Eva Braun

Nonetheless, in the entry of February 15, 1947, Speer recalls a private visit with Hitler eleven years in the past, in Munich, where Hitler had lived since October 1929 in the aristocratic Bogenhausen neighborhood, on the third floor of a majestic, baroquely Jugendstil corner building that today is a protected landmark.⁹ While Henriette von Schirach noticed primarily the “impressive paintings” and spoke of a “perfect apartment” where the furniture was “big, dark, and severe,”¹⁰ Speer was less impressed. He had risen during the course of Hitler’s Reich chancellorship to become his most important architect and representative for urban development in Rudolf Hess’s staff, and yet he noted in Spandau: The Secret Diaries:

The decor was petty-bourgeois: a lot of imposing oak furniture, glass-doored bookcases, cushions embroidered with saccharine sentiments or brash Party slogans. In the corner of one room stood a bust of Richard Wagner; on the walls, in wide gold frames, hung romantic paintings of the Munich School. Nothing suggested that the tenant of this apartment had been chancellor of the German Reich for three years. A smell of cooking oil and leftovers wafted from the kitchen.¹¹

Speer’s contemptuous description is obviously a product of his later view of this period. Eva Braun, on the other hand, who met with Hitler here, must have admired the apartment much as her friend of almost the same age, Henriette von Schirach, did. There were hardly any other opportunities for Braun and Hitler to be together undisturbed: she still lived with her parents, as was common at the time for unmarried women, and Hitler, too, did not live alone before fall 1931. His half-sister’s daughter, Angela “Geli” Maria Raubal, born on June 4, 1908, in Linz, lived with him at Prinzregentenplatz for two years after moving from Vienna to Munich in 1929. She failed to complete a course of study in medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University, and had an affair with Hitler’s chauffeur at the time, Emil Maurice, which Hitler put a stop to.¹² When she took her own life in her room, by shooting herself in the lung on September 18, 1931, rumors about Hitler’s relationship with his twenty-three-year- old stepniece immediately began to circulate.¹³ Incest and jealousy were spoken of as possible motives for the suicide, and there were even speculations about murder. The weapon, a Walther 6.35 caliber pistol, did belong to Hitler. But the police ruled out foul play.¹⁴ In fact, in view of the upcoming Landtag elections of April 1932, Hitler himself and the Gauleiter of Berlin and publisher of the Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack), whom Hitler named Reich Minister of Propaganda on April 27, 1930—Joseph Goebbels—used Raubal’s suicide to cultivate Hitler’s public image as the un-self-interested “Fuhrer” and thus to conceal his private life as a human being.

^{Hitler with his stepniece, Geli Raubal, July 1930 (Illustration Credit 4.2)}

Here is Hitler’s declaration only six days after his niece’s death, at an NSDAP gathering in Hamburg: “What has given me the most pains and cost me the most work is what I love best: our People.”¹⁵ And Goebbels, in his so-called “Diary”—actually a document always intended for posterity—recorded the following about a conversation with Hitler under the date October 27, 1931: “Then he told us about Geli. He loved her very much. She was his ‘good comrade.’ There were tears in his eyes….?This man, at the height of his success, without any personal happiness, committed only to his friend’s happiness. What a good man Hitler is!” A few weeks later, on November 22, Goebbels noted that the “Fuhrer” had told him “about the women he loved very much” and “the one-and-only he could never find.”¹⁶ In fact, Hitler often said to his fellow Party members that he had no “ties to the world” anymore and belonged “only to the German People now.” He repeated in this context his old credo renouncing marriage, necessary in view of the political “task” that lay before him and the National Socialist “movement.” He had already stressed that he had to “deny himself” private happiness since “all his thoughts and efforts” belonged to the oppressed and despised German People.¹⁷

But what did Hitler’s decision to remain unmarried have to do with his niece’s death? Didn’t such explanations only invite further speculation about the nature of his relationship with Geli Raubal? In fact, we can conclude from this pathos-laden exaggeration of Geli Raubal’s role, along with Hitler’s overheated explanations about the “religion” of marriage, that he was now more than ever concerned to conceal his personal life, which was starting to be discussed publicly, except insofar as he could manipulate it to his political benefit. With his followers, this trick was completely successful. Otto Wagener, for instance, a close member of Hitler’s staff for three years as head of the politico-economic division of the NSDAP, believed that he could see “just the man Adolf Hitler before him” during these apparently trustworthy communications.¹⁸ And Heinrich Hoffmann insisted, many years later, that Hitler’s “whole being” had changed after his stepniece’s death—that “a piece of Hitler’s humanity” died with her. His work was “now an exclusive pursuit of a single goal,” Hoffmann said. “Attaining power!”¹⁹

Hitler and Goebbels thus staged, both in Party circles and before the public, a myth of solitude and isolation intended to make the Nazi leader personally unassailable and make his self-presentation as the “savior” of the German People, standing above everyone, more plausible. It was a necessary move. In late 1931, the NSDAP was on the rise. From a radical group limited to Bavaria it had become, within ten years, a political power to be taken seriously, playing an ever-greater role on the national stage since its sensational victory in the Reichstag election of September 14, 1930. The NSDAP was the second-strongest party in the Reichstag, after the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD), and together with the German National People’s Party (DNVP) under Alfred Hugenberg, parts of the German People’s Party (DVP), and the “Steel Helmet” league of World War I veterans they formed a so-called National Front against the Weimar state. At the same time, Hitler and his political adviser Hermann Goring were received for a discussion with Reich President Paul von Hindenburg for the first time on October 10.²⁰ Hitler, not even a German citizen at the time, had arrived—to great public effect—at the summit of political power.²¹

Hindenburg, the eighty-four-year-old former General Field Marshal and a celebrated war hero, had for more than a year left a so-called Presidential Cabinet in charge of state business—without the approval of Parliament, which, since the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 and the collapse of the German economy, was wracked with all sorts of divisions. The Weimar constitution granted Hindenburg dictatorial powers “to restore public safety and order,” and with these powers he was unable to solve the country’s problems but he was able to prevent the state from total collapse for the time being.²² As democracy tottered and the ranks of the unemployed swelled from 4,840,000 in November 1931 to 6,127,000 in February 1932, the NSDAP mobilized voters from every class of society. It won the Hessian Landtag election of November 15, 1931, and put forward its leader as a candidate for Reich President against Hindenburg in early 1932.

Although Hindenburg decisively defeated Hitler in the second round of voting on April 10, 1932, 53 percent to 36.8 percent, the “chess match for power” had begun, as Goebbels strikingly put it at the beginning of the year.²³ The Landtag elections in Prussia, Bayern, Wurttemberg, and Anhalt, as well as the city parliament election in Hamburg, were coming up. In addition, the political right forced Chancellor Heinrich Bruning, chosen by Hindenburg two years earlier, to step down, on May 30, 1932, and this cleared the path to dissolve the national parliament and hold new elections on July 31.²⁴ In the interim, Hitler traveled tirelessly throughout the country, giving speeches, with an entourage consisting of Julius Schaub, Julius Schreck, Wilhelm Bruckner, Hermann Esser, Sepp Dietrich, Max Amann, Otto Dietrich, and of course Heinrich Hoffmann, in various combinations. He crisscrossed Germany in spectacular fashion on his “Germany flights” in a rented airplane, as he had done before in the election campaign for President—a true marathon journey from one city to the next that only strengthened his image as Germany’s omnipotent “Fuhrer” and “savior.”²⁵

During this period, the NSDAP and above all its head of propaganda, Goebbels, organized the rallies and marches that accompanied Hitler, under the slogan “Direct to the People.” The Party had propaganda films made and produced records with its leader’s “Appeal to the Nation.”²⁶ The Propaganda head office had moved from Munich offices on Hedemannstrasse to Berlin by then, near the Anhalter train station in what is today the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg neighborhood. There Goebbels spoke to an NSDAP rally in the Lustgarden on July 9, 1932, the same day Hitler celebrated a so-called Day of Greater Germany in Berchtesgaden.²⁷ Hoffmann’s studio, too, was operating at full speed. Every election event was accompanied by photographers, and the resulting images were used and disseminated in Party publications. The first of what would be many large- format photo-illustrated books published by Hoffmann appeared in 1932, photographically dramatizing the “cult of the Fuhrer” by casting Hitler as the “savior” and glorifying “his” movement.²⁸

Eva Braun, working in Hoffmann’s photo lab, could thus follow the course of the elections and the appearances of her secret lover by means of Hoffmann’s propaganda materials, produced in huge numbers and not