openly and avoided any confrontation.54
8. LIFE ON THE OBERSALZBERG
In January 1937, Reinhard Spitzy, adjutant and personal aide to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, accompanies his boss for the first time to a meeting with Hitler on the Obersalzberg. For Spitzy, a former Austrian fighter pilot from an upper-middle-class background, member of the NSDAP, SA, and SS since 1931, and only twenty-four years old, setting foot in the Berghof, that “legendary place,” is an overwhelming experience that makes an “enormously great impression” on him. He idolizes Hitler beyond measure, “worships” him. Rigid with reverence, Spitzy stands “like a statue” with his briefcase against the wall in the great hall while Hitler and Ribbentrop, deep in conversation, walk back and forth in front of him for two hours. Suddenly a young woman with blond locks pokes her head in the doorway and tells Hitler to “finally” come eat with his guests “already.” It’s “high time,” she says, they can’t wait any longer. Shocked, Spitzy wonders who would dare “to speak to the Fuhrer like that.” After the meal, Hitler’s adjutant Bruckner explains to him that even the “Fuhrer” has “a right to a private life.” Spitzy should keep quiet about everything he’s seen and heard—the best thing would be to forget it entirely. The young follower is devastated to learn that Hitler, whom he “believed lived the life of an ascetic, exalted above the level of sex and lust, had taken unto himself an ordinary female.”1
The incident Spitzy describes sheds light on Eva Braun’s changed position within Hitler’s personal circle, which had grown ever more clear in the period after late 1935. The Obersalzberg, where she could “find her footing” only after Angela Raubal left (as Henriette von Schirach remarked), became her second home, along with Munich.2 During this period, renovations were moving full speed ahead to turn Wachenfeld, the small country house, into the large, formal Berghof. A terrace and veranda had been added in 1932. But after Hitler bought the house, which he had only rented up until then, on June 26, 1933, and the once-almost-unknown locale had become the second power center of the German Reich, construction and technical modernization of the modest “Alpine-style vacation home” began in earnest in 1934.3 Before the official opening on July 8, 1936, a new main wing that included the old country house and several additional buildings was built. Eva Braun now had a small apartment, adjacent to Hitler’s bedroom, on the second floor of the main house.4 Albert Speer later told the historian Werner Maser that a Tegernsee architect undertook the extensions “following sketches of Hitler’s.” The interior construction and renovations were left “in the Troost Atelier’s hands.” He himself had “not been asked for advice” at the time.5
The rural mountain village on the Obersalzberg had meanwhile turned into a kind of pilgrimage site. Encouraged by the cult of Hitler and the marketing of his residence in Heinrich Hoffmann’s illustrated publications, tourist travel to the region underwent an unexpected upswing. Followers, or the merely curious, made pilgrimages by the thousands to the Wachenfeld house to see the “Fuhrer.” As soon as they caught sight of him, Bormann said, “the People [stood] at the fence.”6 While Nazi propaganda used the hysteria to reinforce the legend of Hitler’s closeness to the People and to nature, the entire Obersalzberg was actually fenced off in 1935. The region was quickly declared a “Fuhrer Protection Zone” and Bormann, on Hitler’s orders, forced the remaining house owners and innkeepers there to sell their property to the NSDAP. “Fief by fief, plot by plot,” he bought them up and had, as he himself said, “all the old houses… torn down.”7 Now only registered groups of visitors from various Party organizations were allowed entry, and their processions past Hitler had to follow strict rules and a rigorous schedule. Spontaneous crowds of ordinary tourists were no longer permitted.
Thus whenever Eva Braun stayed at the Berghof, she disappeared into a heavily monitored, sealed domain, surrounded by six-foot-high security fences whose inner rings were kept under observation by Reich security forces. Admittance was permitted only to those with a special pass issued by the “Obersalzberg Administration” under Bormann.8 Unlike in Munich, Eva Braun here lived cut off from the outside world. The same was true of everyone else who lived at the Berghof, their staff, and their servants. Christa Schroeder, who came to “the mountain” regularly as Hitler’s secretary starting in August 1933, stated in her memoir that from then on she “led a life behind barriers and guarded fences,” almost completely cut off “from everyday civilian and normal existence.”9 Therese Linke, on the other hand, a cook who worked on the Obersalzberg in Clubheim/Platterhof (Hoher Goll Inn), a guesthouse for the Party that the owners had been forced to sell, recalled the changes from 1936–1937 in particular: “There had been a fence around the Berghof and the rest of the area for a while. At every guard post we all had to go through the gates….?By then the farmers and peasants were long gone. Everything was bought up and leveled.”10
Meanwhile, Hermann Goring, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann had also settled on Obersalzberg in houses of their own. The construction of additional guesthouses and hotels followed, along with an SS barracks for the so- called Fuhrer Special Security Force—Obersalzberg; the erection of an “Obersalzberg Estate” with a residential building and stables; several administration buildings; and finally the construction of two “teahouses”: one beneath the Berghof and another, the so-called “Eagle’s Nest,” on Kehlstein, a 1,885-meter peak in the Berchtesgaden Alps. All this construction necessitated in turn the laying of new roads and the building of new tunnels and fences. Hitler himself drew up plans for a Berchtesgaden vacation destination, where a spacious “Party Forum” was to arise, but that never came to pass. Instead, during the war, construction began on air-raid bunkers and caves, which it turns out could not all be completed either, despite uninterrupted construction on Hitler’s “mountain” and its surroundings until the end of the war.11
Despite all these changes and renovations, the house on the Obersalzberg remained Hitler’s home, probably his most familiar place of residence. Life there was “to a large extent organized around him personally,” as Speer stated to Allied interrogators in the summer of 1945.12 He surrounded himself exclusively with absolutely loyal (and usually longtime) followers and their families and friends. And he lived there with Eva Braun, whenever he was there. It was always “the same limited circle,” as Christa Schroeder remarked in a letter to a friend in August 1941.13 Eva Braun and Hitler continued to meet in Munich or Berlin as well, but at the Berghof, despite the constant presence of staff and servants, a certain familial domesticity ruled, which neither the Munich apartment nor the Chancellery in the capital could offer.
Fritz Wiedemann, in connection with his time as Hitler’s personal adjutant, wrote in 1938 that the dictator had felt “like the head of a household in his own domain” on the Obersalzberg and had enjoyed “comfort and a kind of family life.” There were “always ladies present” as well, according to Wiedemann, “the wives of his colleagues, such as Frau Hoffmann and Frau Speer, and also the wives of the military adjutants.” In the Reich Chancellery, in contrast, visits from women were “rare,” he wrote.14 As Wiedemann described the daily routine at the Berghof, Hitler woke up late, at one or two in the afternoon, then went to lunch and took “a stroll in the fenced-off area,” in summer typically preceded by a “march-past” of two to three thousand visitors, and then afterward there was “a get-together on the terrace, then dinner at seven inside, and finally a movie.”15
Eva Braun—who, among other things, usually took care of selecting and screening the movies that were provided by the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin—is mentioned not even once in the adjutant’s account.16 Wiedemann, who left Germany in January 1939 and became the German consul general in San Francisco until 1941, himself explained the reason why: on the very first page of his remarks, he notes that a
