Eva Braun

9. ISOLATION DURING THE WAR

Hitler’s fantasy of someday retiring to Linz with Eva Braun and abdicating leadership of the Party and state to a younger man first manifested itself at the same time as the concretization of his war plans in Eastern Europe. He was tormented by the thought of not yet having solved crucial foreign policy problems: revising the cession of territory imposed on the German Reich by the Versailles Treaty and gaining “Lebensraum in the East.” The decision for a war of aggression that he made in fall 1939 may also have been influenced by economic considerations, but the realization of the “Lebensraum” ideology represented the core of National Socialist foreign policy from the beginning. Already in his autobiography and political platform Mein Kampf, published in 1925, Hitler had announced his goal: “We will finally end the colonial and trade policies of the prewar period and transition to the soil-politics of the future. But when we speak of new soil and ground in Europe, we can only think in the first place of Russia and the border states subordinate to it.” The fight against the Soviet Union was raised to a “historical mission of national socialism.”¹

On February 3, 1933, immediately after the National Socialists came to power, Hitler declared in a speech after a dinner with high-ranking military officers that the “expansion of Lebensraum” for the Germans, toward the east, would have to be carried out militarily, and the “soil” conquered in this way would have to be “Germanized.” Hardly anyone present, including Hitler’s personal adjutant Wilhelm Bruckner, comprehended at the time the new Reich Chancellor’s absolute desire for war. After all, he went on to proclaim his readiness for peace and negotiation in public speeches.² In addition, neither the concept of “Lebensraum” nor the idea that such space must be conquered for the German People originated with him—both belonged quite generally to the repertoire of the Populist-nationalist right. But four and a half years later, in early November 1937—when Hitler emphasized, this time in a meeting with the heads of the Wehrmacht (armed forces), that “only the path of violence” would provide the “solution to the German problem”—the domestic and foreign political situations of Germany had changed fundamentally. The National Socialist dictatorship was established; rearmament was moving full speed ahead; the Rhineland had been occupied, without any resistance from the Western powers; the “annexations” of Austria and Czechoslovakia were already decided upon. There could no longer be any doubt within the leadership of the Wehrmacht that Hitler’s unchanged intent to win “agriculturally useful space” in Eastern Europe by military means, for the “protection and support of the mass of the People and its reproduction,” was meant seriously.³

When Hitler withdrew to the Obersalzberg in late January 1939, Goebbels recorded the following for posterity in his “Diaries”: “The Fuhrer now speaks almost solely of foreign politics. Again he is turning over new plans in his mind. A Napoleonic nature…”⁴ In truth, however—as the Minister of Propaganda knew perfectly well—these plans were neither new nor unknown. The racial-ideological genocidal intent of the Nazi regime had already shown itself, not least in the pogrom against German Jews on November 9, 1938, initiated in part by Goebbels himself.⁵ And Hitler was, as always, working—though now more driven than ever— toward realizing his “vision” of the “next struggle”: “a deliberate war between Peoples and between races,” as he declared in early February 1939.⁶

The Outbreak of War

Is it possible that Eva Braun, intimately familiar with Hitler’s sense of being on a mission and his racist ideology, could have suspected nothing of his preparations for war in the spring and summer of 1939? This seems highly unlikely, especially after the Nazi leader had given a speech before the “Greater German Reichstag” in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, on January 30, 1939, that gave rise to “more discussion” than practically any other public statement, as Nicolaus von Below recalled.⁷ In it, Hitler lamented the “warmongers” in England and America who wanted “at all costs to start a war,” and he proclaimed that nothing could “influence [Germany] in the least in the resolution of its Jewish question.” At the same time, Hitler threatened that should it come to war, “the result would not be the Bolshevization of the globe and thus the victory of the Jews, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”⁸ These “foreign policy passages,” Below admitted in retrospect, “depressed” him, since it was “not difficult to conclude” from these “warnings directed at the English and the Jews” that Hitler “was coming to new and far-reaching decisions.”⁹

Since Hitler’s unexpectedly combative appearance before Parliament attracted such wide public attention, we can assume that every member of the private “inner circle” around Hitler heard about these utterances as well. His words came close to being a declaration of war. In particular, the wives of the Nazi leaders obviously also “talked about the daily news,” as Margarete Speer admitted to Gitta Sereny.¹⁰ For Eva Braun, the events involving Hitler in Berlin over the course of 1939 must have been the focus of her attention to an even greater extent, because her life with him was no longer limited merely to Munich or the Obersalzberg: after the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Speer, was finished and dedicated on January 9, 1939, Braun was given rooms of her own in the “Fuhrer apartment” in the Old Reich Chancellery, with furniture personally designed for her by Speer.¹¹ Clearly, this new residence for Eva Braun was possible because all the official public events now took place in Hitler’s new, specially built, monumental seat of office on the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Vosstrasse.

With its 65-foot-high exterior facade, interior hallways sometimes exceeding 320 feet in length, and central marble gallery, 480 feet long, it surpassed anything that had ever been there. The New Chancellery thereby corresponded to Hitler’s conception of an awe-inspiring architecture of power, enabling him to impress especially “the smaller dignitaries.”¹² But even though the building included a private wing for Hitler’s use, he continued to stay at his apartment at 77 Wilhelmstrasse, refurnished four years earlier by the Troost architecture office. Eva Braun, during her stays in Berlin, now no longer spent the night at the Hotel Adlon but instead, in the guise of a private secretary, could go to their common place of residence largely unremarked. Speer wrote in Inside the Third Reich that she “came in through a side entrance and up a side staircase.” She didn’t even linger in the downstairs rooms, formerly the public reception halls, “when only old friends were in the house.” Instead, the architect sometimes “kept her company during her long hours of waiting.”¹³

Hitler’s girlfriend seems not to have remained entirely unobserved in the capital city, however. The American newsmagazine Time, for example, in an article published December 18, 1939, reported that “a blond Bavarian girl named Eva Helen Braun” had moved into “Hitler’s official residence in Berlin, the great Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse,” during the last days of August.¹⁴ The article referred to various sources in Germany and to an article published in The Saturday Evening Post two days earlier. This was not entirely true, but the magazine gave enough biographical details to indicate that the Nazi leader’s private life was not a secret anywhere in the capital city, and that rumors about it had reached the ears of American journalists, too.

As early as May 15, 1939, Time had speculated about Mussolini’s and Hitler’s girlfriends, under the title “Spring in the Axis,” and named Eva Braun: the young woman from Munich had her apartment paid for by her “old friend in Berlin, who always comes to see her when he is in town.”¹⁵ One of Time’s informants was presumably Bella Fromm, the Berlin society columnist who had immigrated to the United States in 1938. She had worked for the Vossische Zeitung newspaper, among others, and had excellent contacts in Berlin political society. In her best-selling diaries published in London in 1943 as Blood & Banquets, she mentions “Eva Helene Braun” as early as her entry of September 16, 1937, describing her as the former assistant of “Court Photographer” Heinrich Hoffmann who had possibly conquered Adolf Hitler’s heart. Fromm was relying on off-the-record information from Louis Paul Lochner, an American journalist in charge of the Associated Press bureau in Berlin who had ties to the National Socialist leadership.¹⁶ Obviously, the German public learned nothing about such overseas news reports—censorship of the press was in effect in the National Socialist state, and foreign newspapers, magazines, and books were not even permitted to be sold.

Eva Braun did, in fact, stay in Berlin in late August 1939. And she had already learned of the worsening international situation while at the Berghof. Hitler’s expansionist goals in the east—first “taking care of what