At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin—the great international media event of the National Socialist state—journalists and photographers were likewise subjected to severe restrictions, of course. The propaganda mission of the Nazi regime was to show the world a new, strong, and at the same time peace-loving Germany, and to that end the communicative power of a picture far outweighed that of the written word. Thus only 125 carefully selected German photographers, called “official photojournalists,” were allowed, and the 1,800 members of the press from fifty-nine other countries were supplied with preselected material by the photo press office of the organizing committee.237 This fact did nothing to dampen international enthusiasm, however. Heinrich Hoffmann’s firm took countless pictures and movies of the games and the Olympics became a major propaganda success, not least because of photo reports, radio reports, and, for the first time, broadcasts on television.238
Meanwhile, there is no photographic evidence of Eva Braun’s presence. She may not have been allowed to see for herself what Rudolf Hess called the “first great public appearance of the new Reich.”239 In the autobiographical literature, there is not a single hint of her presence at the Summer Games. The same is true for other major public events in the prewar years. The information that Eva Braun, accompanied by her mother and her school friend Herta Schneider, traveled to Vienna according to Hitler’s wishes on March 14, 1938, to see her lover’s triumphal entry into the city late that afternoon after the “annexation” of Austria to the German Reich—information that allegedly comes from the family itself—is not confirmed anywhere else in the literature.240 Neither Nicolaus von Below nor Otto Dietrich nor Christa Schroeder, all of whom were part of Hitler’s entourage together with the secretary Gerda Daranowski (who had started that spring), mentioned Eva Braun in the context of these events in their later memoirs, even though she allegedly stayed with Hitler and his staff in Vienna’s Hotel Imperial. All of the autobiographers, in fact, avoid mentioning any names or giving any details of their own experiences in this matter. Von Below, for instance, refers merely to the “retinue” or the “numerous companions,” and speaks of having been “witness to a historical moment.” Christa Schroeder makes do with mentioning the military escort and the factotum Julius Schaub, and remarks vaguely that “back then everything was overwhelming” to her. Reich Press Chief Dietrich even gives the impression that he witnessed what he called the “ardent glow of the enthusiasm” of the Austrian masses as an entirely uninvolved bystander. Speer, perhaps the only one who would willingly have gone into any detail, was not among Hitler’s entourage this time, claiming that it was only “several days later” that he learned “via the newspapers” what had taken place.241
In general, a similarly noticeable silence reigns supreme among the main players’ memoirs concerning the exact makeup of the group around Hitler in Linz and Vienna. What might this silence mean? After all, all the members of the inner circle—Brandt, Below, Hoffmann, Dietrich, Brückner, Schaub, the secretaries, and Eva Braun—were at the center of the maelstrom of events. But why did they keep their collective observations and experiences to themselves? First and foremost, we see here again that the solidarity of this group, through to the end of the war and into the years of denazification, must not be underestimated.242 These individuals were not ordinary observers, not part of the masses burning with enthusiasm outside the hotel who had no way to reach Hitler; rather they constituted, together with the regime’s public officials there, the circle of loyal intimates, accomplices, and accessories around the Nazi leader. As a result, none of them reveal the most salient fact: the extent to which they too cheered the entry of the German army into Austria at the time, and how strongly they themselves identified with the National Socialist worldview.
In fact, it is difficult in general to determine how deeply the members of the inner circle shared Hitler’s long-term political goals and vision of a Greater German Reich.243 Their knowledge varied by how close they were to Hitler as well as by their functions. Still, the immediate effects of the Nazi expansion, beginning with Austria, were clear to see. For example, there is a photograph in the partially preserved archive of Hoffmann’s photographs that shows Vienna Jews scrubbing the street with brushes, watched by SS men.244 The racist anti-Semitism that was for Hitler the “central law of the movement” (in the words of Klaus Hildebrand), the foundation of National Socialist propaganda, and the official dogma of the Nazi state, certainly did not remain hidden from those close to Hitler. Rather, we must assume that Hitler’s adjutants, secretaries, servants, and, not least, Eva Braun shared without reservation the Jew-hatred of their “boss,” as they all called him. All of the later protestations like that of Julius Schaub—that he never heard anything about the “Jewish question,” much less the extermination of Jews, until after the capitulation of 1945—must therefore be rejected, or rather understood as stemming primarily from their fear of judicial punishment after the war.245
The Nazi leader’s first personal will, written by hand and dated May 2, 1938, shows how tight the bonds were between Hitler and his circle. That afternoon, Hitler set out from Berlin for a one-week state visit to Italy; Paul Schmidt, head translator in the foreign office, later recalled that “half the government” took part in the visit.246 Hitler, who for years had been suffering from premonitions of death and apparently was afraid of being assassinated in Italy, set his private matters in order before the trip and bequeathed all of his belongings to the NSDAP in the case of his death.247 At the same time, he made sure that his close relatives and colleagues, including the adjutants Schaub, Brückner, and Wiedemann, would be financially set for life. And the first person he mentioned was his girlfriend, twenty-six years old at the time, stating that “Miss Eva Braun, Munich” should receive from the Party “1,000 marks a month… that is, 12,000 marks a year for the remainder of her life” in the case of his death.248 This is the only surviving document in Hitler’s hand, apart from his testament of April 1945, that mentions Eva Braun by name. Her family claimed, after the war, that Eva herself did not know about the testament.249 Surely not many people did know about it. Among the initiates were, in any case, Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery, to whom the document was given for safekeeping, and Franz Xaver Schwarz, “Reich Treasurer of the NSDAP,” whom Hitler intended to be his executor. Schwarz was not only the “Plenipotentiary of the Führer” in all of the Party’s legal property matters, but also, as Richard Walther Darré expressed it later, the “uncrowned king of the NSDAP,” with whom no “leader of the movement” dared “to have a falling out.”250
Eva Braun was allowed to join this trip to Italy, and she documented it on film. More than five hundred people made the journey, in three special trains from the Anhalter station in Berlin through Munich to the Italian capital. The foreign office organized a special Ladies’ Program for the spouses of the high-ranking Nazi politicians, with group outings. This glittering company included Annelies von Ribbentrop, wife of the new Reich Foreign Minister, as well as Ilse Hess, Magda Goebbels, and Marga Himmler; only Emmy Göring was missing, since her husband, the Reich Minister for Air Travel, had been declared Hitler’s successor a month earlier, by “Führer edict,” and had to remain in Berlin as his deputy.251 The women stayed in Rome at the Grand Hotel (today the St. Regis Grand Hotel), built in 1894 as the first luxury hotel in the heart of the city, while Hitler and his retinue were housed in the Quirinal Palace, the residence of Italian kings.252 Indeed, it was King Victor Emmanuel III, not Mussolini, who was the Germans’ official host. Hitler, to his great annoyance, felt that Mussolini, the Prime Minister and thus subordinate to the head of state, had merely “tagged along” for their visit, as the Nazi leader complained years later.253 The wives, in any case, were permitted to attend the dinner arranged by the King in the Quirinal on May 4—the “stiffest event imaginable,” according to adjutant Wiedemann—as well as a dinner hosted by Il Duce at the Palazzo Venezia three days later.254
Eva Braun was exclu
ded from all of these activities. She boarded one of the three special trains only in Munich, joining Karl and Anni Brandt, the Morells, and Maria Dreesen, wife of the Godesberg hotelier, with her son Fritz. It is nearly certain that Braun traveled in a sleeping car in the same train as Hitler. The train was put into service by the German railroad only in July 1937; called “Amerika,” it consisted of two locomotives, Hitler’s salon car, a conference car with a radio station and telex, a dining car, and several cars for the military escort, staff, and guests.255 No one saw Eva Braun’s face outside her immediate circle. In Rome, too, she stayed separate from the others, although no less luxuriously and no less centrally, at the Hotel Excelsior, a “white palace” built around the turn of the century on Via Veneto, the most famous street in the city. Thus cut off from her fellow travelers, she explored the city with the women in her group in particular, while Karl Brandt joined Goebbels, Himmler, Hess, Ribbentrop, and Otto Dietrich in Hitler’s entourage on May 4, to visit, together with Mussolini, the enormous Victor Emmanuel Monument with its Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.256 After an extensive program of celebrations in Rome and Naples, Hitler and his group stayed a short while in Florence and then returned from there to Germany in the German special trains on May 9, 1938.
Hitler, who was determined to follow up the “annexation” of Austria by occupying Czechoslovakia with its Sudeten-German minority, had achieved the purpose of his visit: Italy would remain neutral in case of war.257 Eva Braun, who did not take the train back to Germany but rather traveled onward with her companions to the island of Capri, presumably knew as little of Hitler’s warlike intentions at this point as most of the others on the Italian trip. She had taken part in none of the official events and saw the maneuvers of the Italian fleet in the Gulf of Naples only from afar, while Hitler observed them from onboard a battleship, together with the King and Mussolini.258 It is not even known whether she spent any time at all with Hitler during the trip. She was, however, ceaselessly taking photographs and shooting films. If we believe Henriette von Schirach, Eva Braun showed her movies at the Berghof in the autumn of that year and remarked to Hitler that now he would see the “real Italy” for once.259
After this state visit, Hitler withdrew to the Obersalzberg again and turned his attention to putting into action his idea of “Lebensraum”[9] in the east and his specific battle plans against Czechoslovakia. He gave the orders for war to Ribbentrop, Göring, and the highest generals of the army and their adjutants in Berlin, on May 28, 1938, and thereby caused the destruction of the European order that had been established in the Peace of Paris treaties of 1919. Hitler’s path to war, and his statement that it was his “unshakeable will that Czechoslovakia disappear from the map,” met with no fundamental objections.260
While Hitler was personally pushing ahead to war in the summer of 1938, drawing up operational plans and busying himself with the details of the Siegfried Line (a defensive structure 390 miles long on the western border of the Reich), he was simultaneously relieving his mental strain by fantasizing about retreating into private life. Linz, the capital of the state of Upper Austria—the city he envisioned as a European art capital, “a kind of German Rome,” and which he styled as his “hometown” even though he had spent only two years of his youth there—was where he planned to retire after achieving all of his political goals.261 Linz’s renovation, including a giant industrial and port district, was planned to last until 1950, and Hitler wanted to spend his twilight years there and eventually be buried there. Speer recalls that the construction of a residence “on a height,” with a view over the city, was planned. Even before the war, Hitler had occasionally described his imagined farewell from politics to the assembled company at table on the Obersalzberg, for example by saying: “Aside from Fräulein Braun, I’ll take no one with me. Fräulein Braun and my dog. I’ll be lonely. For why should anyone voluntarily stay with me for any length of time? Nobody will take notice of me anymore. They’ll all go running after my successor!”262
At the high point of his power, in other words, Hitler began to think about taking his leave of politics. The reason for such reflections may have been his health problems, but possibly also, in secret, the fear that his military ambitions would fail. Speer thought such talk might have been an attempt to call forth the loyalty of his colleagues in the large group, but this latter speculation is doubtful. The extensive plans for Linz were a sensitive subject for Speer in any case, since, as he told Joachim Fest in the autumn of 1974, he had not been asked for advice about them despite having offered his “cooperation.”263 It was primarily other architects who drew up the plans, even if it remained Speer’s responsibility to authorize the plans in consultation with Hitler.
Thus the Linz city planning office under the Austrian architect Anton Estermann, which had submitted a design plan, became the central planning site for the project in July 1938. Then, in March 1939, came Roderich Fick, a professor at the Munich Technical College whom Hitler named “Reich Construction Adviser for the Redesigning of the City of Linz.” Fick had already designed several buildings on the Obersalzberg, including Villa Bormann and the teahouse on the Mooslahnerkopf. On May 9, not long after being appointed, Fick presented a model of Linz on the Berghof terrace, in Speer’s presence.264
Around fall 1940, Hitler appointed the architect Hermann Giesler to assist Fick. Giesler, the “Master Builder of the Capital City of the Movement,” came from an architect’s family in Siegen; his brother, Paul, rose in the NSDAP to be the Gauleiter of Munich–Upper Bavaria, while he himself was also a member of the Party and attended Hitler’s dinner parties in Munich. Until his death in 1987, Hermann Giesler would remain an avowed supporter of Hitler.265
It is thus no wonder that Giesler managed, in the end, to win the unavoidable power struggle between himself and Fick, in which August Eigruber, the Gauleiter of Oberdonau Linz, played a role as well. Until the end of the war, all the monumental construction plans of what was now called the “Führer Capital” of Linz, including the “Danube Riverbank Development” and Hitler’s house on the Freinberg, were assigned to Giesler. The residence, sited on a “rocky plateau above the Danube,” was designed in the “strictly cubicform structure typical of the Austrian country house—the Vierkanthof, built around a square courtyard.” According to Giesler’s apologia, Hitler apparently compared it to Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II of Hohenstaufen’s mystical Castel del Monte in southeast Italy.266 In fact, the Castel del Monte, built in the thirteenth-century and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, is similarly situated on a small hill and is not only a symbol of power but also, due to its eight-sided ground plan with eight octagonal towers at the corners, a symbol of eternity. Friedrich II designed the “Hohenstaufen Acropolis” himself, immortalizing himself as architect and city founder. He used architecture as a way to recuperate from politics and his numerous military campaigns; wherever he stayed, his master builder was required to report to him.267
The National Socialists had projected themselves onto Friedrich II’s life and works for a long time and in many ways. They used the legendary emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation as a legitimating figure for their own “Third Empire” by reinterpreting him as a German hero and manufacturing a historical connection with his “First Empire,” which in fact never existed. Hitler also sought out personal points of connection with Friedrich II and cast himself as a renewer of the Empire along the same lines as his historical forebearer. For example, in 1942 he had Oskar Hugo Gugg—a professor of landscape painting in Weimar and friend of Paul Schultze-Naumberg, the architect working with Hitler—execute an oil painting of Castel del Monte for the planned residence in Linz. The previous year in Rome, at Ribbentrop’s instigation, a model of the Friedrich’s building was made and given to Hitler in Berlin in late 1941.268 This fantasy of a link between his place of retirement and the “castle of castles” of the Hohenstaufer emperor suggests the role that “Linz” played in Hitler’s imagination and how he saw hi
mself there. Courtly ceremonies, such as those that took place during the state visit in Italy, always called forth feelings of inferiority in him, and now he dreamed of an old-European, princely existence for himself in the middle of the future economic and cultural center of the “Third Reich.”
Hitler, in raptures over a model of the city of Linz, 1943 (Illustration Credit 8.10)
During the next few years, Hermann Giesler traveled to the Berghof or to Hitler’s various other headquarters again and again to discuss blueprints and models of the project with him. Sometimes, according to Giesler, he stayed “for weeks.”269 In fall 1942, he even traveled to Hitler’s headquarters, which had temporarily shifted east. Named “Wehrwolf” (a pun on the German for “werewolf” and “Wehr,” meaning “defense”), the headquarters was near the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, where he discussed “further details of his house” with Hitler. When he asked the Nazi leader for details about the “kitchen area” and the “garden,” Giesler recalled three decades later, Hitler told him that this was “Miss Braun’s affair”: he should discuss the matter “with her first,” since she would be “lady of the house.” Once he had “installed his successor and stepped down,” Giesler reported, Hitler was planning to “marry Miss Braun.”270
The postwar statements of Giesler and Speer, the “court architects,” show that Hitler’s dream of “Linz” was clearly not his alone. But whether he involved Eva Braun in his plans as early as 1938 or only during the course of the war is not known. The fact remains that these exalted visions offered his young companion a prospect she longed for: that of a glittering, fairy-tale future at Hitler’s side. Henriette von Schirach later claimed that Eva Braun “clung to Hitler’s personal vision of the future.”271 And more and more over the course of the years to come, he expanded the role that he imagined for her in this vision. Speer, ambitious and irritated at the time that “my dear Giesler” was preferred over him for the project, ended by being annoyed over the precedence given to Eva Braun. His biographer Fest reports that “Linz” was a topic of discussion even on the day of Speer’s very last meeting with the Nazi leader in the bunker on April 23, 1945. “Miss Braun” had already made “very personal suggestions,” Hitler told Speer in their last conversation, and would be responsible for the look of the business district and promenades in Linz.272 With their downfall imminent, it seems that Hitler and Eva Braun had fled reality into irrationality together.
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