Hitler’s fantasy of someday retiring to Linz with Eva Braun and abdicating leadership of the Party and state to a younger man first manifested itself at the same time as the concretization of his war plans in Eastern Europe. He was tormented by the thought of not yet having solved crucial foreign policy problems: revising the cession of territory imposed on the German Reich by the Versailles Treaty and gaining “Lebensraum in the East.” The decision for a war of aggression that he made in fall 1939 may also have been influenced by economic considerations, but the realization of the “Lebensraum” ideology represented the core of National Socialist foreign policy from the beginning. Already in his autobiography and political platform Mein Kampf, published in 1925, Hitler had announced his goal: “We will finally end the colonial and trade policies of the prewar period and transition to the soil-politics of the future. But when we speak of new soil and ground in Europe, we can only think in the first place of Russia and the border states subordinate to it.” The fight against the Soviet Union was raised to a “historical mission of national socialism.”1
On February 3, 1933, immediately after the National Socialists came to power, Hitler declared in a speech after a dinner with high-ranking military officers that the “expansion of Lebensraum” for the Germans, toward the east, would have to be carried out militarily, and the “soil” conquered in this way would have to be “Germanized.” Hardly anyone present, including Hitler’s personal adjutant Wilhelm Brückner, comprehended at the time the new Reich Chancellor’s absolute desire for war. After all, he went on to proclaim his readiness for peace and negotiation in public speeches.2 In addition, neither the concept of “Lebensraum” nor the idea that such space must be conquered for the German People originated with him—both belonged quite generally to the repertoire of the Populist-nationalist right. But four and a half years later, in early November 1937—when Hitler emphasized, this time in a meeting with the heads of the Wehrmacht (armed forces), that “only the path of violence” would provide the “solution to the German problem”—the domestic and foreign political situations of Germany had changed fundamentally. The National Socialist dictatorship was established; rearmament was moving full speed ahead; the Rhineland had been occupied, without any resistance from the Western powers; the “annexations” of Austria and Czechoslovakia were already decided upon. There could no longer be any doubt within the leadership of the Wehrmacht that Hitler’s unchanged intent to win “agriculturally useful space” in Eastern Europe by military means, for the “protection and support of the mass of the People and its reproduction,” was meant seriously.3
When Hitler withdrew to the Obersalzberg in late January 1939, Goebbels recorded the following for posterity in his “Diaries”: “The Führer now speaks almost solely of foreign politics. Again he is turning over new plans in his mind. A Napoleonic nature…”4 In truth, however—as the Minister of Propaganda knew perfectly well—these plans were neither new nor unknown. The racial-ideological genocidal intent of the Nazi regime had already shown itself, not least in the pogrom against German Jews on November 9, 1938, initiated in part by Goebbels himself.5 And Hitler was, as always, working—though now more driven than ever—toward realizing his “vision” of the “next struggle”: “a deliberate war between Peoples and between races,” as he declared in early February 1939.6
Is it possible that Eva Braun, intimately familiar with Hitler’s sense of being on a mission and his racist ideology, could have suspected nothing of his preparations for war in the spring and summer of 1939? This seems highly unlikely, especially after the Nazi leader had given a speech before the “Greater German Reichstag” in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, on January 30, 1939, that gave rise to “more discussion” than practically any other public statement, as Nicolaus von Below recalled.7 In it, Hitler lamented the “warmongers” in England and America who wanted “at all costs to start a war,” and he proclaimed that nothing could “influence [Germany] in the least in the resolution of its Jewish question.” At the same time, Hitler threatened that should it come to war, “the result would not be the Bolshevization of the globe and thus the victory of the Jews, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”8 These “foreign policy passages,” Below admitted in retrospect, “depressed” him, since it was “not difficult to conclude” from these “warnings directed at the English and the Jews” that Hitler “was coming to new and far-reaching decisions.”9
Since Hitler’s unexpectedly combative appearance before Parliament attracted such wide public attention, we can assume that every member of the private “inner circle” around Hitler heard about these utterances as well. His words came close to being a declaration of war. In particular, the wives of the Nazi leaders obviously also “talked about the daily news,” as Margarete Speer admitted to Gitta Sereny.10 For Eva Braun, the events involving Hitler in Berlin over the course of 1939 must have been the focus of her attention to an even greater extent, because her life with him was no longer limited merely to Munich or the Obersalzberg: after the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Speer, was finished and dedicated on January 9, 1939, Braun was given rooms of her own in the “Führer apartment” in the Old Reich Chancellery, with furniture personally designed for her by Speer.11 Clearly, this new residence for Eva Braun was possible because all the official public events now took place in Hitler’s new, specially built, monumental seat of office on the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Vosstrasse.
With its 65-foot-high exterior facade, interior hallways sometimes exceeding 320 feet in length, and central marble gallery, 480 feet long, it surpassed anything that had ever been there. The New Chancellery thereby corresponded to Hitler’s conception of an awe-inspiring architecture of power, enabling him to impress especially “the smaller dignitaries.”12 But even though the building included a private wing for Hitler’s use, he continued to stay at his apartment at 77 Wilhelmstrasse, refurnished four years earlier by the Troost architecture office. Eva Braun, during her stays in Berlin, now no longer spent the night at the Hotel Adlon but instead, in the guise of a private secretary, could go to their common place of residence largely unremarked. Speer wrote in Inside the Third Reich that she “came in through a side entrance and up a side staircase.” She didn’t even linger in the downstairs rooms, formerly the public reception halls, “when only old friends were in the house.” Instead, the architect sometimes “kept her company during her long hours of waiting.”13
Hitler’s girlfriend seems not to have remained entirely unobserved in the capital city, however. The American newsmagazine Time, for example, in an article published December 18, 1939, reported that “a blond Bavarian girl named Eva Helen Braun” had moved into “Hitler’s official residence in Berlin, the great Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse,” during the last days of August.14 The article referred to various sources in Germany and to an article published in The Saturday Evening Post two days earlier. This was not entirely true, but the magazine gave enough biographical details to indicate that the Nazi leader’s private life was not a secret anywhere in the capital city, and that rumors about it had reached the ears of American journalists, too.
As early as May 15, 1939, Time had speculated about Mussolini’s and Hitler’s girlfriends, under the title “Spring in the Axis,” and named Eva Braun: the young woman from Munich had her apartment paid for by her “old friend in Berlin, who always comes to see her when he is in town.”15 One of Time’s informants was presumably Bella Fromm, the Berlin society columnist who had immigrated to the United States in 1938. She had worked for the Vossische Zeitung newspaper, among others, and had excellent contacts in Berlin political society. In her best-selling diaries published in London in 1943 as Blood & Banquets, she mentions “Eva Helene Braun” as early as her entry of September 16, 1937, describing her as the former assistant of “Court Photographer” Heinrich Hoffmann who had possibly conquered Adolf Hitler’s heart. Fromm was relying on off-the-record information from Louis Paul Lochner, an American journalist in charge of the Associated Press bureau in Berlin who had ties to the National Socialist leadership.16 Obviously, the German public learned nothing about such overseas news reports—censorship of the press was in effect in the National Socialist state, and foreign newspapers, magazines, and books were not even permitted to be sold.
Eva Braun did, in fact, stay in Berlin in late August 1939. And she had already learned of the worsening international situation while at the Berghof. Hitler’s expansionist goals in the east—first “taking care of what remained of the Czechs” (in defiance of the concessions of the Western powers in the Munich Agreement of September 1938) and “taking possession” of the formerly East Prussian “Memel Territory” belonging to Lithuania, then reconquering the other territories lost in the First World War—meant war.17 The Nazi regime had decided to use force as soon as any neighboring Eastern European government stood in its way, and indeed it moved closer to war when Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck at a meeting with Hitler on the Obersalzberg on January 5, 1939, in which the Nazi leader demanded the return of Danzig to the German Reich as well as access routes to East Prussia, rejected the German ideas in the name of his government.
The Polish position did not change even after German troops marched into Prague on March 15, with Hitler declaring Czechoslovakia “the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” in Hradschin Castle there, nor after March 23, when the Germans occupied the Memel Territory.18 Three days later the Polish government again rejected the National Socialist dictator’s demands. Hitler then ordered concrete preparations for a war on Poland “beginning 9/1/1939.” He was never interested in a diplomatic solution to the conflict, since, as he remarked to his generals in May 1939, Danzig “is not the real concern. The issue is an expansion of Lebensraum in the east.”19 As in the case of Czechoslovakia, the Western powers failed here, too—as did the League of Nations, which had been founded to collectively ensure world peace. The British government gave merely a halfhearted guarantee to Poland and worked to sign a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union, without success. Hitler’s and Stalin’s realpolitik calculations prevented this agreement, as did the Poles themselves, who did not trust the Soviets as a protective power. The Soviet dictator sought a rapprochement with Hitler, despite their ideological enmity, because his country was not ready for war and he was not willing to be drawn into a conflict by the capitalist powers England and France. Hitler, in turn, must have been afraid of a war on two fronts.20
In late June on the Obersalzberg, Hitler paced back and forth in the great hall of his estate night after night, with either Albert Speer or Nicolaus von Below, “giving his thoughts free rein” as Below recalled later. During these evenings, the Nazi leader explained that he had to lay the groundwork for the Greater German Reich’s future “work of peace” by seizing the opportunity “to create a foundation for the unavoidable fight with Russia by solving the Polish problem.” The English would “certainly stay completely quiet if he managed to bring about a pact with Russia,” and the Poles would “come down off their high horse on their own” since they were “even more afraid of the Russians… than they are of us.”21 In other words, Hitler laid out his worldview and war plans with brutal clarity to the air force adjutant on duty. Nicolaus von Below’s account shows, first, how great the Nazi leader’s tension was with respect to the military conflicts he had planned, so that he needed to seek psychological relief in his trusted circle, far from Berlin. Second, it reveals that Hitler felt no need to exercise caution or discretion around his loyal followers on the Berghof.
The fact is, there were no ideological differences within the “inner circle.” Nicolaus von Below later admitted that he had been impressed with Hitler’s “thoughts” about “Jewish Bolshevism” as a constant threat to Germany and Europe; Hitler’s “clear-sighted judgment of the situation” convinced him.22 Speer, meanwhile, the “Führer’s” special favorite who was on the Obersalzberg through most of the summer of 1939, kept quiet after the war about the political discussions that took place then. He answered the American interrogators’ questions on the subject in September 1945 by evasively claiming that any information from him would merely be “the intuitive impressions of a man at the edge of the circle where foreign-policy questions were decided.” Speer gives the impression in his later memoirs, claiming, for example—unlike Below—that he heard about the negotiations with Moscow for the first time on August 21, 1939, during dinner at the Berghof, after Stalin had sent a telex expressing his willingness to receive the Reich Foreign Minister on August 23 and sign the Nonaggression Pact that had already been drawn up.23
By this point at the very latest, the supposedly apolitical ladies at the table were let into the picture of the looming developments. Speer nonetheless stresses that the women were “still excluded” from discussion.24 But Eva Braun’s photographs tell another story. On August 23, 1939, in the middle of the extremely tense environment reigning at the Berghof in connection with Joachim von Ribbentrop’s departure for Moscow—accompanied by, among others, Heinrich Hoffmann—she captured on film Hitler restlessly awaiting news of the progress of the negotiations in the Soviet capital. Surrounding him in the Berghof hall that afternoon were Goebbels, Bormann, Otto Dietrich, Walther Hewel (head of the Foreign Minister’s personal staff), Karl Bodenschatz (Göring’s adjutant and head of the ministerial office in the Reich Ministry of Air Travel), and Julius Schaub. Speer and Below were there as well, but like many others did not appear in the photographs. Goebbels notes in his “Diaries” that they waited “for hours” for “news from Moscow,” until finally, “at one in the morning,” the communiqué was transmitted. “The Führer and all of us are very happy,” he wrote.25
Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich, on the other hand, in his reminiscences published in 1955 under the title 12 Jahre mit Hitler (Twelve Years with Hitler; published in English as The Hitler I Knew), passes over this day of waiting on the Obersalzberg. He writes that he had not known at the time that Hitler was “launching an attack” on Poland “but wanted to avoid war with England.”26 Dietrich presumably did not suspect the existence of Eva Braun’s photographs. These are not posed pictures but snapshots that reveal the general tension. She later pasted them into a photo album and added typewritten captions pasted under the pictures—for example, “… and then Ribbentrop left for Moscow”; “… and the Führer hears the report over the radio.”27
The Minister of Propaganda had already, on the evening of August 21, arranged for the announcement of the upcoming German-Soviet Pact over German radio, and instructed the editors of all the newspapers “to publish [news of the pact] on the first page, very large.”28 On the morning of August 22, Goebbels held a press conference in Berlin for foreign journalists, while Hitler, at the same time, informed fifty officers, including the commanders of the various armed forces, in his Alpine residence that he was definitively resolved to go to war, a war that he would be “hard and ruthless” in waging.29 The Nazi leader spent the following days getting constant reports about the domestic and foreign reactions. The announcement of a Nonaggression Pact between the two powerful dictators, which Goebbels described as a “worldwide sensation,” did not, however, produce the desired reaction in either England or Poland. Both governments immediately announced that their positions were unchanged; Britain in fact strengthened its mutual assistance pact with Poland (it was formally signed only on August 25), and the Polish government refused further discussions with the Nazi leadership.30
As we would therefore expect, Eva Braun’s photo diary contains the following entry: “… but Poland still does not want to negotiate.” This comment was not “naive”; it matched the view of many Germans who thought that Poland would not risk a military conflict with its powerful neighbor in these circumstances.31 Moreover, Poland’s refusal to accede to Germany’s demands, withdraw from Danzig, and permit passage to East Prussia was criticized outside of Germany as well: the demands were seen as perfectly legitimate outside of National Socialist circles, too. In addition, Nazi propagandists had succeeded in imputing their own country’s war intentions to the Western powers. Goebbels, for example, in an address to the Danzig population on June 17, 1939, accused “Polish chauvinists” of wanting “to smash us Germans to pieces in an upcoming Battle of Berlin,” while England had “given them a blank check” to do so and was trying “to encircle the Reich and Italy.” Right up to the invasion of Poland, the Minister of Propaganda constantly repeated the basic ideas of Hitler’s conspiracy theory, in which Hitler wanted peace but the “encirclers” in London, Paris, and Washington wanted war. As a result of the effectiveness of the German propaganda, the Nazi leader, apparently successful at everything, enjoyed the widespread reputation in Germany of being a savvy politician on the international stage, outwitting Western powers who acted moralistic but ultimately did nothing.32
Was Eva Braun aware of the historic significance of these days that she spent at the Berghof, days whose drama she clearly was trying to capture on film? There is no testimony on the subject, contemporaneous or later. No information from any of the women present—who included Margarete Speer, Anni Brandt, and Gerda Bormann—has been preserved. Eva Braun’s photographs themselves, however, imply that she was well aware of what was happening, as does the fact that she went along to the capital immediately afterward. She presumably rode to Berlin via Munich in one of the ten Mercedes that left the Obersalzberg on August 24, 1939. The “court,” as Speer said, had repaired to the Chancellery.33 Hitler’s “situation room” was in the great hall of the Old Chancellery, and it became the center of the “Führer headquarters” in Berlin after the start of the war.34 Eva Braun was living in her rooms on the upper floor of the Old Chancellery, but it is unclear how well informed she was about the developments. On September 1, though, she apparently witnessed in person, along with her sister Ilse who was then living in Berlin, the session of Parliament hurriedly called by Göring in which Hitler declared war on Poland. His justification was: “This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory. Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met by bombs.”35 No one knew at the time that the alleged Polish attack on a German radio station in Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia, which German propaganda cast as “the cause of the outbreak of the war,” was a fabrication by the SS, along with all the other “border incidents” that had allegedly taken place in the previous days.36
In the former Kroll Opera House near Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, closed since 1931 and housing the National Socialist sham-parliament since the Reichstag fire of February 1933, there were several hundred seats available for visitors and journalists, in the two tiers of boxes. According to Ilse Braun’s description as relayed by Nerin E. Gun, Eva Braun cried when Hitler, dressed in battle dress with the SS insignia on his left sleeve, announced:
My whole life, from this moment on, belongs to my People. I want nothing more than to be the first soldier of the German Reich. I have therefore put on this tunic, which was been the holiest and most priceless to me, and will take it off only after our victory, or not live through its end.37
The members of Parliament stood up at these words, as per protocol, and “a thunderous cry of Heil” resounded in the chamber. Eva Braun, though, according to her sister, said: “If something happens to him, I’ll die too.”38 Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s secretary, expressed herself in similar terms two days later, on September 3, shortly before 9 p.m., when she set off for the Polish front with Hitler in the special train (still bearing the code name “Amerika”) from Berlin’s Stettin station. Great Britain and France had declared war against the German Reich that day. Hitler’s—and his entourage’s—hope that England would continue its wait-and-see policy was thus shattered; the Nazi regime had unleashed a great war. Suitably depressed, Christa Schroeder wrote to her friend Johanna Nusser: “In a few hours we will leave Berlin…. For me it means going with the leader through thick and thin. As for the worst case, I don’t want to think about that yet, but if it happens—my life is over.”39
With the start of the war, Hitler’s Alpine residence became a “Führer headquarters” whenever the commander in chief of the Wehrmacht was staying there. Only the military adjutant on duty was with him at all times; Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) and Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s most influential military adviser and Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command in the OKW, were housed a couple of miles away in the “Sub-Chancellery” in Berchtesgaden. The Wehrmacht command staff, meanwhile, worked in a special train in the Salzburg train station until the end of 1942.40 Briefings on the military situation, however, took place at the Berghof every afternoon and evening. As a result, Otto Dietrich recalled, the women had to stay in their rooms “until the ‘noon briefing’ ended, around 2 p.m., and the generals drove off again.” The same procedure was repeated after dinner, when the “OKW gentlemen” arrived once more. Eva Braun, her friends, and the secretaries repaired to the downstairs rooms of the Berghof most of the time, where there was a bowling alley and where they could watch movies.41
In any case, Hitler no longer showed up on the Obersalzberg several times a month, as he had in the past. There were still extended stays, up until the end of the war, but they were less frequent and also could not happen at will, since they depended on the military situation. Spontaneous trips with a few close friends were a thing of the past, since traveling now required that the whole “Führer headquarters” be moved, including the orderlies and the security personnel, namely an SS military escort and a “Führer escort battalion.” Hitler’s whole way of life changed. He had now become, as Speer remarked, “a slave to work,” whereas before he had “never let himself be pressured by work.”42 Especially in the latter half of the war, he stayed away at the front for months at a time.43
Hitler had no fixed headquarters when the war started. As a result, Hitler and his whole staff, including Schroeder and Daranowski, the secretaries; Wilhelm Brückner; Julius Schaub; Karl Brandt; Nicolaus von Below; Martin Bormann; Heinrich Hoffmann; and Otto Dietrich slept in the “Führer train” for the first three weeks of September 1939, during the so-called Eighteen-Day War against Poland. This train consisted of two locomotives, two special cars with antiaircraft guns, two luggage cars, a “Führer car,” a command car, a military escort car, two dining cars, two guest cars, two sleeping cars, and a press car.44 The train’s locations in Eastern Pomerania and Upper Silesia were declared military protection zones, guarded by military police and defended with antitank and antiaircraft cannons. An airplane was kept at the ready for Hitler; it was monitored by a soldier carrying a machine gun.45 The commander of a given “Führer headquarters”—in this case Major General Erwin Rommel—was responsible for all security measures.46
Christa Schroeder, in a letter to her friend Johanna Nusser dated September 11, 1939, described how the situation appeared from the point of view of the secretaries accompanying the Nazi leader:
We’ve been living in the train for ten days now, always changing our location, but since we—Daranowski and I—never leave the train, it all stays monotonous (for us, very monotonous). The heat is almost unbearable, just horrible. The sun beats down all day long on the compartments and you’re simply powerless against the tropical heat…. The Boss drives off with his men in the morning and we are condemned to wait and wait and wait some more.47
Meanwhile, Hitler visited various sectors of the front. His accompanying physician Karl Brandt occasionally availed himself of a field military hospital and performed operations along with the other doctors.48 Heinrich Hoffmann as well as employees of his company photographed the whole campaign, producing among other things aerial shots of burning buildings, destroyed Polish tank convoys, and the bombing of Polish bunkers and bridges.49 Hoffmann, himself in uniform, also staged the commander in chief in his photos, taking pictures of Hitler on his “Ride Along the Front in the Corridor” on September 4, saluting to marching soldiers, and used this for the cover of the illustrated book he published that year, Mit Hitler in Polen (With Hitler in Poland). He also photographed Hitler at situation briefings in the train, in the field kitchen, talking to wounded soldiers, and during his triumphal entry into Danzig on September 19.50 By the time Hitler returned to Berlin a week later, Poland, which lacked modern military equipment, had been defeated and divided up between the German Reich and the Soviet Union. Seventy thousand Polish soldiers had fallen and another seven hundred thousand were prisoners of war.
In addition, Einsatzgruppen, or task forces of the secret police, part of the SS, had marched in behind the German army and were carrying out mass shootings, primarily of Jews. Hitler had issued a “special order” for the ethnic “cleansing” of Poland and named Heinrich Himmler the Reich Commissioner for the Eastern Territories.51 We have no photographs by Hoffmann and his associates of the murders committed, although there are images that reveal the discrimination, violence, and persecution. They show, for example, members of the security service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) arresting Polish Jews and cutting off their beards. Hoffmann and his team also photographed transports to the ghetto and Jewish forced laborers.52 In truth, the march of German troops into Poland was the start of a horrific program of “Germanization,” deportation, and extermination. Around 3.2 million Jews were kept imprisoned in ghettos. Hitler’s racial mania and hatred of the people in Poland—who were, he said, “more like animals than human beings”—found full expression for the first time during the Poland campaign.53 It is unlikely that Eva Braun ever saw any of the thousand photographs of the Poland campaign that Hoffmann kept, but she presumably knew Hitler’s stereotypical racial views and in fact may have, like many other Germans, shared them. The extermination of Jews, on the other hand, was never discussed openly in the innermost private circle; the topic was never allowed to be mentioned in Hitler’s presence.54
Eva Braun also never joined Hitler at his garrison near the front. None of the women from the Berghof (except the secretaries) were ever brought there. Instead, Eva Braun remained in her house in Munich, drove up to the Obersalzberg with her family and friends, or traveled to Italy, escorted by several of the ladies of the inner circle. Whenever Hitler was in Berlin for a longer stay, Eva Braun also stayed in her small apartment in the Old Chancellery. For example, on the evening of November 8, 1939, she and her friend Herta Schneider found themselves with Hitler in his special train on the way to Berlin while a bomb went off in Munich’s Bürgerbräu beer cellar, which the Nazi leader had just left. Eva Braun learned only the following day, in a conversation with her younger sister, who had stayed in Munich, that their father was among the many injured in the blast.55
Meanwhile, the war in Poland had little tangible effect in Germany. Life went on, despite the introduction of food and clothes rationing. Most people believed that the victory would be quick and then celebrated it with corresponding enthusiasm when it came. When Hitler returned to the Obersalzberg on December 27, 1939, he did so as a celebrated war hero.56 The enthusiasm for the “blitzkrieg” in the east among the German population knew no bounds, and people hoped, as Nicolaus von Below recalled, that “England and France would be reasonable” and that it would not come to war with the Western powers. No one suspected the existence of preparations, already under way in secret, for the German army to attack in the west.57
During the next three months, until the invasion of Norway on April 9, 1940, Hitler traveled back and forth between Berlin, Munich, and the Obersalzberg as he had before the war. On the Obersalzberg, he passed the time with Eva Braun and the other guests. Heinrich Hoffmann, in his postwar work Hitler Was My Friend, writes that he “gave [Eva Braun] time off, at Hitler’s request,” for the occasion.58 But this, like many of Hoffmann’s other later statements, seems to be excessive bluster. In any case, the start of the war did not yet bring about any fundamental changes to the situation at the Berghof, as Hitler did not abandon his bohemian lifestyle from one day to the next. However, apart from continuing to be busy with his architectural plans, he now devoted himself primarily to the war that he had been working toward for so many years. Thus the perception that the successful Poland campaign was never discussed within the trusted circle on the Berghof is less than credible. So are the claims made after the war by the surviving main players that Hitler’s further war plans—the invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg on May 10, 1940, and the attack on France—came as a complete surprise to them.
Hoffmann, for example, maintained that on the evening of May 9, while the usual company was taking the special train from Berlin via Celle and Hannover to Cologne, they had no idea where they were going, and thought they were going to Norway. Otto Dietrich similarly stated that he realized the “great offensive” had begun only on the morning of May 10, when “the first squadron of airplanes flew in the cloudless sky” overhead over the Eifel mountains “toward the west.”59 Since Hoffmann and Dietrich were both always at Hitler’s side, if only because of their jobs, and since they had various channels for receiving information even aside from their proximity to Hitler, these accounts are not very convincing. In fact, Hitler’s legendary obsession with secrecy often seems to be nothing more than a self-protective claim of his inner circle, invented after the war. Nicolaus von Below, who spent Easter 1939 at the Berghof with his wife, also doubts that Hitler’s camouflage of the journey “was believed.” In fact, every person traveling along had “his own private ties with the ‘initiates,’ ”60 that is, Schaub, Bormann, and Below himself, who as Hitler’s military adjutant and conversation partner had precise knowledge about what Hitler was considering. Speer, too, busy since December 1939 with the construction of the first fixed “Führer headquarters” (the “Rocky Eyrie” or Felsennest, on a mountain peak near Rodert, a village near Bad Münstereifel), was clearly in the loop about Hitler’s further plans.61
The blitzkrieg against France, justified as a preventive strike, ended on June 22, 1940, with the signing of a German-French ceasefire in Compiègne, a site rich with symbolism since it was where the armistice ending World War I was signed. In the space of a few weeks, roughly one hundred thousand French and twenty-seven thousand Germans had fallen in battle. Hitler, who had carried out the western campaign over the objections of the army’s high commander, Generaloberst Walther von Brauchitsch, and wiped clean the disgrace of World War I with his victory, was now regarded as the “greatest military leader of all time.”62 It is easy to imagine how this new highpoint of Germany’s “Führer” euphoria would have affected the circle on the Obersalzberg. Wolf Speer, a nephew of Albert Speer’s, recalled that there were photographs in his grandmother’s drawing room “of her successes in the highest society, and at the time that meant the Obersalzberg,” including pictures of Hitler with Eva Braun. Luise Mathilde Speer, who herself had been invited to the Berghof several times in the spring of 1939, later remarked, according to her son Albert, that she “did not want to see any of the people gathered there in her own house.” Still, she had apparently admired the “great Führer,” and added, “Who knows how evenings went with Bismarck or Napoleon!”63
As early as July 11, 1940, five days after his grand reception in Berlin where hundreds of thousands had wildly cheered him, Hitler arrived back on the “mountain.” Through late October he again traveled back and forth between his refuge at Berchtesgaden and the Chancellery in Berlin; Eva Braun sometimes accompanied him to Berlin as well.64 A twenty-two-year-old member of the Waffen-SS named Rochus Misch, part of the “Führer military escort” since early May, stayed on the Obersalzberg for the first time in summer 1940, and Eva Braun was introduced to him as a “housekeeper.” She changed her outfits several times a day, he later reported, and always wore makeup. Thus she did not, in Misch’s judgment, fit the “ideal of a German girl”: “naturalness and rootedness in the soil” were “not her style.”65 In fact, these two qualities had nothing whatsoever to do with Hitler’s personality, either. Misch also observed that Eva Braun’s behavior changed “lightning fast” as soon as Hitler left the Berghof: “You could still see the limousines driving down the winding roads and already the first preparations were being made for various amusing activities. Proper as a governess a moment before, now she was turning everything upside down. And she was cheerful, happy and relaxed, almost like a child.”66
On October 21, 1940, after Hitler departed to meet with acting French Prime Minister Pierre Laval, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and French head of state Marshal Philippe Pétain, Eva Braun threw a party the same evening with the Berghof staff.67 She was dancing on the volcano’s edge, since Hitler failed to bring France and Spain into the war, nor could he knock Great Britain out of the war on his own. The air war against England was in full swing and British bombers had struck Berlin for the first time on August 26. With these events in the background, the lifestyle—even the very existence—of this young, sometimes effusive girlfriend must have seemed like an anachronism in the life of the idolized “Führer and Reich Chancellor.”
Until the attack on the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, Hitler conducted his war in large part from the Berghof. In fact, he spent the first few months of 1941 at the Berghof almost without interruption.68 This was where he considered his next steps, talked them out in the presence of his highest military officers, and formulated the goal of destroying Russia. At no point since the 1920s had he lost sight of his declared main ideological enemy, “Jewish Bolshevism.” Only when Soviet Russia was cast down “in a quick campaign,” he believed, would the English give up their struggle against Germany.69 He estimated that the blitzkrieg in the east would take about three months to reach victory. There were neither battle plans nor any thought of supplies and reinforcements for the period after that; everything was staked, literally, “on the first strike.”70
In summer 1941, for the first time, Hitler stayed for months at a time in his perfectly camouflaged, permanent headquarters, the “Wolf’s Lair,” near Rastenburg in East Prussia.71 In light of the earlier victories, most of the military officers, the Nazi leadership, and especially the members of the Nazi leader’s private circle were absolutely convinced that this was another masterstroke. For example, Below, deeply familiar with the dictator’s worldview and war plans from their many conversations together, admitted in his memoir that at the time he thought “Hitler was sharply and soberly calculating.” On top of everything, Below “in that period” often “marveled at [Hitler’s] calm demeanor” and found him “humane and sympathetic.”72 Given such uncritical acclaim, it is no wonder that Hitler barricaded himself at the Berghof for months in the lead-up to the campaign—he clearly needed this seclusion and blind agreement from his selected entourage. When and to what extent he revealed his war plans to Eva Braun during these months remains unknown to this day. But there is no doubt that, in one form or another, he let his loyal girlfriend in on the facts at some point before he left Berlin on the special train to East Prussia. Maria von Below, in a private (and apparently tapped) telephone call with her relatives, is said to have communicated weeks earlier the exact date of the upcoming German attack on the Soviet Union. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the military secret service, later complained to Hitler about the incident during a visit to the “Wolf’s Lair,” at which point Hitler, to everyone’s surprise, “brushed it aside with a wave of his hand.”73
From the start, Hitler showed no political restraint or secretiveness around his two young secretaries, either. They had accompanied him to his headquarters at the front, and while eating breakfast or having an afternoon coffee with them, he explained “what a great danger Bolshevism posed to Europe” and that, if he had waited another year, “it would probably have already been too late.” Christa Schroeder wrote in a letter to a friend that the women “first heard what the boss had to say about the state of affairs” over breakfast. Then, “around one o’clock,” they went with him “to the general briefing” that took place in the map room, where either the chief-adjutant of the armed forces, Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, or Hitler’s army adjutant, Major Gerhard Engel, gave his “situation report.” These “briefing lectures,” in which Bormann, Morell, and Schaub also took part, were “extremely interesting” to Christa Schroeder.74 The military officers, in contrast, disliked such loose conduct on the part of their commander in chief, and put a stop as soon as they could to Hitler’s bringing his secretaries along to military meetings. Nonetheless, Christa Schroeder described “evening discussions with the leader” in July 1941, which “always [went on] insanely long.”75 And on August 20, after nine weeks in the “Wolf’s Lair,” she put Hitler’s raw and unadulterated views, as she had internalized them, in a private letter:
There is nothing I want more deeply than for the English to propose peace once we’ve taken care of Russia…. I just can’t understand why the English are being so unreasonable. Once we’ve spread out to the east, we won’t need their colonies. It’s much more practical, too, to have everything nice and contiguous, it seems to me. The Ukraine and Crimea are so fertile, we can grow what we need there, and get everything else… in trade with South America. It’s all so simple and makes so much sense. Please God, let the English come to their senses soon.76
The goals of this deliberate war of exploitation and annihilation against the Soviet Union, in all its contempt for humanity, could not have been formulated any more clearly and unambiguously. Incidentally, this contemporaneous letter from Schroeder also proves something else: the claim made later that Hitler never touched on political topics in the presence of women was merely another self-protective lie.
Presumably, Eva Braun and Hitler did not see each other during the next five months. Only twice—in October, shortly after the start of the great offensive against Moscow, and in November—did he leave his wooden barracks in the Rastenburg swamps, and only for one day each time, to travel to Berlin and Munich. In early December 1941, he stayed for about a week in Berlin.77 The New Year’s party that always took place at the Berghof, with its accompanying group photograph, did not happen for New Year’s 1941–1942: Hitler stayed in East Prussia. He apparently phoned Eva Braun in Munich every night at around ten.78 The blitzkrieg had meanwhile failed; the air war against England was lost; and Hitler had declared war on the United States after the Japanese attack on the American Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, without being forced or even obliged by treaty to do so. By late April 1942 when he once again traveled to the Bavarian capital and the Berghof for a few days, more than a million German soldiers had fallen in battle. The SS murdered almost as many civilians in mass shootings in the occupied territories by the end of the year. In spite of the enormous losses, lack of reserve troops, and shortages of matériel on the German side, a new summer offensive was supposed to reach Stalingrad and bring about a final decision in the war.79
In Munich and on the Obersalzberg, however, there was not yet any sign of the war in spring 1942. While Lübeck, Rostock, Cologne, Essen, Bremen, and other major German cities had already undergone nighttime carpet bombing from the British Royal Air Force, the “capital city of the movement” had not experienced a single air attack. Hitler thus met undisturbed with August Eigruber, the NSDAP Gauleiter of the Upper Danube, on April 27 and 28 to discuss the “construction of an operetta theater” in Linz and to determine the “street profile of the grand boulevards” there, which were to have arcades and upscale businesses on all sides. “The most ideal stroll in the world will be in Linz,” he enthused, stressing to Eigruber that he, Hitler, was first and foremost an architect and master builder. Even his “military operations” would not have succeeded had he “not [remained] primarily an artist”: that was the only way it had been possible “to survive this winter and emerge victorious.” Hitler believed that he alone had prevented a military disaster in the winter of 1941–1942, by managing everything himself;80 in fact, to his generals’ annoyance, he had constantly interfered in operations despite having hardly any insight into larger strategic considerations. In the First World War, after all, he had been only a private.
The world of the Upper Bavarian Alps seemed just as intact as Munich. As before, streets and estates were being built on the Obersalzberg under the aegis of Martin Bormann. Bormann’s instructions were even declared to be a “war-critical construction program of the Führer”; unlike everywhere else in the Reich, there were no shortages of labor or restrictions on construction materials, food, or objects of daily use there. This was true first and foremost for Hitler and his entourage—their stay on the “mountain” continued to be idyllic.81 What’s more, in the early summer of 1942 Eva Braun posed Hitler in front of her camera as a devoted paterfamilias and sympathetic private person. She even asked Walter Frentz, a young photographer who had worked as a cameraman for Leni Riefenstahl and had accompanied Hitler as a photographer since the start of the war, to take photographs of herself as well as her friend Herta Schneider’s young daughter, and Hitler.82 Since Eva Braun preserved these pictures in a separate photo album she started specially for them, it is reasonable to assume that she was thereby recording her own desire for a normal family life, and that, during the long periods of separation caused by the war, she took as much delight in her fantasy world on celluloid as Hitler did in his models of Linz. In addition, she herself often photographed and filmed Hitler with her school friend’s children, or the children of other visitors to the Berghof.83 Another reason she did this was apparently that it made the “Führer” appear the way she wanted him to be: pleasant, relaxed, private. At the same time, though, she sold these pictures to Heinrich Hoffmann, who then published them in his propaganda photo books. The assertion that Hitler knew nothing about her fake-family pictures is thus hard to believe.84 If nothing else, he was obviously willing to make himself available to pose for her in this way. Eva Braun, for her part, clearly got vicarious satisfaction from this constant filming, which Hitler always put up with since he could not offer her a fulfilling private life in other ways.85
In the meantime, Eva Braun’s currency at Hitler’s court continued to rise. Christa Schroeder, who had no domestic life of her own since she had constantly been on call for Hitler for years, commented in her memoir that Eva Braun grew “more certain of her influence over Hitler” during the war years. She became “more self-confident,” Schroeder wrote, took a greater part in mealtime conversations, and often expressed her displeasure “when Hitler continued to discuss one of his favorite topics after the meal was over, rather than getting up from the table.” As soon as Eva Braun intervened, by loudly “asking the time” or looking rebukingly at Hitler, he brought “his monologues” to an end “on the spot.”86 Eva Braun thus seems to have been the only person who dared to put a stop to his well-known talkativeness; no other member of the mealtime group at the Berghof would have done so. But it did not gain her any sympathy from the others; it only emphasized the intimacy of her relationship with Hitler and showed up the obsequious behavior of everyone else. Not a few of them held it against her that she dimmed the “Führer’s” radiant glow by treating him like a longtime husband.
This is not the least significant reason why Eva Braun was later called capricious, spoiled, and “very much focused on trivialities.” Baldur von Schirach, for example, a member of Hitler’s inner circle from the age of eighteen who continued to visit the Obersalzberg occasionally until 1943 with his wife, Henriette, said after the war that Eva Braun sometimes supplied the people at the table “with the latest gossip and scandal from the film world for hours on end.” And if she “couldn’t get a word in with her gossip stories,” Schirach said, “she acted bored and complained about migraines, and Hitler worriedly patted her hand again and again while he was talking with his associates.”87 They now addressed each other with the informal “du,” and the rest of the guests could relax from the “formal fireside gatherings” only when Hitler and Braun withdrew upstairs together at night.88
Eva Braun and Martin Bormann were the only people in Hitler’s private world who became more and more important to the Nazi leader in these years. Bormann had taken over for Rudolf Hess after Hess’s bizarre flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941, and now ran the “Party Chancellery of the Führer.” Hess had apparently intended to conduct negotiations on his own in order to secure peace in the west for Hitler’s upcoming war against the Soviet Union in the east, but he was now regarded as a traitor. For months, Bormann mercilessly pursued every suspected “collaborator in this act of insanity,” on Hitler’s orders.89 But while Hess’s adjutants and others in his circle were arrested, his wife, Ilse Hess, was more or less left alone, notwithstanding a lot of harassment from Bormann. She owed this consideration in large part to her National Socialist attitudes, about which no one had any doubt. But Eva Braun, too—nicknamed “Everl” in a postwar letter of Ilse Hess’s—seems to have spoken up for her and supported her.90 It is doubtful that she did so without Hitler’s knowledge—“behind Hitler’s back,” as Albert Speer later claimed—since Ilse Hess continued to be in direct contact with Hitler. For example, she wrote to a friend in early August 1941 that “the Führer” had permitted her to write to “the big” (as she called her husband) in England.91 Hitler’s paranoid suspicions thus seem to have remained within limits in the case of his fugitive deputy’s wife.
Even though it was possible to get around Bormann in this case, Bormann became, with Hitler’s increasing isolation in his various headquarters, Hitler’s primary connection with the outside world. He was almost entirely unknown to the German public but was constantly with Hitler, as the most influential relayer of his orders and a liaison whom no one could bypass—not even Eva Braun.92 Still, she apparently found her own way to get a hearing with Hitler from afar. From time to time in the headquarters, according to Speer, “letters from Eva Braun gave rise to the most annoying interruptions.” She wrote from Munich about, among other things, “cases of blatant stupidity on the part of officials,” which “would send Hitler into a fit” every time until he finally ordered Bormann to investigate her accusations.93
Hitler left the Berghof again for several months on June 20, 1942, to command the planned summer offensive against the Soviet Union—“Operation Blue”—and Eva Braun left the next day for her last trip to Italy.94 It is no longer possible to reconstruct how she traveled, and with whom. Christa Schroeder later claimed that at any given time Eva Braun had always had only one “favorite” among the women at the Berghof who then also accompanied her on her annual trip to Portofino.95 This time, as in previous years, Eva Braun stayed in Italy for almost four weeks, returning to Germany only on July 17.96 In the middle of the war, such long pleasure trips abroad were unusual and, above all, expensive. They had to be reported to the authorities in advance, and approved; a passport, visa, and travel permit were all needed, and so was foreign currency, since it was forbidden to take German currency out of the country—in the case of normal tourism, the limit was set at only ten marks, a measure that made it impossible to leave the country unchecked. The German Workers’ Front, which organized Mediterranean cruises on its own KdF steamships (for example, a “cruise around Italy” from January 22 to February 1, 1939, on the Wilhelm Gustloff), allowed its guests to bring up to 100 reichsmarks in coins, but it was “absolutely forbidden” to bring paper money.97 Eva Braun, in contrast, kept all her travel privileges intact, and she could hardly have realized at the time that she would never again visit the south in her life.
For in the summer of 1942, Hitler continued to be confident, even optimistic, about the progress of the war. While his girlfriend enjoyed the Italian sun, he ordered Army Group B to march on Stalingrad with the Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus. But on November 22, the Sixth Army, with more than 250,000 soldiers, was trapped in Stalingrad by Soviet troops. Paulus capitulated in late January 1943, and ended up as a Soviet prisoner of war along with more than 110,000 soldiers. Hitler then withdrew to the Obersalzberg in spring 1943, for three months in total, through late June.98 The young secretary Traudl Humps experienced “the decampment and relocation of a massive organization in the last days of March, 1943,” and recalled: “We were supposed to arrive in Munich around noon. It was nine. I quickly got dressed and went to breakfast. People were talking about the Berghof and about Eva Braun. I was curious to meet her. She was going to get on the train in Munich and come with us to Berchtesgaden.” Humps’s future husband, Hans Hermann Junge, an SS member since 1933 and one of Hitler’s orderlies, explained to her that Eva Braun was “the mistress of the Berghof and tacitly recognized as such by all the guests.” She went on: “I needed to prepare myself for the fact that this was the Führer’s private household, that we all had to see ourselves as his guests, and that everyone would eat meals together. But all this was true for only a very small circle.”99
The mood at the Berghof was entirely different than it had been in the previous year. After the “catastrophe on the Eastern Front” as Joseph Goebbels noted, premonitions of downfall and death began to spread on the “mountain” for the first time.100 Meanwhile, Munich, too, had been bombed. Eva Braun’s house at Wasserburger Strasse and Hitler’s private residence at 16 Prinzregentenplatz were damaged. Hitler continued to present himself to others as certain of victory, but he barely ever appeared in public anymore. Even the “Führer Address” that took place every year on the anniversary of his having been named Chancellor was omitted in 1943, for the first time in ten years. Hitler was already contemplating a possible catastrophe and the “ending of his own life” that would then be necessary. Bormann, too, unsure what “turn” the war was going to take, discussed the consequences of his own possible death in a letter to his wife, Gerda. According to Hitler’s orders, Bormann wrote, the widow of a Reich minister or Reich chancellor was not permitted to keep her husband’s official residence. Thus, in the case of his own death, she would have to leave the house in Pullach immediately—their formal villa in the neighborhood of the Party elite, built in 1938. She would also need to vacate the house on the Obersalzberg, since she would have to reckon with harassment from Eva Braun.101 This letter reveals how strong the rivalry was between Braun and Bormann, and how poisoned the atmosphere in Hitler’s innermost circle must have been with suspicion and enmity.
Goebbels, on the other hand, who had proclaimed “total war” in a fanatical speech in the Berlin Sportpalast on February 18, 1943, painted a positive picture of Hitler’s girlfriend in his “Diaries.” He mentions Eva Braun there for the first time in an entry dated June 25, 1943, noting that she was “extraordinarily well read, extraordinarily clear and mature in her judgment on aesthetic questions,” and made “the best impression” on him. She would certainly be, he wrote, “a valuable support for the Führer.”102 Apparently Eva Braun’s status had risen so high that Goebbels finally could refer to her by name in the document he was preparing for posterity, after having kept silent about her existence until then. Ultimately, the Minister of Propaganda was trying to expand his own position and power in the immediate environment of the shattered leader.103 Thus his diary returned to Eva Braun again, six weeks later, in the course of recording his judgment on everyone in the Nazi elite in view of the military “crisis.”
Allied troops landed in Sicily in July 1943, and Mussolini was deposed and arrested. At almost the same time, the last army offensive on the Eastern Front, ordered by Hitler, failed.104 Now, according to Goebbels, the Nazi leader was “generally thinking about who could replace whom, if someone should fall.” In this context, Goebbels recorded Hitler’s dissatisfaction, even indignation, with Baldur von Schirach and his wife, who were said to be attending “a social gathering” in Vienna that was “anything but National Socialist.”105 In fact, the break between Hitler and the Schirachs had come in June, when Baldur von Schirach told the Nazi leader that he had to end the war. Hitler commented to his adjutant Below: “How could he imagine that? He knows as well as I do that there is no longer any way except to put a bullet in my brain.”106 Henriette von Schirach even claims in her memoir (which is, however, thoroughly self-justifying from start to finish) that she brought up the “deportation of Jewish women” from Holland during one of the evening gatherings at the Berghof; Hitler supposedly screamed, “You are being sentimental! What do you care about Jewish women in Holland!”107
The end of the decades-long and almost familial connection between Hitler and the Schirachs, however it actually came about, shows the increasing tension within the inner circle in light of the desperate course the war was taking. “The Führer, on the other hand,” Goebbels dictated on August 10, 1943, “points out most forcefully Eva Braun’s calm, intelligent, and objective way of being.” He called her “a clever girl who means a lot to the Führer,” whereas Hitler was “through with Schirach, both personally and politically.”108 What had Eva Braun actually done to earn this praise? Apparently she not only stayed loyal but also continued to act unconcerned about external events. Gerda Bormann, for example, reported from the Obersalzberg to her husband in the “Wolf’s Lair” that there were constant air raids in Munich but Eva Braun was going swimming in the Königssee with her friends.109 Apparently, in an oppressive situation where the only military task was to make “the impossible possible” Eva Braun and the carefree attitude she displayed so openly was a relief for Hitler. Just like him, she had subscribed to the motto “All or nothing,” and in so doing she impressed Goebbels as well, who indulged in expressions of undying loyalty and felt that the Nazi leader’s “closest friends” now had the duty to form “an iron phalanx” around their “Führer.”110
While thus in 1943 and 1944, power struggles were breaking out not only in Hitler’s political environment but also in his private circle, which even at the Berghof was showing its first signs of falling apart, resistance to the war was growing among the leading military and diplomatic circles. Many people understood that the war was lost, and they blamed Hitler’s political and strategic missteps for the loss. Among the general population, too, the defeat at Stalingrad marked a turning point in the popularity of the Nazi regime. The expectation that the state-run German press had fostered for years—that the war would be swift and victorious—had not been met. The aura of an invincible “Führer” had been shattered.1
The climax of this development was the assassination attempt that took place on July 20, 1944. On a hot and humid summer day, Lieutenant Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who was chief of staff to the Commander of the Replacement Army, left behind a briefcase with explosives during a briefing with Hitler in the “Wolf’s Lair” headquarters, intending to kill the Nazi leader and help end the war. The attempt failed, and Hitler survived the explosion only lightly wounded.2 Stauffenberg and three other conspirators were shot the same day, and the other two hundred or so people involved in the plot were then rounded up and hanged after a show trial at the Nazis’ so-called People’s Court in Berlin.3 A camera recorded their deaths in Berlin’s Plötzensee prison. This film, and photographs of the hanged men, were at the “Wolf’s Lair” in August 1944, but no one knows for sure whether Hitler saw them. It is an authenticated fact, however, that one man was delighted by them: SS-Obergruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison officer in the headquarters and Eva Braun’s brother-in-law.4
Fegelein had married Gretl Braun in Salzburg on June 3, 1944, with Bormann and Himmler as witnesses. The ensuing celebrations took place in Bormann’s house and in the teahouse on the Kehlstein peak—the “Eagle’s Nest”—and lasted three days, an inappropriately long time for a wedding party during the war. Eva Braun, who apparently brought her sister and Fegelein together, had arranged the party. Fegelein was a highly decorated member of the Waffen-SS and commander of the SS cavalry forces including the First SS Death’s-Head Cavalry Regiment. According to Speer, he had paid court to all of the single women at the Berghof, and rumors even circulated that he and Eva Braun had found favor with each other.5 Eva Braun remarked at the time, according to Christa Schroeder: “I want this wedding to be as beautiful as if it were my own.”6 Her own prospects of one day living with Hitler as his wife in Linz after the so-called final victory were looking slim. On the very night of June 3–4, the Allies took Rome, and on June 6 the long-expected invasion of the Continent began at Normandy.
Thus the end was conceiveable. Nonetheless, life on the Obersalzberg continued to take its “peaceful course.” Below, Speer, Brandt, and Goebbels were among the regular guests. Eva Braun showed “a series of color films” that she had shot of Hitler in earlier years at the Berghof. “I have never seen him so relaxed on film,” Goebbels remarked.7 The Minister of Propaganda praised Eva Braun’s “critical discernment” in “questions of film and theater,” and recorded: “We sit there around the fire until 2 a.m., exchanging memories, taking pleasure in the many beautiful days and weeks that we spent together. The Führer asks about people, now this one, now that one. In short, the atmosphere is like that of the good old days.”8 For more than four months—from late February until July 16, 1944, with only brief interruptions—Hitler stayed at the Berghof. It was his last time there, and he probably suspected it would be. He postponed his departure several times. There had been hints for months that an attempt on his life from his own military was looming.9
Eva Braun heard about the assassination attempt on the afternoon of July 20. She had once again left the Berghof to go swimming with her best friend Herta Schneider at Königssee, just five miles away. On the way back, a chauffeur fetched the women and told them what had happened. Schneider later told the American journalist Nerin E. Gun that Eva Braun, back at the Berghof, tried to phone Hitler at his headquarters in Rastenburg, and suffered a nervous crisis when she still could not reach him after many attempts. When she finally did get through to Hitler, she reportedly said: “I love you, may God protect you,” and cried tears of joy after hanging up the phone.10 Hitler had apparently already made plans with her at the Berghof for the eventuality of his death, given the rumors that had been circulating for some time of a possible assassination attempt. Goebbels noted after a discussion with the Nazi leader in Rastenburg on August 24, 1944, for example, that Hitler told him about premonitions he had had even before his departure from the Obersalzberg, which had weighed on him like a “nightmare,” and about having “told [Eva Braun] precisely” what she “needed to do upon his death.” She had apparently brushed aside “such admonitions,” however. Instead, she had told Hitler that “in such a case, there would be only one thing left for her, namely to seek her own death as well.”11
It must certainly have been quite clear to Eva Braun that without Hitler she would be in a weak and vulnerable position vis-à-vis her many enemies. But would this fear justify suicide? And why would Hitler, otherwise so silent about private matters, have given Goebbels this advance notice of his girlfriend’s plans? Eva Braun seems to have completely and utterly bound her life to that of Hitler, early on and quite consciously. She had already proven many times over that she was prepared to do the utmost for him. He, in turn, clearly valued this kind of attestation of loyalty, especially as he saw himself increasingly surrounded by “traitors,” and he therefore must have emphasized his appreciation of her. The whole episode makes clear that their double suicide nine months later was no accident. Hitler and Braun had already decided what roles they were to play in the last act. They may even have made arrangements for it together.
To Hitler’s close confidants, the assassination attempt came as a shock. They all knew, of course, how dependent they were on the “Führer.” But while his girlfriend sat waiting for news at the Berghof, Goebbels and Speer in Berlin helped crush the revolt. Goebbels took an active role by putting the “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” (Hitler’s Personal Bodyguard Regiment), stationed in the capital, on alert and by arranging for a special announcement to go out over the German radio: “Assassination Attempt Failed.” Speer, who had come to the Ministry of Propaganda for a meeting on the afternoon of July 20, stood at his side and offered advice.12 Still, there was not exactly rock-solid cohesion among Hitler’s henchmen in light of this threat from within, since Speer, for instance, found his name on a government list of traitors, was exposed to numerous suspicions, and feared intrigues on the part of his rivals, Goebbels and Bormann.13
In any case, the failed attack in no way inspired doubts in Hitler’s circle about the continuation of the war. The members all explicitly declared their faith in Hitler and their belief in the “final victory.” None of Hitler’s longtime companions and convinced National Socialists saw Hitler as the cause of the human suffering in Europe. Ilse Hess, for instance, had complained of the “destruction of our beautiful, beloved Munich” after the heavy bombardment of the Bavarian capital in spring 1944, and when she heard that “the Führer had stood before the rubble, deeply shaken,” she declared:
I imagine that it must have been terribly difficult for him! To wait relentlessly until eventually the one favorable and right moment comes for the last great strike—and to have to look on as one after another of the things closest to his heart is annihilated—not to mention the loss of life! But it is 1944 and we will never give up hope!14
Among the German population as well, Hitler grew more popular after the attempt on his life became known, while the subversives reaped widespread disapproval and outrage. In fact, the events of July 20 had been, to quote German historian Hans-Ulrich Thamer, a “resistance without the people.” Yet the attack left a deep mark on the Nazi leader himself. More than ever, he saw himself as a hero chosen by Providence, the only man who could save Europe from “Bolshevism.” If anything happened to him, he had told his secretary the night before the assassination attempt, there was “no one who would be able to take over as leader.”15
On the very afternoon of July 20, Christa Schroeder received orders from Hitler to send his uniform, shredded by the explosion, to Eva Braun on the Obersalzberg. The secretary—who said of herself that she “played a greater part [in Hitler’s life] than a member of the family”—recalled that Braun was supposed to save the pants, which “were in tatters and threads from top to bottom,” and the jacket, whose back was now missing “a square patch.” She also remarked that the Nazi leader was “in a way proud of this trophy.”16 In fact, Hitler was euphoric after the incident and transformed the damaged uniform, which at first sight testified to his vulnerability, into a kind of sign of victory with which he tried to emphasize his triumph over his enemies. He might have imagined presenting the uniform to the German public, after a victorious end to the war, as proof of his heroic struggle.
First, though, Hitler was showing his girlfriend that he, too, could not escape injury, but was putting his own life and body on the line like every other soldier in battle. Of course, he stayed in his bunker in the “Wolf’s Lair” as though in a fortress, surrounded by several circles of barbed wire fences monitored by the Waffen-SS.17 But he imagined himself as a warrior, a hero making sacrifices for his People, and he made sure that Eva Braun, whom he spoke about in the headquarters “almost every day,” shared his self-image.18 It is said that she “nearly fainted” when she caught sight of Hitler’s uniform.19 But the claim that Eva Braun received a love letter along with the uniform—Hitler supposedly addressed her, using an Austrian pet name, as “dear Tschapperl” in the letter, added a sketch of the barracks, and signed it with the initials A.H.—is surely a legend. Nerin E. Gun quotes this letter from memory, but its contents and provenance are highly doubtful, and it is extremely unlikely that Hitler, who in general avoided writing personal letters, would have dedicated such a personal document for his secretary to type up in precisely the days after July 20, 1944, in an atmosphere of paranoid mistrust of the people around him.20
It is true, though, that Hitler appeared in his East Prussian headquarters right after the attack in an almost giddy mood. (The explosion had killed four people and wounded eleven.) Nicolaus von Below, who took part in the briefing on July 20 and was wounded himself, observed the “lively, almost happy expression on his face” and his “increased sense of mission.”21 Traudl Junge, the secretary Hitler sought out in his bunker immediately after the explosion, recalled that he was walking “upright and ramrod straight as he hadn’t for a long time.”22 As before, the Nazi leader rejected all thoughts of capitulation. From his point of view, it must not come to another “November 1918.” Even withdrawing from occupied areas so as to deploy the troops stationed there in defense of the Reich itself was never an option for him. The complexities of the war were beyond the dictator’s grasp: for him, there was only victory or annihilation. The “downfall was a duty.”23 And so, despite the hopeless military situation—the Red Army was already at the border of the German Reich, while the Allies were making inroads on all fronts—Hitler convinced himself that “Providence” had saved him on July 20, 1944, so that he could complete his “task.”24
Such convictions aside, Hitler’s health, unstable for years, took a dramatic turn for the worse after the assassination attempt. Even during Hitler’s last stay at the Berghof, Goebbels had noticed from Eva Braun’s movies that Hitler had “gotten older and older… during the war” and now walked “all bent over.”25 His stomach complaints had gotten worse after the war started, despite a strictly vegetarian diet. He also had higher blood pressure and was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, with involuntary trembling in his arms and legs.26 Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, who as a young adjutant of the Chief of the General Staff of the Army first saw Hitler in person at a briefing on July 23, 1944, later recalled a “man of fifty-five with the posture of an old man.”27 Two months after the attack, Hitler suffered a full-blown physical collapse. Morell, his personal physician, noted in his daily calendar that “Patient A” had been feeling increasingly unwell since September 24, and was suffering from heart trouble, stomach aches, and a sore throat. “Finally,” Traudl Junge recalls, “the Führer stayed in bed one day. It was sensational news. No one had ever seen Hitler lying in bed.”28 A case of jaundice kept him on strict bed rest into mid-October; he lost a considerable amount of weight, and as a result he seemed haggard and old.29 The psychological strain increased. But since there was no way out for Hitler, and also no turning back, he devoted himself to the idea of one last great offensive in the west, despite the shortages of fuel and other supplies. He fantasized to Speer that “a single breakthrough on the western front” would “lead to collapse and panic among the Americans.”30
At around the same time, on October 26, 1944, Eva Braun drew up her will in Munich.31 What made her take this step just then? Had Hitler’s illness, combined with the visible horrors of war in the destroyed city of Munich, made her aware that the end might be near? This assumption is at least plausible, especially as Gerda Bormann told her husband about a conversation with Eva Braun on the evening of October 23 on the Obersalzberg, in which Braun was deeply concerned that Hitler, who had barely recovered, was so close to the front. The Soviet troops had reached Warsaw and East Prussia in October 1944. Both women therefore hoped that Hitler would return to the Obersalzberg, because that was where, according to Gerda Bormann, it was “safest.” Martin Bormann put a damper on their hopes, however, since he knew that Hitler would under no circumstances abandon the “Wolf’s Lair.” At the same time, Bormann admitted to his wife that “sixty or eighty kilometers” was hardly a sufficient distance; he, too, wanted “more security for the Führer,” who needed a more appropriate location to recuperate.32
Proximity to the front was not the only problem. Hitler’s illness had led to conflicts and power struggles among his attending physicians. Karl Brandt and the other accompanying physicians held Morell responsible for the “Führer’s” poor state of health. Brandt accused Morell of having tried to poison Hitler with strychnine. Brandt was unable, though, to supply proof of this charge or to shake Morell’s position of trust, and as a result he was himself accused of “treason” and dismissed as accompanying physician on October 10, 1944. Despite losing this post, Brandt, who had been named Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation only four weeks earlier, remained one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi regime.33
These squabbles and the rumors of Hitler’s possible death connected with them could not have remained a secret to Eva Braun. In fact, it is likely that either Hitler himself or Anni Brandt, or Morell, or maybe even Bormann, kept her informed. In any case, the whole situation in the faraway “Wolf’s Lair” clearly seemed threatening enough to her that she began to reckon with the possibility of Hitler’s death. In her own life, on the other hand, little on the outside had changed. She continued to shuttle between the Obersalzberg and Munich, where she worked in Heinrich Hoffmann’s art publishing house and liked the work very much.34 Since her house in Bogenhausen had suffered serious damage from air attacks, she lived at the Berghof, where materially she lacked for nothing. And yet the thirty-two-year-old woman was preparing for her death.
Her will conscientiously divided up her property—in particular the jewelry, clothes, china, furniture, cash, and paintings—among her family and friends. According to Nerin E. Gun’s list, which, he wrote, reproduced the will “verbatim,” the paintings included works by Hermann Gradl, Hugo Wilhelm Kauffmann, Theodor Bohnenberger, Oskar Mulley, Heinrich Knirr, and Fritz Halberg-Krauss,35 all members of the Munich School of genre and landscape painters, Hitler’s favorite artists. (Gradl, Mulley, and Halberg-Krauss were represented in the National Socialist “Greater German Art Exhibition” that took place in the “House of German Art” in Munich until 1944.) We can only guess how Eva Braun came into possession of original paintings by these artists—she was certainly close to the source, as a colleague of Heinrich Hoffmann, a major art buyer. Hoffmann’s art press, where she now worked, also produced and sold the official postcards of the “Greater German Art Exhibition” exhibits.36 It is also possible that most of these pictures were gifts from Hitler. He had, for example, personally sought out Hermann Gradl in his studio in 1937, and had had portraits of himself painted by Heinrich Knirr and Theodor Bohnenberger, among others. Eva Braun apparently owned one of each of these “Führer portraits,” and was herself painted by Bohnenberger as well.37 She bequeathed this latter portrait to her sister Ilse, along with the house on Wasserburger Strasse. Gretl Fegelein (née Braun) was to inherit all of Eva Braun’s home movies, photo albums, and personal letters.
Eva Braun’s will of October 1944 reveals yet again her firm decision to die with Hitler. She would presumably have ended her life in Munich if illness or a Soviet attack had killed Hitler in Rastenburg. A future without him apparently never entered her thoughts. Henriette von Schirach later recalled that during her last visit to the Obersalzberg, in the summer of 1943, she had already discussed the future with Eva Braun—the postwar future—and had suggested that Braun could “go into hiding somewhere.” According to Schirach, Braun had answered: “Do you think I would let him die alone? I will stay with him up until the last moment, I’ve thought it out exactly. No one can stop me.”38
Eva Braun had thus long since set her personal affairs in order in Munich when Hitler and his entourage left the “Wolf’s Lair” forever, on Monday, November 20, 1944, at 3:15 p.m., and traveled by special train to the capital, arriving at 5:20 a.m. on November 21.1 Only a few days earlier, he had categorically refused to change his headquarters—Nicolaus von Below recalls that he personally heard Hitler say the war was lost and he would remain in East Prussia. But Martin Bormann succeeded in changing Hitler’s mind.2 In fact, Hitler was not yet ready to die. The day after his arrival in Berlin, he underwent an operation on his vocal cords—as he had back in 1935—to remove what Goebbels called “an insignificant lump.” On the day of the operation, November 22, Eva Braun arrived at the Chancellery. Theodor Morell noted briefly in his daily calendar: “E.B. arrived. I left later.”3
Once again, Eva Braun stayed with Hitler in the rooms on the second floor of the Old Chancellery. Hitler was not allowed to speak after the operation, and during the daily briefings he could make himself understood only “by writing on slips of paper.”4 A “Führer bunker” had been specially built in the garden behind this building in late September, 1944, about 25 feet underground. It measured just 2,150 square feet and had fifteen rooms, including a living room and bedroom for Eva Braun.5 For the time being, Hitler and Braun descended into the cramped, damp, and poorly ventilated bunker only during air raids.
The surviving record nowhere mentions when Eva Braun left Berlin again. The secretaries seem not even to have known she was there. However, they had “not been face to face [with Hitler] for three days” after the operation, as Traudl Junge wrote later, and they had no information about whether he was staying in a hospital or in the Chancellery.6 In all probability, Eva Braun left after only a few days, and had long since returned to Munich when Hitler, on the evening of December 10, left Berlin for the “Eagle’s Eyrie” headquarters in Ziegenberg, near the Hessian city of Bad Nauheim.
A week later, the Ardennes Offensive began, with which Hitler intended to take Antwerp and turn the tide of the war. General Heinrich Eberbach—who was interned with other high-ranking German prisoners of war in the British special camp of Trent Park, where British Intelligence eavesdropped on and recorded all of their conversations with each other without their knowledge—commented on Hitler’s decision to wage one last offensive: “It’s not his last. The man never stops fooling himself. When he’s standing at the base of the gallows, he’ll still fool himself that he won’t be strung up on it.”7 And in fact “Operation Autumn Fog” failed after only ten days. There was no chance it would succeed, and Hitler himself probably didn’t believe it would. Late at night in the bunker, Nicolaus von Below recalled, Hitler told him that he knew the war was lost, and what he wanted most was to “put a bullet in his brain right now.”8 But he didn’t do it. Not yet.
Instead, Hitler returned to Berlin on January 16, 1945. Eva Braun, too, accompanied this time by her pregnant sister Gretl, traveled from Munich to the capital two days later. Both women traveled in the care of Martin Bormann, who had stayed at the Berghof for a few days. Together with his wife, Gerda, and an SS officer, they arrived in Berlin by “special car” on the afternoon of January 19.9 There is thus no truth to the idea that Eva Braun came to Berlin “unexpectedly and against Hitler’s orders,” as Julius Schaub later claimed.10 She was apparently counting on an even earlier reunion, since even before Christmas she had asked Hitler many times to spend the holidays at the Berghof. Hitler told his secretary that “mainly it’s Gretl behind that, she wants her Hermann there with her.”11 As he could not fulfill his girlfriend’s and her sister’s wishes, he had both women come to Berlin as soon as he was back there. Adjutant Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven later wrote in his memoir that he was surprised to see “two elegantly dressed young women with their hair freshly done” coming down the hall of the Chancellery, while he and the other officers were waiting there for the briefing with Hitler to start.12
If we believe Goebbels’s account, Eva Braun had already decided at that point not to leave Berlin again. The Minister of Propaganda wrote, under the date of February 1, 1945:
I explain to the Führer that my wife is determined to stay in Berlin, too, and even refuses to let our children leave. The Führer doesn’t think this standpoint is the right one, but finds it admirable. He says that Miss Eva Braun has the same view. She also does not want to leave Berlin, especially in this critical hour. The Führer finds words of the deepest recognition and admiration for her. And this is certainly what she deserves.13
The small circle of those who linked their fates to Hitler’s to the bitter end was thus beginning to form, in the face of the ever-approaching enemy armies. Bormann, who had been Hitler’s “shadow” since the start of the war—constantly near him and controlling all access to him to a greater and greater extent—was not, however, among them. True, he did emphasize in a letter to his wife that both of their fortunes and fates were tied to that of the “Führer.” At no point, though, did he intend to bring his family to Berlin.14
Meanwhile, the Soviet offensive against the German Reich—the attack on Berlin—had started, on January 12, 1945. By the end of the month, the German troops in East Prussia were cut off from the Reich. The Red Army encircled Königsberg and had pushed ahead into Pomerania. Large swaths of the East Prussian population fled their homes. The first battalions under General Georgy Zhukov, Commander of the First Belorussian Front, were already at Frankfurt an der Oder, about fifty-five miles from Berlin.15 While the situation was thus coming to a head, Eva Braun celebrated her thirty-third birthday in the capital, on the night of February 5–6, 1945. By then, she and Hitler were spending their nights in the air-raid bunker.16 Alongside Hitler’s “last apartment” in the bunker—two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom—a bedroom had also been set up for Eva Braun, which she equipped with her furniture from the Chancellery.17 They retreated to the bunker more and more often by day as well. Two days earlier, on the morning of February 3, 1945, more than nine hundred American airplanes had attacked Berlin and badly damaged the center of the city, near Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Strasse, with high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Fires raged everywhere, the government district on Wilhelmstrasse was destroyed, the Old Reich Chancellery was partly reduced to rubble, traffic was at a standstill, and the trains and streetcars no longer ran. Berlin was in ruins. Well over 100,000 people were made homeless and, according to official statistics, 2,895 had died in the air attack, which lasted barely an hour.18 Goebbels, seeking out Hitler in his bunker one afternoon shortly thereafter, remarked that “access to the Führer” was “totally blocked with mountains of rubble.” It was “practically like the chaos of the trenches trying to find the path to him.”19
In these circumstances, the birthday celebration on the night of February 5 must have been an eerie and ghoulish affair. The small party took place in Eva Braun’s living room on the second floor of the Old Reich Chancellery, which had survived the air raid unharmed while the rooms in the “Führer apartment” had been gutted by fire.20 Hitler thus now took his midday meals with his girlfriend and the secretaries in the “adjutant wing” of the Old Chancellery, which had likewise survived intact—eating “with the curtains drawn and electric lights,” as Christa Schroeder later recalled—and the military briefings were moved to the monumental workroom in the New Chancellery. Only Eva Braun joined him for dinners.21 Martin Bormann wrote to his wife, who had already returned to Bavaria on January 27 and was back on the Obersalzberg, about the birthday party, that the few guests had included Hitler; Eva Braun’s sister Gretl and Gretl’s husband, Hermann Fegelein; and Karl and Anni Brandt.22
Apparently, Brandt, despite having been fired from his position as Hitler’s personal physician, had in no way fallen entirely into disfavor and been expelled from Hitler’s innermost circle, as his biographer Ulf Schmidt claims.23 But the longtime close friend’s days were numbered. On April 16, Hitler had Brandt arrested by SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, the man responsible for carrying out Himmler’s orders to send people to concentration camps. The charge was high treason. Brandt had dared to give Hitler an honest report of the catastrophic situation in the Reich regarding medical supplies, and was also accused of having sent his wife and child to Thuringia, already occupied by U.S. troops, so that they and he could defect to the Americans.24 The following day, Hitler summarily court-martialed him, with Goebbels presiding, and Brandt was sentenced to death. He was to be shot on the morning of April 19. But it never happened—the execution was repeatedly postponed and, in the terrible chaos at the end, was never carried out.25 Hitler’s notion that he was surrounded by traitors who were responsible for the impending defeat thus ended up reaching all the way into his closest circle.
In this regard, Eva Braun was by no means a calming influence on Hitler, as her few statements in the surviving correspondence show. In the case of Karl Brandt, for example, she did not intervene in his favor but rather described his behavior, in a letter to her friend Herta Schneider, as “a real foul trick.”26 In other words, Eva Braun, now in Hitler’s innermost trusted circle along with Bormann and Goebbels, only reinforced his delusions. She also seems to have stirred up Hitler’s suspicions against people whom she herself did not like; even Albert Speer was now in her sights. When, as Speer wrote later, she asked him in Hitler’s name “where my family was,” he lied to her and said that they were staying “in the vicinity of Berlin.” As a result, Hitler wanted to make sure “that we too [Speer and his family] would go to Obersalzberg when he retreated there.”27 Martin Bormann likewise wrote to his wife on February 6 that Eva Braun had been in a good mood at her birthday party but had criticized various (apparently absent) people with a brusqueness unusual for her.28 Was Eva Braun now, in the middle of her downfall, lashing out at her former enemies for belittling her role as Hitler’s mistress? We will never know, especially since Bormann expressed himself in only vague terms and was, of course, deeply suspicious of her.
After three weeks in Berlin, on the evening of February 9, 1945, Eva Braun and her sister left the destroyed city. Bormann, on Hitler’s orders, took care of the women’s return trip to Munich.29 Braun had sat up until six in the morning with Hitler, Speer, Bormann, and the architect Hermann Giesler;30 presumably, they viewed the gigantic model of Linz after its planned renovations that Giesler’s associates had set up that night in one of the basement rooms of the New Reich Chancellery. Giesler later said that, exhausted, he had presented the model to Hitler and his companions “from the angle that his ‘City on the Danube’ would have been seen at from his retirement residence.” In the following days, Hitler returned again and again to this basement room with the architect and other visitors, including the head of the security police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had himself lived in Linz in the late 1920s as a lawyer and was frequently taking part in the briefings. The photographer Walter Frentz’s images show a greatly aged Hitler, standing bent over or sitting in a chair and apparently totally withdrawn from the world, staring at this figment of his imagination.31 Instead of ending the war that had long since been lost, he apparently continued to talk about how the Oder front could be held, and still dreamed of making Linz the most beautiful city in Europe. Speer told his American interrogators in Kransberg, half a year later, that by then Hitler “had left his life behind and descended into an imaginary world that knew no bounds.”32
On March 7, 1945, Eva Braun returned to Berlin for good. She had already said goodbye to her family and friends in Munich. Only four weeks had passed since her previous visit. Her arrival was not in the least unexpected, as was claimed after the war.33 Hitler himself had told Goebbels and Bormann that she intended to stay with him in Berlin; Bormann wrote to his wife only a week after Braun’s departure for Munich that Hitler had told him Eva Braun wanted to come back to Berlin as soon as possible, but Hitler had told her to stay in Munich for now.34 Her decision to experience the end with Hitler—if need be, to die with him, wherever that might be—had been made long before. It is unclear, though, whether she traveled to Berlin in early March against Hitler’s will or whether they had agreed upon it first. Julius Schaub later said that she came “from Munich by airplane in early March.” “She had asked whether she could come,” he said, “but Herr Hitler had refused. In spite of that, she appeared one day and then lived in the small room next to his.”35 Bormann, in contrast, wrote that she had arrived one night in a “diplomatic car.”36
Not only the circumstances of Eva Braun’s arrival in Berlin but also her motive for returning to a capital city in flames have unleashed much speculation since her death. Henriette von Schirach wrote, with unconcealed distaste, that Braun wanted to die with Hitler to finally be able “to stand with him for all to see.” So she had to “force her way into Hitler’s death.”37 Speer, too, wrote in his Inside the Third Reich that when she arrived in Berlin “in the first half of the month of April,” “everyone in the bunker knew why she had come”: she was “figuratively and in reality… a messenger of death.”38 But how did he know? As the organizer of the total war effort, he was traveling most of the time between the various armament facilities throughout Germany as well as to the front lines being pushed farther and farther into the Reich. Thus he went, Below noted, “very much his own way during the last three months.” Moreover, Speer could rarely gather firsthand information about the mood in Hitler’s bunker as he met only occasionally with Hitler then, either there or in the Chancellery. Eva Braun, on the other hand, could have hardly been a “messenger of death” in the bunker since the plan was still, through mid-April, for Hitler to retreat to the Obersalzberg and lead the “final struggle” he had sworn to fight from his Alpine fortress.39
On the same day that Eva Braun left Bavaria, March 7, American troops advancing from the west succeeded in taking the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine intact, and thus established their first bridgehead on the right bank of the Rhine. Soviet tanks were in Pomerania, directly in front of the city of Kolberg on the Baltic. Even so, Hitler continued to radiate optimism among his followers. He was still playing for time, since he knew perfectly well that there would be no life for him after the defeat. In one way or another, death was awaiting him. Without the slightest regard for the millionfold suffering of others, he extended his own life and dramatized the war in his mind as a life-or-death battle for the existence of the German People. A counteroffensive launched in Hungary on March 6 was once again supposed to halt the Red Army’s advance. The production of new weapons, a “miracle weapon” he pinned his hopes on, and internal disagreement in the coalition between the Soviets, the Americans, and the Britons could still bring about a sudden and complete change in the overall course of the war—or so he told himself and those in his circle.40 At the same time, in his so-called Nero Order of March 19, 1945, he ordered the destruction of every “military transport, news, industrial, and supply facility as well as material of any value within the borders of the Reich” that might fall into the enemy’s hands “in the foreseeable future.” He intended to leave a “scorched earth” behind him, to weaken the “enemy’s strike power.” But Speer, who had already declared the war lost in a memo to Hitler, prevented the order from being carried out. By that point, even Himmler—whom Hitler had named Supreme Commander of the Army Group Vistula in January and who was thus responsible, in Hitler’s eyes, for the loss of Pomerania—and Ribbentrop as well, had secretly tried to establish contact with the Western powers via Sweden.41
While his closest followers were thus slowly drawing away, Hitler continued to receive daily briefings about the military situation in the oppressively close quarters of the workroom in the bunker. The briefings began long after midnight and lasted until 6 a.m., and at the “morning teas” that followed—and took up another two hours—Hitler was, according to Christa Schroeder, “almost constantly on edge” and talked “only about dog training, questions of diet, and how bad and stupid the world is.”42 Eva Braun, on the other hand, remained strangely calm in this tense situation, while the bunker constantly shook under air attacks, lights flickering when bombs hit. Even in March, she occasionally escaped the depressing atmosphere underground to her apartment in the Old Reich Chancellery, where she threw small parties with the young secretaries. “And so, while Hitler was in meetings,” Christa Schroeder later wrote, “we played records in her apartment, drank a glass of champagne, and now and then managed a dance with the off-duty officers.”43
A month later, even this was apparently no longer possible. On April 19, Eva Braun wrote to her friend Herta Schneider that they could “already [hear] the artillery fire on the eastern front” and that she “unfortunately” was “ordered to stand ready at every alarm, in case of flooding,” though she would be spending the rest of her life “only in the bunker” in any case.44 The orders came from Hitler personally, who was afraid a bomb hit could break open the bunker and let groundwater come in. Whenever a report of enemy planes came over the radio, Hitler now shaved and dressed in all correctness so as to be able to leave his room immediately when the air raid started.45 Eva Braun seems not to have shared his fear of flooding. Rather, her letter of April 19 gives a carefree, even confident impression. “The secretaries and I are practicing with the pistol every day,” she writes, adding that she was “very happy to be near him, especially now.” She admits that she was constantly being told to save herself at the Berghof, but “up till now I’ve always won.”46 How should we understand these statements? Are they consoling words for the person closest to her, while she kept her real thoughts and feelings to herself? Or had she accomplished her goal in life—to be with Hitler—so that she did not need to pay attention to threats from without? It is difficult to answer these questions from a distance. But it does seem to be the case that she was absolutely at peace about everything, and had arrived where she always wanted to be. Further evidence is provided by the fact that, according to Nicolaus von Below—actually, according to everyone who saw her then—Eva Braun continued “to always take care of herself” in the bunker, to “dress carefully and impeccably,” act “as accommodating and gracious as ever,” and show “not the slightest sign of weakness right up to the final hour.”47 She also seemed to expect from Hitler that he play his part perfectly to the very end. In fact, her conduct helped him rigidly cling to his insane confidence in victory, and reinforced the delusion that he would still “beat back the Russians and liberate Berlin.” She permitted him no weakness and reprimanded him even for slight negligence, such as a fleck of dirt on his uniform. “You can’t copy Old Fritz in everything and run around as unappetizingly as he did,” Braun would say, referring to Hitler’s worshipping of Friedrich the Great, to whom he often compared himself—and Eva Braun would do so even in the presence of Goebbels, Bormann, army Adjutant-General Wilhelm Burgdorf, and the secretaries.48
On the night of April 20, 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and into the morning hours, another party took place in Eva Braun’s rooms in the Old Chancellery. Hitler had withdrawn to his bedroom in the bunker, after accepting since midnight the congratulations of his staff, the military, and leading Nazi politicians including Goebbels, Himmler, Göring, Ribbentrop, and Speer. Many of them had advised Hitler to leave Berlin as quickly as possible and go to the Obersalzberg, because all efforts to halt the Soviet advance had failed. In fact, the first Soviet units reached the southern edge of Berlin that night, April 20–21. The attack on the city center was imminent.49 The henchmen were thus ready to scatter; they had long since prepared their departures. Even Hitler now seemed undecided whether or not to leave Berlin, according to his adjutant Below. In the briefing on the afternoon of April 20, he had said, according to Speer: “I shall leave it to fate whether I die in the capital or fly to Obersalzberg at the last moment!”50 And that same day, he had sent his two oldest secretaries to southern Germany, saying that he would need them later and would “follow them in a few days.”51 Erich Kempka, Hitler’s driver of many years who supervised the fleet of cars belonging to the Reich Chancellery (forty cars and sixty drivers), then received orders to bring several cars to carry the secretaries and others to various Berlin airports.52
Some of those who remained joined Eva Braun and Hitler once more for a glass of champagne in his workroom in the bunker: von Below, Schaub, Heinz Lorenz (adjutant to the Reich Press Chief), the secretaries Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge, and Hitler’s dietitian, Constanze Manziarly. But the group broke up before long, since Hitler, as Traudl Junge recalled, was quiet and when asked had replied that he could not leave Berlin, he had to “bring about the decision here—or die!” Then, while the young secretary was shocked by this confession, Eva Braun threw her last little improvised party in the Old Chancellery. It is unclear who was there besides Traudl Junge, Bormann, and Morell. According to Junge, Braun had brought along “anyone she came across.” Boisterously, in a “desperate frenzy,” they drank champagne, laughed, danced to an old hit record from 1929—Junge quotes the line “Blood-red roses caress you all over”—and tried to forget the fear of the end that was fast approaching.53
The next morning, the center of Berlin was under fire from Soviet artillery. Ribbentrop, who until that point had not been allowed in to any meeting with Hitler, apparently pushed once again for Hitler to retreat from the capital in a conversation with Eva Braun.54 Traudl Junge reports in her memoir that Braun told her about a “discussion” with Ribbentrop, who told her that she was “the only one who could get the Führer to leave”; she should tell him that she wanted to “leave Berlin with him.” Eva Braun answered: “I will not speak a word of your suggestion to the Führer. He has to decide alone. If he thinks it is right to stay in Berlin, then I will stay with him. If he leaves, I will, too.”55 In fact, Hitler was hardly responsive to anything anymore. Unhinged to the end, he wanted to keep fighting, and ordered in all seriousness another counterattack, with a hastily thrown-together panzer corps under the command of SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner. Hitler screamed and threatened the air force chief of staff Karl Koller that they had to “deploy every man,” and that anyone who kept forces in reserve had “forfeited his life within five hours.”56 He was so beside himself that he did not even let Morell approach him that night, because he was afraid that Morell would sedate him so that he could be taken out of Berlin against his will. The doctor had to leave the bunker and was sent back to the Berghof with Eva Braun’s jewelry the following day.57
The next day, April 22, saw Hitler’s complete psychological breakdown, after he learned in the afternoon briefing that Steiner’s counterattack had not taken place. Those present sat through a violent half-hour outburst of rage in which Hitler was especially worked up about the military’s “years-long betrayal.” He then sank into a chair and said that the war was lost. They should all leave Berlin, but he would stay. That was his “irrevocable decision.”58 He ordered Eva Braun, too, and the hurriedly summoned secretaries, to leave the bunker immediately and evacuate by plane to southern Germany, but Eva Braun, as Traudl Junge recalled, spoke to him as to a “child” and promised to stay, at which point Hitler, in front of the people present, kissed her “on the mouth” while the officers stood outside the conference room “and waited to be dismissed.”59 None of the young secretaries dared to leave. Then Hitler summoned Schaub and ordered him to destroy all his personal files. “Everything must be burned immediately,” he ordered, “everything… there is in my steel cabinets. Here in Berlin, in Munich, in Berchtesgaden, you have to destroy everything… do you hear?… everything, everything!” “Not a scrap” must be allowed “to fall into enemy hands.”60
Hitler had clearly decided to end his life. Eva Braun wrote a rushed letter to her friend Herta that same day, April 22, surrounded by the six Goebbels children, who had just moved into the bunker with their parents, saying that these “are the very last lines and therefore the last sign of life from me.” The end was “drawing dangerously near.” She could not describe how much she was “suffering personally on the Führer’s account”; he had “lost faith.” She went on: “Regards to all the friends. I shall die as I lived. It’s no burden. You know that.”61 Eva Braun still seemed unsure about how seriously Hitler’s intentions were, though, since she added in closing that Herta should keep the letter “until you hear of our fate.”
In fact, Hitler postponed his death once again. With the support of Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, he now pinned his hopes on the Twelfth Army under General Walther Wenck at the Elbe, which was to march to Berlin from Magdeburg and “fight the Reich Capital free again.”62 In a letter from Eva Braun to her sister Gretl from April 23, 1945, it says: “There is still hope. But obviously we won’t let ourselves be taken alive.” She had just now “spoken to the Führer” and believed that “the future looked brighter today than it did yesterday” to him, too. Still, she was putting a few last affairs in order, instructing her sister to burn her entire private and business correspondence immediately, except for Hitler’s letters, and to pay any outstanding bills.63 It turned out, of course, that Wenck’s assignment could not be carried out. On April 25, the Soviet army completed its encirclement of Berlin.64
Meanwhile, Albert Speer, presumably driven by feelings of guilt, had returned to the bunker one last time, on April 23. No one can say with certainty what he and Hitler talked about during their last meeting—no one else was there. In Inside the Third Reich, Speer writes that he wanted to “see” Hitler once more and “tell him good-bye.”65 Around midnight, clearly unable to tear himself away from Hitler, Speer sat up for hours with Eva Braun in her small room in the bunker. She revealed, Speer said later, “an almost gay serenity,” offered him champagne and sweets, and said: “You know, it was good that you came back once more. The Führer had assumed you would be working against him. But your visit has proved the opposite to him.”66 Even more than Hitler, Braun now seemed to demand loyalty until death from Hitler’s closest companions, and seemed not to understand why one after another was vanishing and trying to save his or her own life. Looking back, Traudl Junge described Eva Braun’s behavior as a “loyalty complex.”67 Speer, in contrast, obviously admired her for this attitude: during his interrogation in Kransberg a few months later, he said that “Hitler had always emphasized, with resignation, that he had only one person who would stay true to him in the decisive moment, true to the end: Eva Braun. We refused to believe him, but his feelings did not betray him here.”68
It must therefore have come as no surprise to Speer when he later learned that Hitler and Braun had married before taking their lives together in the bunker. On the Obersalzberg, though, where Eva Braun’s mother, sisters, and friend Herta Schneider had brought themselves to safety and where Hitler’s staff who had fled Berlin after April 20 were gathered, no one suspected anything about the upcoming wedding. At first, the people there, including Morell and the photographer Walter Frentz, hoped that Hitler and Eva Braun would be arriving shortly.69 Only when Julius Schaub appeared at the Berghof on April 25, a day after it had been badly hit by bombers, to destroy the contents of Hitler’s safe, must it have become clear to everyone that Hitler would not be coming and that the end was near. In fact, according to Gretl Fegelein in September 1945, terrible mistrust prevailed when Schaub arrived at the residence, drunk and accompanied by his girlfriend. Christa Schroeder recalls that he burned “letters, files, memos, and books” on the Berghof terrace “without saying a word.”70
Meanwhile, the “Führer bunker” in Berlin was now under uninterrupted fire and Hitler was handing out poison capsules. These came originally from Himmler and were supplied by Himmler’s former personal physician SS-Obersturmbahnführer Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger, the only doctor who remained in the bunker. Nicolaus von Below reported that he himself was given an “ampule of potassium cyanide” by Hitler in person, on April 27.71 Hitler had distributed the poison to the women days before. In fact, as a later forensic examination proved, the poison was not potassium cyanide but hydrocyanic acid, a “liquid clear as water” which caused death within seconds and left a scent like that of bitter almonds on the person’s clothes and in the room.72 The conversations over nightly tea in Hitler’s living room now turned on only one topic: the best way to die. “I want to be a beautiful corpse, I will take poison,” Eva Braun supposedly said on one such occasion. Hitler, on the other hand, told the women that he would shoot himself in the head and then have the body burned.73 It was an atmosphere of hysteria, according to Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven, who, as the adjutant of General Hans Krebs, whom Hitler had named as his personal adviser, was stationed at his side in the bunker. The inhabitants of the bunker mostly stood around in the halls, Eva Braun often with Magda Goebbels, smoking and talking. Their psychological state continued to swing wildly between hope and despair. Many numbed their fear with alcohol, of which there was plenty on hand from the Reich Chancellery.74
The mood hit bottom on April 28, when the Reuters news agency broadcast a report from London that reached Hitler: Himmler had offered an unconditional surrender to America and England. Talks had already begun months before between Himmler and the vice president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte, in which Himmler had agreed to the release of twenty thousand prisoners from the German concentration camps. Now the Reichsführer-SS and Interior Minister, even if late in the day, was trying to use his contact with Bernadotte to somehow negotiate a way to save his life in the postwar period to come.75 The fact is that—like Göring, Speer, Ribbentrop, and Bormann, too, for that matter—Himmler in no way saw his life as over after the fall of the “Third Reich.” And so, with Hitler’s swift death in view, he met with Bernadotte in the Swedish embassy in Lübeck on the night of April 23 and offered to surrender to the Western powers. He, and the Germans as a whole, Himmler emphasized, would never surrender to the “Bolshevists” no matter what happened. But American President Harry S. Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused a partial surrender, and informed both Stalin and the world media of what had happened.76
Hitler exploded with rage that Himmler of all people, one of his most faithful followers, had betrayed him. Since his liaison officer and protégé Hermann Fegelein was also nowhere to be found, Hitler ordered an SS commando to look for him. Eva Braun had apparently looked into her brother-in-law’s whereabouts days before—she wrote to her sister on April 23: “Hermann isn’t here with us! He has left for Nauen to set up a battalion or something. I am absolutely sure that you will see him again. He will make it through safely, to maybe carry on the resistance in Bavaria at least for a while.”77 But obviously Hermann Fegelein was no longer willing to fight—he was ready to get out. Traudl Junge said that Eva Braun, “disappointed and shaken,” had told her about a call from Fegelein in which, even before Hitler ordered a search for him, he encouraged her to abandon “the Führer” if she was unable to “get him out of Berlin.” It really was now “a matter of life and death.”78 Gretl Fegelein revealed to an American secret agent after the war that she had heard from her father-in-law that Hermann Fegelein had called his father shortly before the fall of Berlin and explained that he would be coming to Fischhorn the next day. But he never arrived.79 Instead, he was apprehended in his private apartment in Berlin, wearing civilian clothes, and was taken to the Reich Chancellery, interrogated, and shot for desertion on April 28.80 At the same time, the Soviet troops were advancing unstoppably toward the center of the city. Hitler and Eva Braun made the final preparations for their double suicide.
Their decision to get married at the very end of their life together was made that same day. There has been a great deal of speculation about their reasons, but the fact is that none of the people who left the bunker alive and survived the war knew about the decision in advance, or heard anything firsthand about Hitler’s and Braun’s personal motives. Other than the witnesses, Goebbels and Bormann, only Traudl Junge and Nicolaus von Below knew about the upcoming ceremony. Hitler, at around ten thirty at night, had dictated to her his private and political testament.81 There it says:
Since I did not believe it would be responsible to found a marriage during the years of struggle, I have now decided, before the termination of this worldly career, to take as my wife the woman who, after many long years of loyal friendship, came to the already almost besieged city of her own free will in order to share her fate with mine. It is my wish that she go with me into death as my wife. Death will replace for us what my work in the service of my People has robbed from us…. I and my wife choose death, to avoid the shame of flight or surrender.82
We cannot conclude anything about the actual state of Hitler’s feelings from this statement about his decision to marry. The phrasing is ambiguous and remains mysterious. The ceremony itself took place on the night of April 28–29. Besides the bride and groom, the only people present were Goebbels, Bormann, and a hastily summoned registrar, Walter Wagner.83 Afterward, there was a brief champagne reception in Hitler’s living room, where others took part, including Magda Goebbels, General Wilhelm Burgdorf, General Krebs, Below, Gerda Christian, Constanze Manziarly, and Artur Axmann, the fanatical National Youth Leader who had moved into the bunker on April 23. They all made an effort, according to Below, “to think happily about the old days.” It was a “rather ghostly occasion.”84
On the afternoon of April 29, Hitler had his favorite German shepherd, Blondi, poisoned. The dog collapsed immediately and was dead on the spot. The Berchtesgaden district court later concluded that “the poison was tested out on the dog with a view to Eva Hitler’s death by poison, which had already been decided on.”85 By now there was no longer a telephone connection between the bunker and the outside world. On April 30, the Soviet army reached the Reichstag grounds.86 Soviet soldiers were expected to force their way into the “Führer bunker” at any moment. That afternoon, between three and four o’clock, Hitler and Eva Braun died by their own hands. While she bit into a cyanide capsule and died before his eyes, he took a poison capsule into his mouth and simultaneously shot himself in the right temple.87 Their bodies were then taken out to the Chancellery garden, doused in gasoline, and set on fire. The remains were buried that evening in a bomb crater in the garden.
Countless legends sprang up after the death of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. One reason for this is the fact that the direct witnesses to the burning of the bodies who survived the inferno in Berlin gave contradictory statements later about the exact circumstances of the double suicide. Another reason is that the Soviet Union concealed from its Western allies and the rest of the world, for years, the fact that Soviet troops had found the bodies of Hitler, Braun, and the Goebbels family in early May. Instead of passing the information along, Joseph Stalin, in a conversation with the American special envoy Harry Hopkins on May 26, 1945, spread the rumor that Hitler and Bormann were still alive and hidden abroad, possibly in Japan. It was known to Soviet intelligence, Stalin claimed, “that the Germans had three or four large submarines that traveled back and forth between Japan and Germany.” He had “ordered Soviet reconnaissance to locate these submarines, but for now they had not been found.” Stalin was trying to exploit the death of Hitler and his wife to suggest to the Western powers that their common struggle was not yet over and had to be continued in the war against Japan. He clearly struck a nerve with the Americans, as Hopkins’s reply reveals: he immediately told Stalin, according to the notes of the translator, Vladimir Nikolayevich Pavlov, that “Hitler absolutely must be found and put to death.”1
Even at the Potsdam Conference, which took place from July 17 to August 2, 1945, in Cecilienhof Palace, Stalin flatly denied to Truman and Churchill knowing anything about Hitler’s whereabouts.2 The Americans were working to shed light on the matter by having everyone who had been close to Hitler questioned by their secret service, including Eva Braun’s family and friends. But an undercover agent—apparently disguised as a member of the SS—who tracked down Gretl Braun and Herta Schneider on the evening of September 23, 1945, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, learned hardly anything from them about the fate of Eva Braun and Hitler. Gretl Braun only repeated various rumors, and finally explained that she did not think it was impossible that Hitler, her sister, and Hermann Fegelein had left Berlin at the last moment.3
None of them suspected that the charred remains of Hitler and Eva Braun had been in the Soviets’ hands for months. The Red Army had learned of Hitler’s suicide as early as April 30, from General Krebs, Hitler’s closest military adviser at the end, and had immediately informed Stalin.4 Additional members of Hitler’s staff and employees of the Reich Chancellery were quickly discovered among the prisoners of war and questioned about Hitler’s final days. Soviet officers scoured Hitler’s air-raid bunker under the garden of the Chancellery, where they found the dead bodies of the six Goebbels children. They discovered the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels in front of the bunker entrance on May 2, and Hitler’s and Braun’s bodies on May 5. A few days later, an autopsy was performed in the Russian Surgical Army Field Hospital #496 in Berlin-Buch, on the orders of the Soviet secret service, SMERSH counterpropaganda division, and eventually, in February 1946, the bodies were buried at a military site in Magdeburg.5
In the West, on the other hand, countless rumors and speculations circulated for years about the Nazi leader’s whereabouts. An anonymous letter sent to the American general Dwight D. Eisenhower on November 22, 1948, for example, said that Hitler was living under a false name, together with Eva Braun and Martin Bormann, as the owner of a café in Amsterdam. The U.S. secret service took all such reports extremely seriously and investigated them thoroughly.6 Former members of Hitler’s staff, including Erich Kempka, were also arrested and questioned in the Western occupation zones directly after the end of the war, and they reported Hitler’s death and the burning of the bodies, but there was no material evidence to prove these claims.
In 1952, the district court in Berchtesgaden launched “legal proceedings to establish the death and time of death of Adolf Hitler.” During the course of the investigation, “all persons still living from Hitler’s environment in the last days in Berlin”—forty-two witnesses in total—were interrogated.7 Among them were his valet, Heinz Linge, and his personal adjutant, Otto Günsche, who had just returned from being Soviet prisoners of war; Harri Mengershausen, a former detective in the Reichssicherheitsdienst (the German secret police); and Käthe Heusermann, who was the last person to work at the dental clinic in the Reich Chancellery and was the assistant to Hitler’s dentist in Berlin, Prof. Dr. Hugo Blaschke.8 In its final report on August 1, 1956, the court concluded that there was “neither concrete evidence” nor any “finding of fact arising” immediately after the “event in the vicinity of the deed,” but “merely the statements of numerous persons.” Nonetheless, since Hitler’s personal dentist, Dr. Blaschke, and his assistant Heusermann “had been shown Adolf Hitler’s complete lower jaw and bridge of the upper jaw as well as the artificial bridge from Eva Braun’s lower jaw by Russian officers, repeatedly and in various places,” and since both Blaschke and Heusermann had “recognized them as coming from Adolf and Eva Hitler without any doubt,” “decisive proof” for the identification had been supplied from the Russian side.9 Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were therefore officially declared dead in West Germany, in 1956 and 1957 respectively. Thirteen years later, on April 5, 1970, the KGB burned their remains again and scattered their ashes in a river near Magdeburg, in what was then East Germany.10