What She Ate

by Laura Shapiro

  Eleanor was never a lyrical or evocative writer, but now and then she tried to be, and one such passage appears in a “My Day” column she wrote early in 1936. She had spent a weekend in the country, probably at Val-Kill, with some of her women friends; and in the column she described a long Sunday walk and then a quiet, lazy afternoon by the fire with books and knitting. The maid had gone home, so when suppertime came, she wrote, “We all became very busy housewives” and set to work in the kitchen. “My opportunities to satisfy a craving, natural to nearly all women, are rather rare,” she explained; hence she did not try to turn herself into a cook that evening. But she wrote that she enjoyed making salads and setting a pretty table, and that was how she contributed to the meal—tossing the salad and putting out the pewter, the silver, and the blue-and-white china. “There is something healing and life giving in the mere atmosphere surrounding a country house,” she concluded.

  What was life-giving, in this simple party, was the presence of people she loved. This was the context that allowed her to share “a craving natural to nearly all women” and to handle food and homemaking with pleasure. At Cornell she had discovered that domesticity had a brain; here, in the beloved, safe home that was entirely hers, she was learning that it had a heart. Outside the confines of the White House, she experienced moments so abundant with love that she was inspired to feed people from her own hands. One of her most intimate friends was a former state trooper named Earl Miller, who had been her bodyguard when FDR was governor of New York. She and Earl became very close—some, including her son James, believed they were lovers—and although Earl had a number of women in his life, he and Eleanor remained devoted throughout the White House years and after. Once, in the mid-1930s, she and her ever-present secretary, Malvina (“Tommy”) Thompson, spent ten days helping Earl settle into a new house near Albany. “I did the ironing . . . & made popovers which came out well & so feel very satisfied with myself,” Eleanor wrote to a friend. Another day she reported—so shyly that she had to be self-effacing about it—“I’ve actually learned to get breakfast if no one eats anything.” And a day later, almost wonderingly, “It’s the first time I’ve ever learned to feel a tinge of confidence in a kitchen.” On another visit she baked biscuits for Earl, and she made him an applesauce cake.

  Clearly Eleanor had the ability to unleash her senses in the kitchen and at the table—but it wasn’t going to happen inside the four walls of the White House. “On the whole, I think I lived those years very impersonally,” she wrote in her second memoir, This I Remember, which was published four years after FDR’s death. “It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the President’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.” It was “the President’s wife” who took charge of White House cuisine, and “the President’s wife” who allowed Mrs. Nesbitt to strip the food of character and pound it into submission. But it was Eleanor, away from FDR and ensconced with the people she cherished, who discovered the delights of appetite; and it was Eleanor, “deep down inside myself,” who learned what food could mean when love did the cooking.

  Eva Braun

  (1912–1945)

  “How about a bottle of champagne for our farewell? And some sweets? I’m sure you haven’t eaten in a long time.”

  —Eva Braun to Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich

  On April 23, 1945, Berlin was rubble and the streets were littered with corpses. Allied bombing had nearly ceased after hundreds of raids, but Soviet artillery fire was intense and the Red Army was starting to encircle the city. Cars, trucks, vans, and motorcycles poured out of Berlin, blocking traffic for miles. That morning Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s favorite architect and his wartime minister of armaments, was trying to reach the city from Bad Wilsnack, some seventy miles away, but found he couldn’t get anywhere near Berlin by car. He turned off and headed toward an airport in Mecklenburg, where he arranged to be flown the rest of the way, escorted by fighter planes. He wanted to say good-bye to Hitler.

  The bunker where Hitler was hiding out had been built under the Reich Chancellery more than thirty feet belowground, a warren of rank little rooms wrapped in concrete under a roof some sixteen feet thick, with another six feet of earth atop the concrete. Speer arrived late in the afternoon and spent the next eight hours there as the Third Reich gasped and spluttered toward its end. Hitler was stooped and shaking, his eyes empty. He held a brief situation conference with the remnants of his entourage, but the battle reports from outside were too vague to give them anything to discuss. All he cared about by that time was keeping himself out of Soviet hands, lest the enemy make a public spectacle of his humiliation. He was determined to kill himself before that could happen. Around midnight he went to his bedroom to lie down, and Eva Braun, his longtime mistress, sent word that she would like to see Speer.

  Nobody close to Speer, or at least none of the women, could understand how he had become such good friends with Eva. “I could never imagine what they found to talk about,” recalled Annemarie Kempf, who worked for Speer throughout his years with Hitler. Speer was a man of education and culture; Eva was a charming lightweight who surrounded herself with pretty things and doted on her two Highland terriers. “She was of course very feminine,” Speer told his biographer many years later. “A man’s woman, incredibly undemanding for herself.” Eva had been living in the bunker for nine days, in private quarters adjoining Hitler’s, and was planning to die with him. Speer was struck by how untroubled she seemed, in contrast to the grim, nerve-racked state of everyone else in the bunker. She greeted Speer in full hostess mode.

  Eva Braun radiated an almost gay serenity. “How about a bottle of champagne for our farewell? And some sweets? I’m sure you haven’t eaten in a long time.” I was touched by her concern; she was the first person to think that I might be hungry after my many hours in the bunker. The orderly brought a bottle of Moët et Chandon, cake, and sweets.

  They went on to discuss mutual friends, the skiing they both enjoyed, and their fondness for Munich, Eva’s hometown. It was a celebration, an homage to gracious living, staged flawlessly in the face of Eva’s expected suicide and whatever awaited Speer at the hands of the Allies. More so than his farewell to Hitler, this interlude with Eva touched Speer deeply at the time and for the rest of his life. He described it with tenderness in his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, and returned to the subject years later talking with his biographer. “Oh that girl . . . ,” he reflected. “She wished me luck and sent greetings to my wife. It was extraordinary. Don’t you think it was extraordinary?” He saw nothing unsettling about toasting twelve years of terror, blood, and devastation with a bottle of plundered wine. And evidently, after his long stint underground without a bite to eat, he welcomed the cake.

  Eva Braun with Hitler in the teahouse at Berchtesgaden, 1940.

  • • •

  If every life has a food story, every war has a thousand of them; and the one that has most powerfully defined the Third Reich is its saga of starvation. From the outset, Hitler was determined to avoid the drastic food shortages that swept Germany during World War I, making defeat seem inevitable to an exhausted and despairing population. Hence the Nazis waged war with the intent of forcing conquered nations to feed Germany, not only in the imagined future but immediately. As each nation fell and then struggled under occupation, its grains, fats, and meats were shipped off to Germany, ultimately amounting to nearly half of what the country consumed during the war. Meanwhile the invading army scooped up whatever could be bought or stolen from farms, shops, and restaurants, sending parcels of food back to their families and lugging more with them when they went home on leave. “The Führer repeatedly said, and I repeat after him, if anyone has to go hungry, it shall not be the Germans but other peoples,” Hermann Göring announced in 1942. Local populations were left to fend for themselves in what remained of their shops and
fields. Malnutrition and its attendant diseases were widespread in western Europe; famine killed thousands of Greeks; and across the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, civilians and prisoners of war were starved as a matter of policy. Within Germany, many of the handicapped and mentally ill—“useless mouths,” as they were termed by the Nazis—were deliberately underfed until they wasted away. When rationing was introduced in 1939, it included a separate category for Jews, who were allowed to buy so little food that hunger tore away at many even before they were deported. Images of concentration camp prisoners, skeletal on an allotment of filthy soup and scraps of bread, have become the enduring symbols of that era.

  But there were also people who ate very well in Nazi Germany, finding at the table all the convivial warmth that has long hallowed the act of dining. At those same concentration camps, for instance, food for staff and visitors was abundant. “I’m sitting down for lunch of lentil soup with bacon, omelette for dessert,” wrote Friedrich Mennecke to his wife on his first day of work at Ravensbrück, the camp near Berlin that had been built especially for women. Mennecke, a food lover who kept his wife up to date on his meals when he was away from home, was a doctor; his job was to watch hundreds of naked prisoners walk by in procession, most of them Jews, prostitutes, the sick, and the mentally ill. Following this “examination,” he filled out the forms that sent each to her death. “I feel wonderful,” he told his wife one evening after a dinner featuring three different kinds of sausage. “Take more heartfelt kisslets from your lordling and embrace your faithful Fritz-Pa.”

  This image of plenty constitutes another Third Reich food story: eating and drinking with pleasure at the Nazi table. And it’s where we find the food story peculiar to Eva Braun. Although she never joined the Nazi Party and paid scant attention to it until she fell in love with its rising star in 1929, she spent the 1930s and the war years sitting with Hitler and his entourage at countless lunches and dinners. In this setting the familiar domestic rituals of mealtime created a miraculous aura so true to itself and nothing else that Reich officials, their families, and their guests were able to dine at ease in their own charmed space. Food creates community, as we read again and again in culinary history and memoir, and when high-ranking Nazis gathered for a meal, they feasted on the rightness of their cause. Eva, whose place was always next to Hitler, was a mainstay of his domestic life, especially at the Berghof, the mountain retreat in Bavaria that was his favorite place on earth. Whatever Eva learned about Hitler, she kept to herself; whatever they discussed in private, she never reported; whatever she knew about the atrocities he was masterminding had no effect on her devotion. As any sort of influential player in the workings of Nazi Germany, she counted for little. But as a woman—a man’s woman, as Speer noted fondly—she was able to generate a guilt-free zone in the heart of Hitlerdom that the squadrons killing children in his name had reason to envy. Passive, faithful, and decorative, Eva’s version of femininity came naturally to her, and it functioned to keep her conscience well protected. She lived through the Third Reich encased in a sphere of make-believe morality, a comfortable bubble that held firm until the moment of her death. At the Berghof’s well-laden dining table, where Hitler’s cronies and their wives assembled regularly, she ate very little. She took care to maintain a slim figure. Appearances were paramount.

  • • •

  In a three-part New Yorker profile that ran in 1936, the magazine’s longtime European correspondent Janet Flanner confidently described Hitler as “celibate.” Neither his friends nor his enemies, she wrote, could produce evidence of any love affairs, past or present. This was exactly how Hitler and his image makers wanted him to be perceived. Here was a leader who had given himself to the nation and now stood at its helm in solitary grandeur—no wife, no children, and certainly no smiling mistress twenty-three years his junior. For this reason Eva did not go out in public with Hitler, or greet his foreign visitors, or dine at his side on official occasions. When he received important guests at the Berghof, she had to stay upstairs in her private quarters. There was no danger of unwanted publicity in the German press, which had been stifled since the Nazi takeover in 1933. Abroad, however, occasional rumors slipped through the veil of propaganda. In November 1939, Life published several photographs of Hitler, including one with “Evi Braun,” who was identified as a girlfriend but a platonic one. And a month later The Saturday Evening Post, relying on “sources inside Germany which we have always found dependable,” reported that Hitler and “Evi” were secretly married. (Evi, according to the Post, was often seen in the Chancellery kitchen preparing salads, potato dumplings, and apple strudel.)

  This notion of Hitler’s secret hausfrau busily at work on potato dumplings tells us more about how the American press categorized women in the 1930s than about Eva herself, who probably never made a potato dumpling in her life and most certainly did not eat them. (As we’ll see, she was a committed dieter.) Yet Eva’s relationship with food did have something in common with the Post’s invented version of it. The magazine was trying to figure out how best to characterize this unlikely female as the leading lady of the Reich, and that was Eva’s project as well. It wasn’t easy: she had chosen a fantasy that demanded constant buttressing, and she, too, called on food—including champagne and sweets in the face of catastrophe—to help sustain it.

  Fantasy was a great comfort to Eva, so much so that it’s often difficult to glimpse her through the dreams of glory she assiduously piled up around herself—the glamorous wardrobe she assembled, the reels of home movies full of Bavarian merrymaking. She’s not the only woman in this book whose life changed course after she fell in love, but she’s the only one who made sure her life would never change course again. Nothing existed for her outside the context of her devotion to Hitler and the epic romance she constructed around the two of them. That’s where we must look for her food story, and to a very great extent it will be Hitler’s story, too. There was no Eva without him.

  One of the photographs Life had obtained was a picture of Hitler, stern-faced in a trench coat, with the Bavarian Alps behind him. It had been taken by Eva herself. “Obviously not good photography,” the caption noted, implying that only the picture’s news value merited its placement on Life’s famous pages. Eva would have been irritated by such a dismissal. She had been an enthusiastic amateur photographer since she was thirteen; it was one of her few interests apart from sports and dancing. When she left school at seventeen, the first place she looked for work was a Munich photography studio called Photo Hoffmann, where Heinrich Hoffmann gave her a job as his general assistant. Hoffmann, an avid Nazi who had joined the party shortly after it was founded, was often busy with his most important client, a well-known but secretive politician who kept close control over his public image. In the studio Hoffmann referred to him as “Herr Wolf.” According to Eva’s mother, who told this story to an American interviewer in 1948, Eva was standing on a ladder one day, retrieving something from a high shelf, when Herr Wolf came into the studio. She took no notice of him until Hoffmann called her to come down from the ladder and run out to get beer and Leberkäse, a Bavarian sausage, for his guest. When she returned, she placed a mug of beer and the sausage in front of Herr Wolf, and the two of them glanced at each other over the food. The client was forty, with blue eyes and a scrubby mustache; Eva was a pretty teenager. She said politely, “Guten Appetit.” They were the first words she ever spoke to Hitler. Then she blushed.

  At the time Franziska Braun gave this account, three years after the war, the Brauns were in the midst of a court battle against the author of a salacious book purporting to be Eva’s newly discovered diary. The court eventually ruled in their favor, finding that the author had plagiarized most of his text from the 1913 memoirs of a Viennese countess and invented the remainder. But the book was generating a great deal of lurid press coverage, and the Brauns were more bitterly sensitive than ever about the family’s reputation. Meanwhile they had been tap
ped for questioning by Judge Michael Musmanno, who was leading an American investigation into Hitler’s death and the possibility that he might still be alive. Dozens of Hitler’s former associates were being interviewed, and a member of Musmanno’s team had gone to see the Brauns at home, where they seemed to welcome the chance to . . . if not exactly right the record, then tilt it in a slightly more favorable direction. The interviewer described them as quite voluble, especially after the whiskey and wine that accompanied his visit. Franziska, who seemed eager to tell the story of Eva’s initial encounter with Hitler, insisted that her version was the only accurate one of the many that had circulated. It came directly from a witness, she said, someone working for Hoffmann “who volunteered to testify in behalf of Eva if he were ever needed.” Perhaps it was the blush that made this particular story so important to Eva’s mother. Her daughter was the innocent here, not the temptress, and Hoffmann had thrown her directly in the path of the aptly named Herr Wolf.

  “We come from a decent bourgeois family,” Eva’s father emphasized in the same interview. Fritz Braun said he had been a teacher in a Munich technical school, with no interest in Hitler or the Nazis—“I disliked politics and my wife did too”—when Eva suddenly began turning on the radio and listening to Hitler’s speeches. “We thought it was just a flapper’s admiration, the same as all women liked him and fell for him,” Fritz said. Asked when he and Franziska had learned about the relationship, Fritz turned the question over to his wife.