Eva Braun
Heike B. Görtemaker
In this groundbreaking biography of Eva Braun, German historian Heike B. Görtemaker delves into the startlingly neglected historical truth about Adolf Hitler’s mistress. More than just the vapid blonde of popular cliché, Eva Braun was a capricious but uncompromising, fiercely loyal companion to Hitler; theirs was a relationship that flew in the face of the Führer’s proclamations that Germany was his only bride. Görtemaker paints a portrait of Hitler and Braun’s life together with unnerving quotidian detail—Braun chose the movies screened at their mountaintop retreat (propaganda, of course); he dreamed of retiring with her to Linz one day after relinquishing his leadership to a younger man—while weaving their personal relationship throughout the fabric of one of history’s most devastating regimes. Though Braun gradually gained an unrivaled power within Hitler’s inner circle, her identity was kept a secret during the Third Reich, until the final days of the war. Faithful to the end, Braun committed suicide with Hitler in 1945, two days after their marriage.
Through exhaustive research, newly discovered documentation, and anecdotal accounts, Görtemaker has meticulously built a surprising portrait of Hitler’s bourgeois existence outside of the public eye. Though Eva Braun had no role in Hitler’s policies, she was never as banal as she was previously painted; she was privy to his thoughts, ruled life within his entourage, and held his trust. As horrifying as it is astonishing, Eva Braun will undoubtedly be referenced in all future accounts of this period.
Heike B. Görtemaker
EVA BRAUN
Life with Hitler
Translated from the German by Damion Searls
INTRODUCTION
On March 7, 1945, when Eva Braun had a chauffeur bring her in a diplomatic car from Munich to Berlin, she wanted to write the final chapter of her story herself.1 That story had begun in 1929, in the offices of a Munich photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, where she met the leader of a far-right political party that had not, at the time, been very successful: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP). That leader’s name was Adolf Hitler. Now she was driving to the capital, against his will, in order to die with him.
Hitler had ordered her to stay on the Obersalzberg, a mountain in the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, where he owned a large residence called the Berghof. Berlin was badly damaged, practically destroyed, after the Allied air strike of February 3; the air-raid sirens were sounding several times a day. The Soviet Red Army had reached the Oder River in January, while American and British forces, supported by numerous allies, were approaching from the west. As a result, no one in the Reich Chancellery expected Eva Braun to appear. Albert Speer remarked about her arrival in his memoir Inside the Third Reich: “Figuratively and in reality, with her presence a messenger of death moved into the bunker.”2 Be that as it may, she was also stepping out from the shadows of her existence as merely a mistress. Her name became inseparable from that of Hitler, and she herself, with their joint death, became a legend with him. Is that what she wanted?
No one, writes the British historian Ian Kershaw, shaped the twentieth century more powerfully than Adolf Hitler. The shocking experience of a “modern, advanced, cultured society… so rapidly sink[ing] into barbarity”3 has undeniably had consequences down to the present day. In the process, the name Hitler has become a symbol: around the world, standing for violence, inhumanity, racism, perverted nationalism, genocide, and war. Ever since January 30, 1933, when Hitler was named Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg and the NSDAP legally came to power, there have been countless attempts not only to describe the structure and institutions of the National Socialist dictatorship, but also, more than anything, to explain the “phenomenon” of Adolf Hitler.4 The debates continue even today.
Eva Braun, in contrast—the mistress for many years and eventually the wife of “evil incarnate”—has been seen as historically insignificant, as “a very pale shadow of the Führer,”5 even as “a historical disappointment,” in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s words. As nothing. The reason for this was the belief that Eva Braun “played no role in the decisions that led to the worst crimes of the century,” that she was nothing more than part of Hitler’s private pseudoparadise, which may in fact have made it possible for him to pursue “his monstrous horrors all the more persistently.”6 Thus Eva Braun has remained a marginal figure in the biographies of Hitler. The few books that treat her own life story emphasize her allegedly tragic “fate as a woman” and refrain from presenting Hitler’s girlfriend in her social, cultural, and political contexts—unless the book’s author has an ideological agenda of his or her own.7
This disregard of Eva Braun as a historical figure is due in no small part to the dominant image of Hitler in the historical literature, because the question of whether Hitler should be portrayed as a human being at all is a controversial one even now. Some of his biographers maintain that their subject is a “nonperson”; Joachim C. Fest, for example, in the early 1970s, admitted that Hitler had apparently overwhelming power and “his own kind of greatness,” but criticized the paleness of his person and his rigid, statuelike, theatrical appearance, while remarking on Hitler’s “inability to lead an everyday life.”8 Decades later, Ian Kershaw said that Hitler’s “entire being” was given over to his role as “Führer,”[1] to the point where he lacked a “private,” a “deeper” existence: the personal life of this despot who had an “extraordinary kind” of “charismatic” power consisted, according to Kershaw, of nothing more than a chain of “empty routines.”9 Even from a distance of sixty years, even while they are convinced that historical scholarship has “painstakingly taken the measure” of the “abyss,” historians persist in looking at “the grotesque face of the monster” when it comes to Hitler himself.10
But doesn’t this interpretation risk succumbing to Hitler’s own self-presentation, according to which his individuality was of secondary importance? Do we not thereby dehumanize him, and as a result let him escape our critical understanding? It was Joseph Goebbels after all, Hitler’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, who tirelessly promulgated the idea that the “Führer” had sacrificed his private life and all of his individual happiness for the German People[2]—that he stood “above all the daily worries and cares of ordinary mortals ‘like a rock in the sea.’”11 Are we not still creating an artificial figure when we look back at him in this way, one that only makes it harder for succeeding generations to confront their own histories and understand the nature of the Nazi dictatorship?
In no way do I mean to argue for an overemphasis on the individual in history. Nor am I suggesting that we should show “understanding” for the dictator’s private side, especially since that dictator has already become an object of dubious fascination as “the devil in person.” Rather, a serious, source-critical study of Eva Braun, which no one has carried out until now, offers a new perspective on Hitler, and one that can help undo his demonization.
Thus the question is: Who was this woman, actually, and what perspective does she open up onto this “criminal of the century”? The fact is that Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler were together for fourteen years—a relationship that ended only with their double suicide. Moreover, this relationship was one of Hitler’s few close personal ties to any woman at all. She was largely concealed from the German public, and in terms of external appearance, Eva Braun—young, blond, athletic, attractive, fun-loving—absolutely did not fit Hitler with his “psychopath’s face” (Joachim Fest’s phrase), who looks prim, stiff, and elderly in the private photographs in which he appears. Eva Braun, it is said, loved fashion, movies, and jazz; read works by Oscar Wilde (who was banned in Germany after 1933); liked to travel; and pursue
d sports to excess.12 Her life hardly corresponded to the petit bourgeois ideal of the German woman as propounded by Nazi ideology: bravely defending the husband’s home and her motherhood before all else. So what did connect Eva Braun to Hitler? What were her relations like with the men in the Nazi leader’s innermost circle—Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann? What light does this relationship shed on Hitler? Did he live with his lover in a kind of parallel private world that was fundamentally opposed to the official “Führer image”? Or is it in fact impossible to separate public and private in this way? Did both worlds belong together inseparably—for Eva Braun as well as for Hitler?
By all appearances, Eva Braun was a young woman of average abilities from a conventional, lower-middle-class family. She clearly did not stand out due to her background or her interests. It is often mentioned that she was noticeably lacking in any political sympathies or interest in current events at all.13 Eva Braun was not sophisticated and glamorous like Magda Goebbels, nor was she politically influential like Annelies von Ribbentrop (daughter of the champagne manufacturer Otto Henkell), nor did she possess the fanaticism of a Gerda Bormann. But it is precisely her allegedly average ordinariness that invites us to reconstruct her historical circumstances. Her “normality” at the center of this atmosphere of “evil” is like an anachronism that brings this evil into relief and shows it in a new light.
PART ONE
The Meeting
On April 30, 1945, at around 2:30 p.m., Erich Kempka, Hitler’s driver since 1932, receives a phone call in the garage in the basement of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. He is to get hold of fifty gallons of gasoline and bring it to the entrance of the “Führer bunker” in the Chancellery garden. He will be given further details there. When Kempka arrives with the men who are helping him carry the gasoline canisters, SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche explains that the Führer is dead. He, Günsche, has been assigned to burn the body immediately, since Hitler did not want to end up “on display in a Russian panopticon.” Günsche and Kempka enter the bunker, where Martin Bormann hands over Eva Braun’s body to Kempka. She is wearing a dark dress that feels damp around the area of the heart. Kempka carries her upstairs to the exit, preceded by Heinz Linge (a valet) and Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger carrying Hitler’s corpse. Günsche, Bormann, and Joseph Goebbels follow behind. Shortly before 3:00 p.m. they lay the two bodies next to each other in the sand on level ground, pour five barrels of gasoline over them, and set them on fire. The men stand in the bunker entrance and, as the bodies burn, raise their arm one last time in the Hitler salute. When artillery shells start falling on the site, they hurry back into the protection of the bunker.1
1. HEINRICH HOFFMANN’S STUDIO
Almost sixteen years earlier, in October 1929, Hitler and Eva Braun met for the first time in the studio of photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. Hoffmann was a press photographer and portrait photographer well known in Munich after World War I, as well as a publisher and a National Socialist from the beginning. He ran a studio, called Photohaus Hoffmann, at 25 Amalienstrasse, near Odeon Square in central Munich. From there he supplied the Munich Illustrierte Presse (Illustrated Press) and domestic and foreign agencies with his pictures. Hoffmann’s father was a photographer as well, and he had apparently forced his son to follow in his footsteps; Hoffmann had owned a business of his own in Munich since 1909.1 Even before 1914, Heinrich Hoffmann had made a name for himself with the public and in artistic circles with his photography service—the “Hoffmann Photoreport”—as well as by taking portrait photographs. Still, he owed his flourishing business to the NSDAP. After World War I, which he spent on the French front as a reservist in a replacement detachment of the air force, he put his talents at the service of the far-right nationalist movement that was rising to power.2
The Nazi Party’s House Photographer
It is no longer possible to reconstruct exactly when and in what circumstances Hoffmann met Hitler for the first time. Hoffmann’s daughter, Henriette von Schirach, later claimed that the Populist poet and writer Dietrich Eckart had put her father in contact with Hitler; Hoffmann himself said in his memoir that their first encounter was for purely business reasons, after an American photo agency offered him one hundred dollars for a photograph of Hitler, on October 30, 1922.3 As early as 1947, in an unpublished written statement in his own defense, Hoffmann claimed that the “American press” had offered him “a large sum for the first picture of Hitler” at the time. In order to get this money, “under any circumstances,” he contrived a seemingly chance encounter by suggesting that Hermann Esser, a good friend of Hitler’s, hold the reception for his upcoming wedding in Hoffmann’s house, on July 5, 1923. In this way, he planned to meet Hitler, who was to be one of the witnesses at the ceremony.4
In fact, Hoffmann had been a member of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or DAP) since April 6, 1920—six months after Hitler had joined. Anton Drexler had founded the party in January of the previous year, in Munich, and it had recently changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or NSDAP). Hoffmann began to publish the weekly newspaper Auf gut deutsch (In Good German), edited by the radical nationalistic and anti-Semitic Dietrich Eckart, Hitler’s friend, mentor, and father-figure. This failed poet used the paper to rail against the Weimar Republic, Bolshevism, and Judaism, under the motto “Germany, Awake!”5 There is much evidence to suggest that Hoffmann became friends with this circle of like-minded men, including Eckart, Hitler, and the journalist Hermann Esser, before he began to make himself useful to the NSDAP and especially to the man who became its leader starting on July 29, 1921: the aggressive “beer hall agitator” Adolf Hitler.6 Despite numerous requests, Hoffmann at first respected Hitler’s wish not to be photographed. Hoffmann’s first portrait of Hitler, in fact, appeared only after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 8–9, 1923, which made Hitler famous throughout Germany but also landed him in jail. (Hoffmann photographed him as a prisoner.) The following year, Hoffmann published a photo brochure titled (in German) “Germany’s Awakening, in Words and Pictures.” In 1926, the tireless Hoffmann, together with Hitler and Hermann Esser (their mutual friend and the first head of propaganda for the Party), founded a richly illustrated weekly Party newspaper, the Illustrierter Beobachter. That same year, at Hoffmann’s suggestion, the Völkischer Beobachter (The People’s Observer, the Nazi newspaper) included photographs for the first time—from Hoffmann’s own studio, needless to say.
The NSDAP was thus on the cutting edge, technologically speaking. Only a few years earlier it had been common practice to illustrate newspaper stories with drawings or engravings. Even The New York Times started to print photographs regularly only in 1922. Photojournalism’s true breakthrough, made possible by the development of the 35 mm camera in 1925, had only just begun.7 Unlike in America—and also England and France, where the British Daily Mirror and French Illustration had set up a daily photographic exchange service between London and Paris as early as 1907—in Germany the practice of printing photographs in newspapers only slowly gained popularity.8
Among the pictures Hoffmann published in the Völkischer Beobachter was a series showing, for the first time, Hitler giving the Nazi salute with outstretched arm before a march of thousands of Party faithful on July 4, 1926, at the first NSDAP convention after it was reestablished in Weimar.9 Already, in the earliest phase of the Nazi Party’s rise to power, Hoffmann was putting his initiative and photographic skill behind the power of images—and the power of the Party’s not uncontroversial leader, who was controversial even within the Party at first. For Hitler and the propaganda campaign he was waging against both external opponents and opponents within the Party, Hoffmann soon made himself indispensable. He became Hitler’s “personal photographer.”10 From then on the leader of the Nazi Party almost never appeared without Hoffmann, whether on trips, on the campaign trail, or at lunch at Hitler’s local Munich pub.
Hoffmann’s decision to devote his career entirely to Hitler and the NSDAP paid off only in later years, however. In 1929, the Landtag (state parliament) campaigns and mass rallies provided Hoffmann’s business with more and more assignments. These included the four-day NSDAP convention in Nuremburg on August 1–4, with the spectacular parade of sixty thousand SA and SS members, and Hitler’s appearance on October 26 in the Zirkus Krone in Munich with Alfred Hugenberg, the press tycoon and head of the German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, or DNVP), in connection with the proposed German referendum against the Young Plan. That same year gave the Nazi Party its first electoral victories. In the Reichstag (national parliament) election the previous year, on May 20, 1928, it looked as though the National Socialists were sinking back into insignificance—they received only 2.6 percent of the vote—but in the Landtag and municipal elections of 1929 the trend was uniformly upward.11 With the world economic crisis unfolding in the background, and the rise in unemployment to 3.32 million people in Germany, the NSDAP achieved gains in Saxony, Baden, and Bavaria; in Thuringia, in fact, its vote tally rose from 4.6 to 11.3 percent.
In light of these results, it is no accident that Hoffmann, then forty-four years old, was able to expand his business even in fall 1929, at the onset of the worldwide economic crash. He profited both from the increasing number of assignments from the Party and from the greater use Hitler himself made of him. Photo agencies were booming in any case, since by that time more and more newspapers were illustrating their reports with photographs. The demand throughout the world for news photographs was constantly on the rise, and a flourishing business grew from Hoffmann’s small workshop in a courtyard behind 50 Schellingstrasse. It moved to 25 Amalienstrasse in September 1929, and was renamed the NSDAP-Photohaus Hoffmann. Shortly before the reopening, Hoffmann hired new employees, and one of them was the seventeen-year-old Eva Braun.12
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