Eva Braun

by Heike B. Görtemaker

  Unlike Emmy Göring, Ilse Hess was also in contact with Eva Braun. It cannot be determined when they met, or whether their connection included personal meetings or took place entirely by letter. It is certain, though, that Hitler’s girlfriend was among those who received Christmas presents from Ilse Hess, for which Eva Braun gave warm thanks in a letter addressed “Dear Madam.”60 Like the other “First Ladies of the Third Reich,” Ilse Hess also played a public role, admittedly a smaller one than that played by Magda Goebbels. Pictures of Ilse Hess and her son Wolf Rüdiger Hess, Hitler’s godson, appeared in newspapers such as the high-circulation Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. And until her husband flew to Scotland in a fighter plane on a wayward mission on May 10, 1941, “Madame Reich Minister” employed no fewer than two secretaries of her own to keep the flood of correspondence under control. Even after Hess’s mission, as “apparently persona non grata,” she maintained contacts and remained, as she told the writer Hans Grimm in November 1944, “unswervingly true to the law… according to which we lined up under the Führer’s banner in 1920.” Until the very end, the idea that her husband “would stand once more at the Führer’s side as one of his most faithful followers” remained for her a “wonderful dream.”61

  Eva Braun’s Role

  In 1933, Eva Braun turned twenty-one and legally became an adult. The problems in her relationship with Hitler continued to be the unsettled situation and their lack of time together. But it is impossible to tell when and how often she and Hitler saw each other in his early years as Chancellor, from 1933 to 1935. Nevertheless, the biographical accounts up to now, based on the contents of a diary that Eva Braun allegedly kept between February 6 and May 28, 1935, claim that they were often together during these years.62 In fact, Goebbels’s notes also show that Hitler, even in the months after he was named Reich Chancellor, spent most of his time in Munich. For example, in February 1933 he spent half his time in the Bavarian capital.63 While the “transfer of power” in Berlin was turning into what the Nazis themselves called a “seizure of power”—with Hitler immediately arranging for President Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag, call new elections for March 5, and impose the emergency measures “For the Protection of the German People,” which led to massive limits on freedom of the press and freedom of assembly—the head of the NSDAP was flying to his favorite city for several days every week. And Eva Braun—at least according to the postwar testimony of Hitler’s housekeeper, who was living with him on Prinzregentenplatz—“was there every time Hitler was there.” She was “sometimes taken home at night,” but occasionally spent the night “in the house too.”64

  Letter from Eva Braun to Ilse Hess [7] (Illustration Credit 5.4)

  Hitler thus largely withdrew from the electoral campaign that was actually entirely about him, and in which he was cast, more than ever before, as a kind of mythical redeemer. The NSDAP, meanwhile, especially in Berlin, was intimidating and persecuting political opponents with all of the means at its disposal, including arbitrary arrests and violent attacks by the SA.65 Late on the night of February 3, for example, Hitler traveled to Munich after announcing to high-ranking army officers an unprecedented rearmament at a sitting of the army leadership on the Bendlerstrasse (today the Bendlerblock). On the morning of February 5, a Sunday, following the “state burial” staged by Goebbels in the Berlin Cathedral to honor the SA thug Hans Eberhard Maikowski, who had been killed on January 30, Hitler left the capital again in order to celebrate Eva Braun’s twenty-first birthday with her the next day, February 6.66 Eleven days later, on February 17, Hitler flew to Munich again after an election speech in Dortmund and spent the weekend.67 Four days later, on February 23, after a campaign appearance in Frankfurt, Hitler left for Bavaria for five days, remaining there until February 27—on the evening of which, the Reichstag burned.68

  Why was the Chancellor spending so much time in Munich? Was Eva Braun the reason? And how did he justify his frequent absences from the seat of government? The truth was that Hitler, despite his conspicuous political rise to power, had no intention of giving up the bohemian lifestyle that he had led up until then. Rudolf Hess’s announcement of “new time management” a day after taking power in the government was somewhat premature: the “Führer,” Hess enthusiastically wrote to his wife Ilse on January 31, was suddenly punctual and even “always a few minutes early,” so that he, Hess, now “even had to buy a watch.”69 However, Hitler, well known for never being on time, remained restless and erratic.70 Berlin never became the center of his life. At first, he still lived in the Hotel Kaiserhof there; later, during renovations to his apartment in the Old Reich Chancellery, he stayed in the rooms “on the second floor of the office building” of his State Secretary, Hans Heinrich Lammers.71 In Bavaria, on the other hand, he bought the apartment in Munich that he had rented until then, at 16 Prinzregentenplatz, as well as the small Haus Wachenfeld on the Obersalzberg,72 both in 1933. In the Reichstag election of March 5, he campaigned for the seat he needed in Parliament not in Berlin but in District 24, Upper Bavaria/Swabia73—although whether or not he threw himself “with all his strength into the election battle,” as is usually claimed, is certainly doubtful.74 He had his head of propaganda spread the information that he was living “simply, like any other member of the People,” and that he had “no pleasures and no relaxation other than his work and his task.” He himself stated in an interview with the German actor Tony van Eyck after the election, in answer to the question of whether he was happy: “Happy? How can someone be happy with such immensely difficult tasks standing before him? Hopeful, yes—that I certainly am!”75 But the picture painted by Hitler and Goebbels of the “Führer” living a life of renunciation and hardship, overcoming “by some miracle” all “bodily and spiritual strains,” bore no relation to the truth.76 Rather, the first few months of Hitler’s chancellorship already showed that Berlin was primarily the “stage” on which the Nazi propaganda would perform the “cult of the Führer,” while Hitler the actual person simply disappeared unnoticed.77 Tranquil Munich and its surroundings remained his private retreat, a fact largely kept hidden from the public.

  Especially for the period after the Reichstag election of March 5, in which the NSDAP won 43.9 percent of the vote but failed to reach its goal of an absolute majority, Joseph Goebbels’s diary entries document the extent to which Hitler made himself scarce: he hardly ever spent ten days or two weeks in a row in the nation’s capital.78 On the other hand, he extended his stays in Bavaria, for example spending from March 26 to April 4 there, when he drove for several days to his vacation residence on the Obersalzberg. His ministers in Berlin could reach him by telephone, and by the telex service that had just been introduced and was still under construction. Thus Goebbels, now head of the newly created “Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,” communicated to Hitler in Munich by telegram the call for a general boycott of Jewish businesses on March 27, and made “a report by telephone” the following day “about the effects of the call to boycott.”79 The geographical distance did not affect the fact that Hitler was always kept well informed, and still made all the important decisions himself.80

  Week by week, both the social climate and the political landscape of the German Reich were changing. Regulations, laws, and decrees followed one another unceasingly, all leading in the direction of the final destruction of the state governments, the elimination of political opposition, and the removal of Jewish citizens from public life, and all pursuing the goal of making the NSDAP the only power in the Reich. In April alone, no fewer than twelve such regulations went into effect, including the “Reich Governor Law” of April 7 and the “Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service,” announced on the same day, according to which politically suspect civil servants and officials of “non-Aryan heritage” were fired or forcibly retired.81 Still, Hitler himself, as Kershaw notes, was “only minimally active” in the spring of 1933 and “took almost no personal part” in the transformation of the country.82 In April
, too, the Chancellor spent the greater part of his time in Munich and its surroundings: he traveled to Munich on April 10, after only five days fulfilling his duties of office in Berlin; then he flew to Berlin on the afternoon of Friday, April 21, only to drive back to Bavaria the next day and stay until Wednesday of the following week.83 It was difficult, in these circumstances, to get into a “work routine.” Rather, as Otto Dietrich (the “Reich Press Chief” and one of Hitler’s constant companions since 1933) wrote later, Hitler had “no ability to distinguish between public and private life,” and conducted “his public business in the middle of his private life and lived a private life in the middle of his official business and official duties.”84

  Hitler even sidestepped the celebrations on April 20, 1933, his forty-fourth birthday and the first time his birthday was celebrated throughout the country. While the Chancellor, as Goebbels noted in his diary, tarried “somewhere or another in Bavaria” and could not be reached, the Propaganda Minister organized the “Führer’s Birthday” celebration in Berlin. Following the custom of celebrating the Kaiser’s birthday, the “Führer’s Birthday” was to be celebrated every year, from then until the end of the Nazi dictatorship, with nationwide Party celebrations, commemorations, and marches, becoming a major fixed point in the German holiday calendar.85 It was Goebbels, not Hitler, who attended the ceremony to honor the dictator on that evening of April 20 in the National Playhouse Berlin (today the Konzerthaus Berlin) on the Gendarmenmarkt. There the National Socialist author Hanns Johst, head dramaturge since March 1933 of the legendary former Royal National Theater, premiered Schlageter, a play written by him and dedicated to “Adolf Hitler in loving devotion and unwavering loyalty.”86 A few hours earlier, Goebbels had given a radio address to the public with the title “Our Hitler,” which cast the absent leader as a national hero who had taken up Bismarck’s “work” and was “committed to completing” it, while at the same time remaining a “comrade” and “ordinary person like any other.”87

  What was Hitler himself doing while the glorification of his person reached this “new high point”?88 He was strolling around Munich with his entourage, nicknamed the Chauffeureska, visiting his favorite restaurants, the opera, and the theater, and relaxing with close friends in Heinrich Hoffmann’s villa. In addition, he often met with Eva Braun, without letting their relationship turn into a routine or even anything reliable. Ultimately, the existence of a lover with whom he shared “no day-to-day life and no legitimate relationship,” and with whom there was no possibility of feeling a “sense of finality,” the way one would with a wife, was in complete harmony with Hitler’s bohemian, antibourgeois lifestyle.89 He received Eva Braun at his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz, took her to eat at Osteria Bavaria, and invited her to his vacation residence on the Obersalzberg. The young woman spontaneously packed her bags and—officially on assignment from Photohaus Hoffmann—stepped into a chauffeured Mercedes, sent by Hitler, that was waiting on the corner of Türkenstrasse a few yards from the photo shop.90

  There is, though, hardly any evidence for these activities aside from the statements of third parties and a few photographs from the period.91 Still, Albert Speer, who had assisted the architect Paul Ludwig Troost (“Architect to the Führer”) since fall 1933 in renovating the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, and who soon joined Hitler’s innermost circle and was regularly brought along to Munich for “architectural discussions,” has painted a memorable picture in Inside the Third Reich of the usual course of Hitler’s stays in Munich. The Chancellor did not pay much attention “to state or Party business during his time in Munich,” Speer wrote, but rather spent his time largely “vagabonding around” on “construction sites, studios, cafes, and restaurants.” After a few days, they would all set out in several cars—convertibles with the tops down if the weather was fine—for the Obersalzberg, to “Hitler’s cozy little wooden house with large overhanging eaves and modest rooms.” Only hours after their arrival, according to Speer, did the secretaries Johanna Wolf and Christa Schroeder arrive, “most of the time along with an ordinary Munich girl.”92 These women’s closed Mercedes was “never allowed to drive in the official motorcades.” Then Hitler would stay, “with Eva Braun, an adjutant, and a servant,” alone “in the small house,” while the secretaries and Hitler’s guests, often including Martin Bormann and Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich along with Speer, were housed in a nearby pension.93

  Speer’s look back at the early years of his close friendship with Hitler portrays the Nazi leader in stark contrast to the way the “cult of the Führer” propaganda presented him; he describes a man in a light-blue linen jacket, in a remote, isolated mountain cabin, spending his days perusing construction plans or on long walks in the forest and his nights with his young lover.94 Eva Braun, in turn, is described as an ordinary, nice, pretty, unassuming girl. Her relationship to Hitler is given only one brief, disparaging mention. According to Speer, Hitler and Eva Braun kept, even in this circle of close friends on the Obersalzberg, a “pointless distance from each other that came across as tense,” avoiding any displays of intimacy on the one hand (to the point that Eva Braun was only allowed to walk “behind both the secretaries at the end of the procession” on their hikes), but “disappearing together into the upstairs bedroom” at the end of the night. Conflicts that arose from Eva Braun’s “ambiguous position in Hitler’s court,” as Speer called it, are meanwhile hinted at only very briefly, such as when Speer writes that the Munich girl kept her distance from everybody and that this “withdrawn type of behavior” was held against her by many people as arrogance.95

  This portrayal of Eva Braun, on the whole positive and even respectful, is noticeably different from the largely harsh and derogatory descriptions of her from other members of the inner circle. Only Karl Brandt, the young doctor who became Hitler’s personal physician at age thirty in 1934, described Braun in similarly positive terms. Under questioning from the Americans by whom he was being held as a prisoner of war in 1945, he stated that he had “seen [Eva Braun] with Hitler for several years” before he realized “who and what she was.” She had never “pushed herself into the foreground,” always staying “in her place.”96 The Hitler-Braun relationship seemed not to have been an “open secret,” at least in the years before 1936. However, Brandt’s statements and especially Speer’s remarks indicate that, by 1934 at the latest, Eva Braun was a regular guest on the Obersalzberg.97

  Eva Braun with Hitler in front of the chimney stove in Haus Wachenfeld, 1935. To the left, Hitler’s chauffeur Julius Schreck. (Illustration Credit 5.5)

  But is Speer, passing judgment such a long time after the fact, a reliable source? Doubts are in order—as indeed, in principle, they are in order with any eyewitness report. Numerous scholars in recent years have expressed reservations about the historical reliability of Speer’s Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries, finding them to be “later, fictional constructions” in which Speer was demonstrably trying to minimize his involvement with Nazi crimes and to present the more positive, elevated image he had of himself.98 The first of these points holds true, to a greater or lesser degree, of all of the surviving Nazis’ postwar publications, the second point for most writers of memoirs in general. Nonetheless, eyewitness statements are not worthless. They only require constant critical testing and analysis.

  Speer’s description of the past remains informative, especially since he spent over a decade as one of Hitler’s most trusted colleagues. Speer’s oldest son, also named Albert and also an architect, even told the film director and author Heinrich Breloer that there was “a very genuine, deep, emotional relationship on both sides” between his father and Hitler.99 Speer himself, in a letter to his friend and former colleague Rudolf Wolters about his relationship with Hitler, wrote:

  I had a split relationship to Hitler…. It is probably typical of most friendships that they are built on contradictions. With Hitler I never once had the feeling that I had found a friend in him. Maybe
it seemed different to you, from the outside. I was constantly living “in the fear of the Lord”—it was not easy to deal with him and stay in his favor or even, if possible, intensify it.100

  In his memoir, Speer claims to have come “completely under the sway of Hitler” but never to have known Hitler’s “real face.” Rather, he had followed him “unwillingly, almost unconsciously, into a world” that was “actually quite alien” to him.101 Speer thereby casts himself not only as an outsider who was led astray, but as an addict, dependent and even possessed from without—a position he grants also to Eva Braun, seven years younger than he was when the barely thirty-year-old architect apparently struck up a close and trusting friendship with her. In an interview with Joachim Fest, Speer explained the reasons for his friendly relations with Hitler’s lover by saying that they were both equally prisoners of their emotions, even enslaved: “She was, like me, under Hitler’s so to speak hypnotic spell. We both suffered under him, hated him at times, but were still unable to break free of him.”102