The twenty-year-old Ilse Pröhl here formulated, unambiguously and conclusively, her belief in the fundamental ethos of a party that at that point was only one of many Populist-nationalist groups in Munich. And its anti-Semitism presented, as her letter makes clear, a foundation of the Nazi ideology with which she had no problem. She and Rudolf Hess, convinced that striving for socialism on a national basis included “in an entirely intrinsic way the struggle against Judaism,” made their support of Hitler, whom they called “the Tribune,” their raison d’être. Ilse Hess, who after the war insisted that she had been “always passive, as a woman,” was thus in truth an activist from the beginning. Her letters, which are now available to researchers, offer a glimpse that is otherwise hard to come by into the world of the wives of the Nazi leaders and their ideas at the time.
When Hitler was imprisoned in Landsberg after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 8–9, 1923—in which Hess had taken part as well—and started writing his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Ilse Pröhl was once again there to help him. The youthfully romantic student sent her boyfriend Hess, who was with Hitler in Landsberg prison, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Elegies as inspiration for Hitler. Hitler, though, apparently could make little headway with Hölderlin’s poetry, with its oscillations between hope and lament conjuring up the certainty of mankind’s renewal. Hitler liked the “type area,” Hess reported, but “he did not have much understanding of the elegies.”57 Ilse Pröhl also worked with Josef Stolzing-Cerny, the editor and cultural critic of the Völkischer Beobachter, as a reader of Hitler’s manuscript, and helped with the final version in 1925. It is unlikely, in contrast, that Rudolf Hess took part. Hitler assigned him to work on the corrections, but Hess apparently passed that work along to his girlfriend.58
After her marriage to Hess on December 20, 1927—he had meantime become Hitler’s “private secretary” and one of his closest friends—Ilse also corresponded with publishers and Party leaders and their wives, including the Goebbels and Göring families. The correspondence gives the impression of a very familiar, cooperative relationship, with, for example, gifts exchanged on holidays. Hess was the eccentric minister without portfolio, subordinate only to Hitler himself, and the “Deputy Führer” in Party affairs, while his wife, Ilse Hess, worked to maintain relationships and mediate any conflicts that arose. For example, she wrote to Heinrich Himmler, who took over the office of Munich chief of police in 1933, with the salutation “Most honored of all Chiefs of Police!” and continued in a humorously cryptic tone that he had “the surely praiseworthy habit” of “monitoring enemies of the Fatherland.” But why was he also keeping “upstanding ministers” under surveillance and pestering them with “ridiculous surveillance noises on the telephone”? If he was not the “wrongdoer” himself, perhaps he might be able to “look into what she suspected” was happening.59
Unlike Emmy Göring, Ilse Hess was also in contact with Eva Braun. It cannot be determined when they met, or whether their connection included personal meetings or took place entirely by letter. It is certain, though, that Hitler’s girlfriend was among those who received Christmas presents from Ilse Hess, for which Eva Braun gave warm thanks in a letter addressed “Dear Madam.”60 Like the other “First Ladies of the Third Reich,” Ilse Hess also played a public role, admittedly a smaller one than that played by Magda Goebbels. Pictures of Ilse Hess and her son Wolf Rüdiger Hess, Hitler’s godson, appeared in newspapers such as the high-circulation Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. And until her husband flew to Scotland in a fighter plane on a wayward mission on May 10, 1941, “Madame Reich Minister” employed no fewer than two secretaries of her own to keep the flood of correspondence under control. Even after Hess’s mission, as “apparently persona non grata,” she maintained contacts and remained, as she told the writer Hans Grimm in November 1944, “unswervingly true to the law… according to which we lined up under the Führer’s banner in 1920.” Until the very end, the idea that her husband “would stand once more at the Führer’s side as one of his most faithful followers” remained for her a “wonderful dream.”61
Eva Braun’s Role
In 1933, Eva Braun turned twenty-one and legally became an adult. The problems in her relationship with Hitler continued to be the unsettled situation and their lack of time together. But it is impossible to tell when and how often she and Hitler saw each other in his early years as Chancellor, from 1933 to 1935. Nevertheless, the biographical accounts up to now, based on the contents of a diary that Eva Braun allegedly kept between February 6 and May 28, 1935, claim that they were often together during these years.62 In fact, Goebbels’s notes also show that Hitler, even in the months after he was named Reich Chancellor, spent most of his time in Munich. For example, in February 1933 he spent half his time in the Bavarian capital.63 While the “transfer of power” in Berlin was turning into what the Nazis themselves called a “seizure of power”—with Hitler immediately arranging for President Hindenburg to dissolve the Reichstag, call new elections for March 5, and impose the emergency measures “For the Protection of the German People,” which led to massive limits on freedom of the press and freedom of assembly—the head of the NSDAP was flying to his favorite city for several days every week. And Eva Braun—at least according to the postwar testimony of Hitler’s housekeeper, who was living with him on Prinzregentenplatz—“was there every time Hitler was there.” She was “sometimes taken home at night,” but occasionally spent the night “in the house too.”64
Hitler thus largely withdrew from the electoral campaign that was actually entirely about him, and in which he was cast, more than ever before, as a kind of mythical redeemer. The NSDAP, meanwhile, especially in Berlin, was intimidating and persecuting political opponents with all of the means at its disposal, including arbitrary arrests and violent attacks by the SA.65 Late on the night of February 3, for example, Hitler traveled to Munich after announcing to high-ranking army officers an unprecedented rearmament at a sitting of the army leadership on the Bendlerstrasse (today the Bendlerblock). On the morning of February 5, a Sunday, following the “state burial” staged by Goebbels in the Berlin Cathedral to honor the SA thug Hans Eberhard Maikowski, who had been killed on January 30, Hitler left the capital again in order to celebrate Eva Braun’s twenty-first birthday with her the next day, February 6.66 Eleven days later, on February 17, Hitler flew to Munich again after an election speech in Dortmund and spent the weekend.67 Four days later, on February 23, after a campaign appearance in Frankfurt, Hitler left for Bavaria for five days, remaining there until February 27—on the evening of which, the Reichstag burned.68
Why was the Chancellor spending so much time in Munich? Was Eva Braun the reason? And how did he justify his frequent absences from the seat of government? The truth was that Hitler, despite his conspicuous political rise to power, had no intention of giving up the bohemian lifestyle that he had led up until then. Rudolf Hess’s announcement of “new time management” a day after taking power in the government was somewhat premature: the “Führer,” Hess enthusiastically wrote to his wife Ilse on January 31, was suddenly punctual and even “always a few minutes early,” so that he, Hess, now “even had to buy a watch.”69 However, Hitler, well known for never being on time, remained restless and erratic.70 Berlin never became the center of his life. At first, he still lived in the Hotel Kaiserhof there; later, during renovations to his apartment in the Old Reich Chancellery, he stayed in the rooms “on the second floor of the office building” of his State Secretary, Hans Heinrich Lammers.71 In Bavaria, on the other hand, he bought the apartment in Munich that he had rented until then, at 16 Prinzregentenplatz, as well as the small Haus Wachenfeld on the Obersalzberg,72 both in 1933. In the Reichstag election of March 5, he campaigned for the seat he needed in Parliament not in Berlin but in District 24, Upper Bavaria/Swabia73—although whether or not he threw himself “with all his strength into the election battle,” as is usually claimed, is certainly doubtful.74 He had his head of propaganda spread the information that he was living “simply, like any other member of the People,” and that he had “no pleasures and no relaxation other than his work and his task.” He himself stated in an interview with the German actor Tony van Eyck after the election, in answer to the question of whether he was happy: “Happy? How can someone be happy with such immensely difficult tasks standing before him? Hopeful, yes—that I certainly am!”75 But the picture painted by Hitler and Goebbels of the “Führer” living a life of renunciation and hardship, overcoming “by some miracle” all “bodily and spiritual strains,” bore no relation to the truth.76 Rather, the first few months of Hitler’s chancellorship already showed that Berlin was primarily the “stage” on which the Nazi propaganda would perform the “cult of the Führer,” while Hitler the actual person simply disappeared unnoticed.77 Tranquil Munich and its surroundings remained his private retreat, a fact largely kept hidden from the public.
7
Obersalzberg, January 2
Dear Madam,
Thank you very much for your lovely Christmas present. I was very happy to get it.
We have been at the Berghof since the first day of Christmas and are hard at work skiing. Charlie (Stark) has already broken his foot and has to stay in bed for 3 weeks. Still, we have not stopped skiing, to the Führer’s horror; he prophesies the same fate for all of us.
Has little Muck settled in? I hope he is not disgracing his worthy parents.
I wish you a very good New Year, madam, and your husband as well.
Best regards!
Yours