All over Paris, the shops emptied. “The Germans who are there have money in their pockets for the first time in twenty-two years and can buy French luxuries the like of which some of the younger Germans have never laid eyes on since they were born,” wrote Janet Flanner. Official policy permitted, in fact encouraged, members of the army to mail generous gifts to their families and to stuff their bags and pockets with as much as they could carry when they went home on leave. For many Germans, this sudden abundance of silk stockings, watches, jewelry, furs, and perfume, as well as coffee, tinned butter, cognac, and other foods, made the war years quite a bit more livable, at least on a sporadic basis. Others sold the booty on the black market or traded packages of expensive lingerie for a little fresh fruit. But for those with ready cash, it was easy to buy wine. “Every little bureaucrat in the capital could produce at dinner a fine, fat bottle of the best French champagne,” wrote Howard K. Smith, who reported from Berlin until the end of 1941.
Other memoirs of wartime Berlin make it clear that while food supplies were erratic and often skimpy, champagne was everywhere. Marie Vassiltchikov, working at the Reich Broadcasting Corporation and then at the Foreign Ministry, ate yogurt and porridge for dinner on many days. But when she had friends over, they brought champagne. There was wine on the table for a birthday party even when the only food she could offer was fried potatoes and bread. At a guesthouse south of Berlin, while she and her family were waiting for their rooms, they ate tuna sandwiches she had “wisely” packed for the trip, “washed down with a jeroboam of champagne.” On Easter Sunday 1944, she decided to try to eat out in Berlin with friends. “After a fist fight with some brute who burst into the telephone booth and tried to push me out, I rang up Loremarie,” she wrote. With their friend Tony they went to the Hotel Eden, which had been heavily bombed, and used the service entrance “as the front is still non-existent.” To her delight they were able to have an excellent lunch—“radishes with butter and delicious venison schnitzels (unrationed)”—and plenty to drink. “We first had cocktails, then several wines, then champagne, topping it off with a bottle of Tony’s brandy.” Another young woman who spent the war years in Berlin, Marianne Feuersenger, worked for the Reich’s military historian and later published Mein Kriegstagebuch (My War Diary). In late 1943, she wrote, she began commuting to nearby Potsdam after a bombing raid destroyed their office. When she arrived on the first day she found only “empty rooms” and “empty tables”—and her boss, welcoming everyone with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Then he realized they had no proper champagne glasses and was so disappointed he lost his temper. At that point one of her colleagues remarked that perhaps they would all look back someday and remember how good they had it, drinking champagne from water glasses.
Among the highest-ranking Nazis, sumptuous living had been the rule since 1933, and wartime conditions made no difference. The leaders, wrote Speer, “all needed big houses, hunting lodges, estates and palaces, many servants, a rich table, and a select wine cellar.” Joseph Goebbels, as head of propaganda, had been trying for years to promote an image of the Nazi leadership as men of modest living standards and forbade the publication of photographs showing them relaxing at tables amid the remains of splendid feasts. But few of these men were interested in restraint, and decrees issued by Hitler in 1942 and 1943 urging more seemly behavior on the part of the leadership had no effect. Hitler himself took more care, once ordering the window shades lowered in his private train after it pulled into a station alongside a freight train packed with hungry, wretched soldiers from the front lines. He didn’t want them to see inside his dining car and glimpse the china, the silver, the flowers, and the abundant food. In December 1942, when some 280,000 men of the German Sixth Army were surrounded in Stalingrad under desperate conditions, he refused to allow surrender, but in a flourish of solidarity he announced that there would be no more champagne or cognac served at his eastern front headquarters. A few weeks later the wine was flowing again, and it was still flowing when the Sixth Army surrendered in February, after 165,000 men had been killed, frozen, or starved to death.
Champagne was the world’s reigning symbol of high-class gaiety, and nothing that was under way in Germany or the nations in its grip was going to break the bubbles. For Eva, who was looking forward to starring in a movie about herself when the war was over—Hitler had promised—life itself was tantamount to a glass of champagne. She luxuriated in her perfumes and silver brushes, her handmade Italian shoes, the fresh flowers in her room every day, the scores of dresses and evening gowns in her closet. Still, people who were interviewed about her after the war regularly described her as sweet and nice. “She had a very natural and pleasant manner, while her charm and graceful figure enchanted us all,” reported Heinz Linge. (Her mother remarked that Eva could be “rather strict,” but only when she had to instruct the maids.) This pleasant demeanor came easily to her—she had an extraordinarily cosseted existence—but what’s striking is that it seems to have been indestructible. Even during the long, sometimes lonely days at the Berghof, she found plenty to occupy her attention thanks to the two motivating passions of her life. The first, of course, was her devotion to Hitler. And the second, which took up far more time, was an unwavering dedication to her figure.
She dressed it, she photographed it, she displayed it, and she took care to maintain it by persistent dieting and frequent exercise. Eva was determined not to become one of the curvaceous Bavarian damsels that Hitler half-jokingly praised in her presence, though she enjoyed going about in the traditional costume—puffed sleeves, vest, dirndl, long white stockings, and apron. But that was only one of her numerous outfits. Changing her clothes as frequently as possible in honor of a social schedule that was often imaginary, she kept track of her wardrobe by means of a meticulously detailed filing system. “She opened a file on every single dress, every coat, noting where it was bought, what the price was and including a sketch of the garment as well as a comment on shoes, purse, jewelry that were worn with it,” wrote Henrietta von Schirach, daughter of Heinrich Hoffmann and wife of the Nazi official in charge of Vienna. One of Eva’s favorite ways to give herself a treat was to dress up in something chic and pose for a formal portrait photograph, which she would present to Hitler. She spent so much money on clothes that before she killed herself she asked her sister to destroy the bills from the dressmaker, lest they be made public and give her a bad reputation.
This rigorous attention to self-presentation tells us, even more explicitly than the diary does, how she met the psychic demands of the life she had chosen. She did it by keeping her gaze fixed on the surface of things. In this respect she was lucky that her education had been skimpy and her imagination fueled chiefly by popular culture. All she brought with her when she moved into Hitler’s orbit was a fondness for fashion and movies. She would have loved to be included in his official social life, but only because she longed to show herself off to the world beautifully gowned and on Hitler’s arm. The rest of his job didn’t interest her, and she had no trouble maintaining a cocoon around herself, bland and incurious, that resisted any challenges to her equanimity. She didn’t read newspapers or listen to the radio; and if people began discussing politics in her presence, she shushed them by putting a finger across her lips.
Eva’s focus on appearances was also literal: she owned a Rolleiflex and a movie camera and used them regularly. Dozens of her photograph albums survived the war, as did eight reels of her home movies. Clearly other people were behind the camera at times, since she herself was often included in the picture; hence the imagery offers a look both at her world and at the way she preferred to live in it. She was enraptured by her own social life: again and again we see the leading Nazis and their wives gathered on the terrace at the Berghof, with a uniformed waiter bringing in the apple cake. Hitler greets people with stiff courtesy; clusters of men confer over documents; children run about with delight or sit obediently in a grown-up’s embrace, having
their pictures taken. There are picnics, weddings, elaborate tea parties for children. And everywhere, it seems, there’s Eva, charmingly dressed and always performing. She’s intent on making us see what a good time she’s having. She cuddles a dog, then a rabbit. In a stylish dress with a dotted skirt and tightly fitted contrasting bodice, she sits in a chair, leaning eagerly toward the camera, and smiles. She stretches out on the wall of the terrace in a bathing suit, enjoying the chance to bask in the sun and the camera’s attention. On a secluded shore of the Königssee, the picturesque lake that was a short drive from the Berghof, she’s again in a bathing suit and displays a backbend, or stands precariously on one leg while lifting the other as high as she can, or dangles from a tree branch, trying to hoist herself over. She and Speer’s wife, both in Bavarian dresses, gather wildflowers in a field. In loose pants and a fitted jacket, she goes ice-skating and briefly holds an arabesque. Occasionally her women friends get together by themselves—one day they’re in Eva’s sitting room, drinking champagne, and on another day they’re drinking wine on a pretty patio in the Mosel wine district. And of course, there are many photos of Hitler. He was at the Berghof in most of them, but she included one that captured him in a reverent moment at the Reichstag. He was standing with his arm out in the Nazi salute, eyes cast upward as the national anthem played—a scene she found so affecting that she annotated it with a caption: “Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles, Über Alles in der Welt!”
Eva didn’t pay much attention to the threat of war, apart from its potential to complicate her romantic life. Her response to the Anschluss—Germany’s takeover of Austria—was to arrange a quick trip to Vienna to surprise Hitler on the day of his triumphant speech at the Heldenplatz. Surprising him turned out to be a bad idea; he was furious at this unexpected arrival of a woman he wanted kept out of sight, even though she had carefully checked into a different hotel. Otherwise, however, Eva’s indifference to world events and political issues suited him perfectly. He believed women should be kept as far as possible from such matters, and throughout the war he forbade any talk of deportations, killing campaigns, and other atrocities when women were present.
Eva was generally quite good at representing the sweet and sunny side of life, but as the war went on she worried more and more—not about Germany or herself, but about Hitler. She was frantic when she received word of the Stauffenberg plot, an attempt to assassinate Hitler by smuggling a bomb into a conference room at his East Prussian headquarters. He survived but sent Eva his blood-soaked uniform as a sign that providence had protected him. “I shan’t go on living if anything happens to you,” she vowed. Obersalzberg wasn’t bombed until the very end of the war; nonetheless there were many nights when she and the other women living there were rushed into the air-raid shelter under the Berghof living room as Allied planes flew overhead. All the women were under similar orders to avoid discussing sensitive topics, but the prohibition was nerve-racking. “Everything is kept secret from me,” Eva once complained. “I have no idea what’s going on.” During the autumn of 1944 she wrote her will; she also visited Hitler in Berlin and did a little shopping there—she wanted a new dress. She spent that Christmas in Munich with her family, where she saw firsthand the almost total destruction of the city. Yet a month later, when her sister Ilse called Hitler a fiend who was destroying Germany, Eva was outraged and told Ilse she deserved to be shot like a traitor. The demands of the fantasy Eva had been nurturing for all these years were becoming excruciating to fulfill, but she kept at it. In March 1945, she left the Berghof to join Hitler at the Reich Chancellery, knowing she would probably die there.
They moved into the bunker on April 15, when the Chancellery had become unlivable. The Russians were some fifty miles away, advancing with thousands of tanks, guns, and mortars; the bombardment began the next day, and on April 18 they broke through the forces defending Berlin, which were mostly made up of terrified young boys in makeshift uniforms. Speer offered many times to help Eva get on a flight out of Berlin. The Allies had already divided the country into four zones of occupation, and he had moved his own family to Holstein, an area that would fall to the British, trusting that they would treat Nazi wives and children decently. Berlin, on the other hand, would fall to the Russians, a prospect that terrified every woman in the city. But he had to make his offers to Eva discreetly, because Hitler was treating such preparations for defeat as treason. In any event, Eva refused all suggestions that she seek safety.
The bunker had been amply supplied with food, wine, cognac, and champagne, and during the last weeks, desperate celebrations broke out. Hitler turned fifty-six on April 20, and at midnight on the eve of his birthday he sat silently in his study as Göring, von Ribbentrop, Speer, and a few others, including the secretaries, offered champagne toasts in his honor. Eva was wearing a new dress purchased especially for the party—“silvery blue brocade,” recalled Traudl Junge—and gave him a present, yet another photograph of herself, this one in a silver frame. A few nights later there was another impromptu party. A kitchen maid married a driver from the fleet of official cars, and Heinz Linge gave them a reception complete with champagne, cognac, and an absentminded greeting from their Führer. (“Children, I wish you the very best.”)
By this time the bunker was emptying, as officials and staff scrambled to get onto planes headed for safer zones. Among those who remained were the four people closest to Hitler—his secretaries, Traudl Junge and Gerda Christian; his cook, Constanze Manziarly; and Eva. He ate only with them, as if the meals served within a female fortress would protect him as long as he needed protection. The talk was primarily about death. Under the incessant clamor of bombardment and artillery fire, with the Russians nearing them hour by hour, they discussed whether to shoot themselves or take poison. Hitler had handed out cyanide capsules, but he personally advised shooting, as death would be quick and sure. Eva didn’t like that idea; she had it in mind to choose the cyanide. As she remarked to the others, “I want to be a beautiful corpse.”
Eva had been writing her last letters as the dreary days passed, and although she never complained or resisted her fate—on the contrary, she displayed to everyone a calm willingness to die—the cataclysmic end of the Third Reich struck her as some kind of mysterious punishment for unknown offenses. “I cannot understand how it has all come to pass but it is impossible to continue believing in God!” she exclaimed to her best friend, Herta Schneider. Speer, who made his farewell visit to Eva a few days after she wrote this letter, heard a similar lament. “Why do so many more people have to be killed?” she asked him wonderingly. “And it’s all for nothing.” There seems no possibility that she was concerned for anyone except her friends and family, yet Speer, ever admiring, decided this made her “the only person in the bunker capable of humane considerations.” One more letter survives, written to her sister Gretl. In this, probably Eva’s final written communication before death, she urged Gretl to destroy all the correspondence stored in the house in Munich, explained how she wanted her jewelry to be distributed, and said she should give away the tinned food, tobacco, and chocolate stashed in Munich and at the Berghof. “Unfortunately my diamond watch is being repaired—I will give you the address at the end of this letter. With any luck you should still be able to get it back.” The address was added in a postscript.
The last time Eva heard the pop of a champagne cork and the fizz of the bubbles was on her wedding day. Sometime around two in the morning on April 29, wearing a navy-blue dress with sequins and a pair of black heels from Ferragamo, she married Hitler in a brief ceremony conducted by a Berlin city councillor who had been hastily called to the bunker. There was a quiet reception afterward. From then on, people tried to remember to call her “Frau Hitler.”
Many historians, journalists, and survivors have reconstructed the final hours in the bunker, often in minute-by-minute detail, but there is remarkably little documentation of the last meal served there. We do know that it took p
lace on April 30, that it was a late lunch, and that it was over quickly. Hitler most probably had a dish of spaghetti with tomato sauce; some accounts add a salad. Eva ate nothing, and it’s possible she wasn’t even at the table. The next time she appeared, she had washed and styled her hair and was wearing, according to Junge, “the Fuhrer’s favourite dress, the black one with the roses at the neckline.” She and Hitler stood in the corridor outside his quarters and said good-bye to the few people remaining in the bunker. When it was Junge’s turn, Eva hugged her. “Please do try to get out. You may yet make your way through. And give Bavaria my love.” A few minutes later, curled up on a sofa in Hitler’s sitting room, she bit into a cyanide capsule while Hitler shot himself, and they both died instantly. Toward the end of the afternoon Manziarly, sobbing, set about preparing dinner. She had been ordered to maintain the facade of a normal schedule so that the deaths would remain secret as long as possible. Hitler had been frantic lest the Russians use his body to flaunt their triumph and instructed his adjutants to burn both bodies right away. Junge recalled that the cook made fried eggs and creamed potatoes for this faux supper. Nobody ate.
• • •
Evdokia Domina had been at work in the fields in eastern Ukraine when the Nazis swooped down, grabbed her, and shipped her to Ravensbrück, the women’s concentration camp. It was December 1942, and her family didn’t even know she had been taken until she failed to return home that afternoon. A Siemens factory had been built a mile from the entrance to Ravensbrück, and the camp was supplying slave labor to manufacture electrical parts for planes and weapons. Every morning prisoners staggered through the snow to the factory and set to work, hunger raging. They trudged back to the camp for lunch—watery soup and a few potatoes—but often the guards chased them back to the factory, screaming at them, before they could swallow anything. Later Evdokia was transferred to a subcamp at Genthin, and she was there during the last days of April 1945, when the guards fled the approaching Allied forces and left the women suddenly free. “We just thought to head east,” she said. “We walked into deserted houses and found the bedrooms with beds to sleep in. And it was so nice with these sheets and quilts. We ate the food and never washed the plates, just took another one.”
What She Ate Page 16