Such visits were not at all difficult for Hitler to arrange. Photohaus Hoffmann, on the corner of Amalienstrasse and Theresienstrasse, was directly across the street from Café Stephanie, a favorite spot for the leading Nazi politicians. Before World War I, it had been a meeting point for the bohemians of the Schwabing district, including such figures as Heinrich Mann, Erich Mühsam, Eduard Graf von Keyserling, and Paul Klee. The Party’s headquarters were just a side street away, at 50 Schellingstrasse, the same street where the editorial and printing offices of the Völkischer Beobachter were located a few houses farther on. At 50 Schellingstrasse itself was the building where Heinrich Hoffmann and his family used to live, and Hoffmann’s “workshop” was located next door. That was where he photographed Hitler, Göring, and other Party leaders.21 Also on Schellingstrasse was the Osteria Bavaria, the oldest Italian restaurant in Munich, where Hitler and his fellow Party members often used to go; it is still there today, under the name Osteria Italiana. Henriette von Schirach described the restaurant as a “cool, small winery with a little courtyard painted in Pompeian red and a ‘temple,’ that is, an alcove with two columns in front of it,” which was kept reserved for Hitler. However, Hitler’s later secretary, Traudl Junge, said that the Nazi leader’s regular table was the “least comfortable table all the way in the back, in the corner.”22
Hitler rarely ate alone. His constant companions from the early 1920s on included not only Heinrich Hoffmann but also Ernst F. Sedgwick Hanfstaengl,23 a German-American who was named head of the Party’s Foreign Press Bureau in 1931. Ernst was the younger brother of the art publisher Edgar Hanfstaengl, who had taken over the family business, “Franz Hanfstaengl Art Publishers,” in 1907; he led the New York branch of the publishing house until the end of World War I and then returned to Munich. Hitler’s Munich circle in the early years also included Adolf Wagner, the powerful Gauleiter[3] of the Munich–Upper Bavaria region, called the “despot of Munich”; Julius Schaub, Hitler’s personal assistant; Christian Weber, a “potbellied former horse trader” (in Joachim Fest’s words) and good friend of Hitler’s; and Hermann Esser, a founding member of the NSDAP, whom Goebbels called “the little Hitler.” Later additions included the young Martin Bormann (a Party member since 1927), Otto Dietrich (press chief of the NSDAP since 1931), SS General Joseph “Sepp” Dietrich, Max Amann, and Wilhelm Brückner (an SA-Obergruppenführer and Hitler’s chief adjutant since 1930).24
Eva Braun was only occasionally invited out by Hitler—to a meal, a movie, the opera, or a drive in the Munich region. Henriette von Schirach recalled, about the beginning of the acquaintance between her father’s friend and Eva Braun, that Hitler could “give the most thrilling compliments”: “May I invite you to the opera, Miss Eva? I am always surrounded by men, you see, so I know very well how much the pleasure of a woman’s company is worth.” Who, she said, “could withstand” that?25 Although their relationship seemed to be a rather superficial one at first, Hitler immediately had the girl investigated. Martin Bormann, at whose wedding Hitler had recently been a witness, was given the assignment as early as 1930 to determine whether the Braun family was “Aryan,” that is, had no Jewish ancestors.26 Bormann, who had meanwhile risen to the SA Supreme Staff, was to remain one of Hitler’s closest and most trusted friends from 1933 until Hitler’s death.27
Eva Braun, still a minor at that point, presumably did not suspect a thing about Bormann’s vetting. It is easy to imagine that this girl was impressed by her new acquaintance’s prominence and was open to his political ideas. There is no evidence as to whether she herself, or her parents, held anti-Semitic views. Since Ilse Braun, four years older than her sister Eva, worked as a receptionist for a Jewish doctor who was also a close friend of hers, there seem not to have been ideological prejudices in Braun’s family. Photographs of Eva Braun from her early years working in Hoffmann’s photography store show a very childish-seeming girl, who obviously liked to be photographed and was not shy about striking poses in the office rooms.28 Her relationship with Hitler is said to have remained purely “platonic” until 1932. Heinrich Hoffmann, in his memoir Hitler Was My Friend (London, 1955; German translation, 1974), claimed that his employee had pursued the relationship and had let it be known that “Hitler was in love with her and she would definitely succeed in getting him to marry her.”29 He did not perceive any “intense interest” on Hitler’s part at first, though. In truth, what Hoffmann’s observations reveal is the difference between a young woman—still a teenager, in fact—and a bachelor rather more advanced in years: while she spontaneously and enthusiastically expressed her feelings, he set store by the utmost discretion.
Trustee in Personal Matters
The mutual trust between Hitler and Hoffmann—indispensable for the long sittings in the portrait studio and attested by the countless photographs in which Hitler struck uninhibited poses—extended to their private lives.30 Henriette von Schirach later recalled that her family moved into a “tremendously modern apartment in Bogenhausen” in 1929, “which Hitler liked” to visit. He ate spaghetti there, with “a little muscat, tomato sauce on the side, then nuts and apples,” and improvised on the piano after the meal.31 Hitler felt “at home” with Hoffmann and his family, according to Albert Speer in Inside the Third Reich. In the garden of the photographer’s villa in Munich-Bogenhausen, Hitler could, as Speer observed in the summer of 1933, behave without the slightest formality, “lie down on the grass in shirtsleeves” or recite from “a volume of Ludwig Thoma.”32
By that point Hoffmann and Hitler had been friends for at least a decade. Hoffmann’s son-in-law Baldur von Schirach later reported that Hitler had come to know “family life” with Hoffmann; Hoffmann’s first wife, Therese (Lelly); and their children, and that he had been taken in as a member of the family.33 The photographer and his family were, so to speak, the core of the private circle around the unmarried NSDAP leader. After Therese Hoffmann’s early death in 1928, the bond between the two men seemed to grow even stronger. During Hitler’s many trips in the service of the Nazi Party’s ambitions, not only Hoffmann himself but also—at Hitler’s request—Hoffmann’s daughter Henriette accompanied him, to bring a little youthful freshness into the company of men.34 Family celebrations, such as Hoffmann’s son Heinrich’s confirmation in March 1931, his daughter Henriette’s wedding the following year, or Hoffmann’s remarriage in 1934, were celebrated together. Not only that, the weddings were organized by Hitler himself in his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz.35
In Obersalzberg and Berlin as well, Hoffmann was there as Hitler’s constant companion.36 Despite never holding an official position in the government or the Party, the photographer enjoyed a position of trust—and thus power—that important Party members such as Goebbels or Bormann envied, thanks to his practically unlimited access to Hitler until 1944. Others, such as Otto Wagener, head of the political-economic department of the Nazi Party, were annoyed that Hitler would occasionally discuss “the most secret matters in the presence of his close companions.” Wagener “sometimes heard something of truly decisive importance only by complete accident from the photographer, Hoffmann.”37
3
Translator’s note: “