Eva Braun

Christa Schroeder felt, as she wrote in her memoir, that this assessment was corroborated by statements from Heinrich Hoffmann, Julius Schaub, and Ada Klein, an acquaintance of Hitler’s from the 1920s. In truth, however, neither Hoffmann nor Schaub ever expressed himself in these terms. Both men knew Hitler and Eva Braun as closely as could be and were involved, in one way or another, in the couple’s everyday life. And neither of them argued that the relationship was not an intimate one. Hoffmann did claim in 1947, in a written statement, that the relationship started, in his opinion, as “merely platonic in nature.” But he added that it “took a definite shape… many years later,” and that Hitler indulged Eva Braun “in the usual way”: “the way anyone indulges a lover.”²⁰⁸ He dated the start of this development to around the time when he bought her the house in Munich, namely 1935–1936. Hitler’s former personal photographer also explicitly pointed out that he was eager to “clarify” the situation, given the upcoming appearance of his case before the Munich denazification court. He intended to refute before the court the accusation that he had gained any influence or “political power” in Hitler’s circle from the love affair between his employee and the Nazi leader, or that he had even fostered the relationship for that reason. If this suspicion were to be confirmed, it could lead to unpleasant consequences for him, since he denied ever having had anything to do with Nazi politics or National Socialist propaganda. It was thus in his interest to emphasize that Eva Braun was not a “serious relationship” for Hitler in the first six years of their acquaintance.²⁰⁹

Meanwhile, Julius Schaub, SS-Obergruppenfuhrer and Hitler’s personal adjutant, questioned on the topic in Nuremberg on March 12, 1947, by Robert Kempner, the assistant U.S. chief counsel, gave no information at all about the nature of the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun. Kempner asked whether Hitler “loved [Braun] very much” and Schaub answered: “He was very fond of her [Er hat sie sehr gern gehabt].” When Kempner followed up and asked what exactly that meant, Schaub, Hitler’s longtime close confidant who had been near him at all times for twenty years, replied: “He liked her [Er hat sie lieb gehabt].” Schaub added that Hitler had told him he would “never marry” because he “didn’t have time for it” and was “constantly away,” although this “view” had met with incomprehension from those around him: “We often wondered why, we didn’t understand. After all, we were married and not with our wives.”²¹⁰ Schaub, a simple soul, apparently knew nothing about Hitler’s fears of family ties. He also misjudged the compulsions bound up with Hitler’s categorical self-idealization, nor the fact that the power of the National Socialist system depended in large part on the myth of a “Fuhrer” standing above all everyday politics and problems.²¹¹ Even aside from these limitations, Schaub’s statements after the war were generally questionable or downright false. Schaub seems to have remained, after Hitler’s death, an uncritical admirer and loyal protector of his leader’s secrets.²¹²

Herta Schneider, in contrast, the friend of Eva Braun’s who had perhaps the most intimate knowledge of her relationship with Hitler, stated in June 1949: “As a person, in private, Hitler was perfectly nice. Braun loved him very much and he loved her, too.”²¹³ In the end, therefore, it seems that despite all the prudery Hitler and Eva Braun displayed, their relationship was basically like a marriage, and that they conveyed this fact to their immediate circle.

Still, Hitler certainly set the terms of the relationship and Eva Braun had to adapt to them. As for the question of why she did it, what feelings she harbored or what intentions she might have been pursuing, opinions differ. On the one hand, she has been described as an unhappy, frustrated, entirely passive and patient woman who uncomplainingly endured her “fate.” On the other hand, she is portrayed as happy and cheerful, with a lust for life, and not particularly feminine. Clearly, the secrecy surrounding her person and the fact that she played an unmistakably important yet undefined role in Hitler’s life, led to conflicts within the private circle and among the Nazi leader’s staff, so that not all the members of this largely closed society on the Obersalzberg and in Munich liked her. These facts may explain the widely differing views of her.

Officially, Eva Braun remained a member of the staff and an employee of Heinrich Hoffmann’s after 1936. She obviously did not have to show up at the office in Munich every day, but she did become a passionate photographer and home-movie maker during this period. She “often” made “photographs” and color movies of the Berghof’s private circle “available” to her boss, Hoffmann, as he himself stated after the war. Eva Braun even shot movies with a 16 mm Agfa-Movex camera. She took “valuable photographs” that he apparently bought from her for enormous sums of money: for example, according to Hoffmann himself, the astronomical sum of 20,000 reichsmarks for “a piece of photography work” in 1940, though he said he could no longer remember whether the money “was paid directly to Eva Braun or handed over to her sister.” It is also not known whether or how Hoffmann used these photographs.²¹⁴ But it is certainly impossible to claim that Eva Braun no longer worked for Photohaus Hoffmann after 1936. Alfons Brummer, an employee of Hoffmann’s company, was still depositing money into her savings account at Munich’s Bayerische Vereinsbank on September 15, 1943: 5,000 reichsmarks for the “secretary” on that particular day—a sum comparable to an annual income at the time.²¹⁵

^{Eva Braun photographing Hitler in conversation with Morell, 1937 (Illustration Credit 8.8)}

Thus there is no sign of any professional distance between Hitler’s personal photographer and Hitler’s girlfriend. And so it is not surprising that Hoffmann, in a written statement for his denazification proceedings of 1947–1948, says not a word about his continued professional ties to Braun after 1936. In the public denazification hearing against her, he stated only that Eva Braun had “offered her things to the business” while he himself had had “nothing to do with it.”²¹⁶ In light of the amounts of money changing hands, this claim is worse than dubious. The real question is why Hoffmann might have wanted to keep Eva Braun well-disposed to him by means of these huge payments. Was he thereby ensuring that she would speak well of him to the man in charge? In any case, the “Fuhrer’s” lover seems to have been part of the nepotistic practices that were common in National Socialist circles, over and above the financial benefits Hitler accorded her personally.²¹⁷

So as not to stand out among Hitler’s entourage, Eva Braun held the official position of a private secretary. Speer later claimed that whenever the Nazi leader spent time on the Obersalzberg, she likewise had to be there— only once, he wrote in Inside the Third Reich, had Hitler given her “a week’s vacation.”²¹⁸ The insinuation here, that Eva Braun’s presence at the Berghof was a kind of duty or work for her, is unfounded and in fact attributable only to the special character of Speer’s memoirs. Speer himself often emphasized elsewhere the loyalty, devotion, dedication, and love Eva Braun felt for Hitler. Her constant access to the Berghof was a privilege, not a duty, which no member of the “inner circle” would ever have voluntarily gone without.²¹⁹

In any case, Eva Braun lived in Munich most of the time. In summer 1935, when she was still living with her younger sister Margarete (Gretl) on Widenmayerstrasse, Hoffmann bought her a small house built four years earlier, at 12 Wasserburger Strasse (today Delpstrasse) in Bogenhausen. A Munich businessman, Adolf Widmann, had offered it for sale, and he said after the war that Eva Braun had visited the building to take a look and Hoffmann paid the asking price (35,000 reichsmarks) a few weeks later, with a “private check.” Hitler appeared at no point in the transaction, Widmann stated.²²⁰ Only when Widmann delayed supplying a receipt for the transfer fee that he had requested for various items in the house did Hoffmann and his attorney “verbally request” that he draw up the document “as urgently as possible,” “because Hitler wanted the receipt.”²²¹ Three years later, on September 2, 1938, ownership was transfered to Eva Braun, “private secretary in Munich.”²²²

Hoffmann made contradictory statements in this regard as well. In his defense document from 1947, he first claimed that Hitler had bought Eva “a little house.” In the public denazification court proceedings against Eva Braun, on July 1, 1949, in Munich, he then said that he “could no longer recall how the purchase of the house” had come to pass; he might have acquired the property for his son-in-law Baldur von Schirach. He also no longer knew whether he “had been repaid by Hitler.” Finally, he added: “The end result was that I did not pay for the house. The cost was reimbursed, I don’t know by whom, and I also don’t know in what form.”²²³

Hoffmann’s sudden forgetfulness is not credible, nor is it conceivable that National Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach would ever have considered a residence as modest as the little house in Bogenhausen for himself and his family. In fact, Schirach became the owner of a seventeenth-century castle, Schloss Aspenstein, in Kochel am See (about forty miles from Munich), on March 12, 1936, around when Eva Braun and her sister Margarete moved to Wasserburger Strasse (March 30, 1936).²²⁴ Hitler’s girlfriend’s new domicile was located not far from where other prominent Party members lived—on the same street, for example, as Max Amann, president of the Reich Press Chamber and director of the Central Publishing House of the NSDAP. Heinrich Hoffmann’s villa was a few streets over. Heinrich Himmler (the Reichsfuhrer-S), Hermann Giesler (architect and “General Building