Eva Braun

by Heike B. Görtemaker

  During a four-day stay on the Obersalzberg over Easter 1938, which played out “informally, in a private atmosphere” according to Below, Hitler, surrounded by his guests (including Eva and Gretl Braun, Marianne Schönmann, the Bormanns, the Speers, and the Brandts), spoke “frequently about Austria during meals and during the long nights.” It was only five weeks since German troops had occupied the country and Austria had been “integrated” into the German Reich.89 Many of the people present at the Berghof had been at Hitler’s triumphal entry into Linz on March 12, 1938, and into Vienna on March 14, and had seen how their “Führer” had been frantically, jubilantly greeted by crowds of cheering Austrians for fulfilling the dream of a “Greater German Empire.” Walter Schellenberg, who worked in the Reich Main Security Office and was responsible at the time for Hitler’s personal security during his drives through Vienna, described a “true carnival of flowers,”90 and Christa Schroeder later recalled the “almost hysterical outbursts of joy,” which she described as “nerve-shattering.”91 Bormann, Below, and Brandt were also among those accompanying Hitler. Eva Braun, in contrast, had traveled to Vienna unofficially and separate from the others.92 In a move that his followers did not expect, Hitler immediately chose Josef Bürckel, a schoolteacher from the Rhineland and an “old campaigner” in the movement, to take over the Austrian NSDAP and the Gleichschaltung of Austria. This was the decision that Marianne Schönmann, a native Viennese, criticized at the Berghof. His naming a non-Austrian as the “Führer’s Representative for the Building Up of the Party in the Eastern Region” clearly displeased her very deeply.93

  Bürckel’s nomination must indeed have shocked the Austrian National Socialists if they were expecting to regain power once more, after the prohibition of their party on June 19, 1933, and years of political powerlessness. Simultaneously with the entry of German troops, they began to mercilessly persecute political opponents and members of religious minorities and drive them out of office. Nonetheless, Hitler chose Bürckel, an outsider, to reorganize the disorganized Austrian NSDAP and review the existing membership. Bürckel, previously the “Reich Commissioner for the Reintegration of the Saar Region,” was now to ensure a successful “annexation” in Austria as well. He reported directly to Hitler and saw himself as a kind of “Gau-Prince” with dictatorial powers intended solely to enforce “the will of the Führer.”94 He peremptorily disregarded the aims of the traditional institutions, going so far as to declare that he wanted to stem the tide of “a number of candidates who consider themselves qualified to take up certain positions in the state and Party offices,” in fact, “to render such office-seekers harmless.”95 With measures such as the immediate closure of all associations and organizations in Austria—which was now to be referred to only as Ostmark, “the Eastern Region”—Bürckel made himself so disliked even among Party members that his behavior gave rise to a “lively” discussion, even at the Berghof, about whether “the mentality of the Austrians [ought to be] taken into account.”

  But Marianne Schönmann’s efforts on behalf of her homeland’s Party members were in vain. A week later, on April 23, 1938, Hitler named Josef Bürckel “Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of Austria with the German Reich.” Still, Schönmann brought up “several proofs of Bürckel’s missteps in office over the course of the following years” in conversations with Hitler, Below recalled. On the other hand, Baldur von Schirach, who two years later would relieve Bürckel and take over the office of Gauleiter and Reich Governor in Vienna, stated that Schönmann had plied Hitler “with rumors about his predecessor,” to the point where the Nazi leader had held him responsible for the “mood inimical to the Reich in Vienna.”96 Below leaves open whether, and in what way, he or others there, including Eva Braun, may have taken part in the discussion. His remarks show, though, that even in the years leading up to the war, political topics were certainly discussed at the Berghof, and not merely, as Speer would later claim, “questions of fashion, of raising dogs, of the theater and movies, of operettas and their stars.”97

  The persecution of Jews was no secret in the Berghof circle, either. Eva Braun and her friends, as well as the Speer and Brandt families, spent most of their time living in the major cities of Munich or Berlin, after all, not in any way shut off from the outside world as they were on the Obersalzberg. As but one example, they could hardly have been unaware that the mayor of Munich, Karl Fiehler, a long-time Party member who had taken part in the putsch of 1923 and served time in Landsberg prison with Hitler, had imposed radical measures against the Jewish residents of the city from very early on. Even before 1938, Jews in the Bavarian capital were forbidden to visit public baths, parks, and restaurants. They could shop only at a few shops.98 Announcements in all German newspapers openly offered for sale Jewish businesses that had been forcibly expropriated “by reason of Aryanization.” The second biggest department store in Munich underwent numerous boycotts and acts of terror at the hands of the National Socialists before being looted on the night of November 9, 1938—the so-called Night of Broken Glass—and set on fire.99 It will probably never be possible to determine exactly how much each individual member of the Berghof group knew about such activities involving the persecution of Jews and the elimination of political opponents. As Speer said, “Hitler’s private circle” was in any case not “sworn to silence”—Hitler “considered it pointless to attempt to keep women from gossiping” anyway.100 They all were not only witnesses but believers. The survivors from this circle thus had good reasons after the war to stay quiet about what they had seen and heard around Hitler.

  In Austria, meanwhile, Bürckel and his staff were busy transforming Austrian organizations into “Reich-German institutions” and restructuring the Austrian NSDAP. The currency reserves of the Austrian national bank—some 1.4 billion reichsmarks—fell into German hands as well. In addition, they pressed ahead with the “reduction of non-Aryan personnel in private companies,”101 which in practice meant brutally stripping members of the Jewish population of their rights and property. Thousands of Austrian Jews, mostly from Vienna, had fled; their property, declared to be the property of “enemies of the Reich,” was confiscated by the SS.102 Valuable art collections and libraries changed hands in this way, with the “Führer” claiming for himself the right to make final decisions about their ultimate destinations. He decided in June 1938, for instance, that he would personally decree where the art works confiscated in Vienna would go. Heinrich Himmler, who had hurried to the Austrian capital with a company of Waffen-SS soldiers on March 12, received instructions from the Reich Chancellery that Hitler intended “primarily to put [these art objects] at the disposal of the smaller cities of Austria.”103 In the following months, it became clear that Hitler thereby meant predominantly the Upper Austrian provincial capital of Linz on the Danube, Hitler’s “hometown,” which he had planned since the summer of 1938 to redesign architecturally and where he intended to build an art museum of international stature. His goal was to make Linz a “world city.”104

  For the construction of the art museum in Linz, which was to show primarily German and Austrian painters of the nineteenth century, Hitler purchased pictures from art dealers as well as confiscating them from Jewish collections. Among the experts advising him on his purchases and fulfilling his “special wishes” was first and foremost the Berlin art dealer Karl Haberstock, who owned a gallery on the Kurfürstendamm.105 The bustling Heinrich Hoffmann, worth millions by then, acted as a broker as well, along with possibly Marianne Schönmann. Even though Hoffmann was no art expert, Hitler had had him as an adviser on art for years. The “personal photographer’s” obvious access to Hitler the passionate art-lover ensured that dealers would propose all sorts of sales to him. As a result, a flourishing art market developed in the dictator’s immediate environment. Not only was Hitler offered, and often simply given, valuable art objects, but so were his girlfriend, his adjutants, and even his secretaries.106 In addition, Hoffmann used his contacts to build up an
extensive painting collection of his own over the years. In 1946 he confirmed under questioning from Allied interrogation officials that he had received pictures as a broker from Marianne Schönmann among others, including a work by Anton Seitz.107 This nineteenth-century German painter of the Munich School, who portrayed the everyday life of “ordinary people,” was one of the artists Hoffmann privately preferred to collect.108 Karl Brandt also stated in 1946 that he had received pictures from Schönmann.109

  The extent of Marianne Schönmann’s activities remains in shadow, however. Officially, she was not in the art business around Hitler. A friend of hers, the Munich gallerist Maria Almas-Dietrich, in contrast, can be proven to have worked together with Karl Haberstock and Heinrich Hoffmann as a supplier for the “Linz special assignment.” Heinrich Hoffmann introduced Hitler to Almas-Dietrich in 1936; her daughter was apparently friends with Eva Braun.110 A year later, in August 1937, Maria Almas-Dietrich already found herself, along with Hitler, Eva Braun, and Braun’s Munich circle of friends, among the wedding guests in Marianne Schönmann’s apartment. Working partly with Hoffmann, she would sell Hitler more than nine hundred paintings in total and thus be one of the most important art brokers for the Linz “Führer Museum.”111 She conducted her business via Martin Bormann, or directly with the Nazi leader, who then instructed his personal adjutant to pass along her invoices to Hans Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery.112 Despite the evidence that Maria Almas-Dietrich worked with the Operational Center for the Occupied Territories (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR), which stole property from Jewish owners throughout the regions occupied by the German army during the war, the accusation that she had dealt in stolen art has never been proven, even today, due to lack of sales documents. It is also uncertain how close her friendship with Hitler and his private circle actually was, and whether she ever received an invitation to the Berghof. It is certain, however, that she made an enormous financial profit from her dealings with Hitler. Between 1940 and 1944, she apparently took in more than 600,000 reichsmarks with her business for the “Linz special assignment.”113

  In general, there was a close intertwining of private and business relationships within the dictator’s innermost circle. In this context, Heinrich Hoffmann in particular skillfully exploited his friendship with Hitler and his quasifamilial relationship with Eva Braun. And in 1936, he introduced another person into Hitler’s private life who would exert a sizable influence on Hitler’s mental and physical state until the end: Dr. Morell.

  Dr. Morell

  Dr. Theodor Morell, a ship’s doctor before the First World War, had a private practice on Berlin’s chic Kurfürstendamm that included artists, politicians, and Hitler’s personal photographer Hoffmann among its patients. When Hitler—who didn’t smoke, drank no alcohol, and kept to a strict diet—was suffering from increased stomach pains and eczema on his legs in 1935–1936, Hoffmann arranged a meeting with Morell—presumably at his house in Munich.114 Morell apparently succeeded right away in convincing the hypochondriacally inclined Chancellor of his medical abilities, because from then on he invariably treated Hitler and was on call for him at all hours.

  The Morells with Eva Braun at the last NSDAP convention in Nuremberg, in September 1938 (Illustration Credit 8.5)

  By 1937–1938 at the latest, the “personal physician” and his wife, actress Johanna “Hanni” Moller, had also joined the inner circle around the dictator. Already in January 1937, when Hitler spent as usual, the beginning of the New Year at the Berghof, Morell was present as well. Together with Hitler, Hoffmann, and the adjutant Brückner, he went to see the site where the teahouse on the Mooslahnerkopf, a mountain nearby, was to be built. In August 1937, Theodor and Hanni Morell were among Marianne Schönmann’s wedding guests. And at New Year’s 1937–1938, the Berlin doctor once more found himself, alongside Albert Speer, Sofie Stork, and others, on the Obersalzberg.115 Starting in 1938, Morell seems to have taken up a permanent place among Hitler’s companions. Photographs by Hoffmann show him with Karl Brandt and other faithful followers in the Reich Chancellor’s special train on the way to the Austrian city of Klagenfurt, where on April 4, 1938, Hitler gave one of his many propaganda speeches leading up to the plebiscite on the “annexation” of Austria. In early September, Morell appeared in Party uniform between his wife and Eva Braun on a VIP platform at the last NSDAP Party convention (“Greater Germany Reich Party Convention”) in Nuremberg; that same month, he appeared at the conferences in Bad Godesberg and Munich.116

  Morell was thus personally on site when Hitler, under threat of war and clearly suffering from extreme nervous tension, dramatically negotiated the cession of the Sudetenland to the German Reich. The “personal physician” accompanied Hitler to the discussions with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that took place on September 22–24 in the posh Rheinhotel Dreesen, and to the Munich Conference with Chamberlain, Mussolini, and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier in the “Führerbau” on Königsplatz on September 28–30.117 In private, the Brandts, Speers, Bormanns, and Morells formed as it were the core of the Berghof group around Hitler, Eva Braun, and Braun’s sister and friends.118

  However, it seems—at least in retrospect—that Morell was greatly disliked there by everyone except Hitler, and was little respected as a doctor. Speer, for example, tears him apart in Inside the Third Reich, calling him “a bit of a screwball obsessed with making money,” whose treatment methods “we never felt entirely easy about” and who was “the butt of humor” whenever Hitler was not present.119 Franz von Sonnleithner, the Foreign Office liaison officer at the “Führer headquarters” during the last years of the war, described Dr. Morell as an irritating personality, “portly in stature, with a brownish skin color and fat fingers loaded with rings,” who “did not [correspond to] the ideal image of the time.”120 Even the Wagners in Bayreuth considered him “a slob” and so unacceptable that, by order of his “Patient A,” he had to avoid coming near them after 1938.121

  Having attained a position of trust and thus a position of power with remarkable speed, he awakened suspicion and disapproval both in the private “Führer circle” and among high-ranking political associates. It did not fit into the public image of the bold and infallible “Führer”—a man who was trusted “blindly” and whose foreign policy triumphs had given him the aura of a kind of superman; a “real man” who could pull off whatever he wanted—that Morell was constantly supplying him with pills “in gold foil” and giving him injections. The public was not permitted to find out about these occasional indispositions of Hitler’s, in any case, since his popularity in the country as a whole depended on his uninterrupted success.122 The very idea of a man like Morell holding the fate of Germany in his hands by making daily decisions about the health of the mythical “hero” was suspect. Göring, for instance, allegedly called him “Herr Reich Injection Master [Spritzenmeister],” while Himmler, head of the Gestapo, secretly put him under surveillance after the war started in 1939 because he felt Morell had grown too powerful.123 Morell himself complained about the snubs he received from all sides, and the fact that he had to fight hard to keep his position “near the Führer.”124

  Meanwhile, a practically codependent relationship developed between Hitler and Morell, especially during the war years. At first Morell used primarily digestive and vitamin pills to improve his patient’s productivity and relieve, at least temporarily, his fear of becoming seriously ill, but in the last four years of his life, Hitler’s intake of medicines rose to eighty-eight different substances, mostly stimulants and sedatives. Solving bodily problems by popping a pill seemed to satisfy the Nazi leader’s desire for a treatment that was as discreet as possible—he did not, apparently, allow medical exams in which he would have to get undressed. Ernst Hanfstaengl later went so far as to describe Hitler’s “practically spinsterish aversion to being seen without clothes on.”125 In fact, ever since the beginning of his political rise, Hitler was always concerned to minimize any
access to his private life. Especially at the height of his power, the laboriously constructed legend of the “Führer” was not to be endangered by revealing any private needs and weaknesses. Hitler therefore swore by the discreet Morell; named him professor on December 24, 1938; remembered him with a tax-free endowment of 100,000 reichsmarks “on the occasion of January 30, 1943”; bestowed the “golden Party insignia” on him in February 1943; and helped in every imaginable way the pharmaceutical business that Morell ran in Hamburg and the Czech city of Olmütz. In brief: Hitler made him a very rich man.126

  Moreover, there seems to have been hardly anyone around Hitler whom Morell did not also treat. Hitler personally made every member of his staff, and Eva Braun as well, go to see the personal physician at the least sign of any illness, apparently out of fear of catching it himself.127 Speer, Ribbentrop, Hess, Lammers, Below, and the secretaries, as well as members of the Wagner family in Bayreuth, Hitler’s longtime admirer the British aristocrat Unity Valkyrie Mitford, and the film director Leni Riefenstahl, were among Morell’s patients at Hitler’s behest.128 Air force adjutant Below admitted to having agreed to an examination from Morell only “unwillingly” in early 1938, but said that he came to know Morell as a “conscientious and passionate doctor” and could “better understand” why “Hitler trusted him.”129 Speer visited Morell, according to his own account, as early as 1936, shortly after Morell had come into contact with Hitler. At times Speer had even been, in his words, “Morell’s showpiece,” since “after a superficial examination” and the prescription of “intestinal bacteria, dextrose, vitamin, and hormone tablets,” he spread the word about the successful treatment, even though he had in fact been treated by another doctor in Berlin. Speer lied, in other words, in order to, as he put it, “avoid offending Hitler.”130