What is certain is that Hitler and his colleagues in the Nazi Party were anxious to take power as quickly as possible after their electoral successes, and they feverishly schemed about how best to do so. Hitler had not yet, after all, reached his goal of being named Chancellor. In secret negotiations on August 6, 1932, with Kurt von Schleicher, the influential but inscrutable Minister of Defense in Chancellor Franz von Papen’s conservative-national cabinet, Hitler demanded the office of Chancellor for himself and six additional key cabinet posts for his party, including ministers of the interior, economy, and finance, but to no avail.31 Hindenburg in particular was consistently opposed to the NSDAP leader’s demands. Talks between the two men at the elderly president’s offices at 73 Wilhelmstrasse—the former “Ministry of the Royal House”—on the afternoon of August 13, 1932, did nothing to change that. Hitler was offered the position of Vice-Chancellor and turned it down.32
Martyrdom or Calculation?
During this politically decisive period, there was no time for Hitler to see his young Munich girlfriend regularly. In any case, the NSDAP leader was often in Berlin, where since February 1931 he regularly stayed in a suite at the legendary Hotel Kaiserhof at 4 Wilhelmplatz (formerly Ziethenplatz), across the street from the Reich Chancellery. The hotel was the first luxury hotel in the city, opened in 1875 and three years later one of the showpieces of the 1878 Congress of Berlin, which took place under the leadership of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Since the early 1920s, the hotel management had sympathized with the right-wing nationalist forces operating against the Weimar state, so it was no coincidence that the top floor of the hotel turned into the NSDAP’s provisional headquarters.33
Despite his frequent absences, there is no evidence for the claim that Hitler wanted “an undemanding short-term relationship” with Eva Braun at first any more than there is for the opposite claim.34 It is documented in numerous sources, however, that the twenty-year-old woman tried to take her own life with her father’s gun at some point during the course of 1932. Witnesses from Hitler’s circle as well as members of the Braun family reported this fact after the war, although there are differing accounts of exactly what happened and when. Hoffmann wrote in his postwar recollections that Eva Braun did not show up at work one “summer morning” in 1932, and that he heard about her suicide attempt that afternoon from his brother-in-law, Dr. Wilhelm Plate. Eva Braun had called Plate in the middle of the night, according to Hoffmann, since she was getting “scared” after her gunshot wound.35 Hoffmann did not explain how she would have been in a position to make such a phone call, since her parents did not have a phone in their house at 93 Hohenzollernstrasse at that time; nor is it clear why, wounded and panicking, she would try to reach her boss’s brother-in-law, of all people. Is it not far more likely that she would turn to Hoffmann himself on that night, who would then in turn reach out to his brother-in-law, the doctor in the family, for advice? Another implausible element in Hoffmann’s version of events is the claim that he informed Hitler about the dramatic events only when Hitler happened to drop by the photo shop that afternoon.36 Hoffmann’s account is thus not reliable—what it shows is primarily Hoffmann’s own intent to conceal the extent of his role in the relationship between Eva Braun and Hitler.
Hoffmann’s son-in-law, Baldur von Schirach, has left a more plausible account, which also gives a precise date for the incident—despite the fact that he must have heard about what happened from Hoffmann or Dr. Plate. He says that Eva Braun’s first suicide attempt took place on the night of August 10–11, 1932. According to Schirach, Hitler received a farewell note from Eva Braun on the morning of August 11—shortly before his planned departure from the Obersalzberg to Berlin—and immediately postponed the trip. That evening, he met with Dr. Plate in Hoffmann’s Munich apartment, where Plate told him about Braun’s injuries and Hitler said to Hoffmann that he wanted to take care of “the poor child.” Only on the following day, Friday, August 12, did he finally leave for Berlin.37
These statements agree with Goebbels’s notes. Under the date of August 11/12, Goebbels wrote that Hitler was on the Obersalzberg early on the morning of August 11, and that Hitler and he traveled together to a meeting in Prien on the Chiemsee (a lake nearby). “In the afternoon,” the two men continued to Munich, where Hitler went to his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz; while Goebbels took the night train to Berlin, Hitler stayed in Munich. “The Führer,” Goebbels noted, “will come later by car.” They met up again only at 10 p.m. on August 12, in Caputh, to discuss the Nazi leader’s upcoming meeting with President Hindenburg.38
A third, completely different version is Nerin E. Gun’s, for which he gives Ilse Braun as the source. This version dates the suicide attempt to the night of November 1–2, 1932. On that night, says Ilse Braun according to Gun, she found her sister Eva by chance, alone in her cold, unheated apartment, covered in blood, on the bed in their parents’ bedroom, while their parents were away on a trip. Despite her injury, Eva Braun was conscious and had herself called a doctor to take her to the hospital. “The bullet had lodged just near the neck artery,” in Ilse Braun’s exact words according to Gun, “and the doctor had no difficulty in extracting it. Eva had taken my father’s 6.35 mm caliber pistol, which he normally kept in the bedside table beside him.”39 In this account, it is unclear (to say the least) where Eva Braun could have telephoned from; the date in early November is also significantly different from Hoffmann’s and Schirach’s accounts. Nevertheless, the events could indeed have played out like this, as we can see from a closer examination of Hitler’s schedule.
The Nazi leader was in the middle of an exhausting campaign trip at the time, and undertaking his fourth “Germany flight” between October 11 and November 5. The Reichstag elections of July 1932 had not solved the problem of the Weimar Republic’s inability to govern, but only led to a further weakening of the forces of democracy in the parliament, so that Hindenburg’s Chancellor, Franz von Papen, was defeated by the second sitting of the newly elected Reichstag, on September 12. The Communist Party’s motion of no confidence, supported by the NSDAP and all the other major parties, had toppled the government. The Reichstag was thus dissolved, for the second time in the space of a year; the requisite new elections were called for November 6. Now it was up to the National Socialists and their “Führer” to mobilize the masses even more forcefully and finally emerge from the election as the absolute victors.40
On the evening of November 1, 1932, after giving election speeches that day in Pirmasens and Karlsruhe, Hitler first flew back to Berlin, where he was to speak at a large rally in the sports stadium on the following evening.41 He would have heard about the incident in Munich that same night, and left the capital in the early morning hours of November 2.42 Goebbels was at a rally that night in Schönebeck, south of Magdeburg, until 1 a.m., and arrived in Berlin at around 4 a.m.; he noted curtly in his diary: “To Berlin…. 4 a.m. arrival. Hitler just gone.”43 Together with Hoffmann and an adjutant, according to Gun, Hitler was chauffeured to Munich so that he could visit Eva Braun in the hospital on the morning of November 2. Hoffmann accompanied Hitler to the hospital, where he expressed doubt about the seriousness of Braun’s suicide attempt in the presence of the attending physician. After the physician explained that Braun had “aimed at her heart,” Hitler is said to have remarked to Hoffmann: “Now I must look after her,” because something like this “mustn’t happen again.”44
Although the precise details remain unknown, witnesses and historians agree that Eva Braun felt abandoned and calculatedly acted to make the perpetually absent Hitler notice her, and to tie him more closely to her.45 She is said to have intentionally summoned Hoffmann’s brother-in-law, Dr. Plate, rather than her sister’s friend, Dr. Marx, to ensure that Hitler would immediately hear about the incident from his personal photographer.46 In truth, only a year after Hitler’s stepniece Geli Raubal’s suicide and in the middle of his political battle for the chancellorship, whose success was closely bound up
with the “Führer cult” around him, the NSDAP could not afford a new scandal that opened up Hitler’s personal life to public discussion once more. He thus had to bring under control a relationship he had apparently misjudged. From then on, in this version of events, a tight bond grew out of the hitherto rather loose relationship with Eva Braun. Heinrich Hoffmann wrote after the war that Hitler told him then that he “realized from the incident that the girl really loved him,” and that he “felt a moral obligation to care for her.”47 About his own feelings, in contrast, it seems that the “Führer” had nothing to say.
Alone in the Vestibule of Power
Meanwhile, only a few intimates knew about Hitler’s relationship with Braun, now twenty years old. Hitler himself had erected a “wall of silence” around her. They made no joint public appearances: only once in the twelve years after 1933 were Hitler and Eva Braun seen together in a published news photo, which in fact shows Eva Braun sitting in the second row, behind Hitler, at the Winter Olympics in February 1936 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.48 Nothing in the picture indicates any personal relationship between her and the dictator. Officially, Eva Braun was on the staff of the Berghof as a private secretary.49 The German public learned only shortly before the end of the war that Hitler had lived with a woman and eventually married her, and many people at the time considered this report a mere “latrine rumor.”50
In Hitler’s more immediate environment, on the other hand—among his close colleagues in the Party and their wives, and adjutants and staff members—the relationship between their “Führer” and Eva Braun could not remain a secret. For example, on January 1, 1933, a Sunday evening only a few months after her attempted suicide, she accompanied Hitler to a performance at the Munich Royal Court and National Theater, together with Rudolf Hess and his wife, Ilse; Heinrich Hoffmann and his fiancée, Erna Gröbke; and Hitler’s adjutant Wilhelm Brückner and Brückner’s girlfriend Sofie Stork. Hans Knappertsbusch, the musical director of the Bavarian State Opera House, was directing Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg.51 This opera had premiered on the same stage in 1868, and its performance on New Year’s Day 1933 launched the nationwide celebrations of Wagner on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death on February 13, 1883.
At the same time, only a few streets away from Max-Joseph-Platz and this nationalistic drama about the life and work of the early-modern minnesingers, twenty-seven-year-old Erika Mann was celebrating the premiere of her politico-literary cabaret, “The Peppermill,” in the Bonbonnière, a small, somewhat dilapidated stage near the Hofbräuhaus.52 Erika Mann, here lashing out in supremely entertaining and successful fashion at the main players in the dawning “new age,” was as hated in Munich’s nationalist circles as her father, Thomas Mann. And in fact, the same Hans Knappertsbusch, a prominent representative of Munich’s intellectual life, initiated a “Protest from Munich, the Richard Wagner City” against Thomas Mann, which was published in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten three months later, in April 1933. The occasion was a lecture the writer gave in the purview of the Wagner celebrations at the university, with the title “The Sorrows and Greatness of Richard Wagner.” Knappertsbusch and more than forty cosigners resolutely rejected Mann’s alleged disparagement of Wagner.53
Hitler, too, adored Richard Wagner and his music beyond all measure, and counted upper-class Wagnerians—such as the Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann and his wife, Elsa, and the Berlin piano manufacturer Edwin Bechstein and his wife, Helene—among his early supporters. Ernst Hanfstaengl, the publisher’s son, moved in these circles as well, and it was in his apartment on Pienzenauer Strasse, by the Herzogpark, that Hitler and his companions concluded their Wagner evening on January 1.54 Eva Braun visited Hanfstaengl for the first time on that night, although he had, as he later reminisced, already noticed her a few months earlier in Hoffmann’s photography shop: “She was a pleasing-looking blonde… well built, with blue eyes and a modest, diffident manner.” On the evening of January 1, he wrote, Hitler was in a “relaxed mood” and “lively and in good spirits, the way he was in the early ’twenties.” According to Hanfstaengl, Hitler said: “This year belongs to us. I will guarantee you that in writing.”55
Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun at the center of a group photo, 1932 (Illustration Credit 4.3)
This harmonious private occasion stood in stark contrast to the precarious political situation at the start of 1933, after the November election. The turnout was lower than in the summer elections and the NSDAP received two million fewer votes, losing 34 of their 230 Reichstag seats. Still, the National Socialists combined with the Communists, who gained votes, took a majority of the seats in the Reichstag, so that, as before, no governing majority in Parliament was possible without the participation of the radical parties. Chancellor Franz von Papen stepped down on November 17, after the failure of his plans to dissolve Parliament, and on December 3 Hindenburg named Kurt von Schleicher, Papen’s minister of defense, the new Chancellor. While Papen and Schleicher jockeyed for power, a leadership crisis broke out within the NSDAP.56 Gregor Strasser—Reich Organization Leader, head of the left wing of the Party, and for years Hitler’s only significant opponent within the Party itself—was willing to form a coalition, as opposed to the uncompromising head of the Party, who aimed solely at exclusive power, and he negotiated with Schleicher about forming a right-wing bloc and participating in the government.57 But he was unable to prevail over Hitler in the Party, and on December 8, Strasser stepped down from all his Party offices. Hitler, as Hinrich Lohse, the once-powerful Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein, recalled after the war, had shown himself “in this toughest test of the movement” to be “the master and Strasser the journeyman.”58
In the following weeks, Hitler not only crushed Strasser’s central command structure within the NSDAP but also laid out again the organizational framework for his “personal” authority based on relationships of personal devotion. The document, from December 15, 1932, is called (in Hitler’s bureaucratic German) “Memorandum Concerning the Inner Reasons for the Instructions to Produce a Heightened Fighting Power of the Movement.” The document states:
The basis of the political organization is loyalty. In loyalty, the recognition of the necessity of obedience for the construction of every human community is revealed as the noblest expression of feeling…. Loyalty and devotion in obedience can never be replaced by formal, technical measures and institutions of any type.59
Hitler was here demanding from the members of his party—especially the Gauleiters, or regional leaders, who formed its foundation—absolute loyalty. Any deviation from his dogma of devotion meant for him a delegitimizing of his claim to be the “Führer,” or “Leader,” and therefore could not be tolerated. In fact, Hitler was laying claim to what Max Weber once categorized as “charismatic authority.” In such a system of authority, according to Weber’s typology, there is only the leader and the disciples, and the leader is obeyed “purely personally… on the basis of the leader’s exceptional personal qualities,” so long as his “leadership quality,” his “charisma” and “heroism,” can constantly be established and reestablished. Competence, expertise, and privilege play no more of a role than does reliance on traditional bonds.60 Hitler himself spoke of the “fanatic apostles” who were necessary in order to spread the Nazi worldview.61
Yet what effect did such leader-disciple bonds, which certainly existed between Hitler and close associates such as Hoffmann, Hess, and Goebbels, and later Speer and Bormann, have on Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun? Was it acceptable, from the point of view of the “disciples,” that their idol, transfigured into someone or something larger than life by his own propaganda, showed himself to be as incomplete as any ordinary human being by having ordinary human needs? Did the same moral commandment of unswerving submission, which Hitler described as the foundation for every human community, apply to Eva Braun as well? According to Max Weber’s definition, the “charismatic leader” does not distinguish between
private and public bonds, since his authority is based solely on “purely personal social relationships.”62 In this context, Eva Braun’s suicide attempt may well have demonstrated to Hitler her loyalty and adoration to the utmost possible degree, and the self-sacrifice that he demanded from all his followers. By January 1933, in any case, it was clear that, despite their unavoidable geographic separation, Eva Braun had become a lasting and crucial figure in Hitler’s life.
Meanwhile, in Cologne and Berlin, Hitler was in multiple negotiations about the formation of a new government with the scheming Franz von Papen, the opponent of the new Chancellor, Kurt von Schleicher. President Hindenburg was aware of these meetings and approved of them, and Schleicher suspected that the efforts to topple him were going on behind his back.63 The Nazi propaganda machine played up the significance of an NSDAP victory in the Landtag election in the principality of Lippe-Detmold on January 15, 1933, and this gave Hitler some tactical leverage. But a decisive turn in the question of who would be chancellor came about only due to the machinations of a businessman named Joachim von Ribbentrop, in whose villa in Dahlem outside Berlin Hitler had his meetings with Papen and then, on the evening of January 22, with Oskar von Hindenburg, the President’s adjutant and son. When Schleicher’s government stepped down on January 28, Papen gave his unqualified support to a Hitler cabinet.64 After conservatives such as Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the foreign minister; Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, the finance minister; Baron Paul von Eltz-Rübenach, the postal and traffic minister; and Alfred Hugenberg, the head of the German National People’s Party (DNVP), declared themselves willing to work in a government led by Hitler, Hindenburg named the NSDAP leader Chancellor, on January 30, 1933.65
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