Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (113 page)

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.
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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.
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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.’ ”
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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.”
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We do not know whether Hitler, who on 27 May travelled to Munich for a few days to rest his voice,
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 mistress would then get into her small Mercedes, a further status-symbol gift from Hitler, and have herself driven over to Prinzregentenstrasse.
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When Hitler was not in Munich, she enjoyed inviting friends to her house for lively parties.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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In January 1937, Reinhard Spitzy, secretary to the German ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop, got a big surprise while visiting the Berghof for the first time. Hitler and Ribbentrop were pacing around the Great Hall, lost in conversation, when the heavy velvet curtain in front of the living room opened, and a young woman announced that they should sit down to dine. The guests could no longer be kept waiting. “It was like being hit by lightning,” Spitzy reported. “Who would dare to speak to the Führer like that? Who was this woman? Where did she come from?” After the meal, Spitzy put these questions to Wilhelm Brückner and was told: “Our Führer also has a right to a private life, and I would advise you never to tell anyone about what you have seen and heard in this regard…It would be best for you yourself to forget it. Otherwise…” The threat was unmistakable, and Spitzy “loyally joined the conspiracy of silence,” as he put it in his memoirs.
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In addition to a gagging order on staff and guests, a series of other measures were taken to try to keep Hitler and Braun’s liaison a secret. During official receptions and visits by foreign guests, Braun would withdraw to her private quarters.
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Albert Speer remarked that Hitler apparently considered Braun “only partially suitable for polite society.”
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But Speer misunderstood what was likely the primary motivation for Hitler—wanting to keep his private life out of the public eye in order to maintain the myth of the Führer sacrificing himself day and night for his people. That was the main reason Braun was not allowed to appear at Hitler’s side at public events. She travelled to the Nuremberg rallies with Heinrich Hoffmann’s party or with other members of Hitler’s entourage, and she never stayed in the same hotel as Hitler.
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There was only one published press photo showing the two of them together. It was taken during the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and shows Braun sitting two rows behind the dictator. Anyone who did not know better would never conclude from looking at the image that the two were involved in an intimate relationship.
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And when Hitler went abroad, for instance during his state visit to Italy in May 1938, she—unlike the wives of the other high-ranking Nazi officials—travelled separately from the inner circle and never took part in official functions.
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Yet despite all the secrecy, there were many rumours about the Führer’s alleged mistress. His assistant Nicolaus von Below, who met Braun when he visited the Berghof for the first time in November 1937, remembered that Hitler’s private life had been a “topic of conversation” when he was subsequently invited to the home of War Minister von Blomberg. Hans Baur also recalled that Munich was full of gossip about Hitler being involved in “hanky-panky” with Braun.
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In the autumn of 1937, a Czech newspaper published a photo of Braun taken in Berchtesgaden with the caption “Hitler’s paramour.” A friend of the Braun family had bought the paper while on a business trip to Vienna and showed it to Eva’s father Friedrich, who accused his daughter of immoral behaviour.
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But the German public took no notice of this publication. Only a small circle of people knew about Eva Braun’s true status. Most Germans remained unaware that Hitler had a mistress until the end of the Second World War.
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The character of Hitler’s relationship with Braun remained opaque even within his most intimate circles. Officially she was part of the Berghof staff, working as his “private secretary,” and when others were present, Hitler tended to treat her with “awkwardly maintained distance,” strictly avoiding any displays of intimacy or tenderness.
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Like everyone else at the Berghof, Braun addressed Hitler as “my Führer,” while he referred to her towards others as “Fräulein Braun” or Fräulein Eva,” only occasionally calling her his “Tschapperl,” an Austrian word meaning “small, cutely naive child.” Initially, the two used the formal form of address “Sie” when others were around, although they gradually adopted the informal “du” in front of other Berghof regulars.
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“If you were not in the know,” Below observed, “it was almost impossible to tell that Braun and Hitler had a special relationship with one another.”
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It is no wonder that after 1945 speculations were rampant about Hitler and Braun’s sex life. Even people who claimed to have known Hitler well disagreed radically. Contemporary eyewitnesses can hardly be trusted on this issue, however, and historians are well advised to view their statements with extreme scepticism. Albert Speer, for instance, contradicted himself on a number of occasions. At his first interrogation at Kransberg Castle in the summer of 1945, he testified that Braun was Hitler’s true love and that the Führer had always been faithful to her. “She meant a great deal to him,” Speer said, “and he spoke of her with enormous respect and inner admiration.”
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But in Spandau prison in March 1949, Speer already voiced doubts as to whether Hitler was “even capable of honest feelings of friendship, gratitude and loyalty” towards Braun.
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In his memoirs, published in 1969, three years after his release from prison where he’d written much of them, Speer’s doubts had become certainties. Speer depicted Hitler as an emotionally raw, ruthless despot who had, in Braun’s presence, made statements like: “Very intelligent people should make sure they get a primitive, stupid woman.”
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In conversation with Joachim Fest, who assisted him with publishing his memoirs, Speer offered a very simple explanation for Hitler’s relationship with Braun: Hitler had “kept” her “exclusively for certain biological needs…so to speak for the regulation of his hormones.”
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But Speer gave no indication of why he was so certain.

If there was anyone close to Hitler who knew about sexual relations between him and Eva Braun, it would have been the Berghof staff: the couples who managed the place, the servants and the maids. But when they were questioned after the war, their answers were contradictory. House manager Herbert Döhring testified that neither he nor his wife had “gone out of their way to inspect the bed sheets,” but that they would have seen indications, had there been intimate contact between Hitler and Braun. The relationship was not even a “true friendship,” Döhring asserted, but rather an “amiable acquaintance.”
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Heinz Linge, by contrast, had no doubts that Hitler loved Braun and that the two had been intimate. He even maintained that he had once seen them in a “deep embrace.”
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Gretel Mittelstrasser, the wife of Döhring’s successor, also assumed that Hitler and his girlfriend slept together. She even told her niece Anna, the maid, that she had procured medications so that Braun could delay her period when the Führer came to the Berghof.
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There is a fair amount of evidence to suggest that, behind his façade of inhuman inapproachability, Hitler maintained a normal romantic relationship with Braun. But there is no saying for sure, and biographers should beware of titillating readers with through-the-keyhole fantasies. “The duty of the chronicler must halt before and respect the most personal spheres of a human being,” as Otto Dietrich once remarked.
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There is one definitive indication that Braun occupied an important position in Hitler’s private life and was more than mere “decoration” or a “shield to ward off other female advances.”
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On 2 May 1938, seemingly concerned that something could happen to him on his imminent trip to Italy, Hitler personally wrote out his will and testament. It began by specifying that “Fräulein Eva Braun of Munich” was in case of his death to receive “1,000 marks a month, or 12,000 annually, for the rest of her life.” His half-sister Angela Raubal and his sister Paula, who were to receive the same amount, were mentioned second and third.
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