Thus whenever Eva Braun stayed at the Berghof, she disappeared into a heavily monitored, sealed domain, surrounded by six-foot-high security fences whose inner rings were kept under observation by Reich security forces. Admittance was permitted only to those with a special pass issued by the “Obersalzberg Administration” under Bormann.8 Unlike in Munich, Eva Braun here lived cut off from the outside world. The same was true of everyone else who lived at the Berghof, their staff, and their servants. Christa Schroeder, who came to “the mountain” regularly as Hitler’s secretary starting in August 1933, stated in her memoir that from then on she “led a life behind barriers and guarded fences,” almost completely cut off “from everyday civilian and normal existence.”9 Therese Linke, on the other hand, a cook who worked on the Obersalzberg in Clubheim/Platterhof (Hoher Göll Inn), a guesthouse for the Party that the owners had been forced to sell, recalled the changes from 1936–1937 in particular: “There had been a fence around the Berghof and the rest of the area for a while. At every guard post we all had to go through the gates…. By then the farmers and peasants were long gone. Everything was bought up and leveled.”10
Meanwhile, Hermann Göring, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann had also settled on Obersalzberg in houses of their own. The construction of additional guesthouses and hotels followed, along with an SS barracks for the so-called Führer Special Security Force—Obersalzberg; the erection of an “Obersalzberg Estate” with a residential building and stables; several administration buildings; and finally the construction of two “teahouses”: one beneath the Berghof and another, the so-called “Eagle’s Nest,” on Kehlstein, a 1,885-meter peak in the Berchtesgaden Alps. All this construction necessitated in turn the laying of new roads and the building of new tunnels and fences. Hitler himself drew up plans for a Berchtesgaden vacation destination, where a spacious “Party Forum” was to arise, but that never came to pass. Instead, during the war, construction began on air-raid bunkers and caves, which it turns out could not all be completed either, despite uninterrupted construction on Hitler’s “mountain” and its surroundings until the end of the war.11
Despite all these changes and renovations, the house on the Obersalzberg remained Hitler’s home, probably his most familiar place of residence. Life there was “to a large extent organized around him personally,” as Speer stated to Allied interrogators in the summer of 1945.12 He surrounded himself exclusively with absolutely loyal (and usually longtime) followers and their families and friends. And he lived there with Eva Braun, whenever he was there. It was always “the same limited circle,” as Christa Schroeder remarked in a letter to a friend in August 1941.13 Eva Braun and Hitler continued to meet in Munich or Berlin as well, but at the Berghof, despite the constant presence of staff and servants, a certain familial domesticity ruled, which neither the Munich apartment nor the Chancellery in the capital could offer.
Fritz Wiedemann, in connection with his time as Hitler’s personal adjutant, wrote in 1938 that the dictator had felt “like the head of a household in his own domain” on the Obersalzberg and had enjoyed “comfort and a kind of family life.” There were “always ladies present” as well, according to Wiedemann, “the wives of his colleagues, such as Frau Hoffmann and Frau Speer, and also the wives of the military adjutants.” In the Reich Chancellery, in contrast, visits from women were “rare,” he wrote.14 As Wiedemann described the daily routine at the Berghof, Hitler woke up late, at one or two in the afternoon, then went to lunch and took “a stroll in the fenced-off area,” in summer typically preceded by a “march-past” of two to three thousand visitors, and then afterward there was “a get-together on the terrace, then dinner at seven inside, and finally a movie.”15
Eva Braun—who, among other things, usually took care of selecting and screening the movies that were provided by the Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin—is mentioned not even once in the adjutant’s account.16 Wiedemann, who left Germany in January 1939 and became the German consul general in San Francisco until 1941, himself explained the reason why: on the very first page of his remarks, he notes that a diplomat has to be discreet.
So descriptions that could only come from me or another trusted source will not appear here. That would discredit me, in any age and any country. With respect to trusted details known only to a small circle, the whole world would know that the information came from me…. 17
Hitler’s relationship with a much younger lover obviously counted as a fact that everyone present had to maintain strict silence about, at least in public. Thus Wiedemann expresses himself only in very general terms about Hitler’s relations with women in connection with life at the Berghof. He emphasizes Hitler’s “deep personal regard for women” and mentions that he was “loyal and continuously kind” whenever he showed anyone his favor. All the “stories and rumors of ambiguous character,” Wiedemann emphasized, were “lies”: Hitler’s relations with women were “probably the purest that anyone could imagine.”18
In truth, though, the fact that the “Führer” himself was living in an “irregular” relationship made for whispers and rumors outside the fenced-in zone. Nicolaus von Below, for example, recalled almost forty years later how he had visited the Berghof for the first time in 1937, “fully ignorant” of the circle around Hitler; how he met Eva Braun and was so struck by the events there that it was still of “vital” interest to him after his return to the capital—Hitler’s private lifestyle was a constant “topic of conversation” at social gatherings in Berlin.19
Meanwhile, the Reich Chancellor himself continued to turn his back on the capital, often for weeks at a time. Especially in the summer, he spent long periods on the Obersalzberg. To make sure that government business could be kept running smoothly, even from there, the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, stayed in Upper Bavaria as well during this period, with a small staff. For months at a time, private residences across all of Berchtesgaden had to be rented for the purpose, even though the security requirements, if nothing else, were inadequate. Lammers himself, who, he wrote, took up “official residence” there every year “at the express wish of the Führer,” was housed in a “large country house.” But the summer tourist traffic limited the availability of the necessary housing.20
In early 1936, Hitler therefore ordered the establishment of a “Reich Sub-Chancellery” in Berchtesgaden. It was very important to both sides that the head of the Chancellery could be in Hitler’s easy personal reach. Lammers—a fifty-seven-year-old judge, member of the NSDAP since 1932, and summoned by Hitler personally on the day the Nazis took power to be state secretary in the Chancellery—coordinated the government business. After dissolving the state governments, stripping power from Parliament, and combining the offices of President and Chancellor of the Reich after Hindenburg’s death in 1934, Hitler had concentrated the duties of the state in the “Führer’s” hand, and thus in the Chancellery. Lammers passed along Hitler’s decisions to the appropriate departments, translated his ideas into laws, and controlled access to Hitler within the scope of his area of operation. Since cabinet meetings took place only rarely after the proclamation of the Enabling Act (or “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich”) on March 23, 1933, and not at all after 1938, Lammers functioned as the connection—often the sole connection—between the various ministries and the Chancellor. Every edict, Hitler decreed, had to pass through Lammers.21 Often it was Lammers alone, not the Reich ministers, who advised the head of state. By weakening the government in this way, Hitler prevented the rise of any further opponents within the Party—like, most recently, SA-Führer Ernst Röhm—and, in the words of Ian Kershaw, made himself the “pole star and center of the apparatus of state.”