Personal adjutants were traditionally assigned to princes, army commanders, ministers of war, and Reich chancellors; they always had an officer grade and usually came from the nobility. They handled writing and business duties, received phone calls, transmitted orders, and occasionally even undertook diplomatic missions. Hitler’s naming a personal adjutant at a time when he was still years away from becoming Chancellor revealed not only his concern with security and inclination to an egocentrically staged leadership style—more importantly, it revealed that Hitler was creating a further distance between himself and his fellow National Socialists. He was consciously fostering the “nimbus of the unapproachable,” as Ian Kershaw formulated it, in order to both concretize to the outside world and defend from competitors within the Party his persona as the inaccessible, solitary Leader.63
Wilhelm Brückner remained at Hitler’s side for ten years. A bearer of the Blood Order, he rose to be chief adjutant, while three additional adjutants arrived in 1933, 1935, and 1938, respectively: Julius Schaub, the longtime servant; retired Captain Fritz Wiedemann; and Albert Bormann, Martin Bormann’s younger brother, trained as a bank teller and head of Hitler’s “Private Chancellery,” which was integrated as Chief Department 1 into the “Chancellery of the Führer of the NSDAP” under Philipp Bouhler.64 Brückner became an honorary citizen of the city of Detmold on January 15, 1936 (an honor revoked in 1945); became a member of the NSDAP’s parliamentary party for two years in 1936; and, inevitably, took part in Hitler’s entire political and private life, in Berlin, Munich, and on the Obersalzberg. For example, on August 1, 1934, the day before Reich President Paul von Hindenburg died, Brückner was apparently the only person to accompany Hitler to see the elderly head of state on his deathbed.65
Without a doubt, the head of “the Führer’s Personal Adjutant Staff” gained a power not to be underestimated. Nicolaus von Below even claimed that Brückner had attained a “paramount position,” with his “authority” recognized by both the personal and the military adjutants.66 Furthermore, it was the adjutants, especially Brückner, who had direct and practically unlimited access to Hitler. They were the link to the outside world for a “Führer” concerned to keep his distance; they supplied him with all sorts of information and contacts. In addition, the personal adjutants coordinated visits, such that even the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, was obliged in 1938 to submit his request for an audience with Hitler to Brückner in writing. There were clearly also wide-ranging financial opportunities for the adjutants—Fritz Wiedemann later wrote:
If you needed money, Brückner sent word… to Bormann and got 50,000 marks. He took the lion’s share for himself and then passed the rest along to Schaub and to me, in decreasing amounts based on seniority and position.67
When Martin Bormann, who managed the fund that was at Hitler’s personal disposal, complained about the large outlays of money, the Nazi leader dismissed the complaint and forbade the Party to interfere in “his spending.”68 Either Brückner or Schaub paid Hitler’s private bills in restaurants and on trips—or, as it was called, managed his “petty cash.” Brückner stated under questioning in August 1947 that only Schaub paid Eva Braun’s bills.69 Brückner’s own role in Hitler’s private milieu, meanwhile, is not easy to determine. Albert Speer—concerned, as he always was after the fact, to imply the greatest possible distance between himself and the supposedly wretched “Führer circle” on the Obersalzberg—emphasized in May 1967, in response to a question from Joachim Fest, that he had had “nothing in common with Schaub, Brückner, and Morell.” Who, Speer asked his interlocutor, “could have been more different from me?”70 His friend Nicolaus von Below, on the other hand, recalled “especially good and friendly contact” with SA-Obergruppenführer Brückner, which took on “a private character quite quickly.”71
Brückner’s girlfriend Sofie Stork seems to have been introduced into the Berghof society just as quickly and to have made close friendships there. Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographs show her at parties, such as New Year’s or birthdays, but also on excursions alongside Hoffmann’s wife, Erna; Eva Braun; and Anni Brandt.72 In the process of transforming Haus Wachenfeld into the Berghof, the young artist even received assignments from Hitler—and from his girlfriend. For example, Stork decorated the chimney stove in the living room and painted the tiles of the sideboard and the tea table, as well as porcelain for Eva Braun, complete with her monogram.73 She was obviously in Hitler’s good graces. Her separation from Brückner, who left her around the beginning of 1936 and married another woman a short time later, did nothing to change that: she remained a member of the most intimate inner circle at the Berghof even after the separation, along with Karl Brandt, Heinrich Hoffmann, Eva and Gretl Braun, and the secretaries Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski.74
Brückner, on the other hand, left four years later. On October 18, 1940, Hitler fired him from his position as personal adjutant. In fact, there had been at least one departure or removal from the dictator’s private realm every year since 1935: in 1936, his half-sister and housekeeper Angela Raubal was dismissed and his driver, Julius Schreck, died of natural causes; in 1937, the foreign press secretary, Ernst Hanfstaengl, fled to England; in 1938, Fritz Wiedemann was transferred to the German consulate in San Francisco; in 1939, the servant Karl Krause was fired. Thus the idea that Hitler moved in an entirely unchanged environment of servants and adjutants from 1933 on is false. The reasons for Brückner’s removal, meanwhile, are still difficult to understand today. In Below’s memoir it says that the reason was a difference of opinion between Brückner and Hitler’s majordomo Arthur Kannenberg, concerning “petty trifles.”75 Kannenberg, a corpulent Berlin chef and restaurant owner, was responsible with his wife for the “Führer household” in the Chancellery starting in 1933. He organized the state dinners in Berlin and on the Obersalzberg, and even went along every year to the Wagner festivals in Bayreuth, where he and his staff tended to Hitler and his guests in a house put at his special disposal by the Wagner family—the “Führerbau.” Kannenberg was famous, or infamous, for his solo interludes on the accordion at the Chancellor’s artists’ receptions. Winifred Wagner later described him as “a little part of us”—it was impossible to imagine Hitler’s private circle without him.76 Nicolaus von Below, meanwhile, regretted the “removal” of his friend Brückner. He had always hoped, he said, that Brückner would “one day return,” whereas others, such as “Bormann and Eva Braun, were happy to see him go.” Christa Schroeder described an “intrigue” of Kannenberg’s; she considered him to be a “shady character,” and even suggested a connection between Hitler’s “disfavor” toward Brückner and the end of Brückner’s relationship with Sofie Stork.77 In truth, all these retrospective judgments, expressing the speaker’s own sympathies or antipathies, amount largely to hearsay. They do, however, make clear that the group of people at the Berghof was by no means a “sworn society.” Jealousies, power struggles, and nepotistic favoritism were the order of the day there as well.