Eva Braun

wrote:

If you needed money, Bruckner sent word… to Bormann and got 50,000 marks. He took the lion’s share for himself and then passed the rest along to Schaub and to me, in decreasing amounts based on seniority and position.⁶⁷

When Martin Bormann, who managed the fund that was at Hitler’s personal disposal, complained about the large outlays of money, the Nazi leader dismissed the complaint and forbade the Party to interfere in “his spending.”⁶⁸ Either Bruckner or Schaub paid Hitler’s private bills in restaurants and on trips—or, as it was called, managed his “petty cash.” Bruckner stated under questioning in August 1947 that only Schaub paid Eva Braun’s bills.⁶⁹ Bruckner’s own role in Hitler’s private milieu, meanwhile, is not easy to determine. Albert Speer—concerned, as he always was after the fact, to imply the greatest possible distance between himself and the supposedly wretched “Fuhrer circle” on the Obersalzberg—emphasized in May 1967, in response to a question from Joachim Fest, that he had had “nothing in common with Schaub, Bruckner, and Morell.” Who, Speer asked his interlocutor, “could have been more different from me?”⁷⁰ His friend Nicolaus von Below, on the other hand, recalled “especially good and friendly contact” with SA-Obergruppenfuhrer Bruckner, which took on “a private character quite quickly.”⁷¹

Bruckner’s girlfriend Sofie Stork seems to have been introduced into the Berghof society just as quickly and to have made close friendships there. Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographs show her at parties, such as New Year’s or birthdays, but also on excursions alongside Hoffmann’s wife, Erna; Eva Braun; and Anni Brandt.⁷² In the process of transforming Haus Wachenfeld into the Berghof, the young artist even received assignments from Hitler—and from his girlfriend. For example, Stork decorated the chimney stove in the living room and painted the tiles of the sideboard and the tea table, as well as porcelain for Eva Braun, complete with her monogram.⁷³ She was obviously in Hitler’s good graces. Her separation from Bruckner, who left her around the beginning of 1936 and married another woman a short time later, did nothing to change that: she remained a member of the most intimate inner circle at the Berghof even after the separation, along with Karl Brandt, Heinrich Hoffmann, Eva and Gretl Braun, and the secretaries Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski.⁷⁴

Bruckner, on the other hand, left four years later. On October 18, 1940, Hitler fired him from his position as personal adjutant. In fact, there had been at least one departure or removal from the dictator’s private realm every year since 1935: in 1936, his half-sister and housekeeper Angela Raubal was dismissed and his driver, Julius Schreck, died of natural causes; in 1937, the foreign press secretary, Ernst Hanfstaengl, fled to England; in 1938, Fritz Wiedemann was transferred to the German consulate in San Francisco; in 1939, the servant Karl Krause was fired. Thus the idea that Hitler moved in an entirely unchanged environment of servants and adjutants from 1933 on is false. The reasons for Bruckner’s removal, meanwhile, are still difficult to understand today. In Below’s memoir it says that the reason was a difference of opinion between Bruckner and Hitler’s majordomo Arthur Kannenberg, concerning “petty trifles.”⁷⁵ Kannenberg, a corpulent Berlin chef and restaurant owner, was responsible with his wife for the “Fuhrer household” in the Chancellery starting in 1933. He organized the state dinners in Berlin and on the Obersalzberg, and even went along every year to the Wagner festivals in Bayreuth, where he and his staff tended to Hitler and his guests in a house put at his special disposal by the Wagner family— the “Fuhrerbau.” Kannenberg was famous, or infamous, for his solo interludes on the accordion at the Chancellor’s artists’ receptions. Winifred Wagner later described him as “a little part of us”—it was impossible to imagine Hitler’s private circle without him.⁷⁶ Nicolaus von Below, meanwhile, regretted the “removal” of his friend Bruckner. He had always hoped, he said, that Bruckner would “one day return,” whereas others, such as “Bormann and Eva Braun, were happy to see him go.” Christa Schroeder described an “intrigue” of Kannenberg’s; she considered him to be a “shady character,” and even suggested a connection between Hitler’s “disfavor” toward Bruckner and the end of Bruckner’s relationship with Sofie Stork.⁷⁷ In truth, all these retrospective judgments, expressing the speaker’s own sympathies or antipathies, amount largely to hearsay. They do, however, make clear that the group of people at the Berghof was by no means a “sworn society.” Jealousies, power struggles, and nepotistic favoritism were the order of the day there as well.

Politics and Private Dealings

The business interests pursued by individual members of Hitler’s inner circle constitute a special chapter in the history of life at the Berghof. They show above all that Hitler looked after the personal circumstances, too, of the members of his Berghof society and was prepared to support them financially when necessary. The files of Albert Bormann, who handled and archived Hitler’s personal correspondence in the “Private Chancellery of the Fuhrer,” show, for example, that Sofie Stork’s personal and business contact with Hitler lasted until at least 1941. A “correspondence diary” that indicates the incoming and outgoing letters for the years 1939–1940, predominantly within a narrow circle (including Schaub, Bruckner, Heinrich Hoffmann, and Hermann Esser), along with, less often, private letters such as those to or from Hitler’s nephew Leo Raubal, his half-sister Angela’s son, or Sigrid von Laffert, contains numerous entries on the “Stork matter,” revealing Hitler’s energetic business assistance. Already in September 1936, Hitler had arranged for Sofie Stork to receive 45,000 reichsmarks—an astronomical sum at the time—so that she could carry on her deceased father’s fishing-tackle business in Munich, which had apparently run into financial difficulties.⁷⁸ On top of that, Hitler hired, and paid the salary of, a financial adviser who looked after the company for years “on the orders of the Fuhrer.” The auditor regularly sent annual reports to the “Private Chancellery of the Fuhrer” from then on.⁷⁹

In later years as well, Albert Bormann’s entries show that Sofie Stork turned directly to the dictator whenever she ran into business problems. For example, in the early summer of 1940 she asked him for help in procuring Tonkin bamboo (a special type of bamboo reed used to manufacture fishing poles), which had become increasingly difficult to import from the Far East, Australia, or the United States since the start of the war. In September 1940, she put in another request directly to Hitler, for a travel permit to, and purchase approval within, Belgium and France, which had been occupied by the German army a few months earlier. The northern half of France, with its major industrial regions, came under the jurisdiction of the German military administration and was thus a coveted trading center for businesspeople from the German Reich. Sofie Stork received her concession, too, as Albert Bormann’s bookkeeping proves: on October 13, 1940, she appeared in the files again, with a new request. Could her commercial representative use certain airplanes belonging to Hitler’s fleet?⁸⁰

But why would Sofie Stork have been granted such an enormous amount of assistance, financial and otherwise? Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s private secretary, later claimed that Hitler so resented Wilhelm Bruckner’s separation from this woman that he decided “on his own accord” to compensate the ex-girlfriend financially “and very generously.”⁸¹ But is this account plausible? What would explain such an emotional reaction on Hitler’s part? It seems likely that Sofie Stork’s close friendship with Eva and Gretl Braun could have been one possible cause of Bruckner’s gradual loss of Hitler’s favor and eventually his expulsion. For the young artist, in contrast, the Braun sisters’ friendship and thus her belonging to Hitler’s personal sphere was enough to give her extraordinary advantages. This was not the only case in which Hitler rewarded political allegiance, and above all personal loyalty, with material contributions of all kinds.⁸²

Another friend of Eva Braun’s was Marianne Schonmann, from Munich. Thirteen years older than Braun, she first arrived in the Berghof circle thanks to her long-standing acquaintance with Erna Hoffmann, Heinrich Hoffmann’s second wife.⁸³ Erna Hoffmann and Marianne Schonmann both came from artist families; Schonmann’s aunt, Luise Perard-Petzl, a soprano well known in Vienna and Munich, had had successes before the First World War in, among others, Wagner operas—as Sieglinde in Die Walkure and as Elsa in Lohengrin. Marianne Schonmann met Hitler, according to her own statement, around 1934 in Hoffmann’s apartment in Munich. Her relationship to the world of opera, and to Wagner, probably played an important role in forming this acquaintance. They were in harmony politically as well: she had already joined the NSDAP three years previously, in December 1931.⁸⁴ She was then unmarried and still named Petzl.

When and how Schonmann met Eva Braun is not known. The statements she gave in this regard in her denazification proceedings after the war were vague: she stated before the court in 1947 that she was merely one among several “female acquaintances” who “repeatedly” invited Braun to her house in Munich. She herself first