Eva Braun

by Heike B. Görtemaker

  Christa Schroeder felt, as she wrote in her memoir, that this assessment was corroborated by statements from Heinrich Hoffmann, Julius Schaub, and Ada Klein, an acquaintance of Hitler’s from the 1920s. In truth, however, neither Hoffmann nor Schaub ever expressed himself in these terms. Both men knew Hitler and Eva Braun as closely as could be and were involved, in one way or another, in the couple’s everyday life. And neither of them argued that the relationship was not an intimate one. Hoffmann did claim in 1947, in a written statement, that the relationship started, in his opinion, as “merely platonic in nature.” But he added that it “took a definite shape… many years later,” and that Hitler indulged Eva Braun “in the usual way”: “the way anyone indulges a lover.”208 He dated the start of this development to around the time when he bought her the house in Munich, namely 1935–1936. Hitler’s former personal photographer also explicitly pointed out that he was eager to “clarify” the situation, given the upcoming appearance of his case before the Munich denazification court. He intended to refute before the court the accusation that he had gained any influence or “political power” in Hitler’s circle from the love affair between his employee and the Nazi leader, or that he had even fostered the relationship for that reason. If this suspicion were to be confirmed, it could lead to unpleasant consequences for him, since he denied ever having had anything to do with Nazi politics or National Socialist propaganda. It was thus in his interest to emphasize that Eva Braun was not a “serious relationship” for Hitler in the first six years of their acquaintance.209

  Meanwhile, Julius Schaub, SS-Obergruppenführer and Hitler’s personal adjutant, questioned on the topic in Nuremberg on March 12, 1947, by Robert Kempner, the assistant U.S. chief counsel, gave no information at all about the nature of the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun. Kempner asked whether Hitler “loved [Braun] very much” and Schaub answered: “He was very fond of her [Er hat sie sehr gern gehabt].” When Kempner followed up and asked what exactly that meant, Schaub, Hitler’s longtime close confidant who had been near him at all times for twenty years, replied: “He liked her [Er hat sie lieb gehabt].” Schaub added that Hitler had told him he would “never marry” because he “didn’t have time for it” and was “constantly away,” although this “view” had met with incomprehension from those around him: “We often wondered why, we didn’t understand. After all, we were married and not with our wives.”210 Schaub, a simple soul, apparently knew nothing about Hitler’s fears of family ties. He also misjudged the compulsions bound up with Hitler’s categorical self-idealization, nor the fact that the power of the National Socialist system depended in large part on the myth of a “Führer” standing above all everyday politics and problems.211 Even aside from these limitations, Schaub’s statements after the war were generally questionable or downright false. Schaub seems to have remained, after Hitler’s death, an uncritical admirer and loyal protector of his leader’s secrets.212

  Herta Schneider, in contrast, the friend of Eva Braun’s who had perhaps the most intimate knowledge of her relationship with Hitler, stated in June 1949: “As a person, in private, Hitler was perfectly nice. Braun loved him very much and he loved her, too.”213 In the end, therefore, it seems that despite all the prudery Hitler and Eva Braun displayed, their relationship was basically like a marriage, and that they conveyed this fact to their immediate circle.

  Still, Hitler certainly set the terms of the relationship and Eva Braun had to adapt to them. As for the question of why she did it, what feelings she harbored or what intentions she might have been pursuing, opinions differ. On the one hand, she has been described as an unhappy, frustrated, entirely passive and patient woman who uncomplainingly endured her “fate.” On the other hand, she is portrayed as happy and cheerful, with a lust for life, and not particularly feminine. Clearly, the secrecy surrounding her person and the fact that she played an unmistakably important yet undefined role in Hitler’s life, led to conflicts within the private circle and among the Nazi leader’s staff, so that not all the members of this largely closed society on the Obersalzberg and in Munich liked her. These facts may explain the widely differing views of her.

  Officially, Eva Braun remained a member of the staff and an employee of Heinrich Hoffmann’s after 1936. She obviously did not have to show up at the office in Munich every day, but she did become a passionate photographer and home-movie maker during this period. She “often” made “photographs” and color movies of the Berghof’s private circle “available” to her boss, Hoffmann, as he himself stated after the war. Eva Braun even shot movies with a 16 mm Agfa-Movex camera. She took “valuable photographs” that he apparently bought from her for enormous sums of money: for example, according to Hoffmann himself, the astronomical sum of 20,000 reichsmarks for “a piece of photography work” in 1940, though he said he could no longer remember whether the money “was paid directly to Eva Braun or handed over to her sister.” It is also not known whether or how Hoffmann used these photographs.214 But it is certainly impossible to claim that Eva Braun no longer worked for Photohaus Hoffmann after 1936. Alfons Brümmer, an employee of Hoffmann’s company, was still depositing money into her savings account at Munich’s Bayerische Vereinsbank on September 15, 1943: 5,000 reichsmarks for the “secretary” on that particular day—a sum comparable to an annual income at the time.215

  Eva Braun photographing Hitler in conversation with Morell, 1937 (Illustration Credit 8.8)

  Thus there is no sign of any professional distance between Hitler’s personal photographer and Hitler’s girlfriend. And so it is not surprising that Hoffmann, in a written statement for his denazification proceedings of 1947–1948, says not a word about his continued professional ties to Braun after 1936. In the public denazification hearing against her, he stated only that Eva Braun had “offered her things to the business” while he himself had had “nothing to do with it.”216 In light of the amounts of money changing hands, this claim is worse than dubious. The real question is why Hoffmann might have wanted to keep Eva Braun well-disposed to him by means of these huge payments. Was he thereby ensuring that she would speak well of him to the man in charge? In any case, the “Führer’s” lover seems to have been part of the nepotistic practices that were common in National Socialist circles, over and above the financial benefits Hitler accorded her personally.217

  So as not to stand out among Hitler’s entourage, Eva Braun held the official position of a private secretary. Speer later claimed that whenever the Nazi leader spent time on the Obersalzberg, she likewise had to be there—only once, he wrote in Inside the Third Reich, had Hitler given her “a week’s vacation.”218 The insinuation here, that Eva Braun’s presence at the Berghof was a kind of duty or work for her, is unfounded and in fact attributable only to the special character of Speer’s memoirs. Speer himself often emphasized elsewhere the loyalty, devotion, dedication, and love Eva Braun felt for Hitler. Her constant access to the Berghof was a privilege, not a duty, which no member of the “inner circle” would ever have voluntarily gone without.219

  In any case, Eva Braun lived in Munich most of the time. In summer 1935, when she was still living with her younger sister Margarete (Gretl) on Widenmayerstrasse, Hoffmann bought her a small house built four years earlier, at 12 Wasserburger Strasse (today Delpstrasse) in Bogenhausen. A Munich businessman, Adolf Widmann, had offered it for sale, and he said after the war that Eva Braun had visited the building to take a look and Hoffmann paid the asking price (35,000 reichsmarks) a few weeks later, with a “private check.” Hitler appeared at no point in the transaction, Widmann stated.220 Only when Widmann delayed supplying a receipt for the transfer fee that he had requested for various items in the house did Hoffmann and his attorney “verbally request” that he draw up the document “as urgently as possible,” “because Hitler wanted the receipt.”221 Three years later, on September 2, 1938, ownership was transfered to Eva Braun, “private secretary in Munich.”222

  Hoffmann made contradictory sta
tements in this regard as well. In his defense document from 1947, he first claimed that Hitler had bought Eva “a little house.” In the public denazification court proceedings against Eva Braun, on July 1, 1949, in Munich, he then said that he “could no longer recall how the purchase of the house” had come to pass; he might have acquired the property for his son-in-law Baldur von Schirach. He also no longer knew whether he “had been repaid by Hitler.” Finally, he added: “The end result was that I did not pay for the house. The cost was reimbursed, I don’t know by whom, and I also don’t know in what form.”223

  Hoffmann’s sudden forgetfulness is not credible, nor is it conceivable that National Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach would ever have considered a residence as modest as the little house in Bogenhausen for himself and his family. In fact, Schirach became the owner of a seventeenth-century castle, Schloss Aspenstein, in Kochel am See (about forty miles from Munich), on March 12, 1936, around when Eva Braun and her sister Margarete moved to Wasserburger Strasse (March 30, 1936).224 Hitler’s girlfriend’s new domicile was located not far from where other prominent Party members lived—on the same street, for example, as Max Amann, president of the Reich Press Chamber and director of the Central Publishing House of the NSDAP. Heinrich Hoffmann’s villa was a few streets over. Heinrich Himmler (the Reichsführer-S), Hermann Giesler (architect and “General Building Inspector of the Capital City of the Movement”), and Martin Bormann lived in Bogenhausen as well, the latter at 26 Maria-Theresia-Strasse, in a villa confiscated from the painter Benno Becker.225

  While Eva Braun was arranging her move in Munich, Hitler was in his “electoral struggle.” He had just presented the Western powers with a fait accompli by having the German army march into the Rhineland demilitarized zone on March 7, 1936. His generals as well as the diplomats in the foreign service had advised against the step, since breaking international agreements—both the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact, signed in 1925—threatened to increase Germany’s political isolation in Europe and possibly even risked starting another war. Nevertheless, Hitler brought off his coup and as the army marched into the Rhineland he called a sitting of Parliament in Germany, where, amid the frantic cheering of his supporters, he announced that German troops were “at this very moment occupying their future peace garrison.” He swore “to never retreat, from any power or any violence, in the reestablishment of the honor of our People,” and said that “with this day today,” the “struggle for Germany’s equality among nations” had been brought to a close. In the same breath, he made far-reaching offers to Germany’s European neighbors to collectively “ensure the peace,” even proposing a return to the League of Nations. Although Hitler was actually steeped in a racist imperialism that burst all bounds and left absolutely no room for a reconciliation or balance of power among nations, he said in his speech that he hoped from then on “to resolve any tensions on the path of slow, evolutionary development in peaceful collaboration.”226

  After the speech, the national parliament was dissolved and new elections were called for March 29, 1936. Once again, Hitler’s recklessness—he apparently told Albert Speer later that this was “his riskiest undertaking”227—was rewarded: England and France protested Germany’s infringement but did not take military action, and the League of Nations in Geneva confined itself to a formal condemnation of the German violation of the treaties.

  Hitler, meanwhile, made the most of his success. The parliamentary elections turned into a national triumphal celebration for him, as he crisscrossed the country, appearing as an orator in Berlin, Munich, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, Königsberg, Hamburg, Breslau, Ludwigshafen, Leipzig, Essen, and Cologne. Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, had planned the three-week “election campaign,” in which no reelection was actually at stake, to whip up “the German People into a violent frenzy of enthusiasm.”228 It was in truth a publicity campaign on the regime’s part, solely and exclusively seeking the public’s approval for Hitler’s policies: the NSDAP put forth a single-party list of candidates under the slogan “Reichstag for Freedom and Peace.” The official results were that 98.9 percent of voters cast their votes for Hitler; the nationwide fanning of the flames of “Führer”-euphoria knew no bounds. Whether the results correctly matched the votes as actually cast is both unknowable and irrelevant: Hitler was incontestably at the peak of his popularity, being in a position to do what all the political parties during the Weimar Republic had tried to do in vain—wipe out the hated Versailles Treaty.

  And Eva Braun? Would Hitler’s political victories and the increasing adoration he received from the German population have meant nothing to her? It is almost impossible to imagine that Braun, then twenty-four years old, would not have felt her companion to be a kind of demigod, to whose wishes and needs she and everyone else had to submit. She may well have felt herself chosen by a higher power, since these foreign-policy successes only strengthened Hitler’s own view of himself as fulfilling a higher mission and being guided by destiny. “Providence” determined the path he walked on “with the instinctive certainty we have in dreams,” he had announced in front of three hundred thousand people at the Theresienwiese in Munich on March 14, 1936. And this was not just propaganda for public consumption. In his close circle as well, Hitler made no secret of his belief in “God’s Providence.” His sister Paula, for example, reported that he had told her of his “absolute conviction that our Lord God holds his protective hand above me.”229 Similarly, in 1941, during one of his nighttime teas in the East Prussian “Führer headquarters,” he remarked that an “omnipotent power,” which created “worlds,” had “certainly assigned every individual creature its task.” “Everything,” he said, “goes the way it has to go!”230

  Eva Braun, concealed in the entourage sitting behind Hitler, at the Olympic Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, February 1936 (Illustration Credit 8.9)

  Travels

  Travel was an important aspect of life in Hitler’s circle. While the staff of employees who worked closely with Hitler, such as the doctors and secretaries, were his constant travel companions up until 1939 and after the start of the war as well, Eva Braun seems to have been allowed to go along only rarely. Since she never traveled as part of Hitler’s official retinue, however, and her name therefore never appeared on any list in the record, unlike the names of the wives of other high-ranking Nazi officials, it is difficult to determine which events she actually was present at and which not. Thus, a single photograph taken by Heinrich Hoffmann is the only evidence we have that she attended any event at the Olympic Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, whose opening ceremony took place on her birthday, February 6, 1936.231

  These games must have held a special attraction for Braun, herself a passionate skier; here, for the first time, Alpine skiing was among the competitions. Hitler, in contrast, avoided taking part in any sport personally. His refusal had less to do with fear of injury than with his conviction that he would present “a laughable figure every time” he took part. “When people are very famous, a lot is expected of them,” he told his inner circle during one of his “table talks” in August 1942. Referring to Bismarck, he explained that “there would be demands” he would “not be able to meet.” As a result, there was never any question of the Nazi leader “skiing” or “going swimming.”232 He had not forgotten the photograph that appeared on the front page of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung three days after the inauguration of President Friedrich Ebert in 1919, showing Ebert with Minister of Defense Gustav Noske shirtless in bathing trunks on the beach of the Baltic Sea spa Haffkrug. The picture had been a blow to the image of the new Weimar Republic from which it never recovered.233 Mussolini, too, who enjoyed appearing before the Italian public as an athlete in various capacities, including as horseman, pilot, and swimmer, only opened himself up to ridicule, in Hitler’s opinion, since he “couldn’t actually do” all those things. Il Duce, in Hitler’s view, would have been better off “piloting his Italy.”234

  Hit
ler arrived for the Olympic opening ceremonies in Garmisch in a special train. Officially accompanied by Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, Bavarian Minister of the Interior Adolf Wagner, Reich Sports Leader Hans von Tschammer und Osten, and the mayor of Garmisch-Partenkirchen and members of the German Olympic Steering Committee, he stomped through the snow on foot and entered the Olympic ski stadium. Frick had asked Hitler during the run-up to the games to prohibit the “increasing anti-Semitic propaganda” in the Garmisch area for the course of the games; he was afraid that the festivities, destination for a half a million visitors through February 16, and especially the even more prestigious Summer Olympics due to take place a few months later in Berlin, could be endangered “if there were any incidents in Garmisch.”235 As a result, the placards stating “Jews Unwelcome Here,” which were common everywhere in Garmisch, temporarily disappeared.

  Hitler attended the Winter Games in Garmisch several times, with various escorts and usually with prominent Party members such as Göring and Goebbels at his side. It is unknown at precisely which event on which day he had Reich press chief Otto Dietrich, Eva Braun, and other friends from Munich including Helene Bechstein, Erna Hoffmann, and Sofie Stork with him, sitting directly behind him in the second row. The only photograph of this group, taken by Hoffmann, gives no hint of the time of day or the sport event. In any case, Hitler’s presence in Garmisch-Partenkirchen was largely kept from the public, and representatives of the press were permitted to be there only under strict conditions. Heinrich Himmler, head of the Reich Security Service, personally ordered the Bavarian Political Police in writing that it was “strictly forbidden” for “photographers to accompany the Führer.”236