PART THREE
Downfall
9. ISOLATION DURING THE WAR
Hitler’s fantasy of someday retiring to Linz with Eva Braun and abdicating leadership of the Party and state to a younger man first manifested itself at the same time as the concretization of his war plans in Eastern Europe. He was tormented by the thought of not yet having solved crucial foreign policy problems: revising the cession of territory imposed on the German Reich by the Versailles Treaty and gaining “Lebensraum in the East.” The decision for a war of aggression that he made in fall 1939 may also have been influenced by economic considerations, but the realization of the “Lebensraum” ideology represented the core of National Socialist foreign policy from the beginning. Already in his autobiography and political platform Mein Kampf, published in 1925, Hitler had announced his goal: “We will finally end the colonial and trade policies of the prewar period and transition to the soil-politics of the future. But when we speak of new soil and ground in Europe, we can only think in the first place of Russia and the border states subordinate to it.” The fight against the Soviet Union was raised to a “historical mission of national socialism.”1
On February 3, 1933, immediately after the National Socialists came to power, Hitler declared in a speech after a dinner with high-ranking military officers that the “expansion of Lebensraum” for the Germans, toward the east, would have to be carried out militarily, and the “soil” conquered in this way would have to be “Germanized.” Hardly anyone present, including Hitler’s personal adjutant Wilhelm Brückner, comprehended at the time the new Reich Chancellor’s absolute desire for war. After all, he went on to proclaim his readiness for peace and negotiation in public speeches.2 In addition, neither the concept of “Lebensraum” nor the idea that such space must be conquered for the German People originated with him—both belonged quite generally to the repertoire of the Populist-nationalist right. But four and a half years later, in early November 1937—when Hitler emphasized, this time in a meeting with the heads of the Wehrmacht (armed forces), that “only the path of violence” would provide the “solution to the German problem”—the domestic and foreign political situations of Germany had changed fundamentally. The National Socialist dictatorship was established; rearmament was moving full speed ahead; the Rhineland had been occupied, without any resistance from the Western powers; the “annexations” of Austria and Czechoslovakia were already decided upon. There could no longer be any doubt within the leadership of the Wehrmacht that Hitler’s unchanged intent to win “agriculturally useful space” in Eastern Europe by military means, for the “protection and support of the mass of the People and its reproduction,” was meant seriously.3
When Hitler withdrew to the Obersalzberg in late January 1939, Goebbels recorded the following for posterity in his “Diaries”: “The Führer now speaks almost solely of foreign politics. Again he is turning over new plans in his mind. A Napoleonic nature…”4 In truth, however—as the Minister of Propaganda knew perfectly well—these plans were neither new nor unknown. The racial-ideological genocidal intent of the Nazi regime had already shown itself, not least in the pogrom against German Jews on November 9, 1938, initiated in part by Goebbels himself.5 And Hitler was, as always, working—though now more driven than ever—toward realizing his “vision” of the “next struggle”: “a deliberate war between Peoples and between races,” as he declared in early February 1939.6
The Outbreak of War
Is it possible that Eva Braun, intimately familiar with Hitler’s sense of being on a mission and his racist ideology, could have suspected nothing of his preparations for war in the spring and summer of 1939? This seems highly unlikely, especially after the Nazi leader had given a speech before the “Greater German Reichstag” in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, on January 30, 1939, that gave rise to “more discussion” than practically any other public statement, as Nicolaus von Below recalled.7 In it, Hitler lamented the “warmongers” in England and America who wanted “at all costs to start a war,” and he proclaimed that nothing could “influence [Germany] in the least in the resolution of its Jewish question.” At the same time, Hitler threatened that should it come to war, “the result would not be the Bolshevization of the globe and thus the victory of the Jews, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”8 These “foreign policy passages,” Below admitted in retrospect, “depressed” him, since it was “not difficult to conclude” from these “warnings directed at the English and the Jews” that Hitler “was coming to new and far-reaching decisions.”9
Since Hitler’s unexpectedly combative appearance before Parliament attracted such wide public attention, we can assume that every member of the private “inner circle” around Hitler heard about these utterances as well. His words came close to being a declaration of war. In particular, the wives of the Nazi leaders obviously also “talked about the daily news,” as Margarete Speer admitted to Gitta Sereny.10 For Eva Braun, the events involving Hitler in Berlin over the course of 1939 must have been the focus of her attention to an even greater extent, because her life with him was no longer limited merely to Munich or the Obersalzberg: after the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Speer, was finished and dedicated on January 9, 1939, Braun was given rooms of her own in the “Führer apartment” in the Old Reich Chancellery, with furniture personally designed for her by Speer.11 Clearly, this new residence for Eva Braun was possible because all the official public events now took place in Hitler’s new, specially built, monumental seat of office on the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Vosstrasse.
With its 65-foot-high exterior facade, interior hallways sometimes exceeding 320 feet in length, and central marble gallery, 480 feet long, it surpassed anything that had ever been there. The New Chancellery thereby corresponded to Hitler’s conception of an awe-inspiring architecture of power, enabling him to impress especially “the smaller dignitaries.”12 But even though the building included a private wing for Hitler’s use, he continued to stay at his apartment at 77 Wilhelmstrasse, refurnished four years earlier by the Troost architecture office. Eva Braun, during her stays in Berlin, now no longer spent the night at the Hotel Adlon but instead, in the guise of a private secretary, could go to their common place of residence largely unremarked. Speer wrote in Inside the Third Reich that she “came in through a side entrance and up a side staircase.” She didn’t even linger in the downstairs rooms, formerly the public reception halls, “when only old friends were in the house.” Instead, the architect sometimes “kept her company during her long hours of waiting.”13
Hitler’s girlfriend seems not to have remained entirely unobserved in the capital city, however. The American newsmagazine Time, for example, in an article published December 18, 1939, reported that “a blond Bavarian girl named Eva Helen Braun” had moved into “Hitler’s official residence in Berlin, the great Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse,” during the last days of August.14 The article referred to various sources in Germany and to an article published in The Saturday Evening Post two days earlier. This was not entirely true, but the magazine gave enough biographical details to indicate that the Nazi leader’s private life was not a secret anywhere in the capital city, and that rumors about it had reached the ears of American journalists, too.
As early as May 15, 1939, Time had speculated about Mussolini’s and Hitler’s girlfriends, under the title “Spring in the Axis,” and named Eva Braun: the young woman from Munich had her apartment paid for by her “old friend in Berlin, who always comes to see her when he is in town.”15 One of Time’s informants was presumably Bella Fromm, the Berlin society columnist who had immigrated to the United States in 1938. She had worked for the Vossische Zeitung newspaper, among others, and had excellent contacts in Berlin political society. In her best-selling diaries published in London in 1943 as Blood & Banquets, she mentions “Eva Helene Braun” as early as her entry of September 16, 1937, describing her as the former assistant of “Court Photographer” Heinrich Hoffmann who
had possibly conquered Adolf Hitler’s heart. Fromm was relying on off-the-record information from Louis Paul Lochner, an American journalist in charge of the Associated Press bureau in Berlin who had ties to the National Socialist leadership.16 Obviously, the German public learned nothing about such overseas news reports—censorship of the press was in effect in the National Socialist state, and foreign newspapers, magazines, and books were not even permitted to be sold.
Eva Braun did, in fact, stay in Berlin in late August 1939. And she had already learned of the worsening international situation while at the Berghof. Hitler’s expansionist goals in the east—first “taking care of what remained of the Czechs” (in defiance of the concessions of the Western powers in the Munich Agreement of September 1938) and “taking possession” of the formerly East Prussian “Memel Territory” belonging to Lithuania, then reconquering the other territories lost in the First World War—meant war.17 The Nazi regime had decided to use force as soon as any neighboring Eastern European government stood in its way, and indeed it moved closer to war when Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck at a meeting with Hitler on the Obersalzberg on January 5, 1939, in which the Nazi leader demanded the return of Danzig to the German Reich as well as access routes to East Prussia, rejected the German ideas in the name of his government.
The Polish position did not change even after German troops marched into Prague on March 15, with Hitler declaring Czechoslovakia “the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” in Hradschin Castle there, nor after March 23, when the Germans occupied the Memel Territory.18 Three days later the Polish government again rejected the National Socialist dictator’s demands. Hitler then ordered concrete preparations for a war on Poland “beginning 9/1/1939.” He was never interested in a diplomatic solution to the conflict, since, as he remarked to his generals in May 1939, Danzig “is not the real concern. The issue is an expansion of Lebensraum in the east.”19 As in the case of Czechoslovakia, the Western powers failed here, too—as did the League of Nations, which had been founded to collectively ensure world peace. The British government gave merely a halfhearted guarantee to Poland and worked to sign a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union, without success. Hitler’s and Stalin’s realpolitik calculations prevented this agreement, as did the Poles themselves, who did not trust the Soviets as a protective power. The Soviet dictator sought a rapprochement with Hitler, despite their ideological enmity, because his country was not ready for war and he was not willing to be drawn into a conflict by the capitalist powers England and France. Hitler, in turn, must have been afraid of a war on two fronts.20
In late June on the Obersalzberg, Hitler paced back and forth in the great hall of his estate night after night, with either Albert Speer or Nicolaus von Below, “giving his thoughts free rein” as Below recalled later. During these evenings, the Nazi leader explained that he had to lay the groundwork for the Greater German Reich’s future “work of peace” by seizing the opportunity “to create a foundation for the unavoidable fight with Russia by solving the Polish problem.” The English would “certainly stay completely quiet if he managed to bring about a pact with Russia,” and the Poles would “come down off their high horse on their own” since they were “even more afraid of the Russians… than they are of us.”21 In other words, Hitler laid out his worldview and war plans with brutal clarity to the air force adjutant on duty. Nicolaus von Below’s account shows, first, how great the Nazi leader’s tension was with respect to the military conflicts he had planned, so that he needed to seek psychological relief in his trusted circle, far from Berlin. Second, it reveals that Hitler felt no need to exercise caution or discretion around his loyal followers on the Berghof.
The fact is, there were no ideological differences within the “inner circle.” Nicolaus von Below later admitted that he had been impressed with Hitler’s “thoughts” about “Jewish Bolshevism” as a constant threat to Germany and Europe; Hitler’s “clear-sighted judgment of the situation” convinced him.22 Speer, meanwhile, the “Führer’s” special favorite who was on the Obersalzberg through most of the summer of 1939, kept quiet after the war about the political discussions that took place then. He answered the American interrogators’ questions on the subject in September 1945 by evasively claiming that any information from him would merely be “the intuitive impressions of a man at the edge of the circle where foreign-policy questions were decided.” Speer gives the impression in his later memoirs, claiming, for example—unlike Below—that he heard about the negotiations with Moscow for the first time on August 21, 1939, during dinner at the Berghof, after Stalin had sent a telex expressing his willingness to receive the Reich Foreign Minister on August 23 and sign the Nonaggression Pact that had already been drawn up.23
By this point at the very latest, the supposedly apolitical ladies at the table were let into the picture of the looming developments. Speer nonetheless stresses that the women were “still excluded” from discussion.24 But Eva Braun’s photographs tell another story. On August 23, 1939, in the middle of the extremely tense environment reigning at the Berghof in connection with Joachim von Ribbentrop’s departure for Moscow—accompanied by, among others, Heinrich Hoffmann—she captured on film Hitler restlessly awaiting news of the progress of the negotiations in the Soviet capital. Surrounding him in the Berghof hall that afternoon were Goebbels, Bormann, Otto Dietrich, Walther Hewel (head of the Foreign Minister’s personal staff), Karl Bodenschatz (Göring’s adjutant and head of the ministerial office in the Reich Ministry of Air Travel), and Julius Schaub. Speer and Below were there as well, but like many others did not appear in the photographs. Goebbels notes in his “Diaries” that they waited “for hours” for “news from Moscow,” until finally, “at one in the morning,” the communiqué was transmitted. “The Führer and all of us are very happy,” he wrote.25
Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich, on the other hand, in his reminiscences published in 1955 under the title 12 Jahre mit Hitler (Twelve Years with Hitler; published in English as The Hitler I Knew), passes over this day of waiting on the Obersalzberg. He writes that he had not known at the time that Hitler was “launching an attack” on Poland “but wanted to avoid war with England.”26 Dietrich presumably did not suspect the existence of Eva Braun’s photographs. These are not posed pictures but snapshots that reveal the general tension. She later pasted them into a photo album and added typewritten captions pasted under the pictures—for example, “… and then Ribbentrop left for Moscow”; “… and the Führer hears the report over the radio.”27
The Minister of Propaganda had already, on the evening of August 21, arranged for the announcement of the upcoming German-Soviet Pact over German radio, and instructed the editors of all the newspapers “to publish [news of the pact] on the first page, very large.”28 On the morning of August 22, Goebbels held a press conference in Berlin for foreign journalists, while Hitler, at the same time, informed fifty officers, including the commanders of the various armed forces, in his Alpine residence that he was definitively resolved to go to war, a war that he would be “hard and ruthless” in waging.29 The Nazi leader spent the following days getting constant reports about the domestic and foreign reactions. The announcement of a Nonaggression Pact between the two powerful dictators, which Goebbels described as a “worldwide sensation,” did not, however, produce the desired reaction in either England or Poland. Both governments immediately announced that their positions were unchanged; Britain in fact strengthened its mutual assistance pact with Poland (it was formally signed only on August 25), and the Polish government refused further discussions with the Nazi leadership.30
As we would therefore expect, Eva Braun’s photo diary contains the following entry: “… but Poland still does not want to negotiate.” This comment was not “naive”; it matched the view of many Germans who thought that Poland would not risk a military conflict with its powerful neighbor in these circumstances.31 Moreover, Poland’s refusal to accede to Germany’s demands, withdraw from Danzig, and permit
passage to East Prussia was criticized outside of Germany as well: the demands were seen as perfectly legitimate outside of National Socialist circles, too. In addition, Nazi propagandists had succeeded in imputing their own country’s war intentions to the Western powers. Goebbels, for example, in an address to the Danzig population on June 17, 1939, accused “Polish chauvinists” of wanting “to smash us Germans to pieces in an upcoming Battle of Berlin,” while England had “given them a blank check” to do so and was trying “to encircle the Reich and Italy.” Right up to the invasion of Poland, the Minister of Propaganda constantly repeated the basic ideas of Hitler’s conspiracy theory, in which Hitler wanted peace but the “encirclers” in London, Paris, and Washington wanted war. As a result of the effectiveness of the German propaganda, the Nazi leader, apparently successful at everything, enjoyed the widespread reputation in Germany of being a savvy politician on the international stage, outwitting Western powers who acted moralistic but ultimately did nothing.32
Eva Braun Page 22