Braun’s parents’ first meeting with Hitler allegedly took place in the Lambacher Hof, an inn (which still exists today) on the north shore of the Chiemsee approximately halfway between Munich and the Obersalzberg. Hitler, who used to travel on the old road along the lake before the Munich–Salzburg autobahn was finished, often stopped in there with his companions. The Nazi leader was allegedly introduced to his girlfriend’s parents there for the first time on a Sunday in late August 1935, or perhaps on September 1, after returning from the dedication of an “Adolf-Hitler-Koog” land reclamation in the Dithmarschen region of Schleswig-Holstein. Nerin E. Gun reports that the Brauns had gone for a Sunday outing to Lambach, and that there, totally unexpectedly, they ran into their daughter, who was in the Chancellor’s retinue as a colleague of Heinrich Hoffmann’s. Apparently nothing more than a short but friendly greeting took place, and the Brauns are said to have known nothing about their daughter’s relationship with Hitler at that time.27
Henriette von Schirach, on the other hand, claims that Friedrich Braun intentionally traveled the more than sixty miles from Munich to visit the inn in Lambach on that occasion and bring about a discussion with Hitler, because he saw in Hitler’s connection to his daughter “a chance for his favorite child.” She says that Hitler described this conversation as “the most unpleasant [conversation] of his life,” but it nonetheless resulted in Hitler’s supporting Eva Braun with a monthly sum of money and a house.28
In fact, given the few and variously transmitted postwar statements by the family, we can only speculate about what Friedrich and Franziska Braun actually knew and thought, and what roles the two sisters, Ilse and Margarete (Gretl), might have played in the situation.29 Whenever it is a matter of looking back from a great temporal distance—twenty years in this case—we must always keep in mind that people’s perceptions, subjective to begin with, may be discussed, whitewashed, rearranged, and corrected many times over as the years go by. With the Braun family, where the issue is direct proximity to Hitler and thus knowledge of, even perhaps participation in, Nazi crimes, we can presume a certain amount of keeping silent, out of either shame or fear of criminal prosecution.30 Would the Brauns not have had good reason, in their conversations with the journalist Gun after such a long period of silence, to play down any early knowledge of Braun’s relationship with Hitler and even claim to have been opposed to it?31
In fact, Friedrich and Franziska Braun had already had to answer such questions in 1947, before a Munich denazification court. These appointed German trial and appellate tribunals and public prosecutors were given the responsibility of “denazifying” Germany under the “Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism” imposed by the American military authorities in 1946. People were classified into the categories of Major Offenders, Offenders (activists, militarists, and profiteers), Lesser Offenders (probationers), Followers, and Persons Exonerated.
The public prosecutors in this case, according to an article called (in German) “Hitler’s In-laws Before the Judge” in the newspaper Die Welt of August 2, 1947, put the “high-school business instructor Fritz Wilhelm Otto Braun and his wife Franziska Katharina” into the category of “Offenders,” that is, according to the law, “activists, militarist, and profiteers.” Eva’s parents were threatened with prison sentences, confiscation of property, and—especially for the father—a ban on employment and the loss of his pension. Fritz Braun, it was claimed, had known about his daughter’s relationship with Hitler, approved of it, and was in fact proud of it. Eva’s mother, too, although never a Party member, was labeled an “activist” by the official prosecutor.32 In the indictment from July 9, 1947, it was stated that the investigations had shown that “the person in question had been proud that daughter Eva was permitted to be the Führer’s lover for all those years. The persons in question felt at home on the Obersalzberg. Since she was a member of the family, she didn’t need to be a member of the Party.”33
Threatened in this way, their very existence under attack—Fritz Braun, fired from public service as a teacher, was struggling along as a carpentry assistant at the time—the Brauns were obviously making every effort to minimize before the judge the intimacy of their daughter’s relationship with Hitler. They stated that Eva Braun had become the dictator’s “housekeeper” in 1933, and that he had “maintained a love affair with her” ever since, on terms that were “never entirely clear, but seemed to be purely platonic.”34 And at a public sitting of the Munich denazification court, on December 1, 1947, Fritz Braun stated:
I do not know when the relationship between my daughter Eva and Hitler started. I first heard about it in 1937, from a Czech newspaper. Until then I had thought she was his secretary.35
The Brauns told Die Welt through their Munich lawyer, Otto Gritschneder, that they planned “to offer proof that they had always been opposed to the relationship between their daughter and Adolf Hitler.” For example, they had allegedly even written a letter to Hitler, explaining that this “sleazy relationship” was not to be endured any longer.36 The letter was, however, “suppressed and never presented” to him. Fritz Braun testified before the denazification court that he had “written a letter to the Führer and pointed out to him that I did not approve of his simply taking my daughter out of our family circle without notifying us.” Braun was, he said, “furious about Hitler.”37
It is doubtful that any such document, which would have exonerated Friedrich and Franziska Braun from the claim that they had been “activists” in the Nazi state or “profiteers” in Hitler’s inner circle, ever existed. The only document that has been supplied as proof comes from the family: a copy, if we believe Gun’s account, of a letter that Friedrich Braun wrote to the Chancellor on September 7, 1935—about a month after his daughter had moved out—and wanted to give to Heinrich Hoffmann so that he could pass it along to Hitler.38 Hoffmann was visiting and photographing the construction projects on Königsplatz in Munich at the time; in accordance with the plans drawn up by Paul Ludwig Troost, who had died the previous year, more than twenty thousand granite slabs were being laid and Nazi emblems being affixed to create a parade square.39 Hitler himself was spending a few days on the Obersalzberg before the start of the NSDAP convention in Nuremberg, as he usually did; he regularly retreated there weeks before such conventions to write his speeches, and he was due to give no fewer than seventeen speeches at the upcoming convention.40
Eva Braun in Florence with her travel companions. From left to right: Franziska Braun, Margarete Speer, Anni Brandt, Eva Braun, Marianne Schönmann (undated). (Illustration Credit 6.1)
It is therefore entirely possible that Friedrich Braun gave Hoffmann this letter in Munich—a letter in which he asked Hitler “to see to it” that his daughter “return to the family.” But to treat this document, even if it existed, as retrospective proof of a rebellion against Hitler is nonsense. It can only be interpreted as an act of despair. First of all, it never reached its intended recipient, either because it never in fact existed or because Hoffmann and Braun made sure that Hitler never learned about it. Second, the relations between Eva’s parents and Hitler in the years to follow cast serious doubt on the claim that they felt her relationship with Hitler to be a “bitter disgrace.”41
In fact, Eva Braun’s departure from the parental home at the beginning of August 1935 did not mark a break with the family. Rather, Franziska Braun was a welcome guest on the Obersalzberg in the following ten years, and she accompanied her daughter on numerous trips, especially to Italy, but also, in 1938, to Vienna. No conclusions about Franziska Braun’s own personal relationship with Hitler can be drawn—both contemporary witnesses and third-party reports from after the end of the war are lacking. She was, however, the only member of Braun’s family whom Hitler mentioned in his last will and testament, personally dictated on April 29, 1945, a day before his and Eva Braun’s suicide in the bunker. He instructed Martin Bormann, the secretary to whom he gave full powers of executor, to leave everyt
hing “that possesses any personal sentimental value, or that is necessary to supporting a petit-bourgeois life,” to his siblings and “likewise especially the mother of my wife” and the “faithful staff.” Franziska Braun thus ranked ahead of Hitler’s blood relatives, on the same level as his loyal companions who had “supported [him] for years through their work.” This emphasis on Eva’s mother is especially noteworthy in that neither of Eva’s two sisters, nor her father, is mentioned in the testament.42
Can we derive from this fact a broken relationship between father and daughter, or Friedrich Braun’s opposition to the Nazi regime itself? The reasons for Hitler’s last instructions remain mysterious. For one thing, Friedrich Braun joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1937. For another, he testified before the court in 1947 that he had believed “to the end” in the “Führer.” He also said in his statement of December 1, 1947, that his daughter would “never have entered a relationship with Hitler… if he had been a bad person.”43 However, his daughter’s personal relationship with Hitler cannot have been the actual reason for his joining the Party. In fact, it is well known that Hitler strictly kept his relatives away from any political activity. For example, according to a statement by his sister, Paula Wolf, he invited every member of the family to the 1929 NSDAP convention in Nuremberg, where they had to promise not to join the Party.44 It therefore seems reasonable to assume that Eva Braun was held to similar rules of conduct and that her not being a member of the Party can be traced back to Hitler’s instructions. This strategy of forestalling any possible private interference in his political activities was typical of Hitler, although the case of his half-sister, Angela Raubal (later Angela Hammitzsch), shows that it clearly did not always work. She seems to have interfered even after her removal from the Obersalzberg, as is clear from a letter to Ilse Hess, and she sent “repeated requests” to government officials and Party organizations—including Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick—to inform them whenever, in her opinion, “something was not proceeding properly.”45
In this context, it is hard to imagine that Hitler especially advocated the entry of his girlfriend’s father into the NSDAP, never mind required it. Rather, it seems as though Friedrich Braun, like many teachers in the “Third Reich,” merely accommodated the National Socialist regime at first before eventually, not least out of opportunism, making his turn toward the new worldview official. More than 80 percent of the members of this profession became members of the NSDAP only after January 30, 1933, and thus had the reputation among the Party leaders of being “opportunists.”46 To prevent such people from joining, a ban on new members was put into effect starting in 1933 and cancelled only on April 20, 1937, after which point all “Party aspirants” had to fill out an additional two-page questionnaire with their applications, describing in detail their efforts to date for the “movement.” All of these new members, no matter what date they filed their application, were given a membership acceptance date of May 1, 1937.47
In addition, the Nazi educational politics since 1935 had moved in the direction of turning all teachers into “National Socialist People’s educators.” Especially in Bavaria after late November 1936—when Adolf Wagner, the powerful Gauleiter and Interior Minister known for his fanatical anti-Semitism, took over the additional title of Bavarian State Minister for Education and Culture, a post that had been vacant for two years—those who were not Party members were given considerably less leeway. Since that was precisely when Friedrich Braun submitted his application, according to his own testimony, Adolf Wagner could well have played a crucial role in prompting Friedrich Braun’s entry into the NSDAP, along with Braun’s own personal reasons.48
Still, Braun’s membership was not merely a formality. On November 8, 1939, shortly after the war began, he took part in the memorial event for the failed Hitler putsch of 1923, in Munich’s Bürgerbräukeller—among the “old fighters,” no less.49 Friedrich Braun was not actually a member of the “old guard”: he had been a Party member for only two years, and he is not known to have been particularly active in Munich NSDAP circles. Thus he actually should not have been admitted to this event at all—it was an occasion reserved for “Party fanatics,” according to Ian Kershaw. But it is possible that Eva Braun—perhaps through Heinrich Hoffmann—arranged for an invitation for her father so that he could hear the “Führer.” In any case, he ended up in the middle of the dynamite attack against Hitler that took place on that night, leaving eight dead and sixty-three wounded. Friedrich Braun survived, though he was wounded, while Hitler, after an hour-long speech that “decisively broke with England” (as Goebbels recorded), had left the hall a quarter of an hour before the detonation.50 The episode shows that there was certainly no unbridgeable chasm between father and daughter, or distance between Friedrich Braun and the Nazi state.
7. THE MISTRESS AND THE INNER CIRCLE
Eva Braun’s rise from anonymity into the inner circle around Hitler necessarily brought with it new acquaintances and new relationships that were very demanding for the socially inexperienced young woman from Munich. She thus stayed extremely reserved at first with all the other guests on the Obersalzberg, who were the Nazi leader’s close staff members. Instead, she surrounded herself primarily with her younger sister and friends she invited to the Berghof herself or brought with her from Munich. She came into contact with Hitler’s confidants exclusively on the Obersalzberg (with a few exceptions). In any case, her contact there was limited at first to a few people whom Hitler selected personally and considered trustworthy.
Albert and Margarete Speer
Albert Speer was a central figure in Hitler’s inner circle. And Speer’s presence, and that of his wife, in what he himself called “Hitler’s court” was of great importance to him and his position in the regime. His presence and “human” proximity to Hitler offered unique access to power and success to this architect who had lived until 1932 with, for all practical purposes, no income. As a result of this proximity, he suddenly had “the most exciting prospects” for professional success, at not even thirty years of age, and in 1937 he rose to be General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital, appointed by and reporting directly to Hitler. He now had sole control over the planning and carrying out of all municipal construction projects.
Margarete Speer on the Berghof terrace (undated) (Illustration Credit 7.1)
Social life on the Obersalzberg, on the other hand, was described by Speer as a “waste of time”: it was “agonizing” for him, he said, and “what remain[ed]” of it “in [his] memory” was only “a curious vacuity.”1 Still, he worked assiduously to fit in with this community and included his wife, Margarete, from the start as well. Margret Nissen, Speer’s younger daughter, said that her mother’s role on the Obersalzberg consisted in “being there to perform official duties at her husband’s side.”2 Whenever they were wanted, the Speers took part in lunches, dinners, afternoon diversions, or parties, at the Berghof or elsewhere. They also made particular efforts to include Eva Braun, who, like them, was athletic and enthusiastic about sports. They took her skiing, for example, even though Hitler “didn’t like to see” such outings for fear of injuries.3 In a private document written a few years before her death, from which her daughter published excerpts, Margarete Speer described how drastically their daily activities were curtailed by Hitler’s needs. Here is the usual procedure for “lunch with the Führer”:
The phone rings. It might be two, three, sometimes even four o’clock. A friendly male voice: “The Führer requests your presence at the table.” I’ve been ready for a long time, sitting around waiting. Albert and I are fetched….4
While Margarete Speer—after waiting in her apartment for the summons, sometimes for hours on end—is served her food at the Berghof, a governess and a housekeeper take care of the six Speer children. The youngest daughter later said, looking back on her childhood on the Obersalzberg, that she had “grown up basically without parents in those years,” since her mother and father were “more often t
raveling” than at home.5 Margarete Speer’s activities were thus not limited, as one might have expected, to her own household. Rather, she apparently neglected her family to support her husband’s career, based as it was solely on his personal ties to Hitler. To that extent, Margarete Speer may not have been acting in a political sphere, but in a “private” sphere she was no less significant and professionally useful. And she enjoyed such a life. Unlike her husband, who later made derisive comments about it, she described “living in that circle” around Hitler as “heady” to the journalist Gitta Sereny,6 and even before the appearance of her husband’s memoir Inside the Third Reich, she criticized his view of the past to Joachim Fest, complaining that Albert Speer never remembered “for one second that we were happy then.” After reading the book itself, which became a best seller, she is said to have told her husband: “Life hasn’t left me much, but now you’ve ruined the little I had left!”7
In any case, the Speers’ conduct leaves no doubt that they made every effort to be included at the Berghof. Albert Speer paints the picture in his memoir that the “bustle” there was “ruinous” for his work, the daily routine “tiring,” and the circle of acquaintances collected there “boring.” Nonetheless, he “spent endless time” with Hitler, as he himself said, and was “almost at home in his private circle.” He and his wife “stayed longer at the Berghof with Hitler than in our old frame house.”8 Speer, always acutely conscious of power, records very precisely who was enjoying Hitler’s favor at any given time, so it is surprising and noteworthy that he took Eva Braun to be the indicator of how much influence a person around Hitler had.
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