior” to support criminal activity.17
Despite the paucity of sources, Eva Braun’s case, too, and that of the other women belonging to the closed community at the Berghof, must be investigated—and her concrete everyday life and behavior in the Nazi regime reconstructed—without letting our view of the facts be obstructed by the image of women in Nazi propaganda, later strategies of self-justification, or the myth of “male power” in the Nazi regime.18 In the final analysis, the only way to understand Eva Braun’s status and social function within Hitler’s private environment, and her significance in the Berghof group, is to answer the question, What were her own motives? Until now, though, no one has seemed to suppose that she pursued any goals of her own whatsoever. The technicality that she was never a member of the NSDAP or any other Party organization has been taken as proof of her allegedly apolitical behavior; Eva Braun exists in the public eye, even today, only as a submissive victim or as someone who enjoyed the fruits of male actions without participating in them. But to what extent did she herself identify with the National Socialist state? Within the limits drawn for her as a woman and as Hitler’s secret mistress, was there any room to maneuver that she actively made use of? Albert Speer, in an interview with Gitta Sereny a few years before his death, claimed that Eva Braun had been “helpful to many people behind the scenes” without ever making this known.19 How we should take Speer’s brief mention of these activities remains to be seen, but it is clear that they do not fit the common picture of an entirely unaware and uninterested mistress.
The lives of the Nazi elite’s wives and lovers, kept hidden from the public, developed along lines that often contradicted the publicly proclaimed principles of the regime. For example, the diplomat and travel writer Hans-Otto Meissner criticized the “founder of National Socialism” in his postwar memoir for having disregarded “the principles of the Third Reich” at his formal events. Meissner was the son of Otto Meissner, who for many years was head of the Office of the Reich President, which in 1934 became the Presidential Chancellery of the Führer, and he grew up in the Reich President’s official residence on Wilhelmstrasse. He wrote that the “official representations at the Berlin Reich Chancellery,” including state ceremonies and festivities, were constantly violating Party rules; in fact, they were diametrically opposed to the behavior that Party functionaries were advocating “in the whole Reich.” Meissner was intimately familiar with how the Nazi regime conducted itself on the international stage, both because he worked in the German diplomatic service in London and Tokyo from 1935 to 1939 and because his father, as the “Chief of the Presidential Chancellery of the Führer and Chancellor,” was almost solely responsible for managing large, formal events. He remarked that at the state dinners Hitler held in Berlin, not only was the reactionary “kiss of the hand” in good form, but participants also enjoyed the “foreign luxury products,” such as “old Burgundy” and “French champagne,” that were consistently demonized in Nazi propaganda.20 And even while the NSDAP especially targeted female cigarette consumers in their nationwide antismoking campaigns—posting in restaurants and cafés placards that said “The German Woman Does Not Smoke!”—in the Reich Chancellery “liveried servants” offered “the ladies Egyptian cigarettes,” according to Meissner. The “ladies at the Führer’s table,” the former diplomat revealed to his countrymen in 1951, wore evening dresses from “Lanvin and Patou” and wreathed themselves “in Chanel and Chypre perfumes.”21
One such lady who often sat “at the Führer’s table,” filling the function of “First Lady of the Third Reich” at Hitler’s side during receptions, balls, and state visits, was Magda Goebbels. Since Eva Braun, as a girlfriend kept hidden from the public, obviously could not participate in such formal functions and thus never took part in any official meals at the “Reich Chancellor’s House” at 77 Wilhelmstrasse, only the wives of the highest-ranking Reich ministers were appropriate for such duties. This was particularly true for Magda Goebbels, who was attractive, elegant, and sophisticated, in the views of the time, and had a special personal relationship with Hitler as well.22 Ilse Hess, Emmy Göring, and Annelies von Ribbentrop were only replacements: they stood in for the Propaganda Minister’s wife occasionally, when she was not available.
Hitler clearly recognized quite early on the valuable public-relations qualities of Magda Quandt, as she was named when he met her. She had divorced her first husband, Günther Quandt, a major industrialist who was worth millions, and Hitler’s first meeting with her, in the spring of 1931 in the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, was not an accident. Magda Quandt had arranged the encounter herself by sending her ten-year-old son Harald to the NSDAP leader’s suite in a blue costume-uniform to “report for duty to his Führer,”23 who had arrived in Berlin only that morning. The maneuver worked exactly as planned: the boy’s appearance and the ensuing conversation with Magda Quandt in the café in the hotel lobby, arranged by Goebbels, convinced Hitler that this woman could “play a great role” in his life as “the feminine antipole” to him in his work.24
She was certainly something—or, as the saying goes in German, “you could make a country with her.” Her ex-husband, who had given Hitler financial support in his election campaigns, was firmly in the German business elite.25 She herself moved in Berlin’s high-society circles, after her divorce as much as before, and she even had international connections. In addition, she was financially independent, and had been a member of the NSDAP since September 1, 1930. Immediately after joining the Party, she had made deliberate efforts to get close to Goebbels, who at the time was Head of Propaganda for the NSDAP and Gauleiter of Berlin, and only four weeks later she was in charge of his “private archive.”26 This was at a time when the National Socialists were by no means established in the German capital, despite their success in the parliamentary elections of September 14, 1930; the NSDAP remained insignificant on the national level, and Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun was fighting to classify the Party as seditious and ban it, preferably nationwide. The Berlin chief of police, Albert Grzesinski, formerly Prussian Minister of the Interior, banned the NSDAP Party newspaper Der Angriff on February 4, 1931, and Goebbels had to appear before Prussian judges in several slander trials. There were, in fact, conflicts within the NSDAP in this period about whether the Party should continue to pursue legal means of coming to power or should instead unleash a civil war. And despite the political violence being perpetrated by the Party and the SA, Hitler was personally working toward recognition in upper-middle-class circles,27 insisting again and again that the NSDAP did not intend any violent coup, or putsch, only the pursuit of its goals by legal means. The developing romance between Goebbels and the urbane Magda Quandt thus seemed more than opportune to Hitler, as a way to polish his Party’s image of being a mob of working-class hooligans.28
When it comes to understanding the twenty-nine-year-old Magda Quandt’s motives for approaching the National Socialists, the existing biographies rely to a great extent on the postwar statements of contemporaries. For example, it is claimed on the basis of a reminiscence, published in a magazine in 1952, by her mother, Auguste Behrend, that in 1930 Magda Quandt was bored and looking for “a purpose in life” until she became fascinated with Goebbels as a speaker at an NSDAP election event, and spontaneously decided to become involved in National Socialism. Goebbels as a person—his charisma and his “almost eroticizing” effect—is said to be the reason why she joined the Party; his hate and his contempt for humanity were aspects of Goebbels she supposedly did not perceive.29 Albert Speer, too, who in later years was among her close friends, described Magda Quandt as a “very emotional woman, occasionally inclined toward sentimentality.”30 Elsewhere he claims that the wives of high-ranking Party members “resisted the temptations of power far more than their husbands” and regarded the “fantasy world” of their husbands with “inner reservations.”31
But is this account really plausible? Especially with respect to Magda Quandt? Speer’s Inside the Third Reich as a whole gives the impression that his worldview barely allowed for the possibility of a woman with political convictions, never mind ambitions. He does not attribute any interest in political topics to a single woman in Hitler’s inner circle, including his own wife. In Magda Quandt’s case, the fact that she entertained a friendship with the leftist Zionist leader Chaim Arlosoroff before meeting Goebbels indicates that she was seeking a new orientation in this period, not only in her private life but also politically.32 In light of the increasing radicalization of the Weimar Republic, and despite her own insulation from the financial struggles and unemployment resulting from the Great Depression, she clearly shared with many members of her generation the view that democracy had failed in Germany and that in the future people would have to decide between the left and the right. Like many other Germans from all social classes, especially those under forty, she found her way to the NSDAP in 1930, the year of crisis, attracted by the cult of Hitler and the vague but attractive idea of a new society, a “Volksgemeinschaft” united in the struggle for territory and for the race, which would be the only way for Germans to once again attain national greatness.
Only rarely were women active members of the Party. They constituted just 7.8 percent of the members who joined between 1925 and 1932. But neither Magda Quandt’s upper-class background and high educational level, nor the fact that her stepfather, Richard Friedländer, was Jewish, deterred her from joining the loud, militant, anti-Semitic National Socialists.33 In contrast to the Weimar parliamentary politicians, who seemed boring and fossilized, the Nazis embodied a youthful, revolutionary dynamism. They offered simple answers to complicated questions and made it possible to “flee the gray everyday”—not the least of their attractions.34
As early as February 21, 1931, Magda Quandt accompanied Goebbels to a Party event in Weimar.35 Goebbels had been named “Reich Propaganda Leader” of the NSDAP at the start of that year. At the Richard Wagner festival in Bayreuth, July 21–August 19, she was already, with Goebbels, a member of Hitler’s entourage, along with Erna Gröbke and Heinrich Hoffmann; Jakob Werlin, the chairman of Daimler-Benz AG; Hitler’s secretary Johanna Wolf; Julius Schaub; and others.36 In the years before he became Chancellor, Hitler traveled to Bayreuth only with close and trusted friends; there he indulged his passion for Richard Wagner’s operas and pledged friendship with Winifred Wagner. She had run the festival since the death of her husband, Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son, at the start of 1931. In other words, in less than a year after joining the Party, Magda Quandt, “Goebbels’s Madame Pompadour,” had reached the innermost National Socialist circle.37
The fact that Magda Quandt included her son Harald in her political activities from the beginning is a further sign of the depth of her engagement, and her enthusiasm for the antidemocratic, anti-Semitic, and anticommunist worldview of her new friends. She brought him with her to Braunschweig, for example, on October 17, 1931, where approximately seventy-five thousand National Socialists, including members of the SS and the SA, would parade before Hitler on the following day. During the course of the rally, violent riots broke out between the Nazis and the Communists, leaving two dead and sixty seriously injured.38 Quandt’s son, in an SA uniform, was standing next to Goebbels in the front row, next to Wilhelm Frick, the National Socialist Minister of the Interior for the state of Thuringia, and Gregor Strasser, the “Reich Organization Leader.” Magda Quandt could hardly have expressed her Nazi convictions, and her trust in Goebbels, more clearly.39
Nonetheless, Magda Quandt’s precise relationship to National Socialism, both during this period and later, remains uncertain. Did she become a passionate advocate for this ideology herself, or was she only hungry for power and launching a “career as an opportunist”40 in 1931? Can she even be seen as the victim of a cunning psychological maneuver that she herself did not understand? Hitler, according to this argument, manipulated both her and Goebbels in his own personal interest, even to the extent of getting them to quickly marry on December 19, 1931.41
Another theory, propounded by members of Hitler’s inner circle, maintains that Magda Goebbels was actually in love with the Nazi leader and had married the “limping Goebbels” only to be able to live near Hitler. Goebbels himself, in any case, seems to have been tormented with jealousy and mistrust in the early phase of his relationship with Magda Quandt. A few months before the wedding, he noted in his diary that he was “suffering greatly from” his girlfriend’s acting “not entirely like a lady” with Hitler, and he was afraid she was “not secure in her fidelity.”42 A few weeks later, he even claimed that Hitler was the one in love with Magda Quandt—Hitler had been “crushed” to hear the news of her upcoming marriage to Goebbels. It is unclear, however, how much these remarks had their basis in fact and how much they arose from nothing more than the Minister of Propaganda’s imagination, as a way of emphasizing his own masculinity and perseverance. At least in this case, the little man crippled with a short leg and a deformed foot was victorious, even over the all-powerful “Führer,” by winning Magda Quandt for himself; thus he commented condescendingly of Hitler: “Has no luck with women. Because he’s too soft. Women don’t like that. They need to feel their master above them.”43
The fact is, since the 1980s much has been written and speculated about the wives of the Nazi leaders and the prominent women in the Nazi regime, often on the basis of unreliable memoirs and autobiographical sources, but there has been little research. A lack of sources has led, in Magda Quandt’s case, too, to contradictory claims, false dates, and the perpetuation of myths. One thing is certain: she was no victim. She acted independently and on her own initiative. The decisions she made from 1930 on, about her own life and the life of her son, stemmed from deep convictions—of that there can be no doubt, especially after 1933 when she and her children worked hand in hand with the Nazi propaganda machine in the service of the National Socialist ideals of mother and family. Also undeniable is the fact that a “bond of friendship and respect,” as Otto Wagener put it, existed between her and Hitler from the beginning.44 The frequent private meetings between Hitler and the Goebbelses in Berlin are enough to substantiate that. And the idea that Hitler used Magda Goebbels or the other people around him for his own purposes, against their will, is groundless. Rather, we must start from the assumption that the wife of the Minister of Propaganda was a fanatical believer in both the authenticity of her “Führer” and the truth of the National Socialist ideology in general.
What was her relationship with Eva Braun? The two women spent the last weeks of their lives together, in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery; that much is certain. Already in the years before the war, the women met occasionally at the Berghof.45 They committed suicide at their husbands’ sides in spring 1945—the only wives of the Nazi leaders to do so. But can we conclude that their underlying political positions were the same? Were there or were there not points of convergence and agreement in the lives of these women before their legendary common demise? Were they even, as is so often claimed, rivals for Hitler’s favor?46 The thought suggests itself naturally enough, since Magda Goebbels was put forward as a symbolic wife and mother for the Nazi state in public appearances at Hitler’s side, while Eva Braun had to live hidden from the public, but there is no actual proof of any such conflict.
Like Magda Goebbels, the tall, blond Emmy Göring, who had acted in the German National Theater for ten years in Weimar, saw herself as the “First Lady” of the Nazi state. Her husband—who performed such various functions as Prussian Prime Minister, Commander in Chief of the Air Force, and a director of the national economy granted absolute, dictatorial powers—was, in the end, far more powerful politically than the Minister of Propaganda. And it seemed clear that Göring would become the next Führer and chancellor of the German Reich should Hitler ever withdraw from power or die. Göring and Goebbels were said to have been bound by a kind of “love-hate relationship,” while their wives, independently of each other, in the mid-1930s led “Berlin salons” frequented by diplomats and politicians from the NSDAP milieu.47
Emmy Göring, for example, who was already forty-two years old at the time of her marriage and was not yet a member of the NSDAP, regularly invited the spouses of other important Party members, including Ilse Hess, for tea at her Berlin apartment on Leipziger Platz, or at Carinhall, the Görings’ residence in the Schorfheide Forest.48 It is likely that a greater competition existed between Madga Goebbels and Emmy Göring than between Magda Goebbels and Eva Braun, who was, after all, unable to ever appear in public. In her autobiography published in 1967, in any case, Emmy Göring emphasized that despite the frosty relations between their husbands, she and Magda Goebbels “were in perfect harmony” with each other and that she “liked [Magda Goebbels] very much.”49 She was never in contact with Eva Braun, on the other hand, even though the Görings also owned a house on the Obersalzberg. If we are to believe Emmy Göring’s account, she tried many times during the war years to establish a personal connection with Hitler’s young girlfriend, but Hitler immediately put a stop to her efforts.50 In 1939 he granted Emmy Göring her wish to be allowed to join the NSDAP, giving his permission personally, but in her postwar autobiography she said nothing about this decision or what lay behind it. Rather, she presented herself to the public in the 1960s as Hermann Göring’s then-naive, unsuspecting, and entirely apolitical wife, who “never gave a thought” to whether she “was shopping in an Aryan or Jewish shop.”51
Ilse Hess—the third potential Nazi “First Lady”—was an exception among the wives of the leading National Socialists. Unlike the others, she was among the earliest supporters of the National Socialist movement and was, as she said herself, “a National Socialist from inner conviction.”52 A doctor’s daughter from Berlin, she was preparing for her exams in Munich when she met Rudolf Hess in the small Pension von Schildberg in Schwabing, in April 1920. He was studying economics, history, and political science at the time, and he brought her along to a so-called discussion evening run by the NSDAP as early as spring 1920, probably June 1. Adolf Hitler, whom she didn’t yet know, discussed in detail the Party’s goals in a small back room and cast his spell over them both. Hitler had spoken in a language, Ilse Hess later admitted, that she “craved,” because he “had the courage, for the first time since 1918,” to “talk about Germany.”53 Like many women of her generation, especially as the daughter of a Prussian medical officer from the First Guards Regiment in Potsdam, she had been overwhelmed by the trauma of unexpectedly losing the First World War and the feeling of humiliation resulting from the Versailles Treaty, which had “vilified the German People before all other Peoples.”54
Hitler, though, was starting to make a name for himself in the Bavarian capital city for his anti-Semitic agitations in mass rallies against the “Versailles diktat.” As propagandist for the NSDAP—he became its leader only in the following year, on July 29, 1921—he appeared once or twice a week in the city’s beer cellars. While Rudolf Hess joined the NSDAP “immediately” after their joint attendance at the “discussion evening,” Ilse Pröhl, as she was called until her marriage, first became Hess’s “political secretary” and then, in late 1920, as a student of German and library science at the Ludwig Maximilian University, his “secretary, adjutant, and staff” in one. Hess was already, as he wrote in a letter to his parents on September 14, in “almost daily” contact with Hitler. And Ilse Pröhl, as she retrospectively admitted in 1955, contributed the most to her future husband’s “nearly magical” bond with Hitler.55 Finally, in 1921, she joined the NSDAP herself and wrote in a letter to her former grammar school teacher:
For there is a movement starting here in Munich now, which strongly attracts all the young, strong, and still thoroughly healthy forces…. It is called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It stands—to be right upfront about it—completely on the soil of the German People, or, to put it in the clean and plain and negative terms appropriate to the movement: we are anti-Semites. Consistently, rigorously, without exceptions! The two basic pillars of our movement—national, and social—are anchored in the meaning of this anti-Semitism. Love of country and of our people above all private interests.56
The twenty-year-old Ilse Pröhl here formulated, unambiguously and conclusively, her belief in the fundamental ethos of a party that at that point was only one of many Populist-nationalist groups in Munich. And its anti-Semitism presented, as her letter makes clear, a foundation of the Nazi ideology with which she had no problem. She and Rudolf Hess, convinced that striving for socialism on a national basis included “in an entirely intrinsic way the struggle against Judaism,” made their support of Hitler, whom they called “the Tribune,” their raison d’être. Ilse Hess, who after the war insisted that she had been “always passive, as a woman,” was thus in truth an activist from the beginning. Her letters, which are now available to researchers, offer a glimpse that is otherwise hard to come by into the world of the wives of the Nazi leaders and their ideas at the time.
When Hitler was imprisoned in Landsberg after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 8–9, 1923—in which Hess had taken part as well—and started writing his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Ilse Pröhl was once again there to help him. The youthfully romantic student sent her boyfriend Hess, who was with Hitler in Landsberg prison, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Elegies as inspiration for Hitler. Hitler, though, apparently could make little headway with Hölderlin’s poetry, with its oscillations between hope and lament conjuring up the certainty of mankind’s renewal. Hitler liked the “type area,” Hess reported, but “he did not have much understanding of the elegies.”57 Ilse Pröhl also worked with Josef Stolzing-Cerny, the editor and cultural critic of the Völkischer Beobachter, as a reader of Hitler’s manuscript, and helped with the final version in 1925. It is unlikely, in contrast, that Rudolf Hess took part. Hitler assigned him to work on the corrections, but Hess apparently passed that work along to his girlfriend.58
After her marriage to Hess on December 20, 1927—he had meantime become Hitler’s “private secretary” and one of his closest friends—Ilse also corresponded with publishers and Party leaders and their wives, including the Goebbels and Göring families. The correspondence gives the impression of a very familiar, cooperative relationship, with, for example, gifts exchanged on holidays. Hess was the eccentric minister without portfolio, subordinate only to Hitler himself, and the “Deputy Führer” in Party affairs, while his wife, Ilse Hess, worked to maintain relationships and mediate any conflicts that arose. For example, she wrote to Heinrich Himmler, who took over the office of Munich chief of police in 1933, with the salutation “Most honored of all Chiefs of Police!” and continued in a humorously cryptic tone that he had “the surely praiseworthy habit” of “monitoring enemies of the Fatherland.” But why was he also keeping “upstanding ministers” under surveillance and pestering them with “ridiculous surveillance noises on the telephone”? If he was not the “wrongdoer” himself, perhaps he might be able to “look into what she suspected” was happening.59
Unlike Emmy Göring, Ilse Hess was also in contact with Eva Braun. It cannot be determined when they met, or whether their connection included personal meetings or took place entirely by letter. It is certain, though, that Hitler’s girlfriend was among those who received Christmas presents from Ilse Hess, for which Eva Braun gave warm thanks in a letter addressed “Dear Madam.”60 Like the other “First Ladies of the Third Reich,” Ilse Hess also played a public role, admittedly a smaller one than that played by Magda Goebbels. Pictures of Ilse Hess and her son Wolf Rüdiger Hess, Hitler’s godson, appeared in newspapers such as the high-circulation Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. And until her husband flew to Scotland in a fighter plane on a wayward mission on May 10, 1941, “Madame Reich Minister” employed no fewer than two secretaries of her own to keep the flood of correspondence under control. Even after Hess’s mission, as “apparently persona non grata,” she maintained contacts and remained, as she told the writer Hans Grimm in November 1944, “unswervingly true to the law… according to which we lined up under the Führer’s banner in 1920.” Until the very end, the idea that her husband “would stand once more at the Führer’s side as one of his most faithful followers” remained for her a “wonderful dream.”61
In 1933, Eva Braun turned twenty-one and legally became an adult. The problems in her relationship with Hitler continued to be the unsettled situation and their lack of time together. But it is impossible to tell when and how often she and Hitler saw each other in his early years as Chancellor, from 1933 to 1935. Nevertheless, the biographical accounts up to now, based on the contents of a diary that Eva Braun allegedly kept between February 6 and May 28, 1935, claim that they were often together during these years.62 In fact, Goebbels’s notes also show that Hitler, even in the months after he was named Reich Chancellor, spent most of his time in Munich. For example, in February 1933 he spent half his time in the Bavarian capital.63 While the “transfer of power” in Berlin was turning into what the Nazis themselves called a “seizure of power”—with Hitler immediately arranging for President Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag, call new elections for March 5, and impose the emergency measures “For the Protection of the German People,” which led to massive limits on freedom of the press and freedom of assembly—the head of the NSDAP was flying to his favorite city for several days every week. And Eva Braun—at least according to the postwar testimony of Hitler’s housekeeper, who was living with him on Prinzregentenplatz—“was there every time Hitler was there.” She was “sometimes taken home at night,” but occasionally spent the night “in the house too.”64
Hitler thus largely withdrew from the electoral campaign that was actually entirely about him, and in which he was cast, more than ever before, as a kind of mythical redeemer. The NSDAP, meanwhile, especially in Berlin, was intimidating and persecuting political opponents with all of the means at its disposal, including arbitrary arrests and violent attacks by the SA.65 Late on the night of February 3, for example, Hitler traveled to Munich after announcing to high-ranking army officers an unprecedented rearmament at a sitting of the army leadership on the Bendlerstrasse (today the Bendlerblock). On the morning of February 5, a Sunday, following the “state burial” staged by Goebbels in the Berlin Cathedral to honor the SA thug Hans Eberhard Maikowski, who had been killed on January 30, Hitler left the capital again in order to celebrate Eva Braun’s twenty-first birthday with her the next day, February 6.66 Eleven days later, on February 17, Hitler flew to Munich again after an election speech in Dortmund and spent the weekend.67 Four days later, on February 23, after a campaign appearance in Frankfurt, Hitler left for Bavaria for five days, remaining there until February 27—on the evening of which, the Reichstag burned.68
Why was the Chancellor spending so much time in Munich? Was Eva Braun the reason? And how did he justify his frequent absences from the seat of government? The truth was that Hitler, despite his conspicuous political rise to power, had no intention of giving up the bohemian lifestyle that he had led up until then. Rudolf Hess’s announcement of “new time management” a day after taking power in the government was somewhat premature: the “Führer,” Hess enthusiastically wrote to his wife Ilse on January 31, was suddenly punctual and even “always a few minutes early,” so that he, Hess, now “even had to buy a watch.”69 However, Hitler, well known for never being on time, remained restless and erratic.70 Berlin never became the center of his life. At first, he still lived in the Hotel Kaiserhof there; later, during renovations to his apartment in the Old Reich Chancellery, he stayed in the rooms “on the second floor of the office building” of his State Secretary, Hans Heinrich Lammers.71 In Bavaria, on the other hand, he bought the apartment in Munich that he had rented until then, at 16 Prinzregentenplatz, as well as the small Haus Wachenfeld on the Obersalzberg,72 both in 1933. In the Reichstag election of March 5, he campaigned for the seat he needed in Parliament not in Berlin but in District 24, Upper Bavaria/Swabia73—although whether or not he threw himself “with all his strength into the election battle,” as is usually claimed, is certainly doubtful.74 He had his head of propaganda spread the information that he was living “simply, like any other member of the People,” and that he had “no pleasures and no relaxation other than his work and his task.” He himself stated in an interview with the German actor Tony van Eyck after the election, in answer to the question of whether he was happy: “Happy? How can someone be happy with such immensely difficult tasks standing before him? Hopeful, yes—that I certainly am!”75 But the picture painted by Hitler and Goebbels of the “Führer” living a life of renunciation and hardship, overcoming “by some miracle” all “bodily and spiritual strains,” bore no relation to the truth.76 Rather, the first few months of Hitler’s chancellorship already showed that Berlin was primarily the “stage” on which the Nazi propaganda would perform the “cult of the Führer,” while Hitler the actual person simply disappeared unnoticed.77 Tranquil Munich and its surroundings remained his private retreat, a fact largely kept hidden from the public.
Especially for the period after the Reichstag election of March 5, in which the NSDAP won 43.9 percent of the vote but failed to reach its goal of an absolute majority, Joseph Goebbels’s diary entries document the extent to which Hitler made himself scarce: he hardly ever spent ten days or two weeks in a row in the nation’s capital.78 On the other hand, he extended his stays in Bavaria, for example spending from March 26 to April 4 there, when he drove for several days to his vacation residence on the Obersalzberg. His ministers in Berlin could reach him by telephone, and by the telex service that had just been introduced and was still under construction. Thus Goebbels, now head of the newly created “Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,” communicated to Hitler in Munich by telegram the call for a general boycott of Jewish businesses on March 27, and made “a report by telephone” the following day “about the effects of the call to boycott.”79 The geographical distance did not affect the fact that Hitler was always kept well informed, and still made all the important decisions himself.80
Week by week, both the social climate and the political landscape of the German Reich were changing. Regulations, laws, and decrees followed one another unceasingly, all leading in the direction of the final destruction of the state governments, the elimination of political opposition, and the removal of Jewish citizens from public life, and all pursuing the goal of making the NSDAP the only power in the Reich. In April alone, no fewer than twelve such regulations went into effect, including the “Reich Governor Law” of April 7 and the “Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service,” announced on the same day, according to which politically suspect civil servants and officials of “non-Aryan heritage” were fired or forcibly retired.81 Still, Hitler himself, as Kershaw notes, was “only minimally active” in the spring of 1933 and “took almost no personal part” in the transformation of the country.82 In April, too, the Chancellor spent the greater part of his time in Munich and its surroundings: he traveled to Munich on April 10, after only five days fulfilling his duties of office in Berlin; then he flew to Berlin on the afternoon of Friday, April 21, only to drive back to Bavaria the next day and stay until Wednesday of the following week.83 It was difficult, in these circumstances, to get into a “work routine.” Rather, as Otto Dietrich (the “Reich Press Chief” and one of Hitler’s constant companions since 1933) wrote later, Hitler had “no ability to distinguish between public and private life,” and conducted “his public business in the middle of his private life and lived a private life in the middle of his official business and official duties.”84
Hitler even sidestepped the celebrations on April 20, 1933, his forty-fourth birthday and the first time his birthday was celebrated throughout the country. While the Chancellor, as Goebbels noted in his diary, tarried “somewhere or another in Bavaria” and could not be reached, the Propaganda Minister organized the “Führer’s Birthday” celebration in Berlin. Following the custom of celebrating the Kaiser’s birthday, the “Führer’s Birthday” was to be celebrated every year, from then until the end of the Nazi dictatorship, with nationwide Party celebrations, commemorations, and marches, becoming a major fixed point in the German holiday calendar.85 It was Goebbels, not Hitler, who attended the ceremony to honor the dictator on that evening of April 20 in the National Playhouse Berlin (today the Konzerthaus Berlin) on the Gendarmenmarkt. There the National Socialist author Hanns Johst, head dramaturge since March 1933 of the legendary former Royal National Theater, premiered Schlageter, a play written by him and dedicated to “Adolf Hitler in loving devotion and unwavering loyalty.”86 A few hours earlier, Goebbels had given a radio address to the public with the title “Our Hitler,” which cast the absent leader as a national hero who had taken up Bismarck’s “work” and was “committed to completing” it, while at the same time remaining a “comrade” and “ordinary person like any other.”87
What was Hitler himself doing while the glorification of his person reached this “new high point”?88 He was strolling around Munich with his entourage, nicknamed the Chauffeureska, visiting his favorite restaurants, the opera, and the theater, and relaxing with close friends in Heinrich Hoffmann’s villa. In addition, he often met with Eva Braun, without letting their relationship turn into a routine or even anything reliable. Ultimately, the existence of a lover with whom he shared “no day-to-day life and no legitimate relationship,” and with whom there was no possibility of feeling a “sense of finality,” the way one would with a wife, was in complete harmony with Hitler’s bohemian, antibourgeois lifestyle.89 He received Eva Braun at his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz, took her to eat at Osteria Bavaria, and invited her to his vacation residence on the Obersalzberg. The young woman spontaneously packed her bags and—officially on assignment from Photohaus Hoffmann—stepped into a chauffeured Mercedes, sent by Hitler, that was waiting on the corner of Türkenstrasse a few yards from the photo shop.90
There is, though, hardly any evidence for these activities aside from the statements of third parties and a few photographs from the period.91 Still, Albert Speer, who had assisted the architect Paul Ludwig Troost (“Architect to the Führer”) since fall 1933 in renovating the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, and who soon joined Hitler’s innermost circle and was regularly brought along to Munich for “architectural discussions,” has painted a memorable picture in Inside the Third Reich of the usual course of Hitler’s stays in Munich. The Chancellor did not pay much attention “to state or Party business during his time in Munich,” Speer wrote, but rather spent his time largely “vagabonding around” on “construction sites, studios, cafes, and restaurants.” After a few days, they would all set out in several cars—convertibles with the tops down if the weather was fine—for the Obersalzberg, to “Hitler’s cozy little wooden house with large overhanging eaves and modest rooms.” Only hours after their arrival, according to Speer, did the secretaries Johanna Wolf and Christa Schroeder arrive, “most of the time along with an ordinary Munich girl.”92 These women’s closed Mercedes was “never allowed to drive in the official motorcades.” Then Hitler would stay, “with Eva Braun, an adjutant, and a servant,” alone “in the small house,” while the secretaries and Hitler’s guests, often including Martin Bormann and Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich along with Speer, were housed in a nearby pension.93
Speer’s look back at the early years of his close friendship with Hitler portrays the Nazi leader in stark contrast to the way the “cult of the Führer” propaganda presented him; he describes a man in a light-blue linen jacket, in a remote, isolated mountain cabin, spending his days perusing construction plans or on long walks in the forest and his nights with his young lover.94 Eva Braun, in turn, is described as an ordinary, nice, pretty, unassuming girl. Her relationship to Hitler is given only one brief, disparaging mention. According to Speer, Hitler and Eva Braun kept, even in this circle of close friends on the Obersalzberg, a “pointless distance from each other that came across as tense,” avoiding any displays of intimacy on the one hand (to the point that Eva Braun was only allowed to walk “behind both the secretaries at the end of the procession” on their hikes), but “disappearing together into the upstairs bedroom” at the end of the night. Conflicts that arose from Eva Braun’s “ambiguous position in Hitler’s court,” as Speer called it, are meanwhile hinted at only very briefly, such as when Speer writes that the Munich girl kept her distance from everybody and that this “withdrawn type of behavior” was held against her by many people as arrogance.95
This portrayal of Eva Braun, on the whole positive and even respectful, is noticeably different from the largely harsh and derogatory descriptions of her from other members of the inner circle. Only Karl Brandt, the young doctor who became Hitler’s personal physician at age thirty in 1934, described Braun in similarly positive terms. Under questioning from the Americans by whom he was being held as a prisoner of war in 1945, he stated that he had “seen [Eva Braun] with Hitler for several years” before he realized “who and what she was.” She had never “pushed herself into the foreground,” always staying “in her place.”96 The Hitler-Braun relationship seemed not to have been an “open secret,” at least in the years before 1936. However, Brandt’s statements and especially Speer’s remarks indicate that, by 1934 at the latest, Eva Braun was a regular guest on the Obersalzberg.97
But is Speer, passing judgment such a long time after the fact, a reliable source? Doubts are in order—as indeed, in principle, they are in order with any eyewitness report. Numerous scholars in recent years have expressed reservations about the historical reliability of Speer’s Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries, finding them to be “later, fictional constructions” in which Speer was demonstrably trying to minimize his involvement with Nazi crimes and to present the more positive, elevated image he had of himself.98 The first of these points holds true, to a greater or lesser degree, of all of the surviving Nazis’ postwar publications, the second point for most writers of memoirs in general. Nonetheless, eyewitness statements are not worthless. They only require constant critical testing and analysis.
Speer’s description of the past remains informative, especially since he spent over a decade as one of Hitler’s most trusted colleagues. Speer’s oldest son, also named Albert and also an architect, even told the film director and author Heinrich Breloer that there was “a very genuine, deep, emotional relationship on both sides” between his father and Hitler.99 Speer himself, in a letter to his friend and former colleague Rudolf Wolters about his relationship with Hitler, wrote:
I had a split relationship to Hitler…. It is probably typical of most friendships that they are built on contradictions. With Hitler I never once had the feeling that I had found a friend in him. Maybe it seemed different to you, from the outside. I was constantly living “in the fear of the Lord”—it was not easy to deal with him and stay in his favor or even, if possible, intensify it.100
In his memoir, Speer claims to have come “completely under the sway of Hitler” but never to have known Hitler’s “real face.” Rather, he had followed him “unwillingly, almost unconsciously, into a world” that was “actually quite alien” to him.101 Speer thereby casts himself not only as an outsider who was led astray, but as an addict, dependent and even possessed from without—a position he grants also to Eva Braun, seven years younger than he was when the barely thirty-year-old architect apparently struck up a close and trusting friendship with her. In an interview with Joachim Fest, Speer explained the reasons for his friendly relations with Hitler’s lover by saying that they were both equally prisoners of their emotions, even enslaved: “She was, like me, under Hitler’s so to speak hypnotic spell. We both suffered under him, hated him at times, but were still unable to break free of him.”102
Now, does this retroactively negative account of Hitler, which elevates him to a kind of Mephistopheles figure in the interest of Speer’s own self-justification, obstruct a clear view of Eva Braun as well?103 Does it not present her, like Speer himself, as less self-sufficient, more dependent, and more passive than she really was? Did she share the political positions and basic worldview of her lover or was she really the mere “tragic slave,” who nonetheless profited from Hitler’s power by enjoying the luxurious life that he offered her? In any case, Speer, unlike those who continued to hold fast to their respect for Hitler after 1945 and remained true believers in the cult of the “Führer,” had no need to minimize Eva Braun’s significance. He thus remains, despite all of his strategies of mythification and self-exoneration, a key witness, due to his extraordinary personal closeness with both Hitler and Eva Braun.104
Meanwhile, hardly any letters or personal documents exist from the dictator himself or from his companion of many years that shed any light on the nature of their relationship, or Eva Braun’s role, or how she saw her role. It is well known that Hitler rarely wrote private letters, aside from thank-you notes or birthday cards. His secretary Christa Schroeder, in fact, stated immediately after the end of the war that he had considered it “his great strength” that “even in the years of struggle he wrote no letters.” Such letters might have fallen “into the wrong hands” and been “exploited.”105 He also, before his suicide, made sure to destroy the greater part of his private correspondence, of which there was presumably little to begin with. Julius Schaub, his adjutant of many years, left the bunker in Berlin for this reason at the end of April 1945, on direct orders from Hitler, in order to burn the private letters and files stored in safes at both Hitler’s Munich apartment and at the Berghof.106
Similar testimony comes from Johannes Göhler, the former adjutant to Hermann Fegelein, the liaison officer who married Gretl Braun. In an interview with the British historian David Irving, who for years spared no effort in tracking down Hitler’s letters to Eva Braun, Göhler said that he had flown from Berlin to Berchtesgaden in Hitler’s airplane, a Ju 290, at the end of April 1945, in order to destroy all of Hitler’s private correspondence there. Several hundred handwritten letters to and from Eva Braun were said to be included there, in a footlocker.107 Irving’s interest was piqued and so, years later, he questioned Göhler’s wife, who told him that she had worked for the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) from August 1945 until February 1946, during which time she helped “an American CIC officer pack up Eva Braun’s aforementioned diaries from 1933–1945 as well as her correspondence with Hitler”; she also said that she herself was in possession of letters that Eva Braun had written to Gretl Braun between 1930 and 1932. Finally, she claimed that Eva Braun’s private papers stored at the Berghof were not destroyed in 1945, but rather were in the hands of Robert A. Gutierrez, the former head of the CIC team in Stuttgart. Irving, sensing a sensational find, went to the United States and succeeded in tracking down Gutierrez. He did not, however, discover any private letters of Hitler’s or Eva Braun’s there.108
Eva Braun had actually instructed her sister Gretl in her last letter from Berlin, on April 23, 1945—a week before the double suicide—to take all of “the letters from the Führer” as well as “the copies of [her] replies” to him, which she had bequeathed to her sister in a will of October 26, 1944, and “make a water-resistant packet” and “bury them if need be.” She explicitly insisted: “Please don’t destroy them.” The other private correspondence and “above all the business papers,” on the other hand, Gretl should get rid of immediately. Eva Braun emphasized that “on no account must Heise’s bills be found”—she had remained to the end a regular client of the well-known Berlin fashion designer Annemarie Heise.109 In contrast to Hitler, who tried at the end to completely wipe out any trace of his private life, Eva Braun was trying, with her sister’s help, to ensure that posterity would learn about her relationship with the “Führer” and her life at his side. Her letter from April 23, 1945, reveals a woman who, faced with death, was concerned about her image for posterity. In any case, none of the documents she asked her sister to preserve have been found to this day. It seems reasonable to suppose that Julius Schaub, who arrived at the Berghof on April 25—two days after Eva Braun had written her last letter to her sister—destroyed this correspondence together with Hitler’s papers before Gretl Braun could bring them to safety. The final truth, however, remains unknown.
Nerin E. Gun also reported later that Gretl Braun and Herta Ostermayr had hidden “photograph albums, amateur films, letters, jewelry, and other mementos” in the park of Fischhorn Castle in the Pinzgau region of the state of Salzburg, near Zell am See. In fact, the former SS office of Fischhorn, a subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp, was used around the end of the war as a storage depot for stolen art and other “estates” of the Nazi elite who were going into hiding. There, supposedly, Gretl Braun took into her confidence a “German refugee,” who turned out to be an American “agent,” and Eva Braun’s estate was confiscated by the U.S. Army and sent to Washington. Gun said that he had later “chanced to find” the documents again “in a corner of the American archives.”110 These are primarily the papers, photo albums, and films shot by Eva Braun that are now stored in the National Archives in Washington. There are no letters from Hitler to Eva Braun among them.
It is therefore necessary to turn to other sources to gain insight into the relationship that existed between Hitler and Eva Braun, and any details about that relationship. But there are not many other sources. Hitler’s statements that shed light on his views of women in general, for example, are found mostly in the published postwar memoirs of his former followers or, for the years after 1942, in the records of conversations induced by Martin Bormann. Occasional hints can be found in various other diaries and correspondences. Eva Braun, though, is not mentioned. It is thus difficult to reconstruct their relationship, and the question of what actually attracted Hitler to this young woman can be addressed chiefly by means of his behavior with third parties. It is said of Speer, for example, that Hitler deliberately chose him to be his architect because he was modest, “normal” compared to his other followers, young, and easily influenced, and the notoriously suspicious Hitler could be assured of admiration from Speer, who was sixteen years younger.111 Would these motives not also apply to Hitler’s choice of Eva Braun, the youngest member of the inner circle around him? By reason of her youth alone, and her lower-middle-class background, even aside from the intimacy of their relationship, she must surely have been more pliable than the other members of his retinue.
In this context, only the twenty-page diary fragment in Eva Braun’s papers, written in old-style German handwriting, sheds light on the character of their relationship. It is still controversial, however, whether it was actually written by her or not. While Nerin E. Gun had Ilse Fucke-Michels, Eva Braun’s older sister, check the handwriting to confirm the authenticity of the document in 1967, the editor of Christa Schroeder’s memoirs, Anton Joachimsthaler, claims that the handwriting of the document proves that it is a forgery.112 The historian Werner Maser, meanwhile, maintains that it reveals “more about Hitler’s relationship to women” than most of the interpretations of the “supposedly well-informed biographers.”113 Despite these doubts, or because of them, the “Diary,” as it is called, has inspired all sorts of flights of fancy since its discovery and has been not only the object of scholarly studies but also material for fanciful stories.114
Anna Maria Sigmund has described these jottings as “a mirror of Eva Braun’s psyche,” but what are they actually about? In truth, they are the thoughts of a young woman of twenty-three, usually written down some three weeks after the events described and primarily circling around the irregular comings and goings of her much older lover. We learn that Eva Braun celebrated her birthday, February 6, 1935, in Munich without Hitler. The Chancellor spent the day in Berlin but had Wilma Schaub, the wife of his personal assistant Julius Schaub, send “flowers and a telegram” to his girlfriend at Photohaus Hoffmann.115 At the same time, Hitler apparently continued to play the role of the solitary bachelor in the capital, with the support of his Minister of Propaganda. Goebbels, in any case, who never tired of emphasizing his close friendship with the “Führer” in his “Diaries,” noted down after a conversation with Hitler on February 3: “Big discussion with Führer. Personal…. Talks about women, marriage, love, solitude. He talks that way only with me.” Three days earlier, after a meeting in Hitler’s apartment in the Chancellery, Goebbels recorded that Hitler had told him “about his lonely and joyless private life,” without “women, without love, still filled even now with the memory of Geli.”116
We can infer from Eva Braun’s “Diary” that she herself had never yet been to Berlin. But a visit to the capital, and to see Hitler’s renovated office and living space at the Old Reich Chancellery, did seem planned for the near future.117 Paul Ludwig Troost, with his wife, the architect Gerhardine “Gerdy” Troost, and his colleague Leonhard Gall, had started work on the new design for the “Führer apartment” in 1933 and had moved the formal reception rooms from the second floor to the ground floor so that a private office room for Hitler, a bedroom with bathroom, and, later, living quarters for Eva Braun, could be set up on the second floor.118
According to the “Diary,” Hitler did not see his girlfriend until February 11, and then again on February 18, when he apparently told her that he did not want her to work at his friend Hoffmann’s photography business anymore and that he wanted to give her a “little house.” It would be “marvelous” not to have to “play the part of a shopgirl” anymore, Braun remarked.119 Twelve days later, on the evening of Saturday, March 2, their next meeting took place in Hitler’s apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz.120 If we are to trust the entry, she spent “two marvelously beautiful hours with him until midnight” there. Afterward—with, she emphasized, Hitler’s “permission”—Braun amused herself alone until 2 a.m. at the Munich city “ball”: the great masquerade ball in the German Theater that took place every year for Fasching (Mardi Gras). It was the most glittering event of the season.121 On Sunday, Hitler suddenly took the train back to Berlin “without saying goodbye,” so that his lover and his personal photographer, who had hurried to the train station after him, arrived “just in time to see the rear lights of the last coach.” Eva Braun had waited in vain for word from Hitler, despite calling the Osteria Bavaria and spending the afternoon waiting at Hoffmann’s “like a cat on hot bricks” and hoping that Hitler would accept Hoffmann’s invitation to “coffee and supper.”122
While the young woman “rack[ed her] brains” over why her lover would have hurried off so early without saying goodbye to her, Hitler was awaiting British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon’s upcoming visit to Berlin, planned for March 7. Germany had been isolated internationally after Hitler’s government had come to power and had unexpectedly withdrawn from the League of Nations. England, France, Austria, and even Italy under Benito Mussolini had protested the aggressive German foreign policy toward Austria and the unconcealed rearmament efforts of the National Socialists. The British government did, however, seem amenable to negotiations, although it announced an increase in military spending shortly before the meeting, with the justification that the German rearmament could “lead to a jeopardizing of the peace.”123 As a result, Hitler postponed the planned meeting with Simon on the spot and announced over all the German radio stations, on March 16, a reintroduction of the general draft and the raising of thirty-six divisions—in other words, the recruiting of more than half a million German soldiers.124 This was in open defiance of the Versailles Treaty.
That same day, Eva Braun wrote that it was “normal” that Hitler “shouldn’t take a great interest in [her] at the moment with everything that’s going on in politics.” Hitler had spent the whole week leading up to March 15 in Bavaria, but had returned to Berlin without, as he usually did, seeing her.125 She had waited desperately for him, and even stood watch on Monday in the middle of a crowd of curious onlookers in front of the Hotel Carlton in Schwabing to see him congratulate the movie star Anny Ondra, wife of the German boxing idol Max Schmeling, with a bouquet of flowers, for Schmeling’s victory over the American Steve Hamas in a qualifying match for the world championship.126 Eva Braun had met Ondra the previous year, when Hitler invited her and her husband to have a coffee in Franz Xaver Schwarz’s house on the Tegernsee over Pentecost weekend, presumably on May 20, 1934. Schwarz, the powerful National Treasurer of the NSDAP, cultivated familiar relations with Hitler. So on this occasion, Eva Braun, too, along with Hitler, Hoffmann (a friend of Schmeling’s), Schaub, and Brückner, sat in the garden around the coffee table. Schmeling wrote in his Erinnerungen (Autobiography) that he noticed this unknown young woman because she “spoke entirely naturally and obviously very familiarly with Hitler, despite all her outward modesty.” When he tried to find out from Hoffmann who she was, Hoffmann was secretive at first but then told Schmeling her name, nothing more, and said that she was an employee of his.127
Hitler and the Nazi leadership made considerable propagandistic use of Schmeling’s sports successes; for his part, after his knockout win in Hamburg on March 10, 1935, Schmeling gave the Hitler salute in the ring in front of twenty-five thousand spectators.128 The “dream couple” of Schmeling and Ondra had already shot a film together—Knock-out—Ein Junges Mädchen, Ein Junger Mann (Knock-out—A Young Girl, A Young Man)—that had premiered in German theaters a few days earlier, on March 1. Hitler quite consciously made use of their popularity—just a few days before the coup with its foreign-relations risks—to promote the identification of the masses with the Nazi state. He thereby satisfied German society’s need for national greatness and at the same time demonstrated to the world Germany’s renewed strength and readiness to fight, which Schmeling had so impressively proven. The decision, made by Hitler alone, to defy the military limitations of the Versailles Treaty and thus “thumb his nose at Versailles,” as the American foreign correspondent William L. Shirer put it, won enormous popularity for the National Socialist government. Unhappy Eva Braun, jealously fearing the end of her relationship, had no idea about any of this.129
Two weeks later, when she was among the group of Munich friends whom Hitler invited to dinner at the posh Four Seasons hotel on March 31, 1935, the event itself did not warrant a single line in her diary. She and Hitler had not met in private even once in the intervening month, so she would hardly have felt honored by a semiofficial group invitation to the hotel that Hitler liked to use for celebrations, and where the Populist and anti-Semitic Thule Society had its offices as well.130 On the contrary, she felt oppressed by the need “to sit beside him for three hours without being able to say a single word to him.” Her tenacious waiting for “a line of greeting or a kind word” from him was also to be once again disappointed: when Hitler said goodbye, he merely handed her “an envelope with some money inside as he had already done once before.”131 In the years that followed, too, Hitler occasionally supplied her with cash in this way. Speer told Joachim Fest that Hitler, after dining at the Four Seasons on another occasion in 1938 with “members of the Berghof crowd and upper-level Party members,” had given Eva Braun an “envelope,” “in passing” and “more businesslike than anything else.” Speer seemed “openly outraged,” even decades later, at the low opinion of Eva Braun that this behavior of Hitler’s expressed, especially the contrast between it and Hitler’s “Viennese” manners with women in general; the gesture reminded Speer of something you would see in “American gangster films.”132
Hitler, meanhwile, had every reason to be in a celebratory and generous mood at the end of March 1935. The visit from British Foreign Secretary Simon and Lord Privy Seal Anthony Eden on March 25 and 26 had been a gratifying success, despite Germany’s open violation of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler had confidently given long explanations to his patiently listening guests, justifying the necessity of German rearmament, a topic that had been “absolutely taboo for years” at the meetings of the League of Nations in Geneva.133 The aristocratic and reconciliatory restraint of the British, who even declared themselves open to a naval treaty in later negotiations, gave the Nazi leaders another great foreign-policy success and gain in prestige, as had the plebiscite of January 13, 1935, in which 91 percent of the population of the Saar had voted for reunification with Germany. Hitler’s ruthless foreign policy was rewarded with Great Britain’s acknowledgment of a de facto revision of the Versailles Treaty.134
In his private life, though, Hitler’s mercilessness had led to another catastrophe. For three long months, from early March to late May, Eva Braun had waited for her lover to spend time with her as usual, or even for a “good word” from him, as she wrote in her diary. But Hitler wouldn’t see her. He was working feverishly on an “alliance with England,” to fracture the existing international treaties and end Germany’s international isolation. “Love seems not to be on his agenda at the moment,” Braun noted on April 29.
But there seemed to be, or actually were, personal reasons keeping Hitler in Berlin as well: a “love affair” with Baroness Sigrid von Laffert was imputed to him, and he was in poor health. The rumor of a romance (platonic, however) with Sigrid von Laffert, a young relative of Viktoria von Dirksen, was circulating in Berlin throughout the spring.135 Von Dirksen, the widow of Willibald von Dirksen, secret legations counsel under the Kaiser, was an avowed Nazi and a supporter of Hitler’s for many years; her salon on Margaretenstrasse, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, was the most important meeting point where the old nobility and prominent National Socialists made contact. Her brother, the Mecklenburg landowner Karl August von Laffert, was among the many aristocrats who joined the elite, cultlike SS in spring 1933, and he provided the organization with financial support and trained managerial staff.136
It is thus hardly surprising that Viktoria von Dirksen provided access to the Nazi elite to the nineteen-year-old relative living with her in Berlin. The young woman had herself spent the year 1932–1933 in the “Alliance of German Maidens” (Bund Deutscher Mädel, or BDM), the girls’ branch of the Hitler Youth—which was not yet obligatory—and she would join the NSDAP in 1938.137 The young blonde was, the servant Heinz Linge later said, one of the “most beautiful women” around Hitler, and Hitler invited her to “all festive occasions.” For example, she appeared amid the Nazi leadership on May 1, 1934, when a “National Day of Celebration of the German People,” designed by the government to allude to a German popular spring festival, was conducted in an enormous propaganda spectacle at Tempelhof Field. As one of the women who represented the government in public, she did have a certain importance, a fact of which Hitler was clearly aware: he selected such candidates personally, with an eye to their visual effect.138 As late as March 1939, Laffert was among the guests invited to a state dinner in the Chancellor’s residence.139 It is certainly possible that Eva Braun in Munich, forbidden from such appearances, heard about the rumors going around Berlin in early 1935.
In addition, Hitler’s health was in poor shape. Since the start of the year he had suffered from nervous tinnitus at night and hoarseness, and was afraid of dying of throat cancer, as the German emperor Friedrich III had in 1888. On May 23, 1935, only two days after his second so-called Peace Address in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, which had attracted attention abroad as well (in it, he finally paved the way for German-English alliance talks), he underwent an operation in the Reich Chancellery. The doctor who treated him, Carl Otto von Eicken, a professor at the Charité in Berlin and an expert on throat cancer, removed a polyp from the vocal folds and recommended four weeks of recovery. Years later, an article in Time magazine dated November 14, 1938, reported an interview with Eicken, who was at a convention in Philadelphia, and stated that the simple medical procedure had given rise to great concern at the time. Hitler, after being given anesthetics, had slept for fourteen hours straight.140 Hitler waited three months before he spoke again in public, in Rosenheim on August 11, 1935.
Under political stress and in impaired health as he was, it is hardly surprising that Hitler did not find time for the young Munich girl. But Eva Braun clearly took his behavior personally. On May 28, five days after his operation and while the Chancellery was working full steam preparing for the upcoming German-English arms negotiations, Eva Braun, for the second time in three years, attempted suicide in Munich. This time it was not her father’s revolver but an overdose of sleeping pills that was supposed to, as her diary-fragment put it, “make ‘dead sure’ ” of the situation.141
Did Braun really want to die? Was it an act of despair or a blackmail attempt? She had, if we believe the “Diary,” sent Hitler a “decisive” letter on the day of the attempt, but the question of whether the letter told him of her suicide must remain unanswered since the letter no longer exists and there is no other evidence for its having existed. In any case, the events of May 28, 1935, remain unclear. The suicide attempt is attested to only in Nerin E. Gun’s account, based on an interview with the Braun family but not documented with a historian’s thoroughness. According to Gun, Ilse Braun, as in Eva’s first suicide attempt, found Eva unconscious that night. She gave first aid and called a doctor. It was also Ilse Braun who found her sister’s diary on this occasion and removed the relevant pages, in order to keep the second suicide attempt and its causes secret. There is no mention of this incident in the memoir literature. Whether Hitler himself, who was in Munich at the time, ever even heard about it is not recorded.142 The events of the following months, however, suggest that he did.
The first piece of circumstantial evidence in this regard is the fact that Eva Braun moved out of her parents’ house on August 9, 1935, and with her sister Gretl and a Hungarian maid moved into a three-bedroom apartment at 42 Widenmayerstrasse, rented for her by Heinrich Hoffmann. Hitler, whose apartment on Prinzregentenplatz was only five minutes away, had suggested the arrangement and paid for the apartment via his agent, Hoffmann.1 By giving Eva Braun material support and thereby giving her a clear sign of his affection, Hitler was obviously trying to avoid wider attention and especially the scandal that would certainly have been unavoidable after a successful suicide attempt on his lover’s part. He also allowed her closer contact with him. She was even permitted to appear at public events, which until then she had been strictly forbidden to attend.
For example, in September 1935, four months after her second suicide attempt and four weeks after moving into the apartment of her own that Hitler paid for, she attended an NSDAP convention for the first time, in Nuremberg.2 This annual event, with its marches, torchlight processions at night, parades, and roll calls, had no purpose other than propaganda and was centered from start to finish on Hitler, whom hundreds of thousands of supporters welcomed and celebrated like a messiah. In 1935, the convention lasted from September 10 to September 16 and had as its motto “Convention of Freedom,” in reference to Germany’s (at least partial) liberation from the Versailles Treaty and regaining of room to maneuver militarily.3 In addition, the session of Parliament that Hitler convened during the convention and summoned specially to Nuremberg passed, on September 15, the so-called Nuremberg Laws, hastily drawn up the previous day, which expelled Jewish citizens from the “Volksgemeinschaft” and robbed them of their civil rights.4
There is no authenticated information about the extent to which Eva Braun knew of these proceedings, or even when exactly she arrived in Nuremberg. There are, however, suggestions that she traveled to Nuremberg together with her boss, Heinrich Hoffmann, and Hoffmann’s wife and son, along with other employees of his firm, “Heinrich Hoffmann: Publisher of National Socialist Pictures.”5 Hoffmann’s business had turned into a major concern, with sales in the millions, and since he was obviously at the convention from the beginning, in his capacity as “Reich Photographic Correspondent of the NSDAP,” we can presume that Eva Braun was there on the first day as well, when Hitler was driven through the city in an open car and was welcomed in the Nuremberg Historical City Hall by the mayor.6 Ernst Hanfstaengl, who had the task of welcoming the international press in the great hall of the Cultural Union building on the afternoon of September 10, recalled that Braun had come to the convention “inconspicuously,” but in an “expensive fur.”7 She probably also saw the impressive propaganda spectacle staged by Albert Speer on the zeppelin field located five kilometers southeast of the city center, where, on September 12 at 10 a.m., a roll call of the Reich Labor Service took place with an accompanying march “past the Führer”; on the following day came the roll call of the political leaders; and on the last day, September 16, starting at 9 a.m., the presentation of the armed forces, ending that night with a ceremonial tattoo.8 In 1935, though, the zeppelin field was still bare—the well-known monumental stone architectural features, including the gigantic gilded swastika, were built only two years later. The tribunals, speaker’s platform, and colossal eagle lit with several spotlights were still made of wood in 1935; Speer’s idea of a “cathedral of light,” created from the beams of antiaircraft spotlights, was tested out for the first time this year, but not yet put into full effect.9
For Eva Braun, meanwhile, the convention meant a further development in her relationship to Hitler. For the first time, she was allowed to take part in an official NSDAP event along with the wives of leading Nazis—Ilse Hess, Margarete “Marga” Himmler, and Gerda Bormann, among others. Her presence apparently met with resistance from some of the women, though, especially Hitler’s energetic half-sister, Angela Raubal, who kept house for him in Berchtesgaden. Herbert Döhring, the later manager of the Berghof household, recalled after the war that “Frau Raubal and Frau Goebbels and all these ministers’ wives” were “completely shocked” that “this young, capricious, and dissatisfied-looking girl was sitting there on the VIP rostrum.”10 Döhring, twenty-two years old at the time and thus slightly younger than Braun, was a member of the “Führer protection command” stationed in the Deutscher Hof hotel and responsible for Hitler’s personal safety; he could hardly have learned anything of the conflicts among the women on the VIP stage from his own experience. He had possibly not even met Eva Braun by that point in time. His judgment must therefore have been based partly on rumors, partly on his later experiences at the Berghof.
Still, Julius Schaub, Hitler’s personal adjutant and close associate of many years, who followed the Nazi leader “like a shadow,” in Christa Schroeder’s words, also claimed that there was “a rather tense relationship” between Raubal and Braun at the convention.11 Schroeder herself, a secretary in the “Führer’s personal staff” in the Reich Chancellery since 1933, remarks that Angela Raubal could not stand Eva Braun from the beginning, and that Raubal expressed to her brother her disapproval of Braun’s, in her view, “very conspicuous” behavior in Nuremberg. Schroeder said that Raubal later had to “leave the mountain”[8] on Hitler’s wish, and “all the other ladies” who made themselves noticeable “with disparaging remarks” were not permitted “to enjoy” the “hospitality of the house” for long.12
Angela Raubal did in fact leave the Obersalzberg on February 18, 1936, after more than seven years there, but she returned, it seems, for occasional visits. In any case, on May 22, 1936, she wrote in a letter to Rudolf Hess from Dresden that she was planning to accompany her husband on a study trip at the end of June that would pass through Munich and Berchtesgaden. She added: “Especially since my brother was here in Dresden and I spoke to him again after such a long time and he promised to come over to see us for coffee soon, I have been so wildly happy, I am afraid the gods will envy me.”13 Apparently Hitler had reestablished contact with his half-sister after only a few months. It is no longer possible to ascertain whether Eva Braun was the only reason for Raubal’s departure.14 The recollections of the members of Hitler’s personal staff clearly show, however, how dramatic Eva Braun’s rise seemed from the point of view of the staff and the servants. The sudden departure of Hitler’s half-sister clearly showed them that anyone who dared to criticize Eva Braun or her relationship with Hitler would have to reckon with being laid off. As a result, the young woman’s position in the inner circle became practically untouchable.
Nonetheless, even in Nuremberg, only a few initiates knew who Eva Braun actually was. On the record, she remained invisible, and she did not stay at Hotel Kaiserhof like the wives and other female guests, such as Hitler’s architect Gerdy Troost, Marga Himmler, and Gerda Bormann. (Like all lodgings in the city during the convention, Hotel Kaiserhof could be entered only with a “residence pass” given out by the management.) Instead, it is very probable that Braun, along with Marianne (Marion) Schönmann, a friend she had brought along from Munich, moved in Heinrich Hoffmann’s circle as his colleague.15 So it cannot be ruled out that she, like her boss, stayed with Hitler’s entourage in the Deutscher Hof on the Altstadtring, across from the Opera House, where Hitler occupied the second floor of the hotel, as per tradition, during his stay in this “most German of all cities.” Hitler had personally prohibited the wives of other Party members from being housed there, so he may well have presumed that Eva Braun, accompanied by Hoffmann, would arouse the least attention there.16
A photograph taken on the occasion of Hoffmann’s fiftieth birthday on September 12, 1935, in Nuremberg, shows that Hoffmann’s circle at the time included not only Braun and Schönmann, his family, and other colleagues, but also Max Schmeling and the photographer Atto Retti-Marsani.17 Presumably, Braun also received complimentary tickets to the various events at the convention through Hoffmann. In general, tickets for the convention, which were sent out from the Braune Haus (Brown House) in Munich in the “Führer’s” name and signed by Rudolf Hess, were extremely sought-after and hard to come by. Ilse Hess, loyal to the Party line as always, decisively rejected a relative’s request in the run-up to the convention as follows: “Unfortunately, the tickets are in such short supply that even many old comrades-in-arms in the movement are having to stay away. In these circumstances, it is even less possible for me to give preference to a relative who is not among the long-standing Party faithful.”18 Eva Braun, meanwhile, was able to remain discreet, with Hoffmann’s help, even though she became a fixture in Hitler’s innermost circle from then on. Within a year—with or without a suicide attempt—she had managed to decisively change the circumstances of her life with Hitler, entirely to her benefit.
Eva Braun now lived in her own apartment, and a few months later would move with her younger sister Gretl into her own house, with a garden, in Bogenhausen, a neighborhood in Munich filled with aristocratic villas. In addition, she was a constant presence at the Berghof from 1936 on, and received Hitler in his refuge on the Obersalzberg, which became her second residence along with Munich. She even occasionally traveled abroad with him. Since she was concealed in his retinue as a “private secretary,” outsiders had no idea that this young blond woman might be the lover of the unmarried dictator. Eva Braun’s “constant presence,” which made such an impression on Hanfstaengl, was apparent only to those who themselves had, or had once had, close personal contact with Hitler.19
It is true that the formal status of lawfully wedded wife remained unattainable for Braun, but did that make her life a “lost” one, as the British biographer Angela Lambert put it right in the title of her book The Lost Life of Eva Braun?20 What was the actual difference between Braun’s own mode of existence and that of other wives or girlfriends of high-ranking National Socialist politicians? Did it correspond to the typical role of women in her time and social class, or had she taken on, with her tie to Hitler, an “undignified courtesan’s role”? Is it true that she lived like a slave and was allowed to leave Munich only with Hitler’s or Bormann’s permission?21
Ernst Hanfstaengl, who made these claims after the war, was himself strongly under Hitler’s spell and had, despite his upper-middle-class family background and education at Harvard University, supported the NSDAP as early as 1922. After his failed putsch on November 8–9, 1923, Hitler fled first to a house in Uffing am Staffelsee in the Upper Bavarian Alpine foothills some forty-five miles from Munich owned by the Hanfstaengl family. And during Hitler’s following yearlong prison term in Landsberg am Lech, Hanfstaengl was among the faithful supporters who visited him many times in jail.22 Hanfstaengl’s intimate knowledge of Hitler’s personal relationships was limited, though, to the 1920s and early 1930s. By the 1935 convention, he had been cut off from personal contact with Hitler for more than a year. Having fallen into disgrace, he flew to Great Britain in 1937 and tried, unsuccessfully, to achieve rehabilitation with Hitler as a “patriot and Party comrade,” via Hans Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery, and Julius Streicher, Gauleiter of Nuremberg.23
Years later, the fact that Hanfstaengl had once been in close personal contact with Hitler unexpectedly turned out to work to his advantage. During the war, he was set free from the Canadian prisoner of war camp where he was being held as an enemy alien deported from Great Britain, and promoted to a position working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American secret service. Under the name “Dr. Sedgwick,” he provided John F. Carter, President Roosevelt’s adviser and news analyst, with information about how it would be possible to break the political power of the National Socialists in Germany.24 Hanfstaengl’s later assessment of Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun reflects, first and foremost, the cultural norms current in the 1930s, along with the church practices and civil laws, according to which extramarital sexuality was considered unnatural and immoral. Hanfstaengl’s characterization of Braun’s presence in Hitler’s inner circle as shameful and disruptive also testifies to his unbroken perpetuation of the myth of a “Führer” who could not be judged by human standards, and whom Hanfstaengl (himself a notorious ladies’ man) did not want to see undermined by a relationship that was inappropriate on any terms.25
In the context of the restrictive sexual morality reigning in Germany, and Eva Braun’s education by Catholic nuns, it is no wonder that Eva’s parents, Friedrich and Franziska Braun, disapproved of their daughter’s lifestyle at first. We do not know when and in what circumstances they first learned of her relationship with Hitler. It does seem rather implausible, however, that they learned of it only in the late summer of 1935, after Eva Braun moved out into her own apartment, and after they met her with Hitler, supposedly by accident—and still less plausible that they knew of their daughter’s connection to the Chancellor only in 1937.26 The only way the idea of such a relationship could have failed to occur to her parents was if they attributed their daughter’s unbourgeois habits and behavior of many years—the sudden appearance of a phone line; the irregular coming and going; the nights spent out—to her work for Photohaus Hoffmann.
Braun’s parents’ first meeting with Hitler allegedly took place in the Lambacher Hof, an inn (which still exists today) on the north shore of the Chiemsee approximately halfway between Munich and the Obersalzberg. Hitler, who used to travel on the old road along the lake before the Munich–Salzburg autobahn was finished, often stopped in there with his companions. The Nazi leader was allegedly introduced to his girlfriend’s parents there for the first time on a Sunday in late August 1935, or perhaps on September 1, after returning from the dedication of an “Adolf-Hitler-Koog” land reclamation in the Dithmarschen region of Schleswig-Holstein. Nerin E. Gun reports that the Brauns had gone for a Sunday outing to Lambach, and that there, totally unexpectedly, they ran into their daughter, who was in the Chancellor’s retinue as a colleague of Heinrich Hoffmann’s. Apparently nothing more than a short but friendly greeting took place, and the Brauns are said to have known nothing about their daughter’s relationship with Hitler at that time.27
Henriette von Schirach, on the other hand, claims that Friedrich Braun intentionally traveled the more than sixty miles from Munich to visit the inn in Lambach on that occasion and bring about a discussion with Hitler, because he saw in Hitler’s connection to his daughter “a chance for his favorite child.” She says that Hitler described this conversation as “the most unpleasant [conversation] of his life,” but it nonetheless resulted in Hitler’s supporting Eva Braun with a monthly sum of money and a house.28
In fact, given the few and variously transmitted postwar statements by the family, we can only speculate about what Friedrich and Franziska Braun actually knew and thought, and what roles the two sisters, Ilse and Margarete (Gretl), might have played in the situation.29 Whenever it is a matter of looking back from a great temporal distance—twenty years in this case—we must always keep in mind that people’s perceptions, subjective to begin with, may be discussed, whitewashed, rearranged, and corrected many times over as the years go by. With the Braun family, where the issue is direct proximity to Hitler and thus knowledge of, even perhaps participation in, Nazi crimes, we can presume a certain amount of keeping silent, out of either shame or fear of criminal prosecution.30 Would the Brauns not have had good reason, in their conversations with the journalist Gun after such a long period of silence, to play down any early knowledge of Braun’s relationship with Hitler and even claim to have been opposed to it?31
In fact, Friedrich and Franziska Braun had already had to answer such questions in 1947, before a Munich denazification court. These appointed German trial and appellate tribunals and public prosecutors were given the responsibility of “denazifying” Germany under the “Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism” imposed by the American military authorities in 1946. People were classified into the categories of Major Offenders, Offenders (activists, militarists, and profiteers), Lesser Offenders (probationers), Followers, and Persons Exonerated.
The public prosecutors in this case, according to an article called (in German) “Hitler’s In-laws Before the Judge” in the newspaper Die Welt of August 2, 1947, put the “high-school business instructor Fritz Wilhelm Otto Braun and his wife Franziska Katharina” into the category of “Offenders,” that is, according to the law, “activists, militarist, and profiteers.” Eva’s parents were threatened with prison sentences, confiscation of property, and—especially for the father—a ban on employment and the loss of his pension. Fritz Braun, it was claimed, had known about his daughter’s relationship with Hitler, approved of it, and was in fact proud of it. Eva’s mother, too, although never a Party member, was labeled an “activist” by the official prosecutor.32 In the indictment from July 9, 1947, it was stated that the investigations had shown that “the person in question had been proud that daughter Eva was permitted to be the Führer’s lover for all those years. The persons in question felt at home on the Obersalzberg. Since she was a member of the family, she didn’t need to be a member of the Party.”33
Threatened in this way, their very existence under attack—Fritz Braun, fired from public service as a teacher, was struggling along as a carpentry assistant at the time—the Brauns were obviously making every effort to minimize before the judge the intimacy of their daughter’s relationship with Hitler. They stated that Eva Braun had become the dictator’s “housekeeper” in 1933, and that he had “maintained a love affair with her” ever since, on terms that were “never entirely clear, but seemed to be purely platonic.”34 And at a public sitting of the Munich denazification court, on December 1, 1947, Fritz Braun stated:
I do not know when the relationship between my daughter Eva and Hitler started. I first heard about it in 1937, from a Czech newspaper. Until then I had thought she was his secretary.35
The Brauns told Die Welt through their Munich lawyer, Otto Gritschneder, that they planned “to offer proof that they had always been opposed to the relationship between their daughter and Adolf Hitler.” For example, they had allegedly even written a letter to Hitler, explaining that this “sleazy relationship” was not to be endured any longer.36 The letter was, however, “suppressed and never presented” to him. Fritz Braun testified before the denazification court that he had “written a letter to the Führer and pointed out to him that I did not approve of his simply taking my daughter out of our family circle without notifying us.” Braun was, he said, “furious about Hitler.”37
It is doubtful that any such document, which would have exonerated Friedrich and Franziska Braun from the claim that they had been “activists” in the Nazi state or “profiteers” in Hitler’s inner circle, ever existed. The only document that has been supplied as proof comes from the family: a copy, if we believe Gun’s account, of a letter that Friedrich Braun wrote to the Chancellor on September 7, 1935—about a month after his daughter had moved out—and wanted to give to Heinrich Hoffmann so that he could pass it along to Hitler.38 Hoffmann was visiting and photographing the construction projects on Königsplatz in Munich at the time; in accordance with the plans drawn up by Paul Ludwig Troost, who had died the previous year, more than twenty thousand granite slabs were being laid and Nazi emblems being affixed to create a parade square.39 Hitler himself was spending a few days on the Obersalzberg before the start of the NSDAP convention in Nuremberg, as he usually did; he regularly retreated there weeks before such conventions to write his speeches, and he was due to give no fewer than seventeen speeches at the upcoming convention.40
It is therefore entirely possible that Friedrich Braun gave Hoffmann this letter in Munich—a letter in which he asked Hitler “to see to it” that his daughter “return to the family.” But to treat this document, even if it existed, as retrospective proof of a rebellion against Hitler is nonsense. It can only be interpreted as an act of despair. First of all, it never reached its intended recipient, either because it never in fact existed or because Hoffmann and Braun made sure that Hitler never learned about it. Second, the relations between Eva’s parents and Hitler in the years to follow cast serious doubt on the claim that they felt her relationship with Hitler to be a “bitter disgrace.”41
In fact, Eva Braun’s departure from the parental home at the beginning of August 1935 did not mark a break with the family. Rather, Franziska Braun was a welcome guest on the Obersalzberg in the following ten years, and she accompanied her daughter on numerous trips, especially to Italy, but also, in 1938, to Vienna. No conclusions about Franziska Braun’s own personal relationship with Hitler can be drawn—both contemporary witnesses and third-party reports from after the end of the war are lacking. She was, however, the only member of Braun’s family whom Hitler mentioned in his last will and testament, personally dictated on April 29, 1945, a day before his and Eva Braun’s suicide in the bunker. He instructed Martin Bormann, the secretary to whom he gave full powers of executor, to leave everything “that possesses any personal sentimental value, or that is necessary to supporting a petit-bourgeois life,” to his siblings and “likewise especially the mother of my wife” and the “faithful staff.” Franziska Braun thus ranked ahead of Hitler’s blood relatives, on the same level as his loyal companions who had “supported [him] for years through their work.” This emphasis on Eva’s mother is especially noteworthy in that neither of Eva’s two sisters, nor her father, is mentioned in the testament.42
Can we derive from this fact a broken relationship between father and daughter, or Friedrich Braun’s opposition to the Nazi regime itself? The reasons for Hitler’s last instructions remain mysterious. For one thing, Friedrich Braun joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1937. For another, he testified before the court in 1947 that he had believed “to the end” in the “Führer.” He also said in his statement of December 1, 1947, that his daughter would “never have entered a relationship with Hitler… if he had been a bad person.”43 However, his daughter’s personal relationship with Hitler cannot have been the actual reason for his joining the Party. In fact, it is well known that Hitler strictly kept his relatives away from any political activity. For example, according to a statement by his sister, Paula Wolf, he invited every member of the family to the 1929 NSDAP convention in Nuremberg, where they had to promise not to join the Party.44 It therefore seems reasonable to assume that Eva Braun was held to similar rules of conduct and that her not being a member of the Party can be traced back to Hitler’s instructions. This strategy of forestalling any possible private interference in his political activities was typical of Hitler, although the case of his half-sister, Angela Raubal (later Angela Hammitzsch), shows that it clearly did not always work. She seems to have interfered even after her removal from the Obersalzberg, as is clear from a letter to Ilse Hess, and she sent “repeated requests” to government officials and Party organizations—including Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick—to inform them whenever, in her opinion, “something was not proceeding properly.”45
In this context, it is hard to imagine that Hitler especially advocated the entry of his girlfriend’s father into the NSDAP, never mind required it. Rather, it seems as though Friedrich Braun, like many teachers in the “Third Reich,” merely accommodated the National Socialist regime at first before eventually, not least out of opportunism, making his turn toward the new worldview official. More than 80 percent of the members of this profession became members of the NSDAP only after January 30, 1933, and thus had the reputation among the Party leaders of being “opportunists.”46 To prevent such people from joining, a ban on new members was put into effect starting in 1933 and cancelled only on April 20, 1937, after which point all “Party aspirants” had to fill out an additional two-page questionnaire with their applications, describing in detail their efforts to date for the “movement.” All of these new members, no matter what date they filed their application, were given a membership acceptance date of May 1, 1937.47
In addition, the Nazi educational politics since 1935 had moved in the direction of turning all teachers into “National Socialist People’s educators.” Especially in Bavaria after late November 1936—when Adolf Wagner, the powerful Gauleiter and Interior Minister known for his fanatical anti-Semitism, took over the additional title of Bavarian State Minister for Education and Culture, a post that had been vacant for two years—those who were not Party members were given considerably less leeway. Since that was precisely when Friedrich Braun submitted his application, according to his own testimony, Adolf Wagner could well have played a crucial role in prompting Friedrich Braun’s entry into the NSDAP, along with Braun’s own personal reasons.48
Still, Braun’s membership was not merely a formality. On November 8, 1939, shortly after the war began, he took part in the memorial event for the failed Hitler putsch of 1923, in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller—among the “old fighters,” no less.49 Friedrich Braun was not actually a member of the “old guard”: he had been a Party member for only two years, and he is not known to have been particularly active in Munich NSDAP circles. Thus he actually should not have been admitted to this event at all—it was an occasion reserved for “Party fanatics,” according to Ian Kershaw. But it is possible that Eva Braun—perhaps through Heinrich Hoffmann—arranged for an invitation for her father so that he could hear the “Führer.” In any case, he ended up in the middle of the dynamite attack against Hitler that took place on that night, leaving eight dead and sixty-three wounded. Friedrich Braun survived, though he was wounded, while Hitler, after an hour-long speech that “decisively broke with England” (as Goebbels recorded), had left the hall a quarter of an hour before the detonation.50 The episode shows that there was certainly no unbridgeable chasm between father and daughter, or distance between Friedrich Braun and the Nazi state.
Eva Braun’s rise from anonymity into the inner circle around Hitler necessarily brought with it new acquaintances and new relationships that were very demanding for the socially inexperienced young woman from Munich. She thus stayed extremely reserved at first with all the other guests on the Obersalzberg, who were the Nazi leader’s close staff members. Instead, she surrounded herself primarily with her younger sister and friends she invited to the Berghof herself or brought with her from Munich. She came into contact with Hitler’s confidants exclusively on the Obersalzberg (with a few exceptions). In any case, her contact there was limited at first to a few people whom Hitler selected personally and considered trustworthy.
Albert Speer was a central figure in Hitler’s inner circle. And Speer’s presence, and that of his wife, in what he himself called “Hitler’s court” was of great importance to him and his position in the regime. His presence and “human” proximity to Hitler offered unique access to power and success to this architect who had lived until 1932 with, for all practical purposes, no income. As a result of this proximity, he suddenly had “the most exciting prospects” for professional success, at not even thirty years of age, and in 1937 he rose to be General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital, appointed by and reporting directly to Hitler. He now had sole control over the planning and carrying out of all municipal construction projects.
Social life on the Obersalzberg, on the other hand, was described by Speer as a “waste of time”: it was “agonizing” for him, he said, and “what remain[ed]” of it “in [his] memory” was only “a curious vacuity.”1 Still, he worked assiduously to fit in with this community and included his wife, Margarete, from the start as well. Margret Nissen, Speer’s younger daughter, said that her mother’s role on the Obersalzberg consisted in “being there to perform official duties at her husband’s side.”2 Whenever they were wanted, the Speers took part in lunches, dinners, afternoon diversions, or parties, at the Berghof or elsewhere. They also made particular efforts to include Eva Braun, who, like them, was athletic and enthusiastic about sports. They took her skiing, for example, even though Hitler “didn’t like to see” such outings for fear of injuries.3 In a private document written a few years before her death, from which her daughter published excerpts, Margarete Speer described how drastically their daily activities were curtailed by Hitler’s needs. Here is the usual procedure for “lunch with the Führer”:
The phone rings. It might be two, three, sometimes even four o’clock. A friendly male voice: “The Führer requests your presence at the table.” I’ve been ready for a long time, sitting around waiting. Albert and I are fetched….4
While Margarete Speer—after waiting in her apartment for the summons, sometimes for hours on end—is served her food at the Berghof, a governess and a housekeeper take care of the six Speer children. The youngest daughter later said, looking back on her childhood on the Obersalzberg, that she had “grown up basically without parents in those years,” since her mother and father were “more often traveling” than at home.5 Margarete Speer’s activities were thus not limited, as one might have expected, to her own household. Rather, she apparently neglected her family to support her husband’s career, based as it was solely on his personal ties to Hitler. To that extent, Margarete Speer may not have been acting in a political sphere, but in a “private” sphere she was no less significant and professionally useful. And she enjoyed such a life. Unlike her husband, who later made derisive comments about it, she described “living in that circle” around Hitler as “heady” to the journalist Gitta Sereny,6 and even before the appearance of her husband’s memoir Inside the Third Reich, she criticized his view of the past to Joachim Fest, complaining that Albert Speer never remembered “for one second that we were happy then.” After reading the book itself, which became a best seller, she is said to have told her husband: “Life hasn’t left me much, but now you’ve ruined the little I had left!”7
In any case, the Speers’ conduct leaves no doubt that they made every effort to be included at the Berghof. Albert Speer paints the picture in his memoir that the “bustle” there was “ruinous” for his work, the daily routine “tiring,” and the circle of acquaintances collected there “boring.” Nonetheless, he “spent endless time” with Hitler, as he himself said, and was “almost at home in his private circle.” He and his wife “stayed longer at the Berghof with Hitler than in our old frame house.”8 Speer, always acutely conscious of power, records very precisely who was enjoying Hitler’s favor at any given time, so it is surprising and noteworthy that he took Eva Braun to be the indicator of how much influence a person around Hitler had.
For example, in Speer’s account it was a “privilege” to escort “Eva Braun to the table; she usually sat at Hitler’s left.” “From about 1938,” only Martin Bormann enjoyed this distinction, a fact that “in itself,” according to Speer, “was proof of Bormann’s dominant position in the court.”9 Speer never offers an explanation of why the Führer’s girlfriend—whom he later portrays as despised, humiliated, draped in cheap jewelry, and entirely uninterested in politics—possessed such importance at the Berghof. But as early as the summer of 1945, under interrogation by Allied officers at Kransberg Castle in the Taunus, he had hinted at Eva Braun’s “possibilities, i.e., using the power she had within the inner circle,” according to Speer. She had, Speer said, “been able to exploit… her position just like A.H.’s prominent colleagues.”10 Even this comparison with Hitler’s “prominent colleagues” shows what a leading role Eva Braun played, in Speer’s view. His statements justify the assumption that Eva Braun, not long after stabilizing her relationship with Hitler, took on a central position within the Berghof circle.
In this context, Eva Braun’s relationships with the other guests at the Berghof, the staff, and not least the Speers, takes on a whole new significance. The question arises whether Speer’s kind treatment of Braun actually arose, as he later claimed, solely “out of sympathy for her predicament,” and whether he struck up friendly relations with the young woman for entirely selfless reasons.11 Were their outings together and the increasing intimacy of their interactions actually calculated on his part? Was she not a way to cement an even tighter and more personal bond of friendship with Hitler? For even though there was apparently a deep emotional connection between Speer and Hitler “from the first moment on,” as Joachim Fest writes, the young architect occupied a position that was in “constant danger.”12
Margarete Speer, in any case, seems not to have shared her husband’s connection with Hitler’s girlfriend. Looking back, she does not attribute any shyness or unassuming modesty to Braun, as her husband did, but rather claims that Eva Braun was “thoroughly aware of her position” among the women and had the most say. On trips she always conducted herself “very much as the hostess”: what she wanted to do was what was done “and that was that.”13 There is disapproval audible in these lines of Margarete Speer’s, in spite of all the evenings, excursions, and ski vacations spent together. She absolutely did not consider Eva Braun—nor, for that matter, Magda Goebbels—as one of her personal friends, but rather as a member of her husband’s “team,” to whom he gave precedence over even his own children when it came to leisure time.14 Margarete Speer thus does not, in her own retrospective judgment of Eva Braun, follow the line of explanation that her husband laid out after 1945 and stuck to in his later publications. Clearly, we can see from her account, no one dared to oppose Eva Braun’s wishes at the time or call into question her preeminence within the Berghof hierarchy.
Another woman in the sporty “circle of friends” around Eva Braun and Margarete Speer was Anni Brandt, the wife of Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt. In Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer lists the Brandts as in his “closest circle of friends.”15 Karl Brandt had joined the NSDAP in February 1932, and apparently met Hitler the same year, in Essen; he was a member of the dictator’s inner circle for ten years, from 1934 until he was fired in 1944.16 His wife, the former Anni Rehborn, famous nationwide as the SV-Bochum swimming champion, came into contact with Hitler as early as the 1920s, since she won the German championship in the 100 meter backstroke six times between 1923 and 1929 (among other championships), and the ambitious right-wing politician always liked to publicize his connection with important German athletes who fit his, and his Party’s, racial ideal of strong, healthy, pure, “Aryan” bodies.17 Conversely, the young athlete’s family—in which physical health and beauty were also of great importance, in accord with the modern cult of the body in the 1920s—had supported the National Socialist movement even before 1933. Both Anni Rehborn and her father joined the NSDAP in 1932.18 It thus seems likely that it was actually the young swimmer who introduced her then fiancé to the NSDAP leader, and brought him to the Berghof no later than summer 1933.19
Karl Brandt was working at the time as an assistant doctor in a casualty hospital in Bochum, and had already joined the SA in spring 1933. A few years earlier, he had dreamed of following the Protestant theologian, doctor, and philosopher of culture Albert Schweitzer, whom he admired, to his hospital in sub-Saharan Lambaréné, Gabon. But now he used the opportunities that his bride’s personal connection with Hitler opened up to him. It is not entirely clear why Brandt underwent this transformation, turning away from Schweitzer and toward National Socialism; the ideological contrast between Schweitzer’s Christian “worldview and philosophy of honoring life” and Hitler’s deeply inhuman and racist ideas of a “struggle to the death between Peoples” and the “annihilation of the weak” could not have been any greater. If there is any point of connection between the two ideologies, it lies in Schweitzer’s critique of modernity, his disapproval of the “acquisition of scientific knowledge” which had brought forth “the machine,” and spiritually damaged and depersonalized mankind. Schweitzer diagnosed the political fragmentation and material suffering of modern states in similar terms. But he saw the solution to all these problems in the will to come to greater understanding between peoples and the establishment of a “culture state” that, led by a “cultural ethos,” would come into existence “not according to the dictates of nationalism and national culture.”20
Brandt, in contrast, who shared the disorientation and aimlessness of many men and women of his generation after Germany’s loss of World War I and obviously was on the lookout for a charismatic savior-figure, took the nationalist path. In a document he drew up after the end of the war to provide intellectual “clarification” (his term) about what had happened, he wrote that Hitler had “opened the eyes” of the German People, “showed it its soul again and restored its faith in itself.” Thanks to Hitler, Brandt wrote, “old names and values” had been “brought back to life” and “Germany’s own spirit shone forth again… in the present.”21 The young, ambitious, not unadventurous doctor had only waited until the right moment, in 1933—or so his biographer Ulf Schmidt claims—to approach Hitler through his fiancée Anni Rehborn and attract his attention. In fact, the career of the barely thirty-year-old doctor had been steeply on the rise since the summer of 1933. In November 1933, he transferred from Bochum to the recently reopened, well-known University Surgical Clinic on the Ziegelstrasse in Berlin as the Party physician.22 At his wedding, on March 17, 1934, Hitler and Hermann Göring appeared as witnesses. The reception took place in Göring’s Berlin apartment.23 After that, it was probably already easy to predict that Brandt would soon be given a position in Hitler’s immediate retinue. In any case, he himself laid the groundwork for such a position by submitting an application to the SS in April 1934. Two months later, he received the offer to accompany the Reich Chancellor as a specialist for accident injuries on his foreign travels.24 From then on, Brandt and his wife were among the constant guests on the Obersalzberg.
The close friendship between the Brandts and the Speers—Margarete Speer called Anni Brandt her best friend—seems in retrospect to have been anything but fortuitous. The parallels between the two men’s careers are unmistakable. Speer and Brandt, almost the same age, did not belong to the generation of the “old fighters” from the early days of the NSDAP but entered Hitler’s inner circle only after he came to power. Both owed their sudden career successes, and their growing political power, to Hitler personally—not to the Party. For Brandt no less than for Speer, it must have been of vital importance to stay within reach of the “court,” even though he was not actually a personal physician and his services as an escort surgeon were, in the strict sense, necessary only while traveling, primarily in case of an accident or assassination attempt.25
The privileged position that Brandt soon enjoyed alongside Speer can be seen from the fact that both men, who lived and worked in Berlin, moved onto the Obersalzberg in close proximity to Hitler during the course of 1935. While preparations were under way to fence off the area in a radius of fourteen kilometers, they and their families were housed in the Bechstein Villa that already lay within the “Führer Protection Zone.” Bormann had bought the villa at the end of 1935 and repurposed it as a guesthouse;26 Goebbels lived there, too, when he visited the Berghof, and it was enormously prestigious for these two men on the rise, still largely unknown within the NSDAP, to be among Hitler’s personally chosen neighbors. In addition, Speer and Brandt were permitted to accompany Hitler every year to the Wagner festival in Bayreuth—an honor given to few people, according to Speer. Winifred Wagner, who ran the festivals, formed close ties with Brandt, whom she later used, during the war, to transmit letters to Hitler when she wanted to bypass Martin Bormann.27
What did it mean to be “preferred” like this by the most powerful man in Germany, over the majority of one’s other colleagues and compatriots—in fact, to be promoted thanks to “the Führer’s friendship”? Speer’s later confession that he was “happy” then is only the barest hint of the elation and ecstasy the two men must have felt as a result of their proximity to power. Would Hitler not have been able to expect lifelong gratitude, loyalty, and tractability under those circumstances? And in fact, Brandt, after his arrest in 1945, declared in a written statement that his relationship to Hitler had been a “bond for better and for worse.” Speer, too, found himself obliged to make what Joachim Fest called the “monstrous confession” decades later, in September 1974, that he, Speer, had felt himself bound to Hitler until their last encounter in the bunker with bonds of unbreakable personal loyalty and friendship.28
Karl Brandt, in any case, never left Hitler’s side until the end of the war, gradually turning into Hitler’s general factotum. Like Speer, he had direct access to the Nazi leader, who lived predominantly shut away from others, and he accompanied him on almost every occasion: at state visits, the Party conventions in Nuremberg, exhibition openings, balls, concerts both in and outside of Berlin, and, after fall 1939, on travels to the various “Führer headquarters.” Brandt fulfilled all sorts of duties and shared Hitler’s passion for art and architecture. There was thus hardly any time left over for his own medical responsibilities at the university clinic in Berlin.29
Even if Hitler’s friendship with Brandt seems to have been less sensitive than that with his architect, the young doctor still fulfilled an analogous function. Largely unknown to the public and at the same time shielded against the influence of leading lights in the Party, he was, as the “Führer’s” intimate friend, active in various areas of medicine, including the new construction plans for Berlin’s university clinics.30 Once the war started, Hitler gave his ambitious friend “special assignments”—that is, to murder the sick and crippled—and granted him far-reaching “special legal authority” over the health system for that reason.31 Then, together with Philipp Bouhler, “Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP” and a member of the Party for many years, Brandt, by then thirty-five years old, was promoted to head of the euthanasia program. It has also been proven that he conducted human medical experiments in concentration camps.
Brandt carried out what Hitler commanded and as a result found himself, along with Speer, Hoffmann, and Bormann, in the highest “Berghof society.” Unlike the other members of this private entourage, however, who also received assignments from Hitler, usually verbally, Brandt and Speer were among the “Führer direct special representatives,” of which there were only a few in the National Socialist regime. In the army of representatives, special representatives, authorized representatives, general inspectors, and Reich commissioners so characteristic of the inner structure of the Nazi regime, Brandt and Speer were thus exceptional. They occupied—Speer in construction and Brandt in medicine—next to traditional official positions in the Reich, their own spheres of power, established by “Führer’s edict,” in close consultation with Hitler so that they could most effectively translate certain core elements of the National Socialist worldview into reality. Both men took an active part in the racial politics of the regime as well: Brandt by killing the sick and conducting human experiments; Speer by filling the shortage of labor for his construction plans in the capital with concentration camp prisoners, as well as robbing Berlin Jews of their apartments before having them deported.32 It is impossible to determine how decisions were taken precisely within Hitler’s innermost private circle, and how they were communicated. But it is indisputable that the position and actions of these two “charismatic young men” were due not only to great personal closeness to Hitler, but also to their ideological agreement with him. There can be no question here of any “willed unconsciousness” about what was actually happening.33
Speer disputed these implications for the rest of his life. He insisted to the end that he had been a fundamentally apolitical architect, far removed from any ideological concerns, who at most suspected the crimes taking place around him. No anti-Semitic propaganda from him survives; he justified himself in retrospect by saying he saw Hitler’s “insane hatred of Jews” as “a rather vulgar minor detail” of his otherwise convincing vision. Speer’s statements on this topic about the other members of the “Führer circle,” as he put it—especially about his friend Karl Brandt and about Eva Braun, whom he vigorously defends—must therefore be taken with a grain of salt at the very least. His alleging, about himself, “Politically I counted for nothing!” also casts doubt on his appraisal of Eva Braun as apolitical and lacking in influence.34
Since Brandt and Speer stood in an extraordinary relationship of loyalty to Hitler, the question further arises whether they might therefore have had a special relationship with Eva Braun. It is striking, in any case, that after the war both men, unlike almost everyone else in their environment, neither disputed the intimate nature of Eva Braun’s relationship with Hitler nor dismissed her as insignificant in Hitler’s inner circle. A U.S. Army military news service report from April 1947, summarizing Brandt’s statements on the topic, maintained that the relationship between Hitler and his girlfriend was marked by openness and sincerity. Eva Braun, abrupt and severe by nature rather than feminine and compliant, had developed over the years from an average girl into a stylish lady. Hitler occasionally liked to remark, “The more important the man, the less important the woman,” but this did not apply to Eva Braun.35
During his first interrogation in summer 1945, Brandt was trying to make a good impression on his American and British interrogators. Obviously, he denied his involvement in the murder of the sick and crippled. But his statements were saturated with unbowed admiration for Hitler. It is therefore surprising that he expressed even mild criticism of the “chosen one” at Hitler’s side. Brandt said that Eva Braun’s rise into the world of the rich and powerful was too much for her at first, and that in the years before the war she had made “certain guests” of the Berghof suffer under her changeable moods.36 This statement of Brandt’s, revealing for the later judgments of Braun, especially by Hitler’s former staff members, corresponds with the notes that Percy Ernst Schramm, German historian and member of the U.S. Army Historical Division, made during the interrogation of Hitler’s doctors in summer 1945. According to those notes, Eva Braun had caused “trouble” among those around Hitler and “put people off.”37 Who exactly her “victims” were remained unstated, however. In particular, Brandt said nothing about whether he himself, or possibly his wife—who smiled at the camera together with Eva Braun in September 1937, during the ninth Party convention, on a stage on the Nuremberg Hauptmarkt—had suffered under her.38
Martin Bormann played a special role in regard to Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun. Son of a postal official and former military musician, he had joined the NSDAP on February 27, 1927, and within a few years had risen to be one of the most powerful figures around Hitler. He started, though, at the bottom of the Thuringian Party hierarchy in Weimar. Since he had been found guilty as an accomplice to grievous bodily harm in 1924 and spent a year in jail, he could not afford to be choosy, and he carried out duties of all kinds for the Party, including those of bookkeeper, cashier, and driver. For example, he chauffeured the NSDAP-Gauleiter of Thuringia, Fritz Sauckel, to events and functions in the country in his own car, a small Opel. Bormann later became managing director of the Thuringia Gau press office, and in this capacity he met both Hitler and Rudolf Hess, who often traveled together to Thuringia for appearances before 1933.39
Within a year and a half of his joining the Party, in mid-November 1928, the conspicuously devoted and obliging Bormann was in the NSDAP headquarters in Munich. Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, commander of the SA, had asked him to take charge of managing insurance for the SA. Bormann succeeded in transforming the expensive and problematic insurance of SA members into a profitable “NSDAP Assistance Fund,” and thereby helped reduce the National Socialists’ notorious shortage of money. Bormann had made his reputation as a financial and organizational talent, and he impressed Hitler with his unswerving business sense.40
This young man on the rise from the provinces further solidified his position by marrying Gerda Buch on September 2, 1939, in Munich. She was the daughter of Walter Buch, a Party member for many years and an “old fighter” in the National Socialist movement; Hitler had been a regular guest at the Buch house for years and on this occasion served as a witness at the wedding, along with the father of the bride. When the Bormanns’ first son was born, seven months later, the “Führer” and Ilse Hess were the child’s godparents.41 Gerda Bormann, aged twenty, much taller than her husband and a kindergarten teacher by occupation, had been raised by her parents in a staunchly anti-Semitic “Nationalist” spirit.42 Moreover, the family’s personal contact with Hitler and his ideas had shaped her even in her youth. In a view that is consistent with this background, Joachim Fest attributed to her “unembarrassedly radical prejudices” and called her the “purest expression” of the “ideal type” of the National Socialist woman.43 She joined the NSDAP shortly before her wedding and, over the next thirteen years, bore nine children. She played no role, however, in the public self-presentation of the Nazi regime.
The trained farmer Martin Bormann, though, succeeded in gaining Hitler’s trust and making himself indispensable to the leader. From 1933 on, he dependably managed Hitler’s personal property. He also supervised the “Adolf Hitler Fund of German Trade and Industry,” launched by Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, which guaranteed the Party—and Hitler personally—an annual income in the millions from German businesses. These donations, which eventually became mandatory, added up to more than 700 million reichsmarks through 1945. The hardworking Bormann took care of all of Hitler’s financial interests. He handled purchases and paid all the bills, whether for personal acquisitions, staff expenses, monetary gifts to Party colleagues, or Eva Braun’s financial needs. It is thus no wonder that Bormann was able to expand more and more the scope of the position he held starting in July 1933, as chief of staff in the offices of the “Deputy Führer,” Rudolf Hess. While Hess, the ardent follower of the “tribune”—Hitler—with the reputation of being the spotless “conscience of the Party,” was increasingly kept away from Hitler’s inner circle after 1933, Bormann and his wife soon became the dictator’s substitute family at the Berghof.44 Only a few people outside the Nazi leadership knew about him, but he was the man who was always there at Hitler’s service, with unfailing discretion and reliability—qualities that he shared, of course, with Eva Braun. Bormann owed his rise to a position of power almost invisible from the outside to this close personal relationship of trust with Hitler.45
In this he was in no way different from the other functionaries in the Berghof circle, including Speer and Brandt, although they, unlike Bormann, occupied positions near Hitler that could also be perceived from the outside. They owed their careers just as much, however, to the patronage of the Nazi leader. Apparently, there was a ruthlessly competitive relationship between them and Bormann. Brandt, immediately after the end of the war, described Bormann as the most powerful figure in Hitler’s circle, and said that the later “secretary to the Führer” (his title starting April 12, 1943) acted ruthlessly, brutally, and with such influence that having him as an enemy could endanger one’s life.46 In the autobiographical literature as well, Bormann is with few exceptions portrayed negatively. For example, Richard Walther Darré, Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, described him as a heartless “player in his own interest,” for whom Hitler was “the alpha and omega of his efforts.” “Support from other circles, except for alliances of convenience within the Party,” held no interest for him.47 Only Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder complained in her memoir that the “worst characteristics” had been attributed to Bormann unjustly, when he was one of “the few pure National Socialists” and was merely “working—often ruthlessly, sometimes brutally, too—to carry out the orders and commands Hitler gave him.”48
What about the relations between Martin Bormann and Eva Braun? According to Otto Dietrich, the Reich Press Chief, who was among Hitler’s constant companions by virtue of his position alone as early as 1931, it was Bormann who worked to make sure that the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun, and the young woman’s continual presence at the Berghof, remained secret. He was thereby able to consolidate and expand his influence in Hitler’s close environment, Dietrich said, since the Nazi leader was indebted to him for his support in this matter.49 Robert Ley, the head of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or DAF)—the unified National Socialist trade union and a “gigantic propaganda machine,” according to Ian Kershaw—who took his own life on October 25, 1945, after five months in prison at Nuremberg, left behind a similar assessment of Bormann. Ley, notorious in the “Third Reich” as a “Reich-drunkard,” remained an uncritical, devoted henchman of Hitler’s to the end. His last words—“But to be considered a criminal, I can’t bear that”—reveal the extent of his involvement and his intellectual limitations.50 He said of Bormann, in his “notes” that were written down in the Nuremburg military prison in 1945, that he was a “brutal, ruthless, hulking peasant.” He “never left the Führer’s side,” made himself “liked with all sorts of little services that the Führer appreciated,” and forced his way “unheard and unnoticed into the intimate affairs of a great and overburdened man.” According to Ley, “Ask Bormann” was “heard all the time.” Bormann fulfilled the Führer’s every wish and took care of everything, including “putting through calls to Frau Braun in Munich.”51 We must keep in mind, though, with all these retrospective characterizations, that Ley as well as Bormann’s other former antagonists, such as Brandt and Speer, would seem more harmless the more powerful and dangerous they could make Bormann out to be.
The mediating role that Bormann played between Hitler and the outside world applied to Eva Braun as well. She embodied, after all, the private life of the Nazi leader, which was protected as a state secret. It is thus natural to assume that Bormann followed Hitler’s orders not only in arranging her financial affairs but also in monitoring the young woman’s lifestyle on occasion. Heinrich Hoffmann, in his later apologia, even claimed that “any wish of Eva Braun’s was always carried out by Bormann,” especially during the war years.52 In any case, Bormann would have known how important she was and would have been painfully aware that she was not to be turned into his enemy. Bormann made sure of “every person around the Führer,” if we believe Robert Ley’s remark.53 Eva Braun, in turn, was dependent on the bustling functionary, especially in the period after 1935, when both were installed on the Obersalzberg in immediate proximity to Hitler and regularly ate meals together. If she did in fact hate him, as her family and Albert Speer claimed after the war, she never showed it openly and avoided any confrontation.54
In January 1937, Reinhard Spitzy, adjutant and personal aide to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, accompanies his boss for the first time to a meeting with Hitler on the Obersalzberg. For Spitzy, a former Austrian fighter pilot from an upper-middle-class background, member of the NSDAP, SA, and SS since 1931, and only twenty-four years old, setting foot in the Berghof, that “legendary place,” is an overwhelming experience that makes an “enormously great impression” on him. He idolizes Hitler beyond measure, “worships” him. Rigid with reverence, Spitzy stands “like a statue” with his briefcase against the wall in the great hall while Hitler and Ribbentrop, deep in conversation, walk back and forth in front of him for two hours. Suddenly a young woman with blond locks pokes her head in the doorway and tells Hitler to “finally” come eat with his guests “already.” It’s “high time,” she says, they can’t wait any longer. Shocked, Spitzy wonders who would dare “to speak to the Führer like that.” After the meal, Hitler’s adjutant Brückner explains to him that even the “Führer” has “a right to a private life.” Spitzy should keep quiet about everything he’s seen and heard—the best thing would be to forget it entirely. The young follower is devastated to learn that Hitler, whom he “believed lived the life of an ascetic, exalted above the level of sex and lust, had taken unto himself an ordinary female.”1
The incident Spitzy describes sheds light on Eva Braun’s changed position within Hitler’s personal circle, which had grown ever more clear in the period after late 1935. The Obersalzberg, where she could “find her footing” only after Angela Raubal left (as Henriette von Schirach remarked), became her second home, along with Munich.2 During this period, renovations were moving full speed ahead to turn Wachenfeld, the small country house, into the large, formal Berghof. A terrace and veranda had been added in 1932. But after Hitler bought the house, which he had only rented up until then, on June 26, 1933, and the once-almost-unknown locale had become the second power center of the German Reich, construction and technical modernization of the modest “Alpine-style vacation home” began in earnest in 1934.3 Before the official opening on July 8, 1936, a new main wing that included the old country house and several additional buildings was built. Eva Braun now had a small apartment, adjacent to Hitler’s bedroom, on the second floor of the main house.4 Albert Speer later told the historian Werner Maser that a Tegernsee architect undertook the extensions “following sketches of Hitler’s.” The interior construction and renovations were left “in the Troost Atelier’s hands.” He himself had “not been asked for advice” at the time.5
The rural mountain village on the Obersalzberg had meanwhile turned into a kind of pilgrimage site. Encouraged by the cult of Hitler and the marketing of his residence in Heinrich Hoffmann’s illustrated publications, tourist travel to the region underwent an unexpected upswing. Followers, or the merely curious, made pilgrimages by the thousands to the Wachenfeld house to see the “Führer.” As soon as they caught sight of him, Bormann said, “the People [stood] at the fence.”6 While Nazi propaganda used the hysteria to reinforce the legend of Hitler’s closeness to the People and to nature, the entire Obersalzberg was actually fenced off in 1935. The region was quickly declared a “Führer Protection Zone” and Bormann, on Hitler’s orders, forced the remaining house owners and innkeepers there to sell their property to the NSDAP. “Fief by fief, plot by plot,” he bought them up and had, as he himself said, “all the old houses… torn down.”7 Now only registered groups of visitors from various Party organizations were allowed entry, and their processions past Hitler had to follow strict rules and a rigorous schedule. Spontaneous crowds of ordinary tourists were no longer permitted.
Thus whenever Eva Braun stayed at the Berghof, she disappeared into a heavily monitored, sealed domain, surrounded by six-foot-high security fences whose inner rings were kept under observation by Reich security forces. Admittance was permitted only to those with a special pass issued by the “Obersalzberg Administration” under Bormann.8 Unlike in Munich, Eva Braun here lived cut off from the outside world. The same was true of everyone else who lived at the Berghof, their staff, and their servants. Christa Schroeder, who came to “the mountain” regularly as Hitler’s secretary starting in August 1933, stated in her memoir that from then on she “led a life behind barriers and guarded fences,” almost completely cut off “from everyday civilian and normal existence.”9 Therese Linke, on the other hand, a cook who worked on the Obersalzberg in Clubheim/Platterhof (Hoher Göll Inn), a guesthouse for the Party that the owners had been forced to sell, recalled the changes from 1936–1937 in particular: “There had been a fence around the Berghof and the rest of the area for a while. At every guard post we all had to go through the gates…. By then the farmers and peasants were long gone. Everything was bought up and leveled.”10
Meanwhile, Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann had also settled on Obersalzberg in houses of their own. The construction of additional guesthouses and hotels followed, along with an SS barracks for the so-called Führer Special Security Force—Obersalzberg; the erection of an “Obersalzberg Estate” with a residential building and stables; several administration buildings; and finally the construction of two “teahouses”: one beneath the Berghof and another, the so-called “Eagle’s Nest,” on Kehlstein, a 1,885-meter peak in the Berchtesgaden Alps. All this construction necessitated in turn the laying of new roads and the building of new tunnels and fences. Hitler himself drew up plans for a Berchtesgaden vacation destination, where a spacious “Party Forum” was to arise, but that never came to pass. Instead, during the war, construction began on air-raid bunkers and caves, which it turns out could not all be completed either, despite uninterrupted construction on Hitler’s “mountain” and its surroundings until the end of the war.11
Despite all these changes and renovations, the house on the Obersalzberg remained Hitler’s home, probably his most familiar place of residence. Life there was “to a large extent organized around him personally,” as Speer stated to Allied interrogators in the summer of 1945.12 He surrounded himself exclusively with absolutely loyal (and usually longtime) followers and their families and friends. And he lived there with Eva Braun, whenever he was there. It was always “the same limited circle,” as Christa Schroeder remarked in a letter to a friend in August 1941.13 Eva Braun and Hitler continued to meet in Munich or Berlin as well, but at the Berghof, despite the constant presence of staff and servants, a certain familial domesticity ruled, which neither the Munich apartment nor the Chancellery in the capital could offer.
Fritz Wiedemann, in connection with his time as Hitler’s personal adjutant, wrote in 1938 that the dictator had felt “like the head of a household in his own domain” on the Obersalzberg and had enjoyed “comfort and a kind of family life.” There were “always ladies present” as well, according to Wiedemann, “the wives of his colleagues, such as Frau Hoffmann and Frau Speer, and also the wives of the military adjutants.” In the Reich Chancellery, in contrast, visits from women were “rare,” he wrote.14 As Wiedemann described the daily routine at the Berghof, Hitler woke up late, at one or two in the afternoon, then went to lunch and took “a stroll in the fenced-off area,” in summer typically preceded by a “march-past” of two to three thousand visitors, and then afterward there was “a get-together on the terrace, then dinner at seven inside, and finally a movie.”15
Eva Braun—who, among other things, usually took care of selecting and screening the movies that were provided by the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin—is mentioned not even once in the adjutant’s account.16 Wiedemann, who left Germany in January 1939 and became the German consul general in San Francisco until 1941, himself explained the reason why: on the very first page of his remarks, he notes that a diplomat has to be discreet.
So descriptions that could only come from me or another trusted source will not appear here. That would discredit me, in any age and any country. With respect to trusted details known only to a small circle, the whole world would know that the information came from me…. 17
Hitler’s relationship with a much younger lover obviously counted as a fact that everyone present had to maintain strict silence about, at least in public. Thus Wiedemann expresses himself only in very general terms about Hitler’s relations with women in connection with life at the Berghof. He emphasizes Hitler’s “deep personal regard for women” and mentions that he was “loyal and continuously kind” whenever he showed anyone his favor. All the “stories and rumors of ambiguous character,” Wiedemann emphasized, were “lies”: Hitler’s relations with women were “probably the purest that anyone could imagine.”18
In truth, though, the fact that the “Führer” himself was living in an “irregular” relationship made for whispers and rumors outside the fenced-in zone. Nicolaus von Below, for example, recalled almost forty years later how he had visited the Berghof for the first time in 1937, “fully ignorant” of the circle around Hitler; how he met Eva Braun and was so struck by the events there that it was still of “vital” interest to him after his return to the capital—Hitler’s private lifestyle was a constant “topic of conversation” at social gatherings in Berlin.19
Meanwhile, the Reich Chancellor himself continued to turn his back on the capital, often for weeks at a time. Especially in the summer, he spent long periods on the Obersalzberg. To make sure that government business could be kept running smoothly, even from there, the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, stayed in Upper Bavaria as well during this period, with a small staff. For months at a time, private residences across all of Berchtesgaden had to be rented for the purpose, even though the security requirements, if nothing else, were inadequate. Lammers himself, who, he wrote, took up “official residence” there every year “at the express wish of the Führer,” was housed in a “large country house.” But the summer tourist traffic limited the availability of the necessary housing.20
In early 1936, Hitler therefore ordered the establishment of a “Reich Sub-Chancellery” in Berchtesgaden. It was very important to both sides that the head of the Chancellery could be in Hitler’s easy personal reach. Lammers—a fifty-seven-year-old judge, member of the NSDAP since 1932, and summoned by Hitler personally on the day the Nazis took power to be state secretary in the Chancellery—coordinated the government business. After dissolving the state governments, stripping power from Parliament, and combining the offices of President and Chancellor of the Reich after Hindenburg’s death in 1934, Hitler had concentrated the duties of the state in the “Führer’s” hand, and thus in the Chancellery. Lammers passed along Hitler’s decisions to the appropriate departments, translated his ideas into laws, and controlled access to Hitler within the scope of his area of operation. Since cabinet meetings took place only rarely after the proclamation of the Enabling Act (or “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich”) on March 23, 1933, and not at all after 1938, Lammers functioned as the connection—often the sole connection—between the various ministries and the Chancellor. Every edict, Hitler decreed, had to pass through Lammers.21 Often it was Lammers alone, not the Reich ministers, who advised the head of state. By weakening the government in this way, Hitler prevented the rise of any further opponents within the Party—like, most recently, SA-Führer Ernst Röhm—and, in the words of Ian Kershaw, made himself the “pole star and center of the apparatus of state.”
This style of leadership, which favored the role of “chancelleries” in the political decision-making process, meant an enormous increase in power for Lammers, since he was responsible for setting the business of the day—not Otto Meissner, now head of the Presidential Chancellery; nor Philipp Bouhler, who had received the “Blood Order” (a prominent Nazi decoration) and reported directly to Hitler as head of the “Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP.” It was among Lammers’s duties to report to Hitler every morning, about situations in progress and tasks on the agenda.22 In addition, Hitler assigned Lammers to manage his—the “Führer’s”—bank accounts, and to run a “disposition fund” from which ministers and important Party members were remembered with tax-free gifts. Lammers himself, for his sixty-fifth birthday, received a gift of 600,000 reichsmarks along with a hunting lodge in the Schorfheide. Lammers also settled bills for the purchase of artworks meant for the “Führerbau” dedicated in Munich in September 1937, or the art museum in Linz that was planned, but never completed.23 Lammers was thus Hitler’s “right-hand man” and a powerful and influential figure for years within the National Socialist hierarchy.
This is the context in which a branch of the Reich Chancellery was established in 1937 in Stanggass-Bischofswiesen, northwest of Berchtesgaden and a little less than four miles from Obersalzberg. At the roofing ceremony on January 17, 1937, with Lammers present, Hitler made a short speech in which he said that he was “bold and gained trust and confidence” only at the Berghof, which was why his state secretary also had to “be here with the Reich Chancellery.”24 Already during the planning phase of the new service buildings, in September 1936, Lammers remarked in writing to Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, Minister of Finance, that Hitler was planning to stay in Upper Bavaria “even more often and for even longer periods in the future.”25 There was already a “Reichenhall-Berchtesgaden Government Airport” to provide a transportation connection with the capital.
Hitler now preferred to govern from the Berghof and carry out official functions there. There, and not at the actual seat of government in Berlin, was where he sketched out his decisive political and military plans in the years to come, and passed laws and decrees. The Berghof also served to receive foreign guests and gave Hitler the chance to present himself as a statesman: British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and, after his scandalous abdication, the Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII of Great Britain and Ireland) were among his most prominent visitors. The question arises whether Hitler was thereby simply escaping the prescribed course of official business, or whether his changed relationship with Eva Braun played a role as well. She was always at Berchtesgaden whenever he was. In the final analysis, Berlin was a turbulent and uncontrollable environment, where it would hardly have been possible to avoid inconvenient people and burdensome duties. On the Obersalzberg, in contrast, an atmosphere of a “closed society” held sway. In truth, Hitler’s residence after 1937, logistically as well as due to the installation of the most modern communications technology, was perfectly connected with the outside world—there was no question of “mountain solitude” in virgin nature, as the Nazi propaganda liked to claim.26 Nevertheless, many Party members and representatives of the Nazi government did have the experience of finding that the “Führer” was unreachable on the “mountain” when he did not want to be reached. After the new Berghof was finished, Fritz Wiedemann claimed, the Reich Chancellor had less and less to do with day-to-day government business. “Work hours,” previously “regulated to a certain extent,” grew shorter and shorter, so that it was “harder and harder” to “get decisions [from Hitler] that he alone, as head of state, could make.” On the Obersalzberg this situation was “even worse” than in Berlin.27
For example, Lammers, residing in his second seat of government a few miles away, often tried in vain to be admitted to see Hitler. Daily meetings between the two men, which had been the rule in the early years of the Nazi government, no longer took place, and the head of the Reich Chancellery, despite having risen to the rank of Reich minister, now had to seek audience through Hitler’s personal adjutants, Wilhelm Brückner and Fritz Wiedemann. In 1938, after the signing of the Munich Agreement and the entry of German troops into the Sudetenland (the region of western Czechoslovakia occupied primarily by ethnic Germans and already carved off from the Czechoslovakian state), Lammers was often unable to see Hitler for weeks at a time. He wrote to Brückner on October 21 that he had not been able to give the “Führer” a “detailed report” since September 4, but now had to present to him “several laws to execute,” which “could not be postponed.” Lammers begged Brückner “most humbly to give the Führer this information” and to “communicate [to Lammers] a time when he might be received as soon as possible.” In a second letter the same day, Lammers attempted to get an appointment for Economic Affairs Minister Walther Funk,28 who had returned earlier that week from an extended trip to Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Bulgaria and now wanted to report on his successfully concluded foreign trade offensive in the southeast. SA-Obergruppenführer Brückner replied on October 24, however, that “the Führer was not prepared” to “receive” the report from Funk “on the Obersalzberg,” and that he would see the minister “only after his eventual return to Berlin.”29
In his own regard, Lammers followed up with a further request to the adjutant, informing Hitler that a meeting was “urgently necessary.”30 Now that so-called Reichsgan Sudetenland had been “annexed,” its administration had to be reorganized, and that included among other matters the “administrative persecution” of its Jewish population.31 The corresponding “Law Concerning the Reunification of the Sudeten-German Region with the German Reich,” prepared by the Chancellery, was awaiting his signature. Even then, Wiedemann recalled, Hitler was “not in the mood to see Lammers.” And so “Herr Reichsminister” waited another week, less than four miles away at the base of the Obersalzberg, before finally being permitted to set foot in the Berghof and give his “report” on October 31, 1938.32
This incident reveals more than an “unmethodical, even negligent style” of governing. The claim that Hitler was interested only in foreign politics by that point, and considered domestic matters inconsequential, is also incorrect,33 since Lammers and Funk simply tried to promote Hitler’s aims by implementing Funk’s trade agreements concerning the Balkans, which were a preparatory step to carry out the policy of foreign expansion.34 What we see here is how the Nazi leader, surrounded by his personal staff and his closest social circle, repeatedly created a distance between himself on the Obersalzberg and his leading political associates. Hitler postponed decisions or simply refused to make them. This in no way implies that he was weak in his exercise of power, or inefficient—such was not the case.35
But why, then, did he entrench himself on the Obersalzberg? Was it a psychological way to strengthen his aura of an inapproachable, absolute ruler? Or did he simply sometimes want to avoid any confrontation with the world outside the “Grand Hotel” (Eva Braun’s name for the Berghof)?36 Wiedemann, whose memoir gives the impression that Hitler neglected his political duties after 1936, even claimed that Hitler “absolutely never” received less “important personalities” than Lammers anymore after that time.37 The truth was exactly the reverse. Speer, for example, questioned in August 1945 about Hitler’s mode of working, stated that “when [Hitler] had important decisions to make” he went to the Obersalzberg and tried “to clarify things… for himself” by means of hours-long “conversations, repeated many times over,” with his military adjutants.38 Hence, the supposedly “unimportant people” such as adjutants, secretaries, doctors, Martin Bormann, and not least Eva Braun (still largely unknown to the public), had “access to the dictator” that well-known political figures in the Nazi elite, including Göring and Hess, were denied.39
Who were the men and women of this exclusive society, who made up Hitler’s private environment on the Berghof and met with him daily whenever he was there? Were they really, as is often maintained, normal, “simple” people, uneducated and without any political influence? How did this circle of individuals form? What were their relations with each other? And what role did Eva Braun play in the group?
Joachim Fest has argued that Hitler continued to prefer “the uncritical, dull milieu of simple people” around him, such as he had known from childhood on. Guido Knopp, too, said with respect to “everyday life… on the mountain” that the dictator’s “substitute family” consisted of obsequious “personal physicians, personal photographers, personal bodyguards, secretaries, and adjutants.”40 But this way of looking at things has since been superseded. In fact, Hitler’s close environment in no way consisted of a homogenous group of people. It remains the case that, aside from Goebbels and Speer, most of the “great and powerful men” of the Reich were not among this group. Hermann Göring—the power-hungry, second-most-powerful man in the Nazi hierarchy, commander in chief of the air force and “General Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan,” thus a major influence on the development of the rearmament economy—owned a house of his own on the Obersalzberg, but there was no private contact between him and the Reich Chancellor. Any social invitation of Göring and his wife Emmy to the Berghof was, Speer says, “completely out of the question.”41
Heinrich Himmler, as “Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police” after June 1936, reported directly to Hitler and was responsible for terror, persecution, and genocide, but he likewise appeared in Hitler’s Alpine residence only for meetings. Himmler’s unquestioning loyalty and belief in the leader’s convictions ensured him Hitler’s favor, which he used to expand his power and define his role entirely in terms of his own personal principles of military tradition and racial selection. No connection to his “Führer” on a personal level is known, however.42 Joachim von Ribbentrop, too, whom Hitler apparently described as a “second Bismarck,” appeared on the Obersalzberg only for meetings and official occasions such as the visit of David Lloyd George, the former British prime minister, on September 4, 1936. Ribbentrop, the ambassador to London starting in that year and Foreign Minister from 1938 on—thus “the greatest warmonger other than Hitler himself”—was hated by most of the other high-ranking Party members for his high-handed manner.43 Rudolf Hess, the “Deputy Führer” who ran the Party headquarters in Munich, was also excluded from Hitler’s private circle. He had been among Hitler’s constant companions until 1933, with the reputation of being “the high priest of the Führer cult,” but by the time Hitler moved into the “new Berghof,” Hess was already estranged from the center of power. One important reason for this exclusion was probably that the former “private secretary” was seen to be a difficult person, an eccentric loner with obscure interests, unsuited to harmless diversions with others.44
Thus prominent representatives of the government and the Party were denied access to Hitler’s private sphere, however, there were at least three distinct groups with distinct functions around Hitler at the Berghof: (1) personnel, such the doctors, personal adjutants, secretaries, servants, chauffeurs, and bodyguards; (2) military adjutants and representatives of the government, the military, and the Party, including Albert Speer, Martin Bormann, Karl Brandt, Sepp Dietrich, Hermann Esser, and Franz Xaver Schwarz; and (3) a social circle, including Hitler’s lover, her family, and her friends as well as Heinrich Hoffmann and his family.45 Only Speer and Goebbels, among the Nazi Party leadership, can be considered “friends” of the otherwise unapproachable Hitler, who was “cut off from real human contact.”46
But was this circle on the Obersalzberg actually purely private in nature, as Speer claimed to his interrogators in 1945? Speer stated that Hitler had chosen a group of people there “apolitically,” out of purely personal sympathy; that he included only those who “would not disturb his thoughts with political discussions.”47 Speer’s early statements about the composition and significance of the Berghof circle thus give the impression that the people who were regularly present—including himself—were merely the dictator’s personal friends, who had nothing, or an insignificant amount, to do with the regime’s politics, at least until the start of the war. Politics, Speer said, was not a topic of discussion within the so-called private circle—a claim that everyone involved who survived the war stubbornly stuck to as well. But was it even possible to so sharply distinguish private life and politics, in a place that was the regime’s second center of power, along with Berlin? And how does this testimony fit with the widespread belief that Hitler had no private life at all?
The various people at the Berghof were not, of course, all equal in status—or of the same gender—but the boundary between the social circle and the two official groups was extremely fluid. Hitler was the center around whom everyone revolved, and the dividing lines would dissolve and be redrawn according to the various degree of favor and trust each person found himself or herself in. Once the Alpine residence was sealed off in 1935, a kind of community of purpose developed, in which everyone ate lunch together, spent the evenings with one another, went on excursions, celebrated holidays, and—in changing permutations—could be seen on the VIP platform at Party conventions.48 There were also trips together: Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Hoffmann, Karl Brandt, and their families flew to Greece in fall 1936, for example, for a semiofficial eight-day visit; they were received by George II, the reinstated king, and his prime minister, Ioannis Metaxas. Eva Braun, meanwhile, had joined Heinrich Hoffmann Jr. and others on a purely private trip to Italy a few weeks earlier, visiting Venice and Milan, among other places.49
Among the regular guests on the Obersalzberg, who considered spending time with Hitler to be an “exciting experience,” were to be found, after 1937–1938, Nicolaus von Below, a twenty-nine-year-old colonel of the Luftwaffe assigned to Hitler as an adjutant, and his nineteen-year-old wife, Maria. Below later recalled that he had entered the Chancellor’s private circle as early as four weeks after his first assignment on June 23, 1937. His explanation of how this was possible so quickly was that they had immediately discovered a common interest in classical music. Certainly Hitler’s appointments outside of work hours did not lie within Below’s purview. The four military adjutants, one from each of the four branches of the armed forces, unlike the personal adjutants, were on call in alternation and scheduled meetings pertaining only to military matters, in the broadest sense, including “petitions and pleas for clemency from soldiers and their family members.”50 Still, we may presume that Hitler developed a certain sympathy for the strapping young air force adjutant from the first moment he saw him, since the Belows were included on his personal invitation list to the Wagner festivals in Bayreuth as early as July 27.51
Nicolaus von Below was around the same age as Brandt and Speer, and was friends with them as well.52 Like them, Below accompanied the Nazi leader not only officially but also on personal trips. Ever since Hitler had disenfranchised the previous commanders of the military and taken over sole command of the armed forces in early February 1938, he required constant accompaniment by military adjutants. Thus Below went regularly with Hitler to his private apartment in Munich, as well as to the Obersalzberg, from then on. At 16 Prinzregentenplatz, the adjutant later recalled, the housekeeper was “in constant contact with Eva Braun” and had “a telephone connection to her ready for Hitler” immediately upon his arrival.53 Then, in summer 1939, Below went along to the “Reich Theater Week” in Vienna, an event organized by the Ministry of Propaganda that since 1934 had taken place in various cities of the Reich, including Linz. Afterward, at the Berghof, Below (alternating with Speer) followed Hitler in “long walks up and down the great hall” and was impressed by the “Führer’s” thoughts circling around the “extermination” of “Jewish Bolshevism.” As he later confessed in his memoir, the argument that “the German People could not live in peace… under this constant threat” had convinced him.54
Maria von Below, a landowner’s daughter whom Hitler first invited to the Berghof for Easter 1938, stated in 1985, in very similar terms, that Hitler did not win the “loyalty” of those around him “by telling them his plan was murder.” Rather, he persuaded everyone “because he was fascinating.” “Even the early years” at the Berghof were in no way “horribly boring,” she said in this interview with Gitta Sereny; Hitler held everyone in his grip by means of his personality, and his “phenomenal” “knowledge of history and art.” Thus Maria von Below presented herself as unable to understand the retroactive dismissal of the Berghof society in Speer’s publications. How could he have forgotten “how exciting it was for all of us? And how often we were happy there?”55
We can see here that Maria von Below, by far the youngest member of this half-private, half-official group of people around Hitler in 1938, defended her time in this circle more than forty years later just as forcefully and in almost the same words as Margarete Speer. How are we to comprehend this attitude, in light of the monstrous misdeeds of the Nazi regime, which these women must have learned about at least in later years? Why did they stubbornly insist on this description of a supposedly ideal world at the Berghof? Is it because they—unlike their husbands—were under no pressure from a prosecutor or a court to justify themselves after the collapse of the Nazi state? The fact remains that, to whatever greater or lesser degree they may have known about the crimes that were committed, they barely connected their life at the Berghof with the actual political events of those years.
Nicolaus and Maria von Below met Hitler and his close circle shortly after the entry of German troops into Austria on March 12, 1938, and Austria’s “annexation” to the German Reich—in other words, at a time when Hitler was more powerful and more popular than ever. Not only his immediate followers but the overwhelming majority of the population celebrated this new coup, which was explicitly recognized by the Great Powers in Europe, and considered him a genius as a statesman. Air force adjutant Below, one of the many people to accompany Hitler on his “triumphal procession” to Vienna, wrote later that on this trip he understood “more and more” why the Nazi “Führer” “had won his followers, and the love of the people.”56 Maria von Below’s enthusiasm looking back at this period likewise reflects the then-widespread mood, and certainly gives us insight into the emotional world of the Berghof.
Her relationship with Eva Braun, meanwhile, is difficult to judge after such a long time. Her husband’s memoir gives very few hints of any possible friendly contact. In a chapter called “Peaceful Life at the Berghof,” it says that in spring 1944 Hitler thanked Maria von Below “many times” for having “found such a nice relationship with Miss Braun.”57 And to Traudl Junge, Hitler’s last secretary, who moved from his headquarters in East Prussia onto the Obersalzberg with Hitler’s staff in early 1943, it seemed that Anni Brandt and Maria von Below were “close friends” with Eva Braun.58 Christa Schroeder, on the other hand, states that Eva Braun had always had only one “favorite” and the others were always “careful and reserved” around her.59 It is certainly striking that Maria von Below never appears with the other women in the Berghof group in Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographs. The explanation must be that, as the wife of a military adjutant, she came along to Berchtesgaden only when her husband was on duty. In addition, the Belows seem to have attained a position of trust with Hitler, and also with Eva Braun, only in the last years before the end of the war.
From the beginning, that is to say since 1933, the Munich artist Sofie Stork was also in the circle of those around Hitler and Eva Braun. A trained sculptor and painter, and a beautiful, dark-haired woman of thirty whose father owned a well-known company that manufactured and sold fishing tackle (the “H. Stork Fishing Tackle Factory”), Sofie Stork was involved with Wilhelm Brückner, Hitler’s personal adjutant, nineteen years older than she was. In the course of their acquaintance she had joined the NSDAP on December 1, 1931, and entered farther and farther into Hitler’s private circle.60 Brückner himself, a university-educated economist and an officer in the First World War, was among the “old campaigners” from the early days of the NSDAP. He was a member of the Party going back to late 1922, led the Munich SA regiment in the following years, and in that capacity took part in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. As a result, the State Court in Munich sentenced him to fifteen months prison and a fine of 100 reichsmarks for abetting high treason,61 although Brückner, like all the others who took part in the putsch, actually served only part of this already mild sentence. Later, he made a living for many years with all sorts of different activities, including as a tennis coach, before again joining Hitler’s circle when Hitler chose him as his personal adjutant in 1930. Otto Wagener, named chief of staff of the SA in the previous year and one of Hitler’s closest confidants in the “period of struggle” until 1933, did not approve of the choice: the forty-five-year-old Brückner’s whole life history, without a real career or contact with the SA, seemed dubious to Wagener. But Hitler, Wagener wrote in his autobiography while a prisoner of war in England in 1946 (it was published posthumously in 1978), justified his decision by saying that he wanted someone around him who offered “a certain security simply by virtue of his sturdy build and size,” and would prevent anyone from daring to approach him.62
Personal adjutants were traditionally assigned to princes, army commanders, ministers of war, and Reich chancellors; they always had an officer grade and usually came from the nobility. They handled writing and business duties, received phone calls, transmitted orders, and occasionally even undertook diplomatic missions. Hitler’s naming a personal adjutant at a time when he was still years away from becoming Chancellor revealed not only his concern with security and inclination to an egocentrically staged leadership style—more importantly, it revealed that Hitler was creating a further distance between himself and his fellow National Socialists. He was consciously fostering the “nimbus of the unapproachable,” as Ian Kershaw formulated it, in order to both concretize to the outside world and defend from competitors within the Party his persona as the inaccessible, solitary Leader.63
Wilhelm Brückner remained at Hitler’s side for ten years. A bearer of the Blood Order, he rose to be chief adjutant, while three additional adjutants arrived in 1933, 1935, and 1938, respectively: Julius Schaub, the longtime servant; retired Captain Fritz Wiedemann; and Albert Bormann, Martin Bormann’s younger brother, trained as a bank teller and head of Hitler’s “Private Chancellery,” which was integrated as Chief Department 1 into the “Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP” under Philipp Bouhler.64 Brückner became an honorary citizen of the city of Detmold on January 15, 1936 (an honor revoked in 1945); became a member of the NSDAP’s parliamentary party for two years in 1936; and, inevitably, took part in Hitler’s entire political and private life, in Berlin, Munich, and on the Obersalzberg. For example, on August 1, 1934, the day before Reich President Paul von Hindenburg died, Brückner was apparently the only person to accompany Hitler to see the elderly head of state on his deathbed.65
Without a doubt, the head of “the Führer’s Personal Adjutant Staff” gained a power not to be underestimated. Nicolaus von Below even claimed that Brückner had attained a “paramount position,” with his “authority” recognized by both the personal and the military adjutants.66 Furthermore, it was the adjutants, especially Brückner, who had direct and practically unlimited access to Hitler. They were the link to the outside world for a “Führer” concerned to keep his distance; they supplied him with all sorts of information and contacts. In addition, the personal adjutants coordinated visits, such that even the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, was obliged in 1938 to submit his request for an audience with Hitler to Brückner in writing. There were clearly also wide-ranging financial opportunities for the adjutants—Fritz Wiedemann later wrote:
If you needed money, Brückner sent word… to Bormann and got 50,000 marks. He took the lion’s share for himself and then passed the rest along to Schaub and to me, in decreasing amounts based on seniority and position.67
When Martin Bormann, who managed the fund that was at Hitler’s personal disposal, complained about the large outlays of money, the Nazi leader dismissed the complaint and forbade the Party to interfere in “his spending.”68 Either Brückner or Schaub paid Hitler’s private bills in restaurants and on trips—or, as it was called, managed his “petty cash.” Brückner stated under questioning in August 1947 that only Schaub paid Eva Braun’s bills.69 Brückner’s own role in Hitler’s private milieu, meanwhile, is not easy to determine. Albert Speer—concerned, as he always was after the fact, to imply the greatest possible distance between himself and the supposedly wretched “Führer circle” on the Obersalzberg—emphasized in May 1967, in response to a question from Joachim Fest, that he had had “nothing in common with Schaub, Brückner, and Morell.” Who, Speer asked his interlocutor, “could have been more different from me?”70 His friend Nicolaus von Below, on the other hand, recalled “especially good and friendly contact” with SA-Obergruppenführer Brückner, which took on “a private character quite quickly.”71
Brückner’s girlfriend Sofie Stork seems to have been introduced into the Berghof society just as quickly and to have made close friendships there. Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographs show her at parties, such as New Year’s or birthdays, but also on excursions alongside Hoffmann’s wife, Erna; Eva Braun; and Anni Brandt.72 In the process of transforming Haus Wachenfeld into the Berghof, the young artist even received assignments from Hitler—and from his girlfriend. For example, Stork decorated the chimney stove in the living room and painted the tiles of the sideboard and the tea table, as well as porcelain for Eva Braun, complete with her monogram.73 She was obviously in Hitler’s good graces. Her separation from Brückner, who left her around the beginning of 1936 and married another woman a short time later, did nothing to change that: she remained a member of the most intimate inner circle at the Berghof even after the separation, along with Karl Brandt, Heinrich Hoffmann, Eva and Gretl Braun, and the secretaries Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski.74
Brückner, on the other hand, left four years later. On October 18, 1940, Hitler fired him from his position as personal adjutant. In fact, there had been at least one departure or removal from the dictator’s private realm every year since 1935: in 1936, his half-sister and housekeeper Angela Raubal was dismissed and his driver, Julius Schreck, died of natural causes; in 1937, the foreign press secretary, Ernst Hanfstaengl, fled to England; in 1938, Fritz Wiedemann was transferred to the German consulate in San Francisco; in 1939, the servant Karl Krause was fired. Thus the idea that Hitler moved in an entirely unchanged environment of servants and adjutants from 1933 on is false. The reasons for Brückner’s removal, meanwhile, are still difficult to understand today. In Below’s memoir it says that the reason was a difference of opinion between Brückner and Hitler’s majordomo Arthur Kannenberg, concerning “petty trifles.”75 Kannenberg, a corpulent Berlin chef and restaurant owner, was responsible with his wife for the “Führer household” in the Chancellery starting in 1933. He organized the state dinners in Berlin and on the Obersalzberg, and even went along every year to the Wagner festivals in Bayreuth, where he and his staff tended to Hitler and his guests in a house put at his special disposal by the Wagner family—the “Führerbau.” Kannenberg was famous, or infamous, for his solo interludes on the accordion at the Chancellor’s artists’ receptions. Winifred Wagner later described him as “a little part of us”—it was impossible to imagine Hitler’s private circle without him.76 Nicolaus von Below, meanwhile, regretted the “removal” of his friend Brückner. He had always hoped, he said, that Brückner would “one day return,” whereas others, such as “Bormann and Eva Braun, were happy to see him go.” Christa Schroeder described an “intrigue” of Kannenberg’s; she considered him to be a “shady character,” and even suggested a connection between Hitler’s “disfavor” toward Brückner and the end of Brückner’s relationship with Sofie Stork.77 In truth, all these retrospective judgments, expressing the speaker’s own sympathies or antipathies, amount largely to hearsay. They do, however, make clear that the group of people at the Berghof was by no means a “sworn society.” Jealousies, power struggles, and nepotistic favoritism were the order of the day there as well.
The business interests pursued by individual members of Hitler’s inner circle constitute a special chapter in the history of life at the Berghof. They show above all that Hitler looked after the personal circumstances, too, of the members of his Berghof society and was prepared to support them financially when necessary. The files of Albert Bormann, who handled and archived Hitler’s personal correspondence in the “Private Chancellery of the Führer,” show, for example, that Sofie Stork’s personal and business contact with Hitler lasted until at least 1941. A “correspondence diary” that indicates the incoming and outgoing letters for the years 1939–1940, predominantly within a narrow circle (including Schaub, Brückner, Heinrich Hoffmann, and Hermann Esser), along with, less often, private letters such as those to or from Hitler’s nephew Leo Raubal, his half-sister Angela’s son, or Sigrid von Laffert, contains numerous entries on the “Stork matter,” revealing Hitler’s energetic business assistance. Already in September 1936, Hitler had arranged for Sofie Stork to receive 45,000 reichsmarks—an astronomical sum at the time—so that she could carry on her deceased father’s fishing-tackle business in Munich, which had apparently run into financial difficulties.78 On top of that, Hitler hired, and paid the salary of, a financial adviser who looked after the company for years “on the orders of the Führer.” The auditor regularly sent annual reports to the “Private Chancellery of the Führer” from then on.79
In later years as well, Albert Bormann’s entries show that Sofie Stork turned directly to the dictator whenever she ran into business problems. For example, in the early summer of 1940 she asked him for help in procuring Tonkin bamboo (a special type of bamboo reed used to manufacture fishing poles), which had become increasingly difficult to import from the Far East, Australia, or the United States since the start of the war. In September 1940, she put in another request directly to Hitler, for a travel permit to, and purchase approval within, Belgium and France, which had been occupied by the German army a few months earlier. The northern half of France, with its major industrial regions, came under the jurisdiction of the German military administration and was thus a coveted trading center for businesspeople from the German Reich. Sofie Stork received her concession, too, as Albert Bormann’s bookkeeping proves: on October 13, 1940, she appeared in the files again, with a new request. Could her commercial representative use certain airplanes belonging to Hitler’s fleet?80
But why would Sofie Stork have been granted such an enormous amount of assistance, financial and otherwise? Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s private secretary, later claimed that Hitler so resented Wilhelm Brückner’s separation from this woman that he decided “on his own accord” to compensate the ex-girlfriend financially “and very generously.”81 But is this account plausible? What would explain such an emotional reaction on Hitler’s part? It seems likely that Sofie Stork’s close friendship with Eva and Gretl Braun could have been one possible cause of Brückner’s gradual loss of Hitler’s favor and eventually his expulsion. For the young artist, in contrast, the Braun sisters’ friendship and thus her belonging to Hitler’s personal sphere was enough to give her extraordinary advantages. This was not the only case in which Hitler rewarded political allegiance, and above all personal loyalty, with material contributions of all kinds.82
Another friend of Eva Braun’s was Marianne Schönmann, from Munich. Thirteen years older than Braun, she first arrived in the Berghof circle thanks to her long-standing acquaintance with Erna Hoffmann, Heinrich Hoffmann’s second wife.83 Erna Hoffmann and Marianne Schönmann both came from artist families; Schönmann’s aunt, Luise Perard-Petzl, a soprano well known in Vienna and Munich, had had successes before the First World War in, among others, Wagner operas—as Sieglinde in Die Walküre and as Elsa in Lohengrin. Marianne Schönmann met Hitler, according to her own statement, around 1934 in Hoffmann’s apartment in Munich. Her relationship to the world of opera, and to Wagner, probably played an important role in forming this acquaintance. They were in harmony politically as well: she had already joined the NSDAP three years previously, in December 1931.84 She was then unmarried and still named Petzl.
When and how Schönmann met Eva Braun is not known. The statements she gave in this regard in her denazification proceedings after the war were vague: she stated before the court in 1947 that she was merely one among several “female acquaintances” who “repeatedly” invited Braun to her house in Munich. She herself first visited the Obersalzberg, she said, sometime during 1935.85 However, Schönmann very quickly became one of the regular visitors there after Eva Braun’s position at the Berghof became unassailable in early 1936. Within a few years, Marianne Schönmann was one of the women around Hitler. When she married the Munich building contractor (and NSDAP member) Friedrich “Fritz” Schönmann on August 7, 1937, at age thirty-six, Hitler and Eva Braun were among the select few guests.86
Marianne Schönmann and Eva Braun were apparently in regular contact in Munich as well as at the Berghof. The Schönmanns’ villa near the Herzogpark was located not far from the Braun sisters’ residence in Bogenhausen. After the war, when it was necessary to play down such close connections to Hitler and those near to him in order to save one’s own skin, Marianne Schönmann stated that Eva Braun must have been “so obliging” to her only because of Braun’s interest in opera. She emphasized, too, that her acquaintance with Eva Braun and Erna Hoffmann did not lead to any “political activity” on her part; there was “never any politicizing” between them. Neither acquaintance had “ever told [her] about the actions or any other affairs of Hitler or Heinrich Hoffmann,” she said.87
In reality, Schönmann was extremely well informed, since the “actions” and “affairs” about which she claimed to know nothing were ones she had close and direct experience of during her numerous visits on the Obersalzberg. And she must have heard from other members of the inner circle, in one form or another, at least some details about the events taking place around Hitler—events that all those who had anything to do with him were as burningly interested in as the curious general public. Karl Brandt later stated that he was a “very close” friend of Schönmann’s,88 and Nicolaus von Below still remembered precisely, decades later, Schönmann’s confident manner in Hitler’s presence: he described in his memoir how Eva Braun’s friend even dared to disapprove openly of one of the Reich Chancellor’s decisions.
During a four-day stay on the Obersalzberg over Easter 1938, which played out “informally, in a private atmosphere” according to Below, Hitler, surrounded by his guests (including Eva and Gretl Braun, Marianne Schönmann, the Bormanns, the Speers, and the Brandts), spoke “frequently about Austria during meals and during the long nights.” It was only five weeks since German troops had occupied the country and Austria had been “integrated” into the German Reich.89 Many of the people present at the Berghof had been at Hitler’s triumphal entry into Linz on March 12, 1938, and into Vienna on March 14, and had seen how their “Führer” had been frantically, jubilantly greeted by crowds of cheering Austrians for fulfilling the dream of a “Greater German Empire.” Walter Schellenberg, who worked in the Reich Main Security Office and was responsible at the time for Hitler’s personal security during his drives through Vienna, described a “true carnival of flowers,”90 and Christa Schroeder later recalled the “almost hysterical outbursts of joy,” which she described as “nerve-shattering.”91 Bormann, Below, and Brandt were also among those accompanying Hitler. Eva Braun, in contrast, had traveled to Vienna unofficially and separate from the others.92 In a move that his followers did not expect, Hitler immediately chose Josef Bürckel, a schoolteacher from the Rhineland and an “old campaigner” in the movement, to take over the Austrian NSDAP and the Gleichschaltung of Austria. This was the decision that Marianne Schönmann, a native Viennese, criticized at the Berghof. His naming a non-Austrian as the “Führer’s Representative for the Building Up of the Party in the Eastern Region” clearly displeased her very deeply.93
Bürckel’s nomination must indeed have shocked the Austrian National Socialists if they were expecting to regain power once more, after the prohibition of their party on June 19, 1933, and years of political powerlessness. Simultaneously with the entry of German troops, they began to mercilessly persecute political opponents and members of religious minorities and drive them out of office. Nonetheless, Hitler chose Bürckel, an outsider, to reorganize the disorganized Austrian NSDAP and review the existing membership. Bürckel, previously the “Reich Commissioner for the Reintegration of the Saar Region,” was now to ensure a successful “annexation” in Austria as well. He reported directly to Hitler and saw himself as a kind of “Gau-Prince” with dictatorial powers intended solely to enforce “the will of the Führer.”94 He peremptorily disregarded the aims of the traditional institutions, going so far as to declare that he wanted to stem the tide of “a number of candidates who consider themselves qualified to take up certain positions in the state and Party offices,” in fact, “to render such office-seekers harmless.”95 With measures such as the immediate closure of all associations and organizations in Austria—which was now to be referred to only as Ostmark, “the Eastern Region”—Bürckel made himself so disliked even among Party members that his behavior gave rise to a “lively” discussion, even at the Berghof, about whether “the mentality of the Austrians [ought to be] taken into account.”
But Marianne Schönmann’s efforts on behalf of her homeland’s Party members were in vain. A week later, on April 23, 1938, Hitler named Josef Bürckel “Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of Austria with the German Reich.” Still, Schönmann brought up “several proofs of Bürckel’s missteps in office over the course of the following years” in conversations with Hitler, Below recalled. On the other hand, Baldur von Schirach, who two years later would relieve Bürckel and take over the office of Gauleiter and Reich Governor in Vienna, stated that Schönmann had plied Hitler “with rumors about his predecessor,” to the point where the Nazi leader had held him responsible for the “mood inimical to the Reich in Vienna.”96 Below leaves open whether, and in what way, he or others there, including Eva Braun, may have taken part in the discussion. His remarks show, though, that even in the years leading up to the war, political topics were certainly discussed at the Berghof, and not merely, as Speer would later claim, “questions of fashion, of raising dogs, of the theater and movies, of operettas and their stars.”97
The persecution of Jews was no secret in the Berghof circle, either. Eva Braun and her friends, as well as the Speer and Brandt families, spent most of their time living in the major cities of Munich or Berlin, after all, not in any way shut off from the outside world as they were on the Obersalzberg. As but one example, they could hardly have been unaware that the mayor of Munich, Karl Fiehler, a long-time Party member who had taken part in the putsch of 1923 and served time in Landsberg prison with Hitler, had imposed radical measures against the Jewish residents of the city from very early on. Even before 1938, Jews in the Bavarian capital were forbidden to visit public baths, parks, and restaurants. They could shop only at a few shops.98 Announcements in all German newspapers openly offered for sale Jewish businesses that had been forcibly expropriated “by reason of Aryanization.” The second biggest department store in Munich underwent numerous boycotts and acts of terror at the hands of the National Socialists before being looted on the night of November 9, 1938—the so-called Night of Broken Glass—and set on fire.99 It will probably never be possible to determine exactly how much each individual member of the Berghof group knew about such activities involving the persecution of Jews and the elimination of political opponents. As Speer said, “Hitler’s private circle” was in any case not “sworn to silence”—Hitler “considered it pointless to attempt to keep women from gossiping” anyway.100 They all were not only witnesses but believers. The survivors from this circle thus had good reasons after the war to stay quiet about what they had seen and heard around Hitler.
In Austria, meanwhile, Bürckel and his staff were busy transforming Austrian organizations into “Reich-German institutions” and restructuring the Austrian NSDAP. The currency reserves of the Austrian national bank—some 1.4 billion reichsmarks—fell into German hands as well. In addition, they pressed ahead with the “reduction of non-Aryan personnel in private companies,”101 which in practice meant brutally stripping members of the Jewish population of their rights and property. Thousands of Austrian Jews, mostly from Vienna, had fled; their property, declared to be the property of “enemies of the Reich,” was confiscated by the SS.102 Valuable art collections and libraries changed hands in this way, with the “Führer” claiming for himself the right to make final decisions about their ultimate destinations. He decided in June 1938, for instance, that he would personally decree where the art works confiscated in Vienna would go. Heinrich Himmler, who had hurried to the Austrian capital with a company of Waffen-SS soldiers on March 12, received instructions from the Reich Chancellery that Hitler intended “primarily to put [these art objects] at the disposal of the smaller cities of Austria.”103 In the following months, it became clear that Hitler thereby meant predominantly the Upper Austrian provincial capital of Linz on the Danube, Hitler’s “hometown,” which he had planned since the summer of 1938 to redesign architecturally and where he intended to build an art museum of international stature. His goal was to make Linz a “world city.”104
For the construction of the art museum in Linz, which was to show primarily German and Austrian painters of the nineteenth century, Hitler purchased pictures from art dealers as well as confiscating them from Jewish collections. Among the experts advising him on his purchases and fulfilling his “special wishes” was first and foremost the Berlin art dealer Karl Haberstock, who owned a gallery on the Kurfürstendamm.105 The bustling Heinrich Hoffmann, worth millions by then, acted as a broker as well, along with possibly Marianne Schönmann. Even though Hoffmann was no art expert, Hitler had had him as an adviser on art for years. The “personal photographer’s” obvious access to Hitler the passionate art-lover ensured that dealers would propose all sorts of sales to him. As a result, a flourishing art market developed in the dictator’s immediate environment. Not only was Hitler offered, and often simply given, valuable art objects, but so were his girlfriend, his adjutants, and even his secretaries.106 In addition, Hoffmann used his contacts to build up an extensive painting collection of his own over the years. In 1946 he confirmed under questioning from Allied interrogation officials that he had received pictures as a broker from Marianne Schönmann among others, including a work by Anton Seitz.107 This nineteenth-century German painter of the Munich School, who portrayed the everyday life of “ordinary people,” was one of the artists Hoffmann privately preferred to collect.108 Karl Brandt also stated in 1946 that he had received pictures from Schönmann.109
The extent of Marianne Schönmann’s activities remains in shadow, however. Officially, she was not in the art business around Hitler. A friend of hers, the Munich gallerist Maria Almas-Dietrich, in contrast, can be proven to have worked together with Karl Haberstock and Heinrich Hoffmann as a supplier for the “Linz special assignment.” Heinrich Hoffmann introduced Hitler to Almas-Dietrich in 1936; her daughter was apparently friends with Eva Braun.110 A year later, in August 1937, Maria Almas-Dietrich already found herself, along with Hitler, Eva Braun, and Braun’s Munich circle of friends, among the wedding guests in Marianne Schönmann’s apartment. Working partly with Hoffmann, she would sell Hitler more than nine hundred paintings in total and thus be one of the most important art brokers for the Linz “Führer Museum.”111 She conducted her business via Martin Bormann, or directly with the Nazi leader, who then instructed his personal adjutant to pass along her invoices to Hans Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery.112 Despite the evidence that Maria Almas-Dietrich worked with the Operational Center for the Occupied Territories (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR), which stole property from Jewish owners throughout the regions occupied by the German army during the war, the accusation that she had dealt in stolen art has never been proven, even today, due to lack of sales documents. It is also uncertain how close her friendship with Hitler and his private circle actually was, and whether she ever received an invitation to the Berghof. It is certain, however, that she made an enormous financial profit from her dealings with Hitler. Between 1940 and 1944, she apparently took in more than 600,000 reichsmarks with her business for the “Linz special assignment.”113
In general, there was a close intertwining of private and business relationships within the dictator’s innermost circle. In this context, Heinrich Hoffmann in particular skillfully exploited his friendship with Hitler and his quasifamilial relationship with Eva Braun. And in 1936, he introduced another person into Hitler’s private life who would exert a sizable influence on Hitler’s mental and physical state until the end: Dr. Morell.
Dr. Theodor Morell, a ship’s doctor before the First World War, had a private practice on Berlin’s chic Kurfürstendamm that included artists, politicians, and Hitler’s personal photographer Hoffmann among its patients. When Hitler—who didn’t smoke, drank no alcohol, and kept to a strict diet—was suffering from increased stomach pains and eczema on his legs in 1935–1936, Hoffmann arranged a meeting with Morell—presumably at his house in Munich.114 Morell apparently succeeded right away in convincing the hypochondriacally inclined Chancellor of his medical abilities, because from then on he invariably treated Hitler and was on call for him at all hours.
By 1937–1938 at the latest, the “personal physician” and his wife, actress Johanna “Hanni” Moller, had also joined the inner circle around the dictator. Already in January 1937, when Hitler spent as usual, the beginning of the New Year at the Berghof, Morell was present as well. Together with Hitler, Hoffmann, and the adjutant Brückner, he went to see the site where the teahouse on the Mooslahnerkopf, a mountain nearby, was to be built. In August 1937, Theodor and Hanni Morell were among Marianne Schönmann’s wedding guests. And at New Year’s 1937–1938, the Berlin doctor once more found himself, alongside Albert Speer, Sofie Stork, and others, on the Obersalzberg.115 Starting in 1938, Morell seems to have taken up a permanent place among Hitler’s companions. Photographs by Hoffmann show him with Karl Brandt and other faithful followers in the Reich Chancellor’s special train on the way to the Austrian city of Klagenfurt, where on April 4, 1938, Hitler gave one of his many propaganda speeches leading up to the plebiscite on the “annexation” of Austria. In early September, Morell appeared in Party uniform between his wife and Eva Braun on a VIP platform at the last NSDAP Party convention (“Greater Germany Reich Party Convention”) in Nuremberg; that same month, he appeared at the conferences in Bad Godesberg and Munich.116
Morell was thus personally on site when Hitler, under threat of war and clearly suffering from extreme nervous tension, dramatically negotiated the cession of the Sudetenland to the German Reich. The “personal physician” accompanied Hitler to the discussions with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that took place on September 22–24 in the posh Rheinhotel Dreesen, and to the Munich Conference with Chamberlain, Mussolini, and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier in the “Führerbau” on Königsplatz on September 28–30.117 In private, the Brandts, Speers, Bormanns, and Morells formed as it were the core of the Berghof group around Hitler, Eva Braun, and Braun’s sister and friends.118
However, it seems—at least in retrospect—that Morell was greatly disliked there by everyone except Hitler, and was little respected as a doctor. Speer, for example, tears him apart in Inside the Third Reich, calling him “a bit of a screwball obsessed with making money,” whose treatment methods “we never felt entirely easy about” and who was “the butt of humor” whenever Hitler was not present.119 Franz von Sonnleithner, the Foreign Office liaison officer at the “Führer headquarters” during the last years of the war, described Dr. Morell as an irritating personality, “portly in stature, with a brownish skin color and fat fingers loaded with rings,” who “did not [correspond to] the ideal image of the time.”120 Even the Wagners in Bayreuth considered him “a slob” and so unacceptable that, by order of his “Patient A,” he had to avoid coming near them after 1938.121
Having attained a position of trust and thus a position of power with remarkable speed, he awakened suspicion and disapproval both in the private “Führer circle” and among high-ranking political associates. It did not fit into the public image of the bold and infallible “Führer”—a man who was trusted “blindly” and whose foreign policy triumphs had given him the aura of a kind of superman; a “real man” who could pull off whatever he wanted—that Morell was constantly supplying him with pills “in gold foil” and giving him injections. The public was not permitted to find out about these occasional indispositions of Hitler’s, in any case, since his popularity in the country as a whole depended on his uninterrupted success.122 The very idea of a man like Morell holding the fate of Germany in his hands by making daily decisions about the health of the mythical “hero” was suspect. Göring, for instance, allegedly called him “Herr Reich Injection Master [Spritzenmeister],” while Himmler, head of the Gestapo, secretly put him under surveillance after the war started in 1939 because he felt Morell had grown too powerful.123 Morell himself complained about the snubs he received from all sides, and the fact that he had to fight hard to keep his position “near the Führer.”124
Meanwhile, a practically codependent relationship developed between Hitler and Morell, especially during the war years. At first Morell used primarily digestive and vitamin pills to improve his patient’s productivity and relieve, at least temporarily, his fear of becoming seriously ill, but in the last four years of his life, Hitler’s intake of medicines rose to eighty-eight different substances, mostly stimulants and sedatives. Solving bodily problems by popping a pill seemed to satisfy the Nazi leader’s desire for a treatment that was as discreet as possible—he did not, apparently, allow medical exams in which he would have to get undressed. Ernst Hanfstaengl later went so far as to describe Hitler’s “practically spinsterish aversion to being seen without clothes on.”125 In fact, ever since the beginning of his political rise, Hitler was always concerned to minimize any access to his private life. Especially at the height of his power, the laboriously constructed legend of the “Führer” was not to be endangered by revealing any private needs and weaknesses. Hitler therefore swore by the discreet Morell; named him professor on December 24, 1938; remembered him with a tax-free endowment of 100,000 reichsmarks “on the occasion of January 30, 1943”; bestowed the “golden Party insignia” on him in February 1943; and helped in every imaginable way the pharmaceutical business that Morell ran in Hamburg and the Czech city of Olmütz. In brief: Hitler made him a very rich man.126
Moreover, there seems to have been hardly anyone around Hitler whom Morell did not also treat. Hitler personally made every member of his staff, and Eva Braun as well, go to see the personal physician at the least sign of any illness, apparently out of fear of catching it himself.127 Speer, Ribbentrop, Hess, Lammers, Below, and the secretaries, as well as members of the Wagner family in Bayreuth, Hitler’s longtime admirer the British aristocrat Unity Valkyrie Mitford, and the film director Leni Riefenstahl, were among Morell’s patients at Hitler’s behest.128 Air force adjutant Below admitted to having agreed to an examination from Morell only “unwillingly” in early 1938, but said that he came to know Morell as a “conscientious and passionate doctor” and could “better understand” why “Hitler trusted him.”129 Speer visited Morell, according to his own account, as early as 1936, shortly after Morell had come into contact with Hitler. At times Speer had even been, in his words, “Morell’s showpiece,” since “after a superficial examination” and the prescription of “intestinal bacteria, dextrose, vitamin, and hormone tablets,” he spread the word about the successful treatment, even though he had in fact been treated by another doctor in Berlin. Speer lied, in other words, in order to, as he put it, “avoid offending Hitler.”130
Eva Braun, who is not known to have suffered from any sickness more serious than the occasional cold, supposedly told Speer after an exam by Morell that Morell was “disgustingly dirty” and that she would “not let Morell treat her again.”131 We cannot know whether this corresponds to the truth, or whether Speer was retroactively making Eva Braun the star witness of his own argument against Morell. But why would she tell Speer—a man who himself zealously courted Hitler’s favor and had misled Hitler about having been healed by the personal physician—that Morell disgusted her? Once again, Speer’s explanations seem implausible and ultimately untrue.132 Ilse Hess, in a letter to the wife of Hess’s adjutant Alfred Leitgen, wrote on February 3, 1938, that the personal physician had “really helped” her husband and others “even with the heart issue.” “Miss Braun,” too, had had “very similar symptoms” but was now, thanks to Morell, “fit as a fiddle again.”133 Moreover, Morell’s few remaining files show that Eva Braun was still his patient in January 1944.134 She seems, in fact, to have joined Hitler when he underwent digestive cures during the war years.135 We can only assume that by virtue of her special position she was even more concerned than the others at the “court” to placate the notoriously suspicious and standoffish Hitler—even by involving herself in his physical ailments and showing her solidarity by taking part in Morell’s treatments.136 If only because of this closeness, she could never openly express disapproval, even if she did dislike the doctor and revealed to one of the secretaries in spring 1944 that she “didn’t trust him and hated him.”137
Not the least impressive example of how dangerous it was to oppose Morell was Karl Brandt, who, along with his team of accompanying physicians, flatly rejected Morell’s treatment methods. There was tension between the doctors from the beginning, with Brandt considering Morell a swindler and a quack.138 After a bitter but surreptitious competitive struggle lasting many years, Brandt finally claimed, in October 1944, that Morell’s pills were poisoning Hitler. He could not supply any proof, however, and so his intention to end Morell’s career backfired and Brandt himself was dismissed on October 10, 1944. Hitler saw the attack on Morell as a conspiracy and a betrayal of a man he trusted. And Brandt, who owed his rise entirely to Hitler’s good graces, now learned for himself what it meant to stand outside the “court.”139
In the broader Berghof circle must also be included Hermann Esser, an “old campaigner” and for many years a close friend of Hitler who used the familiar “du” with him. Esser was a member of the NSDAP since 1920, and already the editor in chief of the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Nationalsozialist, two Party newspapers, in his early twenties. In 1923 he rose to be the first head of propaganda in the Party, and from 1926 to 1932 he worked, again as editor in chief, for the weekly Illustrierter Beobachter, which was lavishly illustrated and which reported mainly on meetings, rallies, and marches of the NSDAP and the SS. Hitler’s rise to Chancellor brought the trained journalist, known as an aggressive speaker and radical anti-Semite, into office as the Bavarian Commerce Secretary from 1933 to 1935. Ernst Hanfstaengl, who described Esser as his friend, called him the “enfant terrible of the Party” and also probably its “most talented orator after Hitler.”140 Hitler met with Esser whenever he was in Bavaria; as Nicolaus von Below remarked, Esser was among the Nazi leader’s “Munich crowd.”141 He was a “mercenary type,” like Ernst Röhm and Max Amann, and belonged to the “hard core” around Hitler going back to the early days of the NSDAP. The phrase “Germany’s Mussolini is called Adolf Hitler”142—with which the cult of the “Führer” was born in 1922, taking Italian fascism as its model—comes from Esser. Hitler, in turn, held fast to his friendship with Esser, despite political as well as personal differences of opinion and even though Esser’s brutal, boorish personality had been controversial for a long time among many Party members.143 Albert Speer, too, remembers only reluctantly “those Bavarian vulgarians in Hitler’s retinue” whom he himself “always kept… at arm’s length.”144
After the war, when questioned about his National Socialist career, Hermann Esser stated (in Nuremberg on December 6, 1946) that there were arguments between himself and Hitler in 1934, resulting in his stepping down as minister and withdrawing from political life. He was not politically active anymore after 1935, he said, and also stopped attending the Party convention events in Nuremberg. He had merely accepted the nonpolitical position of “President of the Reich Tourism Association” in 1936.145 In addition, Esser claimed, he had disapproved of and criticized the Aryanization measures and other violent steps against Jews. When questioned about his book, first published in 1927 by the Party’s own press, Eher Verlag, and bearing the infamous title Die jüdische Weltpest: Kann ein Jude Staatsbürger sein? (The Jewish World Plague: Can a Jew Be a Citizen?), Esser talked his way out of it by saying that Alfred Rosenberg had given him all the content for the book. Even though Rosenberg was one of Esser’s fiercest opponents within the Party, at least in the 1920s, Esser now tried to suggest that the chief ideologue of the Party—who by that point had already been hanged as one of the main Nazi war criminals—was the actual author of the book.146 As for the new edition of the book that came out in 1939, shortly after the November pogrom of 1938, with the title Die jüdische Weltpest: Judendämmerung auf dem Erdball (The Jewish World Plague: Twilight of the Jews Across the Globe), Esser claimed not to know a thing about it. He had, he said, neither written the book nor ever seen it.147 The American interrogator summarized Esser’s testimony in his report by saying that he had been opposed to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and that the “Jewish question” represented one of the reasons for his differences with Hitler.148
In reality, Esser had every reason to distance himself from his hate-filled screed, which among other things explained the allegedly evil “racial character” of the Jews using falsified passages from the Old Testament and the Talmud. Right in the introduction, it declared that it was time to say “Enough” to “certain more or less intellectual types with their tearjerker morality always talking about the ‘poor,’ ‘persecuted’ Jews.” The Jews were actually “enemies of the world and of humanity,” and a “Reich under National Socialist government” would necessarily “stand against the Jewish world plague as a deadly enemy.”149 Esser’s book was thus among the early works of National Socialist literature justifying the murder of the German and European Jews, whom Esser stigmatized as the true originators of racism. Esser claimed in Nuremberg—of course—to have heard about the “gassing” of the Jews only after the end of the war.150
With this testimony, Esser was trying, like so many of Hitler’s close followers after the collapse of the Nazi state, to escape responsibility and save his own life and livelihood in the new era. Two months before his interrogation, the International Military Court in Nuremberg had passed sentence on the twenty-two main war criminals of the Nazi regime and condemned ten of them to death. Numerous other organizations and groups were still under suspicion, including the leadership of the NSDAP, ministers, and high government officials. The trials would drag on into the spring of 1949. Esser, who was in Nuremberg only as a witness, therefore went underground until September 1949, just to be safe.151
In truth, Esser absolutely did not withdraw from politics or distance himself from Hitler after 1935. The old comrade-in-arms continued to be among the regular guests on the Obersalzberg.152 On January 10, 1937, for example, he inspected a model of the House of German Tourism, together with Hitler, Goebbels, Reich press chief Otto Dietrich, Fritz Todt (later General Commissioner for the Regulation of the Construction Industry), and Albert Speer. The foundation stone for the building was laid on June 14, 1938, in Berlin,153 and it would be the first and only construction project to be mostly completed from the “World Capital Germania” as conceived by Hitler and Speer. Hermann Esser’s posh seat of office was to have been in the center of Berlin (approximately where the New National Library [Neue Staatsbibliothek] is today), if the course of the war had not necessitated the halting of construction projects in 1942; his offices were therefore located in the nearby Columbus House at 1 Potsdamer Platz, one of the last buildings from the era of “New Construction.”154 Esser’s position was not, it is true, a particularly political one like that of Max Amann (president of the Reich Press Chamber) or that of Alfred Rosenberg (Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories), but there is no question of his having disappeared from Hitler’s environs.155 Rather, he remained quite close to Hitler personally, and his later important positions—president of the National Tourism Committee after 1936, and state secretary for tourism in the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda—show no signs of any distance between Esser and the Nazi regime, nor of his departure from its inner circle of power.156
By the time Esser rose to join the National Tourism Committee, all private tourist organizations had already been “coordinated” and nationalized—that is, placed under the Ministry of Propaganda’s direct control—as per the “Reich Law Concerning the National Tourism Association” of March 28, 1936. Three years later, Esser was one of three state secretaries under Goebbels in charge of the tourism division in his ministry. His responsibilities included deciding who would fill the top management positions of all the state tourism associations. The Nazi regime wanted to ensure what they called “tight, goal-focused conduct” in the encouraging of foreign tourism. Above all, vacations and leisure time were to be instruments of propaganda, playing no small part in the legitimization of National Socialist rule. In the interest of creating a “nation of workers united in a Volksgemeinschaft,” individuals were to be channeled into groups and managed as groups, even during their leisure hours. In short, the regime promoted politically organized People’s Tourism and Social Tourism.157
Following government orders, tourism within the borders of the German Reich was given an increasingly anti-Semitic bent. The goal was to create “Jew-free sites.” Jewish and non-Jewish guests were ordered to be separated in spas, especially in the popular vacation spots that profited from group tourist trips organized by the German Workers’ Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or DAF): Bavaria, the North Sea baths, and the Baltic Sea baths, where so-called spa anti-Semitism was widespread even before 1933.158 “Power Through Pleasure” (Kraft durch Freude, or KdF), the extremely popular leisure organization of the DAF, made it possible for the first time for the lower social classes to take vacations, thereby winning enormous prestige for the Nazis.159 The annual spectacle of the Party convention in Nuremberg, destination for up to 450,000 visitors a year between 1933 and 1938, was another tourist gold mine. The management of domestic tourism continued even during the early years of the war, although accommodations were increasingly used for military purposes. Finally, in September 1944, the Tourism Department of the Ministry of Propaganda ceased operation. Until that point, Hermann Esser had pursued the politics of tourism according to Nazi ideology; his office was in no way merely an apolitical management position.
More important, however, Esser continued to have high personal status in Hitler’s eyes. Otherwise it would be very difficult to explain how his private problems—a divorce from his first wife—could have turned into a fairly major political issue.160 Esser’s separation was extremely complicated, and it occupied not only Hitler’s time and attention in 1938 but also that of Justice Minister Franz Gürtner and Reich Minister Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery. Hitler, to whom it was apparently very important to bring the chaos of his friend’s family life to an end, ordered Lammers in fall 1938 to report to him on the Obersalzberg about the state of Esser’s divorce proceedings. Lammers asked the Justice Minister for the files concerning Esser’s divorce, which filled seven volumes by that point, and had them sent to Berchtesgaden on October 29, 1938. Gürtner added, in explaining Esser’s difficult situation to Lammers, that Esser’s wife, whom he had married on July 5, 1923, and with whom he had two children, did not agree to the divorce that he had been pushing for for years. Esser had already tried in vain more than once to dissolve the marriage—in 1933 and again in 1935—but all of his efforts came to nothing, since, according to the divorce laws then in effect, from the Civil Law Code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, or BGB) of 1900, divorce was permitted only by reason of culpable matrimonial offenses on the part of a spouse.161 Divorce required the innocent party to file proceedings against the guilty party, and at least one of four “findings of fact”—adultery, intention to kill, malicious abandonment, or grave dereliction of marital duties—had to be proven. In this case, Hermann Esser had been living with another woman for many years and had another two children with her.162 So he himself was guilty of adultery under the law and could not win a divorce.
Even in the Weimar Republic there had been efforts to change these regulations. But the Nazi regime was in fact the first to carry out a fundamental reform, along National Socialist lines and unopposed by the Church. It used the “annexation” of Austria as the occasion to pass a new divorce law on July 6, 1938, making the former justifications for divorce invalid and creating a system whereby a marriage was judged by its significance for the “Volksgemeinschaft.” It was entirely in this sense that “refusal to propagate” and “infertility of the spouse” now counted as valid reasons for divorce. In addition, the National Socialist legislators introduced for the first time, into Section 55 of the BGB, a general concept of irreconcilable differences, according to which a marriage could be dissolved after three years of separation without a finding of guilt. The spouse who did not want the divorce could file an appeal, but the judges would decide whether sustaining the marriage was “morally” justified.163
The new law seemed to betoken a breakthrough in Hermann Esser’s deadlocked private situation. Two days after his files arrived in Berchtesgaden, on October 31, 1938, Lammers presented the situation to Hitler at the Berghof. It was hard to predict, he said, which way the judge would rule, because the principle of determining the guilty party had not been entirely abolished by the new law, and adultery still qualified as a reason for divorce that weighed heavily. As a result, there were particular problems with remarriage, since according to Section 9 of the BGB a marriage “could not take place between a person who was divorced by reason of adultery and the individual with whom that person had had the adulterous relationship, if this adultery is determined in the divorce proceedings to have been the reason for the divorce.”164
Lammers remarked to Gürtner—in confidence, he wrote—that in the discussions about the new marriage law the issue had been, above all, how to make a divorce possible “as a consequence of the objective collapse of the marriage… without it coming down to declaring one or the other spouse guilty.” In these discussions, “the Führer… had Esser’s case in mind.” If the judges refused to follow this interpretation of Section 55, Lammers threatened, “the only remaining course of action would be to consider revising the law.”165 Hitler’s interpretation was, Lammers wrote, “of special significance,” since he, as “Führer and Reich Chancellor,” was in the final analysis “the sole lawgiver of the Third Reich.” If the state court’s decision was not in favor of a divorce, Lammers wrote to Gürtner, “a second hearing of the case would have to be worked toward in as expedited a manner as possible, on the Führer’s instructions.”166 Clearly law and justice had little meaning at this point for the fifty-nine-year-old jurist, who had been educated before World War I and was an undersecretary in the Interior Ministry by the early 1920s. Lammers was prepared to put himself outside any legal framework as long as the “Führer’s” wish demanded it—no matter how personal that wish might be. As in an absolute monarchy, Hitler alone embodied the law, in Lammers’s view.167
The district court in Berlin could not resist this pressure from the very highest places. It decided in favor of the party who was actually guilty, and put the party who was legally and morally innocent in the dock. The court’s opinion of December 23, 1938, found that the defendant—that is, Esser’s wife—lacked “the true marital attitude,” since she could not show that she had “a serious will to sustain a true marriage.”168 Esser duly thanked Lammers for his “support in the matter” in a letter that same day, and reported that the district court had “announced the expected decision… today.” As a result, he said Christmas would be “a celebration of joy” for him, too, this year.169 Still, the decision was not fully legal, since Therese Esser filed the appeal to which she was entitled. Once again, the Minister of Justice intervened. Gürtner wrote to Lammers to assure him that on January 24, 1939, he had insisted in a meeting with the Lord Justice of Appeal “that the sociopolitical and population-policy considerations which the Führer put into effect by issuing this decree… be impressed upon the judges involved in the matter of this divorce.”170 The Superior Court of Justice of Berlin finally rejected Therese Esser’s appeal on March 17, 1939.
Less than three weeks later, on April 5, Hermann Esser remarried. Among the wedding guests were Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, the Bormanns, the Morells, and Reich Treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz and his wife.171 The presence of Hitler and Braun shows that Esser had in no way fallen into disfavor, much less been banned from the inner circle. Rather, it indicates a special, almost familial bond. Eventually, on November 10, 1940, Eva Braun would become the godmother of Esser’s daughter, who was given the name Eva.172 Hitler himself had long attended his closest followers’ weddings—those of Goebbels, Göring, Bormann, and Brandt, among others—and had been their children’s godfather. Now Eva Braun was likewise serving as the godparent of one of those followers’ children.173
It is not known whether Eva Braun, in her new and practically unassailable position at Hitler’s side, undertook to be anyone else’s godmother. There are suggestions, though, to indicate that Martin Bormann also named one of his daughters after her. Now, how significant was this act of becoming a godparent within the inner circle, that is, in a nonpublic sphere? Taking on duties as a godparent actually played a significant role in the Nazi regime’s propaganda campaign to increase the birthrate in Germany. Hitler himself had said about mothers: “Every child [a mother] brings into the world is a victory in the battle for the life or death of her People.” He thereby equated motherhood with being a soldier. For publicity, he personally became the godfather of every demonstrably “Aryan” family’s tenth child.174 In Esser’s case, Hitler was once again taking on the role of patron of the families of his old Party comrades. The role of patron and protector allowed him to cast himself as the keeper of the German People, in private as well as according to his public code of conduct that he exaggerated to an almost religious level and that was given widespread publicity: “I serve him with my will, I give to him my life.”175 The question arises, of course, how he could justify to himself and to those who knew his circumstances the fact that he remained unmarried and childless despite obviously living with Eva Braun.
For the National Socialists, “boosting and facilitating the will to propagate within the Volksgemeinschaft” was one of the “most pressing tasks of the rebuilding of the People.” Nazi doctors who worked in the field of “political biology” explained “intentional birth control” as a “misguided attitude in the area of character,” or even went so far as to describe it as an expression of “moral decay.”176 Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun must therefore have caused some astonishment even in the trusted circle at the Berghof. In the Nazi regime, the personal needs of the individual were subordinated to the requirements of the “Volksgemeinschaft”; rogue actions taken for individual reasons were propagandistically condemned as embodying a “Jewish-liberal” outlook on life, and Hitler himself publicly declaimed that “of all the tasks before us, the most exalted and thus most holy human task is the preservation of the species defined by the blood given to us by God.” But he clearly judged his own private life by entirely different standards.
Hitler absolutely refused to get married and explicitly wanted no children of his own; neither, as is said, did Eva Braun.177 But why? On Hitler’s part, was it from the politically calculated wish to “visibly stand apart” from those around him, as their “Führer”?178 Did Hitler play, as Ian Kershaw claims, the roll of an “idol” within his closest circle of friends as well?179 And what effects did this attitude have on Eva Braun and her position within the Berghof group? Here is where we have to distinguish between the propaganda assertions and the actual rationales. The first thing to point out is that Hitler’s political style of promoting a cult of the mother while remaining an unmarried heartthrob was not his own invention. Historian Brigitte Hamann has shown that Hitler was merely copying the propaganda pose of Karl Lueger, the popular anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna (1897–1910) whom Hitler idolized, and who likewise used his bachelor status for political purposes. Like Lueger, who told his lover that he could not marry because he needed “the women” in order to “achieve anything” politically, Hitler said: “Lots of women are attracted to me because I am unmarried. That was especially useful during our days of struggle. It’s the same as with a movie actor; when he marries he loses a certain something for the women who adore him. Then he is no longer their idol as he was before.”180
Hitler accordingly emphasized, in a speech at the 1936 Party convention to the elite National Socialist Women’s League (Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft, or NSF), that he “never would have been able to lead the Party to victory without women’s constancy and truly loving devotion toward the movement.” He knew, he said, that “women stood with the movement from the depths of their hearts, steadfast and true, and are bound together with me forever.” Their children were in fact what gave his work meaning, and they belonged to their mothers “in exactly the same way… that they belong, in the same moment, to me.”181 Hitler drew women to him by linking the concepts of devotion, eternal bonds, and children to his own person. He thereby cast himself as the husband of every German woman and the father of every German child—in accordance with the well-known motto of the cult of the “Führer,” “Hitler is Germany! Germany is Hitler!”—and satisfied their deeply rooted desire for a “messiah of the People.”182
Out of the public eye, Hitler gave deeper insights into the real reason for his remaining unmarried over tea one night in January 1942 at his East Prussian “Führer headquarters.” With respect to his private life, he said there that it was a “lucky thing” he had never married, since the time commitment of a wife would have been a burden on him. He explained further: “That’s the bad thing about marriage: It establishes legal rights! So it’s much more proper to have a lover. The burden drops away and everything remains a gift.” If we believe this account, Hitler’s confession “disturbed” the secretaries who were there, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, so that Hitler added jokingly that “of course” this was true “only for great men.”183
Hitler’s refusal to marry Eva Braun thus apparently had nothing to do with her, nor with the assertion that, according to Albert Speer, he “obviously” thought of his girlfriend as “socially acceptable only within strict limits.”184 Rather, he seems to have been afraid to expose himself to the possibilities of a wife’s power and influence, and to make himself vulnerable in the private sphere. The fact is that he always kept everyone in this sphere who could get too close to him, including all of the members of his real family, at a distance. He saw his sister Paula every year between 1929 and 1941, for example, either in Munich, Berlin, or Vienna, but demanded that she live “under the name Frau Wolf and strictly incognito.”185 Even back in 1924, when Rudolf Hess suggested to him while they were in prison together at Landsberg that Hitler could have his sister come from Vienna to Munich, Hitler reacted with panic. Hess wrote to his future wife that Hitler dismissed the idea
with every sign of horror. He became nervous, shifted back and forth in his chair, ran his hands through his hair—“For God’s sake no!” That would be, with all his love for her, a burden and a constraint—she could try to influence him before an important decision, or plead with him. He won’t get married, for the same reason, and he even—he implied—avoids any serious attachments with a female. He must be able to face all dangers at any time without the slightest human or personal considerations, and be able even to die, if necessary.186
Given the propaganda and cult of personality that cast him as a godlike superfather, a relationship like the one he had with Eva Braun was not allowed and had to be kept in the strictest secrecy from the outside world. His girlfriend could not appear in public, so as not to damage his aura. At the Berghof, too, when official visitors or foreign guests were there she remained out of sight, withdrawing to her room the whole time. The same was true not only for Eva Braun but for all of the private guests, who, according to Speer, “were banished to the upper floor” on such occasions.187
Given all of these constraints upon her, can we describe Eva Braun as “Lady of the House” at the Berghof at all? After 1936, she did take on the role of the hostess more and more within their private circle at least. Unlike everyone else except Hitler, she invited friends and their children or other family members to the Obersalzberg. She also, Speer commented in August 1945, suffered from an “inferiority complex” and so “often” came across as “conceited and dismissive” to outsiders.188 At no point, in any case, did Eva Braun act as “housekeeper” at the Berghof: other people were there to worry about the housekeeping, including a married pair of house managers as well as, for special occasions, Hitler’s majordomo Arthur Kannenberg.189 Presumably, in any case, she intervened in developments from time to time and tried to put her own ideas into effect. Especially among the housekeeping staff, but also among the professional colleagues and several female regular guests, she seems to have made enemies for a variety of reasons. At the end of 1945, Hanskarl von Hasselbach (a surgeon, SS-Obersturmbannführer, and the Nazi leader’s third accompanying physician along with Karl Brandt and Werner Haase—part of Karl Brandt’s team since 1934) expressed a deeply critical opinion of Eva Braun’s conduct on the Obersalzberg. She called herself “Lady of the Berghof” in recent years, he reported, but only laid claim to the privileges of that position without fulfilling the attendant duties. Everyone in the house except Hitler had to do what she wanted, he said, while she hardly cared about the well-being of the service personnel. Hasselbach also held Eva Braun responsible for the makeup of the Berghof circle, and for its low “intellectual and moral level.”190
In any case, the people in Hitler’s immediate environment did not demand any explanation, much less justification, of Eva Braun’s existence and presence in closest proximity to him, even in the context of the reigning morality of the time or Hitler’s ideological stipulations. Especially in his refuge on the Obersalzberg, Hitler was surrounded by true-believing followers who not only shared his political convictions but saw in him a heroic figure of historical greatness.191 Robert Ley—not actually in the Berghof circle but one of Hitler’s earliest henchmen and uncritical of him to the very end—recorded for posterity in his cell in Nuremberg, in 1945, that Hitler’s life was “a single act of sacrifice for his People right up to his sacrificial death,” and claimed: “Nothing, absolutely nothing—not even the woman he loved—had any influence on him, except for his duty.”192
Emmy Göring, in her memoir, illustrates how unwilling Hitler was to allow this image to be tarnished. She complains that she was not allowed to meet Eva Braun no matter how hard she tried to arrange it: Hitler kept Braun “under lock and key” on the Obersalzberg, she said, and when she invited the ladies of the Berghof (Anni Brandt, Hanni Morell, and Eva and Gretl Braun) to tea at her own Obersalzberg country house one day, in the “second year of the war” (1940), they all said yes but Hitler summoned Hermann Göring late that night and told him that Eva Braun couldn’t attend. The reason he gave was that Braun was “so bashful, she was even afraid” of Göring’s wife.193 In fact, Hitler had kept the second-most-powerful man in the “Third Reich” at a distance for years, in his private life. He had served as a witness at the ostentatious wedding of Hermann and Emmy Göring on April 11, 1935, at the Berlin Cathedral, and three years later had agreed to be their only daughter’s godfather; politically as well, he had helped Göring reach a unique position of power and named him his successor in a secret decree as early as December 1934. But despite, or because of, Göring’s popularity and growing political power—he had already started to present himself as “successor to the Führer and Chancellor” to foreign diplomats—Göring was not among the inner circle of Hitler intimates.194 Instead, the Nazi leader avoided personal closeness, probably so as not to let his designated successor’s lust for power and fame get out of hand and ultimately grow uncontrollable. Emmy Göring’s attempt to get close to Eva Braun and thus to Hitler’s private life must therefore have been extremely unwelcome to him.
This episode does not, as Emmy Göring put it, reveal “the tragedy of this woman [i.e., Braun] in such a moving way”; rather it shows the nature of the relationship between Hitler and Hermann Göring.195 Furthermore, the question naturally arises: Why did Emmy Göring invite Hitler’s girlfriend over for the first time only in “the second year of the war”? Why not in 1937 or 1938? Hermann Göring’s loss of political power, which had already begun in 1939 and accelerated starting in September 1940 due to his military errors in the air war against England, suggests that his wife invited Eva Braun only as a means to an end: an attempt to compensate for fading political and military significance by getting closer on a personal level.196
Hitler’s inapproachability and standoffishness, meanwhile, were not simply the “Führer’s” personal proclivities; they also protected him from needing to reveal anything about his personal life and thus from becoming humanly vulnerable. As a result, Eva Braun’s “socially unclear position” can also be attributed to the fact that Hitler lived outside the bounds of his own ideology of the “Volksgemeinschaft,” and claimed for himself the status of an exception.197 In fact, it was not only Eva Braun’s social status that was questionable among the “Führer’s” close circle; the character of her relationship to Hitler itself remained completely mysterious. Public displays of affection or even the slightest hint of any physical closeness, at least in the years leading up to the outbreak of war, remained nonexistent at the Berghof. Both Hitler and Braun were “thoroughly prudish,” Speer reported to Joachim Fest in 1978. Even in his intimate circle, Hitler avoided any move in that direction. He was always careful to maintain a certain distance from his entourage, and he valued conventionality and traditional behavior. Even in his relations to Speer and Goebbels, he remained above all a “father figure.”198
Every guest was left on his or her own to decide what the connection between Hitler and Braun might be. And so, even after the end of the war, opinions differed drastically about whether the couple had an actual love affair or merely a “relationship for show.” Speer, in any case, Hitler’s young close friend, had no doubt that Eva Braun was Hitler’s lover. Under questioning from Allied officers in Kransberg in the summer of 1945, he stated in writing that Eva Braun meant “very much” to Hitler. Hitler had spoken of her “with great respect and inner admiration”; she was “the woman whom he loved.” A mere quarter-century later, in Inside the Third Reich, there was no longer any talk of “love” as what Hitler felt for Eva Braun. Twenty years in prison and the influence of his editorial advisers Joachim Fest and Wolf Jobst Siedler had changed Speer’s way of seeing things. The once-powerful Minister of Armaments, who remained obsessed with power to the end, was now concerned to emphasize his political and personal distance from the man whom he had served with unswerving conviction to the last moment. Now he described Hitler as cold and always unapproachable, a man who “had no humor” and acted ruthlessly, suspiciously, and cynically toward his lover.199 Twenty-five years earlier, however, in Kransberg, when his statements had been less calculated, the same Speer had drawn a distinction between Hitler’s public conduct and his dealings with people in “private life.” According to Speer’s earlier account, Hitler acted chilly and “rarely like a ‘person’ ” when working, but in private he had “a soul” (that is, he was capable of feeling), “like every other human being.”200
Max Amann, who knew Hitler since their service together in World War I, described Hitler’s relation to women as “normal” in his interrogation by the U.S. Seventh Army on May 26, 1945. The only woman with whom Hitler had had “occasional intimate relations” was Eva Braun, Amann said. The literal record runs as follows: “Amann describes Hitler as a sexually normal man. Hitler’s only woman friend, with whom he had occasional intimate relations, was Eva Braun, a former employee of the photographer Hoffmann…. During the last month she was constantly around Hitler.”201
Two months later, Franz Xaver Schwarz, another fellow traveler of many years, “old campaigner,” and friend who used the familiar “du” with Hitler, said diametrically opposite things about Hitler and Eva Braun. Schwarz was an anti-Semite “in every fiber of his being” and “from an early age,” according to Richard Walther Darré after 1945, and in Hitler Schwarz had found the man who “saw things politically and expressed them the way Schwarz felt them to be.”202 A member of NSDAP since 1922 and its treasurer from its reestablishment in 1925 to the end, as well as a Reichsleiter, SS-Oberstgruppenführer, SA-Obergruppenführer, and member of Parliament, he—along with his wife, the former Bertha Breher—was among the Nazi leader’s and Eva Braun’s Munich circle of friends. Both Schwarzes were welcome guests on the Obersalzberg.203 Under questioning from Allied officers on July 21, 1945, Schwarz stated that Hitler had had a “platonic relationship” with Eva Braun since 1931. He said Hitler himself had told him that he lived only for his work: “A woman gets absolutely nothing from me. I can’t pay any attention to any of that.”204 We should note in evaluating the former Reich treasurer’s reliability on this topic that he had absolutely no reason to reveal anything about Hitler’s carefully concealed private life to his American interrogators. In Nuremberg at the end of 1945, Schwarz gave the impression of being a “sincere fanatic, who still professes unbound personal admiration for Hitler.”205
Then again, Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s longtime secretary, was also convinced that the erotic side of the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun was a false pretence. It is true that, on May 22, 1945, three weeks after Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s demise, during an American officer’s interrogation in Berchtesgaden, she answered the question of whether “Hitler saw Miss Braun as his wife” with the words “That’s how he treated her.” And to the follow-up question, “Did he see her that way?” she replied: “Yes, of course.”206 Meanwhile, in the memoir she published later, she claimed, like Franz Xaver Schwarz, that the entire relationship of her “leader” to the female sex had been purely platonic in nature. His stepniece Geli Raubal was the only woman he “loved,” and he “would definitely have married her later,” she wrote. Eva Braun, on the other hand, was in Hitler’s life only to protect him “from further threats of suicide.” With “her presence” he had also, she said, constructed a “protective shield against all the other pushy women.”207
Christa Schroeder felt, as she wrote in her memoir, that this assessment was corroborated by statements from Heinrich Hoffmann, Julius Schaub, and Ada Klein, an acquaintance of Hitler’s from the 1920s. In truth, however, neither Hoffmann nor Schaub ever expressed himself in these terms. Both men knew Hitler and Eva Braun as closely as could be and were involved, in one way or another, in the couple’s everyday life. And neither of them argued that the relationship was not an intimate one. Hoffmann did claim in 1947, in a written statement, that the relationship started, in his opinion, as “merely platonic in nature.” But he added that it “took a definite shape… many years later,” and that Hitler indulged Eva Braun “in the usual way”: “the way anyone indulges a lover.”208 He dated the start of this development to around the time when he bought her the house in Munich, namely 1935–1936. Hitler’s former personal photographer also explicitly pointed out that he was eager to “clarify” the situation, given the upcoming appearance of his case before the Munich denazification court. He intended to refute before the court the accusation that he had gained any influence or “political power” in Hitler’s circle from the love affair between his employee and the Nazi leader, or that he had even fostered the relationship for that reason. If this suspicion were to be confirmed, it could lead to unpleasant consequences for him, since he denied ever having had anything to do with Nazi politics or National Socialist propaganda. It was thus in his interest to emphasize that Eva Braun was not a “serious relationship” for Hitler in the first six years of their acquaintance.209
Meanwhile, Julius Schaub, SS-Obergruppenführer and Hitler’s personal adjutant, questioned on the topic in Nuremberg on March 12, 1947, by Robert Kempner, the assistant U.S. chief counsel, gave no information at all about the nature of the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun. Kempner asked whether Hitler “loved [Braun] very much” and Schaub answered: “He was very fond of her [Er hat sie sehr gern gehabt].” When Kempner followed up and asked what exactly that meant, Schaub, Hitler’s longtime close confidant who had been near him at all times for twenty years, replied: “He liked her [Er hat sie lieb gehabt].” Schaub added that Hitler had told him he would “never marry” because he “didn’t have time for it” and was “constantly away,” although this “view” had met with incomprehension from those around him: “We often wondered why, we didn’t understand. After all, we were married and not with our wives.”210 Schaub, a simple soul, apparently knew nothing about Hitler’s fears of family ties. He also misjudged the compulsions bound up with Hitler’s categorical self-idealization, nor the fact that the power of the National Socialist system depended in large part on the myth of a “Führer” standing above all everyday politics and problems.211 Even aside from these limitations, Schaub’s statements after the war were generally questionable or downright false. Schaub seems to have remained, after Hitler’s death, an uncritical admirer and loyal protector of his leader’s secrets.212
Herta Schneider, in contrast, the friend of Eva Braun’s who had perhaps the most intimate knowledge of her relationship with Hitler, stated in June 1949: “As a person, in private, Hitler was perfectly nice. Braun loved him very much and he loved her, too.”213 In the end, therefore, it seems that despite all the prudery Hitler and Eva Braun displayed, their relationship was basically like a marriage, and that they conveyed this fact to their immediate circle.
Still, Hitler certainly set the terms of the relationship and Eva Braun had to adapt to them. As for the question of why she did it, what feelings she harbored or what intentions she might have been pursuing, opinions differ. On the one hand, she has been described as an unhappy, frustrated, entirely passive and patient woman who uncomplainingly endured her “fate.” On the other hand, she is portrayed as happy and cheerful, with a lust for life, and not particularly feminine. Clearly, the secrecy surrounding her person and the fact that she played an unmistakably important yet undefined role in Hitler’s life, led to conflicts within the private circle and among the Nazi leader’s staff, so that not all the members of this largely closed society on the Obersalzberg and in Munich liked her. These facts may explain the widely differing views of her.
Officially, Eva Braun remained a member of the staff and an employee of Heinrich Hoffmann’s after 1936. She obviously did not have to show up at the office in Munich every day, but she did become a passionate photographer and home-movie maker during this period. She “often” made “photographs” and color movies of the Berghof’s private circle “available” to her boss, Hoffmann, as he himself stated after the war. Eva Braun even shot movies with a 16 mm Agfa-Movex camera. She took “valuable photographs” that he apparently bought from her for enormous sums of money: for example, according to Hoffmann himself, the astronomical sum of 20,000 reichsmarks for “a piece of photography work” in 1940, though he said he could no longer remember whether the money “was paid directly to Eva Braun or handed over to her sister.” It is also not known whether or how Hoffmann used these photographs.214 But it is certainly impossible to claim that Eva Braun no longer worked for Photohaus Hoffmann after 1936. Alfons Brümmer, an employee of Hoffmann’s company, was still depositing money into her savings account at Munich’s Bayerische Vereinsbank on September 15, 1943: 5,000 reichsmarks for the “secretary” on that particular day—a sum comparable to an annual income at the time.215
Thus there is no sign of any professional distance between Hitler’s personal photographer and Hitler’s girlfriend. And so it is not surprising that Hoffmann, in a written statement for his denazification proceedings of 1947–1948, says not a word about his continued professional ties to Braun after 1936. In the public denazification hearing against her, he stated only that Eva Braun had “offered her things to the business” while he himself had had “nothing to do with it.”216 In light of the amounts of money changing hands, this claim is worse than dubious. The real question is why Hoffmann might have wanted to keep Eva Braun well-disposed to him by means of these huge payments. Was he thereby ensuring that she would speak well of him to the man in charge? In any case, the “Führer’s” lover seems to have been part of the nepotistic practices that were common in National Socialist circles, over and above the financial benefits Hitler accorded her personally.217
So as not to stand out among Hitler’s entourage, Eva Braun held the official position of a private secretary. Speer later claimed that whenever the Nazi leader spent time on the Obersalzberg, she likewise had to be there—only once, he wrote in Inside the Third Reich, had Hitler given her “a week’s vacation.”218 The insinuation here, that Eva Braun’s presence at the Berghof was a kind of duty or work for her, is unfounded and in fact attributable only to the special character of Speer’s memoirs. Speer himself often emphasized elsewhere the loyalty, devotion, dedication, and love Eva Braun felt for Hitler. Her constant access to the Berghof was a privilege, not a duty, which no member of the “inner circle” would ever have voluntarily gone without.219
In any case, Eva Braun lived in Munich most of the time. In summer 1935, when she was still living with her younger sister Margarete (Gretl) on Widenmayerstrasse, Hoffmann bought her a small house built four years earlier, at 12 Wasserburger Strasse (today Delpstrasse) in Bogenhausen. A Munich businessman, Adolf Widmann, had offered it for sale, and he said after the war that Eva Braun had visited the building to take a look and Hoffmann paid the asking price (35,000 reichsmarks) a few weeks later, with a “private check.” Hitler appeared at no point in the transaction, Widmann stated.220 Only when Widmann delayed supplying a receipt for the transfer fee that he had requested for various items in the house did Hoffmann and his attorney “verbally request” that he draw up the document “as urgently as possible,” “because Hitler wanted the receipt.”221 Three years later, on September 2, 1938, ownership was transfered to Eva Braun, “private secretary in Munich.”222
Hoffmann made contradictory statements in this regard as well. In his defense document from 1947, he first claimed that Hitler had bought Eva “a little house.” In the public denazification court proceedings against Eva Braun, on July 1, 1949, in Munich, he then said that he “could no longer recall how the purchase of the house” had come to pass; he might have acquired the property for his son-in-law Baldur von Schirach. He also no longer knew whether he “had been repaid by Hitler.” Finally, he added: “The end result was that I did not pay for the house. The cost was reimbursed, I don’t know by whom, and I also don’t know in what form.”223
Hoffmann’s sudden forgetfulness is not credible, nor is it conceivable that National Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach would ever have considered a residence as modest as the little house in Bogenhausen for himself and his family. In fact, Schirach became the owner of a seventeenth-century castle, Schloss Aspenstein, in Kochel am See (about forty miles from Munich), on March 12, 1936, around when Eva Braun and her sister Margarete moved to Wasserburger Strasse (March 30, 1936).224 Hitler’s girlfriend’s new domicile was located not far from where other prominent Party members lived—on the same street, for example, as Max Amann, president of the Reich Press Chamber and director of the Central Publishing House of the NSDAP. Heinrich Hoffmann’s villa was a few streets over. Heinrich Himmler (the Reichsführer-S), Hermann Giesler (architect and “General Building Inspector of the Capital City of the Movement”), and Martin Bormann lived in Bogenhausen as well, the latter at 26 Maria-Theresia-Strasse, in a villa confiscated from the painter Benno Becker.225
While Eva Braun was arranging her move in Munich, Hitler was in his “electoral struggle.” He had just presented the Western powers with a fait accompli by having the German army march into the Rhineland demilitarized zone on March 7, 1936. His generals as well as the diplomats in the foreign service had advised against the step, since breaking international agreements—both the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact, signed in 1925—threatened to increase Germany’s political isolation in Europe and possibly even risked starting another war. Nevertheless, Hitler brought off his coup and as the army marched into the Rhineland he called a sitting of Parliament in Germany, where, amid the frantic cheering of his supporters, he announced that German troops were “at this very moment occupying their future peace garrison.” He swore “to never retreat, from any power or any violence, in the reestablishment of the honor of our People,” and said that “with this day today,” the “struggle for Germany’s equality among nations” had been brought to a close. In the same breath, he made far-reaching offers to Germany’s European neighbors to collectively “ensure the peace,” even proposing a return to the League of Nations. Although Hitler was actually steeped in a racist imperialism that burst all bounds and left absolutely no room for a reconciliation or balance of power among nations, he said in his speech that he hoped from then on “to resolve any tensions on the path of slow, evolutionary development in peaceful collaboration.”226
After the speech, the national parliament was dissolved and new elections were called for March 29, 1936. Once again, Hitler’s recklessness—he apparently told Albert Speer later that this was “his riskiest undertaking”227—was rewarded: England and France protested Germany’s infringement but did not take military action, and the League of Nations in Geneva confined itself to a formal condemnation of the German violation of the treaties.
Hitler, meanwhile, made the most of his success. The parliamentary elections turned into a national triumphal celebration for him, as he crisscrossed the country, appearing as an orator in Berlin, Munich, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, Königsberg, Hamburg, Breslau, Ludwigshafen, Leipzig, Essen, and Cologne. Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, had planned the three-week “election campaign,” in which no reelection was actually at stake, to whip up “the German People into a violent frenzy of enthusiasm.”228 It was in truth a publicity campaign on the regime’s part, solely and exclusively seeking the public’s approval for Hitler’s policies: the NSDAP put forth a single-party list of candidates under the slogan “Reichstag for Freedom and Peace.” The official results were that 98.9 percent of voters cast their votes for Hitler; the nationwide fanning of the flames of “Führer”-euphoria knew no bounds. Whether the results correctly matched the votes as actually cast is both unknowable and irrelevant: Hitler was incontestably at the peak of his popularity, being in a position to do what all the political parties during the Weimar Republic had tried to do in vain—wipe out the hated Versailles Treaty.
And Eva Braun? Would Hitler’s political victories and the increasing adoration he received from the German population have meant nothing to her? It is almost impossible to imagine that Braun, then twenty-four years old, would not have felt her companion to be a kind of demigod, to whose wishes and needs she and everyone else had to submit. She may well have felt herself chosen by a higher power, since these foreign-policy successes only strengthened Hitler’s own view of himself as fulfilling a higher mission and being guided by destiny. “Providence” determined the path he walked on “with the instinctive certainty we have in dreams,” he had announced in front of three hundred thousand people at the Theresienwiese in Munich on March 14, 1936. And this was not just propaganda for public consumption. In his close circle as well, Hitler made no secret of his belief in “God’s Providence.” His sister Paula, for example, reported that he had told her of his “absolute conviction that our Lord God holds his protective hand above me.”229 Similarly, in 1941, during one of his nighttime teas in the East Prussian “Führer headquarters,” he remarked that an “omnipotent power,” which created “worlds,” had “certainly assigned every individual creature its task.” “Everything,” he said, “goes the way it has to go!”230
Travel was an important aspect of life in Hitler’s circle. While the staff of employees who worked closely with Hitler, such as the doctors and secretaries, were his constant travel companions up until 1939 and after the start of the war as well, Eva Braun seems to have been allowed to go along only rarely. Since she never traveled as part of Hitler’s official retinue, however, and her name therefore never appeared on any list in the record, unlike the names of the wives of other high-ranking Nazi officials, it is difficult to determine which events she actually was present at and which not. Thus, a single photograph taken by Heinrich Hoffmann is the only evidence we have that she attended any event at the Olympic Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, whose opening ceremony took place on her birthday, February 6, 1936.231
These games must have held a special attraction for Braun, herself a passionate skier; here, for the first time, Alpine skiing was among the competitions. Hitler, in contrast, avoided taking part in any sport personally. His refusal had less to do with fear of injury than with his conviction that he would present “a laughable figure every time” he took part. “When people are very famous, a lot is expected of them,” he told his inner circle during one of his “table talks” in August 1942. Referring to Bismarck, he explained that “there would be demands” he would “not be able to meet.” As a result, there was never any question of the Nazi leader “skiing” or “going swimming.”232 He had not forgotten the photograph that appeared on the front page of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung three days after the inauguration of President Friedrich Ebert in 1919, showing Ebert with Minister of Defense Gustav Noske shirtless in bathing trunks on the beach of the Baltic Sea spa Haffkrug. The picture had been a blow to the image of the new Weimar Republic from which it never recovered.233 Mussolini, too, who enjoyed appearing before the Italian public as an athlete in various capacities, including as horseman, pilot, and swimmer, only opened himself up to ridicule, in Hitler’s opinion, since he “couldn’t actually do” all those things. Il Duce, in Hitler’s view, would have been better off “piloting his Italy.”234
Hitler arrived for the Olympic opening ceremonies in Garmisch in a special train. Officially accompanied by Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, Bavarian Minister of the Interior Adolf Wagner, Reich Sports Leader Hans von Tschammer und Osten, and the mayor of Garmisch-Partenkirchen and members of the German Olympic Steering Committee, he stomped through the snow on foot and entered the Olympic ski stadium. Frick had asked Hitler during the run-up to the games to prohibit the “increasing anti-Semitic propaganda” in the Garmisch area for the course of the games; he was afraid that the festivities, destination for a half a million visitors through February 16, and especially the even more prestigious Summer Olympics due to take place a few months later in Berlin, could be endangered “if there were any incidents in Garmisch.”235 As a result, the placards stating “Jews Unwelcome Here,” which were common everywhere in Garmisch, temporarily disappeared.
Hitler attended the Winter Games in Garmisch several times, with various escorts and usually with prominent Party members such as Göring and Goebbels at his side. It is unknown at precisely which event on which day he had Reich press chief Otto Dietrich, Eva Braun, and other friends from Munich including Helene Bechstein, Erna Hoffmann, and Sofie Stork with him, sitting directly behind him in the second row. The only photograph of this group, taken by Hoffmann, gives no hint of the time of day or the sport event. In any case, Hitler’s presence in Garmisch-Partenkirchen was largely kept from the public, and representatives of the press were permitted to be there only under strict conditions. Heinrich Himmler, head of the Reich Security Service, personally ordered the Bavarian Political Police in writing that it was “strictly forbidden” for “photographers to accompany the Führer.”236
At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin—the great international media event of the National Socialist state—journalists and photographers were likewise subjected to severe restrictions, of course. The propaganda mission of the Nazi regime was to show the world a new, strong, and at the same time peace-loving Germany, and to that end the communicative power of a picture far outweighed that of the written word. Thus only 125 carefully selected German photographers, called “official photojournalists,” were allowed, and the 1,800 members of the press from fifty-nine other countries were supplied with preselected material by the photo press office of the organizing committee.237 This fact did nothing to dampen international enthusiasm, however. Heinrich Hoffmann’s firm took countless pictures and movies of the games and the Olympics became a major propaganda success, not least because of photo reports, radio reports, and, for the first time, broadcasts on television.238
Meanwhile, there is no photographic evidence of Eva Braun’s presence. She may not have been allowed to see for herself what Rudolf Hess called the “first great public appearance of the new Reich.”239 In the autobiographical literature, there is not a single hint of her presence at the Summer Games. The same is true for other major public events in the prewar years. The information that Eva Braun, accompanied by her mother and her school friend Herta Schneider, traveled to Vienna according to Hitler’s wishes on March 14, 1938, to see her lover’s triumphal entry into the city late that afternoon after the “annexation” of Austria to the German Reich—information that allegedly comes from the family itself—is not confirmed anywhere else in the literature.240 Neither Nicolaus von Below nor Otto Dietrich nor Christa Schroeder, all of whom were part of Hitler’s entourage together with the secretary Gerda Daranowski (who had started that spring), mentioned Eva Braun in the context of these events in their later memoirs, even though she allegedly stayed with Hitler and his staff in Vienna’s Hotel Imperial. All of the autobiographers, in fact, avoid mentioning any names or giving any details of their own experiences in this matter. Von Below, for instance, refers merely to the “retinue” or the “numerous companions,” and speaks of having been “witness to a historical moment.” Christa Schroeder makes do with mentioning the military escort and the factotum Julius Schaub, and remarks vaguely that “back then everything was overwhelming” to her. Reich Press Chief Dietrich even gives the impression that he witnessed what he called the “ardent glow of the enthusiasm” of the Austrian masses as an entirely uninvolved bystander. Speer, perhaps the only one who would willingly have gone into any detail, was not among Hitler’s entourage this time, claiming that it was only “several days later” that he learned “via the newspapers” what had taken place.241
In general, a similarly noticeable silence reigns supreme among the main players’ memoirs concerning the exact makeup of the group around Hitler in Linz and Vienna. What might this silence mean? After all, all the members of the inner circle—Brandt, Below, Hoffmann, Dietrich, Brückner, Schaub, the secretaries, and Eva Braun—were at the center of the maelstrom of events. But why did they keep their collective observations and experiences to themselves? First and foremost, we see here again that the solidarity of this group, through to the end of the war and into the years of denazification, must not be underestimated.242 These individuals were not ordinary observers, not part of the masses burning with enthusiasm outside the hotel who had no way to reach Hitler; rather they constituted, together with the regime’s public officials there, the circle of loyal intimates, accomplices, and accessories around the Nazi leader. As a result, none of them reveal the most salient fact: the extent to which they too cheered the entry of the German army into Austria at the time, and how strongly they themselves identified with the National Socialist worldview.
In fact, it is difficult in general to determine how deeply the members of the inner circle shared Hitler’s long-term political goals and vision of a Greater German Reich.243 Their knowledge varied by how close they were to Hitler as well as by their functions. Still, the immediate effects of the Nazi expansion, beginning with Austria, were clear to see. For example, there is a photograph in the partially preserved archive of Hoffmann’s photographs that shows Vienna Jews scrubbing the street with brushes, watched by SS men.244 The racist anti-Semitism that was for Hitler the “central law of the movement” (in the words of Klaus Hildebrand), the foundation of National Socialist propaganda, and the official dogma of the Nazi state, certainly did not remain hidden from those close to Hitler. Rather, we must assume that Hitler’s adjutants, secretaries, servants, and, not least, Eva Braun shared without reservation the Jew-hatred of their “boss,” as they all called him. All of the later protestations like that of Julius Schaub—that he never heard anything about the “Jewish question,” much less the extermination of Jews, until after the capitulation of 1945—must therefore be rejected, or rather understood as stemming primarily from their fear of judicial punishment after the war.245
The Nazi leader’s first personal will, written by hand and dated May 2, 1938, shows how tight the bonds were between Hitler and his circle. That afternoon, Hitler set out from Berlin for a one-week state visit to Italy; Paul Schmidt, head translator in the foreign office, later recalled that “half the government” took part in the visit.246 Hitler, who for years had been suffering from premonitions of death and apparently was afraid of being assassinated in Italy, set his private matters in order before the trip and bequeathed all of his belongings to the NSDAP in the case of his death.247 At the same time, he made sure that his close relatives and colleagues, including the adjutants Schaub, Brückner, and Wiedemann, would be financially set for life. And the first person he mentioned was his girlfriend, twenty-six years old at the time, stating that “Miss Eva Braun, Munich” should receive from the Party “1,000 marks a month… that is, 12,000 marks a year for the remainder of her life” in the case of his death.248 This is the only surviving document in Hitler’s hand, apart from his testament of April 1945, that mentions Eva Braun by name. Her family claimed, after the war, that Eva herself did not know about the testament.249 Surely not many people did know about it. Among the initiates were, in any case, Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery, to whom the document was given for safekeeping, and Franz Xaver Schwarz, “Reich Treasurer of the NSDAP,” whom Hitler intended to be his executor. Schwarz was not only the “Plenipotentiary of the Führer” in all of the Party’s legal property matters, but also, as Richard Walther Darré expressed it later, the “uncrowned king of the NSDAP,” with whom no “leader of the movement” dared “to have a falling out.”250
Eva Braun was allowed to join this trip to Italy, and she documented it on film. More than five hundred people made the journey, in three special trains from the Anhalter station in Berlin through Munich to the Italian capital. The foreign office organized a special Ladies’ Program for the spouses of the high-ranking Nazi politicians, with group outings. This glittering company included Annelies von Ribbentrop, wife of the new Reich Foreign Minister, as well as Ilse Hess, Magda Goebbels, and Marga Himmler; only Emmy Göring was missing, since her husband, the Reich Minister for Air Travel, had been declared Hitler’s successor a month earlier, by “Führer edict,” and had to remain in Berlin as his deputy.251 The women stayed in Rome at the Grand Hotel (today the St. Regis Grand Hotel), built in 1894 as the first luxury hotel in the heart of the city, while Hitler and his retinue were housed in the Quirinal Palace, the residence of Italian kings.252 Indeed, it was King Victor Emmanuel III, not Mussolini, who was the Germans’ official host. Hitler, to his great annoyance, felt that Mussolini, the Prime Minister and thus subordinate to the head of state, had merely “tagged along” for their visit, as the Nazi leader complained years later.253 The wives, in any case, were permitted to attend the dinner arranged by the King in the Quirinal on May 4—the “stiffest event imaginable,” according to adjutant Wiedemann—as well as a dinner hosted by Il Duce at the Palazzo Venezia three days later.254
Eva Braun was excluded from all of these activities. She boarded one of the three special trains only in Munich, joining Karl and Anni Brandt, the Morells, and Maria Dreesen, wife of the Godesberg hotelier, with her son Fritz. It is nearly certain that Braun traveled in a sleeping car in the same train as Hitler. The train was put into service by the German railroad only in July 1937; called “Amerika,” it consisted of two locomotives, Hitler’s salon car, a conference car with a radio station and telex, a dining car, and several cars for the military escort, staff, and guests.255 No one saw Eva Braun’s face outside her immediate circle. In Rome, too, she stayed separate from the others, although no less luxuriously and no less centrally, at the Hotel Excelsior, a “white palace” built around the turn of the century on Via Veneto, the most famous street in the city. Thus cut off from her fellow travelers, she explored the city with the women in her group in particular, while Karl Brandt joined Goebbels, Himmler, Hess, Ribbentrop, and Otto Dietrich in Hitler’s entourage on May 4, to visit, together with Mussolini, the enormous Victor Emmanuel Monument with its Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.256 After an extensive program of celebrations in Rome and Naples, Hitler and his group stayed a short while in Florence and then returned from there to Germany in the German special trains on May 9, 1938.
Hitler, who was determined to follow up the “annexation” of Austria by occupying Czechoslovakia with its Sudeten-German minority, had achieved the purpose of his visit: Italy would remain neutral in case of war.257 Eva Braun, who did not take the train back to Germany but rather traveled onward with her companions to the island of Capri, presumably knew as little of Hitler’s warlike intentions at this point as most of the others on the Italian trip. She had taken part in none of the official events and saw the maneuvers of the Italian fleet in the Gulf of Naples only from afar, while Hitler observed them from onboard a battleship, together with the King and Mussolini.258 It is not even known whether she spent any time at all with Hitler during the trip. She was, however, ceaselessly taking photographs and shooting films. If we believe Henriette von Schirach, Eva Braun showed her movies at the Berghof in the autumn of that year and remarked to Hitler that now he would see the “real Italy” for once.259
After this state visit, Hitler withdrew to the Obersalzberg again and turned his attention to putting into action his idea of “Lebensraum”[9] in the east and his specific battle plans against Czechoslovakia. He gave the orders for war to Ribbentrop, Göring, and the highest generals of the army and their adjutants in Berlin, on May 28, 1938, and thereby caused the destruction of the European order that had been established in the Peace of Paris treaties of 1919. Hitler’s path to war, and his statement that it was his “unshakeable will that Czechoslovakia disappear from the map,” met with no fundamental objections.260
While Hitler was personally pushing ahead to war in the summer of 1938, drawing up operational plans and busying himself with the details of the Siegfried Line (a defensive structure 390 miles long on the western border of the Reich), he was simultaneously relieving his mental strain by fantasizing about retreating into private life. Linz, the capital of the state of Upper Austria—the city he envisioned as a European art capital, “a kind of German Rome,” and which he styled as his “hometown” even though he had spent only two years of his youth there—was where he planned to retire after achieving all of his political goals.261 Linz’s renovation, including a giant industrial and port district, was planned to last until 1950, and Hitler wanted to spend his twilight years there and eventually be buried there. Speer recalls that the construction of a residence “on a height,” with a view over the city, was planned. Even before the war, Hitler had occasionally described his imagined farewell from politics to the assembled company at table on the Obersalzberg, for example by saying: “Aside from Fräulein Braun, I’ll take no one with me. Fräulein Braun and my dog. I’ll be lonely. For why should anyone voluntarily stay with me for any length of time? Nobody will take notice of me anymore. They’ll all go running after my successor!”262
At the high point of his power, in other words, Hitler began to think about taking his leave of politics. The reason for such reflections may have been his health problems, but possibly also, in secret, the fear that his military ambitions would fail. Speer thought such talk might have been an attempt to call forth the loyalty of his colleagues in the large group, but this latter speculation is doubtful. The extensive plans for Linz were a sensitive subject for Speer in any case, since, as he told Joachim Fest in the autumn of 1974, he had not been asked for advice about them despite having offered his “cooperation.”263 It was primarily other architects who drew up the plans, even if it remained Speer’s responsibility to authorize the plans in consultation with Hitler.
Thus the Linz city planning office under the Austrian architect Anton Estermann, which had submitted a design plan, became the central planning site for the project in July 1938. Then, in March 1939, came Roderich Fick, a professor at the Munich Technical College whom Hitler named “Reich Construction Adviser for the Redesigning of the City of Linz.” Fick had already designed several buildings on the Obersalzberg, including Villa Bormann and the teahouse on the Mooslahnerkopf. On May 9, not long after being appointed, Fick presented a model of Linz on the Berghof terrace, in Speer’s presence.264
Around fall 1940, Hitler appointed the architect Hermann Giesler to assist Fick. Giesler, the “Master Builder of the Capital City of the Movement,” came from an architect’s family in Siegen; his brother, Paul, rose in the NSDAP to be the Gauleiter of Munich–Upper Bavaria, while he himself was also a member of the Party and attended Hitler’s dinner parties in Munich. Until his death in 1987, Hermann Giesler would remain an avowed supporter of Hitler.265
It is thus no wonder that Giesler managed, in the end, to win the unavoidable power struggle between himself and Fick, in which August Eigruber, the Gauleiter of Oberdonau Linz, played a role as well. Until the end of the war, all the monumental construction plans of what was now called the “Führer Capital” of Linz, including the “Danube Riverbank Development” and Hitler’s house on the Freinberg, were assigned to Giesler. The residence, sited on a “rocky plateau above the Danube,” was designed in the “strictly cubicform structure typical of the Austrian country house—the Vierkanthof, built around a square courtyard.” According to Giesler’s apologia, Hitler apparently compared it to Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II of Hohenstaufen’s mystical Castel del Monte in southeast Italy.266 In fact, the Castel del Monte, built in the thirteenth-century and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, is similarly situated on a small hill and is not only a symbol of power but also, due to its eight-sided ground plan with eight octagonal towers at the corners, a symbol of eternity. Friedrich II designed the “Hohenstaufen Acropolis” himself, immortalizing himself as architect and city founder. He used architecture as a way to recuperate from politics and his numerous military campaigns; wherever he stayed, his master builder was required to report to him.267
The National Socialists had projected themselves onto Friedrich II’s life and works for a long time and in many ways. They used the legendary emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation as a legitimating figure for their own “Third Empire” by reinterpreting him as a German hero and manufacturing a historical connection with his “First Empire,” which in fact never existed. Hitler also sought out personal points of connection with Friedrich II and cast himself as a renewer of the Empire along the same lines as his historical forebearer. For example, in 1942 he had Oskar Hugo Gugg—a professor of landscape painting in Weimar and friend of Paul Schultze-Naumberg, the architect working with Hitler—execute an oil painting of Castel del Monte for the planned residence in Linz. The previous year in Rome, at Ribbentrop’s instigation, a model of the Friedrich’s building was made and given to Hitler in Berlin in late 1941.268 This fantasy of a link between his place of retirement and the “castle of castles” of the Hohenstaufer emperor suggests the role that “Linz” played in Hitler’s imagination and how he saw himself there. Courtly ceremonies, such as those that took place during the state visit in Italy, always called forth feelings of inferiority in him, and now he dreamed of an old-European, princely existence for himself in the middle of the future economic and cultural center of the “Third Reich.”
During the next few years, Hermann Giesler traveled to the Berghof or to Hitler’s various other headquarters again and again to discuss blueprints and models of the project with him. Sometimes, according to Giesler, he stayed “for weeks.”269 In fall 1942, he even traveled to Hitler’s headquarters, which had temporarily shifted east. Named “Wehrwolf” (a pun on the German for “werewolf” and “Wehr,” meaning “defense”), the headquarters was near the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, where he discussed “further details of his house” with Hitler. When he asked the Nazi leader for details about the “kitchen area” and the “garden,” Giesler recalled three decades later, Hitler told him that this was “Miss Braun’s affair”: he should discuss the matter “with her first,” since she would be “lady of the house.” Once he had “installed his successor and stepped down,” Giesler reported, Hitler was planning to “marry Miss Braun.”270
The postwar statements of Giesler and Speer, the “court architects,” show that Hitler’s dream of “Linz” was clearly not his alone. But whether he involved Eva Braun in his plans as early as 1938 or only during the course of the war is not known. The fact remains that these exalted visions offered his young companion a prospect she longed for: that of a glittering, fairy-tale future at Hitler’s side. Henriette von Schirach later claimed that Eva Braun “clung to Hitler’s personal vision of the future.”271 And more and more over the course of the years to come, he expanded the role that he imagined for her in this vision. Speer, ambitious and irritated at the time that “my dear Giesler” was preferred over him for the project, ended by being annoyed over the precedence given to Eva Braun. His biographer Fest reports that “Linz” was a topic of discussion even on the day of Speer’s very last meeting with the Nazi leader in the bunker on April 23, 1945. “Miss Braun” had already made “very personal suggestions,” Hitler told Speer in their last conversation, and would be responsible for the look of the business district and promenades in Linz.272 With their downfall imminent, it seems that Hitler and Eva Braun had fled reality into irrationality together.
Translator’s note: Sometimes translated as “coordination” or “integration,” this term refers to the nationalization under National Socialism of previously private or independent organizations.
Translator’s note: The “Volksgemeinschaft” was the Nazi social ideal of a racially unified and hierarchically organized “People’s community.”
Obersalzberg, January 2Dear Madam,Thank you very much for your lovely Christmas present. I was very happy to get it.We have been at the Berghof since the first day of Christmas and are hard at work skiing. Charlie (Stark) has already broken his foot and has to stay in bed for 3 weeks. Still, we have not stopped skiing, to the Führer’s horror; he prophesies the same fate for all of us.Has little Muck settled in? I hope he is not disgracing his worthy parents.I wish you a very good New Year, madam, and your husband as well.Best regards!YoursEva Braun
Translator’s note: “Mountain” is Berg in German, a pun on “Berghof” (“mountain estate”).
Literally, “living space.” This concept of Hitler’s was a major component in the Nazi ideology, referring to the German population’s need for land and raw materials and the availability of this land in the east after the Slavic peoples were killed or deported.