What She Ate

by Laura Shapiro

  “That was in 1933, shortly after the seizure of power,” Franziska said. The Brauns had taken a day trip by car to Berchtesgaden, the charming Bavarian village that was a popular sightseeing destination; and on this occasion Franziska suggested they drive on up into the Alps to Obersalzberg, where the new chancellor had a house, for a look at the place everyone was talking about. “I was very much disappointed, for it was just a small house, nothing like later,” she recalled. “All the people were standing in front, shouting ‘We want to see our Fuehrer, we want to see our Fuehrer.’ Well, I didn’t want to see him, so I said we want to drive back.” On the way back to Munich they made their usual stop for coffee at an inn called the Lambacher Hof, famous for its cakes and Bavarian atmosphere. “When we had got out of our car, a big car drove up [and] out jumps our daughter Eva,” Franziska said. “I rubbed my eyes, I thought I had not seen right. I went up to her and said: ‘Eva, you? What are you doing in this car?’ And my husband came up too and said to her very strictly: ‘Where have you come from, what does this mean?’ She [said] very roughly and flippantly, ‘I come from the Berghof.’” With that, she swept into the café and disappeared into a room reserved for Hitler.

  Then another car drove up, and Hitler himself got out. “I suddenly knew why Eva had talked such a lot about the Fuehrer, why she always urged us to believe in him,” said Franziska. She and Fritz were now desperate to leave, but an adjutant was summoning them—“The Braun parents, please”—and they understood they had no choice. They went inside the café. Hitler put Franziska in the seat next to him and kept up an amiable stream of chitchat about the cakes and the beauty of the scenery. Nobody mentioned his relationship with Eva, but when Hitler spoke to her using “du”—the intimate form of “you”—Franziska knew they were a couple. At the end of this excruciating social hour, Eva left with the entourage and didn’t say good-bye. When she turned up at home later that night, her father demanded, “Is it true that you are the Fuehrer’s mistress?” and she retorted, “What of it? If you don’t like it I’ll leave altogether.”

  But she couldn’t leave home; she couldn’t afford to. She made only a small salary at Hoffmann’s. So the family went on together with its awkward secret, the parents mortified that she was anybody’s mistress, let alone Hitler’s. Eva had never been close to her older sister, Ilse, who worked for a Jewish doctor until 1937. But the younger sister, Gretl, who looked up to Eva, decided to become a follower of Hitler herself and began hovering at the radio, listening eagerly to his speeches.

  Forgeries notwithstanding, Eva did keep diaries, and a few pages from one of them survives. Written during this period, it was obtained by the U.S. government after the war and is now in the National Archives. She started writing on her twenty-third birthday, February 6, 1935, and continued sporadically until May 28, when the last entry ends in the middle of a page. Unlike most of what we know about Eva, this is rare information that comes directly from her and opens a tiny but genuine window onto her mind and heart. What the handwritten pages reveal, disconcertingly, is not a young woman of twenty-three, but a lovelorn teenager, with all the narcissism and melodrama endemic to that age, as if she had stopped moving ahead in her life the moment she met Hitler and simply burrowed deeper and deeper into her obsession with him. Why, oh why didn’t he come over on her birthday? And where was her present? Flowers didn’t count; he should have given her a puppy or at least some nice jewelry. How could he stay away, on this of all days? A week and a half later he dropped by, and she was delirious—“I am so infinitely happy that he loves me so and pray that it will always be like this”—but a couple of weeks later he skipped a promised date and she was “mortally unhappy” again. She started wishing she were “seriously ill,” for maybe he would pay attention to her if she were. “Why doesn’t something happen to me? Why do I have to suffer like this?” That spring Hitler was setting up the German air force and building a submarine fleet, both initiatives in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, and in the fall he issued the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of the rights of citizenship. Eva found such preoccupations bothersome and couldn’t understand why they took up so much of his time. “Agreed that he’s been busy with political problems but have not things eased off? And how about last year when he had lots of worries with Röhm and with Italy and still found time for me?” She might have been complaining about a boyfriend who spent too much time at soccer practice.

  In May, Eva learned from Hoffmann’s wife that Hitler could be interested in someone else—the six-foot British debutante Unity Valkyrie Mitford, who was living in Munich and was passionately devoted to him and to the Nazi Party. (Her middle name had been suggested by her grandfather, a friend of Wagner’s.) “Her name is WALKURE and she looks it, including her legs,” Eva wrote irritably. She didn’t really believe Hitler had fallen for Mitford, but he had barely spoken a word to Eva in three months and she was in despair. On May 28 she sent him a “decisive” letter and vowed that if he didn’t respond that evening, she would take an overdose of sleeping pills.

  It would be her second attempt at suicide, both of them perhaps cries for help, certainly cries for attention. Three years earlier, in the autumn of 1932, Hitler was flying from city to city delivering as many speeches as he could cram into a day, whipping up support for the Nazis in preparation for the general elections to be held on November 6. Eva spent the time moping and wishing he would call. On the evening of November 1, when Hitler had just spoken in four different venues and was preparing for yet another big speech the next day, she took her father’s wartime pistol and shot herself, aiming for the jugular or perhaps not, but at any rate missing it. Ilse found her and summoned help, Hitler hastily showed up with flowers, and Eva seems to have counted the event a success.

  Now it was 1935 and they were three years deeper into their relationship, but nothing of substance had changed. “The weather is gorgeous, and I, the mistress of Germany’s and the world’s greatest man, have to sit at home and look at it through the window.” She settled on twenty pills rather than the thirty-five she had originally planned, and fell into a coma, but once again she survived thanks to another rescue on Ilse’s part. This time the outcome was far more satisfactory: by the end of the year Hitler had installed her in a house of her own. At last she was independent, or at least no longer dependent on the parents who so deeply disapproved of her; and the teenage angst started to drop away. What’s more, she now had monogrammed linen, direct phone lines to Berlin and the Berghof, art on the walls (courtesy of German museums), a well-stocked wine cellar, and a maid. Gretl lived there with her, and nearby was the flat where “the world’s greatest man” stayed when he was in Munich. Real life, or as close as she would ever come to it, had begun.

  • • •

  Much as she relished her Munich house, Eva’s most important home was the Berghof, in effect her primary residence starting in the mid-1930s. Hitler could show up at almost any time, and when he did, he would settle in for as long as possible. Atop the mountain, his all-powerful private secretary, Martin Bormann, had organized the destruction of the idyllic village of Obersalzberg in order to create a sprawling Nazi headquarters complete with SS barracks, guardhouses, air-raid shelters, staff housing, guesthouses, a garage, and a hotel for visiting dignitaries, as well as a big house for the Führer. Eva’s job was to live there and wait for him. The Berghof was the place where Eva could most easily don her favorite role: Hitler’s beloved consort, the enchanting woman on his arm, the lady of the house. This fantasy didn’t always run smoothly, since she had to be hustled out of sight whenever anybody arrived who wasn’t supposed to know about her—she was furious when she wasn’t allowed to meet the Duke and Duchess of Windsor—but it was a workable version of a shared domestic life, and she made the most of it.

  All morning she looked forward to lunch, the main meal of the day and the high point of official social life at the Berghof. Hitler never saw anyone but aides
and associates before that time, and guests invited to lunch often waited for hours while his meetings went on and on. Eva, who was known to change clothes up to seven times a day, was always beautifully dressed for this protracted meal. It was a chance for her to enjoy her status as hostess, if not precisely in public, then at least surrounded by company. Ten or twenty people were usually at the table, including Hitler’s staff and other officials, sometimes their wives, and sometimes one or two of Eva’s women friends, who visited regularly. Her parents, too, came to stay from time to time—they had grown accustomed to her situation and could see the advantages. Fritz had been advised to join the Nazi Party, which he did, and Eva brought her mother along on shopping trips to Italy. Her sister Gretl was such a frequent guest that she ended up marrying an SS general in a splashy Obersalzberg wedding. Even Ilse was allowed to visit, once she had quit her job in the Jewish doctor’s office.

  Albert Speer, who had a house and studio not far from the Berghof, attended countless meals there. In his second volume of memoirs, drafted in Spandau Prison while he was serving a twenty-year sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity, he described the ritual gathering for drinks that typically preceded a summer lunch.

  On the terrace we would stand around informally while the ladies stretched out on the wicker reclining chairs with cushions covered in red-and-white gingham. The ladies sunned themselves as if they were at some spa, for being tanned was the fashion. Liveried attendants, select SS men from Sepp Dietrich’s Bodyguard Regiment, with perfect manners that seemed a shade too intimate, handed around drinks: champagne, vermouth and soda, or fruit juices. Sooner or later Hitler’s valet would appear and report that the Führer would join us in ten minutes. . . . At the news of Hitler’s imminent arrival, the buzz of conversation becomes more muted, the bursts of laughter cease. The women drop murmurs as they continue chatting about clothes and traveling. . . . Hitler appears in civilian dress, in a well-tailored suit that is somewhat too loud. His tie is not well chosen. Weeks ago Eva Braun several times proposed that she pick out suitable ties from his collection, but he ignored the offers. . . . His slight paunch gives his whole appearance a portly, comfortable cast.

  Hitler greets each of the guests with friendly words and asks about everyone’s children, personal plans, and circumstances. From the moment of his entrance the scene has changed. Everyone is tense, visibly trying to make a good impression. . . .

  Another half-hour passes before we are asked to table. Hitler leads the way alone, Bormann following with Eva Braun.

  Everyone had an assigned place at the long table. Eva always sat on Hitler’s left, and the others looked for their names, written on the paper envelopes that held the napkins at each place. The china was Rosenthal, “a hand-painted flower pattern on a white background,” wrote Traudl Junge in her memoir, Until the Final Hour. Junge, a secretary who went to work for Hitler in 1942 when she was twenty-two, never forgot the first lunch she had at the Berghof, in part because all morning she had been dreading the food. Hitler’s vegetarian diet was notorious, and she was afraid the company would have to eat linseed mush along with him. To her relief, Hitler received a special tray with his meal on it, and the food that arrived for everyone else was comfortably recognizable. “Two orderlies brought large dishes of various salads for each side of the table and began serving down both sides from the middle. Two others asked what we would like to drink. The salad seemed to be a kind of starter, because everyone began eating it at once. But then the next course appeared too: braised beef marinated in vinegar and herbs, with creamed potatoes and young beans.” This, of course, was sauerbraten, a traditional pot roast popular everywhere in Germany.

  Speer’s wife, Margarete, who was often invited with her husband, once wrote down her memories of the Berghof for her grandchildren and described an ambience so pleasant and easygoing it’s possible to forget that this was a table full of Nazis, which perhaps was her intention. She called the food “nothing extravagant” but noted that it was always prepared well. “They never talked politics,” she added. “They talked theater, opera, they liked talking about famous actors, singers.” Once, according to Hitler’s closest aide, Heinz Linge, an argument broke out at the table about the best way to make Bavarian meatballs. The Führer urged all the ladies to go right into the kitchen and prepare their own versions so that the men could compare them. Soon the table was laden with meatballs, some of them rolling about haphazardly; unfortunately Linge did not record the winner.

  The group spent about an hour at the table and then set out for a walk down through the meadows to a teahouse that had been built about twenty minutes from the main house, on a high bluff with a sweeping view across the valley toward Salzburg. Junge said the teahouse looked like a silo from the outside, but inside there was a large round room with marble walls and oversize windows looking out on the dazzling vista. Heavy armchairs were set around an enormous coffee table, and the guests were served coffee or tea. “Hitler himself would have apple-peel tea or sometimes caraway tea, never anything else,” she wrote. “He ate freshly baked apple-cake with it and perhaps a couple of biscuits. The rest of us were given pastries bought in Berchtesgaden, and some of them could be stale and hard to chew.” Junge rarely had a complaint about the way she was housed or fed, so the pastries on at least some afternoons must have been poor indeed. Meanwhile people were trying to converse, but it was difficult to keep a general discussion going except in voices loud enough to carry across the room, and once Hitler dropped off to sleep, as he usually did, nobody wanted to shout. When he woke up, the party was allowed to disperse. By then it was close to six p.m.

  • • •

  At the time Junge began participating in these all-afternoon lunches, wartime rationing had been in force for three years and the nation had been pursuing the goal of self-sufficiency in food for nearly a decade. When the Nazis seized power, they pushed industry and rearmament to the center of the economy, a shift of resources that demanded major reductions in spending on food imports. But foreign countries supplied a great deal of what appeared on the German table, both directly—coffee, bananas, oranges—and indirectly, such as the fodder that was essential for Germany’s meat and dairy industries. Meanwhile the emphasis on building up industry and the military meant that the rate of unemployment was dropping, leaving in its wake a more affluent population ready to spend money on these very foods. Throughout the 1930s, and especially after 1936, when Hitler announced the Four-Year Plan that would prepare Germany for war, the Nazis directed torrents of propaganda at homemakers in an effort to turn back the culinary tide and overhaul the nation’s eating habits. The Nazi ideal was an all-German diet in the service of Aryan vigor, a regimen based on the whole grains, fruits, and vegetables that could be obtained locally. No foreign fruits, small portions of meat, little butter, no cream, ersatz coffee, and inventive ways with potato skins were among the principles of the patriotic kitchen. White bread, long preferred in Germany as elsewhere, was to be shunned in favor of rye and whole-grain loaves, for wheat was scarce and rye was plentiful. Hence Vollkornbrot, or wholemeal bread, a dark loaf heavy with bran, became an important icon of the Reich. Quark, a soft, fresh cheese made from curdled milk, had been known in Germany for centuries, but it was given a starring role and massive publicity as the spread that could take the place of butter. Perhaps the most ardently promoted emblem of culinary nationalism was Eintopf-Sonntage, or “stew Sundays,” a custom instituted by the Nazis in 1933 and retained through the 1930s and the war years. On the first Sunday of the month, from October through March, dinner at home or in a restaurant was supposed to consist of a simple stew made from inexpensive, all-German ingredients. The money thus saved was to be donated to a fund for the unemployed, and party members called on their neighbors personally to collect the coins.

  Hitler’s kitchen dutifully observed Eintopf-Sonntage—Speer remarked that guests were notably fewer on those Sundays—but otherwise the house
hold seems to have ignored many of the restrictions imposed on the rest of the country. When local residents swarmed across Obersalzberg after the war to explore what remained of the Berghof and other Nazi dwellings, they found underground bunkers stocked with massive supplies of sugar, tinned butter, coffee beans, champagne, cognac—enough to make it clear that Hitler and his circle were not skimping in wartime or any other time. And indeed, according to Junge’s memoir and other accounts, meat (including the sauerbraten she never forgot) was served regularly, imported oranges were available, cakes and puddings were abundant despite the sugar and fats rations, and the breakfast table offered white bread, demonized though it was. (Junge noted that it was supposed to be reserved for guests with “delicate stomachs” who couldn’t digest the Vollkornbrot.) A pat of butter appeared on every breakfast plate, and Junge made no mention of being served quark. Most luxurious of all, especially during the war, was a regular supply of fresh produce, available year-round. Bormann had set up what he intended to be a model farm, with cattle, pigs, an aviary, a cider mill, crops, and orchards. The idea was to demonstrate the most efficient methods of agriculture and animal husbandry, but despite his claims of being an expert agronomist, the farm produced very little. Heinz Linge remembered Hitler caustically remarking that the cost of producing a liter of milk on the farm was approximately twenty times what they would have paid to have it delivered from a local dairy. Even the orchard did so poorly that if they wanted to use the cider mill, they had to buy apples locally. But the greenhouses ran very well, and wherever Hitler happened to be dining—Berlin, Munich, or Obersalzberg—there was never a shortage of fresh flowers or vegetables. “Here on the Berghof in March the whole party was enjoying young cucumbers, radishes, mushrooms, tomatoes, and fresh green lettuce,” Junge marveled.