In fact, Friedrich and Franziska Braun had already had to answer such questions in 1947, before a Munich denazification court. These appointed German trial and appellate tribunals and public prosecutors were given the responsibility of “denazifying” Germany under the “Law for Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism” imposed by the American military authorities in 1946. People were classified into the categories of Major Offenders, Offenders (activists, militarists, and profiteers), Lesser Offenders (probationers), Followers, and Persons Exonerated.
The public prosecutors in this case, according to an article called (in German) “Hitler’s In-laws Before the Judge” in the newspaper Die Welt of August 2, 1947, put the “high-school business instructor Fritz Wilhelm Otto Braun and his wife Franziska Katharina” into the category of “Offenders,” that is, according to the law, “activists, militarist, and profiteers.” Eva’s parents were threatened with prison sentences, confiscation of property, and—especially for the father—a ban on employment and the loss of his pension. Fritz Braun, it was claimed, had known about his daughter’s relationship with Hitler, approved of it, and was in fact proud of it. Eva’s mother, too, although never a Party member, was labeled an “activist” by the official prosecutor.32 In the indictment from July 9, 1947, it was stated that the investigations had shown that “the person in question had been proud that daughter Eva was permitted to be the Führer’s lover for all those years. The persons in question felt at home on the Obersalzberg. Since she was a member of the family, she didn’t need to be a member of the Party.”33
Threatened in this way, their very existence under attack—Fritz Braun, fired from public service as a teacher, was struggling along as a carpentry assistant at the time—the Brauns were obviously making every effort to minimize before the judge the intimacy of their daughter’s relationship with Hitler. They stated that Eva Braun had become the dictator’s “housekeeper” in 1933, and that he had “maintained a love affair with her” ever since, on terms that were “never entirely clear, but seemed to be purely platonic.”34 And at a public sitting of the Munich denazification court, on December 1, 1947, Fritz Braun stated:
I do not know when the relationship between my daughter Eva and Hitler started. I first heard about it in 1937, from a Czech newspaper. Until then I had thought she was his secretary.35
The Brauns told Die Welt through their Munich lawyer, Otto Gritschneder, that they planned “to offer proof that they had always been opposed to the relationship between their daughter and Adolf Hitler.” For example, they had allegedly even written a letter to Hitler, explaining that this “sleazy relationship” was not to be endured any longer.36 The letter was, however, “suppressed and never presented” to him. Fritz Braun testified before the denazification court that he had “written a letter to the Führer and pointed out to him that I did not approve of his simply taking my daughter out of our family circle without notifying us.” Braun was, he said, “furious about Hitler.”37
It is doubtful that any such document, which would have exonerated Friedrich and Franziska Braun from the claim that they had been “activists” in the Nazi state or “profiteers” in Hitler’s inner circle, ever existed. The only document that has been supplied as proof comes from the family: a copy, if we believe Gun’s account, of a letter that Friedrich Braun wrote to the Chancellor on September 7, 1935—about a month after his daughter had moved out—and wanted to give to Heinrich Hoffmann so that he could pass it along to Hitler.38 Hoffmann was visiting and photographing the construction projects on Königsplatz in Munich at the time; in accordance with the plans drawn up by Paul Ludwig Troost, who had died the previous year, more than twenty thousand granite slabs were being laid and Nazi emblems being affixed to create a parade square.39 Hitler himself was spending a few days on the Obersalzberg before the start of the NSDAP convention in Nuremberg, as he usually did; he regularly retreated there weeks before such conventions to write his speeches, and he was due to give no fewer than seventeen speeches at the upcoming convention.40
It is therefore entirely possible that Friedrich Braun gave Hoffmann this letter in Munich—a letter in which he asked Hitler “to see to it” that his daughter “return to the family.” But to treat this document, even if it existed, as retrospective proof of a rebellion against Hitler is nonsense. It can only be interpreted as an act of despair. First of all, it never reached its intended recipient, either because it never in fact existed or because Hoffmann and Braun made sure that Hitler never learned about it. Second, the relations between Eva’s parents and Hitler in the years to follow cast serious doubt on the claim that they felt her relationship with Hitler to be a “bitter disgrace.”41
In fact, Eva Braun’s departure from the parental home at the beginning of August 1935 did not mark a break with the family. Rather, Franziska Braun was a welcome guest on the Obersalzberg in the following ten years, and she accompanied her daughter on numerous trips, especially to Italy, but also, in 1938, to Vienna. No conclusions about Franziska Braun’s own personal relationship with Hitler can be drawn—both contemporary witnesses and third-party reports from after the end of the war are lacking. She was, however, the only member of Braun’s family whom Hitler mentioned in his last will and testament, personally dictated on April 29, 1945, a day before his and Eva Braun’s suicide in the bunker. He instructed Martin Bormann, the secretary to whom he gave full powers of executor, to leave everything “that possesses any personal sentimental value, or that is necessary to supporting a petit-bourgeois life,” to his siblings and “likewise especially the mother of my wife” and the “faithful staff.” Franziska Braun thus ranked ahead of Hitler’s blood relatives, on the same level as his loyal companions who had “supported [him] for years through their work.” This emphasis on Eva’s mother is especially noteworthy in that neither of Eva’s two sisters, nor her father, is mentioned in the testament.42
Can we derive from this fact a broken relationship between father and daughter, or Friedrich Braun’s opposition to the Nazi regime itself? The reasons for Hitler’s last instructions remain mysterious. For one thing, Friedrich Braun joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1937. For another, he testified before the court in 1947 that he had believed “to the end” in the “Führer.” He also said in his statement of December 1, 1947, that his daughter would “never have entered a relationship with Hitler… if he had been a bad person.”43 However, his daughter’s personal relationship with Hitler cannot have been the actual reason for his joining the Party. In fact, it is well known that Hitler strictly kept his relatives away from any political activity. For example, according to a statement by his sister, Paula Wolf, he invited every member of the family to the 1929 NSDAP convention in Nuremberg, where they had to promise not to join the Party.44 It therefore seems reasonable to assume that Eva Braun was held to similar rules of conduct and that her not being a member of the Party can be traced back to Hitler’s instructions. This strategy of forestalling any possible private interference in his political activities was typical of Hitler, although the case of his half-sister, Angela Raubal (later Angela Hammitzsch), shows that it clearly did not always work. She seems to have interfered even after her removal from the Obersalzberg, as is clear from a letter to Ilse Hess, and she sent “repeated requests” to government officials and Party organizations—including Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick—to inform them whenever, in her opinion, “something was not proceeding properly.”45