In general, a similarly noticeable silence reigns supreme among the main players’ memoirs concerning the exact makeup of the group around Hitler in Linz and Vienna. What might this silence mean? After all, all the members of the inner circle—Brandt, Below, Hoffmann, Dietrich, Brückner, Schaub, the secretaries, and Eva Braun—were at the center of the maelstrom of events. But why did they keep their collective observations and experiences to themselves? First and foremost, we see here again that the solidarity of this group, through to the end of the war and into the years of denazification, must not be underestimated.242 These individuals were not ordinary observers, not part of the masses burning with enthusiasm outside the hotel who had no way to reach Hitler; rather they constituted, together with the regime’s public officials there, the circle of loyal intimates, accomplices, and accessories around the Nazi leader. As a result, none of them reveal the most salient fact: the extent to which they too cheered the entry of the German army into Austria at the time, and how strongly they themselves identified with the National Socialist worldview.
In fact, it is difficult in general to determine how deeply the members of the inner circle shared Hitler’s long-term political goals and vision of a Greater German Reich.243 Their knowledge varied by how close they were to Hitler as well as by their functions. Still, the immediate effects of the Nazi expansion, beginning with Austria, were clear to see. For example, there is a photograph in the partially preserved archive of Hoffmann’s photographs that shows Vienna Jews scrubbing the street with brushes, watched by SS men.244 The racist anti-Semitism that was for Hitler the “central law of the movement” (in the words of Klaus Hildebrand), the foundation of National Socialist propaganda, and the official dogma of the Nazi state, certainly did not remain hidden from those close to Hitler. Rather, we must assume that Hitler’s adjutants, secretaries, servants, and, not least, Eva Braun shared without reservation the Jew-hatred of their “boss,” as they all called him. All of the later protestations like that of Julius Schaub—that he never heard anything about the “Jewish question,” much less the extermination of Jews, until after the capitulation of 1945—must therefore be rejected, or rather understood as stemming primarily from their fear of judicial punishment after the war.245
The Nazi leader’s first personal will, written by hand and dated May 2, 1938, shows how tight the bonds were between Hitler and his circle. That afternoon, Hitler set out from Berlin for a one-week state visit to Italy; Paul Schmidt, head translator in the foreign office, later recalled that “half the government” took part in the visit.246 Hitler, who for years had been suffering from premonitions of death and apparently was afraid of being assassinated in Italy, set his private matters in order before the trip and bequeathed all of his belongings to the NSDAP in the case of his death.247 At the same time, he made sure that his close relatives and colleagues, including the adjutants Schaub, Brückner, and Wiedemann, would be financially set for life. And the first person he mentioned was his girlfriend, twenty-six years old at the time, stating that “Miss Eva Braun, Munich” should receive from the Party “1,000 marks a month… that is, 12,000 marks a year for the remainder of her life” in the case of his death.248 This is the only surviving document in Hitler’s hand, apart from his testament of April 1945, that mentions Eva Braun by name. Her family claimed, after the war, that Eva herself did not know about the testament.249 Surely not many people did know about it. Among the initiates were, in any case, Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery, to whom the document was given for safekeeping, and Franz Xaver Schwarz, “Reich Treasurer of the NSDAP,” whom Hitler intended to be his executor. Schwarz was not only the “Plenipotentiary of the Führer” in all of the Party’s legal property matters, but also, as Richard Walther Darré expressed it later, the “uncrowned king of the NSDAP,” with whom no “leader of the movement” dared “to have a falling out.”250
Eva Braun was allowed to join this trip to Italy, and she documented it on film. More than five hundred people made the journey, in three special trains from the Anhalter station in Berlin through Munich to the Italian capital. The foreign office organized a special Ladies’ Program for the spouses of the high-ranking Nazi politicians, with group outings. This glittering company included Annelies von Ribbentrop, wife of the new Reich Foreign Minister, as well as Ilse Hess, Magda Goebbels, and Marga Himmler; only Emmy Göring was missing, since her husband, the Reich Minister for Air Travel, had been declared Hitler’s successor a month earlier, by “Führer edict,” and had to remain in Berlin as his deputy.251 The women stayed in Rome at the Grand Hotel (today the St. Regis Grand Hotel), built in 1894 as the first luxury hotel in the heart of the city, while Hitler and his retinue were housed in the Quirinal Palace, the residence of Italian kings.252 Indeed, it was King Victor Emmanuel III, not Mussolini, who was the Germans’ official host. Hitler, to his great annoyance, felt that Mussolini, the Prime Minister and thus subordinate to the head of state, had merely “tagged along” for their visit, as the Nazi leader complained years later.253 The wives, in any case, were permitted to attend the dinner arranged by the King in the Quirinal on May 4—the “stiffest event imaginable,” according to adjutant Wiedemann—as well as a dinner hosted by Il Duce at the Palazzo Venezia three days later.254
Eva Braun was excluded from all of these activities. She boarded one of the three special trains only in Munich, joining Karl and Anni Brandt, the Morells, and Maria Dreesen, wife of the Godesberg hotelier, with her son Fritz. It is nearly certain that Braun traveled in a sleeping car in the same train as Hitler. The train was put into service by the German railroad only in July 1937; called “Amerika,” it consisted of two locomotives, Hitler’s salon car, a conference car with a radio station and telex, a dining car, and several cars for the military escort, staff, and guests.255 No one saw Eva Braun’s face outside her immediate circle. In Rome, too, she stayed separate from the others, although no less luxuriously and no less centrally, at the Hotel Excelsior, a “white palace” built around the turn of the century on Via Veneto, the most famous street in the city. Thus cut off from her fellow travelers, she explored the city with the women in her group in particular, while Karl Brandt joined Goebbels, Himmler, Hess, Ribbentrop, and Otto Dietrich in Hitler’s entourage on May 4, to visit, together with Mussolini, the enormous Victor Emmanuel Monument with its Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.256 After an extensive program of celebrations in Rome and Naples, Hitler and his group stayed a short while in Florence and then returned from there to Germany in the German special trains on May 9, 1938.
Hitler, who was determined to follow up the “annexation” of Austria by occupying Czechoslovakia with its Sudeten-German minority, had achieved the purpose of his visit: Italy would remain neutral in case of war.257 Eva Braun, who did not take the train back to Germany but rather traveled onward with her companions to the island of Capri, presumably knew as little of Hitler’s warlike intentions at this point as most of the others on the Italian trip. She had taken part in none of the official events and saw the maneuvers of the Italian fleet in the Gulf of Naples only from afar, while Hitler observed them from onboard a battleship, together with the King and Mussolini.258 It is not even known whether she spent any time at all with Hitler during the trip. She was, however, ceaselessly taking photographs and shooting films. If we believe Henriette von Schirach, Eva Braun showed her movies at the Berghof in the autumn of that year and remarked to Hitler that now he would see the “real Italy” for once.259