Eva Braun
Page 19
“Lady of the House” at the Berghof, 1936–1939
It is not known whether Eva Braun, in her new and practically unassailable position at Hitler’s side, undertook to be anyone else’s godmother. There are suggestions, though, to indicate that Martin Bormann also named one of his daughters after her. Now, how significant was this act of becoming a godparent within the inner circle, that is, in a nonpublic sphere? Taking on duties as a godparent actually played a significant role in the Nazi regime’s propaganda campaign to increase the birthrate in Germany. Hitler himself had said about mothers: “Every child [a mother] brings into the world is a victory in the battle for the life or death of her People.” He thereby equated motherhood with being a soldier. For publicity, he personally became the godfather of every demonstrably “Aryan” family’s tenth child.174 In Esser’s case, Hitler was once again taking on the role of patron of the families of his old Party comrades. The role of patron and protector allowed him to cast himself as the keeper of the German People, in private as well as according to his public code of conduct that he exaggerated to an almost religious level and that was given widespread publicity: “I serve him with my will, I give to him my life.”175 The question arises, of course, how he could justify to himself and to those who knew his circumstances the fact that he remained unmarried and childless despite obviously living with Eva Braun.
For the National Socialists, “boosting and facilitating the will to propagate within the Volksgemeinschaft” was one of the “most pressing tasks of the rebuilding of the People.” Nazi doctors who worked in the field of “political biology” explained “intentional birth control” as a “misguided attitude in the area of character,” or even went so far as to describe it as an expression of “moral decay.”176 Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun must therefore have caused some astonishment even in the trusted circle at the Berghof. In the Nazi regime, the personal needs of the individual were subordinated to the requirements of the “Volksgemeinschaft”; rogue actions taken for individual reasons were propagandistically condemned as embodying a “Jewish-liberal” outlook on life, and Hitler himself publicly declaimed that “of all the tasks before us, the most exalted and thus most holy human task is the preservation of the species defined by the blood given to us by God.” But he clearly judged his own private life by entirely different standards.
Hitler absolutely refused to get married and explicitly wanted no children of his own; neither, as is said, did Eva Braun.177 But why? On Hitler’s part, was it from the politically calculated wish to “visibly stand apart” from those around him, as their “Führer”?178 Did Hitler play, as Ian Kershaw claims, the roll of an “idol” within his closest circle of friends as well?179 And what effects did this attitude have on Eva Braun and her position within the Berghof group? Here is where we have to distinguish between the propaganda assertions and the actual rationales. The first thing to point out is that Hitler’s political style of promoting a cult of the mother while remaining an unmarried heartthrob was not his own invention. Historian Brigitte Hamann has shown that Hitler was merely copying the propaganda pose of Karl Lueger, the popular anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna (1897–1910) whom Hitler idolized, and who likewise used his bachelor status for political purposes. Like Lueger, who told his lover that he could not marry because he needed “the women” in order to “achieve anything” politically, Hitler said: “Lots of women are attracted to me because I am unmarried. That was especially useful during our days of struggle. It’s the same as with a movie actor; when he marries he loses a certain something for the women who adore him. Then he is no longer their idol as he was before.”180
Hitler accordingly emphasized, in a speech at the 1936 Party convention to the elite National Socialist Women’s League (Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft, or NSF), that he “never would have been able to lead the Party to victory without women’s constancy and truly loving devotion toward the movement.” He knew, he said, that “women stood with the movement from the depths of their hearts, steadfast and true, and are bound together with me forever.” Their children were in fact what gave his work meaning, and they belonged to their mothers “in exactly the same way… that they belong, in the same moment, to me.”181 Hitler drew women to him by linking the concepts of devotion, eternal bonds, and children to his own person. He thereby cast himself as the husband of every German woman and the father of every German child—in accordance with the well-known motto of the cult of the “Führer,” “Hitler is Germany! Germany is Hitler!”—and satisfied their deeply rooted desire for a “messiah of the People.”182
Hitler between Eva and Gretl Braun in the obligatory group photograph on New Year’s Eve on the Obersalzberg, 1939 (Illustration Credit 8.6)
Out of the public eye, Hitler gave deeper insights into the real reason for his remaining unmarried over tea one night in January 1942 at his East Prussian “Führer headquarters.” With respect to his private life, he said there that it was a “lucky thing” he had never married, since the time commitment of a wife would have been a burden on him. He explained further: “That’s the bad thing about marriage: It establishes legal rights! So it’s much more proper to have a lover. The burden drops away and everything remains a gift.” If we believe this account, Hitler’s confession “disturbed” the secretaries who were there, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, so that Hitler added jokingly that “of course” this was true “only for great men.”183
Hitler’s refusal to marry Eva Braun thus apparently had nothing to do with her, nor with the assertion that, according to Albert Speer, he “obviously” thought of his girlfriend as “socially acceptable only within strict limits.”184 Rather, he seems to have been afraid to expose himself to the possibilities of a wife’s power and influence, and to make himself vulnerable in the private sphere. The fact is that he always kept everyone in this sphere who could get too close to him, including all of the members of his real family, at a distance. He saw his sister Paula every year between 1929 and 1941, for example, either in Munich, Berlin, or Vienna, but demanded that she live “under the name Frau Wolf and strictly incognito.”185 Even back in 1924, when Rudolf Hess suggested to him while they were in prison together at Landsberg that Hitler could have his sister come from Vienna to Munich, Hitler reacted with panic. Hess wrote to his future wife that Hitler dismissed the idea
with every sign of horror. He became nervous, shifted back and forth in his chair, ran his hands through his hair—“For God’s sake no!” That would be, with all his love for her, a burden and a constraint—she could try to influence him before an important decision, or plead with him. He won’t get married, for the same reason, and he even—he implied—avoids any serious attachments with a female. He must be able to face all dangers at any time without the slightest human or personal considerations, and be able even to die, if necessary.186
Given the propaganda and cult of personality that cast him as a godlike superfather, a relationship like the one he had with Eva Braun was not allowed and had to be kept in the strictest secrecy from the outside world. His girlfriend could not appear in public, so as not to damage his aura. At the Berghof, too, when official visitors or foreign guests were there she remained out of sight, withdrawing to her room the whole time. The same was true not only for Eva Braun but for all of the private guests, who, according to Speer, “were banished to the upper floor” on such occasions.187
Given all of these constraints upon her, can we describe Eva Braun as “Lady of the House” at the Berghof at all? After 1936, she did take on the role of the hostess more and more within their private circle at least. Unlike everyone else except Hitler, she invited friends and their children or other family members to the Obersalzberg. She also, Speer commented in August 1945, suffered from an “inferiority complex” and so “often” came across as “conceited and dismissive” to outsiders.188 At no point, in any case, did Eva Braun act as “housekeeper” at the Berghof: other people were there to worry about the housekeeping,
including a married pair of house managers as well as, for special occasions, Hitler’s majordomo Arthur Kannenberg.189 Presumably, in any case, she intervened in developments from time to time and tried to put her own ideas into effect. Especially among the housekeeping staff, but also among the professional colleagues and several female regular guests, she seems to have made enemies for a variety of reasons. At the end of 1945, Hanskarl von Hasselbach (a surgeon, SS-Obersturmbannführer, and the Nazi leader’s third accompanying physician along with Karl Brandt and Werner Haase—part of Karl Brandt’s team since 1934) expressed a deeply critical opinion of Eva Braun’s conduct on the Obersalzberg. She called herself “Lady of the Berghof” in recent years, he reported, but only laid claim to the privileges of that position without fulfilling the attendant duties. Everyone in the house except Hitler had to do what she wanted, he said, while she hardly cared about the well-being of the service personnel. Hasselbach also held Eva Braun responsible for the makeup of the Berghof circle, and for its low “intellectual and moral level.”190
Eva Braun on the Berghof terrace, photographed by Walter Frentz, ca. 1943 (Illustration Credit 8.7)
In any case, the people in Hitler’s immediate environment did not demand any explanation, much less justification, of Eva Braun’s existence and presence in closest proximity to him, even in the context of the reigning morality of the time or Hitler’s ideological stipulations. Especially in his refuge on the Obersalzberg, Hitler was surrounded by true-believing followers who not only shared his political convictions but saw in him a heroic figure of historical greatness.191 Robert Ley—not actually in the Berghof circle but one of Hitler’s earliest henchmen and uncritical of him to the very end—recorded for posterity in his cell in Nuremberg, in 1945, that Hitler’s life was “a single act of sacrifice for his People right up to his sacrificial death,” and claimed: “Nothing, absolutely nothing—not even the woman he loved—had any influence on him, except for his duty.”192
Emmy Göring, in her memoir, illustrates how unwilling Hitler was to allow this image to be tarnished. She complains that she was not allowed to meet Eva Braun no matter how hard she tried to arrange it: Hitler kept Braun “under lock and key” on the Obersalzberg, she said, and when she invited the ladies of the Berghof (Anni Brandt, Hanni Morell, and Eva and Gretl Braun) to tea at her own Obersalzberg country house one day, in the “second year of the war” (1940), they all said yes but Hitler summoned Hermann Göring late that night and told him that Eva Braun couldn’t attend. The reason he gave was that Braun was “so bashful, she was even afraid” of Göring’s wife.193 In fact, Hitler had kept the second-most-powerful man in the “Third Reich” at a distance for years, in his private life. He had served as a witness at the ostentatious wedding of Hermann and Emmy Göring on April 11, 1935, at the Berlin Cathedral, and three years later had agreed to be their only daughter’s godfather; politically as well, he had helped Göring reach a unique position of power and named him his successor in a secret decree as early as December 1934. But despite, or because of, Göring’s popularity and growing political power—he had already started to present himself as “successor to the Führer and Chancellor” to foreign diplomats—Göring was not among the inner circle of Hitler intimates.194 Instead, the Nazi leader avoided personal closeness, probably so as not to let his designated successor’s lust for power and fame get out of hand and ultimately grow uncontrollable. Emmy Göring’s attempt to get close to Eva Braun and thus to Hitler’s private life must therefore have been extremely unwelcome to him.
This episode does not, as Emmy Göring put it, reveal “the tragedy of this woman [i.e., Braun] in such a moving way”; rather it shows the nature of the relationship between Hitler and Hermann Göring.195 Furthermore, the question naturally arises: Why did Emmy Göring invite Hitler’s girlfriend over for the first time only in “the second year of the war”? Why not in 1937 or 1938? Hermann Göring’s loss of political power, which had already begun in 1939 and accelerated starting in September 1940 due to his military errors in the air war against England, suggests that his wife invited Eva Braun only as a means to an end: an attempt to compensate for fading political and military significance by getting closer on a personal level.196
Hitler’s inapproachability and standoffishness, meanwhile, were not simply the “Führer’s” personal proclivities; they also protected him from needing to reveal anything about his personal life and thus from becoming humanly vulnerable. As a result, Eva Braun’s “socially unclear position” can also be attributed to the fact that Hitler lived outside the bounds of his own ideology of the “Volksgemeinschaft,” and claimed for himself the status of an exception.197 In fact, it was not only Eva Braun’s social status that was questionable among the “Führer’s” close circle; the character of her relationship to Hitler itself remained completely mysterious. Public displays of affection or even the slightest hint of any physical closeness, at least in the years leading up to the outbreak of war, remained nonexistent at the Berghof. Both Hitler and Braun were “thoroughly prudish,” Speer reported to Joachim Fest in 1978. Even in his intimate circle, Hitler avoided any move in that direction. He was always careful to maintain a certain distance from his entourage, and he valued conventionality and traditional behavior. Even in his relations to Speer and Goebbels, he remained above all a “father figure.”198
Every guest was left on his or her own to decide what the connection between Hitler and Braun might be. And so, even after the end of the war, opinions differed drastically about whether the couple had an actual love affair or merely a “relationship for show.” Speer, in any case, Hitler’s young close friend, had no doubt that Eva Braun was Hitler’s lover. Under questioning from Allied officers in Kransberg in the summer of 1945, he stated in writing that Eva Braun meant “very much” to Hitler. Hitler had spoken of her “with great respect and inner admiration”; she was “the woman whom he loved.” A mere quarter-century later, in Inside the Third Reich, there was no longer any talk of “love” as what Hitler felt for Eva Braun. Twenty years in prison and the influence of his editorial advisers Joachim Fest and Wolf Jobst Siedler had changed Speer’s way of seeing things. The once-powerful Minister of Armaments, who remained obsessed with power to the end, was now concerned to emphasize his political and personal distance from the man whom he had served with unswerving conviction to the last moment. Now he described Hitler as cold and always unapproachable, a man who “had no humor” and acted ruthlessly, suspiciously, and cynically toward his lover.199 Twenty-five years earlier, however, in Kransberg, when his statements had been less calculated, the same Speer had drawn a distinction between Hitler’s public conduct and his dealings with people in “private life.” According to Speer’s earlier account, Hitler acted chilly and “rarely like a ‘person’ ” when working, but in private he had “a soul” (that is, he was capable of feeling), “like every other human being.”200
Max Amann, who knew Hitler since their service together in World War I, described Hitler’s relation to women as “normal” in his interrogation by the U.S. Seventh Army on May 26, 1945. The only woman with whom Hitler had had “occasional intimate relations” was Eva Braun, Amann said. The literal record runs as follows: “Amann describes Hitler as a sexually normal man. Hitler’s only woman friend, with whom he had occasional intimate relations, was Eva Braun, a former employee of the photographer Hoffmann…. During the last month she was constantly around Hitler.”201
Two months later, Franz Xaver Schwarz, another fellow traveler of many years, “old campaigner,” and friend who used the familiar “du” with Hitler, said diametrically opposite things about Hitler and Eva Braun. Schwarz was an anti-Semite “in every fiber of his being” and “from an early age,” according to Richard Walther Darré after 1945, and in Hitler Schwarz had found the man who “saw things politically and expressed them the way Schwarz felt them to be.”202 A member of NSDAP since 1922 and its treasurer from its reestablishment in 1925 to the end, as well as a Reichsleit
er, SS-Oberstgruppenführer, SA-Obergruppenführer, and member of Parliament, he—along with his wife, the former Bertha Breher—was among the Nazi leader’s and Eva Braun’s Munich circle of friends. Both Schwarzes were welcome guests on the Obersalzberg.203 Under questioning from Allied officers on July 21, 1945, Schwarz stated that Hitler had had a “platonic relationship” with Eva Braun since 1931. He said Hitler himself had told him that he lived only for his work: “A woman gets absolutely nothing from me. I can’t pay any attention to any of that.”204 We should note in evaluating the former Reich treasurer’s reliability on this topic that he had absolutely no reason to reveal anything about Hitler’s carefully concealed private life to his American interrogators. In Nuremberg at the end of 1945, Schwarz gave the impression of being a “sincere fanatic, who still professes unbound personal admiration for Hitler.”205
Then again, Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s longtime secretary, was also convinced that the erotic side of the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun was a false pretence. It is true that, on May 22, 1945, three weeks after Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s demise, during an American officer’s interrogation in Berchtesgaden, she answered the question of whether “Hitler saw Miss Braun as his wife” with the words “That’s how he treated her.” And to the follow-up question, “Did he see her that way?” she replied: “Yes, of course.”206 Meanwhile, in the memoir she published later, she claimed, like Franz Xaver Schwarz, that the entire relationship of her “leader” to the female sex had been purely platonic in nature. His stepniece Geli Raubal was the only woman he “loved,” and he “would definitely have married her later,” she wrote. Eva Braun, on the other hand, was in Hitler’s life only to protect him “from further threats of suicide.” With “her presence” he had also, she said, constructed a “protective shield against all the other pushy women.”207