nun Mary Ward (1585–1645), one of the most important woman of the seventeenth century, and thus also known in Germany as the “Institute of the English Maiden,” this order of women was active throughout Europe and is considered even today a pioneer in women’s education.8 Along with home economics, Eva Braun studied bookkeeping and typing at Marienhohe and was thereby trained for future office work—a path that was by no means taken for granted for girls in the middle-class environment of that time. When Eva Braun, at the age of seventeen, returned from Simbach to Munich, on July 22, 1929, she moved back in with her parents. Only a few months later, in September, she answered an ad in a Munich newspaper and found a trainee position: Heinrich Hoffmann, photographer, was hiring.9
Eva Braun was not to be the only member of her family to work for Hoffmann. Three years later, in early April 1932, her younger sister Margarete Berta (Gretl) followed her and was given a job as a salesgirl in the photographer’s publishing house. Sixteen at the time, Gretl had just dropped out of the Franciscans’ upper girls’ school in Medingen near Willingen on the Danube and was entering the sphere of NSDAP activities.10 It is highly likely that Eva Braun’s recommendation played a role in getting her sister the job: by that point, Eva already had an intimate relationship with Hitler. But it is also true that Hoffmann needed more employees: his business, recast by the owner himself as the “Hoffmann National Socialist Photographic Propaganda Division,” expanded its activities for the NSDAP through the start of the year of crisis, 1932.11
Important votes were soon to be held: for Reich President on April 10, and for the Reichstag (Parliament) in July. Unemployment was running rampant—almost six million people in Germany were jobless. In these circumstances, the NSDAP could expect an enormous increase in its vote tallies, and it ran its propaganda machine at full speed. For example, Hoffmann, shortly before Gretl Braun got a job with him, was “charged with the responsibility of carrying out the photo-reporting for the Reich President electoral campaign” on April 1, 1932, in his capacity as Hitler’s “Party photographer.”12 In addition, his press was turning out massive quantities of Nazi photo-illustrated books for the first time, and in mid-1932 Hoffmann also took over a press photography illustration office in Berlin, finally ensuring his presence at the center of political events.13 Still, it is noteworthy that both Braun sisters, who henceforth were to move in Hitler’s closest private circles, worked for Hoffmann. It is not known whether Hoffmann gave Gretl Braun a position to “be helpful” to Eva Braun, and thereby indirectly do the “Fuhrer” a favor, and the specific details about his private and business dealings with Gretl Braun remain unclear. Hoffmann himself kept silent about these dealings for the rest of his life.14
In any case, Eva and Gretl Braun remained inseparable in the years to follow. They left home together in 1935 and moved into an apartment in Munich, then a few months later into a single-family house that Hoffmann bought for them on Hitler’s instructions. Gretl Braun accompanied her sister during their weeks-long stays on the Obersalzberg as well, and also on foreign trips, for example to Italy.15 Starting in 1936 at the latest, she was a member of the Berghof inner circle around Hitler. She is rarely mentioned, however, in the memoirs and reminiscences from the period. Only the secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Traudl Junge, would later remark that the Nazi leader occasionally tried to marry off his girlfriend’s sister. Junge, who traveled to the Berghof only starting in March 1943, also recalled that Gretl Braun was in love with Fritz Darges, an SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer and Hitler’s personal adjutant, but that their affair was “a little too dangerous and not private enough” for him, given her close personal relations with Hitler.16
Whereas Eva Braun’s role and her significance for Hitler have been controversial since the war, her sister’s profile has remained unclear. What did she do at the Berghof? What was her relationship to Hitler, and to Eva? Only one thing is clear: Gretl Braun never stepped out from the shadow of her older sister before 1944. Her role was, it seems, organized around Eva Braun’s needs: she acted in the background, as Eva’s guest, companion, or chaperone. This role changed only with her marriage, on June 3, 1944, which gave her the status of wife at last. She married Hermann Fegelein, Heinrich Himmler’s liaison officer in the “Fuhrer headquarters” and—according to Albert Speer—one of the “most disgusting persons in Hitler’s circle.”17 At the instigation of her sister Eva, Gretl had grown up from girlhood in a political environment that she remained attached to until the bitter end; her marriage to Fegelein only consolidated her position there.
Ilse Braun, in contrast, spent her life at some distance from her sisters, geographically at least. She was the first to move out of their parents’ house, in 1929, and by her own account lived for years in the office of her Munich employer, the ear, nose, and throat doctor Martin Marx.18 He was fourteen years older than she, likewise born in Munich, and had received his PhD from Ludwig Maximilian University in 1922 and practiced in the Bavarian capital ever since.19 In a postwar interview, Ilse Braun did not provide further background about her residence in her employer’s office, and we do not know if she had an intimate relationship with her boss or if he was merely doing the young woman a favor by putting a room at her disposal. Ilse Braun’s life circumstances—standing in radical opposition to the ideas of morality prevalent at the time—certainly suggest that the Braun family ties remained problematic. Furthermore, Ilse Braun’s position working for a “Jewish” doctor, as she herself stated he was, obviously led to tensions with her sister Eva, who at the time was not only working for Hoffmann (and thus the Nazi Party) but was also in personal contact with Hitler. In any case, Ilse Braun maintained after the end of the war that her sister had pointed out “the impossibility of our having two such opposite jobs” and had asked her to break off both business and personal ties with the doctor.20 Presumably, Eva Braun was afraid that if her older sister’s affair with Dr. Marx became known in her National Socialist environment, it could threaten her own developing relationship with Hitler.
Nonetheless, Ilse Braun worked as a receptionist for Martin Marx for another eight years, leaving only, on his “advice,” when he was making preparations to emigrate in 1937—or so she emphasized under questioning in October 1946.21 In fact, the discrimination against and exclusion of Jewish doctors, roughly a quarter of all the doctors in Munich, had already started shortly after Hitler came to power. In the Bavarian capital, 80 percent of “non-Aryan” doctors in the national health insurance system lost their licenses due to a new regulation announced in April 1933. The “cleansing” of the field of medicine, demanded by Hitler personally, was carried out more diligently in Munich, under Karl Fiehler (mayor, 1933–1945), than elsewhere, since Fiehler was a committed National Socialist of the first order and an extreme anti-Semite. He had doctors fired from state-run facilities, clinics, and universities for racist ideological reasons.22
At first, the private practice of the doctor for whom Ilse Braun worked and under whose roof she lived was not affected: Dr. Marx could continue, like many of his colleagues, to practice unhindered, despite the exclusion from government positions. The situation in Munich became more extreme only with the proclamation of the “Nuremberg Laws,” with their “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” on September 15, 1935. Not only marriage but also “extramarital relations” between “Jews and citizens of German or related blood types” would now be prosecuted, likewise any work by an “Aryan” woman under forty-five in a “Jewish” household.23 Ilse Braun’s friendship with her employer and above all her remaining under his roof now meant that both of them risked arrest on charges of “defiling the race.” The Gestapo carried out checks in Munich in this regard and followed up on rumors and suspicions. Nevertheless, Ilse Braun and Martin Marx apparently remained undisturbed until their business and personal relationship came to an end in early 1937.
By then, Eva Braun had become a figure of permanent importance in Hitler’s life, joining the Nazi leader at his refuge on the Obersalzberg whenever he was there. She had dedicated herself entirely to Hitler and his life and must have found her sister’s living and work situation, unchanged for years, completely unbearable. Ilse’s later career developments suggest that it was Eva who was responsible for Ilse’s dismissal and who, at the same time, helped her find a remarkable new career and place to live. For immediately after her departure from Dr. Marx’s
