Eva Braun
Page 26
Her will conscientiously divided up her property—in particular the jewelry, clothes, china, furniture, cash, and paintings—among her family and friends. According to Nerin E. Gun’s list, which, he wrote, reproduced the will “verbatim,” the paintings included works by Hermann Gradl, Hugo Wilhelm Kauffmann, Theodor Bohnenberger, Oskar Mulley, Heinrich Knirr, and Fritz Halberg-Krauss,35 all members of the Munich School of genre and landscape painters, Hitler’s favorite artists. (Gradl, Mulley, and Halberg-Krauss were represented in the National Socialist “Greater German Art Exhibition” that took place in the “House of German Art” in Munich until 1944.) We can only guess how Eva Braun came into possession of original paintings by these artists—she was certainly close to the source, as a colleague of Heinrich Hoffmann, a major art buyer. Hoffmann’s art press, where she now worked, also produced and sold the official postcards of the “Greater German Art Exhibition” exhibits.36 It is also possible that most of these pictures were gifts from Hitler. He had, for example, personally sought out Hermann Gradl in his studio in 1937, and had had portraits of himself painted by Heinrich Knirr and Theodor Bohnenberger, among others. Eva Braun apparently owned one of each of these “Führer portraits,” and was herself painted by Bohnenberger as well.37 She bequeathed this latter portrait to her sister Ilse, along with the house on Wasserburger Strasse. Gretl Fegelein (née Braun) was to inherit all of Eva Braun’s home movies, photo albums, and personal letters.
Eva Braun’s will of October 1944 reveals yet again her firm decision to die with Hitler. She would presumably have ended her life in Munich if illness or a Soviet attack had killed Hitler in Rastenburg. A future without him apparently never entered her thoughts. Henriette von Schirach later recalled that during her last visit to the Obersalzberg, in the summer of 1943, she had already discussed the future with Eva Braun—the postwar future—and had suggested that Braun could “go into hiding somewhere.” According to Schirach, Braun had answered: “Do you think I would let him die alone? I will stay with him up until the last moment, I’ve thought it out exactly. No one can stop me.”38
11. THE DECISION FOR BERLIN
Eva Braun had thus long since set her personal affairs in order in Munich when Hitler and his entourage left the “Wolf’s Lair” forever, on Monday, November 20, 1944, at 3:15 p.m., and traveled by special train to the capital, arriving at 5:20 a.m. on November 21.1 Only a few days earlier, he had categorically refused to change his headquarters—Nicolaus von Below recalls that he personally heard Hitler say the war was lost and he would remain in East Prussia. But Martin Bormann succeeded in changing Hitler’s mind.2 In fact, Hitler was not yet ready to die. The day after his arrival in Berlin, he underwent an operation on his vocal cords—as he had back in 1935—to remove what Goebbels called “an insignificant lump.” On the day of the operation, November 22, Eva Braun arrived at the Chancellery. Theodor Morell noted briefly in his daily calendar: “E.B. arrived. I left later.”3
Once again, Eva Braun stayed with Hitler in the rooms on the second floor of the Old Chancellery. Hitler was not allowed to speak after the operation, and during the daily briefings he could make himself understood only “by writing on slips of paper.”4 A “Führer bunker” had been specially built in the garden behind this building in late September, 1944, about 25 feet underground. It measured just 2,150 square feet and had fifteen rooms, including a living room and bedroom for Eva Braun.5 For the time being, Hitler and Braun descended into the cramped, damp, and poorly ventilated bunker only during air raids.
The surviving record nowhere mentions when Eva Braun left Berlin again. The secretaries seem not even to have known she was there. However, they had “not been face to face [with Hitler] for three days” after the operation, as Traudl Junge wrote later, and they had no information about whether he was staying in a hospital or in the Chancellery.6 In all probability, Eva Braun left after only a few days, and had long since returned to Munich when Hitler, on the evening of December 10, left Berlin for the “Eagle’s Eyrie” headquarters in Ziegenberg, near the Hessian city of Bad Nauheim.
A week later, the Ardennes Offensive began, with which Hitler intended to take Antwerp and turn the tide of the war. General Heinrich Eberbach—who was interned with other high-ranking German prisoners of war in the British special camp of Trent Park, where British Intelligence eavesdropped on and recorded all of their conversations with each other without their knowledge—commented on Hitler’s decision to wage one last offensive: “It’s not his last. The man never stops fooling himself. When he’s standing at the base of the gallows, he’ll still fool himself that he won’t be strung up on it.”7 And in fact “Operation Autumn Fog” failed after only ten days. There was no chance it would succeed, and Hitler himself probably didn’t believe it would. Late at night in the bunker, Nicolaus von Below recalled, Hitler told him that he knew the war was lost, and what he wanted most was to “put a bullet in his brain right now.”8 But he didn’t do it. Not yet.
The Final Offensive
Instead, Hitler returned to Berlin on January 16, 1945. Eva Braun, too, accompanied this time by her pregnant sister Gretl, traveled from Munich to the capital two days later. Both women traveled in the care of Martin Bormann, who had stayed at the Berghof for a few days. Together with his wife, Gerda, and an SS officer, they arrived in Berlin by “special car” on the afternoon of January 19.9 There is thus no truth to the idea that Eva Braun came to Berlin “unexpectedly and against Hitler’s orders,” as Julius Schaub later claimed.10 She was apparently counting on an even earlier reunion, since even before Christmas she had asked Hitler many times to spend the holidays at the Berghof. Hitler told his secretary that “mainly it’s Gretl behind that, she wants her Hermann there with her.”11 As he could not fulfill his girlfriend’s and her sister’s wishes, he had both women come to Berlin as soon as he was back there. Adjutant Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven later wrote in his memoir that he was surprised to see “two elegantly dressed young women with their hair freshly done” coming down the hall of the Chancellery, while he and the other officers were waiting there for the briefing with Hitler to start.12
If we believe Goebbels’s account, Eva Braun had already decided at that point not to leave Berlin again. The Minister of Propaganda wrote, under the date of February 1, 1945:
I explain to the Führer that my wife is determined to stay in Berlin, too, and even refuses to let our children leave. The Führer doesn’t think this standpoint is the right one, but finds it admirable. He says that Miss Eva Braun has the same view. She also does not want to leave Berlin, especially in this critical hour. The Führer finds words of the deepest recognition and admiration for her. And this is certainly what she deserves.13
The small circle of those who linked their fates to Hitler’s to the bitter end was thus beginning to form, in the face of the ever-approaching enemy armies. Bormann, who had been Hitler’s “shadow” since the start of the war—constantly near him and controlling all access to him to a greater and greater extent—was not, however, among them. True, he did emphasize in a letter to his wife that both of their fortunes and fates were tied to that of the “Führer.” At no point, though, did he intend to bring his family to Berlin.14
Meanwhile, the Soviet offensive against the German Reich—the attack on Berlin—had started, on January 12, 1945. By the end of the month, the German troops in East Prussia were cut off from the Reich. The Red Army encircled Königsberg and had pushed ahead into Pomerania. Large swaths of the East Prussian population fled their homes. The first battalions under General Georgy Zhukov, Commander of the First Belorussian Front, were already at Frankfurt an der Oder, about fifty-five miles from Berlin.15 While the situation was thus coming to a head, Eva Braun celebrated her thirty-third birthday in the capital, on the night of February 5–6, 1945. By then, she and Hitler were spending their nights in the air-raid bunker.16 Alongside Hitler’s “last apartment” in the bunker—two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom—a bedroom had also been set u
p for Eva Braun, which she equipped with her furniture from the Chancellery.17 They retreated to the bunker more and more often by day as well. Two days earlier, on the morning of February 3, 1945, more than nine hundred American airplanes had attacked Berlin and badly damaged the center of the city, near Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Strasse, with high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Fires raged everywhere, the government district on Wilhelmstrasse was destroyed, the Old Reich Chancellery was partly reduced to rubble, traffic was at a standstill, and the trains and streetcars no longer ran. Berlin was in ruins. Well over 100,000 people were made homeless and, according to official statistics, 2,895 had died in the air attack, which lasted barely an hour.18 Goebbels, seeking out Hitler in his bunker one afternoon shortly thereafter, remarked that “access to the Führer” was “totally blocked with mountains of rubble.” It was “practically like the chaos of the trenches trying to find the path to him.”19
Mohrenstrasse in the center of Berlin, after the bombardment of February 3, 1945 (Illustration Credit 11.1)
In these circumstances, the birthday celebration on the night of February 5 must have been an eerie and ghoulish affair. The small party took place in Eva Braun’s living room on the second floor of the Old Reich Chancellery, which had survived the air raid unharmed while the rooms in the “Führer apartment” had been gutted by fire.20 Hitler thus now took his midday meals with his girlfriend and the secretaries in the “adjutant wing” of the Old Chancellery, which had likewise survived intact—eating “with the curtains drawn and electric lights,” as Christa Schroeder later recalled—and the military briefings were moved to the monumental workroom in the New Chancellery. Only Eva Braun joined him for dinners.21 Martin Bormann wrote to his wife, who had already returned to Bavaria on January 27 and was back on the Obersalzberg, about the birthday party, that the few guests had included Hitler; Eva Braun’s sister Gretl and Gretl’s husband, Hermann Fegelein; and Karl and Anni Brandt.22
Apparently, Brandt, despite having been fired from his position as Hitler’s personal physician, had in no way fallen entirely into disfavor and been expelled from Hitler’s innermost circle, as his biographer Ulf Schmidt claims.23 But the longtime close friend’s days were numbered. On April 16, Hitler had Brandt arrested by SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, the man responsible for carrying out Himmler’s orders to send people to concentration camps. The charge was high treason. Brandt had dared to give Hitler an honest report of the catastrophic situation in the Reich regarding medical supplies, and was also accused of having sent his wife and child to Thuringia, already occupied by U.S. troops, so that they and he could defect to the Americans.24 The following day, Hitler summarily court-martialed him, with Goebbels presiding, and Brandt was sentenced to death. He was to be shot on the morning of April 19. But it never happened—the execution was repeatedly postponed and, in the terrible chaos at the end, was never carried out.25 Hitler’s notion that he was surrounded by traitors who were responsible for the impending defeat thus ended up reaching all the way into his closest circle.
In this regard, Eva Braun was by no means a calming influence on Hitler, as her few statements in the surviving correspondence show. In the case of Karl Brandt, for example, she did not intervene in his favor but rather described his behavior, in a letter to her friend Herta Schneider, as “a real foul trick.”26 In other words, Eva Braun, now in Hitler’s innermost trusted circle along with Bormann and Goebbels, only reinforced his delusions. She also seems to have stirred up Hitler’s suspicions against people whom she herself did not like; even Albert Speer was now in her sights. When, as Speer wrote later, she asked him in Hitler’s name “where my family was,” he lied to her and said that they were staying “in the vicinity of Berlin.” As a result, Hitler wanted to make sure “that we too [Speer and his family] would go to Obersalzberg when he retreated there.”27 Martin Bormann likewise wrote to his wife on February 6 that Eva Braun had been in a good mood at her birthday party but had criticized various (apparently absent) people with a brusqueness unusual for her.28 Was Eva Braun now, in the middle of her downfall, lashing out at her former enemies for belittling her role as Hitler’s mistress? We will never know, especially since Bormann expressed himself in only vague terms and was, of course, deeply suspicious of her.
After three weeks in Berlin, on the evening of February 9, 1945, Eva Braun and her sister left the destroyed city. Bormann, on Hitler’s orders, took care of the women’s return trip to Munich.29 Braun had sat up until six in the morning with Hitler, Speer, Bormann, and the architect Hermann Giesler;30 presumably, they viewed the gigantic model of Linz after its planned renovations that Giesler’s associates had set up that night in one of the basement rooms of the New Reich Chancellery. Giesler later said that, exhausted, he had presented the model to Hitler and his companions “from the angle that his ‘City on the Danube’ would have been seen at from his retirement residence.” In the following days, Hitler returned again and again to this basement room with the architect and other visitors, including the head of the security police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had himself lived in Linz in the late 1920s as a lawyer and was frequently taking part in the briefings. The photographer Walter Frentz’s images show a greatly aged Hitler, standing bent over or sitting in a chair and apparently totally withdrawn from the world, staring at this figment of his imagination.31 Instead of ending the war that had long since been lost, he apparently continued to talk about how the Oder front could be held, and still dreamed of making Linz the most beautiful city in Europe. Speer told his American interrogators in Kransberg, half a year later, that by then Hitler “had left his life behind and descended into an imaginary world that knew no bounds.”32
Life Underground
On March 7, 1945, Eva Braun returned to Berlin for good. She had already said goodbye to her family and friends in Munich. Only four weeks had passed since her previous visit. Her arrival was not in the least unexpected, as was claimed after the war.33 Hitler himself had told Goebbels and Bormann that she intended to stay with him in Berlin; Bormann wrote to his wife only a week after Braun’s departure for Munich that Hitler had told him Eva Braun wanted to come back to Berlin as soon as possible, but Hitler had told her to stay in Munich for now.34 Her decision to experience the end with Hitler—if need be, to die with him, wherever that might be—had been made long before. It is unclear, though, whether she traveled to Berlin in early March against Hitler’s will or whether they had agreed upon it first. Julius Schaub later said that she came “from Munich by airplane in early March.” “She had asked whether she could come,” he said, “but Herr Hitler had refused. In spite of that, she appeared one day and then lived in the small room next to his.”35 Bormann, in contrast, wrote that she had arrived one night in a “diplomatic car.”36
Not only the circumstances of Eva Braun’s arrival in Berlin but also her motive for returning to a capital city in flames have unleashed much speculation since her death. Henriette von Schirach wrote, with unconcealed distaste, that Braun wanted to die with Hitler to finally be able “to stand with him for all to see.” So she had to “force her way into Hitler’s death.”37 Speer, too, wrote in his Inside the Third Reich that when she arrived in Berlin “in the first half of the month of April,” “everyone in the bunker knew why she had come”: she was “figuratively and in reality… a messenger of death.”38 But how did he know? As the organizer of the total war effort, he was traveling most of the time between the various armament facilities throughout Germany as well as to the front lines being pushed farther and farther into the Reich. Thus he went, Below noted, “very much his own way during the last three months.” Moreover, Speer could rarely gather firsthand information about the mood in Hitler’s bunker as he met only occasionally with Hitler then, either there or in the Chancellery. Eva Braun, on the other hand, could have hardly been a “messenger of death” in the bunker since the plan was still, through mid-April, for Hitler to retreat to the Obersalzberg and lead the “final struggle” he had swor
n to fight from his Alpine fortress.39
On the same day that Eva Braun left Bavaria, March 7, American troops advancing from the west succeeded in taking the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine intact, and thus established their first bridgehead on the right bank of the Rhine. Soviet tanks were in Pomerania, directly in front of the city of Kolberg on the Baltic. Even so, Hitler continued to radiate optimism among his followers. He was still playing for time, since he knew perfectly well that there would be no life for him after the defeat. In one way or another, death was awaiting him. Without the slightest regard for the millionfold suffering of others, he extended his own life and dramatized the war in his mind as a life-or-death battle for the existence of the German People. A counteroffensive launched in Hungary on March 6 was once again supposed to halt the Red Army’s advance. The production of new weapons, a “miracle weapon” he pinned his hopes on, and internal disagreement in the coalition between the Soviets, the Americans, and the Britons could still bring about a sudden and complete change in the overall course of the war—or so he told himself and those in his circle.40 At the same time, in his so-called Nero Order of March 19, 1945, he ordered the destruction of every “military transport, news, industrial, and supply facility as well as material of any value within the borders of the Reich” that might fall into the enemy’s hands “in the foreseeable future.” He intended to leave a “scorched earth” behind him, to weaken the “enemy’s strike power.” But Speer, who had already declared the war lost in a memo to Hitler, prevented the order from being carried out. By that point, even Himmler—whom Hitler had named Supreme Commander of the Army Group Vistula in January and who was thus responsible, in Hitler’s eyes, for the loss of Pomerania—and Ribbentrop as well, had secretly tried to establish contact with the Western powers via Sweden.41