In 1923, at the peak of hyperinflation in Germany, the NSDAP was as popular as it had ever been up to that point. The number of Party members rose to over fifty thousand.19 But after the failed Beer Hall Putsch (or Hitler Putsch) of November 8–9, 1923, in Munich—the violent, so-called national revolution against the “Berlin Jew-government,” in which fourteen members of the uprising and four policemen lost their lives—the Party’s rise came to a halt. The NSDAP was outlawed; Hitler and many of his comrades-in-arms ended up in prison or were forced to flee. The National Socialist movement seemed to be over, and the refounding of the Party in the Bürgerbräukeller on February 27, 1925, did not at first seem to make much of a difference. Financial problems, intraparty squabbles, and sluggish recruitment of new members gave the impression throughout Germany that the National Socialists were in decline. The situation changed abruptly in 1929. The worldwide economic depression, poverty, and rising unemployment put the German parliamentary democracy in an increasingly embattled position and helped the NSDAP achieve a renewed upswing nationwide, although the center of the Party remained in Munich. Hitler, a “howling dervish,” in Carl Zuckmayer’s words, was on the threshold of his political breakthrough in the autumn of 1929 when, in the photography store of his friend Heinrich Hoffmann, he met Eva Braun—the woman he was to die with sixteen years later in Berlin.20
3. THE BRAUN FAMILY
Eva Braun, baptized Eva Anna Paula Braun, was the second of three daughters of a vocational school teacher in Munich. When she was born, on February 6, 1912, troubled times lay ahead for Germany and the world. The Balkans, with its multicultural countries and border conflicts, had long been like a powder keg ready to blow up at any time. The assassination of Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife on June 28, 1914, unleashed the First World War, and Germany had to pay for its defeat with submission to the Versailles Treaty. The atmosphere within the Braun family was tense as well: Eva’s parents, Friedrich and Franziska Braun, underwent a marital crisis in 1919, after eleven years of marriage, which ended in their divorce on April 3, 1921. It is not known what caused the split. Possibly, as for many couples, their living apart for years as a result of Friedrich’s military service led to their estrangement. He had voluntarily enlisted in the war in 1914, and he was stationed first in Serbia, then elsewhere, finally serving in a military hospital in Würzburg until the end of April 1919. During this period, Franziska—a veterinarian’s daughter who had worked as a seamstress in a Munich textile company before her marriage—mostly lived alone with her three small children. In the divorce, she was granted custody of the girls, who were thirteen, nine, and six at the time. But the separation did not last long; the following year, on November 16, 1922, Friedrich and Franziska Braun remarried.1
Middle-Class Normalcy
Financial reasons may well have played a large part in the Braun family’s reuniting. There had been famine in Germany since the end of the war; prices never stopped rising, and in August 1922 inflation reached an initial high-water mark of 860 marks to the dollar. While foreign visitors poured into Germany to buy things cheaply, it grew more and more difficult for Germans to pay for the basic food they needed with their ever-more-worthless money.2 The result was strikes, demonstrations, and labor unrest. Friedrich Braun himself, as a teacher, was not faced with unemployment, but in the period of hyperinflation in 1922–1923, when a pound of butter cost 13,000 marks, the fixed salaries of public employees lost an enormous amount of value. Craftsmen, small business owners, and the self-employed suffered likewise, of course. In these circumstances—inflation and reduced income—it was not possible to run two households.3
The economic situation improved only after currency reform was carried out in November 1923. Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, in office for only three months, managed to stabilize the currency and reorient the German approach to the question of reparations. The conflict between Germany and the Allies about the amount and method of reparations payments had escalated ever since the Versailles Treaty of June 28, 1919, in which the victors in World War I dictated the terms of the peace. Stresemann’s skill in negotiating, especially with the French, resulted in a new, less strict financing program for the German Reich, which was drawn up in London on August 16, 1924, with the decisive help of American bankers. This Dawes Plan—named after Charles G. Dawes, the American lawyer and banker who played a leading role in its formulation—was intended to support the German economy in order to promote the rebuilding of Europe. Money poured into Germany from the United States in the following years—a loan of 800 million gold marks as well as private investments—enabling the economic recovery that had so long been hoped for. The so-called Golden Twenties of the Weimar Republic had begun, during which exports boomed while unemployment remained high and the national debt increased.4
For the Brauns, these developments meant a great improvement in their own financial situation. In 1925, they moved, with a servant, into a large apartment at 93 Hohenzollernstrasse in Schwabing, Munich’s artists’ and entertainment district. In the following years the family could also afford an automobile; they bought a BMW 3/15 with the money from an inheritance.5 After the painful experiences of the inflation, they clearly preferred to convert their money into valuable property as quickly as possible. Still, despite a situation now lacking in material worries for the most part, Friedrich and Franziska Braun’s marriage seems to have remained unhappy. Eva Braun’s friend Herta Ostermayr later described Eva’s family circumstances in that period as “not very pleasant.” That is why, Ostermayr said, Eva Braun spent “almost her whole childhood at my house” and also took vacations “with me at the rural estate of my relatives.” Eva Braun’s ties to her school friend’s parents were so close, according to Ostermayr, that she called them “Father and Mother.”6 Herta Ostermayr, or Herta Schneider after her marriage in 1936, knew Eva Braun from elementary school and was her closest friend. Later, she and her children would be regular guests at the Berghof until the end of the Nazi regime.
Ostermayr’s statements are significant because they contradict the testimony of the Braun family. Franziska Braun in particular emphasized to the journalist Nerin E. Gun that her daughter grew up in an intact household. She assured Gun that “not a single cloud” had cast its shadow across her marriage, “not even a real quarrel.”7 This statement is obviously false, in light of the legal dissolution of the marriage. Franziska Braun—who, like every other member of the family, fell under pressure to justify herself after 1945, given her personal relations with Hitler—retroactively constructed a private idyll that never, in fact, existed.
At any rate, Friedrich Braun in the mid-1920s was able to offer a solid, middle-class prosperity to his family, which extended to his daughters’ education. Eva attended elementary school from 1918 to 1922, then a lyceum on Tengstrasse, not far from their apartment. In 1928 she spent a year at Marienhöhe in Simbach am Inn on the German-Austrian border, a Catholic institute rich in tradition. A Merian copperplate engraving from around 1700 shows the view of Braunau from Simbach across an old wooden bridge—the same Braunau where Adolf Hitler had been born on April 20, 1889. The institute in Simbach had opened a housekeeping school only a few years earlier. The facility itself had been in existence since 1864, and was run by the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an order of Roman Catholic nuns pledged to the rules and spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Founded by the English nun Mary Ward (1585–1645), one of the most important woman of the seventeenth century, and thus also known in Germany as the “Institute of the English Maiden,” this order of women was active throughout Europe and is considered even today a pioneer in women’s education.8 Along with home economics, Eva Braun studied bookkeeping and typing at Marienhöhe and was thereby trained for future office work—a path that was by no means taken for granted for girls in the middle-class environment of that time. When Eva Braun, at the age of seventeen, returned from Simbach to Munich, on July 22, 1929, she moved back in with her parents. O
nly a few months later, in September, she answered an ad in a Munich newspaper and found a trainee position: Heinrich Hoffmann, photographer, was hiring.9
The Braun family (left to right): Ilse, Friedrich, Franziska, Gretl, and Eva, 1942 (Illustration Credit 3.1)
The Constant Companion: Margarete Braun
Eva Braun was not to be the only member of her family to work for Hoffmann. Three years later, in early April 1932, her younger sister Margarete Berta (Gretl) followed her and was given a job as a salesgirl in the photographer’s publishing house. Sixteen at the time, Gretl had just dropped out of the Franciscans’ upper girls’ school in Medingen near Willingen on the Danube and was entering the sphere of NSDAP activities.10 It is highly likely that Eva Braun’s recommendation played a role in getting her sister the job: by that point, Eva already had an intimate relationship with Hitler. But it is also true that Hoffmann needed more employees: his business, recast by the owner himself as the “Hoffmann National Socialist Photographic Propaganda Division,” expanded its activities for the NSDAP through the start of the year of crisis, 1932.11
Important votes were soon to be held: for Reich President on April 10, and for the Reichstag (Parliament) in July. Unemployment was running rampant—almost six million people in Germany were jobless. In these circumstances, the NSDAP could expect an enormous increase in its vote tallies, and it ran its propaganda machine at full speed. For example, Hoffmann, shortly before Gretl Braun got a job with him, was “charged with the responsibility of carrying out the photo-reporting for the Reich President electoral campaign” on April 1, 1932, in his capacity as Hitler’s “Party photographer.”12 In addition, his press was turning out massive quantities of Nazi photo-illustrated books for the first time, and in mid-1932 Hoffmann also took over a press photography illustration office in Berlin, finally ensuring his presence at the center of political events.13 Still, it is noteworthy that both Braun sisters, who henceforth were to move in Hitler’s closest private circles, worked for Hoffmann. It is not known whether Hoffmann gave Gretl Braun a position to “be helpful” to Eva Braun, and thereby indirectly do the “Führer” a favor, and the specific details about his private and business dealings with Gretl Braun remain unclear. Hoffmann himself kept silent about these dealings for the rest of his life.14
In any case, Eva and Gretl Braun remained inseparable in the years to follow. They left home together in 1935 and moved into an apartment in Munich, then a few months later into a single-family house that Hoffmann bought for them on Hitler’s instructions. Gretl Braun accompanied her sister during their weeks-long stays on the Obersalzberg as well, and also on foreign trips, for example to Italy.15 Starting in 1936 at the latest, she was a member of the Berghof inner circle around Hitler. She is rarely mentioned, however, in the memoirs and reminiscences from the period. Only the secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Traudl Junge, would later remark that the Nazi leader occasionally tried to marry off his girlfriend’s sister. Junge, who traveled to the Berghof only starting in March 1943, also recalled that Gretl Braun was in love with Fritz Darges, an SS-Obersturmbannführer and Hitler’s personal adjutant, but that their affair was “a little too dangerous and not private enough” for him, given her close personal relations with Hitler.16
Whereas Eva Braun’s role and her significance for Hitler have been controversial since the war, her sister’s profile has remained unclear. What did she do at the Berghof? What was her relationship to Hitler, and to Eva? Only one thing is clear: Gretl Braun never stepped out from the shadow of her older sister before 1944. Her role was, it seems, organized around Eva Braun’s needs: she acted in the background, as Eva’s guest, companion, or chaperone. This role changed only with her marriage, on June 3, 1944, which gave her the status of wife at last. She married Hermann Fegelein, Heinrich Himmler’s liaison officer in the “Führer headquarters” and—according to Albert Speer—one of the “most disgusting persons in Hitler’s circle.”17 At the instigation of her sister Eva, Gretl had grown up from girlhood in a political environment that she remained attached to until the bitter end; her marriage to Fegelein only consolidated her position there.
The Distant Sister: Ilse Braun
Ilse Braun, in contrast, spent her life at some distance from her sisters, geographically at least. She was the first to move out of their parents’ house, in 1929, and by her own account lived for years in the office of her Munich employer, the ear, nose, and throat doctor Martin Marx.18 He was fourteen years older than she, likewise born in Munich, and had received his PhD from Ludwig Maximilian University in 1922 and practiced in the Bavarian capital ever since.19 In a postwar interview, Ilse Braun did not provide further background about her residence in her employer’s office, and we do not know if she had an intimate relationship with her boss or if he was merely doing the young woman a favor by putting a room at her disposal. Ilse Braun’s life circumstances—standing in radical opposition to the ideas of morality prevalent at the time—certainly suggest that the Braun family ties remained problematic. Furthermore, Ilse Braun’s position working for a “Jewish” doctor, as she herself stated he was, obviously led to tensions with her sister Eva, who at the time was not only working for Hoffmann (and thus the Nazi Party) but was also in personal contact with Hitler. In any case, Ilse Braun maintained after the end of the war that her sister had pointed out “the impossibility of our having two such opposite jobs” and had asked her to break off both business and personal ties with the doctor.20 Presumably, Eva Braun was afraid that if her older sister’s affair with Dr. Marx became known in her National Socialist environment, it could threaten her own developing relationship with Hitler.
Nonetheless, Ilse Braun worked as a receptionist for Martin Marx for another eight years, leaving only, on his “advice,” when he was making preparations to emigrate in 1937—or so she emphasized under questioning in October 1946.21 In fact, the discrimination against and exclusion of Jewish doctors, roughly a quarter of all the doctors in Munich, had already started shortly after Hitler came to power. In the Bavarian capital, 80 percent of “non-Aryan” doctors in the national health insurance system lost their licenses due to a new regulation announced in April 1933. The “cleansing” of the field of medicine, demanded by Hitler personally, was carried out more diligently in Munich, under Karl Fiehler (mayor, 1933–1945), than elsewhere, since Fiehler was a committed National Socialist of the first order and an extreme anti-Semite. He had doctors fired from state-run facilities, clinics, and universities for racist ideological reasons.22
At first, the private practice of the doctor for whom Ilse Braun worked and under whose roof she lived was not affected: Dr. Marx could continue, like many of his colleagues, to practice unhindered, despite the exclusion from government positions. The situation in Munich became more extreme only with the proclamation of the “Nuremberg Laws,” with their “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” on September 15, 1935. Not only marriage but also “extramarital relations” between “Jews and citizens of German or related blood types” would now be prosecuted, likewise any work by an “Aryan” woman under forty-five in a “Jewish” household.23 Ilse Braun’s friendship with her employer and above all her remaining under his roof now meant that both of them risked arrest on charges of “defiling the race.” The Gestapo carried out checks in Munich in this regard and followed up on rumors and suspicions. Nevertheless, Ilse Braun and Martin Marx apparently remained undisturbed until their business and personal relationship came to an end in early 1937.
By then, Eva Braun had become a figure of permanent importance in Hitler’s life, joining the Nazi leader at his refuge on the Obersalzberg whenever he was there. She had dedicated herself entirely to Hitler and his life and must have found her sister’s living and work situation, unchanged for years, completely unbearable. Ilse’s later career developments suggest that it was Eva who was responsible for Ilse’s dismissal and who, at the same time, helped her find a remarkable new career and place to live. For immediatel
y after her departure from Dr. Marx’s office, Ilse Braun started work as a secretary in Albert Speer’s office in Berlin, on March 15, 1937.24 A month and a half earlier, on January 30, Speer had been named “General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital” by a “Führer’s edict” and was given the responsibility of remaking the architecture of Berlin into a “World Capital Germania.” The ambitious architect, just thirty-two years old at the time, was a trusted friend of the Nazi leader and among the frequent guests at the Berghof, where he also knew Eva Braun. He must have been only too happy to do a favor for his “Führer’s” girlfriend. That is the only way to explain why Ilse Braun was one of Speer’s first employees to move with him into his new Berlin office building at 4 Pariser Platz, the just-requisitioned Prussian Academy of Arts.25
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