Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (114 page)

—

Who was admitted to the Berghof society and who was not? The most important criterion for inclusion was not party rank, but Hitler’s personal likes and dislikes, and this depended, among other things, on how well a given individual got on with Eva Braun and accepted her role at the mountain manor. At the Berghof, Hitler wanted to surround himself with people—men and women in equal numbers—in whose presence he felt at ease and in whose company he could relax. In contrast to the Chancellery in Berlin, the Berghof circle on the Obersalzberg was far more familial, which was down primarily to the greater presence of the female element.
⁸²

That explains why Göring, although he too owned a house in the vicinity, was not part of the Berghof circle. He appeared at official events, but Hitler had no private contact with him. The same was true of Himmler: Hitler valued him as the unscrupulous organiser of a Reich-wide apparatus of terror and repression, but in private he also made fun of the Reichsführer-SS’s cultish worship of everything Germanic.
⁸³
The situation was no different with Ribbentrop, whom Hitler made Reich foreign minister in 1938 but whom he consciously kept at a distance from the Berghof. By contrast, Ribbentrop’s liaison to Hitler, Walter Hewel, was invited to the Berghof because Hitler liked him personally.
⁸⁴

Hess only appeared at the Berghof in his official function. He had lost the exclusive position he enjoyed prior to 1933 as Hitler’s private secretary when he became deputy to the Führer. His place was taken by Bormann, who had earned the dictator’s favour with his tireless work on the construction on the Obersalzberg and his discreet handling of all the financial issues connected with it. He further ingratiated himself with Hitler by paying special attention to Braun, a point upon which, as Otto Dietrich noted, Hitler was “extraordinarily sensitive.”
⁸⁵
Bormann was Hitler’s constant shadow at the Berghof, while his wife Gerda, who was the daughter of the “uppermost party judge” Walter Buch and whom he kept regularly pregnant, was only allowed to visit as a guest by her power-hungry husband.
⁸⁶
Goebbels’s situation was rather in-between. He and Magda were frequently invited to the Obersalzberg for private visits, but unlike in Berlin, here they were not part of Hitler’s standard entourage. Most of their visits only lasted a few days, and during that time they were housed a short distance from the Berghof in the Bechsteins’ villa, which had been used since 1935 as a guest house for Nazi elites.
⁸⁷

Albert and Margarete Speer, on the other hand, were regular, privileged guests. The architect had gone to the Obersalzberg with Hitler as early as 1933, and after introducing Hitler to his wife, who apparently found the dictator’s favour, the couple was accepted into the Berghof circle.
⁸⁸
It was Hitler’s express wish that the Speers buy a house on the Obersalzberg, and on special occasions, such as the Führer’s birthday, their children, dressed in their Sunday best, were allowed to come along and present Hitler with bouquets of flowers. Hitler did his best with the children and tried to engage with them in “friendly, paternal fashion,” Speer recalled, but he never found the “right wholehearted manner” and soon turned his back on them “after a few words of praise.”
⁸⁹

The Speers were especially solicitous of Eva Braun. They took her skiing, which Hitler greeted with a furrowed brow as he feared that there would be an accident. Hitler hated snow anyway. “The cold, lifeless element was deeply foreign to his nature,” wrote Speer. “The mere sight of snow made him act irritated.”
⁹⁰
In his memoirs, Speer claimed to have befriended Braun, the “unhappy woman…who doted on Hitler,” because he felt sorry for her. But Heike Görtemaker has rightly questioned this idea. Like Bormann, Speer realised early on what an important role Braun played in Hitler’s life, and he knew that he could deepen his connection with the Führer if he maintained friendly relations with her.
⁹¹

Karl and Anni Brandt were close friends of the Speers. It was the wife in this case who had brought her husband into the Berghof circle. Competing under her maiden name, Anni Rehborn, she had been one of the most famous female swimmers of the 1920s, winning several German championships in the 100-metre freestyle and the 100-metre backstroke and setting numerous records. Hitler, whom she first met in 1927 or 1928, immediately liked her. In the early 1930s, she introduced him to her fiancé, then an assistant physician in the Bergmannsheil Clinic in the mining city of Bochum. Both joined the NSDAP, and in June 1933, Hitler invited them to the Obersalzberg.
⁹²
When, on 15 August 1933, Wilhelm Brückner got in a car accident near the village of Reit im Winkel, Karl Brandt happened to be travelling in the car directly behind him. The young surgeon administered first aid, drove Brückner, who had a serious head injury, to the hospital in nearby Traunstein and operated on him himself.
⁹³
Hitler was impressed and offered the physician the chance to become a member of his personal staff, accompanying him on trips so that he could receive immediate medical attention should he be the victim of an accident or assassination attempt. That new status automatically made the Brandts members of the Berghof circle. Karl and Anni Brandt’s wedding in Berlin in March 1934 was attended by Hoffmann, Brückner, Hitler, Goebbels and Göring. In July 1934, Hitler invited the couple for the first time to the Bayreuth festival.
⁹⁴

On the Obersalzberg, the Brandts rented a suite in the Bechsteins’ villa so as to be permanently contactable by Hitler. They shared the Speers’ enthusiasm for sports, and that also gave them something in common with Braun, whom they included in their joint activities. Brandt and Speer were uncannily similar. Both were young men—around thirty—who personally owed their meteoric careers to Hitler. Both were good-looking with engaging personalities, entirely unlike the coarse “old fighters.” Both were very competent in their areas of expertise, extremely ambitious and willing to follow Hitler without scruple. It was no accident that with the start of the Second World War Hitler charged Brandt with carrying out his forced euthanasia programme.

Brandt was not the only physician in Hitler’s entourage. In the spring of 1936, Hanskarl von Hasselbach, an NSDAP member since 1932, was hired as Hitler’s second travelling doctor. He was a university friend of Brandt and transferred with him in November 1933 from Bochum to the university clinic in Berlin. He remained a member of Hitler’s entourage, even if his relationship with the Führer was more remote than his colleague’s.
⁹⁵

Another doctor appeared over the course of 1936. Fifty-year-old Theodor Morell ran a practice, frequented above all by screen and stage stars, near the Memorial Church on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. His patients included Hoffmann, who recommended him to Hitler. During the tense months after the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, Hitler suffered from stomach complaints and eczema on his legs. Among other things, Morell prescribed Mutaflor capsules to restore Hitler’s intestinal bacteria, and the treatment was a success. A former ship’s doctor, Morell seems to have known how to exploit Hitler’s hypochondria to ingratiate himself. In any case, Hitler swore by Morell’s abilities, remarking privately: “He saved my life! Wonderful, how he helped me!”
⁹⁶
As of 1937, Morell and his wife, the actress Johanna “Hanni” Moller, were an integral part of the Berghof society. The couple were also clever enough to court Braun’s favour, and she smoothed their way.
⁹⁷
Towards Hitler, Morell acted like a selfless assistant whose only wish “was to keep Germany’s greatest man free of physical complaints for a long time.”
⁹⁸
In reality, he not only craved attention but had an excellent head for business. He exploited his privileged status of “the Führer’s personal physician” for material gain, for instance in the form of lucrative shares in pharmaceutical companies.

Otherwise, the corpulent new arrival did not have many friends within the Berghof circle. Karl Brandt in particular was none too pleased about the appearance of a rival, whom he considered a loudmouth and a quack.
⁹⁹
But as long as Morell enjoyed Hitler’s favour, he could feel secure. As a gesture of his appreciation in December 1938, Hitler appointed him a professor, and he told members of his entourage to consult his personal physician at the first sign of any complaint. Braun was also a patient of Morell, even though, if we believe Speer’s memoirs, she once complained after an examination how “disgustingly dirty” he was.
¹⁰⁰
Morell’s body odour was no secret to Hitler either, but he answered jibes on that score from his entourage by saying that Morell was not there “to be smelled” but to keep him healthy.
¹⁰¹

The only one of Hitler’s old pals from Munich to become a regular at the Berghof was Heinrich Hoffmann. He usually visited with his second wife, Erna Gröbke, the daughter of a classical singer from the northern German city of Schwerin, whom he had married in April 1934. Hoffmann was a welcome guest not only as the man who visually documented the Third Reich and as a kind of court prankster. He also advised Hitler on art and purchased paintings for him. In June 1937, Hitler charged him with selecting the pictures to appear in the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich’s House of German Art, after sacking the twelve-head-strong panel of judges whose work had displeased him. Assisted by Gerdy Troost and House of German Art Director Karl Kolb, he also curated exhibitions in the years that followed as the Führer’s personal agent. Hitler appointed him a professor in July 1938.
¹⁰²

Hoffmann particularly enjoyed playing jokes on Morell and exposing him wherever possible to ridicule. For Hitler’s personal physician, the photographer was “the evil spirit of the company at table.”
¹⁰³
Hitler had a soft spot for Hoffmann and ignored the fact that his old ally was a bit too fond of alcohol. The dictator’s enormous faith in him was reflected in the fact that he asked Hoffmann to handle the finances for renting the apartment for Eva Braun and later purchasing her house. Hoffmann set up a small darkroom at the Berghof for her, and the Führer’s mistress turned into a passionate amateur photographer and maker of home movies. Armed with a 16-millimetre Agfa-Movex camera, Braun made numerous films that, together with photos taken by cameraman Walter Frentz, provide an intimate look at everyday Berghof life. Occasionally Hoffmann bought photographs from his former employee, paying—no doubt on instructions from Hitler—relatively large sums of money for them.
¹⁰⁴

As a kind of compensation for not being allowed to appear at official functions, Hitler permitted Braun to invite guests of her own to the Obersalzberg, and rooms were set aside for that purpose. Among them were her constant companion and sister Gretl, who had begun working for Hoffmann as a clerk in 1932, her oldest and best friend, Herta Scheider (née Ostermeier), and Marianne (Marion) Schönmann (née Petzl), whose mother, the opera singer Maria Petzl, Hitler had heard perform during his days in Vienna. “With her lively manners and witty charm, she was typically Viennese,” wrote Karl Brandt of Marion Schönmann in his essay “The Women around Hitler” in August 1945, and that explains the attention the dictator paid to this friend of Braun in particular. Hitler and Braun were among the small number of guests when Schönmann married a Munich construction magnate in August 1937.
¹⁰⁵

Also visible on the wedding photo was Sofie Stork, who remained part of the Berghof society even after breaking off her engagement to Brückner in 1936. She and Braun had become friends soon after she visited Haus Wachenfeld for the first time, and Stork made the intertitles for Braun’s colour films. The ever-lively “Störklein” (Little Stork) or “Charly,” as she was nicknamed, was a fixture at the Berghof New Year’s Eve parties. She was very close to Hitler’s assistant Fritz Wiedemann, and Hitler, too, appreciated the gifted artisan, bailing her out with considerable sums of money when her father’s fishing tackle shop on Munich’s Residenzstrasse got into financial difficulties.
¹⁰⁶

The regulars were complemented by occasional visitors. Hoffmann sometimes brought along the “old fighter” and Hitler’s long-term friend Hermann Esser, who served as Bavarian economics minister from 1933 to 1935 and became president of the Reich Committee for Tourism in 1936. His wife was also friends with Braun. Speer was sometimes accompanied by his friend, the sculptor Arno Breker, and his wife Minima, a Greek woman with a sharp tongue with whom Hitler enjoyed joking. Also visiting every once in a while were NSDAP Reich Treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz and his wife, and Daimler-Benz Director Jakob Werlin, who had known Hitler since the 1920s.
¹⁰⁷

Finally, to complete the picture, several members of Hitler’s staff were also members of the Berghof circle. They included Reich Press Spokesman Otto Dietrich, the commander of Hitler’s SS bodyguards, Sepp Dietrich, and Hitler’s personal assistants Wilhelm Brückner and Julius Schaub. His secretaries Johanna Wolf, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski also took part in the Berghof social life, but there was a fine dividing line between them and the actual guests.
¹⁰⁸
Among the military aides, 29-year-old Colonel Nicolaus von Below enjoyed Hitler’s particular affection. He and his attractive 19-year-old wife Maria were popular guests and were close to the Speers and the Brandts.
¹⁰⁹