Eva Braun in conversation with Martin Bormann, 1944 (Illustration Credit 7.5)
This young man on the rise from the provinces further solidified his position by marrying Gerda Buch on September 2, 1939, in Munich. She was the daughter of Walter Buch, a Party member for many years and an “old fighter” in the National Socialist movement; Hitler had been a regular guest at the Buch house for years and on this occasion served as a witness at the wedding, along with the father of the bride. When the Bormanns’ first son was born, seven months later, the “Führer” and Ilse Hess were the child’s godparents.41 Gerda Bormann, aged twenty, much taller than her husband and a kindergarten teacher by occupation, had been raised by her parents in a staunchly anti-Semitic “Nationalist” spirit.42 Moreover, the family’s personal contact with Hitler and his ideas had shaped her even in her youth. In a view that is consistent with this background, Joachim Fest attributed to her “unembarrassedly radical prejudices” and called her the “purest expression” of the “ideal type” of the National Socialist woman.43 She joined the NSDAP shortly before her wedding and, over the next thirteen years, bore nine children. She played no role, however, in the public self-presentation of the Nazi regime.
The trained farmer Martin Bormann, though, succeeded in gaining Hitler’s trust and making himself indispensable to the leader. From 1933 on, he dependably managed Hitler’s personal property. He also supervised the “Adolf Hitler Fund of German Trade and Industry,” launched by Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, which guaranteed the Party—and Hitler personally—an annual income in the millions from German businesses. These donations, which eventually became mandatory, added up to more than 700 million reichsmarks through 1945. The hardworking Bormann took care of all of Hitler’s financial interests. He handled purchases and paid all the bills, whether for personal acquisitions, staff expenses, monetary gifts to Party colleagues, or Eva Braun’s financial needs. It is thus no wonder that Bormann was able to expand more and more the scope of the position he held starting in July 1933, as chief of staff in the offices of the “Deputy Führer,” Rudolf Hess. While Hess, the ardent follower of the “tribune”—Hitler—with the reputation of being the spotless “conscience of the Party,” was increasingly kept away from Hitler’s inner circle after 1933, Bormann and his wife soon became the dictator’s substitute family at the Berghof.44 Only a few people outside the Nazi leadership knew about him, but he was the man who was always there at Hitler’s service, with unfailing discretion and reliability—qualities that he shared, of course, with Eva Braun. Bormann owed his rise to a position of power almost invisible from the outside to this close personal relationship of trust with Hitler.45
In this he was in no way different from the other functionaries in the Berghof circle, including Speer and Brandt, although they, unlike Bormann, occupied positions near Hitler that could also be perceived from the outside. They owed their careers just as much, however, to the patronage of the Nazi leader. Apparently, there was a ruthlessly competitive relationship between them and Bormann. Brandt, immediately after the end of the war, described Bormann as the most powerful figure in Hitler’s circle, and said that the later “secretary to the Führer” (his title starting April 12, 1943) acted ruthlessly, brutally, and with such influence that having him as an enemy could endanger one’s life.46 In the autobiographical literature as well, Bormann is with few exceptions portrayed negatively. For example, Richard Walther Darré, Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, described him as a heartless “player in his own interest,” for whom Hitler was “the alpha and omega of his efforts.” “Support from other circles, except for alliances of convenience within the Party,” held no interest for him.47 Only Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder complained in her memoir that the “worst characteristics” had been attributed to Bormann unjustly, when he was one of “the few pure National Socialists” and was merely “working—often ruthlessly, sometimes brutally, too—to carry out the orders and commands Hitler gave him.”48
What about the relations between Martin Bormann and Eva Braun? According to Otto Dietrich, the Reich Press Chief, who was among Hitler’s constant companions by virtue of his position alone as early as 1931, it was Bormann who worked to make sure that the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun, and the young woman’s continual presence at the Berghof, remained secret. He was thereby able to consolidate and expand his influence in Hitler’s close environment, Dietrich said, since the Nazi leader was indebted to him for his support in this matter.49 Robert Ley, the head of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or DAF)—the unified National Socialist trade union and a “gigantic propaganda machine,” according to Ian Kershaw—who took his own life on October 25, 1945, after five months in prison at Nuremberg, left behind a similar assessment of Bormann. Ley, notorious in the “Third Reich” as a “Reich-drunkard,” remained an uncritical, devoted henchman of Hitler’s to the end. His last words—“But to be considered a criminal, I can’t bear that”—reveal the extent of his involvement and his intellectual limitations.50 He said of Bormann, in his “notes” that were written down in the Nuremburg military prison in 1945, that he was a “brutal, ruthless, hulking peasant.” He “never left the Führer’s side,” made himself “liked with all sorts of little services that the Führer appreciated,” and forced his way “unheard and unnoticed into the intimate affairs of a great and overburdened man.” According to Ley, “Ask Bormann” was “heard all the time.” Bormann fulfilled the Führer’s every wish and took care of everything, including “putting through calls to Frau Braun in Munich.”51 We must keep in mind, though, with all these retrospective characterizations, that Ley as well as Bormann’s other former antagonists, such as Brandt and Speer, would seem more harmless the more powerful and dangerous they could make Bormann out to be.
The mediating role that Bormann played between Hitler and the outside world applied to Eva Braun as well. She embodied, after all, the private life of the Nazi leader, which was protected as a state secret. It is thus natural to assume that Bormann followed Hitler’s orders not only in arranging her financial affairs but also in monitoring the young woman’s lifestyle on occasion. Heinrich Hoffmann, in his later apologia, even claimed that “any wish of Eva Braun’s was always carried out by Bormann,” especially during the war years.52 In any case, Bormann would have known how important she was and would have been painfully aware that she was not to be turned into his enemy. Bormann made sure of “every person around the Führer,” if we believe Robert Ley’s remark.53 Eva Braun, in turn, was dependent on the bustling functionary, especially in the period after 1935, when both were installed on the Obersalzberg in immediate proximity to Hitler and regularly ate meals together. If she did in fact hate him, as her family and Albert Speer claimed after the war, she never showed it openly and avoided any confrontation.54
8. LIFE ON THE OBERSALZBERG
In January 1937, Reinhard Spitzy, adjutant and personal aide to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, accompanies his boss for the first time to a meeting with Hitler on the Obersalzberg. For Spitzy, a former Austrian fighter pilot from an upper-middle-class background, member of the NSDAP, SA, and SS since 1931, and only twenty-four years old, setting foot in the Berghof, that “legendary place,” is an overwhelming experience that makes an “enormously great impression” on him. He idolizes Hitler beyond measure, “worships” him. Rigid with reverence, Spitzy stands “like a statue” with his briefcase against the wall in the great hall while Hitler and Ribbentrop, deep in conversation, walk back and forth in front of him for two hours. Suddenly a young woman with blond locks pokes her head in the doorway and tells Hitler to “finally” come eat with his guests “already.” It’s “high time,” she says, they can’t wait any longer. Shocked, Spitzy wonders who would dare “to speak to the Führer like that.” After the meal, Hitler’s adjutant Brückner explains to him that even the “Führer” has “a right to a private life.” Spitzy should keep quiet about everything he’s
seen and heard—the best thing would be to forget it entirely. The young follower is devastated to learn that Hitler, whom he “believed lived the life of an ascetic, exalted above the level of sex and lust, had taken unto himself an ordinary female.”1
Refuge and Center of Power
The incident Spitzy describes sheds light on Eva Braun’s changed position within Hitler’s personal circle, which had grown ever more clear in the period after late 1935. The Obersalzberg, where she could “find her footing” only after Angela Raubal left (as Henriette von Schirach remarked), became her second home, along with Munich.2 During this period, renovations were moving full speed ahead to turn Wachenfeld, the small country house, into the large, formal Berghof. A terrace and veranda had been added in 1932. But after Hitler bought the house, which he had only rented up until then, on June 26, 1933, and the once-almost-unknown locale had become the second power center of the German Reich, construction and technical modernization of the modest “Alpine-style vacation home” began in earnest in 1934.3 Before the official opening on July 8, 1936, a new main wing that included the old country house and several additional buildings was built. Eva Braun now had a small apartment, adjacent to Hitler’s bedroom, on the second floor of the main house.4 Albert Speer later told the historian Werner Maser that a Tegernsee architect undertook the extensions “following sketches of Hitler’s.” The interior construction and renovations were left “in the Troost Atelier’s hands.” He himself had “not been asked for advice” at the time.5
The rural mountain village on the Obersalzberg had meanwhile turned into a kind of pilgrimage site. Encouraged by the cult of Hitler and the marketing of his residence in Heinrich Hoffmann’s illustrated publications, tourist travel to the region underwent an unexpected upswing. Followers, or the merely curious, made pilgrimages by the thousands to the Wachenfeld house to see the “Führer.” As soon as they caught sight of him, Bormann said, “the People [stood] at the fence.”6 While Nazi propaganda used the hysteria to reinforce the legend of Hitler’s closeness to the People and to nature, the entire Obersalzberg was actually fenced off in 1935. The region was quickly declared a “Führer Protection Zone” and Bormann, on Hitler’s orders, forced the remaining house owners and innkeepers there to sell their property to the NSDAP. “Fief by fief, plot by plot,” he bought them up and had, as he himself said, “all the old houses… torn down.”7 Now only registered groups of visitors from various Party organizations were allowed entry, and their processions past Hitler had to follow strict rules and a rigorous schedule. Spontaneous crowds of ordinary tourists were no longer permitted.
Hitler on the Obersalzberg, 1934. As soon as they caught sight of him, Bormann said, “the people [stood] at the fence.” (Illustration Credit 8.1)
Thus whenever Eva Braun stayed at the Berghof, she disappeared into a heavily monitored, sealed domain, surrounded by six-foot-high security fences whose inner rings were kept under observation by Reich security forces. Admittance was permitted only to those with a special pass issued by the “Obersalzberg Administration” under Bormann.8 Unlike in Munich, Eva Braun here lived cut off from the outside world. The same was true of everyone else who lived at the Berghof, their staff, and their servants. Christa Schroeder, who came to “the mountain” regularly as Hitler’s secretary starting in August 1933, stated in her memoir that from then on she “led a life behind barriers and guarded fences,” almost completely cut off “from everyday civilian and normal existence.”9 Therese Linke, on the other hand, a cook who worked on the Obersalzberg in Clubheim/Platterhof (Hoher Göll Inn), a guesthouse for the Party that the owners had been forced to sell, recalled the changes from 1936–1937 in particular: “There had been a fence around the Berghof and the rest of the area for a while. At every guard post we all had to go through the gates…. By then the farmers and peasants were long gone. Everything was bought up and leveled.”10
Meanwhile, Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann had also settled on Obersalzberg in houses of their own. The construction of additional guesthouses and hotels followed, along with an SS barracks for the so-called Führer Special Security Force—Obersalzberg; the erection of an “Obersalzberg Estate” with a residential building and stables; several administration buildings; and finally the construction of two “teahouses”: one beneath the Berghof and another, the so-called “Eagle’s Nest,” on Kehlstein, a 1,885-meter peak in the Berchtesgaden Alps. All this construction necessitated in turn the laying of new roads and the building of new tunnels and fences. Hitler himself drew up plans for a Berchtesgaden vacation destination, where a spacious “Party Forum” was to arise, but that never came to pass. Instead, during the war, construction began on air-raid bunkers and caves, which it turns out could not all be completed either, despite uninterrupted construction on Hitler’s “mountain” and its surroundings until the end of the war.11
Despite all these changes and renovations, the house on the Obersalzberg remained Hitler’s home, probably his most familiar place of residence. Life there was “to a large extent organized around him personally,” as Speer stated to Allied interrogators in the summer of 1945.12 He surrounded himself exclusively with absolutely loyal (and usually longtime) followers and their families and friends. And he lived there with Eva Braun, whenever he was there. It was always “the same limited circle,” as Christa Schroeder remarked in a letter to a friend in August 1941.13 Eva Braun and Hitler continued to meet in Munich or Berlin as well, but at the Berghof, despite the constant presence of staff and servants, a certain familial domesticity ruled, which neither the Munich apartment nor the Chancellery in the capital could offer.
Fritz Wiedemann, in connection with his time as Hitler’s personal adjutant, wrote in 1938 that the dictator had felt “like the head of a household in his own domain” on the Obersalzberg and had enjoyed “comfort and a kind of family life.” There were “always ladies present” as well, according to Wiedemann, “the wives of his colleagues, such as Frau Hoffmann and Frau Speer, and also the wives of the military adjutants.” In the Reich Chancellery, in contrast, visits from women were “rare,” he wrote.14 As Wiedemann described the daily routine at the Berghof, Hitler woke up late, at one or two in the afternoon, then went to lunch and took “a stroll in the fenced-off area,” in summer typically preceded by a “march-past” of two to three thousand visitors, and then afterward there was “a get-together on the terrace, then dinner at seven inside, and finally a movie.”15
The Berghof after the 1935–1936 renovations (Illustration Credit 8.2)
Eva Braun—who, among other things, usually took care of selecting and screening the movies that were provided by the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin—is mentioned not even once in the adjutant’s account.16 Wiedemann, who left Germany in January 1939 and became the German consul general in San Francisco until 1941, himself explained the reason why: on the very first page of his remarks, he notes that a diplomat has to be discreet.
So descriptions that could only come from me or another trusted source will not appear here. That would discredit me, in any age and any country. With respect to trusted details known only to a small circle, the whole world would know that the information came from me…. 17
Hitler’s relationship with a much younger lover obviously counted as a fact that everyone present had to maintain strict silence about, at least in public. Thus Wiedemann expresses himself only in very general terms about Hitler’s relations with women in connection with life at the Berghof. He emphasizes Hitler’s “deep personal regard for women” and mentions that he was “loyal and continuously kind” whenever he showed anyone his favor. All the “stories and rumors of ambiguous character,” Wiedemann emphasized, were “lies”: Hitler’s relations with women were “probably the purest that anyone could imagine.”18
In truth, though, the fact that the “Führer” himself was living in an “irregular” relationship made for whispers and rumors outside the fenced-in zone. Nicolaus von Below, for example, recalled almo
st forty years later how he had visited the Berghof for the first time in 1937, “fully ignorant” of the circle around Hitler; how he met Eva Braun and was so struck by the events there that it was still of “vital” interest to him after his return to the capital—Hitler’s private lifestyle was a constant “topic of conversation” at social gatherings in Berlin.19
Meanwhile, the Reich Chancellor himself continued to turn his back on the capital, often for weeks at a time. Especially in the summer, he spent long periods on the Obersalzberg. To make sure that government business could be kept running smoothly, even from there, the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, stayed in Upper Bavaria as well during this period, with a small staff. For months at a time, private residences across all of Berchtesgaden had to be rented for the purpose, even though the security requirements, if nothing else, were inadequate. Lammers himself, who, he wrote, took up “official residence” there every year “at the express wish of the Führer,” was housed in a “large country house.” But the summer tourist traffic limited the availability of the necessary housing.20
In early 1936, Hitler therefore ordered the establishment of a “Reich Sub-Chancellery” in Berchtesgaden. It was very important to both sides that the head of the Chancellery could be in Hitler’s easy personal reach. Lammers—a fifty-seven-year-old judge, member of the NSDAP since 1932, and summoned by Hitler personally on the day the Nazis took power to be state secretary in the Chancellery—coordinated the government business. After dissolving the state governments, stripping power from Parliament, and combining the offices of President and Chancellor of the Reich after Hindenburg’s death in 1934, Hitler had concentrated the duties of the state in the “Führer’s” hand, and thus in the Chancellery. Lammers passed along Hitler’s decisions to the appropriate departments, translated his ideas into laws, and controlled access to Hitler within the scope of his area of operation. Since cabinet meetings took place only rarely after the proclamation of the Enabling Act (or “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich”) on March 23, 1933, and not at all after 1938, Lammers functioned as the connection—often the sole connection—between the various ministries and the Chancellor. Every edict, Hitler decreed, had to pass through Lammers.21 Often it was Lammers alone, not the Reich ministers, who advised the head of state. By weakening the government in this way, Hitler prevented the rise of any further opponents within the Party—like, most recently, SA-Führer Ernst Röhm—and, in the words of Ian Kershaw, made himself the “pole star and center of the apparatus of state.”
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