Eva Braun, ice-skating (undated) (Illustration Credit 7.2)
For example, in Speer’s account it was a “privilege” to escort “Eva Braun to the table; she usually sat at Hitler’s left.” “From about 1938,” only Martin Bormann enjoyed this distinction, a fact that “in itself,” according to Speer, “was proof of Bormann’s dominant position in the court.”9 Speer never offers an explanation of why the Führer’s girlfriend—whom he later portrays as despised, humiliated, draped in cheap jewelry, and entirely uninterested in politics—possessed such importance at the Berghof. But as early as the summer of 1945, under interrogation by Allied officers at Kransberg Castle in the Taunus, he had hinted at Eva Braun’s “possibilities, i.e., using the power she had within the inner circle,” according to Speer. She had, Speer said, “been able to exploit… her position just like A.H.’s prominent colleagues.”10 Even this comparison with Hitler’s “prominent colleagues” shows what a leading role Eva Braun played, in Speer’s view. His statements justify the assumption that Eva Braun, not long after stabilizing her relationship with Hitler, took on a central position within the Berghof circle.
Eva Braun and Albert Speer on the Obersalzberg, 1941 (Illustration Credit 7.3)
In this context, Eva Braun’s relationships with the other guests at the Berghof, the staff, and not least the Speers, takes on a whole new significance. The question arises whether Speer’s kind treatment of Braun actually arose, as he later claimed, solely “out of sympathy for her predicament,” and whether he struck up friendly relations with the young woman for entirely selfless reasons.11 Were their outings together and the increasing intimacy of their interactions actually calculated on his part? Was she not a way to cement an even tighter and more personal bond of friendship with Hitler? For even though there was apparently a deep emotional connection between Speer and Hitler “from the first moment on,” as Joachim Fest writes, the young architect occupied a position that was in “constant danger.”12
Margarete Speer, in any case, seems not to have shared her husband’s connection with Hitler’s girlfriend. Looking back, she does not attribute any shyness or unassuming modesty to Braun, as her husband did, but rather claims that Eva Braun was “thoroughly aware of her position” among the women and had the most say. On trips she always conducted herself “very much as the hostess”: what she wanted to do was what was done “and that was that.”13 There is disapproval audible in these lines of Margarete Speer’s, in spite of all the evenings, excursions, and ski vacations spent together. She absolutely did not consider Eva Braun—nor, for that matter, Magda Goebbels—as one of her personal friends, but rather as a member of her husband’s “team,” to whom he gave precedence over even his own children when it came to leisure time.14 Margarete Speer thus does not, in her own retrospective judgment of Eva Braun, follow the line of explanation that her husband laid out after 1945 and stuck to in his later publications. Clearly, we can see from her account, no one dared to oppose Eva Braun’s wishes at the time or call into question her preeminence within the Berghof hierarchy.
Karl and Anni Brandt
Another woman in the sporty “circle of friends” around Eva Braun and Margarete Speer was Anni Brandt, the wife of Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt. In Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer lists the Brandts as in his “closest circle of friends.”15 Karl Brandt had joined the NSDAP in February 1932, and apparently met Hitler the same year, in Essen; he was a member of the dictator’s inner circle for ten years, from 1934 until he was fired in 1944.16 His wife, the former Anni Rehborn, famous nationwide as the SV-Bochum swimming champion, came into contact with Hitler as early as the 1920s, since she won the German championship in the 100 meter backstroke six times between 1923 and 1929 (among other championships), and the ambitious right-wing politician always liked to publicize his connection with important German athletes who fit his, and his Party’s, racial ideal of strong, healthy, pure, “Aryan” bodies.17 Conversely, the young athlete’s family—in which physical health and beauty were also of great importance, in accord with the modern cult of the body in the 1920s—had supported the National Socialist movement even before 1933. Both Anni Rehborn and her father joined the NSDAP in 1932.18 It thus seems likely that it was actually the young swimmer who introduced her then fiancé to the NSDAP leader, and brought him to the Berghof no later than summer 1933.19
Karl Brandt was working at the time as an assistant doctor in a casualty hospital in Bochum, and had already joined the SA in spring 1933. A few years earlier, he had dreamed of following the Protestant theologian, doctor, and philosopher of culture Albert Schweitzer, whom he admired, to his hospital in sub-Saharan Lambaréné, Gabon. But now he used the opportunities that his bride’s personal connection with Hitler opened up to him. It is not entirely clear why Brandt underwent this transformation, turning away from Schweitzer and toward National Socialism; the ideological contrast between Schweitzer’s Christian “worldview and philosophy of honoring life” and Hitler’s deeply inhuman and racist ideas of a “struggle to the death between Peoples” and the “annihilation of the weak” could not have been any greater. If there is any point of connection between the two ideologies, it lies in Schweitzer’s critique of modernity, his disapproval of the “acquisition of scientific knowledge” which had brought forth “the machine,” and spiritually damaged and depersonalized mankind. Schweitzer diagnosed the political fragmentation and material suffering of modern states in similar terms. But he saw the solution to all these problems in the will to come to greater understanding between peoples and the establishment of a “culture state” that, led by a “cultural ethos,” would come into existence “not according to the dictates of nationalism and national culture.”20
Brandt, in contrast, who shared the disorientation and aimlessness of many men and women of his generation after Germany’s loss of World War I and obviously was on the lookout for a charismatic savior-figure, took the nationalist path. In a document he drew up after the end of the war to provide intellectual “clarification” (his term) about what had happened, he wrote that Hitler had “opened the eyes” of the German People, “showed it its soul again and restored its faith in itself.” Thanks to Hitler, Brandt wrote, “old names and values” had been “brought back to life” and “Germany’s own spirit shone forth again… in the present.”21 The young, ambitious, not unadventurous doctor had only waited until the right moment, in 1933—or so his biographer Ulf Schmidt claims—to approach Hitler through his fiancée Anni Rehborn and attract his attention. In fact, the career of the barely thirty-year-old doctor had been steeply on the rise since the summer of 1933. In November 1933, he transferred from Bochum to the recently reopened, well-known University Surgical Clinic on the Ziegelstrasse in Berlin as the Party physician.22 At his wedding, on March 17, 1934, Hitler and Hermann Göring appeared as witnesses. The reception took place in Göring’s Berlin apartment.23 After that, it was probably already easy to predict that Brandt would soon be given a position in Hitler’s immediate retinue. In any case, he himself laid the groundwork for such a position by submitting an application to the SS in April 1934. Two months later, he received the offer to accompany the Reich Chancellor as a specialist for accident injuries on his foreign travels.24 From then on, Brandt and his wife were among the constant guests on the Obersalzberg.
The close friendship between the Brandts and the Speers—Margarete Speer called Anni Brandt her best friend—seems in retrospect to have been anything but fortuitous. The parallels between the two men’s careers are unmistakable. Speer and Brandt, almost the same age, did not belong to the generation of the “old fighters” from the early days of the NSDAP but entered Hitler’s inner circle only after he came to power. Both owed their sudden career successes, and their growing political power, to Hitler personally—not to the Party. For Brandt no less than for Speer, it must have been of vital importance to stay within reach of the “court,” even though he was not actually a personal physician and his se
rvices as an escort surgeon were, in the strict sense, necessary only while traveling, primarily in case of an accident or assassination attempt.25
The privileged position that Brandt soon enjoyed alongside Speer can be seen from the fact that both men, who lived and worked in Berlin, moved onto the Obersalzberg in close proximity to Hitler during the course of 1935. While preparations were under way to fence off the area in a radius of fourteen kilometers, they and their families were housed in the Bechstein Villa that already lay within the “Führer Protection Zone.” Bormann had bought the villa at the end of 1935 and repurposed it as a guesthouse;26 Goebbels lived there, too, when he visited the Berghof, and it was enormously prestigious for these two men on the rise, still largely unknown within the NSDAP, to be among Hitler’s personally chosen neighbors. In addition, Speer and Brandt were permitted to accompany Hitler every year to the Wagner festival in Bayreuth—an honor given to few people, according to Speer. Winifred Wagner, who ran the festivals, formed close ties with Brandt, whom she later used, during the war, to transmit letters to Hitler when she wanted to bypass Martin Bormann.27
What did it mean to be “preferred” like this by the most powerful man in Germany, over the majority of one’s other colleagues and compatriots—in fact, to be promoted thanks to “the Führer’s friendship”? Speer’s later confession that he was “happy” then is only the barest hint of the elation and ecstasy the two men must have felt as a result of their proximity to power. Would Hitler not have been able to expect lifelong gratitude, loyalty, and tractability under those circumstances? And in fact, Brandt, after his arrest in 1945, declared in a written statement that his relationship to Hitler had been a “bond for better and for worse.” Speer, too, found himself obliged to make what Joachim Fest called the “monstrous confession” decades later, in September 1974, that he, Speer, had felt himself bound to Hitler until their last encounter in the bunker with bonds of unbreakable personal loyalty and friendship.28
Karl Brandt, in any case, never left Hitler’s side until the end of the war, gradually turning into Hitler’s general factotum. Like Speer, he had direct access to the Nazi leader, who lived predominantly shut away from others, and he accompanied him on almost every occasion: at state visits, the Party conventions in Nuremberg, exhibition openings, balls, concerts both in and outside of Berlin, and, after fall 1939, on travels to the various “Führer headquarters.” Brandt fulfilled all sorts of duties and shared Hitler’s passion for art and architecture. There was thus hardly any time left over for his own medical responsibilities at the university clinic in Berlin.29
Even if Hitler’s friendship with Brandt seems to have been less sensitive than that with his architect, the young doctor still fulfilled an analogous function. Largely unknown to the public and at the same time shielded against the influence of leading lights in the Party, he was, as the “Führer’s” intimate friend, active in various areas of medicine, including the new construction plans for Berlin’s university clinics.30 Once the war started, Hitler gave his ambitious friend “special assignments”—that is, to murder the sick and crippled—and granted him far-reaching “special legal authority” over the health system for that reason.31 Then, together with Philipp Bouhler, “Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP” and a member of the Party for many years, Brandt, by then thirty-five years old, was promoted to head of the euthanasia program. It has also been proven that he conducted human medical experiments in concentration camps.
Brandt carried out what Hitler commanded and as a result found himself, along with Speer, Hoffmann, and Bormann, in the highest “Berghof society.” Unlike the other members of this private entourage, however, who also received assignments from Hitler, usually verbally, Brandt and Speer were among the “Führer direct special representatives,” of which there were only a few in the National Socialist regime. In the army of representatives, special representatives, authorized representatives, general inspectors, and Reich commissioners so characteristic of the inner structure of the Nazi regime, Brandt and Speer were thus exceptional. They occupied—Speer in construction and Brandt in medicine—next to traditional official positions in the Reich, their own spheres of power, established by “Führer’s edict,” in close consultation with Hitler so that they could most effectively translate certain core elements of the National Socialist worldview into reality. Both men took an active part in the racial politics of the regime as well: Brandt by killing the sick and conducting human experiments; Speer by filling the shortage of labor for his construction plans in the capital with concentration camp prisoners, as well as robbing Berlin Jews of their apartments before having them deported.32 It is impossible to determine how decisions were taken precisely within Hitler’s innermost private circle, and how they were communicated. But it is indisputable that the position and actions of these two “charismatic young men” were due not only to great personal closeness to Hitler, but also to their ideological agreement with him. There can be no question here of any “willed unconsciousness” about what was actually happening.33
Speer disputed these implications for the rest of his life. He insisted to the end that he had been a fundamentally apolitical architect, far removed from any ideological concerns, who at most suspected the crimes taking place around him. No anti-Semitic propaganda from him survives; he justified himself in retrospect by saying he saw Hitler’s “insane hatred of Jews” as “a rather vulgar minor detail” of his otherwise convincing vision. Speer’s statements on this topic about the other members of the “Führer circle,” as he put it—especially about his friend Karl Brandt and about Eva Braun, whom he vigorously defends—must therefore be taken with a grain of salt at the very least. His alleging, about himself, “Politically I counted for nothing!” also casts doubt on his appraisal of Eva Braun as apolitical and lacking in influence.34
Since Brandt and Speer stood in an extraordinary relationship of loyalty to Hitler, the question further arises whether they might therefore have had a special relationship with Eva Braun. It is striking, in any case, that after the war both men, unlike almost everyone else in their environment, neither disputed the intimate nature of Eva Braun’s relationship with Hitler nor dismissed her as insignificant in Hitler’s inner circle. A U.S. Army military news service report from April 1947, summarizing Brandt’s statements on the topic, maintained that the relationship between Hitler and his girlfriend was marked by openness and sincerity. Eva Braun, abrupt and severe by nature rather than feminine and compliant, had developed over the years from an average girl into a stylish lady. Hitler occasionally liked to remark, “The more important the man, the less important the woman,” but this did not apply to Eva Braun.35
Karl Brandt and Eva Braun on the Berghof terrace, ca. 1937 (Illustration Credit 7.4)
During his first interrogation in summer 1945, Brandt was trying to make a good impression on his American and British interrogators. Obviously, he denied his involvement in the murder of the sick and crippled. But his statements were saturated with unbowed admiration for Hitler. It is therefore surprising that he expressed even mild criticism of the “chosen one” at Hitler’s side. Brandt said that Eva Braun’s rise into the world of the rich and powerful was too much for her at first, and that in the years before the war she had made “certain guests” of the Berghof suffer under her changeable moods.36 This statement of Brandt’s, revealing for the later judgments of Braun, especially by Hitler’s former staff members, corresponds with the notes that Percy Ernst Schramm, German historian and member of the U.S. Army Historical Division, made during the interrogation of Hitler’s doctors in summer 1945. According to those notes, Eva Braun had caused “trouble” among those around Hitler and “put people off.”37 Who exactly her “victims” were remained unstated, however. In particular, Brandt said nothing about whether he himself, or possibly his wife—who smiled at the camera together with Eva Braun in September 1937, during the ninth Party convention, on a stage on the Nuremberg Hauptmarkt—had suf
fered under her.38
Martin Bormann
Martin Bormann played a special role in regard to Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun. Son of a postal official and former military musician, he had joined the NSDAP on February 27, 1927, and within a few years had risen to be one of the most powerful figures around Hitler. He started, though, at the bottom of the Thuringian Party hierarchy in Weimar. Since he had been found guilty as an accomplice to grievous bodily harm in 1924 and spent a year in jail, he could not afford to be choosy, and he carried out duties of all kinds for the Party, including those of bookkeeper, cashier, and driver. For example, he chauffeured the NSDAP-Gauleiter of Thuringia, Fritz Sauckel, to events and functions in the country in his own car, a small Opel. Bormann later became managing director of the Thuringia Gau press office, and in this capacity he met both Hitler and Rudolf Hess, who often traveled together to Thuringia for appearances before 1933.39
Within a year and a half of his joining the Party, in mid-November 1928, the conspicuously devoted and obliging Bormann was in the NSDAP headquarters in Munich. Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, commander of the SA, had asked him to take charge of managing insurance for the SA. Bormann succeeded in transforming the expensive and problematic insurance of SA members into a profitable “NSDAP Assistance Fund,” and thereby helped reduce the National Socialists’ notorious shortage of money. Bormann had made his reputation as a financial and organizational talent, and he impressed Hitler with his unswerving business sense.40
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