Eva Braun

turned out to work to his advantage. During the war, he was set free from the Canadian prisoner of war camp where he was being held as an enemy alien deported from Great Britain, and promoted to a position working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American secret service. Under the name “Dr. Sedgwick,” he provided John F. Carter, President Roosevelt’s adviser and news analyst, with information about how it would be possible to break the political power of the National Socialists in Germany.²⁴ Hanfstaengl’s later assessment of Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun reflects, first and foremost, the cultural norms current in the 1930s, along with the church practices and civil laws, according to which extramarital sexuality was considered unnatural and immoral. Hanfstaengl’s characterization of Braun’s presence in Hitler’s inner circle as shameful and disruptive also testifies to his unbroken perpetuation of the myth of a “Fuhrer” who could not be judged by human standards, and whom Hanfstaengl (himself a notorious ladies’ man) did not want to see undermined by a relationship that was inappropriate on any terms.²⁵

Hitler and the Braun Family

In the context of the restrictive sexual morality reigning in Germany, and Eva Braun’s education by Catholic nuns, it is no wonder that Eva’s parents, Friedrich and Franziska Braun, disapproved of their daughter’s lifestyle at first. We do not know when and in what circumstances they first learned of her relationship with Hitler. It does seem rather implausible, however, that they learned of it only in the late summer of 1935, after Eva Braun moved out into her own apartment, and after they met her with Hitler, supposedly by accident—and still less plausible that they knew of their daughter’s connection to the Chancellor only in 1937.²⁶ The only way the idea of such a relationship could have failed to occur to her parents was if they attributed their daughter’s unbourgeois habits and behavior of many years—the sudden appearance of a phone line; the irregular coming and going; the nights spent out—to her work for Photohaus Hoffmann.

Braun’s parents’ first meeting with Hitler allegedly took place in the Lambacher Hof, an inn (which still exists today) on the north shore of the Chiemsee approximately halfway between Munich and the Obersalzberg. Hitler, who used to travel on the old road along the lake before the Munich–Salzburg autobahn was finished, often stopped in there with his companions. The Nazi leader was allegedly introduced to his girlfriend’s parents there for the first time on a Sunday in late August 1935, or perhaps on September 1, after returning from the dedication of an “Adolf-Hitler-Koog” land reclamation in the Dithmarschen region of Schleswig-Holstein. Nerin E. Gun reports that the Brauns had gone for a Sunday outing to Lambach, and that there, totally unexpectedly, they ran into their daughter, who was in the Chancellor’s retinue as a colleague of Heinrich Hoffmann’s. Apparently nothing more than a short but friendly greeting took place, and the Brauns are said to have known nothing about their daughter’s relationship with Hitler at that time.²⁷

Henriette von Schirach, on the other hand, claims that Friedrich Braun intentionally traveled the more than sixty miles from Munich to visit the inn in Lambach on that occasion and bring about a discussion with Hitler, because he saw in Hitler’s connection to his daughter “a chance for his favorite child.” She says that Hitler described this conversation as “the most unpleasant [conversation] of his life,” but it nonetheless resulted in Hitler’s supporting Eva Braun with a monthly sum of money and a house.²⁸

In fact, given the few and variously transmitted postwar statements by the family, we can only speculate about what Friedrich and Franziska Braun actually knew and thought, and what roles the two sisters, Ilse and Margarete (Gretl), might have played in the situation.²⁹ Whenever it is a matter of looking back from a great temporal distance—twenty years in this case—we must always keep in mind that people’s perceptions, subjective to begin with, may be discussed, whitewashed, rearranged, and corrected many times over as the years go by. With the Braun family, where the issue is direct proximity to Hitler and thus knowledge of, even perhaps participation in, Nazi crimes, we can presume a certain amount of keeping silent, out of either shame or fear of criminal prosecution.³⁰ Would the Brauns not have had good reason, in their conversations with the journalist Gun after such a long period of silence, to play down any early knowledge of Braun’s relationship with Hitler and even claim to have been opposed to it?³¹

In fact, Friedrich and Franziska Braun had already had to answer such questions in 1947, before a Munich denazification court. These appointed German trial and appellate tribunals and public prosecutors were given the responsibility of “denazifying” Germany under the “Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism” imposed by the American military authorities in 1946. People were classified into the categories of Major Offenders, Offenders (activists, militarists, and profiteers), Lesser Offenders (probationers), Followers, and Persons Exonerated.

The public prosecutors in this case, according to an article called (in German) “Hitler’s In-laws Before the Judge” in the newspaper Die Welt of August 2, 1947, put the “high-school business instructor Fritz Wilhelm Otto Braun and his wife Franziska Katharina” into the category of “Offenders,” that is, according to the law, “activists, militarist, and profiteers.” Eva’s parents were threatened with prison sentences, confiscation of property, and—especially for the father—a ban on employment and the loss of his pension. Fritz Braun, it was claimed, had known about his daughter’s relationship with Hitler, approved of it, and was in fact proud of it. Eva’s mother, too, although never a Party member, was labeled an “activist” by the official prosecutor.³² In the indictment from July 9, 1947, it was stated that the investigations had shown that “the person in question had been proud that daughter Eva was permitted to be the Fuhrer’s lover for all those years. The persons in question felt at home on the Obersalzberg. Since she was a member of the family, she didn’t need to be a member of the Party.”³³

Threatened in this way, their very existence under attack—Fritz Braun, fired from public service as a teacher, was struggling along as a carpentry assistant at the time—the Brauns were obviously making every effort to minimize before the judge the intimacy of their daughter’s relationship with Hitler. They stated that Eva Braun had become the dictator’s “housekeeper” in 1933, and that he had “maintained a love affair with her” ever since, on terms that were “never entirely clear, but seemed to be purely platonic.”³⁴ And at a public sitting of the Munich denazification court, on December 1, 1947, Fritz Braun stated:

I do not know when the relationship between my daughter Eva and Hitler started. I first heard about it in 1937, from a Czech newspaper. Until then I had thought she was his secretary.³⁵

The Brauns told Die Welt through their Munich lawyer, Otto Gritschneder, that they planned “to offer proof that they had always been opposed to the relationship between their daughter and Adolf Hitler.” For example, they had allegedly even written a letter to Hitler, explaining that this “sleazy relationship” was not to be endured any longer.³⁶ The letter was, however, “suppressed and never presented” to him. Fritz Braun testified before the denazification court that he had “written a letter to the Fuhrer and pointed out to him that I did not approve of his simply taking my daughter out of our family circle without notifying us.” Braun was, he said, “furious about Hitler.”³⁷

It is doubtful that any such document, which would have exonerated Friedrich and Franziska Braun from the claim that they had been “activists” in the Nazi state or “profiteers” in Hitler’s inner circle, ever existed. The only document that has been supplied as proof comes from the family: a copy, if we believe Gun’s account, of a letter that Friedrich Braun wrote to the Chancellor on September 7, 1935—about a month after his daughter had moved out—and wanted to give to Heinrich Hoffmann so that he could pass it along to Hitler.³⁸ Hoffmann was visiting and photographing the construction projects on Konigsplatz in Munich at the time; in accordance with the plans drawn up by Paul Ludwig Troost, who had died the previous year, more than twenty thousand granite slabs were being laid and Nazi emblems being affixed to create a parade square.³⁹ Hitler himself was spending a few days on the Obersalzberg before the start of the NSDAP convention in Nuremberg, as he usually did; he regularly retreated there weeks before such conventions to write his speeches, and he was due to give no fewer than seventeen speeches at the upcoming convention.⁴⁰

^{Eva Braun in Florence with her travel companions. From left to right: Franziska Braun, Margarete Speer, Anni Brandt, Eva Braun, Marianne Schonmann (undated). (Illustration Credit 6.1)}

It is therefore entirely possible that Friedrich Braun gave Hoffmann this letter in Munich—a letter in which he asked Hitler “to see to it” that his daughter “return to the family.” But to treat this document, even if it existed,