What about the relations between Martin Bormann and Eva Braun? According to Otto Dietrich, the Reich Press Chief, who was among Hitler’s constant companions by virtue of his position alone as early as 1931, it was Bormann who worked to make sure that the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun, and the young woman’s continual presence at the Berghof, remained secret. He was thereby able to consolidate and expand his influence in Hitler’s close environment, Dietrich said, since the Nazi leader was indebted to him for his support in this matter.49 Robert Ley, the head of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, or DAF)—the unified National Socialist trade union and a “gigantic propaganda machine,” according to Ian Kershaw—who took his own life on October 25, 1945, after five months in prison at Nuremberg, left behind a similar assessment of Bormann. Ley, notorious in the “Third Reich” as a “Reich-drunkard,” remained an uncritical, devoted henchman of Hitler’s to the end. His last words—“But to be considered a criminal, I can’t bear that”—reveal the extent of his involvement and his intellectual limitations.50 He said of Bormann, in his “notes” that were written down in the Nuremburg military prison in 1945, that he was a “brutal, ruthless, hulking peasant.” He “never left the Führer’s side,” made himself “liked with all sorts of little services that the Führer appreciated,” and forced his way “unheard and unnoticed into the intimate affairs of a great and overburdened man.” According to Ley, “Ask Bormann” was “heard all the time.” Bormann fulfilled the Führer’s every wish and took care of everything, including “putting through calls to Frau Braun in Munich.”51 We must keep in mind, though, with all these retrospective characterizations, that Ley as well as Bormann’s other former antagonists, such as Brandt and Speer, would seem more harmless the more powerful and dangerous they could make Bormann out to be.
The mediating role that Bormann played between Hitler and the outside world applied to Eva Braun as well. She embodied, after all, the private life of the Nazi leader, which was protected as a state secret. It is thus natural to assume that Bormann followed Hitler’s orders not only in arranging her financial affairs but also in monitoring the young woman’s lifestyle on occasion. Heinrich Hoffmann, in his later apologia, even claimed that “any wish of Eva Braun’s was always carried out by Bormann,” especially during the war years.52 In any case, Bormann would have known how important she was and would have been painfully aware that she was not to be turned into his enemy. Bormann made sure of “every person around the Führer,” if we believe Robert Ley’s remark.53 Eva Braun, in turn, was dependent on the bustling functionary, especially in the period after 1935, when both were installed on the Obersalzberg in immediate proximity to Hitler and regularly ate meals together. If she did in fact hate him, as her family and Albert Speer claimed after the war, she never showed it openly and avoided any confrontation.54
8. LIFE ON THE OBERSALZBERG
In January 1937, Reinhard Spitzy, adjutant and personal aide to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, accompanies his boss for the first time to a meeting with Hitler on the Obersalzberg. For Spitzy, a former Austrian fighter pilot from an upper-middle-class background, member of the NSDAP, SA, and SS since 1931, and only twenty-four years old, setting foot in the Berghof, that “legendary place,” is an overwhelming experience that makes an “enormously great impression” on him. He idolizes Hitler beyond measure, “worships” him. Rigid with reverence, Spitzy stands “like a statue” with his briefcase against the wall in the great hall while Hitler and Ribbentrop, deep in conversation, walk back and forth in front of him for two hours. Suddenly a young woman with blond locks pokes her head in the doorway and tells Hitler to “finally” come eat with his guests “already.” It’s “high time,” she says, they can’t wait any longer. Shocked, Spitzy wonders who would dare “to speak to the Führer like that.” After the meal, Hitler’s adjutant Brückner explains to him that even the “Führer” has “a right to a private life.” Spitzy should keep quiet about everything he’s seen and heard—the best thing would be to forget it entirely. The young follower is devastated to learn that Hitler, whom he “believed lived the life of an ascetic, exalted above the level of sex and lust, had taken unto himself an ordinary female.”1
Refuge and Center of Power
The incident Spitzy describes sheds light on Eva Braun’s changed position within Hitler’s personal circle, which had grown ever more clear in the period after late 1935. The Obersalzberg, where she could “find her footing” only after Angela Raubal left (as Henriette von Schirach remarked), became her second home, along with Munich.2 During this period, renovations were moving full speed ahead to turn Wachenfeld, the small country house, into the large, formal Berghof. A terrace and veranda had been added in 1932. But after Hitler bought the house, which he had only rented up until then, on June 26, 1933, and the once-almost-unknown locale had become the second power center of the German Reich, construction and technical modernization of the modest “Alpine-style vacation home” began in earnest in 1934.3 Before the official opening on July 8, 1936, a new main wing that included the old country house and several additional buildings was built. Eva Braun now had a small apartment, adjacent to Hitler’s bedroom, on the second floor of the main house.4 Albert Speer later told the historian Werner Maser that a Tegernsee architect undertook the extensions “following sketches of Hitler’s.” The interior construction and renovations were left “in the Troost Atelier’s hands.” He himself had “not been asked for advice” at the time.5
The rural mountain village on the Obersalzberg had meanwhile turned into a kind of pilgrimage site. Encouraged by the cult of Hitler and the marketing of his residence in Heinrich Hoffmann’s illustrated publications, tourist travel to the region underwent an unexpected upswing. Followers, or the merely curious, made pilgrimages by the thousands to the Wachenfeld house to see the “Führer.” As soon as they caught sight of him, Bormann said, “the People [stood] at the fence.”6 While Nazi propaganda used the hysteria to reinforce the legend of Hitler’s closeness to the People and to nature, the entire Obersalzberg was actually fenced off in 1935. The region was quickly declared a “Führer Protection Zone” and Bormann, on Hitler’s orders, forced the remaining house owners and innkeepers there to sell their property to the NSDAP. “Fief by fief, plot by plot,” he bought them up and had, as he himself said, “all the old houses… torn down.”7 Now only registered groups of visitors from various Party organizations were allowed entry, and their processions past Hitler had to follow strict rules and a rigorous schedule. Spontaneous crowds of ordinary tourists were no longer permitted.