Eva Braun

office, Ilse Braun started work as a secretary in Albert Speer’s office in Berlin, on March 15, 1937.²⁴ A month and a half earlier, on January 30, Speer had been named “General Building Inspector for the Reich Capital” by a “Fuhrer’s edict” and was given the responsibility of remaking the architecture of Berlin into a “World Capital Germania.” The ambitious architect, just thirty-two years old at the time, was a trusted friend of the Nazi leader and among the frequent guests at the Berghof, where he also knew Eva Braun. He must have been only too happy to do a favor for his “Fuhrer’s” girlfriend. That is the only way to explain why Ilse Braun was one of Speer’s first employees to move with him into his new Berlin office building at 4 Pariser Platz, the just-requisitioned Prussian Academy of Arts.²⁵

Ilse Braun’s employer of many years, Martin Marx, left Germany only the following year, in 1938, and emigrated to the United States, which since 1936 had been the main destination for German doctors. With an established personal practice of many years’ standing, Dr. Marx, like numerous members of his profession, decided to flee the country only quite late. Ilse Braun stated after the war that she had “tried to intercede for him,” while it had been apparent to him that, she said, “my sister was unable—and I was even less able—to do anything to help him.” In fact, it was Ordinance 4 of the “Reich Citizenship Law” of July 25, 1938, which revoked the license to practice medicine of all Jewish doctors in Germany, that was the decisive factor. Dr. Marx was officially expatriated on April 5, 1939, according to the expatriation list published six months later, on November 15, in the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger. The revocation of his doctorate from Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University followed on October 25 of the same year.²⁶

Ilse Braun, meanwhile, had already married in Berlin, in October 1937, and she therefore gave up her job with Speer after only six months.²⁷ Nothing is known about her husband, named Hochstetter. They divorced after approximately three years. Ilse Braun nonetheless stayed in Berlin. Her sister Eva had had a small apartment of her own in the Old Reich Chancellery since early 1939 and occasionally stayed in the capital. In 1940, after the outbreak of the war, Ilse Braun graduated from a training program in the editorial offices at the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ) newspaper and worked as an editor there until summer 1941.²⁸ This well-known conservative national paper, once owned by the Ruhr industrialist Hugo Stinnes and his heirs, was transferred to the National Socialist Deutscher Verlag only at the beginning of 1939. Thus the DAZ, like the vast majority of newspapers in the capital, was a part of the Nazi Press Trust controlled by Max Amann, the Reich Press Chamber’s powerful president and an old comrade-in-arms of Hitler’s from the early days of the NSDAP.²⁹

Still, it is difficult to understand—almost incomprehensible—how and by what means a simple doctor’s receptionist found a trainee position as a DAZ journalist. By comparison, a colleague of Ilse Braun’s, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who was given a trainee position there at the same time, was not only seven years younger than Ilse Braun but was highly qualified, was faithful to the Nazi regime, came from a rich, upper-middle class family, and had received a doctorate under Emil Dovifat, a well-known professor of journalism at Berlin University.³⁰ Of course, none of that was true of Ilse Braun. Yet Ursula von Kardorff, a member of the editorial staff of the DAZ from 1939 through 1945, clearly knew even back then whom she was dealing with, and knew that her new colleague’s sister, Eva Braun, was “often” to be found “with Hitler at the Berghof.” Still, after Ilse Braun’s brief excursion into Berlin’s newspaper world, Kardorff remained in contact with her “former trainee,” especially since, as she wrote in her diary, Ilse Braun seemed “not particularly nazi.” So it stands in Kardorff’s entry from July 30, 1944, after she visited Ilse Braun and looked at photographs showing Eva and Gretl with Hitler at the Berghof: “I thought to myself, this connection could still be useful someday, if things get really bad.”³¹

After Ilse Braun remarried, on June 15, 1941, she left Berlin. She moved to Breslau with her husband, a certain Fucke-Michels, and worked there as an editor for the Schlesische Zeitung.³² One hint about who her husband may have been appeared in a New York Times article on April 12, 1998: in the context of a story about an international conference on the subject of art looted during the Holocaust, the unusual name Dr. Fucke-Michels came up. He was described as a “Nazi cultural aide” who in 1942 had told Hans Posse, director of the Staatliche Gemaldegalerie in Dresden and an art representative of Hitler’s, that a valuable medieval manuscript had been confiscated in 1938 because there was a danger that the Jewish owner would leave the country.³³ Was this Ilse Braun’s husband? In the memoirs and reminiscences of the members of the Berghof circle, Eva Braun’s older sister is not mentioned once; there is obviously not the slightest hint about her husband. Only in the fragmentary notes of the historian Percy Ernst Schramm, who was the official diarist for the Operational Staff of the German High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) during the war, and who was present during the questioning of Hitler’s personal physicians in 1945–1946 in the course of his work for the U.S. Army Historical Division, is it stated that Ilse Braun was married to a “propaganda man” in Breslau.³⁴ In any case, we cannot believe Ilse Braun’s later testimony that she received neither “financial support nor any other privileges” from her sister Eva, in light of her job in Berlin, at the very least.³⁵ Likewise, her flight from Breslau to the Obersalzberg at the end of the war does not suggest a great distance between her and Eva Braun.

4. RISE TO POWER AT HITLER’S SIDE

After 1931, the contact between Eva Braun and Hitler grew more intensive. Yet he also insisted at every opportunity, to fellow Party members, that he lived only for politics and therefore his private life belonged to the cause. Otto Wagener, for instance, the first chief of staff of the SA who spent 1929 to 1933 near his “Fuhrer” and heard many of his personal conversations, recalled one long discussion in which Hitler explained to him that he could not ever marry: “I have another bride: Germany! I am married: to the German People and their fate!… No, I cannot marry, I must not.”¹ Nonetheless, he met with Eva Braun more and more often, although the exact circumstances and precise development of their relationship remain unclear.

The “Fuhrer’s” Long-Distance Lover

Heinrich Hoffmann, who saw Eva Braun almost daily and the leader of the Nazi Party often, remarked that Hitler himself “did not let on” about any close relationship at the time—either because he was not interested in the young woman or because he “did not want to say anything.” Hoffmann said he was convinced that Eva Braun became Hitler’s lover only “many years later.”² His daughter Henriette von Schirach, in contrast, wrote in her memoir that the “love affair” between Braun and Hitler had already started by the winter of 1931– 1932.³ Hitler’s housekeeper, Anni Winter, who lived in Hitler’s apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz along with her husband and another subletter, likewise claimed that Eva Braun became Hitler’s lover at the start of 1932.⁴ This version of events, which Nerin E. Gun retold without providing any exact sources, was later confirmed by the historian Werner Maser, relying on a personal communication from Anni Winter in 1969.⁵

^{Eva Braun (undated) (Illustration Credit 4.1)}

Thus the evidence suggests that their intimate relationship did begin in 1932. Hitler’s driver, Erich Kempka, also claimed immediately after the war that he had known Eva Braun “since 1932,” in which case she must have been traveling in Hitler’s entourage by then.⁶ Anna Maria Sigmund similarly claimed, referring to Albert Speer’s Spandau: The Secret Diaries, that a sexual relationship between Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler started in Hitler’s apartment at the beginning of 1932.⁷ Yet Speer says nothing of the sort, neither in his Spandau: The Secret Diaries nor in Inside the Third Reich—with good reason, since he was not yet a close colleague of Hitler’s in 1932. He was an independent architect in Mannheim and joined the NSDAP and the SA only in the previous year; in 1932 he was receiving his first assignments from the Party.⁸