judgments of Braun, especially by Hitler’s former staff members, corresponds with the notes that Percy Ernst Schramm, German historian and member of the U.S. Army Historical Division, made during the interrogation of Hitler’s doctors in summer 1945. According to those notes, Eva Braun had caused “trouble” among those around Hitler and “put people off.”37 Who exactly her “victims” were remained unstated, however. In particular, Brandt said nothing about whether he himself, or possibly his wife—who smiled at the camera together with Eva Braun in September 1937, during the ninth Party convention, on a stage on the Nuremberg Hauptmarkt— had suffered under her.38
Martin Bormann played a special role in regard to Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun. Son of a postal official and former military musician, he had joined the NSDAP on February 27, 1927, and within a few years had risen to be one of the most powerful figures around Hitler. He started, though, at the bottom of the Thuringian Party hierarchy in Weimar. Since he had been found guilty as an accomplice to grievous bodily harm in 1924 and spent a year in jail, he could not afford to be choosy, and he carried out duties of all kinds for the Party, including those of bookkeeper, cashier, and driver. For example, he chauffeured the NSDAP-Gauleiter of Thuringia, Fritz Sauckel, to events and functions in the country in his own car, a small Opel. Bormann later became managing director of the Thuringia Gau press office, and in this capacity he met both Hitler and Rudolf Hess, who often traveled together to Thuringia for appearances before 1933.39
Within a year and a half of his joining the Party, in mid-November 1928, the conspicuously devoted and obliging Bormann was in the NSDAP headquarters in Munich. Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, commander of the SA, had asked him to take charge of managing insurance for the SA. Bormann succeeded in transforming the expensive and problematic insurance of SA members into a profitable “NSDAP Assistance Fund,” and thereby helped reduce the National Socialists’ notorious shortage of money. Bormann had made his reputation as a financial and organizational talent, and he impressed Hitler with his unswerving business sense.40
This young man on the rise from the provinces further solidified his position by marrying Gerda Buch on September 2, 1939, in Munich. She was the daughter of Walter Buch, a Party member for many years and an “old fighter” in the National Socialist movement; Hitler had been a regular guest at the Buch house for years and on this occasion served as a witness at the wedding, along with the father of the bride. When the Bormanns’ first son was born, seven months later, the “Fuhrer” and Ilse Hess were the child’s godparents.41 Gerda Bormann, aged twenty, much taller than her husband and a kindergarten teacher by occupation, had been raised by her parents in a staunchly anti-Semitic “Nationalist” spirit.42 Moreover, the family’s personal contact with Hitler and his ideas had shaped her even in her youth. In a view that is consistent with this background, Joachim Fest attributed to her “unembarrassedly radical prejudices” and called her the “purest expression” of the “ideal type” of the National Socialist woman.43 She joined the NSDAP shortly before her wedding and, over the next thirteen years, bore nine children. She played no role, however, in the public self-presentation of the Nazi regime.
The trained farmer Martin Bormann, though, succeeded in gaining Hitler’s trust and making himself indispensable to the leader. From 1933 on, he dependably managed Hitler’s personal property. He also supervised the “Adolf Hitler Fund of German Trade and Industry,” launched by Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, which guaranteed the Party—and Hitler personally—an annual income in the millions from German businesses. These donations, which eventually became mandatory, added up to more than 700 million reichsmarks through 1945. The hardworking Bormann took care of all of Hitler’s financial interests. He handled purchases and paid all the bills, whether for personal acquisitions, staff expenses, monetary gifts to Party colleagues, or Eva Braun’s financial needs. It is thus no wonder that Bormann was able to expand more and more the scope of the position he held starting in July 1933, as chief of staff in the offices of the “Deputy Fuhrer,” Rudolf Hess. While Hess, the ardent follower of the “tribune”—Hitler—with the reputation of being the spotless “conscience of the Party,” was increasingly kept away from Hitler’s inner circle after 1933, Bormann and his wife soon became the dictator’s substitute family at the Berghof.44 Only a few people outside the Nazi leadership knew about him, but he was the man who was always there at Hitler’s service, with unfailing discretion and reliability—qualities that he shared, of course, with Eva Braun. Bormann owed his rise to a position of power almost invisible from the outside to this close personal relationship of trust with Hitler.45
In this he was in no way different from the other functionaries in the Berghof circle, including Speer and Brandt, although they, unlike Bormann, occupied positions near Hitler that could also be perceived from the outside. They owed their careers just as much, however, to the patronage of the Nazi leader. Apparently, there was a ruthlessly competitive relationship between them and Bormann. Brandt, immediately after the end of the war, described Bormann as the most powerful figure in Hitler’s circle, and said that the later “secretary to the Fuhrer” (his title starting April 12, 1943) acted ruthlessly, brutally, and with such influence that having him as an enemy could endanger one’s life.46 In the autobiographical literature as well, Bormann is with few exceptions portrayed negatively. For example, Richard Walther Darre, Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, described him as a heartless “player in his own interest,” for whom Hitler was “the alpha and omega of his efforts.” “Support from other circles, except for alliances of convenience within the Party,” held no interest for him.47 Only Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder complained in her memoir that the “worst characteristics” had been attributed to Bormann unjustly, when he was one of “the few pure National Socialists” and was merely “working—often ruthlessly, sometimes brutally, too—to carry out the orders and commands Hitler gave him.”48
What about the relations between Martin Bormann and Eva Braun? According to Otto Dietrich, the Reich Press Chief, who was among Hitler’s constant companions by virtue of his position alone as early as 1931, it was Bormann who worked to make sure that the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun, and the young woman’s continual presence at the Berghof, remained secret. He was thereby able to consolidate and expand his influence in Hitler’s close environment, Dietrich said, since the Nazi leader was indebted to him for his support in this matter.49 Robert Ley, the head of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or DAF)—the unified National Socialist trade union and a “gigantic propaganda machine,” according to Ian Kershaw—who took his own life on October 25, 1945, after five months in prison at Nuremberg, left behind a similar assessment of Bormann. Ley, notorious in the “Third Reich” as a “Reich-drunkard,” remained an uncritical, devoted henchman of Hitler’s to the end. His last words—“But to be considered a criminal, I can’t bear that”—reveal the extent of his involvement and his intellectual limitations.50 He said of Bormann, in his “notes” that were written down in the Nuremburg military prison in 1945, that he was a “brutal, ruthless, hulking peasant.” He “never left the Fuhrer’s side,” made himself “liked with all sorts of little services that the Fuhrer appreciated,” and forced his way “unheard and unnoticed into the intimate affairs of a great and overburdened man.” According to Ley, “Ask Bormann” was “heard all the time.” Bormann fulfilled the Fuhrer’s every wish and took care of everything, including “putting through calls to Frau Braun in Munich.”51 We must keep in mind, though, with all these retrospective characterizations, that Ley as well as Bormann’s other former antagonists, such as Brandt and Speer, would seem more harmless the more powerful and dangerous they could make Bormann out to be.
The mediating role that Bormann played between Hitler and the outside world applied to Eva Braun as well. She embodied, after all, the private life of the Nazi leader, which was protected as a state secret. It is thus natural to assume that Bormann followed Hitler’s orders not only in arranging her financial affairs but also in monitoring the young woman’s lifestyle on occasion. Heinrich Hoffmann, in his later apologia, even claimed that “any wish of Eva Braun’s was always carried out by Bormann,” especially during the war years.52 In any case, Bormann would have known how important she was and would have been painfully aware that she was not to be turned into his enemy. Bormann made sure of “every person around the Fuhrer,” if we believe Robert Ley’s remark.53 Eva Braun, in turn, was dependent on the bustling functionary, especially in the period after 1935, when both were installed on the Obersalzberg in immediate proximity to Hitler and regularly ate meals together. If she did in fact hate him, as her family and Albert Speer claimed after the war, she never showed it
