Eva Braun

by Heike B. Görtemaker

  Hitler had reached his goal. Immediately after his swearing in, he had himself driven the few steps from the Reich Chancellery to the Hotel Kaiserhof, flanked by cheering crowds.66 Numerous faithful followers were already waiting there, including Göring, Goebbels, Hess, Hanfstaengl, and Hoffmann. Together they celebrated attaining the center of power in the German Reich. “Wilhelmstrasse is ours,” Goebbels remarked, full of satisfaction, in his diary that would be published a year later as Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei (From Kaiserhof to the Reich Chancellery).67 Hess wrote to his wife, Ilse, that he had “not thought possible until the last moment” what had now become “reality.”68

  The first meeting of Hitler’s cabinet took place at 5:00 p.m. the same day. At around 8:30, Hitler showed himself at the window to his followers, who—in an improvised mobilization from Goebbels—marched from the Grosser Stern in the Tiergarten, through the Brandenburg Gate, to Wilhelmstrasse in a torchlit procession that included thousands of Berliners.69 Although the conferring of power upon the head of the NSDAP was in no way seen as a turning point at the time, the leading National Socialists immediately created the legend of a “German revolution,” and they conducted themselves like bellicose upstarts. Intoxicated by their success, they did not leave the Chancellery until the early morning hours of January 31.70

  Hindenburg, who had temporarily been using the official residence in the Chancellery since October 1932, apparently saluted the masses marching past his window until after midnight. Gathered around Hitler were his vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, Wilhelm Frick, and Hermann Göring as minister without portfolio and acting head of the Prussian interior ministry, as well as Joseph Goebbels, Rudolf Hess, NSDAP lawyer Hans Frank, Heinrich Hoffmann, and other followers. As the night progressed, Hitler managed to withdraw to a small room next to the chancellor’s ballroom and reception hall, where he held forth in a monologue for hours on end before his comrades-in-arms.71 A large number of phone calls and telegrams had already arrived from Germany and abroad, acknowledging the change of government, to the point that the telephone lines were sometimes jammed. Nevertheless, Hitler, it is said, tried to reach Eva Braun by phone in Munich that night.72

  Eva Braun did not actually have her own phone. In the early 1930s, a telephone was a luxury item that only a few private households could afford, especially in a time of general economic hardship. Long conversations on the telephone were still rare; in general, the phone was used for brief communications or to call for help in emergencies. There were, however, already some four hundred thousand connections in the metropolis of Berlin, population four million. The German postal service was just beginning to promote the purchase of telephone connections, with a brochure called “You Need a Telephone Too.”73 In any case, Hitler could reach Eva Braun by phone only at the office of his friend Hoffmann. She apparently spent nights at the office, sleeping on a “bench” and waiting for her lover’s phone call.74 Only after Hitler was introduced to Braun’s best friend Herta Ostermayr at Café Heck in Munich, which was after he had come to power, did he “always” call the Ostermayrs “from Berlin”—as Herta later recalled—“since the Brauns didn’t have a phone.”75 This arrangement did not last long, though—the official phone book of May 1, 1934, lists Eva Braun with her own phone number at 93 Hohenzollernstrasse. Even though the address was that of her parents’ apartment, the name in the phone book was hers alone,76 which shows that the phone line was acquired especially for her, so that she could talk on the phone with Hitler undisturbed.

  On January 30, 1933, there was no such possibility. If we are to believe Nerin E. Gun, it was a nun collecting donations from the Brauns on the afternoon of January 30 who told Eva the news from Berlin. Eva Braun’s first reaction was happiness; then, in the following days at Photohaus Hoffmann, she enthusiastically collected photographs of the National Socialist rally in Berlin while her father and her sister Ilse expressed reservations about the change in government. According to Gun, Franziska and Ilse Braun, who lived together in the family home in Ruhpolding in Upper Bavaria after Friedrich Braun’s death on January 22, 1964, stated that Eva Braun grew very pensive after her initial reaction of high spirits, because she was afraid that she would be able to see Hitler even less often than before.77

  PART TWO

  Contrasting Worlds

  5. WOMEN IN NATIONAL SOCIALISM

  National Socialist propaganda put forth an official image of women that implied a single standard model for women’s lives. Countless brochures, textbooks, proclamations, and speeches constructed the ideal of a woman’s world completely restricted to the domestic and social realms. In a speech before the National Socialist Women’s League at the NSDAP convention in Nuremberg on September 8, 1934, for example, Adolf Hitler explained: “If we say that the world of the man is the state, the world of the man is his struggle, his readiness for battle in the service of the community, then we might perhaps say that the world of the woman is a smaller world. For her world is her husband, her family, her children, and her house.”1 As the speech continued, Hitler referred to “nature,” “God,” and the “Providence” that had “assigned women to their ownmost world” and made them, in this clearly demarcated realm, “man’s helper” and his “most faithful friend” and “partner.”2

  The “Reich Women’s Leader” Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, only thirty-two years old at the time, spoke to the members of her sex at the same event. Although she was to push for the Gleichschaltung[5] of the women’s unions and the establishment of a women’s labor service in the coming years, she implored the women in her audience to become a part of the People—and part of History—by “being a mother.” At the same time, though, she also appealed to women working in industry or farming, by declaring: “Clear the path from yourself to other women, and never let your first question be what National Socialism brings us, but rather ask first, and over and over again: What are we prepared to bring to National Socialism?”3 Clearly the “Reich Women’s Leader”—unlike Hitler himself—was concerned not to exclude working women, who numbered more than a million by that point, but instead to integrate them, as well as housewives, into the Nazi “Volksgemeinschaft.”[6] 4

  Ideology and Reality

  In actual fact, the image that Hitler and the Nazi propagandists presented of the lives of women and girls in Germany had little to do with reality. In 1932, during the worst phase of the economic depression in Germany, a higher percentage of women than men were fully employed.5 After Hitler came to power, the number of women in industry rose steadily from 1,205,000 in 1933 to 1,846,000 in 1938.6 The actual lives of women in the “Third Reich” beyond the “cult of the mother” was thus significantly more multilayered and complex than is generally assumed.

  There were, however, many professions that women were no longer allowed to practice after 1933. Hitler had personally forbidden women from being licensed as judges or lawyers in the German Reich, and decided that “women were categorically not to be used as high government officials.” Exceptions would be made only “for positions especially suited to women, in the areas of social work, education, and health services.”7 At the Party convention in 1936, Hitler declared once again to “all the literary know-it-alls and equal-rights philosophizers” that there were “two worlds in the life of a People: the world of the woman and the world of the man.”8 However, economic constraints such as the shortage of labor in the country, as well as Nazi political goals including the rearmament program under way since 1936 and the concomitant need for workers, made it harder to carry out a unified ideological political program for women and families based on racist/biologist principles.9

  The realities of women’s lives in the National Socialist state were increasingly studied as a topic of historical research only from the late 1970s on. Until then, scholars of National Socialism concentrated primarily on analyzing the structures of power and thus women, who were excluded from important political, economic, and military roles in the Nazi state, were typically seen as ins
ignificant and their influence was little examined. This approach was likewise—in fact, above all—to be found in the biographical portraits of the leading National Socialists—Hitler, Speer, Himmler. The journalist Gitta Sereny was an exception: for her biography of Speer, she also made sure to talk with Speer’s wife, Margarete, who had, after all, “for years seen Hitler as a private man day after day” and, Sereny believed, could hardly have “remained in total ignorance” of the Nazi crimes.10 Joachim Fest, on the other hand, as late as the early 1990s, maintained that the cult of Hitler among his early female supporters from the “better circles of society” (for example, Helene Bechstein, Elsa Bruckmann, and Viktoria von Dirksen) had its cause in the “exuberance of feeling among a certain type of older woman, who sought to awaken the unsatisfied drives inside them in the frenzy of nighttime mass rallies around the ecstatic figure of Hitler.” There is no talk of these women having any possible political motives or well-thought-out antidemocratic or anti-Semitic positions, though Fest does discuss their moral decay, world-weariness, “muffled covetousness,” and a “maternal concern” projected onto Hitler.11

  The memoir literature by Hitler’s more or less close collaborators, which seeks to explain his mass popularity, encourages such interpretations. Moreover, in such texts the wives, girlfriends, and female family members are usually on the margins, mentioned only as passive bystanders. “Eva Braun had no interest in politics,” wrote Albert Speer, for example. “She scarcely ever attempted to influence Hitler.” Speer likewise claimed about his own wife that she was “not political.” In general, he almost entirely excludes his family from his postwar reminiscences, in which, as his youngest daughter complained, his wife and children are “practically nonexistent.”12 The women’s own writings, in turn, retrospectively give the impression that these women were occupied exclusively in the private sphere during the twelve years of Nazi rule, casting the authors as devoted but politically passive companions to their men. They deny any personal responsibility or guilt, since they were, they say, to a large extent unaware of what was going on around them. Margarete Speer, for example, kept silent her whole life about her role in the Berghof inner circle as well as about her relations with Eva Braun and Anni Brandt (the wife of Hitler’s attending physician, Karl Brandt), and was thus described by her children “as always completely apolitical.”13 Maria von Below’s husband, Nicolaus von Below, worked in Hitler’s immediate surroundings as air force adjutant from 1937 to 1945 and developed an increasingly close “relationship of mutual trust” with him over the course of those years; she later said that at the time, when she belonged to the circle of women on the Obersalzberg, she had been “not all that pleased to come into that political world”—she and her husband were, she said, “entirely apolitical.”14

  In fact, most women claimed after the war that they had had nothing to do with politics in the years before 1945. The widespread claim of “feminine innocence” was, not least, part of the strategy of exoneration in a debate about the past that took place in Germany in the 1950s. Even decades later, the psychoanalyst Margarete Mitscherlich reaffirmed, in a much-noticed book called The Peaceable Sex, that anti-Semitism is intrinsically masculine—a “social disease” that stands in close relation to “typical male development.” Women, on the other hand, are inclined to conform to “male prejudices” out of a “fear of loss of love.” In the Nazi period, she writes, women, “like all weak and oppressed members of a society,” thus identified with the “aggressor.”15 To this day, the fact that a woman like Eva Braun did not take part in any of “the decisions that led to the worst crimes of the century” is taken as proof of her exclusively private existence, “outside of history.”16 But is uncritically sharing Hitler’s worldview and political opinions not enough to transform someone from a victim into a collaborator? Doesn’t the danger of a dictatorship consist precisely in such blind obedience?

  It has thus become more and more common to no longer see the wives of Nazi Party leaders or functionaries as mere dependents or conformists, but to understand them as active agents, “complicit” or even “perpetrators” in their own right. This new perspective has already led to studies centered on female propagandists of the NSDAP, or on women who were active in the SS system. But it also illuminates the hitherto unnoticed lives of SS men’s wives, and their significance for the SS “clan-community.” The conclusions were as could have been predicted: these women actively or passively consented to the “murderous reality” surrounding them every day, and at the very least lacked a sense of guilt. It was apparently socially acceptable “normal behavior” to support criminal activity.17

  Despite the paucity of sources, Eva Braun’s case, too, and that of the other women belonging to the closed community at the Berghof, must be investigated—and her concrete everyday life and behavior in the Nazi regime reconstructed—without letting our view of the facts be obstructed by the image of women in Nazi propaganda, later strategies of self-justification, or the myth of “male power” in the Nazi regime.18 In the final analysis, the only way to understand Eva Braun’s status and social function within Hitler’s private environment, and her significance in the Berghof group, is to answer the question, What were her own motives? Until now, though, no one has seemed to suppose that she pursued any goals of her own whatsoever. The technicality that she was never a member of the NSDAP or any other Party organization has been taken as proof of her allegedly apolitical behavior; Eva Braun exists in the public eye, even today, only as a submissive victim or as someone who enjoyed the fruits of male actions without participating in them. But to what extent did she herself identify with the National Socialist state? Within the limits drawn for her as a woman and as Hitler’s secret mistress, was there any room to maneuver that she actively made use of? Albert Speer, in an interview with Gitta Sereny a few years before his death, claimed that Eva Braun had been “helpful to many people behind the scenes” without ever making this known.19 How we should take Speer’s brief mention of these activities remains to be seen, but it is clear that they do not fit the common picture of an entirely unaware and uninterested mistress.

  The lives of the Nazi elite’s wives and lovers, kept hidden from the public, developed along lines that often contradicted the publicly proclaimed principles of the regime. For example, the diplomat and travel writer Hans-Otto Meissner criticized the “founder of National Socialism” in his postwar memoir for having disregarded “the principles of the Third Reich” at his formal events. Meissner was the son of Otto Meissner, who for many years was head of the Office of the Reich President, which in 1934 became the Presidential Chancellery of the Führer, and he grew up in the Reich President’s official residence on Wilhelmstrasse. He wrote that the “official representations at the Berlin Reich Chancellery,” including state ceremonies and festivities, were constantly violating Party rules; in fact, they were diametrically opposed to the behavior that Party functionaries were advocating “in the whole Reich.” Meissner was intimately familiar with how the Nazi regime conducted itself on the international stage, both because he worked in the German diplomatic service in London and Tokyo from 1935 to 1939 and because his father, as the “Chief of the Presidential Chancellery of the Führer and Chancellor,” was almost solely responsible for managing large, formal events. He remarked that at the state dinners Hitler held in Berlin, not only was the reactionary “kiss of the hand” in good form, but participants also enjoyed the “foreign luxury products,” such as “old Burgundy” and “French champagne,” that were consistently demonized in Nazi propaganda.20 And even while the NSDAP especially targeted female cigarette consumers in their nationwide antismoking campaigns—posting in restaurants and cafés placards that said “The German Woman Does Not Smoke!”—in the Reich Chancellery “liveried servants” offered “the ladies Egyptian cigarettes,” according to Meissner. The “ladies at the Führer’s table,” the former diplomat revealed to his countrymen in 1951, wore evening dresses from “Lanvin and Patou” and
wreathed themselves “in Chanel and Chypre perfumes.”21

  Magda Goebbels: “First Lady of the Third Reich”

  One such lady who often sat “at the Führer’s table,” filling the function of “First Lady of the Third Reich” at Hitler’s side during receptions, balls, and state visits, was Magda Goebbels. Since Eva Braun, as a girlfriend kept hidden from the public, obviously could not participate in such formal functions and thus never took part in any official meals at the “Reich Chancellor’s House” at 77 Wilhelmstrasse, only the wives of the highest-ranking Reich ministers were appropriate for such duties. This was particularly true for Magda Goebbels, who was attractive, elegant, and sophisticated, in the views of the time, and had a special personal relationship with Hitler as well.22 Ilse Hess, Emmy Göring, and Annelies von Ribbentrop were only replacements: they stood in for the Propaganda Minister’s wife occasionally, when she was not available.

  Hitler clearly recognized quite early on the valuable public-relations qualities of Magda Quandt, as she was named when he met her. She had divorced her first husband, Günther Quandt, a major industrialist who was worth millions, and Hitler’s first meeting with her, in the spring of 1931 in the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, was not an accident. Magda Quandt had arranged the encounter herself by sending her ten-year-old son Harald to the NSDAP leader’s suite in a blue costume-uniform to “report for duty to his Führer,”23 who had arrived in Berlin only that morning. The maneuver worked exactly as planned: the boy’s appearance and the ensuing conversation with Magda Quandt in the café in the hotel lobby, arranged by Goebbels, convinced Hitler that this woman could “play a great role” in his life as “the feminine antipole” to him in his work.24