In his private life, though, Hitler’s mercilessness had led to another catastrophe. For three long months, from early March to late May, Eva Braun had waited for her lover to spend time with her as usual, or even for a “good word” from him, as she wrote in her diary. But Hitler wouldn’t see her. He was working feverishly on an “alliance with England,” to fracture the existing international treaties and end Germany’s international isolation. “Love seems not to be on his agenda at the moment,” Braun noted on April 29.
But there seemed to be, or actually were, personal reasons keeping Hitler in Berlin as welclass="underline" a “love affair” with Baroness Sigrid von Laffert was imputed to him, and he was in poor health. The rumor of a romance (platonic, however) with Sigrid von Laffert, a young relative of Viktoria von Dirksen, was circulating in Berlin throughout the spring.135 Von Dirksen, the widow of Willibald von Dirksen, secret legations counsel under the Kaiser, was an avowed Nazi and a supporter of Hitler’s for many years; her salon on Margaretenstrasse, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, was the most important meeting point where the old nobility and prominent National Socialists made contact. Her brother, the Mecklenburg landowner Karl August von Laffert, was among the many aristocrats who joined the elite, cultlike SS in spring 1933, and he provided the organization with financial support and trained managerial staff.136
It is thus hardly surprising that Viktoria von Dirksen provided access to the Nazi elite to the nineteen-year-old relative living with her in Berlin. The young woman had herself spent the year 1932–1933 in the “Alliance of German Maidens” (Bund Deutscher Mädel, or BDM), the girls’ branch of the Hitler Youth—which was not yet obligatory—and she would join the NSDAP in 1938.137 The young blonde was, the servant Heinz Linge later said, one of the “most beautiful women” around Hitler, and Hitler invited her to “all festive occasions.” For example, she appeared amid the Nazi leadership on May 1, 1934, when a “National Day of Celebration of the German People,” designed by the government to allude to a German popular spring festival, was conducted in an enormous propaganda spectacle at Tempelhof Field. As one of the women who represented the government in public, she did have a certain importance, a fact of which Hitler was clearly aware: he selected such candidates personally, with an eye to their visual effect.138 As late as March 1939, Laffert was among the guests invited to a state dinner in the Chancellor’s residence.139 It is certainly possible that Eva Braun in Munich, forbidden from such appearances, heard about the rumors going around Berlin in early 1935.
In addition, Hitler’s health was in poor shape. Since the start of the year he had suffered from nervous tinnitus at night and hoarseness, and was afraid of dying of throat cancer, as the German emperor Friedrich III had in 1888. On May 23, 1935, only two days after his second so-called Peace Address in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, which had attracted attention abroad as well (in it, he finally paved the way for German-English alliance talks), he underwent an operation in the Reich Chancellery. The doctor who treated him, Carl Otto von Eicken, a professor at the Charité in Berlin and an expert on throat cancer, removed a polyp from the vocal folds and recommended four weeks of recovery. Years later, an article in Time magazine dated November 14, 1938, reported an interview with Eicken, who was at a convention in Philadelphia, and stated that the simple medical procedure had given rise to great concern at the time. Hitler, after being given anesthetics, had slept for fourteen hours straight.140 Hitler waited three months before he spoke again in public, in Rosenheim on August 11, 1935.
Under political stress and in impaired health as he was, it is hardly surprising that Hitler did not find time for the young Munich girl. But Eva Braun clearly took his behavior personally. On May 28, five days after his operation and while the Chancellery was working full steam preparing for the upcoming German-English arms negotiations, Eva Braun, for the second time in three years, attempted suicide in Munich. This time it was not her father’s revolver but an overdose of sleeping pills that was supposed to, as her diary-fragment put it, “make ‘dead sure’ ” of the situation.141
Did Braun really want to die? Was it an act of despair or a blackmail attempt? She had, if we believe the “Diary,” sent Hitler a “decisive” letter on the day of the attempt, but the question of whether the letter told him of her suicide must remain unanswered since the letter no longer exists and there is no other evidence for its having existed. In any case, the events of May 28, 1935, remain unclear. The suicide attempt is attested to only in Nerin E. Gun’s account, based on an interview with the Braun family but not documented with a historian’s thoroughness. According to Gun, Ilse Braun, as in Eva’s first suicide attempt, found Eva unconscious that night. She gave first aid and called a doctor. It was also Ilse Braun who found her sister’s diary on this occasion and removed the relevant pages, in order to keep the second suicide attempt and its causes secret. There is no mention of this incident in the memoir literature. Whether Hitler himself, who was in Munich at the time, ever even heard about it is not recorded.142 The events of the following months, however, suggest that he did.
6. THE MYTH OF THE “FÜHRER,” OR HERR HITLER IN PRIVATE
The first piece of circumstantial evidence in this regard is the fact that Eva Braun moved out of her parents’ house on August 9, 1935, and with her sister Gretl and a Hungarian maid moved into a three-bedroom apartment at 42 Widenmayerstrasse, rented for her by Heinrich Hoffmann. Hitler, whose apartment on Prinzregentenplatz was only five minutes away, had suggested the arrangement and paid for the apartment via his agent, Hoffmann.1 By giving Eva Braun material support and thereby giving her a clear sign of his affection, Hitler was obviously trying to avoid wider attention and especially the scandal that would certainly have been unavoidable after a successful suicide attempt on his lover’s part. He also allowed her closer contact with him. She was even permitted to appear at public events, which until then she had been strictly forbidden to attend.
At the 1935 Party Convention in Nuremberg