So as not to stand out among Hitler’s entourage, Eva Braun held the official position of a private secretary. Speer later claimed that whenever the Nazi leader spent time on the Obersalzberg, she likewise had to be there—only once, he wrote in Inside the Third Reich, had Hitler given her “a week’s vacation.”218 The insinuation here, that Eva Braun’s presence at the Berghof was a kind of duty or work for her, is unfounded and in fact attributable only to the special character of Speer’s memoirs. Speer himself often emphasized elsewhere the loyalty, devotion, dedication, and love Eva Braun felt for Hitler. Her constant access to the Berghof was a privilege, not a duty, which no member of the “inner circle” would ever have voluntarily gone without.219
In any case, Eva Braun lived in Munich most of the time. In summer 1935, when she was still living with her younger sister Margarete (Gretl) on Widenmayerstrasse, Hoffmann bought her a small house built four years earlier, at 12 Wasserburger Strasse (today Delpstrasse) in Bogenhausen. A Munich businessman, Adolf Widmann, had offered it for sale, and he said after the war that Eva Braun had visited the building to take a look and Hoffmann paid the asking price (35,000 reichsmarks) a few weeks later, with a “private check.” Hitler appeared at no point in the transaction, Widmann stated.220 Only when Widmann delayed supplying a receipt for the transfer fee that he had requested for various items in the house did Hoffmann and his attorney “verbally request” that he draw up the document “as urgently as possible,” “because Hitler wanted the receipt.”221 Three years later, on September 2, 1938, ownership was transfered to Eva Braun, “private secretary in Munich.”222
Hoffmann made contradictory statements in this regard as well. In his defense document from 1947, he first claimed that Hitler had bought Eva “a little house.” In the public denazification court proceedings against Eva Braun, on July 1, 1949, in Munich, he then said that he “could no longer recall how the purchase of the house” had come to pass; he might have acquired the property for his son-in-law Baldur von Schirach. He also no longer knew whether he “had been repaid by Hitler.” Finally, he added: “The end result was that I did not pay for the house. The cost was reimbursed, I don’t know by whom, and I also don’t know in what form.”223
Hoffmann’s sudden forgetfulness is not credible, nor is it conceivable that National Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach would ever have considered a residence as modest as the little house in Bogenhausen for himself and his family. In fact, Schirach became the owner of a seventeenth-century castle, Schloss Aspenstein, in Kochel am See (about forty miles from Munich), on March 12, 1936, around when Eva Braun and her sister Margarete moved to Wasserburger Strasse (March 30, 1936).224 Hitler’s girlfriend’s new domicile was located not far from where other prominent Party members lived—on the same street, for example, as Max Amann, president of the Reich Press Chamber and director of the Central Publishing House of the NSDAP. Heinrich Hoffmann’s villa was a few streets over. Heinrich Himmler (the Reichsführer-S), Hermann Giesler (architect and “General Building Inspector of the Capital City of the Movement”), and Martin Bormann lived in Bogenhausen as well, the latter at 26 Maria-Theresia-Strasse, in a villa confiscated from the painter Benno Becker.225
While Eva Braun was arranging her move in Munich, Hitler was in his “electoral struggle.” He had just presented the Western powers with a fait accompli by having the German army march into the Rhineland demilitarized zone on March 7, 1936. His generals as well as the diplomats in the foreign service had advised against the step, since breaking international agreements—both the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact, signed in 1925—threatened to increase Germany’s political isolation in Europe and possibly even risked starting another war. Nevertheless, Hitler brought off his coup and as the army marched into the Rhineland he called a sitting of Parliament in Germany, where, amid the frantic cheering of his supporters, he announced that German troops were “at this very moment occupying their future peace garrison.” He swore “to never retreat, from any power or any violence, in the reestablishment of the honor of our People,” and said that “with this day today,” the “struggle for Germany’s equality among nations” had been brought to a close. In the same breath, he made far-reaching offers to Germany’s European neighbors to collectively “ensure the peace,” even proposing a return to the League of Nations. Although Hitler was actually steeped in a racist imperialism that burst all bounds and left absolutely no room for a reconciliation or balance of power among nations, he said in his speech that he hoped from then on “to resolve any tensions on the path of slow, evolutionary development in peaceful collaboration.”226
After the speech, the national parliament was dissolved and new elections were called for March 29, 1936. Once again, Hitler’s recklessness—he apparently told Albert Speer later that this was “his riskiest undertaking”227—was rewarded: England and France protested Germany’s infringement but did not take military action, and the League of Nations in Geneva confined itself to a formal condemnation of the German violation of the treaties.
Hitler, meanwhile, made the most of his success. The parliamentary elections turned into a national triumphal celebration for him, as he crisscrossed the country, appearing as an orator in Berlin, Munich, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, Königsberg, Hamburg, Breslau, Ludwigshafen, Leipzig, Essen, and Cologne. Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, had planned the three-week “election campaign,” in which no reelection was actually at stake, to whip up “the German People into a violent frenzy of enthusiasm.”228 It was in truth a publicity campaign on the regime’s part, solely and exclusively seeking the public’s approval for Hitler’s policies: the NSDAP put forth a single-party list of candidates under the slogan “Reichstag for Freedom and Peace.” The official results were that 98.9 percent of voters cast their votes for Hitler; the nationwide fanning of the flames of “Führer”-euphoria knew no bounds. Whether the results correctly matched the votes as actually cast is both unknowable and irrelevant: Hitler was incontestably at the peak of his popularity, being in a position to do what all the political parties during the Weimar Republic had tried to do in vain—wipe out the hated Versailles Treaty.
And Eva Braun? Would Hitler’s political victories and the increasing adoration he received from the German population have meant nothing to her? It is almost impossible to imagine that Braun, then twenty-four years old, would not have felt her companion to be a kind of demigod, to whose wishes and needs she and everyone else had to submit. She may well have felt herself chosen by a higher power, since these foreign-policy successes only strengthened Hitler’s own view of himself as fulfilling a higher mission and being guided by destiny. “Providence” determined the path he walked on “with the instinctive certainty we have in dreams,” he had announced in front of three hundred thousand people at the Theresienwiese in Munich on March 14, 1936. And this was not just propaganda for public consumption. In his close circle as well, Hitler made no secret of his belief in “God’s Providence.” His sister Paula, for example, reported that he had told her of his “absolute conviction that our Lord God holds his protective hand above me.”229 Similarly, in 1941, during one of his nighttime teas in the East Prussian “Führer headquarters,” he remarked that an “omnipotent power,” which created “worlds,” had “certainly assigned every individual creature its task.” “Everything,” he said, “goes the way it has to go!”230