Eva Braun

the rest of the guests could relax from the “formal fireside gatherings” only when Hitler and Braun withdrew upstairs together at night.⁸⁸

Eva Braun and Martin Bormann were the only people in Hitler’s private world who became more and more important to the Nazi leader in these years. Bormann had taken over for Rudolf Hess after Hess’s bizarre flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941, and now ran the “Party Chancellery of the Fuhrer.” Hess had apparently intended to conduct negotiations on his own in order to secure peace in the west for Hitler’s upcoming war against the Soviet Union in the east, but he was now regarded as a traitor. For months, Bormann mercilessly pursued every suspected “collaborator in this act of insanity,” on Hitler’s orders.⁸⁹ But while Hess’s adjutants and others in his circle were arrested, his wife, Ilse Hess, was more or less left alone, notwithstanding a lot of harassment from Bormann. She owed this consideration in large part to her National Socialist attitudes, about which no one had any doubt. But Eva Braun, too—nicknamed “Everl” in a postwar letter of Ilse Hess’s—seems to have spoken up for her and supported her.⁹⁰ It is doubtful that she did so without Hitler’s knowledge—“behind Hitler’s back,” as Albert Speer later claimed—since Ilse Hess continued to be in direct contact with Hitler. For example, she wrote to a friend in early August 1941 that “the Fuhrer” had permitted her to write to “the big” (as she called her husband) in England.⁹¹ Hitler’s paranoid suspicions thus seem to have remained within limits in the case of his fugitive deputy’s wife.

^{Hitler and Eva Braun at the dining table in the teahouse on Mooslahnerkopf, 1940 (Illustration Credit 9.5)}

Even though it was possible to get around Bormann in this case, Bormann became, with Hitler’s increasing isolation in his various headquarters, Hitler’s primary connection with the outside world. He was almost entirely unknown to the German public but was constantly with Hitler, as the most influential relayer of his orders and a liaison whom no one could bypass—not even Eva Braun.⁹² Still, she apparently found her own way to get a hearing with Hitler from afar. From time to time in the headquarters, according to Speer, “letters from Eva Braun gave rise to the most annoying interruptions.” She wrote from Munich about, among other things, “cases of blatant stupidity on the part of officials,” which “would send Hitler into a fit” every time until he finally ordered Bormann to investigate her accusations.⁹³

^{Hitler in his airplane, 1942/1943 (Illustration Credit 9.6)}

Hitler left the Berghof again for several months on June 20, 1942, to command the planned summer offensive against the Soviet Union—“Operation Blue”—and Eva Braun left the next day for her last trip to Italy.⁹⁴ It is no longer possible to reconstruct how she traveled, and with whom. Christa Schroeder later claimed that at any given time Eva Braun had always had only one “favorite” among the women at the Berghof who then also accompanied her on her annual trip to Portofino.⁹⁵ This time, as in previous years, Eva Braun stayed in Italy for almost four weeks, returning to Germany only on July 17.⁹⁶ In the middle of the war, such long pleasure trips abroad were unusual and, above all, expensive. They had to be reported to the authorities in advance, and approved; a passport, visa, and travel permit were all needed, and so was foreign currency, since it was forbidden to take German currency out of the country—in the case of normal tourism, the limit was set at only ten marks, a measure that made it impossible to leave the country unchecked. The German Workers’ Front, which organized Mediterranean cruises on its own KdF steamships (for example, a “cruise around Italy” from January 22 to February 1, 1939, on the Wilhelm Gustloff), allowed its guests to bring up to 100 reichsmarks in coins, but it was “absolutely forbidden” to bring paper money.⁹⁷ Eva Braun, in contrast, kept all her travel privileges intact, and she could hardly have realized at the time that she would never again visit the south in her life.

For in the summer of 1942, Hitler continued to be confident, even optimistic, about the progress of the war. While his girlfriend enjoyed the Italian sun, he ordered Army Group B to march on Stalingrad with the Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus. But on November 22, the Sixth Army, with more than 250,000 soldiers, was trapped in Stalingrad by Soviet troops. Paulus capitulated in late January 1943, and ended up as a Soviet prisoner of war along with more than 110,000 soldiers. Hitler then withdrew to the Obersalzberg in spring 1943, for three months in total, through late June.⁹⁸ The young secretary Traudl Humps experienced “the decampment and relocation of a massive organization in the last days of March, 1943,” and recalled: “We were supposed to arrive in Munich around noon. It was nine. I quickly got dressed and went to breakfast. People were talking about the Berghof and about Eva Braun. I was curious to meet her. She was going to get on the train in Munich and come with us to Berchtesgaden.” Humps’s future husband, Hans Hermann Junge, an SS member since 1933 and one of Hitler’s orderlies, explained to her that Eva Braun was “the mistress of the Berghof and tacitly recognized as such by all the guests.” She went on: “I needed to prepare myself for the fact that this was the Fuhrer’s private household, that we all had to see ourselves as his guests, and that everyone would eat meals together. But all this was true for only a very small circle.”⁹⁹

The mood at the Berghof was entirely different than it had been in the previous year. After the “catastrophe on the Eastern Front” as Joseph Goebbels noted, premonitions of downfall and death began to spread on the “mountain” for the first time.¹⁰⁰ Meanwhile, Munich, too, had been bombed. Eva Braun’s house at Wasserburger Strasse and Hitler’s private residence at 16 Prinzregentenplatz were damaged. Hitler continued to present himself to others as certain of victory, but he barely ever appeared in public anymore. Even the “Fuhrer Address” that took place every year on the anniversary of his having been named Chancellor was omitted in 1943, for the first time in ten years. Hitler was already contemplating a possible catastrophe and the “ending of his own life” that would then be necessary. Bormann, too, unsure what “turn” the war was going to take, discussed the consequences of his own possible death in a letter to his wife, Gerda. According to Hitler’s orders, Bormann wrote, the widow of a Reich minister or Reich chancellor was not permitted to keep her husband’s official residence. Thus, in the case of his own death, she would have to leave the house in Pullach immediately—their formal villa in the neighborhood of the Party elite, built in 1938. She would also need to vacate the house on the Obersalzberg, since she would have to reckon with harassment from Eva Braun.¹⁰¹ This letter reveals how strong the rivalry was between Braun and Bormann, and how poisoned the atmosphere in Hitler’s innermost circle must have been with suspicion and enmity.

Goebbels, on the other hand, who had proclaimed “total war” in a fanatical speech in the Berlin Sportpalast on February 18, 1943, painted a positive picture of Hitler’s girlfriend in his “Diaries.” He mentions Eva Braun there for the first time in an entry dated June 25, 1943, noting that she was “extraordinarily well read, extraordinarily clear and mature in her judgment on aesthetic questions,” and made “the best impression” on him. She would certainly be, he wrote, “a valuable support for the Fuhrer.”¹⁰² Apparently Eva Braun’s status had risen so high that Goebbels finally could refer to her by name in the document he was preparing for posterity, after having kept silent about her existence until then. Ultimately, the Minister of Propaganda was trying to expand his own position and power in the immediate environment of the shattered leader.¹⁰³ Thus his diary returned to Eva Braun again, six weeks later, in the course of recording his judgment on everyone in the Nazi elite in view of the military “crisis.”

Allied troops landed in Sicily in July 1943, and Mussolini was deposed and arrested. At almost the same time, the last army offensive on the Eastern Front, ordered by Hitler, failed.¹⁰⁴ Now, according to Goebbels, the Nazi leader was “generally thinking about who could replace whom, if someone should fall.” In this context, Goebbels recorded Hitler’s dissatisfaction, even indignation, with Baldur von Schirach and his wife, who were said to be attending “a social gathering” in Vienna that was “anything but National Socialist.”¹⁰⁵ In fact, the break between Hitler and the Schirachs had come in June, when Baldur von Schirach told the Nazi leader that he had to end the war. Hitler commented to his adjutant Below: “How could he imagine that? He knows as well as I do that there is no longer any way except to put a bullet in my brain.”¹⁰⁶ Henriette von Schirach even claims in her memoir (which is, however, thoroughly self- justifying from start to finish) that she brought up the “deportation of Jewish women” from Holland during one of the evening gatherings at the Berghof; Hitler supposedly screamed, “You are being sentimental! What do you care about Jewish women in Holland!”¹⁰⁷

The end of the decades-long and almost familial connection between Hitler and the Schirachs, however it actually came about, shows the increasing tension within the inner circle in light of the desperate course the war was taking. “The Fuhrer, on the other hand,” Goebbels dictated on August 10, 1943, “points out most forcefully Eva