In any case, Hitler no longer showed up on the Obersalzberg several times a month, as he had in the past. There were still extended stays, up until the end of the war, but they were less frequent and also could not happen at will, since they depended on the military situation. Spontaneous trips with a few close friends were a thing of the past, since traveling now required that the whole “Führer headquarters” be moved, including the orderlies and the security personnel, namely an SS military escort and a “Führer escort battalion.” Hitler’s whole way of life changed. He had now become, as Speer remarked, “a slave to work,” whereas before he had “never let himself be pressured by work.”42 Especially in the latter half of the war, he stayed away at the front for months at a time.43
Hitler had no fixed headquarters when the war started. As a result, Hitler and his whole staff, including Schroeder and Daranowski, the secretaries; Wilhelm Brückner; Julius Schaub; Karl Brandt; Nicolaus von Below; Martin Bormann; Heinrich Hoffmann; and Otto Dietrich slept in the “Führer train” for the first three weeks of September 1939, during the so-called Eighteen-Day War against Poland. This train consisted of two locomotives, two special cars with antiaircraft guns, two luggage cars, a “Führer car,” a command car, a military escort car, two dining cars, two guest cars, two sleeping cars, and a press car.44 The train’s locations in Eastern Pomerania and Upper Silesia were declared military protection zones, guarded by military police and defended with antitank and antiaircraft cannons. An airplane was kept at the ready for Hitler; it was monitored by a soldier carrying a machine gun.45 The commander of a given “Führer headquarters”—in this case Major General Erwin Rommel—was responsible for all security measures.46
Christa Schroeder, in a letter to her friend Johanna Nusser dated September 11, 1939, described how the situation appeared from the point of view of the secretaries accompanying the Nazi leader:
We’ve been living in the train for ten days now, always changing our location, but since we—Daranowski and I—never leave the train, it all stays monotonous (for us, very monotonous). The heat is almost unbearable, just horrible. The sun beats down all day long on the compartments and you’re simply powerless against the tropical heat…. The Boss drives off with his men in the morning and we are condemned to wait and wait and wait some more.47
Meanwhile, Hitler visited various sectors of the front. His accompanying physician Karl Brandt occasionally availed himself of a field military hospital and performed operations along with the other doctors.48 Heinrich Hoffmann as well as employees of his company photographed the whole campaign, producing among other things aerial shots of burning buildings, destroyed Polish tank convoys, and the bombing of Polish bunkers and bridges.49 Hoffmann, himself in uniform, also staged the commander in chief in his photos, taking pictures of Hitler on his “Ride Along the Front in the Corridor” on September 4, saluting to marching soldiers, and used this for the cover of the illustrated book he published that year, Mit Hitler in Polen (With Hitler in Poland). He also photographed Hitler at situation briefings in the train, in the field kitchen, talking to wounded soldiers, and during his triumphal entry into Danzig on September 19.50 By the time Hitler returned to Berlin a week later, Poland, which lacked modern military equipment, had been defeated and divided up between the German Reich and the Soviet Union. Seventy thousand Polish soldiers had fallen and another seven hundred thousand were prisoners of war.
In addition, Einsatzgruppen, or task forces of the secret police, part of the SS, had marched in behind the German army and were carrying out mass shootings, primarily of Jews. Hitler had issued a “special order” for the ethnic “cleansing” of Poland and named Heinrich Himmler the Reich Commissioner for the Eastern Territories.51 We have no photographs by Hoffmann and his associates of the murders committed, although there are images that reveal the discrimination, violence, and persecution. They show, for example, members of the security service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) arresting Polish Jews and cutting off their beards. Hoffmann and his team also photographed transports to the ghetto and Jewish forced laborers.52 In truth, the march of German troops into Poland was the start of a horrific program of “Germanization,” deportation, and extermination. Around 3.2 million Jews were kept imprisoned in ghettos. Hitler’s racial mania and hatred of the people in Poland—who were, he said, “more like animals than human beings”—found full expression for the first time during the Poland campaign.53 It is unlikely that Eva Braun ever saw any of the thousand photographs of the Poland campaign that Hoffmann kept, but she presumably knew Hitler’s stereotypical racial views and in fact may have, like many other Germans, shared them. The extermination of Jews, on the other hand, was never discussed openly in the innermost private circle; the topic was never allowed to be mentioned in Hitler’s presence.54
Eva Braun also never joined Hitler at his garrison near the front. None of the women from the Berghof (except the secretaries) were ever brought there. Instead, Eva Braun remained in her house in Munich, drove up to the Obersalzberg with her family and friends, or traveled to Italy, escorted by several of the ladies of the inner circle. Whenever Hitler was in Berlin for a longer stay, Eva Braun also stayed in her small apartment in the Old Chancellery. For example, on the evening of November 8, 1939, she and her friend Herta Schneider found themselves with Hitler in his special train on the way to Berlin while a bomb went off in Munich’s Bürgerbräu beer cellar, which the Nazi leader had just left. Eva Braun learned only the following day, in a conversation with her younger sister, who had stayed in Munich, that their father was among the many injured in the blast.55
Meanwhile, the war in Poland had little tangible effect in Germany. Life went on, despite the introduction of food and clothes rationing. Most people believed that the victory would be quick and then celebrated it with corresponding enthusiasm when it came. When Hitler returned to the Obersalzberg on December 27, 1939, he did so as a celebrated war hero.56 The enthusiasm for the “blitzkrieg” in the east among the German population knew no bounds, and people hoped, as Nicolaus von Below recalled, that “England and France would be reasonable” and that it would not come to war with the Western powers. No one suspected the existence of preparations, already under way in secret, for the German army to attack in the west.57