The extent of Marianne Schönmann’s activities remains in shadow, however. Officially, she was not in the art business around Hitler. A friend of hers, the Munich gallerist Maria Almas-Dietrich, in contrast, can be proven to have worked together with Karl Haberstock and Heinrich Hoffmann as a supplier for the “Linz special assignment.” Heinrich Hoffmann introduced Hitler to Almas-Dietrich in 1936; her daughter was apparently friends with Eva Braun.110 A year later, in August 1937, Maria Almas-Dietrich already found herself, along with Hitler, Eva Braun, and Braun’s Munich circle of friends, among the wedding guests in Marianne Schönmann’s apartment. Working partly with Hoffmann, she would sell Hitler more than nine hundred paintings in total and thus be one of the most important art brokers for the Linz “Führer Museum.”111 She conducted her business via Martin Bormann, or directly with the Nazi leader, who then instructed his personal adjutant to pass along her invoices to Hans Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery.112 Despite the evidence that Maria Almas-Dietrich worked with the Operational Center for the Occupied Territories (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR), which stole property from Jewish owners throughout the regions occupied by the German army during the war, the accusation that she had dealt in stolen art has never been proven, even today, due to lack of sales documents. It is also uncertain how close her friendship with Hitler and his private circle actually was, and whether she ever received an invitation to the Berghof. It is certain, however, that she made an enormous financial profit from her dealings with Hitler. Between 1940 and 1944, she apparently took in more than 600,000 reichsmarks with her business for the “Linz special assignment.”113
In general, there was a close intertwining of private and business relationships within the dictator’s innermost circle. In this context, Heinrich Hoffmann in particular skillfully exploited his friendship with Hitler and his quasifamilial relationship with Eva Braun. And in 1936, he introduced another person into Hitler’s private life who would exert a sizable influence on Hitler’s mental and physical state until the end: Dr. Morell.
Dr. Morell
Dr. Theodor Morell, a ship’s doctor before the First World War, had a private practice on Berlin’s chic Kurfürstendamm that included artists, politicians, and Hitler’s personal photographer Hoffmann among its patients. When Hitler—who didn’t smoke, drank no alcohol, and kept to a strict diet—was suffering from increased stomach pains and eczema on his legs in 1935–1936, Hoffmann arranged a meeting with Morell—presumably at his house in Munich.114 Morell apparently succeeded right away in convincing the hypochondriacally inclined Chancellor of his medical abilities, because from then on he invariably treated Hitler and was on call for him at all hours.
By 1937–1938 at the latest, the “personal physician” and his wife, actress Johanna “Hanni” Moller, had also joined the inner circle around the dictator. Already in January 1937, when Hitler spent as usual, the beginning of the New Year at the Berghof, Morell was present as well. Together with Hitler, Hoffmann, and the adjutant Brückner, he went to see the site where the teahouse on the Mooslahnerkopf, a mountain nearby, was to be built. In August 1937, Theodor and Hanni Morell were among Marianne Schönmann’s wedding guests. And at New Year’s 1937–1938, the Berlin doctor once more found himself, alongside Albert Speer, Sofie Stork, and others, on the Obersalzberg.115 Starting in 1938, Morell seems to have taken up a permanent place among Hitler’s companions. Photographs by Hoffmann show him with Karl Brandt and other faithful followers in the Reich Chancellor’s special train on the way to the Austrian city of Klagenfurt, where on April 4, 1938, Hitler gave one of his many propaganda speeches leading up to the plebiscite on the “annexation” of Austria. In early September, Morell appeared in Party uniform between his wife and Eva Braun on a VIP platform at the last NSDAP Party convention (“Greater Germany Reich Party Convention”) in Nuremberg; that same month, he appeared at the conferences in Bad Godesberg and Munich.116
Morell was thus personally on site when Hitler, under threat of war and clearly suffering from extreme nervous tension, dramatically negotiated the cession of the Sudetenland to the German Reich. The “personal physician” accompanied Hitler to the discussions with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that took place on September 22–24 in the posh Rheinhotel Dreesen, and to the Munich Conference with Chamberlain, Mussolini, and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier in the “Führerbau” on Königsplatz on September 28–30.117 In private, the Brandts, Speers, Bormanns, and Morells formed as it were the core of the Berghof group around Hitler, Eva Braun, and Braun’s sister and friends.118
However, it seems—at least in retrospect—that Morell was greatly disliked there by everyone except Hitler, and was little respected as a doctor. Speer, for example, tears him apart in Inside the Third Reich, calling him “a bit of a screwball obsessed with making money,” whose treatment methods “we never felt entirely easy about” and who was “the butt of humor” whenever Hitler was not present.119 Franz von Sonnleithner, the Foreign Office liaison officer at the “Führer headquarters” during the last years of the war, described Dr. Morell as an irritating personality, “portly in stature, with a brownish skin color and fat fingers loaded with rings,” who “did not [correspond to] the ideal image of the time.”120 Even the Wagners in Bayreuth considered him “a slob” and so unacceptable that, by order of his “Patient A,” he had to avoid coming near them after 1938.121
Having attained a position of trust and thus a position of power with remarkable speed, he awakened suspicion and disapproval both in the private “Führer circle” and among high-ranking political associates. It did not fit into the public image of the bold and infallible “Führer”—a man who was trusted “blindly” and whose foreign policy triumphs had given him the aura of a kind of superman; a “real man” who could pull off whatever he wanted—that Morell was constantly supplying him with pills “in gold foil” and giving him injections. The public was not permitted to find out about these occasional indispositions of Hitler’s, in any case, since his popularity in the country as a whole depended on his uninterrupted success.122 The very idea of a man like Morell holding the fate of Germany in his hands by making daily decisions about the health of the mythical “hero” was suspect. Göring, for instance, allegedly called him “Herr Reich Injection Master [Spritzenmeister],” while Himmler, head of the Gestapo, secretly put him under surveillance after the war started in 1939 because he felt Morell had grown too powerful.123 Morell himself complained about the snubs he received from all sides, and the fact that he had to fight hard to keep his position “near the Führer.”124