Ilse Braun’s employer of many years, Martin Marx, left Germany only the following year, in 1938, and emigrated to the United States, which since 1936 had been the main destination for German doctors. With an established personal practice of many years’ standing, Dr. Marx, like numerous members of his profession, decided to flee the country only quite late. Ilse Braun stated after the war that she had “tried to intercede for him,” while it had been apparent to him that, she said, “my sister was unable—and I was even less able—to do anything to help him.” In fact, it was Ordinance 4 of the “Reich Citizenship Law” of July 25, 1938, which revoked the license to practice medicine of all Jewish doctors in Germany, that was the decisive factor. Dr. Marx was officially expatriated on April 5, 1939, according to the expatriation list published six months later, on November 15, in the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger. The revocation of his doctorate from Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University followed on October 25 of the same year.26
Ilse Braun, meanwhile, had already married in Berlin, in October 1937, and she therefore gave up her job with Speer after only six months.27 Nothing is known about her husband, named Höchstetter. They divorced after approximately three years. Ilse Braun nonetheless stayed in Berlin. Her sister Eva had had a small apartment of her own in the Old Reich Chancellery since early 1939 and occasionally stayed in the capital. In 1940, after the outbreak of the war, Ilse Braun graduated from a training program in the editorial offices at the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ) newspaper and worked as an editor there until summer 1941.28 This well-known conservative national paper, once owned by the Ruhr industrialist Hugo Stinnes and his heirs, was transferred to the National Socialist Deutscher Verlag only at the beginning of 1939. Thus the DAZ, like the vast majority of newspapers in the capital, was a part of the Nazi Press Trust controlled by Max Amann, the Reich Press Chamber’s powerful president and an old comrade-in-arms of Hitler’s from the early days of the NSDAP.29
Still, it is difficult to understand—almost incomprehensible—how and by what means a simple doctor’s receptionist found a trainee position as a DAZ journalist. By comparison, a colleague of Ilse Braun’s, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who was given a trainee position there at the same time, was not only seven years younger than Ilse Braun but was highly qualified, was faithful to the Nazi regime, came from a rich, upper-middle class family, and had received a doctorate under Emil Dovifat, a well-known professor of journalism at Berlin University.30 Of course, none of that was true of Ilse Braun. Yet Ursula von Kardorff, a member of the editorial staff of the DAZ from 1939 through 1945, clearly knew even back then whom she was dealing with, and knew that her new colleague’s sister, Eva Braun, was “often” to be found “with Hitler at the Berghof.” Still, after Ilse Braun’s brief excursion into Berlin’s newspaper world, Kardorff remained in contact with her “former trainee,” especially since, as she wrote in her diary, Ilse Braun seemed “not particularly nazi.” So it stands in Kardorff’s entry from July 30, 1944, after she visited Ilse Braun and looked at photographs showing Eva and Gretl with Hitler at the Berghof: “I thought to myself, this connection could still be useful someday, if things get really bad.”31
After Ilse Braun remarried, on June 15, 1941, she left Berlin. She moved to Breslau with her husband, a certain Fucke-Michels, and worked there as an editor for the Schlesische Zeitung.32 One hint about who her husband may have been appeared in a New York Times article on April 12, 1998: in the context of a story about an international conference on the subject of art looted during the Holocaust, the unusual name Dr. Fucke-Michels came up. He was described as a “Nazi cultural aide” who in 1942 had told Hans Posse, director of the Staatliche Gemäldegalerie in Dresden and an art representative of Hitler’s, that a valuable medieval manuscript had been confiscated in 1938 because there was a danger that the Jewish owner would leave the country.33 Was this Ilse Braun’s husband? In the memoirs and reminiscences of the members of the Berghof circle, Eva Braun’s older sister is not mentioned once; there is obviously not the slightest hint about her husband. Only in the fragmentary notes of the historian Percy Ernst Schramm, who was the official diarist for the Operational Staff of the German High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) during the war, and who was present during the questioning of Hitler’s personal physicians in 1945–1946 in the course of his work for the U.S. Army Historical Division, is it stated that Ilse Braun was married to a “propaganda man” in Breslau.34 In any case, we cannot believe Ilse Braun’s later testimony that she received neither “financial support nor any other privileges” from her sister Eva, in light of her job in Berlin, at the very least.35 Likewise, her flight from Breslau to the Obersalzberg at the end of the war does not suggest a great distance between her and Eva Braun.
4. RISE TO POWER AT HITLER’S SIDE
After 1931, the contact between Eva Braun and Hitler grew more intensive. Yet he also insisted at every opportunity, to fellow Party members, that he lived only for politics and therefore his private life belonged to the cause. Otto Wagener, for instance, the first chief of staff of the SA who spent 1929 to 1933 near his “Führer” and heard many of his personal conversations, recalled one long discussion in which Hitler explained to him that he could not ever marry: “I have another bride: Germany! I am married: to the German People and their fate!… No, I cannot marry, I must not.”1 Nonetheless, he met with Eva Braun more and more often, although the exact circumstances and precise development of their relationship remain unclear.
The “Führer’s” Long-Distance Lover
Heinrich Hoffmann, who saw Eva Braun almost daily and the leader of the Nazi Party often, remarked that Hitler himself “did not let on” about any close relationship at the time—either because he was not interested in the young woman or because he “did not want to say anything.” Hoffmann said he was convinced that Eva Braun became Hitler’s lover only “many years later.”2 His daughter Henriette von Schirach, in contrast, wrote in her memoir that the “love affair” between Braun and Hitler had already started by the winter of 1931–1932.3 Hitler’s housekeeper, Anni Winter, who lived in Hitler’s apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz along with her husband and another subletter, likewise claimed that Eva Braun became Hitler’s lover at the start of 1932.4 This version of events, which Nerin E. Gun retold without providing any exact sources, was later confirmed by the historian Werner Maser, relying on a personal communication from Anni Winter in 1969.5
Eva Braun (undated) (Illustration Credit 4.1)
Thus the evidence suggests that their intimate relationship did begin in 1932. Hitler’s driver, Erich Kempka, also claimed immediately after the war that he had known Eva Braun “since 1932,” in which case she must have been traveling in Hitler’s entourage by then.6 Anna Maria Sigmund similarly claimed, referring to Albert Speer’s Spandau: The Secret Diaries, that a sexual relationship between Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler started in Hitler’s apartment at the beginning of 1932.7 Yet Speer says nothing of the sort, neither in his Spandau: The Secret Diaries nor in Inside the Third Reich—with good reason, since he was not yet a close colleague of Hitler’s in 1932. He was an independent architect in Mannheim and joined the NSDAP and the SA only in the previous year; in 1932 he was receiving his first assignments from the Party.8
Nonetheless, in the entry of February 15, 1947, Speer recalls a private visit with Hitler eleven years in the past, in Munich, where Hitler had lived since October 1929 in the aristocratic Bogenhausen neighborhood, on the third floor of a majestic, baroquely Jugendstil corner building that today is a protected landmark.9 While Henriette von Schirach noticed primarily the “impressive paintings” and spoke of a “perfect apartment” where the furniture was “big, dark, and severe,”10 Speer was less impressed. He had risen during the course of Hitler’s Reich chancellorship to become his most important architect and representative for urban development in Rudolf Hess’s staff, and yet he noted in Spandau: The Secret Diaries:
The décor was petty-bourgeois: a lot of imposing oak fur
niture, glass-doored bookcases, cushions embroidered with saccharine sentiments or brash Party slogans. In the corner of one room stood a bust of Richard Wagner; on the walls, in wide gold frames, hung romantic paintings of the Munich School. Nothing suggested that the tenant of this apartment had been chancellor of the German Reich for three years. A smell of cooking oil and leftovers wafted from the kitchen.11
Speer’s contemptuous description is obviously a product of his later view of this period. Eva Braun, on the other hand, who met with Hitler here, must have admired the apartment much as her friend of almost the same age, Henriette von Schirach, did. There were hardly any other opportunities for Braun and Hitler to be together undisturbed: she still lived with her parents, as was common at the time for unmarried women, and Hitler, too, did not live alone before fall 1931. His half-sister’s daughter, Angela “Geli” Maria Raubal, born on June 4, 1908, in Linz, lived with him at Prinzregentenplatz for two years after moving from Vienna to Munich in 1929. She failed to complete a course of study in medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University, and had an affair with Hitler’s chauffeur at the time, Emil Maurice, which Hitler put a stop to.12 When she took her own life in her room, by shooting herself in the lung on September 18, 1931, rumors about Hitler’s relationship with his twenty-three-year-old stepniece immediately began to circulate.13 Incest and jealousy were spoken of as possible motives for the suicide, and there were even speculations about murder. The weapon, a Walther 6.35 caliber pistol, did belong to Hitler. But the police ruled out foul play.14 In fact, in view of the upcoming Landtag elections of April 1932, Hitler himself and the Gauleiter of Berlin and publisher of the Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack), whom Hitler named Reich Minister of Propaganda on April 27, 1930—Joseph Goebbels—used Raubal’s suicide to cultivate Hitler’s public image as the un-self-interested “Führer” and thus to conceal his private life as a human being.
Hitler with his stepniece, Geli Raubal, July 1930 (Illustration Credit 4.2)
Here is Hitler’s declaration only six days after his niece’s death, at an NSDAP gathering in Hamburg: “What has given me the most pains and cost me the most work is what I love best: our People.”15 And Goebbels, in his so-called “Diary”—actually a document always intended for posterity—recorded the following about a conversation with Hitler under the date October 27, 1931: “Then he told us about Geli. He loved her very much. She was his ‘good comrade.’ There were tears in his eyes…. This man, at the height of his success, without any personal happiness, committed only to his friend’s happiness. What a good man Hitler is!” A few weeks later, on November 22, Goebbels noted that the “Führer” had told him “about the women he loved very much” and “the one-and-only he could never find.”16 In fact, Hitler often said to his fellow Party members that he had no “ties to the world” anymore and belonged “only to the German People now.” He repeated in this context his old credo renouncing marriage, necessary in view of the political “task” that lay before him and the National Socialist “movement.” He had already stressed that he had to “deny himself” private happiness since “all his thoughts and efforts” belonged to the oppressed and despised German People.17
But what did Hitler’s decision to remain unmarried have to do with his niece’s death? Didn’t such explanations only invite further speculation about the nature of his relationship with Geli Raubal? In fact, we can conclude from this pathos-laden exaggeration of Geli Raubal’s role, along with Hitler’s overheated explanations about the “religion” of marriage, that he was now more than ever concerned to conceal his personal life, which was starting to be discussed publicly, except insofar as he could manipulate it to his political benefit. With his followers, this trick was completely successful. Otto Wagener, for instance, a close member of Hitler’s staff for three years as head of the politico-economic division of the NSDAP, believed that he could see “just the man Adolf Hitler before him” during these apparently trustworthy communications.18 And Heinrich Hoffmann insisted, many years later, that Hitler’s “whole being” had changed after his stepniece’s death—that “a piece of Hitler’s humanity” died with her. His work was “now an exclusive pursuit of a single goal,” Hoffmann said. “Attaining power!”19
Hitler and Goebbels thus staged, both in Party circles and before the public, a myth of solitude and isolation intended to make the Nazi leader personally unassailable and make his self-presentation as the “savior” of the German People, standing above everyone, more plausible. It was a necessary move. In late 1931, the NSDAP was on the rise. From a radical group limited to Bavaria it had become, within ten years, a political power to be taken seriously, playing an ever-greater role on the national stage since its sensational victory in the Reichstag election of September 14, 1930. The NSDAP was the second-strongest party in the Reichstag, after the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD), and together with the German National People’s Party (DNVP) under Alfred Hugenberg, parts of the German People’s Party (DVP), and the “Steel Helmet” league of World War I veterans they formed a so-called National Front against the Weimar state. At the same time, Hitler and his political adviser Hermann Göring were received for a discussion with Reich President Paul von Hindenburg for the first time on October 10.20 Hitler, not even a German citizen at the time, had arrived—to great public effect—at the summit of political power.21
Hindenburg, the eighty-four-year-old former General Field Marshal and a celebrated war hero, had for more than a year left a so-called Presidential Cabinet in charge of state business—without the approval of Parliament, which, since the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 and the collapse of the German economy, was wracked with all sorts of divisions. The Weimar constitution granted Hindenburg dictatorial powers “to restore public safety and order,” and with these powers he was unable to solve the country’s problems but he was able to prevent the state from total collapse for the time being.22 As democracy tottered and the ranks of the unemployed swelled from 4,840,000 in November 1931 to 6,127,000 in February 1932, the NSDAP mobilized voters from every class of society. It won the Hessian Landtag election of November 15, 1931, and put forward its leader as a candidate for Reich President against Hindenburg in early 1932.
Although Hindenburg decisively defeated Hitler in the second round of voting on April 10, 1932, 53 percent to 36.8 percent, the “chess match for power” had begun, as Goebbels strikingly put it at the beginning of the year.23 The Landtag elections in Prussia, Bayern, Württemberg, and Anhalt, as well as the city parliament election in Hamburg, were coming up. In addition, the political right forced Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, chosen by Hindenburg two years earlier, to step down, on May 30, 1932, and this cleared the path to dissolve the national parliament and hold new elections on July 31.24 In the interim, Hitler traveled tirelessly throughout the country, giving speeches, with an entourage consisting of Julius Schaub, Julius Schreck, Wilhelm Brückner, Hermann Esser, Sepp Dietrich, Max Amann, Otto Dietrich, and of course Heinrich Hoffmann, in various combinations. He crisscrossed Germany in spectacular fashion on his “Germany flights” in a rented airplane, as he had done before in the election campaign for President—a true marathon journey from one city to the next that only strengthened his image as Germany’s omnipotent “Führer” and “savior.”25
During this period, the NSDAP and above all its head of propaganda, Goebbels, organized the rallies and marches that accompanied Hitler, under the slogan “Direct to the People.” The Party had propaganda films made and produced records with its leader’s “Appeal to the Nation.”26 The Propaganda head office had moved from Munich offices on Hedemannstrasse to Berlin by then, near the Anhalter train station in what is today the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg neighborhood. There Goebbels spoke to an NSDAP rally in the Lustgarden on July 9, 1932, the same day Hitler celebrated a so-called Day of Greater Germany in Berchtesgaden.27 Hoffmann’s studio, too, was operating at full speed. Every election event was accompanied
by photographers, and the resulting images were used and disseminated in Party publications. The first of what would be many large-format photo-illustrated books published by Hoffmann appeared in 1932, photographically dramatizing the “cult of the Führer” by casting Hitler as the “savior” and glorifying “his” movement.28
Eva Braun, working in Hoffmann’s photo lab, could thus follow the course of the elections and the appearances of her secret lover by means of Hoffmann’s propaganda materials, produced in huge numbers and not yet winnowed down for publication. There was not much time for the relationship itself, of course. Even after the Reichstag elections, in which the NSDAP won 37.4 percent of the vote and became the strongest political force in Germany, with 230 seats in Parliament, Hitler allowed himself only a few days of rest and relaxation in Munich and Berchtesgaden. Accompanied by Goebbels, with whom he was in constant contact, Hitler traveled to the Tegernsee (a lake in the Bavarian Alps), went to the opera in Munich, and then withdrew to Haus Wachenfeld, the small summer house on the Obersalzberg that he had rented in 1928. The housekeeper there was his half-sister Angela Raubal, mother of the dead Geli. Hitler gathered around him the members of his innermost NSDAP leadership circle—Goebbels, Göring, Gregor Strasser, Wilhelm Frick—and they worked out what would be necessary if the NSDAP were to take power.29 It is unclear when and how he saw Eva Braun during that stay, or even if he saw her at all. However, Otto Wagener, who said himself that he accompanied Hitler “on the majority of his many trips,” said in his memoir that during the 1932 campaign Hoffmann often brought “his little lab girl Eva Braun” along, “whom Hitler liked to see at the table in the evening, for distraction.”30
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