In any case, the Speers’ conduct leaves no doubt that they made every effort to be included at the Berghof. Albert Speer paints the picture in his memoir that the “bustle” there was “ruinous” for his work, the daily routine “tiring,” and the circle of acquaintances collected there “boring.” Nonetheless, he “spent endless time” with Hitler, as he himself said, and was “almost at home in his private circle.” He and his wife “stayed longer at the Berghof with Hitler than in our old frame house.”8 Speer, always acutely conscious of power, records very precisely who was enjoying Hitler’s favor at any given time, so it is surprising and noteworthy that he took Eva Braun to be the indicator of how much influence a person around Hitler had.
For example, in Speer’s account it was a “privilege” to escort “Eva Braun to the table; she usually sat at Hitler’s left.” “From about 1938,” only Martin Bormann enjoyed this distinction, a fact that “in itself,” according to Speer, “was proof of Bormann’s dominant position in the court.”9 Speer never offers an explanation of why the Führer’s girlfriend—whom he later portrays as despised, humiliated, draped in cheap jewelry, and entirely uninterested in politics—possessed such importance at the Berghof. But as early as the summer of 1945, under interrogation by Allied officers at Kransberg Castle in the Taunus, he had hinted at Eva Braun’s “possibilities, i.e., using the power she had within the inner circle,” according to Speer. She had, Speer said, “been able to exploit… her position just like A.H.’s prominent colleagues.”10 Even this comparison with Hitler’s “prominent colleagues” shows what a leading role Eva Braun played, in Speer’s view. His statements justify the assumption that Eva Braun, not long after stabilizing her relationship with Hitler, took on a central position within the Berghof circle.
In this context, Eva Braun’s relationships with the other guests at the Berghof, the staff, and not least the Speers, takes on a whole new significance. The question arises whether Speer’s kind treatment of Braun actually arose, as he later claimed, solely “out of sympathy for her predicament,” and whether he struck up friendly relations with the young woman for entirely selfless reasons.11 Were their outings together and the increasing intimacy of their interactions actually calculated on his part? Was she not a way to cement an even tighter and more personal bond of friendship with Hitler? For even though there was apparently a deep emotional connection between Speer and Hitler “from the first moment on,” as Joachim Fest writes, the young architect occupied a position that was in “constant danger.”12
Margarete Speer, in any case, seems not to have shared her husband’s connection with Hitler’s girlfriend. Looking back, she does not attribute any shyness or unassuming modesty to Braun, as her husband did, but rather claims that Eva Braun was “thoroughly aware of her position” among the women and had the most say. On trips she always conducted herself “very much as the hostess”: what she wanted to do was what was done “and that was that.”13 There is disapproval audible in these lines of Margarete Speer’s, in spite of all the evenings, excursions, and ski vacations spent together. She absolutely did not consider Eva Braun—nor, for that matter, Magda Goebbels—as one of her personal friends, but rather as a member of her husband’s “team,” to whom he gave precedence over even his own children when it came to leisure time.14 Margarete Speer thus does not, in her own retrospective judgment of Eva Braun, follow the line of explanation that her husband laid out after 1945 and stuck to in his later publications. Clearly, we can see from her account, no one dared to oppose Eva Braun’s wishes at the time or call into question her preeminence within the Berghof hierarchy.
Karl and Anni Brandt
Another woman in the sporty “circle of friends” around Eva Braun and Margarete Speer was Anni Brandt, the wife of Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt. In Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer lists the Brandts as in his “closest circle of friends.”15 Karl Brandt had joined the NSDAP in February 1932, and apparently met Hitler the same year, in Essen; he was a member of the dictator’s inner circle for ten years, from 1934 until he was fired in 1944.16 His wife, the former Anni Rehborn, famous nationwide as the SV-Bochum swimming champion, came into contact with Hitler as early as the 1920s, since she won the German championship in the 100 meter backstroke six times between 1923 and 1929 (among other championships), and the ambitious right-wing politician always liked to publicize his connection with important German athletes who fit his, and his Party’s, racial ideal of strong, healthy, pure, “Aryan” bodies.17 Conversely, the young athlete’s family—in which physical health and beauty were also of great importance, in accord with the modern cult of the body in the 1920s—had supported the National Socialist movement even before 1933. Both Anni Rehborn and her father joined the NSDAP in 1932.18 It thus seems likely that it was actually the young swimmer who introduced her then fiancé to the NSDAP leader, and brought him to the Berghof no later than summer 1933.19
Karl Brandt was working at the time as an assistant doctor in a casualty hospital in Bochum, and had already joined the SA in spring 1933. A few years earlier, he had dreamed of following the Protestant theologian, doctor, and philosopher of culture Albert Schweitzer, whom he admired, to his hospital in sub-Saharan Lambaréné, Gabon. But now he used the opportunities that his bride’s personal connection with Hitler opened up to him. It is not entirely clear why Brandt underwent this transformation, turning away from Schweitzer and toward National Socialism; the ideological contrast between Schweitzer’s Christian “worldview and philosophy of honoring life” and Hitler’s deeply inhuman and racist ideas of a “struggle to the death between Peoples” and the “annihilation of the weak” could not have been any greater. If there is any point of connection between the two ideologies, it lies in Schweitzer’s critique of modernity, his disapproval of the “acquisition of scientific knowledge” which had brought forth “the machine,” and spiritually damaged and depersonalized mankind. Schweitzer diagnosed the political fragmentation and material suffering of modern states in similar terms. But he saw the solution to all these problems in the will to come to greater understanding between peoples and the establishment of a “culture state” that, led by a “cultural ethos,” would come into existence “not according to the dictates of nationalism and national culture.”20
Brandt, in contrast, who shared the disorientation and aimlessness of many men and women of his generation after Germany’s loss of World War I and obviously was on the lookout for a charismatic savior-figure, took the nationalist path. In a document he drew up after the end of the war to provide intellectual “clarification” (his term) about what had happened, he wrote that Hitler had “opened the eyes” of the German People, “showed it its soul again and restored its faith in itself.” Thanks to Hitler, Brandt wrote, “old names and values” had been “brought back to life” and “Germany’s own spirit shone forth again… in the present.”21 The young, ambitious, not unadventurous doctor had only waited until the right moment, in 1933—or so his biographer Ulf Schmidt claims—to approach Hitler through his fiancée Anni Rehborn and attract his attention. In fact, the career of the barely thirty-year-old doctor had been steeply on the rise since the summer of 1933. In November 1933, he transferred from Bochum to the recently reopened, well-known University Surgical Clinic on the Ziegelstrasse in Berlin as the Party physician.22 At his wedding, on March 17, 1934, Hitler and Hermann Göring appeared as witnesses. The reception took place in Göring’s Berlin apartment.23 After that, it was probably already easy to predict that Brandt would soon be given a position in Hitler’s immediate retinue. In any case, he himself laid the groundwork for such a position by submitting an application to the SS in April 1934. Two months later, he received the offer to accompany the Reich Chancellor as a specialist for accident injuries on his foreign travels.24 From then on, Brandt and his wife were among the constant guests on the Obersalzberg.