Since Brandt and Speer stood in an extraordinary relationship of loyalty to Hitler, the question further arises whether they might therefore have had a special relationship with Eva Braun. It is striking, in any case, that after the war both men, unlike almost everyone else in their environment, neither disputed the intimate nature of Eva Braun’s relationship with Hitler nor dismissed her as insignificant in Hitler’s inner circle. A U.S. Army military news service report from April 1947, summarizing Brandt’s statements on the topic, maintained that the relationship between Hitler and his girlfriend was marked by openness and sincerity. Eva Braun, abrupt and severe by nature rather than feminine and compliant, had developed over the years from an average girl into a stylish lady. Hitler occasionally liked to remark, “The more important the man, the less important the woman,” but this did not apply to Eva Braun.35
During his first interrogation in summer 1945, Brandt was trying to make a good impression on his American and British interrogators. Obviously, he denied his involvement in the murder of the sick and crippled. But his statements were saturated with unbowed admiration for Hitler. It is therefore surprising that he expressed even mild criticism of the “chosen one” at Hitler’s side. Brandt said that Eva Braun’s rise into the world of the rich and powerful was too much for her at first, and that in the years before the war she had made “certain guests” of the Berghof suffer under her changeable moods.36 This statement of Brandt’s, revealing for the later judgments of Braun, especially by Hitler’s former staff members, corresponds with the notes that Percy Ernst Schramm, German historian and member of the U.S. Army Historical Division, made during the interrogation of Hitler’s doctors in summer 1945. According to those notes, Eva Braun had caused “trouble” among those around Hitler and “put people off.”37 Who exactly her “victims” were remained unstated, however. In particular, Brandt said nothing about whether he himself, or possibly his wife—who smiled at the camera together with Eva Braun in September 1937, during the ninth Party convention, on a stage on the Nuremberg Hauptmarkt—had suffered under her.38
Martin Bormann
Martin Bormann played a special role in regard to Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun. Son of a postal official and former military musician, he had joined the NSDAP on February 27, 1927, and within a few years had risen to be one of the most powerful figures around Hitler. He started, though, at the bottom of the Thuringian Party hierarchy in Weimar. Since he had been found guilty as an accomplice to grievous bodily harm in 1924 and spent a year in jail, he could not afford to be choosy, and he carried out duties of all kinds for the Party, including those of bookkeeper, cashier, and driver. For example, he chauffeured the NSDAP-Gauleiter of Thuringia, Fritz Sauckel, to events and functions in the country in his own car, a small Opel. Bormann later became managing director of the Thuringia Gau press office, and in this capacity he met both Hitler and Rudolf Hess, who often traveled together to Thuringia for appearances before 1933.39
Within a year and a half of his joining the Party, in mid-November 1928, the conspicuously devoted and obliging Bormann was in the NSDAP headquarters in Munich. Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, commander of the SA, had asked him to take charge of managing insurance for the SA. Bormann succeeded in transforming the expensive and problematic insurance of SA members into a profitable “NSDAP Assistance Fund,” and thereby helped reduce the National Socialists’ notorious shortage of money. Bormann had made his reputation as a financial and organizational talent, and he impressed Hitler with his unswerving business sense.40
This young man on the rise from the provinces further solidified his position by marrying Gerda Buch on September 2, 1939, in Munich. She was the daughter of Walter Buch, a Party member for many years and an “old fighter” in the National Socialist movement; Hitler had been a regular guest at the Buch house for years and on this occasion served as a witness at the wedding, along with the father of the bride. When the Bormanns’ first son was born, seven months later, the “Führer” and Ilse Hess were the child’s godparents.41 Gerda Bormann, aged twenty, much taller than her husband and a kindergarten teacher by occupation, had been raised by her parents in a staunchly anti-Semitic “Nationalist” spirit.42 Moreover, the family’s personal contact with Hitler and his ideas had shaped her even in her youth. In a view that is consistent with this background, Joachim Fest attributed to her “unembarrassedly radical prejudices” and called her the “purest expression” of the “ideal type” of the National Socialist woman.43 She joined the NSDAP shortly before her wedding and, over the next thirteen years, bore nine children. She played no role, however, in the public self-presentation of the Nazi regime.
The trained farmer Martin Bormann, though, succeeded in gaining Hitler’s trust and making himself indispensable to the leader. From 1933 on, he dependably managed Hitler’s personal property. He also supervised the “Adolf Hitler Fund of German Trade and Industry,” launched by Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, which guaranteed the Party—and Hitler personally—an annual income in the millions from German businesses. These donations, which eventually became mandatory, added up to more than 700 million reichsmarks through 1945. The hardworking Bormann took care of all of Hitler’s financial interests. He handled purchases and paid all the bills, whether for personal acquisitions, staff expenses, monetary gifts to Party colleagues, or Eva Braun’s financial needs. It is thus no wonder that Bormann was able to expand more and more the scope of the position he held starting in July 1933, as chief of staff in the offices of the “Deputy Führer,” Rudolf Hess. While Hess, the ardent follower of the “tribune”—Hitler—with the reputation of being the spotless “conscience of the Party,” was increasingly kept away from Hitler’s inner circle after 1933, Bormann and his wife soon became the dictator’s substitute family at the Berghof.44 Only a few people outside the Nazi leadership knew about him, but he was the man who was always there at Hitler’s service, with unfailing discretion and reliability—qualities that he shared, of course, with Eva Braun. Bormann owed his rise to a position of power almost invisible from the outside to this close personal relationship of trust with Hitler.45
In this he was in no way different from the other functionaries in the Berghof circle, including Speer and Brandt, although they, unlike Bormann, occupied positions near Hitler that could also be perceived from the outside. They owed their careers just as much, however, to the patronage of the Nazi leader. Apparently, there was a ruthlessly competitive relationship between them and Bormann. Brandt, immediately after the end of the war, described Bormann as the most powerful figure in Hitler’s circle, and said that the later “secretary to the Führer” (his title starting April 12, 1943) acted ruthlessly, brutally, and with such influence that having him as an enemy could endanger one’s life.46 In the autobiographical literature as well, Bormann is with few exceptions portrayed negatively. For example, Richard Walther Darré, Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, described him as a heartless “player in his own interest,” for whom Hitler was “the alpha and omega of his efforts.” “Support from other circles, except for alliances of convenience within the Party,” held no interest for him.47 Only Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder complained in her memoir that the “worst characteristics” had been attributed to Bormann unjustly, when he was one of “the few pure National Socialists” and was merely “working—often ruthlessly, sometimes brutally, too—to carry out the orders and commands Hitler gave him.”48