We can infer from Eva Braun’s “Diary” that she herself had never yet been to Berlin. But a visit to the capital, and to see Hitler’s renovated office and living space at the Old Reich Chancellery, did seem planned for the near future.117 Paul Ludwig Troost, with his wife, the architect Gerhardine “Gerdy” Troost, and his colleague Leonhard Gall, had started work on the new design for the “Führer apartment” in 1933 and had moved the formal reception rooms from the second floor to the ground floor so that a private office room for Hitler, a bedroom with bathroom, and, later, living quarters for Eva Braun, could be set up on the second floor.118
According to the “Diary,” Hitler did not see his girlfriend until February 11, and then again on February 18, when he apparently told her that he did not want her to work at his friend Hoffmann’s photography business anymore and that he wanted to give her a “little house.” It would be “marvelous” not to have to “play the part of a shopgirl” anymore, Braun remarked.119 Twelve days later, on the evening of Saturday, March 2, their next meeting took place in Hitler’s apartment at 16 Prinzregentenplatz.120 If we are to trust the entry, she spent “two marvelously beautiful hours with him until midnight” there. Afterward—with, she emphasized, Hitler’s “permission”—Braun amused herself alone until 2 a.m. at the Munich city “ball”: the great masquerade ball in the German Theater that took place every year for Fasching (Mardi Gras). It was the most glittering event of the season.121 On Sunday, Hitler suddenly took the train back to Berlin “without saying goodbye,” so that his lover and his personal photographer, who had hurried to the train station after him, arrived “just in time to see the rear lights of the last coach.” Eva Braun had waited in vain for word from Hitler, despite calling the Osteria Bavaria and spending the afternoon waiting at Hoffmann’s “like a cat on hot bricks” and hoping that Hitler would accept Hoffmann’s invitation to “coffee and supper.”122
While the young woman “rack[ed her] brains” over why her lover would have hurried off so early without saying goodbye to her, Hitler was awaiting British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon’s upcoming visit to Berlin, planned for March 7. Germany had been isolated internationally after Hitler’s government had come to power and had unexpectedly withdrawn from the League of Nations. England, France, Austria, and even Italy under Benito Mussolini had protested the aggressive German foreign policy toward Austria and the unconcealed rearmament efforts of the National Socialists. The British government did, however, seem amenable to negotiations, although it announced an increase in military spending shortly before the meeting, with the justification that the German rearmament could “lead to a jeopardizing of the peace.”123 As a result, Hitler postponed the planned meeting with Simon on the spot and announced over all the German radio stations, on March 16, a reintroduction of the general draft and the raising of thirty-six divisions—in other words, the recruiting of more than half a million German soldiers.124 This was in open defiance of the Versailles Treaty.
That same day, Eva Braun wrote that it was “normal” that Hitler “shouldn’t take a great interest in [her] at the moment with everything that’s going on in politics.” Hitler had spent the whole week leading up to March 15 in Bavaria, but had returned to Berlin without, as he usually did, seeing her.125 She had waited desperately for him, and even stood watch on Monday in the middle of a crowd of curious onlookers in front of the Hotel Carlton in Schwabing to see him congratulate the movie star Anny Ondra, wife of the German boxing idol Max Schmeling, with a bouquet of flowers, for Schmeling’s victory over the American Steve Hamas in a qualifying match for the world championship.126 Eva Braun had met Ondra the previous year, when Hitler invited her and her husband to have a coffee in Franz Xaver Schwarz’s house on the Tegernsee over Pentecost weekend, presumably on May 20, 1934. Schwarz, the powerful National Treasurer of the NSDAP, cultivated familiar relations with Hitler. So on this occasion, Eva Braun, too, along with Hitler, Hoffmann (a friend of Schmeling’s), Schaub, and Brückner, sat in the garden around the coffee table. Schmeling wrote in his Erinnerungen (Autobiography) that he noticed this unknown young woman because she “spoke entirely naturally and obviously very familiarly with Hitler, despite all her outward modesty.” When he tried to find out from Hoffmann who she was, Hoffmann was secretive at first but then told Schmeling her name, nothing more, and said that she was an employee of his.127
Hitler and the Nazi leadership made considerable propagandistic use of Schmeling’s sports successes; for his part, after his knockout win in Hamburg on March 10, 1935, Schmeling gave the Hitler salute in the ring in front of twenty-five thousand spectators.128 The “dream couple” of Schmeling and Ondra had already shot a film together—Knock-out—Ein Junges Mädchen, Ein Junger Mann (Knock-out—A Young Girl, A Young Man)—that had premiered in German theaters a few days earlier, on March 1. Hitler quite consciously made use of their popularity—just a few days before the coup with its foreign-relations risks—to promote the identification of the masses with the Nazi state. He thereby satisfied German society’s need for national greatness and at the same time demonstrated to the world Germany’s renewed strength and readiness to fight, which Schmeling had so impressively proven. The decision, made by Hitler alone, to defy the military limitations of the Versailles Treaty and thus “thumb his nose at Versailles,” as the American foreign correspondent William L. Shirer put it, won enormous popularity for the National Socialist government. Unhappy Eva Braun, jealously fearing the end of her relationship, had no idea about any of this.129
Two weeks later, when she was among the group of Munich friends whom Hitler invited to dinner at the posh Four Seasons hotel on March 31, 1935, the event itself did not warrant a single line in her diary. She and Hitler had not met in private even once in the intervening month, so she would hardly have felt honored by a semiofficial group invitation to the hotel that Hitler liked to use for celebrations, and where the Populist and anti-Semitic Thule Society had its offices as well.130 On the contrary, she felt oppressed by the need “to sit beside him for three hours without being able to say a single word to him.” Her tenacious waiting for “a line of greeting or a kind word” from him was also to be once again disappointed: when Hitler said goodbye, he merely handed her “an envelope with some money inside as he had already done once before.”131 In the years that followed, too, Hitler occasionally supplied her with cash in this way. Speer told Joachim Fest that Hitler, after dining at the Four Seasons on another occasion in 1938 with “members of the Berghof crowd and upper-level Party members,” had given Eva Braun an “envelope,” “in passing” and “more businesslike than anything else.” Speer seemed “openly outraged,” even decades later, at the low opinion of Eva Braun that this behavior of Hitler’s expressed, especially the contrast between it and Hitler’s “Viennese” manners with women in general; the gesture reminded Speer of something you would see in “American gangster films.”132
Hitler, meanhwile, had every reason to be in a celebratory and generous mood at the end of March 1935. The visit from British Foreign Secretary Simon and Lord Privy Seal Anthony Eden on March 25 and 26 had been a gratifying success, despite Germany’s open violation of the Versailles Treaty. Hitler had confidently given long explanations to his patiently listening guests, justifying the necessity of German rearmament, a topic that had been “absolutely taboo for years” at the meetings of the League of Nations in Geneva.133 The aristocratic and reconciliatory restraint of the British, who even declared themselves open to a naval treaty in later negotiations, gave the Nazi leaders another great foreign-policy success and gain in prestige, as had the plebiscite of January 13, 1935, in which 91 percent of the population of the Saar had voted for reunification with Germany. Hitler’s ruthless foreign policy was rewarded with Great Britain’s acknowledgment of a de facto revision of the Versailles Treaty.134