Among the regular guests on the Obersalzberg, who considered spending time with Hitler to be an “exciting experience,” were to be found, after 1937–1938, Nicolaus von Below, a twenty-nine-year-old colonel of the Luftwaffe assigned to Hitler as an adjutant, and his nineteen-year-old wife, Maria. Below later recalled that he had entered the Chancellor’s private circle as early as four weeks after his first assignment on June 23, 1937. His explanation of how this was possible so quickly was that they had immediately discovered a common interest in classical music. Certainly Hitler’s appointments outside of work hours did not lie within Below’s purview. The four military adjutants, one from each of the four branches of the armed forces, unlike the personal adjutants, were on call in alternation and scheduled meetings pertaining only to military matters, in the broadest sense, including “petitions and pleas for clemency from soldiers and their family members.”50 Still, we may presume that Hitler developed a certain sympathy for the strapping young air force adjutant from the first moment he saw him, since the Belows were included on his personal invitation list to the Wagner festivals in Bayreuth as early as July 27.51
Nicolaus von Below was around the same age as Brandt and Speer, and was friends with them as well.52 Like them, Below accompanied the Nazi leader not only officially but also on personal trips. Ever since Hitler had disenfranchised the previous commanders of the military and taken over sole command of the armed forces in early February 1938, he required constant accompaniment by military adjutants. Thus Below went regularly with Hitler to his private apartment in Munich, as well as to the Obersalzberg, from then on. At 16 Prinzregentenplatz, the adjutant later recalled, the housekeeper was “in constant contact with Eva Braun” and had “a telephone connection to her ready for Hitler” immediately upon his arrival.53 Then, in summer 1939, Below went along to the “Reich Theater Week” in Vienna, an event organized by the Ministry of Propaganda that since 1934 had taken place in various cities of the Reich, including Linz. Afterward, at the Berghof, Below (alternating with Speer) followed Hitler in “long walks up and down the great hall” and was impressed by the “Führer’s” thoughts circling around the “extermination” of “Jewish Bolshevism.” As he later confessed in his memoir, the argument that “the German People could not live in peace… under this constant threat” had convinced him.54
Maria von Below, a landowner’s daughter whom Hitler first invited to the Berghof for Easter 1938, stated in 1985, in very similar terms, that Hitler did not win the “loyalty” of those around him “by telling them his plan was murder.” Rather, he persuaded everyone “because he was fascinating.” “Even the early years” at the Berghof were in no way “horribly boring,” she said in this interview with Gitta Sereny; Hitler held everyone in his grip by means of his personality, and his “phenomenal” “knowledge of history and art.” Thus Maria von Below presented herself as unable to understand the retroactive dismissal of the Berghof society in Speer’s publications. How could he have forgotten “how exciting it was for all of us? And how often we were happy there?”55
We can see here that Maria von Below, by far the youngest member of this half-private, half-official group of people around Hitler in 1938, defended her time in this circle more than forty years later just as forcefully and in almost the same words as Margarete Speer. How are we to comprehend this attitude, in light of the monstrous misdeeds of the Nazi regime, which these women must have learned about at least in later years? Why did they stubbornly insist on this description of a supposedly ideal world at the Berghof? Is it because they—unlike their husbands—were under no pressure from a prosecutor or a court to justify themselves after the collapse of the Nazi state? The fact remains that, to whatever greater or lesser degree they may have known about the crimes that were committed, they barely connected their life at the Berghof with the actual political events of those years.
Nicolaus and Maria von Below met Hitler and his close circle shortly after the entry of German troops into Austria on March 12, 1938, and Austria’s “annexation” to the German Reich—in other words, at a time when Hitler was more powerful and more popular than ever. Not only his immediate followers but the overwhelming majority of the population celebrated this new coup, which was explicitly recognized by the Great Powers in Europe, and considered him a genius as a statesman. Air force adjutant Below, one of the many people to accompany Hitler on his “triumphal procession” to Vienna, wrote later that on this trip he understood “more and more” why the Nazi “Führer” “had won his followers, and the love of the people.”56 Maria von Below’s enthusiasm looking back at this period likewise reflects the then-widespread mood, and certainly gives us insight into the emotional world of the Berghof.
Her relationship with Eva Braun, meanwhile, is difficult to judge after such a long time. Her husband’s memoir gives very few hints of any possible friendly contact. In a chapter called “Peaceful Life at the Berghof,” it says that in spring 1944 Hitler thanked Maria von Below “many times” for having “found such a nice relationship with Miss Braun.”57 And to Traudl Junge, Hitler’s last secretary, who moved from his headquarters in East Prussia onto the Obersalzberg with Hitler’s staff in early 1943, it seemed that Anni Brandt and Maria von Below were “close friends” with Eva Braun.58 Christa Schroeder, on the other hand, states that Eva Braun had always had only one “favorite” and the others were always “careful and reserved” around her.59 It is certainly striking that Maria von Below never appears with the other women in the Berghof group in Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographs. The explanation must be that, as the wife of a military adjutant, she came along to Berchtesgaden only when her husband was on duty. In addition, the Belows seem to have attained a position of trust with Hitler, and also with Eva Braun, only in the last years before the end of the war.
From the beginning, that is to say since 1933, the Munich artist Sofie Stork was also in the circle of those around Hitler and Eva Braun. A trained sculptor and painter, and a beautiful, dark-haired woman of thirty whose father owned a well-known company that manufactured and sold fishing tackle (the “H. Stork Fishing Tackle Factory”), Sofie Stork was involved with Wilhelm Brückner, Hitler’s personal adjutant, nineteen years older than she was. In the course of their acquaintance she had joined the NSDAP on December 1, 1931, and entered farther and farther into Hitler’s private circle.60 Brückner himself, a university-educated economist and an officer in the First World War, was among the “old campaigners” from the early days of the NSDAP. He was a member of the Party going back to late 1922, led the Munich SA regiment in the following years, and in that capacity took part in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. As a result, the State Court in Munich sentenced him to fifteen months prison and a fine of 100 reichsmarks for abetting high treason,61 although Brückner, like all the others who took part in the putsch, actually served only part of this already mild sentence. Later, he made a living for many years with all sorts of different activities, including as a tennis coach, before again joining Hitler’s circle when Hitler chose him as his personal adjutant in 1930. Otto Wagener, named chief of staff of the SA in the previous year and one of Hitler’s closest confidants in the “period of struggle” until 1933, did not approve of the choice: the forty-five-year-old Brückner’s whole life history, without a real career or contact with the SA, seemed dubious to Wagener. But Hitler, Wagener wrote in his autobiography while a prisoner of war in England in 1946 (it was published posthumously in 1978), justified his decision by saying that he wanted someone around him who offered “a certain security simply by virtue of his sturdy build and size,” and would prevent anyone from daring to approach him.62