Eva Braun
Page 10
Now, does this retroactively negative account of Hitler, which elevates him to a kind of Mephistopheles figure in the interest of Speer’s own self-justification, obstruct a clear view of Eva Braun as well?103 Does it not present her, like Speer himself, as less self-sufficient, more dependent, and more passive than she really was? Did she share the political positions and basic worldview of her lover or was she really the mere “tragic slave,” who nonetheless profited from Hitler’s power by enjoying the luxurious life that he offered her? In any case, Speer, unlike those who continued to hold fast to their respect for Hitler after 1945 and remained true believers in the cult of the “Führer,” had no need to minimize Eva Braun’s significance. He thus remains, despite all of his strategies of mythification and self-exoneration, a key witness, due to his extraordinary personal closeness with both Hitler and Eva Braun.104
The “Diary”
Meanwhile, hardly any letters or personal documents exist from the dictator himself or from his companion of many years that shed any light on the nature of their relationship, or Eva Braun’s role, or how she saw her role. It is well known that Hitler rarely wrote private letters, aside from thank-you notes or birthday cards. His secretary Christa Schroeder, in fact, stated immediately after the end of the war that he had considered it “his great strength” that “even in the years of struggle he wrote no letters.” Such letters might have fallen “into the wrong hands” and been “exploited.”105 He also, before his suicide, made sure to destroy the greater part of his private correspondence, of which there was presumably little to begin with. Julius Schaub, his adjutant of many years, left the bunker in Berlin for this reason at the end of April 1945, on direct orders from Hitler, in order to burn the private letters and files stored in safes at both Hitler’s Munich apartment and at the Berghof.106
Similar testimony comes from Johannes Göhler, the former adjutant to Hermann Fegelein, the liaison officer who married Gretl Braun. In an interview with the British historian David Irving, who for years spared no effort in tracking down Hitler’s letters to Eva Braun, Göhler said that he had flown from Berlin to Berchtesgaden in Hitler’s airplane, a Ju 290, at the end of April 1945, in order to destroy all of Hitler’s private correspondence there. Several hundred handwritten letters to and from Eva Braun were said to be included there, in a footlocker.107 Irving’s interest was piqued and so, years later, he questioned Göhler’s wife, who told him that she had worked for the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) from August 1945 until February 1946, during which time she helped “an American CIC officer pack up Eva Braun’s aforementioned diaries from 1933–1945 as well as her correspondence with Hitler”; she also said that she herself was in possession of letters that Eva Braun had written to Gretl Braun between 1930 and 1932. Finally, she claimed that Eva Braun’s private papers stored at the Berghof were not destroyed in 1945, but rather were in the hands of Robert A. Gutierrez, the former head of the CIC team in Stuttgart. Irving, sensing a sensational find, went to the United States and succeeded in tracking down Gutierrez. He did not, however, discover any private letters of Hitler’s or Eva Braun’s there.108
Eva Braun had actually instructed her sister Gretl in her last letter from Berlin, on April 23, 1945—a week before the double suicide—to take all of “the letters from the Führer” as well as “the copies of [her] replies” to him, which she had bequeathed to her sister in a will of October 26, 1944, and “make a water-resistant packet” and “bury them if need be.” She explicitly insisted: “Please don’t destroy them.” The other private correspondence and “above all the business papers,” on the other hand, Gretl should get rid of immediately. Eva Braun emphasized that “on no account must Heise’s bills be found”—she had remained to the end a regular client of the well-known Berlin fashion designer Annemarie Heise.109 In contrast to Hitler, who tried at the end to completely wipe out any trace of his private life, Eva Braun was trying, with her sister’s help, to ensure that posterity would learn about her relationship with the “Führer” and her life at his side. Her letter from April 23, 1945, reveals a woman who, faced with death, was concerned about her image for posterity. In any case, none of the documents she asked her sister to preserve have been found to this day. It seems reasonable to suppose that Julius Schaub, who arrived at the Berghof on April 25—two days after Eva Braun had written her last letter to her sister—destroyed this correspondence together with Hitler’s papers before Gretl Braun could bring them to safety. The final truth, however, remains unknown.
Nerin E. Gun also reported later that Gretl Braun and Herta Ostermayr had hidden “photograph albums, amateur films, letters, jewelry, and other mementos” in the park of Fischhorn Castle in the Pinzgau region of the state of Salzburg, near Zell am See. In fact, the former SS office of Fischhorn, a subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp, was used around the end of the war as a storage depot for stolen art and other “estates” of the Nazi elite who were going into hiding. There, supposedly, Gretl Braun took into her confidence a “German refugee,” who turned out to be an American “agent,” and Eva Braun’s estate was confiscated by the U.S. Army and sent to Washington. Gun said that he had later “chanced to find” the documents again “in a corner of the American archives.”110 These are primarily the papers, photo albums, and films shot by Eva Braun that are now stored in the National Archives in Washington. There are no letters from Hitler to Eva Braun among them.
It is therefore necessary to turn to other sources to gain insight into the relationship that existed between Hitler and Eva Braun, and any details about that relationship. But there are not many other sources. Hitler’s statements that shed light on his views of women in general, for example, are found mostly in the published postwar memoirs of his former followers or, for the years after 1942, in the records of conversations induced by Martin Bormann. Occasional hints can be found in various other diaries and correspondences. Eva Braun, though, is not mentioned. It is thus difficult to reconstruct their relationship, and the question of what actually attracted Hitler to this young woman can be addressed chiefly by means of his behavior with third parties. It is said of Speer, for example, that Hitler deliberately chose him to be his architect because he was modest, “normal” compared to his other followers, young, and easily influenced, and the notoriously suspicious Hitler could be assured of admiration from Speer, who was sixteen years younger.111 Would these motives not also apply to Hitler’s choice of Eva Braun, the youngest member of the inner circle around him? By reason of her youth alone, and her lower-middle-class background, even aside from the intimacy of their relationship, she must surely have been more pliable than the other members of his retinue.
In this context, only the twenty-page diary fragment in Eva Braun’s papers, written in old-style German handwriting, sheds light on the character of their relationship. It is still controversial, however, whether it was actually written by her or not. While Nerin E. Gun had Ilse Fucke-Michels, Eva Braun’s older sister, check the handwriting to confirm the authenticity of the document in 1967, the editor of Christa Schroeder’s memoirs, Anton Joachimsthaler, claims that the handwriting of the document proves that it is a forgery.112 The historian Werner Maser, meanwhile, maintains that it reveals “more about Hitler’s relationship to women” than most of the interpretations of the “supposedly well-informed biographers.”113 Despite these doubts, or because of them, the “Diary,” as it is called, has inspired all sorts of flights of fancy since its discovery and has been not only the object of scholarly studies but also material for fanciful stories.114
Anna Maria Sigmund has described these jottings as “a mirror of Eva Braun’s psyche,” but what are they actually about? In truth, they are the thoughts of a young woman of twenty-three, usually written down some three weeks after the events described and primarily circling around the irregular comings and goings of her much older lover. We learn that Eva Braun celebrated her birthday, February 6, 1935, in Munich without Hitler. The Chancellor spent the d
ay in Berlin but had Wilma Schaub, the wife of his personal assistant Julius Schaub, send “flowers and a telegram” to his girlfriend at Photohaus Hoffmann.115 At the same time, Hitler apparently continued to play the role of the solitary bachelor in the capital, with the support of his Minister of Propaganda. Goebbels, in any case, who never tired of emphasizing his close friendship with the “Führer” in his “Diaries,” noted down after a conversation with Hitler on February 3: “Big discussion with Führer. Personal…. Talks about women, marriage, love, solitude. He talks that way only with me.” Three days earlier, after a meeting in Hitler’s apartment in the Chancellery, Goebbels recorded that Hitler had told him “about his lonely and joyless private life,” without “women, without love, still filled even now with the memory of Geli.”116
We can infer from Eva Braun’s “Diary” that she herself had never yet been to Berlin. But a visit to the capital, and to see Hitler’s renovated office and living space at the Old Reich Chancellery, did seem planned for the near future.117 Paul Ludwig Troost, with his wife, the architect Gerhardine “Gerdy” Troost, and his colleague Leonhard Gall, had started work on the new design for the “Führer apartment” in 1933 and had moved the formal reception rooms from the second floor to the ground floor so that a private office room for Hitler, a bedroom with bathroom, and, later, living quarters for Eva Braun, could be set up on the second floor.118
According to the “Diary,” Hitler did not see his girlfriend until February 11, and then again on February 18, when he apparently told her that he did not want her to work at his friend Hoffmann’s photography business anymore and that he wanted to give her a “little house.” It would be “marvelous” not to have to “play the part of a shopgirl” anymore, Braun remarked.119 Twelve days later, on the evening of Saturday, March 2, their next meeting took place in Hitler’s apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz.120 If we are to trust the entry, she spent “two marvelously beautiful hours with him until midnight” there. Afterward—with, she emphasized, Hitler’s “permission”—Braun amused herself alone until 2 a.m. at the Munich city “ball”: the great masquerade ball in the German Theater that took place every year for Fasching (Mardi Gras). It was the most glittering event of the season.121 On Sunday, Hitler suddenly took the train back to Berlin “without saying goodbye,” so that his lover and his personal photographer, who had hurried to the train station after him, arrived “just in time to see the rear lights of the last coach.” Eva Braun had waited in vain for word from Hitler, despite calling the Osteria Bavaria and spending the afternoon waiting at Hoffmann’s “like a cat on hot bricks” and hoping that Hitler would accept Hoffmann’s invitation to “coffee and supper.”122
Eva Braun in blackface, dressed as the American singer and entertainer, Al Jolson, ca. 1930 (Illustration Credit 5.6)
While the young woman “rack[ed her] brains” over why her lover would have hurried off so early without saying goodbye to her, Hitler was awaiting British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon’s upcoming visit to Berlin, planned for March 7. Germany had been isolated internationally after Hitler’s government had come to power and had unexpectedly withdrawn from the League of Nations. England, France, Austria, and even Italy under Benito Mussolini had protested the aggressive German foreign policy toward Austria and the unconcealed rearmament efforts of the National Socialists. The British government did, however, seem amenable to negotiations, although it announced an increase in military spending shortly before the meeting, with the justification that the German rearmament could “lead to a jeopardizing of the peace.”123 As a result, Hitler postponed the planned meeting with Simon on the spot and announced over all the German radio stations, on March 16, a reintroduction of the general draft and the raising of thirty-six divisions—in other words, the recruiting of more than half a million German soldiers.124 This was in open defiance of the Versailles Treaty.
That same day, Eva Braun wrote that it was “normal” that Hitler “shouldn’t take a great interest in [her] at the moment with everything that’s going on in politics.” Hitler had spent the whole week leading up to March 15 in Bavaria, but had returned to Berlin without, as he usually did, seeing her.125 She had waited desperately for him, and even stood watch on Monday in the middle of a crowd of curious onlookers in front of the Hotel Carlton in Schwabing to see him congratulate the movie star Anny Ondra, wife of the German boxing idol Max Schmeling, with a bouquet of flowers, for Schmeling’s victory over the American Steve Hamas in a qualifying match for the world championship.126 Eva Braun had met Ondra the previous year, when Hitler invited her and her husband to have a coffee in Franz Xaver Schwarz’s house on the Tegernsee over Pentecost weekend, presumably on May 20, 1934. Schwarz, the powerful National Treasurer of the NSDAP, cultivated familiar relations with Hitler. So on this occasion, Eva Braun, too, along with Hitler, Hoffmann (a friend of Schmeling’s), Schaub, and Brückner, sat in the garden around the coffee table. Schmeling wrote in his Erinnerungen (Autobiography) that he noticed this unknown young woman because she “spoke entirely naturally and obviously very familiarly with Hitler, despite all her outward modesty.” When he tried to find out from Hoffmann who she was, Hoffmann was secretive at first but then told Schmeling her name, nothing more, and said that she was an employee of his.127
Hitler and the Nazi leadership made considerable propagandistic use of Schmeling’s sports successes; for his part, after his knockout win in Hamburg on March 10, 1935, Schmeling gave the Hitler salute in the ring in front of twenty-five thousand spectators.128 The “dream couple” of Schmeling and Ondra had already shot a film together—Knock-out—Ein Junges Mädchen, Ein Junger Mann (Knock-out—A Young Girl, A Young Man)—that had premiered in German theaters a few days earlier, on March 1. Hitler quite consciously made use of their popularity—just a few days before the coup with its foreign-relations risks—to promote the identification of the masses with the Nazi state. He thereby satisfied German society’s need for national greatness and at the same time demonstrated to the world Germany’s renewed strength and readiness to fight, which Schmeling had so impressively proven. The decision, made by Hitler alone, to defy the military limitations of the Versailles Treaty and thus “thumb his nose at Versailles,” as the American foreign correspondent William L. Shirer put it, won enormous popularity for the National Socialist government. Unhappy Eva Braun, jealously fearing the end of her relationship, had no idea about any of this.129
Two weeks later, when she was among the group of Munich friends whom Hitler invited to dinner at the posh Four Seasons hotel on March 31, 1935, the event itself did not warrant a single line in her diary. She and Hitler had not met in private even once in the intervening month, so she would hardly have felt honored by a semiofficial group invitation to the hotel that Hitler liked to use for celebrations, and where the Populist and anti-Semitic Thule Society had its offices as well.130 On the contrary, she felt oppressed by the need “to sit beside him for three hours without being able to say a single word to him.” Her tenacious waiting for “a line of greeting or a kind word” from him was also to be once again disappointed: when Hitler said goodbye, he merely handed her “an envelope with some money inside as he had already done once before.”131 In the years that followed, too, Hitler occasionally supplied her with cash in this way. Speer told Joachim Fest that Hitler, after dining at the Four Seasons on another occasion in 1938 with “members of the Berghof crowd and upper-level Party members,” had given Eva Braun an “envelope,” “in passing” and “more businesslike than anything else.” Speer seemed “openly outraged,” even decades later, at the low opinion of Eva Braun that this behavior of Hitler’s expressed, especially the contrast between it and Hitler’s “Viennese” manners with women in general; the gesture reminded Speer of something you would see in “American gangster films.”132
Hitler, meanhwile, had every reason to be in a celebratory and generous mood at the end of March 1935. The visit from British Foreign Secretary Simon and Lord Privy Seal Anthony Eden on Mar
ch 25 and 26 had been a gratifying success, despite Germany’s open violation of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler had confidently given long explanations to his patiently listening guests, justifying the necessity of German rearmament, a topic that had been “absolutely taboo for years” at the meetings of the League of Nations in Geneva.133 The aristocratic and reconciliatory restraint of the British, who even declared themselves open to a naval treaty in later negotiations, gave the Nazi leaders another great foreign-policy success and gain in prestige, as had the plebiscite of January 13, 1935, in which 91 percent of the population of the Saar had voted for reunification with Germany. Hitler’s ruthless foreign policy was rewarded with Great Britain’s acknowledgment of a de facto revision of the Versailles Treaty.134
Hitler on the Obersalzberg, purportedly receiving the news of the official results of the Saar plebiscite over the telephone, January 1935 (Illustration Credit 5.7)
In his private life, though, Hitler’s mercilessness had led to another catastrophe. For three long months, from early March to late May, Eva Braun had waited for her lover to spend time with her as usual, or even for a “good word” from him, as she wrote in her diary. But Hitler wouldn’t see her. He was working feverishly on an “alliance with England,” to fracture the existing international treaties and end Germany’s international isolation. “Love seems not to be on his agenda at the moment,” Braun noted on April 29.
But there seemed to be, or actually were, personal reasons keeping Hitler in Berlin as well: a “love affair” with Baroness Sigrid von Laffert was imputed to him, and he was in poor health. The rumor of a romance (platonic, however) with Sigrid von Laffert, a young relative of Viktoria von Dirksen, was circulating in Berlin throughout the spring.135 Von Dirksen, the widow of Willibald von Dirksen, secret legations counsel under the Kaiser, was an avowed Nazi and a supporter of Hitler’s for many years; her salon on Margaretenstrasse, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, was the most important meeting point where the old nobility and prominent National Socialists made contact. Her brother, the Mecklenburg landowner Karl August von Laffert, was among the many aristocrats who joined the elite, cultlike SS in spring 1933, and he provided the organization with financial support and trained managerial staff.136