Similar testimony comes from Johannes Göhler, the former adjutant to Hermann Fegelein, the liaison officer who married Gretl Braun. In an interview with the British historian David Irving, who for years spared no effort in tracking down Hitler’s letters to Eva Braun, Göhler said that he had flown from Berlin to Berchtesgaden in Hitler’s airplane, a Ju 290, at the end of April 1945, in order to destroy all of Hitler’s private correspondence there. Several hundred handwritten letters to and from Eva Braun were said to be included there, in a footlocker.107 Irving’s interest was piqued and so, years later, he questioned Göhler’s wife, who told him that she had worked for the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) from August 1945 until February 1946, during which time she helped “an American CIC officer pack up Eva Braun’s aforementioned diaries from 1933–1945 as well as her correspondence with Hitler”; she also said that she herself was in possession of letters that Eva Braun had written to Gretl Braun between 1930 and 1932. Finally, she claimed that Eva Braun’s private papers stored at the Berghof were not destroyed in 1945, but rather were in the hands of Robert A. Gutierrez, the former head of the CIC team in Stuttgart. Irving, sensing a sensational find, went to the United States and succeeded in tracking down Gutierrez. He did not, however, discover any private letters of Hitler’s or Eva Braun’s there.108
Eva Braun had actually instructed her sister Gretl in her last letter from Berlin, on April 23, 1945—a week before the double suicide—to take all of “the letters from the Führer” as well as “the copies of [her] replies” to him, which she had bequeathed to her sister in a will of October 26, 1944, and “make a water-resistant packet” and “bury them if need be.” She explicitly insisted: “Please don’t destroy them.” The other private correspondence and “above all the business papers,” on the other hand, Gretl should get rid of immediately. Eva Braun emphasized that “on no account must Heise’s bills be found”—she had remained to the end a regular client of the well-known Berlin fashion designer Annemarie Heise.109 In contrast to Hitler, who tried at the end to completely wipe out any trace of his private life, Eva Braun was trying, with her sister’s help, to ensure that posterity would learn about her relationship with the “Führer” and her life at his side. Her letter from April 23, 1945, reveals a woman who, faced with death, was concerned about her image for posterity. In any case, none of the documents she asked her sister to preserve have been found to this day. It seems reasonable to suppose that Julius Schaub, who arrived at the Berghof on April 25—two days after Eva Braun had written her last letter to her sister—destroyed this correspondence together with Hitler’s papers before Gretl Braun could bring them to safety. The final truth, however, remains unknown.
Nerin E. Gun also reported later that Gretl Braun and Herta Ostermayr had hidden “photograph albums, amateur films, letters, jewelry, and other mementos” in the park of Fischhorn Castle in the Pinzgau region of the state of Salzburg, near Zell am See. In fact, the former SS office of Fischhorn, a subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp, was used around the end of the war as a storage depot for stolen art and other “estates” of the Nazi elite who were going into hiding. There, supposedly, Gretl Braun took into her confidence a “German refugee,” who turned out to be an American “agent,” and Eva Braun’s estate was confiscated by the U.S. Army and sent to Washington. Gun said that he had later “chanced to find” the documents again “in a corner of the American archives.”110 These are primarily the papers, photo albums, and films shot by Eva Braun that are now stored in the National Archives in Washington. There are no letters from Hitler to Eva Braun among them.
It is therefore necessary to turn to other sources to gain insight into the relationship that existed between Hitler and Eva Braun, and any details about that relationship. But there are not many other sources. Hitler’s statements that shed light on his views of women in general, for example, are found mostly in the published postwar memoirs of his former followers or, for the years after 1942, in the records of conversations induced by Martin Bormann. Occasional hints can be found in various other diaries and correspondences. Eva Braun, though, is not mentioned. It is thus difficult to reconstruct their relationship, and the question of what actually attracted Hitler to this young woman can be addressed chiefly by means of his behavior with third parties. It is said of Speer, for example, that Hitler deliberately chose him to be his architect because he was modest, “normal” compared to his other followers, young, and easily influenced, and the notoriously suspicious Hitler could be assured of admiration from Speer, who was sixteen years younger.111 Would these motives not also apply to Hitler’s choice of Eva Braun, the youngest member of the inner circle around him? By reason of her youth alone, and her lower-middle-class background, even aside from the intimacy of their relationship, she must surely have been more pliable than the other members of his retinue.
In this context, only the twenty-page diary fragment in Eva Braun’s papers, written in old-style German handwriting, sheds light on the character of their relationship. It is still controversial, however, whether it was actually written by her or not. While Nerin E. Gun had Ilse Fucke-Michels, Eva Braun’s older sister, check the handwriting to confirm the authenticity of the document in 1967, the editor of Christa Schroeder’s memoirs, Anton Joachimsthaler, claims that the handwriting of the document proves that it is a forgery.112 The historian Werner Maser, meanwhile, maintains that it reveals “more about Hitler’s relationship to women” than most of the interpretations of the “supposedly well-informed biographers.”113 Despite these doubts, or because of them, the “Diary,” as it is called, has inspired all sorts of flights of fancy since its discovery and has been not only the object of scholarly studies but also material for fanciful stories.114
Anna Maria Sigmund has described these jottings as “a mirror of Eva Braun’s psyche,” but what are they actually about? In truth, they are the thoughts of a young woman of twenty-three, usually written down some three weeks after the events described and primarily circling around the irregular comings and goings of her much older lover. We learn that Eva Braun celebrated her birthday, February 6, 1935, in Munich without Hitler. The Chancellor spent the day in Berlin but had Wilma Schaub, the wife of his personal assistant Julius Schaub, send “flowers and a telegram” to his girlfriend at Photohaus Hoffmann.115 At the same time, Hitler apparently continued to play the role of the solitary bachelor in the capital, with the support of his Minister of Propaganda. Goebbels, in any case, who never tired of emphasizing his close friendship with the “Führer” in his “Diaries,” noted down after a conversation with Hitler on February 3: “Big discussion with Führer. Personal…. Talks about women, marriage, love, solitude. He talks that way only with me.” Three days earlier, after a meeting in Hitler’s apartment in the Chancellery, Goebbels recorded that Hitler had told him “about his lonely and joyless private life,” without “women, without love, still filled even now with the memory of Geli.”116