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.15 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.16 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.”17 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.”18 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.19
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.20 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.’ ”21 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.22
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.23
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.”24 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.”25 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.26 But that was as far as their reconciliation went. Hitler remained reserved towards his half-sister and rarely saw her.27
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.”28 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.”29
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.”30 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.31 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.32 Werner Maser, who published facsimiles in 1973, also trusted their provenance.33 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.”34 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.35
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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.”36 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.37
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.38 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.”39
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.”40 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.”41 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.42 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.”43 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.44 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.45 The two were never intimate.
Eva Braun thus had no reason for jealousy. Nor was there any truth to the rumour of an affair between Hitler and the beautiful Baroness Sigrid von Laffert, the niece of the salonnière and Nazi patroness Victoria von Dirksen.46 There were other reasons why Hitler paid so little attention to his mistress in April and May 1935. Not only was he very busy; he also had health problems. He had been suffering for months from hoarseness, the result of years of straining his voice, and feared he might have throat cancer like Kaiser Friedrich III, who had died of the disease after only ninety-nine days on the throne in 1888. On 23 May, the director of the ear, nose and throat division at Berlin’s Charité hospital, Professor Carl von Eicken, operated on Hitler. A polyp removed from his vocal cords proved benign. But the chancellor had to rest his voice. He did not fully recover until late June 1935.47
Hitler does not seem to have told Braun a thing about his illness, and she interpreted his lengthy silence as a sign that he had turned his back on her. “Is this the mad love he always assured me of, if he does not have a friendly word for me in three months?” she asked on 28 May. That day, she decided for the second time to end her life, this time by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. “I’ve decided on 35 pills,” she wrote. “This time it’s going to be ‘dead certain.’ ”48 But whether Braun truly meant to kill herself is even less certain than in her first suicide attempt in 1932. In the 1960s, Ilse Fucke-Michels told Nerin E. Gun of finding her sister “deeply unconscious” in their parents’ apartment on the night of 28–29 May 1935 and of administering first aid. Afterwards, she called a doctor she could trust to be discreet and tore the pages from this period from Eva Braun’s diary. She said she later returned them to her sister, who kept them in a safe place. But Fucke-Michels is the only witness to this incident, and even she voiced suspicions during the interview that her sister might have “staged her suicide a bit.”49
We do not know whether Hitler, who on 27 May travelled to Munich for a few days to rest his voice,50 ever learned of these events. One indication that he did might be the fact that in August 1935 Eva and her younger sister Gretl moved into a three-room apartment at Widenmayerstrasse 42, which Hitler had Hoffmann rent for them. It was only five minutes away from Hitler’s own apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse. Apparently the dictator wanted to signal how important his relationship with his mistress was: he probably also wanted to get Braun out from under the thumb of her domineering father.51 A short time later, Hitler had Hoffmann buy the villa at Wasserburgerstrasse 12 in the exclusive Bogenhausen district. Eva and Gretl Braun moved in there in March 1936. In September 1938, the titles for the house were transferred to Eva Braun, “private secretary in Munich.”52 With that, Hitler kept his promise to procure her a house of her own and make her financially independent, even if she was officially still in Hoffmann’s employ.53
From the outside, the two-storey house looked fairly inconspicuous, but it was decorated with luxurious furniture, fine carpets and valuable oil paintings in keeping with Braun’s status as the mistress of the most powerful man in Europe.54 To avoid publicity, however, Hitler rarely visited Wasserburgerstrasse. As soon as he arrived in Munich, he would call his housekeeper, Anni Winter, ordering her to tell him the latest Munich gossip and get Braun on the telephone. The Führer’s mi
stress would then get into her small Mercedes, a further status-symbol gift from Hitler, and have herself driven over to Prinzregentenstrasse.55 When Hitler was not in Munich, she enjoyed inviting friends to her house for lively parties.56
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On the Obersalzberg, her second home, Braun soon grew into the role of the woman of the house involuntarily vacated by Angela Raubal. But she did not have to run the household. That responsibility fell to others: first Else Enders, who had previously worked in the Osteria Bavaria; from 1936 onwards a couple named Herbert and Anne Döhring; and during the Second World War, Willi and Gretel Mittelstrasser. On special occasions, the Chancellery building manager Arthur Kannenberg and his wife were also summoned to provide support.57
The privileged status Braun enjoyed at the Berghof was clearly underscored for everyone who worked there by the fact that her private quarters were next to Hitler’s own and had separate access to them. Nonetheless, everything possible was done to prevent the news that the Führer had a mistress from getting beyond his inner circle. Both the service personnel and Hitler’s guests had to swear to keep this fact confidential. “See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing” was the order of the day, Hitler’s manservant Heinz Linge recalled.58 Anna Mittelstrasser, a cousin of the Berghof manager who began work as a maid there in May 1941, was instructed on her first day: “Everything you now know, everything you see here and everything you hear here must stay here. You aren’t allowed to say anything. Not to anybody. Never…Is that clear? And especially nothing about the Führer and Eva Braun.”59
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