analysis.
Speer’s description of the past remains informative, especially since he spent over a decade as one of Hitler’s most trusted colleagues. Speer’s oldest son, also named Albert and also an architect, even told the film director and author Heinrich Breloer that there was “a very genuine, deep, emotional relationship on both sides” between his father and Hitler.99 Speer himself, in a letter to his friend and former colleague Rudolf Wolters about his relationship with Hitler, wrote:
I had a split relationship to Hitler…. It is probably typical of most friendships that they are built on contradictions. With Hitler I never once had the feeling that I had found a friend in him. Maybe it seemed different to you, from the outside. I was constantly living “in the fear of the Lord”—it was not easy to deal with him and stay in his favor or even, if possible, intensify it.100
In his memoir, Speer claims to have come “completely under the sway of Hitler” but never to have known Hitler’s “real face.” Rather, he had followed him “unwillingly, almost unconsciously, into a world” that was “actually quite alien” to him.101 Speer thereby casts himself not only as an outsider who was led astray, but as an addict, dependent and even possessed from without—a position he grants also to Eva Braun, seven years younger than he was when the barely thirty-year-old architect apparently struck up a close and trusting friendship with her. In an interview with Joachim Fest, Speer explained the reasons for his friendly relations with Hitler’s lover by saying that they were both equally prisoners of their emotions, even enslaved: “She was, like me, under Hitler’s so to speak hypnotic spell. We both suffered under him, hated him at times, but were still unable to break free of him.”102
Now, does this retroactively negative account of Hitler, which elevates him to a kind of Mephistopheles figure in the interest of Speer’s own self-justification, obstruct a clear view of Eva Braun as well?103 Does it not present her, like Speer himself, as less self-sufficient, more dependent, and more passive than she really was? Did she share the political positions and basic worldview of her lover or was she really the mere “tragic slave,” who nonetheless profited from Hitler’s power by enjoying the luxurious life that he offered her? In any case, Speer, unlike those who continued to hold fast to their respect for Hitler after 1945 and remained true believers in the cult of the “Fuhrer,” had no need to minimize Eva Braun’s significance. He thus remains, despite all of his strategies of mythification and self-exoneration, a key witness, due to his extraordinary personal closeness with both Hitler and Eva Braun.104
Meanwhile, hardly any letters or personal documents exist from the dictator himself or from his companion of many years that shed any light on the nature of their relationship, or Eva Braun’s role, or how she saw her role. It is well known that Hitler rarely wrote private letters, aside from thank-you notes or birthday cards. His secretary Christa Schroeder, in fact, stated immediately after the end of the war that he had considered it “his great strength” that “even in the years of struggle he wrote no letters.” Such letters might have fallen “into the wrong hands” and been “exploited.”105 He also, before his suicide, made sure to destroy the greater part of his private correspondence, of which there was presumably little to begin with. Julius Schaub, his adjutant of many years, left the bunker in Berlin for this reason at the end of April 1945, on direct orders from Hitler, in order to burn the private letters and files stored in safes at both Hitler’s Munich apartment and at the Berghof.106
Similar testimony comes from Johannes Gohler, the former adjutant to Hermann Fegelein, the liaison officer who married Gretl Braun. In an interview with the British historian David Irving, who for years spared no effort in tracking down Hitler’s letters to Eva Braun, Gohler said that he had flown from Berlin to Berchtesgaden in Hitler’s airplane, a Ju 290, at the end of April 1945, in order to destroy all of Hitler’s private correspondence there. Several hundred handwritten letters to and from Eva Braun were said to be included there, in a footlocker.107 Irving’s interest was piqued and so, years later, he questioned Gohler’s wife, who told him that she had worked for the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) from August 1945 until February 1946, during which time she helped “an American CIC officer pack up Eva Braun’s aforementioned diaries from 1933–1945 as well as her correspondence with Hitler”; she also said that she herself was in possession of letters that Eva Braun had written to Gretl Braun between 1930 and 1932. Finally, she claimed that Eva Braun’s private papers stored at the Berghof were not destroyed in 1945, but rather were in the hands of Robert A. Gutierrez, the former head of the CIC team in Stuttgart. Irving, sensing a sensational find, went to the United States and succeeded in tracking down Gutierrez. He did not, however, discover any private letters of Hitler’s or Eva Braun’s there.108
Eva Braun had actually instructed her sister Gretl in her last letter from Berlin, on April 23, 1945—a week before the double suicide—to take all of “the letters from the Fuhrer” as well as “the copies of [her] replies” to him, which she had bequeathed to her sister in a will of October 26, 1944, and “make a water-resistant packet” and “bury them if need be.” She explicitly insisted: “Please don’t destroy them.” The other private correspondence and “above all the business papers,” on the other hand, Gretl should get rid of immediately. Eva Braun emphasized that “on no account must Heise’s bills be found”—she had remained to the end a regular client of the well-known Berlin fashion designer Annemarie Heise.109 In contrast to Hitler, who tried at the end to completely wipe out any trace of his private life, Eva Braun was trying, with her sister’s help, to ensure that posterity would learn about her relationship with the “Fuhrer” and her life at his side. Her letter from April 23, 1945, reveals a woman who, faced with death, was concerned about her image for posterity. In any case, none of the documents she asked her sister to preserve have been found to this day. It seems reasonable to suppose that Julius Schaub, who arrived at the Berghof on April 25—two days after Eva Braun had written her last letter to her sister—destroyed this correspondence together with Hitler’s papers before Gretl Braun could bring them to safety. The final truth, however, remains unknown.
Nerin E. Gun also reported later that Gretl Braun and Herta Ostermayr had hidden “photograph albums, amateur films, letters, jewelry, and other mementos” in the park of Fischhorn Castle in the Pinzgau region of the state of Salzburg, near Zell am See. In fact, the former SS office of Fischhorn, a subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp, was used around the end of the war as a storage depot for stolen art and other “estates” of the Nazi elite who were going into hiding. There, supposedly, Gretl Braun took into her confidence a “German refugee,” who turned out to be an American “agent,” and Eva Braun’s estate was confiscated by the U.S. Army and sent to Washington. Gun said that he had later “chanced to find” the documents again “in a corner of the American archives.”110 These are primarily the papers, photo albums, and films shot by Eva Braun that are now stored in the National Archives in Washington. There are no letters from Hitler to Eva Braun among them.
It is therefore necessary to turn to other sources to gain insight into the relationship that existed between Hitler and Eva Braun, and any details about that relationship. But there are not many other sources. Hitler’s statements that shed light on his views of women in general, for example, are found mostly in the published postwar memoirs of his former followers or, for the years after 1942, in the records of conversations induced by Martin Bormann. Occasional hints can be found in various other diaries and correspondences. Eva Braun, though, is not mentioned. It is thus difficult to reconstruct their relationship, and the question of what actually attracted Hitler to this young woman can be addressed chiefly by means of his behavior with third parties. It is said of Speer, for example, that Hitler deliberately chose him to be his architect because he was modest, “normal” compared to his other followers, young, and easily influenced, and the notoriously suspicious Hitler could be assured of admiration from Speer, who was sixteen years younger.111 Would these motives not also apply to Hitler’s choice of Eva Braun, the youngest member of the inner circle around him? By reason of her youth alone, and her lower- middle-class background, even aside from the intimacy of their relationship, she must surely have been more pliable than the other members of his retinue.
In this context, only the twenty-page diary fragment in Eva Braun’s papers, written in old-style German handwriting, sheds light on the character of their relationship. It is still controversial, however, whether it was actually written by her or not. While Nerin E. Gun had Ilse Fucke-Michels, Eva Braun’s older sister, check the handwriting to confirm the authenticity of the document in 1967, the editor of Christa Schroeder’s memoirs, Anton Joachimsthaler, claims that the handwriting of the document proves that it is a forgery.112 The historian Werner Maser, meanwhile, maintains that it reveals “more about Hitler’s relationship to women” than most of the interpretations of the “supposedly well-informed biographers.”113 Despite these doubts, or because of them, the “Diary,” as it is called, has inspired all sorts of flights of fancy since its discovery and has
