Especially for the period after the Reichstag election of March 5, in which the NSDAP won 43.9 percent of the vote but failed to reach its goal of an absolute majority, Joseph Goebbels’s diary entries document the extent to which Hitler made himself scarce: he hardly ever spent ten days or two weeks in a row in the nation’s capital.78 On the other hand, he extended his stays in Bavaria, for example spending from March 26 to April 4 there, when he drove for several days to his vacation residence on the Obersalzberg. His ministers in Berlin could reach him by telephone, and by the telex service that had just been introduced and was still under construction. Thus Goebbels, now head of the newly created “Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda,” communicated to Hitler in Munich by telegram the call for a general boycott of Jewish businesses on March 27, and made “a report by telephone” the following day “about the effects of the call to boycott.”79 The geographical distance did not affect the fact that Hitler was always kept well informed, and still made all the important decisions himself.80
Week by week, both the social climate and the political landscape of the German Reich were changing. Regulations, laws, and decrees followed one another unceasingly, all leading in the direction of the final destruction of the state governments, the elimination of political opposition, and the removal of Jewish citizens from public life, and all pursuing the goal of making the NSDAP the only power in the Reich. In April alone, no fewer than twelve such regulations went into effect, including the “Reich Governor Law” of April 7 and the “Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service,” announced on the same day, according to which politically suspect civil servants and officials of “non-Aryan heritage” were fired or forcibly retired.81 Still, Hitler himself, as Kershaw notes, was “only minimally active” in the spring of 1933 and “took almost no personal part” in the transformation of the country.82 In April, too, the Chancellor spent the greater part of his time in Munich and its surroundings: he traveled to Munich on April 10, after only five days fulfilling his duties of office in Berlin; then he flew to Berlin on the afternoon of Friday, April 21, only to drive back to Bavaria the next day and stay until Wednesday of the following week.83 It was difficult, in these circumstances, to get into a “work routine.” Rather, as Otto Dietrich (the “Reich Press Chief” and one of Hitler’s constant companions since 1933) wrote later, Hitler had “no ability to distinguish between public and private life,” and conducted “his public business in the middle of his private life and lived a private life in the middle of his official business and official duties.”84
Hitler even sidestepped the celebrations on April 20, 1933, his forty-fourth birthday and the first time his birthday was celebrated throughout the country. While the Chancellor, as Goebbels noted in his diary, tarried “somewhere or another in Bavaria” and could not be reached, the Propaganda Minister organized the “Führer’s Birthday” celebration in Berlin. Following the custom of celebrating the Kaiser’s birthday, the “Führer’s Birthday” was to be celebrated every year, from then until the end of the Nazi dictatorship, with nationwide Party celebrations, commemorations, and marches, becoming a major fixed point in the German holiday calendar.85 It was Goebbels, not Hitler, who attended the ceremony to honor the dictator on that evening of April 20 in the National Playhouse Berlin (today the Konzerthaus Berlin) on the Gendarmenmarkt. There the National Socialist author Hanns Johst, head dramaturge since March 1933 of the legendary former Royal National Theater, premiered Schlageter, a play written by him and dedicated to “Adolf Hitler in loving devotion and unwavering loyalty.”86 A few hours earlier, Goebbels had given a radio address to the public with the title “Our Hitler,” which cast the absent leader as a national hero who had taken up Bismarck’s “work” and was “committed to completing” it, while at the same time remaining a “comrade” and “ordinary person like any other.”87
What was Hitler himself doing while the glorification of his person reached this “new high point”?88 He was strolling around Munich with his entourage, nicknamed the Chauffeureska, visiting his favorite restaurants, the opera, and the theater, and relaxing with close friends in Heinrich Hoffmann’s villa. In addition, he often met with Eva Braun, without letting their relationship turn into a routine or even anything reliable. Ultimately, the existence of a lover with whom he shared “no day-to-day life and no legitimate relationship,” and with whom there was no possibility of feeling a “sense of finality,” the way one would with a wife, was in complete harmony with Hitler’s bohemian, antibourgeois lifestyle.89 He received Eva Braun at his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz, took her to eat at Osteria Bavaria, and invited her to his vacation residence on the Obersalzberg. The young woman spontaneously packed her bags and—officially on assignment from Photohaus Hoffmann—stepped into a chauffeured Mercedes, sent by Hitler, that was waiting on the corner of Türkenstrasse a few yards from the photo shop.90
There is, though, hardly any evidence for these activities aside from the statements of third parties and a few photographs from the period.91 Still, Albert Speer, who had assisted the architect Paul Ludwig Troost (“Architect to the Führer”) since fall 1933 in renovating the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, and who soon joined Hitler’s innermost circle and was regularly brought along to Munich for “architectural discussions,” has painted a memorable picture in Inside the Third Reich of the usual course of Hitler’s stays in Munich. The Chancellor did not pay much attention “to state or Party business during his time in Munich,” Speer wrote, but rather spent his time largely “vagabonding around” on “construction sites, studios, cafes, and restaurants.” After a few days, they would all set out in several cars—convertibles with the tops down if the weather was fine—for the Obersalzberg, to “Hitler’s cozy little wooden house with large overhanging eaves and modest rooms.” Only hours after their arrival, according to Speer, did the secretaries Johanna Wolf and Christa Schroeder arrive, “most of the time along with an ordinary Munich girl.”92 These women’s closed Mercedes was “never allowed to drive in the official motorcades.” Then Hitler would stay, “with Eva Braun, an adjutant, and a servant,” alone “in the small house,” while the secretaries and Hitler’s guests, often including Martin Bormann and Reich Press Chief Otto Dietrich along with Speer, were housed in a nearby pension.93