Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (112 page)

An expansive hallway connected the living room with the dining room, which had hardwood floors and patterned pine panelling. A long dining-room table offered space for twenty-four people. One length of the room had a semicircular bay window, in front of which guests would breakfast while Hitler was still in bed.
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Hitler’s private quarters—an office, a bedroom and a bathroom—were located on the first floor. Next to his bedroom, separated from it only by a small space with two connecting doors, was Eva Braun’s apartment, which consisted of a bedroom, a small living room and a bathroom. “Why did the housekeeper of the Berghof, as Eva Braun was introduced to us, need a special entrance to Hitler’s bedroom?” wondered Rochus Misch, who was part of the Führer’s escort command from 1940, in his memoirs. “Everyone imagined a reason.”
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After becoming chancellor, Hitler had continued his relationship with the young woman from Munich. During his frequent visits to the Bavarian capital, they would meet in his private apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse. On 6 February 1933, for instance, he celebrated Braun’s twenty-first birthday there, giving her jewellery.
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When interviewed by U.S. investigators in 1945, Hitler’s housekeeper Anni Winter testified that sometimes Braun had been taken home at night, and sometimes she had stayed in the apartment.
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The pilot Hans Baur recalled surprising Hitler and Braun during a rendezvous in Hitler’s apartment shortly before Christmas 1933. Braun, he wrote, blushed, while Hitler had been “somewhat embarrassed.”
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Apparently, in the early years of their affair, Hitler wanted to keep it secret from his entourage. This was confirmed by the clandestine manner in which Hitler had her brought to the Obersalzberg. Speer recalled that several hours after the official motorcade arrived, a small, hardtop Mercedes would pull up with Hitler’s secretaries Johanna Wolf and Christa Schroeder. “They were usually accompanied by a simple girl,” Speer recalled. “She was pleasant, more a breath of fresh air than a beauty, and was modest in manner. There was no sign that she was the ruler’s mistress: Eva Braun.”
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Speer added that the astonishment was all the greater the first time Hitler and Braun disappeared together in the direction of the upstairs bedrooms. Most of the evidence, however, suggests that the dictator did not allow her to stay the night in Haus Wachenfeld but rather put her up with his other visitors in nearby guest houses.
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The woman who initially ran the household on the Obersalzberg was Hitler’s no-nonsense half-sister Angela Raubal, and the copious receipts for goods and services she accumulated over the years attest to her attention to even the smallest details. A number of Munich businesses profited handsomely for her diligence in keeping up Hitler’s mountain retreat, in particular the city’s largest department store, Horn am Stachus, which supplied her with everything from blankets, tablecloths and pillows to deck chairs. From April 1933 to August 1934 Raubal spent almost 12,000 marks at Horn alone.
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Angela Raubal felt a lively antipathy for Eva Braun, ignoring her wherever possible and addressing her, when it could not be avoided, only as “Fräulein.” In the words of one of Braun’s biographers, she saw the young woman from Munich as “a decorative doll craftily spinning her web to ensnare her brother, who was always naive and inexperienced around ‘brazen hussies.’ ”
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The two are often thought to have fallen out in 1935, but the first big quarrel actually occurred a year earlier at the Nuremberg rally. Raubal, Magda Goebbels and other prominent Nazi wives were not at all happy about Braun taking a seat on the VIP stand for the first time. They found that the young woman behaved “very conspicuously,” although most probably the mere presence of the Führer’s girlfriend was an eyesore to them. The women badmouthed her, and after the rally Raubal promptly told Hitler about the incidents on the stand. But instead of dropping Braun, Hitler flew into a rage, forbade anyone to meddle in his private affairs and ordered Raubal to quit the Obersalzberg immediately.
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The other women who had made derogatory remarks about Braun, including Henriette von Schirach, were also banned from Hitler’s Alpine residence. The scandal even temporarily clouded Hitler’s relationship with Magda Goebbels. In mid-October 1934, the wife of the propaganda minister cleared the air with Hitler in the Reich Chancellery. Goebbels noted:

As I suspected, a huge bit of tittle-tattle staged by Frau von Schirach. You have to feel sorry for the Führer. Now he wants to withdraw entirely. Silly women’s prattle. Nothing better to do. It makes my blood boil. Frau Raubal already sent back to Austria. No women any more in the Chancellery. That’s the result of it.
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In April 1935, Goebbels met Raubal in Frankfurt am Main: “She told with tears in her eyes what happened in Nuremberg…Poor woman! I consoled her as much as I could.”
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But whereas Hitler’s relationship with the Goebbelses soon returned to normal, Raubal remained
persona non grata
. In mid-November 1935, she came to Berlin, but was not admitted to see the chancellor. Over coffee at the Goebbelses’ home, she bemoaned her fate. “She’s to be pitied,” wrote the propaganda minister. “It would be good if the Führer would accept her again. She’s been punished enough.”
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In January 1936, Raubal married Professor Martin Hammitzsch, the director of the State Architectural Academy in Dresden. She was “completely happy,” she wrote to Hess, especially since she had spoken to her half-brother while he was visiting the Saxon city.
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But that was as far as their reconciliation went. Hitler remained reserved towards his half-sister and rarely saw her.
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By removing Raubal, Hitler signalled unmistakably to his entourage that anyone who dared meddle with his private life and speak ill of his mistress would fall from grace and lose power and influence. Eva Braun’s position was thus cemented. Indeed, as one of Braun’s biographers put it, she became “practically untouchable within the inner circle.”
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Yet Hitler remained unusually secretive about their relationship. When he was in Berlin, he played the role of the ascetic Führer, nobly sacrificing himself for the nation and forgoing any sort of personal happiness. Even Goebbels fell for this pose. “He told me about his lonely, joyless private life,” he noted in his diary in late January 1935. “Without women, without love, still consumed by memories of Geli. I was deeply moved. He’s such a fine man.”
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Since Hitler left his inner circle in the dark as to the precise nature of his relationship with Braun, it is doubly difficult for historians to put together a halfway reliable picture of it. The lack of authentic historical documents in particular is frustrating. In her final letter from the Chancellery in Berlin on 23 April 1945, Eva Braun ordered her sister Gretl to destroy all her private correspondence, especially her business letters. “An envelope addressed to the Führer to be found in the safe of the bunker”—likely the bunker in the small Munich villa at Wasserburgerstrasse 12 which Hitler purchased for Braun in 1936—was also to be destroyed. “Please do not read it,” Braun told her sister. “I would ask you pack the Führer’s letters and my answers to them (blue leather-bound portfolio) and perhaps bury them. Please do not destroy them.”
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Braun’s most recent biographer, Heike Görtemaker, has speculated that Julius Schaub, who arrived at the Berghof on 25 April 1945, burned this correspondence along with other private Hitler documents before Gretl Braun could take them to safety.
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But that would assume that the correspondence was in fact kept at the Berghof and not at Wasserburgerstrasse. It is possible that Gretl Braun ignored her sister’s instructions and destroyed all the material. In any case, no letter from Eva Braun to Hitler or vice versa has ever been found.

That gives all the more significance to a twenty-two-page excerpt from Braun’s diary covering 6 February to 28 May 1935. The authenticity of this document—which was found by American soldiers after the war together with films and photo albums and brought to the National Archives in Washington—is by no means beyond question. Braun’s older sister, Ilse Fucke-Michels, confirmed that the pages were genuine when asked by the American journalist Nerin E. Gun, who first published them.
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Werner Maser, who published facsimiles in 1973, also trusted their provenance.
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By contrast, in 2003 the historian Anton Joachimsthaler claimed that a simple handwriting test proved that the diary excerpt was a fake: “Numerous documents show that between the ages of seventeen and thirty-three Eva Braun wrote an idiosyncratic, angular, left-leaning hand in Latin letters, which by no means conforms to the flowing, right-leaning diaries in traditional German Sütterlin script.”
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This is a serious objection, and as long as we have no authenticated example of Braun’s writing in Sütterlin, doubts must remain. Görtemaker, however, tends towards considering the diaries authentic, arguing that, where Hitler’s visits to Munich are concerned, they correspond exactly to Goebbels’s diary entries and contain no internal inconsistencies.
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If we assume that the excerpts did indeed come from Braun’s diary, what do they reveal about her relationship with Hitler? First and foremost they tell of the emotional ups and downs of a young woman uncertain about the true feelings of her much older lover. “I turned 23 today,” Braun wrote on 6 February 1935. “But that does not necessarily mean I’m a happy 23. At the moment, I’m definitely not.” Hitler had stayed in Berlin and had his assistant Schaub bring her a bouquet of flowers and a congratulatory telegram. Braun felt neglected, but she tried to keep up her spirits: “Do not give up hope. Soon I’ll have to have learned how to be patient.”
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Just twelve days later she seems completely transformed. Hitler had “quite unexpectedly” come to Munich, and the two had spent an “enchanting evening” together. On this occasion, Hitler seems to have promised her that he would buy her a “little house” and that she would no longer have to work in Heinrich Hoffmann’s photo studio. “I’m so endlessly happy that he loves me so and pray that he always does,” she wrote.
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On 2 March, Braun also met Hitler in Prinzregentenstrasse, where she spent “a couple of wonderful hours.” Subsequently her lover allowed her to amuse herself at a carnival ball in the city. But Hitler failed to keep an appointment to meet her the following day, and she waited in vain for news from him: “Maybe he wanted to meet alone with Dr. G[oebbels], who’s also in the city, but he could have let me know. It was like sitting on red-hot coals at work with Hoffmann. I thought he’d arrive any minute.” That evening Hitler left Munich without saying goodbye. Braun was left racking her brains about what she had done to make him treat her so thoughtlessly.
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The inconstancy of the relationship seems to have taken a toll on Braun’s nerves. “If only I’d never come into contact with him,” she wrote on 11 March. “I’m desperate. He only needs me for certain purposes. Otherwise it’s impossible [to understand].” A few days later, though, she herself dismissed this diary remark as “foolish.”
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Occasionally, Braun’s complaints about Hitler’s unreliability were tempered by flashes of understanding. Once she wrote, “Actually it’s self-evident that he has no great interest in me right now after having so much to do politically.”
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In fact, during the period covered by the diary excerpt, Hitler was preoccupied by his next foreign-policy moves. On 16 March, he announced the reintroduction of compulsory military service, and on 23 March, he held his talks with the British politicians John Simon and Anthony Eden in Berlin. He would have had scant time for his mistress in Munich. Late that month, he did invite her out for dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel in the Bavarian capital. Numerous people seem to have been in attendance, and Braun found out that in company Hitler treated her very differently—as if they hardly knew one another—than he did in the familiar confines of Prinzregentenstrasse. “I sat next to him for three hours and was hardly able to exchange a single word with him,” she complained. “When we parted he gave me, as he has done once before, an envelope full of money.” This businesslike gesture might be an indication of how little attention Hitler paid to his girlfriend’s feelings. Braun was hurt: “It would have been nice if he’d written a goodbye or something nice. That would have made me happy.”
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Her status as a mistress, who was not allowed to appear as such in public, could not have been made any clearer.

Hitler kept his distance from Munich in April and May 1935. “Love seems to have been crossed off his programme at the moment,” Braun wrote in late April.
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She was also plagued by jealousy after Hoffmann’s wife had cattily remarked that Hitler had found a “replacement” for her. “She’s called Valkyrie and looks the part, including her legs,” Braun wrote. “And he likes such dimensions.”
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The woman in question was Valkyrie Unity Mitford, a young British aristocrat who had come to Munich in October 1934, ostensibly to learn German, but whose main interest was meeting the dictator, whom she revered. In February 1935, she succeeded in attracting Hitler’s attention in his favourite restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria. Since then, she had been part of Hitler’s entourage and accompanied the dictator on trips. She was spotted at party rallies and at the Bayreuth festival. Hitler’s assistants nicknamed her “Unity Mitfahrt”—Unity Along-for-the-Ride. Her closeness to the leaders of the Nazi regime was evident in the fact that Goebbels himself hosted her sister Diana’s wedding to the British fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, in his house in Berlin in October 1936, with Hitler in attendance. “A matter that has to be kept top secret,” noted the propaganda minister.
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In terms of appearance, Eva Braun and Unity Mitford were very different. Braun was small, delicate and brunette. Mitford was almost six foot tall, athletic and had light blond hair and blue eyes—closer to Hitler’s stated feminine ideal. But the dictator was not interested in her physical charms. He used his connection to her to gain information about the attitudes of the British upper classes and get messages passed on to Britain.
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The two were never intimate.