Martyrdom or Calculation?
During this politically decisive period, there was no time for Hitler to see his young Munich girlfriend regularly. In any case, the NSDAP leader was often in Berlin, where since February 1931 he regularly stayed in a suite at the legendary Hotel Kaiserhof at 4 Wilhelmplatz (formerly Ziethenplatz), across the street from the Reich Chancellery. The hotel was the first luxury hotel in the city, opened in 1875 and three years later one of the showpieces of the 1878 Congress of Berlin, which took place under the leadership of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Since the early 1920s, the hotel management had sympathized with the right-wing nationalist forces operating against the Weimar state, so it was no coincidence that the top floor of the hotel turned into the NSDAP’s provisional headquarters.33
Despite his frequent absences, there is no evidence for the claim that Hitler wanted “an undemanding short-term relationship” with Eva Braun at first any more than there is for the opposite claim.34 It is documented in numerous sources, however, that the twenty-year-old woman tried to take her own life with her father’s gun at some point during the course of 1932. Witnesses from Hitler’s circle as well as members of the Braun family reported this fact after the war, although there are differing accounts of exactly what happened and when. Hoffmann wrote in his postwar recollections that Eva Braun did not show up at work one “summer morning” in 1932, and that he heard about her suicide attempt that afternoon from his brother-in-law, Dr. Wilhelm Plate. Eva Braun had called Plate in the middle of the night, according to Hoffmann, since she was getting “scared” after her gunshot wound.35 Hoffmann did not explain how she would have been in a position to make such a phone call, since her parents did not have a phone in their house at 93 Hohenzollernstrasse at that time; nor is it clear why, wounded and panicking, she would try to reach her boss’s brother-in-law, of all people. Is it not far more likely that she would turn to Hoffmann himself on that night, who would then in turn reach out to his brother-in-law, the doctor in the family, for advice? Another implausible element in Hoffmann’s version of events is the claim that he informed Hitler about the dramatic events only when Hitler happened to drop by the photo shop that afternoon.36 Hoffmann’s account is thus not reliable—what it shows is primarily Hoffmann’s own intent to conceal the extent of his role in the relationship between Eva Braun and Hitler.
Hoffmann’s son-in-law, Baldur von Schirach, has left a more plausible account, which also gives a precise date for the incident—despite the fact that he must have heard about what happened from Hoffmann or Dr. Plate. He says that Eva Braun’s first suicide attempt took place on the night of August 10–11, 1932. According to Schirach, Hitler received a farewell note from Eva Braun on the morning of August 11—shortly before his planned departure from the Obersalzberg to Berlin—and immediately postponed the trip. That evening, he met with Dr. Plate in Hoffmann’s Munich apartment, where Plate told him about Braun’s injuries and Hitler said to Hoffmann that he wanted to take care of “the poor child.” Only on the following day, Friday, August 12, did he finally leave for Berlin.37
These statements agree with Goebbels’s notes. Under the date of August 11/12, Goebbels wrote that Hitler was on the Obersalzberg early on the morning of August 11, and that Hitler and he traveled together to a meeting in Prien on the Chiemsee (a lake nearby). “In the afternoon,” the two men continued to Munich, where Hitler went to his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz; while Goebbels took the night train to Berlin, Hitler stayed in Munich. “The Führer,” Goebbels noted, “will come later by car.” They met up again only at 10 p.m. on August 12, in Caputh, to discuss the Nazi leader’s upcoming meeting with President Hindenburg.38
A third, completely different version is Nerin E. Gun’s, for which he gives Ilse Braun as the source. This version dates the suicide attempt to the night of November 1–2, 1932. On that night, says Ilse Braun according to Gun, she found her sister Eva by chance, alone in her cold, unheated apartment, covered in blood, on the bed in their parents’ bedroom, while their parents were away on a trip. Despite her injury, Eva Braun was conscious and had herself called a doctor to take her to the hospital. “The bullet had lodged just near the neck artery,” in Ilse Braun’s exact words according to Gun, “and the doctor had no difficulty in extracting it. Eva had taken my father’s 6.35 mm caliber pistol, which he normally kept in the bedside table beside him.”39 In this account, it is unclear (to say the least) where Eva Braun could have telephoned from; the date in early November is also significantly different from Hoffmann’s and Schirach’s accounts. Nevertheless, the events could indeed have played out like this, as we can see from a closer examination of Hitler’s schedule.
The Nazi leader was in the middle of an exhausting campaign trip at the time, and undertaking his fourth “Germany flight” between October 11 and November 5. The Reichstag elections of July 1932 had not solved the problem of the Weimar Republic’s inability to govern, but only led to a further weakening of the forces of democracy in the parliament, so that Hindenburg’s Chancellor, Franz von Papen, was defeated by the second sitting of the newly elected Reichstag, on September 12. The Communist Party’s motion of no confidence, supported by the NSDAP and all the other major parties, had toppled the government. The Reichstag was thus dissolved, for the second time in the space of a year; the requisite new elections were called for November 6. Now it was up to the National Socialists and their “Führer” to mobilize the masses even more forcefully and finally emerge from the election as the absolute victors.40
On the evening of November 1, 1932, after giving election speeches that day in Pirmasens and Karlsruhe, Hitler first flew back to Berlin, where he was to speak at a large rally in the sports stadium on the following evening.41 He would have heard about the incident in Munich that same night, and left the capital in the early morning hours of November 2.42 Goebbels was at a rally that night in Schönebeck, south of Magdeburg, until 1 a.m., and arrived in Berlin at around 4 a.m.; he noted curtly in his diary: “To Berlin…. 4 a.m. arrival. Hitler just gone.”43 Together with Hoffmann and an adjutant, according to Gun, Hitler was chauffeured to Munich so that he could visit Eva Braun in the hospital on the morning of November 2. Hoffmann accompanied Hitler to the hospital, where he expressed doubt about the seriousness of Braun’s suicide attempt in the presence of the attending physician. After the physician explained that Braun had “aimed at her heart,” Hitler is said to have remarked to Hoffmann: “Now I must look after her,” because something like this “mustn’t happen again.”44
Although the precise details remain unknown, witnesses and historians agree that Eva Braun felt abandoned and calculatedly acted to make the perpetually absent Hitler notice her, and to tie him more closely to her.45 She is said to have intentionally summoned Hoffmann’s brother-in-law, Dr. Plate, rather than her sister’s friend, Dr. Marx, to ensure that Hitler would immediately hear about the incident from his personal photographer.46 In truth, only a year after Hitler’s stepniece Geli Raubal’s suicide and in the middle of his political battle for the chancellorship, whose success was closely bound up with the “Führer cult” around him, the NSDAP could not afford a new scandal that opened up Hitler’s personal life to public discussion once more. He thus had to bring under control a relationship he had apparently misjudged. From then on, in this version of events, a tight bond grew out of the hitherto rather loose relationship with Eva Braun. Heinrich Hoffmann wrote after the war that Hitler told him then that he “realized from the incident that the girl really loved him,” and that he “felt a moral obligation to care for her.”47 About his own feelings, in contrast, it seems that the “Führer” had nothing to say.