In any case, the people in Hitler’s immediate environment did not demand any explanation, much less justification, of Eva Braun’s existence and presence in closest proximity to him, even in the context of the reigning morality of the time or Hitler’s ideological stipulations. Especially in his refuge on the Obersalzberg, Hitler was surrounded by true-believing followers who not only shared his political convictions but saw in him a heroic figure of historical greatness.191 Robert Ley—not actually in the Berghof circle but one of Hitler’s earliest henchmen and uncritical of him to the very end—recorded for posterity in his cell in Nuremberg, in 1945, that Hitler’s life was “a single act of sacrifice for his People right up to his sacrificial death,” and claimed: “Nothing, absolutely nothing—not even the woman he loved—had any influence on him, except for his duty.”192
Emmy Göring, in her memoir, illustrates how unwilling Hitler was to allow this image to be tarnished. She complains that she was not allowed to meet Eva Braun no matter how hard she tried to arrange it: Hitler kept Braun “under lock and key” on the Obersalzberg, she said, and when she invited the ladies of the Berghof (Anni Brandt, Hanni Morell, and Eva and Gretl Braun) to tea at her own Obersalzberg country house one day, in the “second year of the war” (1940), they all said yes but Hitler summoned Hermann Göring late that night and told him that Eva Braun couldn’t attend. The reason he gave was that Braun was “so bashful, she was even afraid” of Göring’s wife.193 In fact, Hitler had kept the second-most-powerful man in the “Third Reich” at a distance for years, in his private life. He had served as a witness at the ostentatious wedding of Hermann and Emmy Göring on April 11, 1935, at the Berlin Cathedral, and three years later had agreed to be their only daughter’s godfather; politically as well, he had helped Göring reach a unique position of power and named him his successor in a secret decree as early as December 1934. But despite, or because of, Göring’s popularity and growing political power—he had already started to present himself as “successor to the Führer and Chancellor” to foreign diplomats—Göring was not among the inner circle of Hitler intimates.194 Instead, the Nazi leader avoided personal closeness, probably so as not to let his designated successor’s lust for power and fame get out of hand and ultimately grow uncontrollable. Emmy Göring’s attempt to get close to Eva Braun and thus to Hitler’s private life must therefore have been extremely unwelcome to him.
This episode does not, as Emmy Göring put it, reveal “the tragedy of this woman [i.e., Braun] in such a moving way”; rather it shows the nature of the relationship between Hitler and Hermann Göring.195 Furthermore, the question naturally arises: Why did Emmy Göring invite Hitler’s girlfriend over for the first time only in “the second year of the war”? Why not in 1937 or 1938? Hermann Göring’s loss of political power, which had already begun in 1939 and accelerated starting in September 1940 due to his military errors in the air war against England, suggests that his wife invited Eva Braun only as a means to an end: an attempt to compensate for fading political and military significance by getting closer on a personal level.196
Hitler’s inapproachability and standoffishness, meanwhile, were not simply the “Führer’s” personal proclivities; they also protected him from needing to reveal anything about his personal life and thus from becoming humanly vulnerable. As a result, Eva Braun’s “socially unclear position” can also be attributed to the fact that Hitler lived outside the bounds of his own ideology of the “Volksgemeinschaft,” and claimed for himself the status of an exception.197 In fact, it was not only Eva Braun’s social status that was questionable among the “Führer’s” close circle; the character of her relationship to Hitler itself remained completely mysterious. Public displays of affection or even the slightest hint of any physical closeness, at least in the years leading up to the outbreak of war, remained nonexistent at the Berghof. Both Hitler and Braun were “thoroughly prudish,” Speer reported to Joachim Fest in 1978. Even in his intimate circle, Hitler avoided any move in that direction. He was always careful to maintain a certain distance from his entourage, and he valued conventionality and traditional behavior. Even in his relations to Speer and Goebbels, he remained above all a “father figure.”198
Every guest was left on his or her own to decide what the connection between Hitler and Braun might be. And so, even after the end of the war, opinions differed drastically about whether the couple had an actual love affair or merely a “relationship for show.” Speer, in any case, Hitler’s young close friend, had no doubt that Eva Braun was Hitler’s lover. Under questioning from Allied officers in Kransberg in the summer of 1945, he stated in writing that Eva Braun meant “very much” to Hitler. Hitler had spoken of her “with great respect and inner admiration”; she was “the woman whom he loved.” A mere quarter-century later, in Inside the Third Reich, there was no longer any talk of “love” as what Hitler felt for Eva Braun. Twenty years in prison and the influence of his editorial advisers Joachim Fest and Wolf Jobst Siedler had changed Speer’s way of seeing things. The once-powerful Minister of Armaments, who remained obsessed with power to the end, was now concerned to emphasize his political and personal distance from the man whom he had served with unswerving conviction to the last moment. Now he described Hitler as cold and always unapproachable, a man who “had no humor” and acted ruthlessly, suspiciously, and cynically toward his lover.199 Twenty-five years earlier, however, in Kransberg, when his statements had been less calculated, the same Speer had drawn a distinction between Hitler’s public conduct and his dealings with people in “private life.” According to Speer’s earlier account, Hitler acted chilly and “rarely like a ‘person’ ” when working, but in private he had “a soul” (that is, he was capable of feeling), “like every other human being.”200
Max Amann, who knew Hitler since their service together in World War I, described Hitler’s relation to women as “normal” in his interrogation by the U.S. Seventh Army on May 26, 1945. The only woman with whom Hitler had had “occasional intimate relations” was Eva Braun, Amann said. The literal record runs as follows: “Amann describes Hitler as a sexually normal man. Hitler’s only woman friend, with whom he had occasional intimate relations, was Eva Braun, a former employee of the photographer Hoffmann…. During the last month she was constantly around Hitler.”201
Two months later, Franz Xaver Schwarz, another fellow traveler of many years, “old campaigner,” and friend who used the familiar “du” with Hitler, said diametrically opposite things about Hitler and Eva Braun. Schwarz was an anti-Semite “in every fiber of his being” and “from an early age,” according to Richard Walther Darré after 1945, and in Hitler Schwarz had found the man who “saw things politically and expressed them the way Schwarz felt them to be.”202 A member of NSDAP since 1922 and its treasurer from its reestablishment in 1925 to the end, as well as a Reichsleiter, SS-Oberstgruppenführer, SA-Obergruppenführer, and member of Parliament, he—along with his wife, the former Bertha Breher—was among the Nazi leader’s and Eva Braun’s Munich circle of friends. Both Schwarzes were welcome guests on the Obersalzberg.203 Under questioning from Allied officers on July 21, 1945, Schwarz stated that Hitler had had a “platonic relationship” with Eva Braun since 1931. He said Hitler himself had told him that he lived only for his work: “A woman gets absolutely nothing from me. I can’t pay any attention to any of that.”204 We should note in evaluating the former Reich treasurer’s reliability on this topic that he had absolutely no reason to reveal anything about Hitler’s carefully concealed private life to his American interrogators. In Nuremberg at the end of 1945, Schwarz gave the impression of being a “sincere fanatic, who still professes unbound personal admiration for Hitler.”205