The close friendship between the Brandts and the Speers—Margarete Speer called Anni Brandt her best friend—seems in retrospect to have been anything but fortuitous. The parallels between the two men’s careers are unmistakable. Speer and Brandt, almost the same age, did not belong to the generation of the “old fighters” from the early days of the NSDAP but entered Hitler’s inner circle only after he came to power. Both owed their sudden career successes, and their growing political power, to Hitler personally—not to the Party. For Brandt no less than for Speer, it must have been of vital importance to stay within reach of the “court,” even though he was not actually a personal physician and his services as an escort surgeon were, in the strict sense, necessary only while traveling, primarily in case of an accident or assassination attempt.25
The privileged position that Brandt soon enjoyed alongside Speer can be seen from the fact that both men, who lived and worked in Berlin, moved onto the Obersalzberg in close proximity to Hitler during the course of 1935. While preparations were under way to fence off the area in a radius of fourteen kilometers, they and their families were housed in the Bechstein Villa that already lay within the “Führer Protection Zone.” Bormann had bought the villa at the end of 1935 and repurposed it as a guesthouse;26 Goebbels lived there, too, when he visited the Berghof, and it was enormously prestigious for these two men on the rise, still largely unknown within the NSDAP, to be among Hitler’s personally chosen neighbors. In addition, Speer and Brandt were permitted to accompany Hitler every year to the Wagner festival in Bayreuth—an honor given to few people, according to Speer. Winifred Wagner, who ran the festivals, formed close ties with Brandt, whom she later used, during the war, to transmit letters to Hitler when she wanted to bypass Martin Bormann.27
What did it mean to be “preferred” like this by the most powerful man in Germany, over the majority of one’s other colleagues and compatriots—in fact, to be promoted thanks to “the Führer’s friendship”? Speer’s later confession that he was “happy” then is only the barest hint of the elation and ecstasy the two men must have felt as a result of their proximity to power. Would Hitler not have been able to expect lifelong gratitude, loyalty, and tractability under those circumstances? And in fact, Brandt, after his arrest in 1945, declared in a written statement that his relationship to Hitler had been a “bond for better and for worse.” Speer, too, found himself obliged to make what Joachim Fest called the “monstrous confession” decades later, in September 1974, that he, Speer, had felt himself bound to Hitler until their last encounter in the bunker with bonds of unbreakable personal loyalty and friendship.28
Karl Brandt, in any case, never left Hitler’s side until the end of the war, gradually turning into Hitler’s general factotum. Like Speer, he had direct access to the Nazi leader, who lived predominantly shut away from others, and he accompanied him on almost every occasion: at state visits, the Party conventions in Nuremberg, exhibition openings, balls, concerts both in and outside of Berlin, and, after fall 1939, on travels to the various “Führer headquarters.” Brandt fulfilled all sorts of duties and shared Hitler’s passion for art and architecture. There was thus hardly any time left over for his own medical responsibilities at the university clinic in Berlin.29
Even if Hitler’s friendship with Brandt seems to have been less sensitive than that with his architect, the young doctor still fulfilled an analogous function. Largely unknown to the public and at the same time shielded against the influence of leading lights in the Party, he was, as the “Führer’s” intimate friend, active in various areas of medicine, including the new construction plans for Berlin’s university clinics.30 Once the war started, Hitler gave his ambitious friend “special assignments”—that is, to murder the sick and crippled—and granted him far-reaching “special legal authority” over the health system for that reason.31 Then, together with Philipp Bouhler, “Chief of the Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP” and a member of the Party for many years, Brandt, by then thirty-five years old, was promoted to head of the euthanasia program. It has also been proven that he conducted human medical experiments in concentration camps.
Brandt carried out what Hitler commanded and as a result found himself, along with Speer, Hoffmann, and Bormann, in the highest “Berghof society.” Unlike the other members of this private entourage, however, who also received assignments from Hitler, usually verbally, Brandt and Speer were among the “Führer direct special representatives,” of which there were only a few in the National Socialist regime. In the army of representatives, special representatives, authorized representatives, general inspectors, and Reich commissioners so characteristic of the inner structure of the Nazi regime, Brandt and Speer were thus exceptional. They occupied—Speer in construction and Brandt in medicine—next to traditional official positions in the Reich, their own spheres of power, established by “Führer’s edict,” in close consultation with Hitler so that they could most effectively translate certain core elements of the National Socialist worldview into reality. Both men took an active part in the racial politics of the regime as welclass="underline" Brandt by killing the sick and conducting human experiments; Speer by filling the shortage of labor for his construction plans in the capital with concentration camp prisoners, as well as robbing Berlin Jews of their apartments before having them deported.32 It is impossible to determine how decisions were taken precisely within Hitler’s innermost private circle, and how they were communicated. But it is indisputable that the position and actions of these two “charismatic young men” were due not only to great personal closeness to Hitler, but also to their ideological agreement with him. There can be no question here of any “willed unconsciousness” about what was actually happening.33
Speer disputed these implications for the rest of his life. He insisted to the end that he had been a fundamentally apolitical architect, far removed from any ideological concerns, who at most suspected the crimes taking place around him. No anti-Semitic propaganda from him survives; he justified himself in retrospect by saying he saw Hitler’s “insane hatred of Jews” as “a rather vulgar minor detail” of his otherwise convincing vision. Speer’s statements on this topic about the other members of the “Führer circle,” as he put it—especially about his friend Karl Brandt and about Eva Braun, whom he vigorously defends—must therefore be taken with a grain of salt at the very least. His alleging, about himself, “Politically I counted for nothing!” also casts doubt on his appraisal of Eva Braun as apolitical and lacking in influence.34