Eva Braun

“scorched earth” behind him, to weaken the “enemy’s strike power.” But Speer, who had already declared the war lost in a memo to Hitler, prevented the order from being carried out. By that point, even Himmler—whom Hitler had named Supreme Commander of the Army Group Vistula in January and who was thus responsible, in Hitler’s eyes, for the loss of Pomerania—and Ribbentrop as well, had secretly tried to establish contact with the Western powers via Sweden.⁴¹

While his closest followers were thus slowly drawing away, Hitler continued to receive daily briefings about the military situation in the oppressively close quarters of the workroom in the bunker. The briefings began long after midnight and lasted until 6 a.m., and at the “morning teas” that followed—and took up another two hours— Hitler was, according to Christa Schroeder, “almost constantly on edge” and talked “only about dog training, questions of diet, and how bad and stupid the world is.”⁴² Eva Braun, on the other hand, remained strangely calm in this tense situation, while the bunker constantly shook under air attacks, lights flickering when bombs hit. Even in March, she occasionally escaped the depressing atmosphere underground to her apartment in the Old Reich Chancellery, where she threw small parties with the young secretaries. “And so, while Hitler was in meetings,” Christa Schroeder later wrote, “we played records in her apartment, drank a glass of champagne, and now and then managed a dance with the off-duty officers.”⁴³

A month later, even this was apparently no longer possible. On April 19, Eva Braun wrote to her friend Herta Schneider that they could “already [hear] the artillery fire on the eastern front” and that she “unfortunately” was “ordered to stand ready at every alarm, in case of flooding,” though she would be spending the rest of her life “only in the bunker” in any case.⁴⁴ The orders came from Hitler personally, who was afraid a bomb hit could break open the bunker and let groundwater come in. Whenever a report of enemy planes came over the radio, Hitler now shaved and dressed in all correctness so as to be able to leave his room immediately when the air raid started.⁴⁵ Eva Braun seems not to have shared his fear of flooding. Rather, her letter of April 19 gives a carefree, even confident impression. “The secretaries and I are practicing with the pistol every day,” she writes, adding that she was “very happy to be near him, especially now.” She admits that she was constantly being told to save herself at the Berghof, but “up till now I’ve always won.”⁴⁶ How should we understand these statements? Are they consoling words for the person closest to her, while she kept her real thoughts and feelings to herself? Or had she accomplished her goal in life—to be with Hitler—so that she did not need to pay attention to threats from without? It is difficult to answer these questions from a distance. But it does seem to be the case that she was absolutely at peace about everything, and had arrived where she always wanted to be. Further evidence is provided by the fact that, according to Nicolaus von Below—actually, according to everyone who saw her then—Eva Braun continued “to always take care of herself” in the bunker, to “dress carefully and impeccably,” act “as accommodating and gracious as ever,” and show “not the slightest sign of weakness right up to the final hour.”⁴⁷ She also seemed to expect from Hitler that he play his part perfectly to the very end. In fact, her conduct helped him rigidly cling to his insane confidence in victory, and reinforced the delusion that he would still “beat back the Russians and liberate Berlin.” She permitted him no weakness and reprimanded him even for slight negligence, such as a fleck of dirt on his uniform. “You can’t copy Old Fritz in everything and run around as unappetizingly as he did,” Braun would say, referring to Hitler’s worshipping of Friedrich the Great, to whom he often compared himself—and Eva Braun would do so even in the presence of Goebbels, Bormann, army Adjutant-General Wilhelm Burgdorf, and the secretaries.⁴⁸

On the night of April 20, 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and into the morning hours, another party took place in Eva Braun’s rooms in the Old Chancellery. Hitler had withdrawn to his bedroom in the bunker, after accepting since midnight the congratulations of his staff, the military, and leading Nazi politicians including Goebbels, Himmler, Goring, Ribbentrop, and Speer. Many of them had advised Hitler to leave Berlin as quickly as possible and go to the Obersalzberg, because all efforts to halt the Soviet advance had failed. In fact, the first Soviet units reached the southern edge of Berlin that night, April 20–21. The attack on the city center was imminent.⁴⁹ The henchmen were thus ready to scatter; they had long since prepared their departures. Even Hitler now seemed undecided whether or not to leave Berlin, according to his adjutant Below. In the briefing on the afternoon of April 20, he had said, according to Speer: “I shall leave it to fate whether I die in the capital or fly to Obersalzberg at the last moment!”⁵⁰ And that same day, he had sent his two oldest secretaries to southern Germany, saying that he would need them later and would “follow them in a few days.”⁵¹ Erich Kempka, Hitler’s driver of many years who supervised the fleet of cars belonging to the Reich Chancellery (forty cars and sixty drivers), then received orders to bring several cars to carry the secretaries and others to various Berlin airports.⁵²

Some of those who remained joined Eva Braun and Hitler once more for a glass of champagne in his workroom in the bunker: von Below, Schaub, Heinz Lorenz (adjutant to the Reich Press Chief), the secretaries Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge, and Hitler’s dietitian, Constanze Manziarly. But the group broke up before long, since Hitler, as Traudl Junge recalled, was quiet and when asked had replied that he could not leave Berlin, he had to “bring about the decision here—or die!” Then, while the young secretary was shocked by this confession, Eva Braun threw her last little improvised party in the Old Chancellery. It is unclear who was there besides Traudl Junge, Bormann, and Morell. According to Junge, Braun had brought along “anyone she came across.” Boisterously, in a “desperate frenzy,” they drank champagne, laughed, danced to an old hit record from 1929—Junge quotes the line “Blood-red roses caress you all over”—and tried to forget the fear of the end that was fast approaching.⁵³

The next morning, the center of Berlin was under fire from Soviet artillery. Ribbentrop, who until that point had not been allowed in to any meeting with Hitler, apparently pushed once again for Hitler to retreat from the capital in a conversation with Eva Braun.⁵⁴ Traudl Junge reports in her memoir that Braun told her about a “discussion” with Ribbentrop, who told her that she was “the only one who could get the Fuhrer to leave”; she should tell him that she wanted to “leave Berlin with him.” Eva Braun answered: “I will not speak a word of your suggestion to the Fuhrer. He has to decide alone. If he thinks it is right to stay in Berlin, then I will stay with him. If he leaves, I will, too.”⁵⁵ In fact, Hitler was hardly responsive to anything anymore. Unhinged to the end, he wanted to keep fighting, and ordered in all seriousness another counterattack, with a hastily thrown- together panzer corps under the command of SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Felix Steiner. Hitler screamed and threatened the air force chief of staff Karl Koller that they had to “deploy every man,” and that anyone who kept forces in reserve had “forfeited his life within five hours.”⁵⁶ He was so beside himself that he did not even let Morell approach him that night, because he was afraid that Morell would sedate him so that he could be taken out of Berlin against his will. The doctor had to leave the bunker and was sent back to the Berghof with Eva Braun’s jewelry the following day.⁵⁷

The next day, April 22, saw Hitler’s complete psychological breakdown, after he learned in the afternoon briefing that Steiner’s counterattack had not taken place. Those present sat through a violent half-hour outburst of rage in which Hitler was especially worked up about the military’s “years-long betrayal.” He then sank into a chair and said that the war was lost. They should all leave Berlin, but he would stay. That was his “irrevocable decision.”⁵⁸ He ordered Eva Braun, too, and the hurriedly summoned secretaries, to leave the bunker immediately and evacuate by plane to southern Germany, but Eva Braun, as Traudl Junge recalled, spoke to him as to a “child” and promised to stay, at which point Hitler, in front of the people present, kissed her “on the mouth” while the officers stood outside the conference room “and waited to be dismissed.”⁵⁹ None of the young secretaries dared to leave. Then Hitler summoned Schaub and ordered him to destroy all his personal files. “Everything must be burned immediately,” he ordered, “everything… there is in my steel cabinets. Here in Berlin, in Munich, in Berchtesgaden, you have to destroy everything… do you hear?… everything, everything!” “Not a scrap” must be allowed “to fall into enemy hands.”⁶⁰

Hitler had clearly decided to end his life. Eva Braun wrote a rushed letter to her friend Herta that same day, April 22, surrounded by the six Goebbels children, who had just moved into the bunker with their parents, saying that these “are the very last lines and therefore the last sign of life from me.” The end was “drawing dangerously near.” She could not describe how much she was “suffering personally on the Fuhrer’s account”; he had “lost faith.” She went on: “Regards to all the friends. I shall die as I lived. It’s no burden. You know that.”⁶¹ Eva Braun still seemed unsure about how seriously Hitler’s intentions were, though, since she added in closing that Herta should keep the letter “until you hear of our fate.”

In fact, Hitler postponed his death once again. With the support of Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, he now pinned his hopes on the Twelfth Army under General Walther Wenck at the Elbe, which was to march to Berlin from Magdeburg and “fight the Reich Capital free again.”⁶² In a