Eva Braun

by Heike B. Görtemaker

  Was Eva Braun aware of the historic significance of these days that she spent at the Berghof, days whose drama she clearly was trying to capture on film? There is no testimony on the subject, contemporaneous or later. No information from any of the women present—who included Margarete Speer, Anni Brandt, and Gerda Bormann—has been preserved. Eva Braun’s photographs themselves, however, imply that she was well aware of what was happening, as does the fact that she went along to the capital immediately afterward. She presumably rode to Berlin via Munich in one of the ten Mercedes that left the Obersalzberg on August 24, 1939. The “court,” as Speer said, had repaired to the Chancellery.33 Hitler’s “situation room” was in the great hall of the Old Chancellery, and it became the center of the “Führer headquarters” in Berlin after the start of the war.34 Eva Braun was living in her rooms on the upper floor of the Old Chancellery, but it is unclear how well informed she was about the developments. On September 1, though, she apparently witnessed in person, along with her sister Ilse who was then living in Berlin, the session of Parliament hurriedly called by Göring in which Hitler declared war on Poland. His justification was: “This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our territory. Since 5:45 a.m. we have been returning the fire, and from now on bombs will be met by bombs.”35 No one knew at the time that the alleged Polish attack on a German radio station in Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia, which German propaganda cast as “the cause of the outbreak of the war,” was a fabrication by the SS, along with all the other “border incidents” that had allegedly taken place in the previous days.36

  In the former Kroll Opera House near Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, closed since 1931 and housing the National Socialist sham-parliament since the Reichstag fire of February 1933, there were several hundred seats available for visitors and journalists, in the two tiers of boxes. According to Ilse Braun’s description as relayed by Nerin E. Gun, Eva Braun cried when Hitler, dressed in battle dress with the SS insignia on his left sleeve, announced:

  My whole life, from this moment on, belongs to my People. I want nothing more than to be the first soldier of the German Reich. I have therefore put on this tunic, which was been the holiest and most priceless to me, and will take it off only after our victory, or not live through its end.37

  The members of Parliament stood up at these words, as per protocol, and “a thunderous cry of Heil” resounded in the chamber. Eva Braun, though, according to her sister, said: “If something happens to him, I’ll die too.”38 Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s secretary, expressed herself in similar terms two days later, on September 3, shortly before 9 p.m., when she set off for the Polish front with Hitler in the special train (still bearing the code name “Amerika”) from Berlin’s Stettin station. Great Britain and France had declared war against the German Reich that day. Hitler’s—and his entourage’s—hope that England would continue its wait-and-see policy was thus shattered; the Nazi regime had unleashed a great war. Suitably depressed, Christa Schroeder wrote to her friend Johanna Nusser: “In a few hours we will leave Berlin…. For me it means going with the leader through thick and thin. As for the worst case, I don’t want to think about that yet, but if it happens—my life is over.”39

  The Berghof as “Führer Headquarters”

  With the start of the war, Hitler’s Alpine residence became a “Führer headquarters” whenever the commander in chief of the Wehrmacht was staying there. Only the military adjutant on duty was with him at all times; Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) and Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s most influential military adviser and Chief of the Operations Staff of the Armed Forces High Command in the OKW, were housed a couple of miles away in the “Sub-Chancellery” in Berchtesgaden. The Wehrmacht command staff, meanwhile, worked in a special train in the Salzburg train station until the end of 1942.40 Briefings on the military situation, however, took place at the Berghof every afternoon and evening. As a result, Otto Dietrich recalled, the women had to stay in their rooms “until the ‘noon briefing’ ended, around 2 p.m., and the generals drove off again.” The same procedure was repeated after dinner, when the “OKW gentlemen” arrived once more. Eva Braun, her friends, and the secretaries repaired to the downstairs rooms of the Berghof most of the time, where there was a bowling alley and where they could watch movies.41

  In any case, Hitler no longer showed up on the Obersalzberg several times a month, as he had in the past. There were still extended stays, up until the end of the war, but they were less frequent and also could not happen at will, since they depended on the military situation. Spontaneous trips with a few close friends were a thing of the past, since traveling now required that the whole “Führer headquarters” be moved, including the orderlies and the security personnel, namely an SS military escort and a “Führer escort battalion.” Hitler’s whole way of life changed. He had now become, as Speer remarked, “a slave to work,” whereas before he had “never let himself be pressured by work.”42 Especially in the latter half of the war, he stayed away at the front for months at a time.43

  Hitler had no fixed headquarters when the war started. As a result, Hitler and his whole staff, including Schroeder and Daranowski, the secretaries; Wilhelm Brückner; Julius Schaub; Karl Brandt; Nicolaus von Below; Martin Bormann; Heinrich Hoffmann; and Otto Dietrich slept in the “Führer train” for the first three weeks of September 1939, during the so-called Eighteen-Day War against Poland. This train consisted of two locomotives, two special cars with antiaircraft guns, two luggage cars, a “Führer car,” a command car, a military escort car, two dining cars, two guest cars, two sleeping cars, and a press car.44 The train’s locations in Eastern Pomerania and Upper Silesia were declared military protection zones, guarded by military police and defended with antitank and antiaircraft cannons. An airplane was kept at the ready for Hitler; it was monitored by a soldier carrying a machine gun.45 The commander of a given “Führer headquarters”—in this case Major General Erwin Rommel—was responsible for all security measures.46

  Christa Schroeder, in a letter to her friend Johanna Nusser dated September 11, 1939, described how the situation appeared from the point of view of the secretaries accompanying the Nazi leader:

  We’ve been living in the train for ten days now, always changing our location, but since we—Daranowski and I—never leave the train, it all stays monotonous (for us, very monotonous). The heat is almost unbearable, just horrible. The sun beats down all day long on the compartments and you’re simply powerless against the tropical heat…. The Boss drives off with his men in the morning and we are condemned to wait and wait and wait some more.47

  Meanwhile, Hitler visited various sectors of the front. His accompanying physician Karl Brandt occasionally availed himself of a field military hospital and performed operations along with the other doctors.48 Heinrich Hoffmann as well as employees of his company photographed the whole campaign, producing among other things aerial shots of burning buildings, destroyed Polish tank convoys, and the bombing of Polish bunkers and bridges.49 Hoffmann, himself in uniform, also staged the commander in chief in his photos, taking pictures of Hitler on his “Ride Along the Front in the Corridor” on September 4, saluting to marching soldiers, and used this for the cover of the illustrated book he published that year, Mit Hitler in Polen (With Hitler in Poland). He also photographed Hitler at situation briefings in the train, in the field kitchen, talking to wounded soldiers, and during his triumphal entry into Danzig on September 19.50 By the time Hitler returned to Berlin a week later, Poland, which lacked modern military equipment, had been defeated and divided up between the German Reich and the Soviet Union. Seventy thousand Polish soldiers had fallen and another seven hundred thousand were prisoners of war.

  In addition, Einsatzgruppen, or task forces of the secret police, part of the SS, had marched in behind the German army and were carrying out mass shootings, primarily of Jews. Hitler had issued a “special order” for the ethnic “cleansing�
� of Poland and named Heinrich Himmler the Reich Commissioner for the Eastern Territories.51 We have no photographs by Hoffmann and his associates of the murders committed, although there are images that reveal the discrimination, violence, and persecution. They show, for example, members of the security service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) arresting Polish Jews and cutting off their beards. Hoffmann and his team also photographed transports to the ghetto and Jewish forced laborers.52 In truth, the march of German troops into Poland was the start of a horrific program of “Germanization,” deportation, and extermination. Around 3.2 million Jews were kept imprisoned in ghettos. Hitler’s racial mania and hatred of the people in Poland—who were, he said, “more like animals than human beings”—found full expression for the first time during the Poland campaign.53 It is unlikely that Eva Braun ever saw any of the thousand photographs of the Poland campaign that Hoffmann kept, but she presumably knew Hitler’s stereotypical racial views and in fact may have, like many other Germans, shared them. The extermination of Jews, on the other hand, was never discussed openly in the innermost private circle; the topic was never allowed to be mentioned in Hitler’s presence.54

  Heinrich Hoffmann taking a photograph during the western campaign, June 1940 (Illustration Credit 9.1)

  Eva Braun also never joined Hitler at his garrison near the front. None of the women from the Berghof (except the secretaries) were ever brought there. Instead, Eva Braun remained in her house in Munich, drove up to the Obersalzberg with her family and friends, or traveled to Italy, escorted by several of the ladies of the inner circle. Whenever Hitler was in Berlin for a longer stay, Eva Braun also stayed in her small apartment in the Old Chancellery. For example, on the evening of November 8, 1939, she and her friend Herta Schneider found themselves with Hitler in his special train on the way to Berlin while a bomb went off in Munich’s Bürgerbräu beer cellar, which the Nazi leader had just left. Eva Braun learned only the following day, in a conversation with her younger sister, who had stayed in Munich, that their father was among the many injured in the blast.55

  Meanwhile, the war in Poland had little tangible effect in Germany. Life went on, despite the introduction of food and clothes rationing. Most people believed that the victory would be quick and then celebrated it with corresponding enthusiasm when it came. When Hitler returned to the Obersalzberg on December 27, 1939, he did so as a celebrated war hero.56 The enthusiasm for the “blitzkrieg” in the east among the German population knew no bounds, and people hoped, as Nicolaus von Below recalled, that “England and France would be reasonable” and that it would not come to war with the Western powers. No one suspected the existence of preparations, already under way in secret, for the German army to attack in the west.57

  During the next three months, until the invasion of Norway on April 9, 1940, Hitler traveled back and forth between Berlin, Munich, and the Obersalzberg as he had before the war. On the Obersalzberg, he passed the time with Eva Braun and the other guests. Heinrich Hoffmann, in his postwar work Hitler Was My Friend, writes that he “gave [Eva Braun] time off, at Hitler’s request,” for the occasion.58 But this, like many of Hoffmann’s other later statements, seems to be excessive bluster. In any case, the start of the war did not yet bring about any fundamental changes to the situation at the Berghof, as Hitler did not abandon his bohemian lifestyle from one day to the next. However, apart from continuing to be busy with his architectural plans, he now devoted himself primarily to the war that he had been working toward for so many years. Thus the perception that the successful Poland campaign was never discussed within the trusted circle on the Berghof is less than credible. So are the claims made after the war by the surviving main players that Hitler’s further war plans—the invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg on May 10, 1940, and the attack on France—came as a complete surprise to them.

  Hoffmann, for example, maintained that on the evening of May 9, while the usual company was taking the special train from Berlin via Celle and Hannover to Cologne, they had no idea where they were going, and thought they were going to Norway. Otto Dietrich similarly stated that he realized the “great offensive” had begun only on the morning of May 10, when “the first squadron of airplanes flew in the cloudless sky” overhead over the Eifel mountains “toward the west.”59 Since Hoffmann and Dietrich were both always at Hitler’s side, if only because of their jobs, and since they had various channels for receiving information even aside from their proximity to Hitler, these accounts are not very convincing. In fact, Hitler’s legendary obsession with secrecy often seems to be nothing more than a self-protective claim of his inner circle, invented after the war. Nicolaus von Below, who spent Easter 1939 at the Berghof with his wife, also doubts that Hitler’s camouflage of the journey “was believed.” In fact, every person traveling along had “his own private ties with the ‘initiates,’ ”60 that is, Schaub, Bormann, and Below himself, who as Hitler’s military adjutant and conversation partner had precise knowledge about what Hitler was considering. Speer, too, busy since December 1939 with the construction of the first fixed “Führer headquarters” (the “Rocky Eyrie” or Felsennest, on a mountain peak near Rodert, a village near Bad Münstereifel), was clearly in the loop about Hitler’s further plans.61

  The blitzkrieg against France, justified as a preventive strike, ended on June 22, 1940, with the signing of a German-French ceasefire in Compiègne, a site rich with symbolism since it was where the armistice ending World War I was signed. In the space of a few weeks, roughly one hundred thousand French and twenty-seven thousand Germans had fallen in battle. Hitler, who had carried out the western campaign over the objections of the army’s high commander, Generaloberst Walther von Brauchitsch, and wiped clean the disgrace of World War I with his victory, was now regarded as the “greatest military leader of all time.”62 It is easy to imagine how this new highpoint of Germany’s “Führer” euphoria would have affected the circle on the Obersalzberg. Wolf Speer, a nephew of Albert Speer’s, recalled that there were photographs in his grandmother’s drawing room “of her successes in the highest society, and at the time that meant the Obersalzberg,” including pictures of Hitler with Eva Braun. Luise Mathilde Speer, who herself had been invited to the Berghof several times in the spring of 1939, later remarked, according to her son Albert, that she “did not want to see any of the people gathered there in her own house.” Still, she had apparently admired the “great Führer,” and added, “Who knows how evenings went with Bismarck or Napoleon!”63

  As early as July 11, 1940, five days after his grand reception in Berlin where hundreds of thousands had wildly cheered him, Hitler arrived back on the “mountain.” Through late October he again traveled back and forth between his refuge at Berchtesgaden and the Chancellery in Berlin; Eva Braun sometimes accompanied him to Berlin as well.64 A twenty-two-year-old member of the Waffen-SS named Rochus Misch, part of the “Führer military escort” since early May, stayed on the Obersalzberg for the first time in summer 1940, and Eva Braun was introduced to him as a “housekeeper.” She changed her outfits several times a day, he later reported, and always wore makeup. Thus she did not, in Misch’s judgment, fit the “ideal of a German girl”: “naturalness and rootedness in the soil” were “not her style.”65 In fact, these two qualities had nothing whatsoever to do with Hitler’s personality, either. Misch also observed that Eva Braun’s behavior changed “lightning fast” as soon as Hitler left the Berghof: “You could still see the limousines driving down the winding roads and already the first preparations were being made for various amusing activities. Proper as a governess a moment before, now she was turning everything upside down. And she was cheerful, happy and relaxed, almost like a child.”66

  Hitler’s arrival on the Obersalzberg, Eva Braun in the foreground, 1940 (Illustration Credit 9.2)

  On October 21, 1940, after Hitler departed to meet with acting French Prime Minister Pierre Laval, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and French head of state Marshal Philippe Pétai
n, Eva Braun threw a party the same evening with the Berghof staff.67 She was dancing on the volcano’s edge, since Hitler failed to bring France and Spain into the war, nor could he knock Great Britain out of the war on his own. The air war against England was in full swing and British bombers had struck Berlin for the first time on August 26. With these events in the background, the lifestyle—even the very existence—of this young, sometimes effusive girlfriend must have seemed like an anachronism in the life of the idolized “Führer and Reich Chancellor.”

  Until the attack on the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, Hitler conducted his war in large part from the Berghof. In fact, he spent the first few months of 1941 at the Berghof almost without interruption.68 This was where he considered his next steps, talked them out in the presence of his highest military officers, and formulated the goal of destroying Russia. At no point since the 1920s had he lost sight of his declared main ideological enemy, “Jewish Bolshevism.” Only when Soviet Russia was cast down “in a quick campaign,” he believed, would the English give up their struggle against Germany.69 He estimated that the blitzkrieg in the east would take about three months to reach victory. There were neither battle plans nor any thought of supplies and reinforcements for the period after that; everything was staked, literally, “on the first strike.”70

  In summer 1941, for the first time, Hitler stayed for months at a time in his perfectly camouflaged, permanent headquarters, the “Wolf’s Lair,” near Rastenburg in East Prussia.71 In light of the earlier victories, most of the military officers, the Nazi leadership, and especially the members of the Nazi leader’s private circle were absolutely convinced that this was another masterstroke. For example, Below, deeply familiar with the dictator’s worldview and war plans from their many conversations together, admitted in his memoir that at the time he thought “Hitler was sharply and soberly calculating.” On top of everything, Below “in that period” often “marveled at [Hitler’s] calm demeanor” and found him “humane and sympathetic.”72 Given such uncritical acclaim, it is no wonder that Hitler barricaded himself at the Berghof for months in the lead-up to the campaign—he clearly needed this seclusion and blind agreement from his selected entourage. When and to what extent he revealed his war plans to Eva Braun during these months remains unknown to this day. But there is no doubt that, in one form or another, he let his loyal girlfriend in on the facts at some point before he left Berlin on the special train to East Prussia. Maria von Below, in a private (and apparently tapped) telephone call with her relatives, is said to have communicated weeks earlier the exact date of the upcoming German attack on the Soviet Union. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the military secret service, later complained to Hitler about the incident during a visit to the “Wolf’s Lair,” at which point Hitler, to everyone’s surprise, “brushed it aside with a wave of his hand.”73