Eva Braun

by Heike B. Görtemaker

  We can see here that Maria von Below, by far the youngest member of this half-private, half-official group of people around Hitler in 1938, defended her time in this circle more than forty years later just as forcefully and in almost the same words as Margarete Speer. How are we to comprehend this attitude, in light of the monstrous misdeeds of the Nazi regime, which these women must have learned about at least in later years? Why did they stubbornly insist on this description of a supposedly ideal world at the Berghof? Is it because they—unlike their husbands—were under no pressure from a prosecutor or a court to justify themselves after the collapse of the Nazi state? The fact remains that, to whatever greater or lesser degree they may have known about the crimes that were committed, they barely connected their life at the Berghof with the actual political events of those years.

  Nicolaus and Maria von Below met Hitler and his close circle shortly after the entry of German troops into Austria on March 12, 1938, and Austria’s “annexation” to the German Reich—in other words, at a time when Hitler was more powerful and more popular than ever. Not only his immediate followers but the overwhelming majority of the population celebrated this new coup, which was explicitly recognized by the Great Powers in Europe, and considered him a genius as a statesman. Air force adjutant Below, one of the many people to accompany Hitler on his “triumphal procession” to Vienna, wrote later that on this trip he understood “more and more” why the Nazi “Führer” “had won his followers, and the love of the people.”56 Maria von Below’s enthusiasm looking back at this period likewise reflects the then-widespread mood, and certainly gives us insight into the emotional world of the Berghof.

  Her relationship with Eva Braun, meanwhile, is difficult to judge after such a long time. Her husband’s memoir gives very few hints of any possible friendly contact. In a chapter called “Peaceful Life at the Berghof,” it says that in spring 1944 Hitler thanked Maria von Below “many times” for having “found such a nice relationship with Miss Braun.”57 And to Traudl Junge, Hitler’s last secretary, who moved from his headquarters in East Prussia onto the Obersalzberg with Hitler’s staff in early 1943, it seemed that Anni Brandt and Maria von Below were “close friends” with Eva Braun.58 Christa Schroeder, on the other hand, states that Eva Braun had always had only one “favorite” and the others were always “careful and reserved” around her.59 It is certainly striking that Maria von Below never appears with the other women in the Berghof group in Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographs. The explanation must be that, as the wife of a military adjutant, she came along to Berchtesgaden only when her husband was on duty. In addition, the Belows seem to have attained a position of trust with Hitler, and also with Eva Braun, only in the last years before the end of the war.

  From the beginning, that is to say since 1933, the Munich artist Sofie Stork was also in the circle of those around Hitler and Eva Braun. A trained sculptor and painter, and a beautiful, dark-haired woman of thirty whose father owned a well-known company that manufactured and sold fishing tackle (the “H. Stork Fishing Tackle Factory”), Sofie Stork was involved with Wilhelm Brückner, Hitler’s personal adjutant, nineteen years older than she was. In the course of their acquaintance she had joined the NSDAP on December 1, 1931, and entered farther and farther into Hitler’s private circle.60 Brückner himself, a university-educated economist and an officer in the First World War, was among the “old campaigners” from the early days of the NSDAP. He was a member of the Party going back to late 1922, led the Munich SA regiment in the following years, and in that capacity took part in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. As a result, the State Court in Munich sentenced him to fifteen months prison and a fine of 100 reichsmarks for abetting high treason,61 although Brückner, like all the others who took part in the putsch, actually served only part of this already mild sentence. Later, he made a living for many years with all sorts of different activities, including as a tennis coach, before again joining Hitler’s circle when Hitler chose him as his personal adjutant in 1930. Otto Wagener, named chief of staff of the SA in the previous year and one of Hitler’s closest confidants in the “period of struggle” until 1933, did not approve of the choice: the forty-five-year-old Brückner’s whole life history, without a real career or contact with the SA, seemed dubious to Wagener. But Hitler, Wagener wrote in his autobiography while a prisoner of war in England in 1946 (it was published posthumously in 1978), justified his decision by saying that he wanted someone around him who offered “a certain security simply by virtue of his sturdy build and size,” and would prevent anyone from daring to approach him.62

  Personal adjutants were traditionally assigned to princes, army commanders, ministers of war, and Reich chancellors; they always had an officer grade and usually came from the nobility. They handled writing and business duties, received phone calls, transmitted orders, and occasionally even undertook diplomatic missions. Hitler’s naming a personal adjutant at a time when he was still years away from becoming Chancellor revealed not only his concern with security and inclination to an egocentrically staged leadership style—more importantly, it revealed that Hitler was creating a further distance between himself and his fellow National Socialists. He was consciously fostering the “nimbus of the unapproachable,” as Ian Kershaw formulated it, in order to both concretize to the outside world and defend from competitors within the Party his persona as the inaccessible, solitary Leader.63

  Wilhelm Brückner remained at Hitler’s side for ten years. A bearer of the Blood Order, he rose to be chief adjutant, while three additional adjutants arrived in 1933, 1935, and 1938, respectively: Julius Schaub, the longtime servant; retired Captain Fritz Wiedemann; and Albert Bormann, Martin Bormann’s younger brother, trained as a bank teller and head of Hitler’s “Private Chancellery,” which was integrated as Chief Department 1 into the “Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP” under Philipp Bouhler.64 Brückner became an honorary citizen of the city of Detmold on January 15, 1936 (an honor revoked in 1945); became a member of the NSDAP’s parliamentary party for two years in 1936; and, inevitably, took part in Hitler’s entire political and private life, in Berlin, Munich, and on the Obersalzberg. For example, on August 1, 1934, the day before Reich President Paul von Hindenburg died, Brückner was apparently the only person to accompany Hitler to see the elderly head of state on his deathbed.65

  Without a doubt, the head of “the Führer’s Personal Adjutant Staff” gained a power not to be underestimated. Nicolaus von Below even claimed that Brückner had attained a “paramount position,” with his “authority” recognized by both the personal and the military adjutants.66 Furthermore, it was the adjutants, especially Brückner, who had direct and practically unlimited access to Hitler. They were the link to the outside world for a “Führer” concerned to keep his distance; they supplied him with all sorts of information and contacts. In addition, the personal adjutants coordinated visits, such that even the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, was obliged in 1938 to submit his request for an audience with Hitler to Brückner in writing. There were clearly also wide-ranging financial opportunities for the adjutants—Fritz Wiedemann later wrote:

  If you needed money, Brückner sent word… to Bormann and got 50,000 marks. He took the lion’s share for himself and then passed the rest along to Schaub and to me, in decreasing amounts based on seniority and position.67

  When Martin Bormann, who managed the fund that was at Hitler’s personal disposal, complained about the large outlays of money, the Nazi leader dismissed the complaint and forbade the Party to interfere in “his spending.”68 Either Brückner or Schaub paid Hitler’s private bills in restaurants and on trips—or, as it was called, managed his “petty cash.” Brückner stated under questioning in August 1947 that only Schaub paid Eva Braun’s bills.69 Brückner’s own role in Hitler’s private milieu, meanwhile, is not easy to determine. Albert Speer—concerned, as he always was after the fact, to imply the greatest possible distance between himself and the supposedly wretched
“Führer circle” on the Obersalzberg—emphasized in May 1967, in response to a question from Joachim Fest, that he had had “nothing in common with Schaub, Brückner, and Morell.” Who, Speer asked his interlocutor, “could have been more different from me?”70 His friend Nicolaus von Below, on the other hand, recalled “especially good and friendly contact” with SA-Obergruppenführer Brückner, which took on “a private character quite quickly.”71

  Brückner’s girlfriend Sofie Stork seems to have been introduced into the Berghof society just as quickly and to have made close friendships there. Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographs show her at parties, such as New Year’s or birthdays, but also on excursions alongside Hoffmann’s wife, Erna; Eva Braun; and Anni Brandt.72 In the process of transforming Haus Wachenfeld into the Berghof, the young artist even received assignments from Hitler—and from his girlfriend. For example, Stork decorated the chimney stove in the living room and painted the tiles of the sideboard and the tea table, as well as porcelain for Eva Braun, complete with her monogram.73 She was obviously in Hitler’s good graces. Her separation from Brückner, who left her around the beginning of 1936 and married another woman a short time later, did nothing to change that: she remained a member of the most intimate inner circle at the Berghof even after the separation, along with Karl Brandt, Heinrich Hoffmann, Eva and Gretl Braun, and the secretaries Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski.74

  Brückner, on the other hand, left four years later. On October 18, 1940, Hitler fired him from his position as personal adjutant. In fact, there had been at least one departure or removal from the dictator’s private realm every year since 1935: in 1936, his half-sister and housekeeper Angela Raubal was dismissed and his driver, Julius Schreck, died of natural causes; in 1937, the foreign press secretary, Ernst Hanfstaengl, fled to England; in 1938, Fritz Wiedemann was transferred to the German consulate in San Francisco; in 1939, the servant Karl Krause was fired. Thus the idea that Hitler moved in an entirely unchanged environment of servants and adjutants from 1933 on is false. The reasons for Brückner’s removal, meanwhile, are still difficult to understand today. In Below’s memoir it says that the reason was a difference of opinion between Brückner and Hitler’s majordomo Arthur Kannenberg, concerning “petty trifles.”75 Kannenberg, a corpulent Berlin chef and restaurant owner, was responsible with his wife for the “Führer household” in the Chancellery starting in 1933. He organized the state dinners in Berlin and on the Obersalzberg, and even went along every year to the Wagner festivals in Bayreuth, where he and his staff tended to Hitler and his guests in a house put at his special disposal by the Wagner family—the “Führerbau.” Kannenberg was famous, or infamous, for his solo interludes on the accordion at the Chancellor’s artists’ receptions. Winifred Wagner later described him as “a little part of us”—it was impossible to imagine Hitler’s private circle without him.76 Nicolaus von Below, meanwhile, regretted the “removal” of his friend Brückner. He had always hoped, he said, that Brückner would “one day return,” whereas others, such as “Bormann and Eva Braun, were happy to see him go.” Christa Schroeder described an “intrigue” of Kannenberg’s; she considered him to be a “shady character,” and even suggested a connection between Hitler’s “disfavor” toward Brückner and the end of Brückner’s relationship with Sofie Stork.77 In truth, all these retrospective judgments, expressing the speaker’s own sympathies or antipathies, amount largely to hearsay. They do, however, make clear that the group of people at the Berghof was by no means a “sworn society.” Jealousies, power struggles, and nepotistic favoritism were the order of the day there as well.

  Politics and Private Dealings

  The business interests pursued by individual members of Hitler’s inner circle constitute a special chapter in the history of life at the Berghof. They show above all that Hitler looked after the personal circumstances, too, of the members of his Berghof society and was prepared to support them financially when necessary. The files of Albert Bormann, who handled and archived Hitler’s personal correspondence in the “Private Chancellery of the Führer,” show, for example, that Sofie Stork’s personal and business contact with Hitler lasted until at least 1941. A “correspondence diary” that indicates the incoming and outgoing letters for the years 1939–1940, predominantly within a narrow circle (including Schaub, Brückner, Heinrich Hoffmann, and Hermann Esser), along with, less often, private letters such as those to or from Hitler’s nephew Leo Raubal, his half-sister Angela’s son, or Sigrid von Laffert, contains numerous entries on the “Stork matter,” revealing Hitler’s energetic business assistance. Already in September 1936, Hitler had arranged for Sofie Stork to receive 45,000 reichsmarks—an astronomical sum at the time—so that she could carry on her deceased father’s fishing-tackle business in Munich, which had apparently run into financial difficulties.78 On top of that, Hitler hired, and paid the salary of, a financial adviser who looked after the company for years “on the orders of the Führer.” The auditor regularly sent annual reports to the “Private Chancellery of the Führer” from then on.79

  In later years as well, Albert Bormann’s entries show that Sofie Stork turned directly to the dictator whenever she ran into business problems. For example, in the early summer of 1940 she asked him for help in procuring Tonkin bamboo (a special type of bamboo reed used to manufacture fishing poles), which had become increasingly difficult to import from the Far East, Australia, or the United States since the start of the war. In September 1940, she put in another request directly to Hitler, for a travel permit to, and purchase approval within, Belgium and France, which had been occupied by the German army a few months earlier. The northern half of France, with its major industrial regions, came under the jurisdiction of the German military administration and was thus a coveted trading center for businesspeople from the German Reich. Sofie Stork received her concession, too, as Albert Bormann’s bookkeeping proves: on October 13, 1940, she appeared in the files again, with a new request. Could her commercial representative use certain airplanes belonging to Hitler’s fleet?80

  But why would Sofie Stork have been granted such an enormous amount of assistance, financial and otherwise? Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s private secretary, later claimed that Hitler so resented Wilhelm Brückner’s separation from this woman that he decided “on his own accord” to compensate the ex-girlfriend financially “and very generously.”81 But is this account plausible? What would explain such an emotional reaction on Hitler’s part? It seems likely that Sofie Stork’s close friendship with Eva and Gretl Braun could have been one possible cause of Brückner’s gradual loss of Hitler’s favor and eventually his expulsion. For the young artist, in contrast, the Braun sisters’ friendship and thus her belonging to Hitler’s personal sphere was enough to give her extraordinary advantages. This was not the only case in which Hitler rewarded political allegiance, and above all personal loyalty, with material contributions of all kinds.82

  Another friend of Eva Braun’s was Marianne Schönmann, from Munich. Thirteen years older than Braun, she first arrived in the Berghof circle thanks to her long-standing acquaintance with Erna Hoffmann, Heinrich Hoffmann’s second wife.83 Erna Hoffmann and Marianne Schönmann both came from artist families; Schönmann’s aunt, Luise Perard-Petzl, a soprano well known in Vienna and Munich, had had successes before the First World War in, among others, Wagner operas—as Sieglinde in Die Walküre and as Elsa in Lohengrin. Marianne Schönmann met Hitler, according to her own statement, around 1934 in Hoffmann’s apartment in Munich. Her relationship to the world of opera, and to Wagner, probably played an important role in forming this acquaintance. They were in harmony politically as well: she had already joined the NSDAP three years previously, in December 1931.84 She was then unmarried and still named Petzl.

  When and how Schönmann met Eva Braun is not known. The statements she gave in this regard in her denazification proceedings after the war were vague: she stated before the court in 1947 that she was merely one among several “female acquaint
ances” who “repeatedly” invited Braun to her house in Munich. She herself first visited the Obersalzberg, she said, sometime during 1935.85 However, Schönmann very quickly became one of the regular visitors there after Eva Braun’s position at the Berghof became unassailable in early 1936. Within a few years, Marianne Schönmann was one of the women around Hitler. When she married the Munich building contractor (and NSDAP member) Friedrich “Fritz” Schönmann on August 7, 1937, at age thirty-six, Hitler and Eva Braun were among the select few guests.86

  Marianne Schönmann and Eva Braun were apparently in regular contact in Munich as well as at the Berghof. The Schönmanns’ villa near the Herzogpark was located not far from the Braun sisters’ residence in Bogenhausen. After the war, when it was necessary to play down such close connections to Hitler and those near to him in order to save one’s own skin, Marianne Schönmann stated that Eva Braun must have been “so obliging” to her only because of Braun’s interest in opera. She emphasized, too, that her acquaintance with Eva Braun and Erna Hoffmann did not lead to any “political activity” on her part; there was “never any politicizing” between them. Neither acquaintance had “ever told [her] about the actions or any other affairs of Hitler or Heinrich Hoffmann,” she said.87

  In reality, Schönmann was extremely well informed, since the “actions” and “affairs” about which she claimed to know nothing were ones she had close and direct experience of during her numerous visits on the Obersalzberg. And she must have heard from other members of the inner circle, in one form or another, at least some details about the events taking place around Hitler—events that all those who had anything to do with him were as burningly interested in as the curious general public. Karl Brandt later stated that he was a “very close” friend of Schönmann’s,88 and Nicolaus von Below still remembered precisely, decades later, Schönmann’s confident manner in Hitler’s presence: he described in his memoir how Eva Braun’s friend even dared to disapprove openly of one of the Reich Chancellor’s decisions.