Eva Braun

by Heike B. Görtemaker

  On the afternoon of April 29, Hitler had his favorite German shepherd, Blondi, poisoned. The dog collapsed immediately and was dead on the spot. The Berchtesgaden district court later concluded that “the poison was tested out on the dog with a view to Eva Hitler’s death by poison, which had already been decided on.”85 By now there was no longer a telephone connection between the bunker and the outside world. On April 30, the Soviet army reached the Reichstag grounds.86 Soviet soldiers were expected to force their way into the “Führer bunker” at any moment. That afternoon, between three and four o’clock, Hitler and Eva Braun died by their own hands. While she bit into a cyanide capsule and died before his eyes, he took a poison capsule into his mouth and simultaneously shot himself in the right temple.87 Their bodies were then taken out to the Chancellery garden, doused in gasoline, and set on fire. The remains were buried that evening in a bomb crater in the garden.

  The destroyed Old Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse, March 1945 (Illustration Credit 11.2)

  12. AFTER DEATH

  Countless legends sprang up after the death of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. One reason for this is the fact that the direct witnesses to the burning of the bodies who survived the inferno in Berlin gave contradictory statements later about the exact circumstances of the double suicide. Another reason is that the Soviet Union concealed from its Western allies and the rest of the world, for years, the fact that Soviet troops had found the bodies of Hitler, Braun, and the Goebbels family in early May. Instead of passing the information along, Joseph Stalin, in a conversation with the American special envoy Harry Hopkins on May 26, 1945, spread the rumor that Hitler and Bormann were still alive and hidden abroad, possibly in Japan. It was known to Soviet intelligence, Stalin claimed, “that the Germans had three or four large submarines that traveled back and forth between Japan and Germany.” He had “ordered Soviet reconnaissance to locate these submarines, but for now they had not been found.” Stalin was trying to exploit the death of Hitler and his wife to suggest to the Western powers that their common struggle was not yet over and had to be continued in the war against Japan. He clearly struck a nerve with the Americans, as Hopkins’s reply reveals: he immediately told Stalin, according to the notes of the translator, Vladimir Nikolayevich Pavlov, that “Hitler absolutely must be found and put to death.”1

  Even at the Potsdam Conference, which took place from July 17 to August 2, 1945, in Cecilienhof Palace, Stalin flatly denied to Truman and Churchill knowing anything about Hitler’s whereabouts.2 The Americans were working to shed light on the matter by having everyone who had been close to Hitler questioned by their secret service, including Eva Braun’s family and friends. But an undercover agent—apparently disguised as a member of the SS—who tracked down Gretl Braun and Herta Schneider on the evening of September 23, 1945, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, learned hardly anything from them about the fate of Eva Braun and Hitler. Gretl Braun only repeated various rumors, and finally explained that she did not think it was impossible that Hitler, her sister, and Hermann Fegelein had left Berlin at the last moment.3

  None of them suspected that the charred remains of Hitler and Eva Braun had been in the Soviets’ hands for months. The Red Army had learned of Hitler’s suicide as early as April 30, from General Krebs, Hitler’s closest military adviser at the end, and had immediately informed Stalin.4 Additional members of Hitler’s staff and employees of the Reich Chancellery were quickly discovered among the prisoners of war and questioned about Hitler’s final days. Soviet officers scoured Hitler’s air-raid bunker under the garden of the Chancellery, where they found the dead bodies of the six Goebbels children. They discovered the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels in front of the bunker entrance on May 2, and Hitler’s and Braun’s bodies on May 5. A few days later, an autopsy was performed in the Russian Surgical Army Field Hospital #496 in Berlin-Buch, on the orders of the Soviet secret service, SMERSH counterpropaganda division, and eventually, in February 1946, the bodies were buried at a military site in Magdeburg.5

  In the West, on the other hand, countless rumors and speculations circulated for years about the Nazi leader’s whereabouts. An anonymous letter sent to the American general Dwight D. Eisenhower on November 22, 1948, for example, said that Hitler was living under a false name, together with Eva Braun and Martin Bormann, as the owner of a café in Amsterdam. The U.S. secret service took all such reports extremely seriously and investigated them thoroughly.6 Former members of Hitler’s staff, including Erich Kempka, were also arrested and questioned in the Western occupation zones directly after the end of the war, and they reported Hitler’s death and the burning of the bodies, but there was no material evidence to prove these claims.

  In 1952, the district court in Berchtesgaden launched “legal proceedings to establish the death and time of death of Adolf Hitler.” During the course of the investigation, “all persons still living from Hitler’s environment in the last days in Berlin”—forty-two witnesses in total—were interrogated.7 Among them were his valet, Heinz Linge, and his personal adjutant, Otto Günsche, who had just returned from being Soviet prisoners of war; Harri Mengershausen, a former detective in the Reichssicherheitsdienst (the German secret police); and Käthe Heusermann, who was the last person to work at the dental clinic in the Reich Chancellery and was the assistant to Hitler’s dentist in Berlin, Prof. Dr. Hugo Blaschke.8 In its final report on August 1, 1956, the court concluded that there was “neither concrete evidence” nor any “finding of fact arising” immediately after the “event in the vicinity of the deed,” but “merely the statements of numerous persons.” Nonetheless, since Hitler’s personal dentist, Dr. Blaschke, and his assistant Heusermann “had been shown Adolf Hitler’s complete lower jaw and bridge of the upper jaw as well as the artificial bridge from Eva Braun’s lower jaw by Russian officers, repeatedly and in various places,” and since both Blaschke and Heusermann had “recognized them as coming from Adolf and Eva Hitler without any doubt,” “decisive proof” for the identification had been supplied from the Russian side.9 Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were therefore officially declared dead in West Germany, in 1956 and 1957 respectively. Thirteen years later, on April 5, 1970, the KGB burned their remains again and scattered their ashes in a river near Magdeburg, in what was then East Germany.10

  A wooden chest with human remains, like the one that held Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s remains until their ashes were burned again and scattered in a river near Magdeburg on April 5, 1970 (Illustration Credit 12.1)

  CONCLUSION

  Due to her life and death with Hitler, Eva Braun is forever tied to the National Socialist regime that, driven by radical anti-Semitism and marked by utter contempt for humanity, brought about, in Ian Kershaw’s words, “the steepest descent in civilized values known in modern times.” Therefore Eva Braun remains a public figure and is present in the media to this day. That is what she wanted, and why she single-mindedly worked toward a joint death with her “Führer” when the Nazi state’s downfall and catastrophic defeat in the war were assured. She took her own life with the notion that she died a “hero’s death.”1

  In the fourteen years of her intimate relationship with Hitler, Eva Braun developed from an ordinary girl far from the center of power, from a lower-middle-class family whose father believed “to the end” in the “Führer,” into a capricious, uncompromising champion of absolute loyalty to the dictator.2 It is true that she did not belong to the NSDAP, but this fact does not mean that she rejected the Nazi state or was opposed to it in any way. On the contrary: her life, at least as much as those of everyone else around Hitler, was shaped by his worldview, his charismatic attraction (however difficult it may be to explain what that consisted in), and the extent of his power. He, in turn, recognized in her someone from a similar background, and with a similar education, outside of traditional elites, who was more ready than any of his other fanatical supporters to live her life on his terms.

  Eva Braun’s position in Hitler’s innermost circle was th
us unassailable, by 1935 at the latest. Many of the people who tried to get close to Hitler, including Speer, Göring, and Goebbels, thus found it necessary to pay court to her as well. They even had to be nice to her dog, who crawled “unnoticed and abandoned” through the rubble of the Berghof after the death of his mistress. When Eva Braun was still there, “everyone had been nice to the spoiled, vicious animal,” Christa Schroeder later recalled.3

  In any case, Eva Braun’s life was decidedly different from the image of the woman’s world as presented by National Socialist propaganda. In this, Hitler’s girlfriend was like most of the wives of high-ranking Nazi politicians. She led a privileged existence, with trips, expensive clothes, and occasional professional activities in the service of the NSDAP, in her case working for Hitler’s personal photographer and delivering supposedly private pictures of the “Führer” and his life at the Berghof to him. For that reason alone, she cannot be seen as someone with no involvement in the regime, an entirely apolitical young woman, as Albert Speer among others later claimed. Her collaboration, within the scope of what was possible for her, is unmistakable, and she clearly acted without any sense of guilt. Furthermore, Eva Braun was neither a housewife nor a mother, and it is extremely unlikely that she wanted to be. Precisely for that reason, she fit the needs of a man twenty-three years older than she, afraid of commitment and with eccentric habits. Since her existence so blatantly contradicted the officially propagated “Führer image,” Eva Braun was not allowed to appear in public—just as Hitler’s other inappropriate proclivities were kept largely hidden, such as his being a teetotaler, a vegetarian, a nonsmoker, that he did not drink coffee, that he popped an enormous number of pills, especially before the war, and that, like his girlfriend, he was obsessed with personal cleanliness.

  Eva Braun’s life with Hitler thus gives us deep insight into the dictator’s personal life, which was carefully concealed in the Nazi state and whose very existence was officially denied. Contrary to the later protestations from members of Hitler’s “royal court,” this personal life was not and could not be separated from his political life. There was no private sphere in which politics was not discussed and Nazi ideology played no part. The idea, spread by Speer in particular, that Hitler never touched on political topics in his private circle and especially when women were present, has to be considered a myth. Rather, not only the men but also the women around Hitler identified with the anti-Semitic, racist worldview and aggressive expansionist politics of the Nazi regime, laid out in full view during long evening conversations (or monologues) by the fire.

  This is especially true for Eva Braun. Why would she, less educated than the others, doubt that Hitler’s explanations and arguments were justified when even an officer such as Nicolaus von Below, an educated aristocrat, was convinced by Hitler’s explanation of the “constant threat” of “Jewish Bolshevism” hanging over the German People?4 Every member of the inner circle was at least familiar with the “Führer’s” basic ideas about the world situation, not least the secretaries to whom Hitler often expressed “his innermost fears” after the war started during their “usual coffee breaks,” for example that “Russia seemed monstrous and uncanny to him, kind of like the ghost ship in The Flying Dutchman.”5 Finally, the idea that no one could “influence or convince” Hitler of anything—that even Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler were weak and helpless against him—primarily served former committed National Socialists as a tool to exculpate themselves after the war. That does not mean it was true.6

  Hitler does seem to have prevented his girlfriend from the start from intervening openly in political debates—an attitude that makes him not essentially different from other men of his time. Nor was there any question of Eva Braun’s joining the NSDAP—the same as with any of Hitler’s relatives. It is hard to determine from the available sources whether Eva Braun, in these circumstances, “consciously” refrained from expressing herself on political matters, as her sister Ilse claimed before the court after the war, or whether her silence merely indicated a lack of interest on her part.7 Likewise, the question of whether she knew about the Holocaust remains finally unanswered.

  But there can be no doubt that Eva Braun, at twenty years old, presumably with the vigorous support of her boss Heinrich Hoffmann, used self-inflicted violence to fight her way to a place at Hitler’s side that many envied her for. She had “very many opponents,” according to a later statement by her friend Herta Schneider.8 Indeed, the opinion was widespread among Hitler’s followers that Eva Braun was not good enough for the “Führer”—that she lacked the stature to appear publicly at his side. This opinion, which comes up frequently among the memoirs of the surviving parties, later found its way—astonishingly—into the accounts written by professional historians. In truth, it was largely Hitler himself who assigned this thankless role to his girlfriend, a fact that reveals less about her inadequacies than about his own anxieties and lack of self-confidence as a parvenu. Caught between power and powerlessness, but in the end acting decisively—vain and in no way a victim—Eva Braun assured herself of a place, even if a questionable place, in history.

  NOTES

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  In the original German edition, Heike Görtemaker cites sources in German, including German translations of English original texts. For this English-language edition, sources originally written in English (e.g., Nerin E. Gun’s biography of Eva Braun and Ian Kershaw’s biographies of Hitler) are quoted from the English texts. Selected major sources for which there are English translations, such as Speer’s memoirs, are also cited from the existing English translations, but no attempt has been made to use an extant translation of every German-language source.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. See Lew Besymenski, Die letzten Notizen von Martin Bormann (Stuttgart, 1974), p. 148; Nerin E. Gun, Eva Braun: Hitler’s Mistress (New York, 1968), p. 181; Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York, 1970), p. 465; Mario Frank, Der Tod im Führerbunker (Munich, 2005), p. 284.

  2. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 465.

  3. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York, 1999), p. xx.

  4. These include Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York, 1952); Helmut Heiber, Adolf Hitler: Eine Biographie (Berlin, 1960); Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, Hitlers letzte Tage (Frankfurt am Main, 1965); Werner Maser, Adolf Hitler: Legende, Mythos, Werklichkeit, 6th ed. (Munich and Esslingen, 1974); Joachim C. Fest, Hitler: Eine Biographie (Berlin and Vienna, 1973); Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945 (New York, 2000).

  5. See Maser, Adolf Hitler, p. 318.

  6. Guido Knopp, Hitlers Frauen und Marlene (Munich, 2001), p. 83.

  7. See Angela Lambert, The Lost Life of Eva Braun (London, 2006); Johannes Frank, Eva Braun (Preussisch Oldendorf, 1988); Jean Michel Charlier and Jacques de Launay, Eva Hitler, née Braun (Paris, 1978); Glenn Infield, Eva and Adolf (New York, 1974). Gun’s Eva Braun: Hitler’s Mistress is regarded by many as the only serious biography. See also “Eva Braun: Die verborgene Geliebte,” in Anna Maria Sigmund, Die Frauen der Nazis (Vienna, 1998–2002), vol. 1, pp. 235–284.

  8. Fest, Hitler, pp. 17, 698, and 708.

  9. Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936, pp. xxvf. Alan Bullock also claims that Hitler was unable to have a relationship, in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London, 1991), pp. 502f.

  10. Albert Speer, Albert Speer: Die Kransberg-Protokolle 1945, ed. Ulrich Schlie (Munich, 2003), p. 12.

  11. Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), p. 80.

  12. See Sigmund, Die Frauen der Nazis, p. 248.

  13. See Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 93; Christa Schroeder, Er war mein Chef, ed. Anton Joachimsthaler (Munich, 1985), p. 166.

  PART ONE: THE MEETING

  1. This account is based on a statement from Erich Kempka about Hitler’s last days, dated June 20, 1945, from Berchtesgaden, in MA 1298/10, Microfilm, Various Documents DJ-13 (David Irving), Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich
(hereafter cited as IfZ Munich). Kempka’s account differs from that of other sources by approximately one hour.

  1. HEINRICH HOFFMANN’S STUDIO

  1. Hoffmann’s father, Robert Hoffmann, ran a portrait studio in Regensburg with his younger brother Heinrich. This brother had borne the title of “Royal Bavarian Court Photographer” since 1887 and gained international fame with his photographs of Kaiser Wilhelm II and King Edward VII of England. See Rudolf Herz, Hoffmann & Hitler: Fotographie als Medium des Führer-Mythos (Munich, 1994), p. 26. See also Joachim Fest and Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler—Gesichter eines Diktators (Munich, 2005), p. 4.

  2. Hoffmann’s studio in Munich was located first at 33 Schellingstrasse, and later—until 1929—at 50 Schellingstrasse. See Herz, Hoffmann & Hitler, pp. 26f.

  3. See Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler wie ich ihn sah (Munich and Berlin, 1974), p. 19. See also the original edition of Hoffmann’s memoir, Hitler Was My Friend (London, 1955), pp. 45f.; Henriette von Schirach, Der Preis der Herrlichkeit (Munich and Berlin, 1975), p. 97; Herz, Hoffmann & Hitler, p. 34.

  4. Heinrich Hoffmann, “Mein Beruf Meine Arbeit für die Kunst-Mein Verhältnis zu Adolf Hitler,” unpublished manuscript (presumably from 1947), MS 2049, IfZ Munich, pp. 7f. Cf. Fest and Hoffmann, Hitler—Gesichter eines Diktators, p. 4.

  5. See Herz, Hoffmann & Hitler, p. 34. On Eckart, see Margarete Plewnia, Auf dem Weg zu Hitler: Der “völkische” Publizist Dietrich Eckart (Bremen, 1970).