visited the Obersalzberg, she said, sometime during 1935.85 However, Schonmann very quickly became one of the regular visitors there after Eva Braun’s position at the Berghof became unassailable in early 1936. Within a few years, Marianne Schonmann was one of the women around Hitler. When she married the Munich building contractor (and NSDAP member) Friedrich “Fritz” Schonmann on August 7, 1937, at age thirty-six, Hitler and Eva Braun were among the select few guests.86
Marianne Schonmann and Eva Braun were apparently in regular contact in Munich as well as at the Berghof. The Schonmanns’ villa near the Herzogpark was located not far from the Braun sisters’ residence in Bogenhausen. After the war, when it was necessary to play down such close connections to Hitler and those near to him in order to save one’s own skin, Marianne Schonmann stated that Eva Braun must have been “so obliging” to her only because of Braun’s interest in opera. She emphasized, too, that her acquaintance with Eva Braun and Erna Hoffmann did not lead to any “political activity” on her part; there was “never any politicizing” between them. Neither acquaintance had “ever told [her] about the actions or any other affairs of Hitler or Heinrich Hoffmann,” she said.87
In reality, Schonmann was extremely well informed, since the “actions” and “affairs” about which she claimed to know nothing were ones she had close and direct experience of during her numerous visits on the Obersalzberg. And she must have heard from other members of the inner circle, in one form or another, at least some details about the events taking place around Hitler—events that all those who had anything to do with him were as burningly interested in as the curious general public. Karl Brandt later stated that he was a “very close” friend of Schonmann’s,88 and Nicolaus von Below still remembered precisely, decades later, Schonmann’s confident manner in Hitler’s presence: he described in his memoir how Eva Braun’s friend even dared to disapprove openly of one of the Reich Chancellor’s decisions.
During a four-day stay on the Obersalzberg over Easter 1938, which played out “informally, in a private atmosphere” according to Below, Hitler, surrounded by his guests (including Eva and Gretl Braun, Marianne Schonmann, the Bormanns, the Speers, and the Brandts), spoke “frequently about Austria during meals and during the long nights.” It was only five weeks since German troops had occupied the country and Austria had been “integrated” into the German Reich.89 Many of the people present at the Berghof had been at Hitler’s triumphal entry into Linz on March 12, 1938, and into Vienna on March 14, and had seen how their “Fuhrer” had been frantically, jubilantly greeted by crowds of cheering Austrians for fulfilling the dream of a “Greater German Empire.” Walter Schellenberg, who worked in the Reich Main Security Office and was responsible at the time for Hitler’s personal security during his drives through Vienna, described a “true carnival of flowers,”90 and Christa Schroeder later recalled the “almost hysterical outbursts of joy,” which she described as “nerve- shattering.”91 Bormann, Below, and Brandt were also among those accompanying Hitler. Eva Braun, in contrast, had traveled to Vienna unofficially and separate from the others.92 In a move that his followers did not expect, Hitler immediately chose Josef Burckel, a schoolteacher from the Rhineland and an “old campaigner” in the movement, to take over the Austrian NSDAP and the
Burckel’s nomination must indeed have shocked the Austrian National Socialists if they were expecting to regain power once more, after the prohibition of their party on June 19, 1933, and years of political powerlessness. Simultaneously with the entry of German troops, they began to mercilessly persecute political opponents and members of religious minorities and drive them out of office. Nonetheless, Hitler chose Burckel, an outsider, to reorganize the disorganized Austrian NSDAP and review the existing membership. Burckel, previously the “Reich Commissioner for the Reintegration of the Saar Region,” was now to ensure a successful “annexation” in Austria as well. He reported directly to Hitler and saw himself as a kind of “Gau-Prince” with dictatorial powers intended solely to enforce “the will of the Fuhrer.”94 He peremptorily disregarded the aims of the traditional institutions, going so far as to declare that he wanted to stem the tide of “a number of candidates who consider themselves qualified to take up certain positions in the state and Party offices,” in fact, “to render such office- seekers harmless.”95 With measures such as the immediate closure of all associations and organizations in Austria—which was now to be referred to only as Ostmark, “the Eastern Region”—Burckel made himself so disliked even among Party members that his behavior gave rise to a “lively” discussion, even at the Berghof, about whether “the mentality of the Austrians [ought to be] taken into account.”
But Marianne Schonmann’s efforts on behalf of her homeland’s Party members were in vain. A week later, on April 23, 1938, Hitler named Josef Burckel “Reich Commissioner for the Reunification of Austria with the German Reich.” Still, Schonmann brought up “several proofs of Burckel’s missteps in office over the course of the following years” in conversations with Hitler, Below recalled. On the other hand, Baldur von Schirach, who two years later would relieve Burckel and take over the office of Gauleiter and Reich Governor in Vienna, stated that Schonmann had plied Hitler “with rumors about his predecessor,” to the point where the Nazi leader had held him responsible for the “mood inimical to the Reich in Vienna.”96 Below leaves open whether, and in what way, he or others there, including Eva Braun, may have taken part in the discussion. His remarks show, though, that even in the years leading up to the war, political topics were certainly discussed at the Berghof, and not merely, as Speer would later claim, “questions of fashion, of raising dogs, of the theater and movies, of operettas and their stars.”97
The persecution of Jews was no secret in the Berghof circle, either. Eva Braun and her friends, as well as the Speer and Brandt families, spent most of their time living in the major cities of Munich or Berlin, after all, not in any way shut off from the outside world as they were on the Obersalzberg. As but one example, they could hardly have been unaware that the mayor of Munich, Karl Fiehler, a long-time Party member who had taken part in the putsch of 1923 and served time in Landsberg prison with Hitler, had imposed radical measures against the Jewish residents of the city from very early on. Even before 1938, Jews in the Bavarian capital were forbidden to visit public baths, parks, and restaurants. They could shop only at a few shops.98 Announcements in all German newspapers openly offered for sale Jewish businesses that had been forcibly expropriated “by reason of Aryanization.” The second biggest department store in Munich underwent numerous boycotts and acts of terror at the hands of the National Socialists before being looted on the night of November 9, 1938—the so-called Night of Broken Glass—and set on fire.99 It will probably never be possible to determine exactly how much each individual member of the Berghof group knew about such activities involving the persecution of Jews and the elimination of political opponents. As Speer said, “Hitler’s private circle” was in any case not “sworn to silence”— Hitler “considered it pointless to attempt to keep women from gossiping” anyway.100 They all were not only witnesses but believers. The survivors from this circle thus had good reasons after the war to stay quiet about what they had seen and heard around Hitler.
In Austria, meanwhile, Burckel and his staff were busy transforming Austrian organizations into “Reich- German institutions” and restructuring the Austrian NSDAP. The currency reserves of the Austrian national bank— some 1.4 billion reichsmarks—fell into German hands as well. In addition, they pressed ahead with the “reduction of non-Aryan personnel in private companies,”101 which in practice meant brutally stripping members of the Jewish population of their rights and property. Thousands of Austrian Jews, mostly from Vienna, had fled; their property, declared to be the property of “enemies of the Reich,” was confiscated by the SS.102 Valuable art collections and libraries changed hands in this way, with the “Fuhrer” claiming for himself the right to make final decisions about their ultimate destinations. He decided in June 1938, for instance, that he would personally decree where the art works confiscated in Vienna would go. Heinrich Himmler, who had hurried to the Austrian capital with a company of Waffen-SS soldiers on March 12, received instructions from the Reich Chancellery that Hitler intended “primarily to put [these art objects] at the disposal of the smaller cities of Austria.”103 In the following months, it became clear that Hitler thereby meant predominantly the Upper Austrian provincial capital of Linz on the Danube, Hitler’s “hometown,” which he had planned since the summer of 1938 to redesign architecturally and where he intended to build an art museum of international stature. His goal was to make Linz a “world city.”104
For the construction of the art museum in Linz, which was to show primarily German and Austrian painters of the nineteenth century, Hitler purchased pictures from art dealers as well as confiscating them from Jewish collections. Among the experts advising him on his purchases and fulfilling his “special wishes” was first and foremost the Berlin art dealer Karl Haberstock, who owned a gallery on the Kurfurstendamm.105 The bustling Heinrich Hoffmann, worth millions by then, acted as a broker as well, along with possibly Marianne
