Alone in the Vestibule of Power
Meanwhile, only a few intimates knew about Hitler’s relationship with Braun, now twenty years old. Hitler himself had erected a “wall of silence” around her. They made no joint public appearances: only once in the twelve years after 1933 were Hitler and Eva Braun seen together in a published news photo, which in fact shows Eva Braun sitting in the second row, behind Hitler, at the Winter Olympics in February 1936 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.48 Nothing in the picture indicates any personal relationship between her and the dictator. Officially, Eva Braun was on the staff of the Berghof as a private secretary.49 The German public learned only shortly before the end of the war that Hitler had lived with a woman and eventually married her, and many people at the time considered this report a mere “latrine rumor.”50
In Hitler’s more immediate environment, on the other hand—among his close colleagues in the Party and their wives, and adjutants and staff members—the relationship between their “Führer” and Eva Braun could not remain a secret. For example, on January 1, 1933, a Sunday evening only a few months after her attempted suicide, she accompanied Hitler to a performance at the Munich Royal Court and National Theater, together with Rudolf Hess and his wife, Ilse; Heinrich Hoffmann and his fiancée, Erna Gröbke; and Hitler’s adjutant Wilhelm Brückner and Brückner’s girlfriend Sofie Stork. Hans Knappertsbusch, the musical director of the Bavarian State Opera House, was directing Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg.51 This opera had premiered on the same stage in 1868, and its performance on New Year’s Day 1933 launched the nationwide celebrations of Wagner on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death on February 13, 1883.
At the same time, only a few streets away from Max-Joseph-Platz and this nationalistic drama about the life and work of the early-modern minnesingers, twenty-seven-year-old Erika Mann was celebrating the premiere of her politico-literary cabaret, “The Peppermill,” in the Bonbonnière, a small, somewhat dilapidated stage near the Hofbräuhaus.52 Erika Mann, here lashing out in supremely entertaining and successful fashion at the main players in the dawning “new age,” was as hated in Munich’s nationalist circles as her father, Thomas Mann. And in fact, the same Hans Knappertsbusch, a prominent representative of Munich’s intellectual life, initiated a “Protest from Munich, the Richard Wagner City” against Thomas Mann, which was published in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten three months later, in April 1933. The occasion was a lecture the writer gave in the purview of the Wagner celebrations at the university, with the title “The Sorrows and Greatness of Richard Wagner.” Knappertsbusch and more than forty cosigners resolutely rejected Mann’s alleged disparagement of Wagner.53
Hitler, too, adored Richard Wagner and his music beyond all measure, and counted upper-class Wagnerians—such as the Munich publisher Hugo Bruckmann and his wife, Elsa, and the Berlin piano manufacturer Edwin Bechstein and his wife, Helene—among his early supporters. Ernst Hanfstaengl, the publisher’s son, moved in these circles as well, and it was in his apartment on Pienzenauer Strasse, by the Herzogpark, that Hitler and his companions concluded their Wagner evening on January 1.54 Eva Braun visited Hanfstaengl for the first time on that night, although he had, as he later reminisced, already noticed her a few months earlier in Hoffmann’s photography shop: “She was a pleasing-looking blonde… well built, with blue eyes and a modest, diffident manner.” On the evening of January 1, he wrote, Hitler was in a “relaxed mood” and “lively and in good spirits, the way he was in the early ’twenties.” According to Hanfstaengl, Hitler said: “This year belongs to us. I will guarantee you that in writing.”55
This harmonious private occasion stood in stark contrast to the precarious political situation at the start of 1933, after the November election. The turnout was lower than in the summer elections and the NSDAP received two million fewer votes, losing 34 of their 230 Reichstag seats. Still, the National Socialists combined with the Communists, who gained votes, took a majority of the seats in the Reichstag, so that, as before, no governing majority in Parliament was possible without the participation of the radical parties. Chancellor Franz von Papen stepped down on November 17, after the failure of his plans to dissolve Parliament, and on December 3 Hindenburg named Kurt von Schleicher, Papen’s minister of defense, the new Chancellor. While Papen and Schleicher jockeyed for power, a leadership crisis broke out within the NSDAP.56 Gregor Strasser—Reich Organization Leader, head of the left wing of the Party, and for years Hitler’s only significant opponent within the Party itself—was willing to form a coalition, as opposed to the uncompromising head of the Party, who aimed solely at exclusive power, and he negotiated with Schleicher about forming a right-wing bloc and participating in the government.57 But he was unable to prevail over Hitler in the Party, and on December 8, Strasser stepped down from all his Party offices. Hitler, as Hinrich Lohse, the once-powerful Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein, recalled after the war, had shown himself “in this toughest test of the movement” to be “the master and Strasser the journeyman.”58
In the following weeks, Hitler not only crushed Strasser’s central command structure within the NSDAP but also laid out again the organizational framework for his “personal” authority based on relationships of personal devotion. The document, from December 15, 1932, is called (in Hitler’s bureaucratic German) “Memorandum Concerning the Inner Reasons for the Instructions to Produce a Heightened Fighting Power of the Movement.” The document states:
The basis of the political organization is loyalty. In loyalty, the recognition of the necessity of obedience for the construction of every human community is revealed as the noblest expression of feeling…. Loyalty and devotion in obedience can never be replaced by formal, technical measures and institutions of any type.59
Hitler was here demanding from the members of his party—especially the Gauleiters, or regional leaders, who formed its foundation—absolute loyalty. Any deviation from his dogma of devotion meant for him a delegitimizing of his claim to be the “Führer,” or “Leader,” and therefore could not be tolerated. In fact, Hitler was laying claim to what Max Weber once categorized as “charismatic authority.” In such a system of authority, according to Weber’s typology, there is only the leader and the disciples, and the leader is obeyed “purely personally… on the basis of the leader’s exceptional personal qualities,” so long as his “leadership quality,” his “charisma” and “heroism,” can constantly be established and reestablished. Competence, expertise, and privilege play no more of a role than does reliance on traditional bonds.60 Hitler himself spoke of the “fanatic apostles” who were necessary in order to spread the Nazi worldview.61