Speer’s look back at the early years of his close friendship with Hitler portrays the Nazi leader in stark contrast to the way the “cult of the Führer” propaganda presented him; he describes a man in a light-blue linen jacket, in a remote, isolated mountain cabin, spending his days perusing construction plans or on long walks in the forest and his nights with his young lover.94 Eva Braun, in turn, is described as an ordinary, nice, pretty, unassuming girl. Her relationship to Hitler is given only one brief, disparaging mention. According to Speer, Hitler and Eva Braun kept, even in this circle of close friends on the Obersalzberg, a “pointless distance from each other that came across as tense,” avoiding any displays of intimacy on the one hand (to the point that Eva Braun was only allowed to walk “behind both the secretaries at the end of the procession” on their hikes), but “disappearing together into the upstairs bedroom” at the end of the night. Conflicts that arose from Eva Braun’s “ambiguous position in Hitler’s court,” as Speer called it, are meanwhile hinted at only very briefly, such as when Speer writes that the Munich girl kept her distance from everybody and that this “withdrawn type of behavior” was held against her by many people as arrogance.95
This portrayal of Eva Braun, on the whole positive and even respectful, is noticeably different from the largely harsh and derogatory descriptions of her from other members of the inner circle. Only Karl Brandt, the young doctor who became Hitler’s personal physician at age thirty in 1934, described Braun in similarly positive terms. Under questioning from the Americans by whom he was being held as a prisoner of war in 1945, he stated that he had “seen [Eva Braun] with Hitler for several years” before he realized “who and what she was.” She had never “pushed herself into the foreground,” always staying “in her place.”96 The Hitler-Braun relationship seemed not to have been an “open secret,” at least in the years before 1936. However, Brandt’s statements and especially Speer’s remarks indicate that, by 1934 at the latest, Eva Braun was a regular guest on the Obersalzberg.97
But is Speer, passing judgment such a long time after the fact, a reliable source? Doubts are in order—as indeed, in principle, they are in order with any eyewitness report. Numerous scholars in recent years have expressed reservations about the historical reliability of Speer’s Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries, finding them to be “later, fictional constructions” in which Speer was demonstrably trying to minimize his involvement with Nazi crimes and to present the more positive, elevated image he had of himself.98 The first of these points holds true, to a greater or lesser degree, of all of the surviving Nazis’ postwar publications, the second point for most writers of memoirs in general. Nonetheless, eyewitness statements are not worthless. They only require constant critical testing and analysis.
Speer’s description of the past remains informative, especially since he spent over a decade as one of Hitler’s most trusted colleagues. Speer’s oldest son, also named Albert and also an architect, even told the film director and author Heinrich Breloer that there was “a very genuine, deep, emotional relationship on both sides” between his father and Hitler.99 Speer himself, in a letter to his friend and former colleague Rudolf Wolters about his relationship with Hitler, wrote:
I had a split relationship to Hitler…. It is probably typical of most friendships that they are built on contradictions. With Hitler I never once had the feeling that I had found a friend in him. Maybe it seemed different to you, from the outside. I was constantly living “in the fear of the Lord”—it was not easy to deal with him and stay in his favor or even, if possible, intensify it.100
In his memoir, Speer claims to have come “completely under the sway of Hitler” but never to have known Hitler’s “real face.” Rather, he had followed him “unwillingly, almost unconsciously, into a world” that was “actually quite alien” to him.101 Speer thereby casts himself not only as an outsider who was led astray, but as an addict, dependent and even possessed from without—a position he grants also to Eva Braun, seven years younger than he was when the barely thirty-year-old architect apparently struck up a close and trusting friendship with her. In an interview with Joachim Fest, Speer explained the reasons for his friendly relations with Hitler’s lover by saying that they were both equally prisoners of their emotions, even enslaved: “She was, like me, under Hitler’s so to speak hypnotic spell. We both suffered under him, hated him at times, but were still unable to break free of him.”102
Now, does this retroactively negative account of Hitler, which elevates him to a kind of Mephistopheles figure in the interest of Speer’s own self-justification, obstruct a clear view of Eva Braun as well?103 Does it not present her, like Speer himself, as less self-sufficient, more dependent, and more passive than she really was? Did she share the political positions and basic worldview of her lover or was she really the mere “tragic slave,” who nonetheless profited from Hitler’s power by enjoying the luxurious life that he offered her? In any case, Speer, unlike those who continued to hold fast to their respect for Hitler after 1945 and remained true believers in the cult of the “Führer,” had no need to minimize Eva Braun’s significance. He thus remains, despite all of his strategies of mythification and self-exoneration, a key witness, due to his extraordinary personal closeness with both Hitler and Eva Braun.104
The “Diary”
Meanwhile, hardly any letters or personal documents exist from the dictator himself or from his companion of many years that shed any light on the nature of their relationship, or Eva Braun’s role, or how she saw her role. It is well known that Hitler rarely wrote private letters, aside from thank-you notes or birthday cards. His secretary Christa Schroeder, in fact, stated immediately after the end of the war that he had considered it “his great strength” that “even in the years of struggle he wrote no letters.” Such letters might have fallen “into the wrong hands” and been “exploited.”105 He also, before his suicide, made sure to destroy the greater part of his private correspondence, of which there was presumably little to begin with. Julius Schaub, his adjutant of many years, left the bunker in Berlin for this reason at the end of April 1945, on direct orders from Hitler, in order to burn the private letters and files stored in safes at both Hitler’s Munich apartment and at the Berghof.106