During the next three months, until the invasion of Norway on April 9, 1940, Hitler traveled back and forth between Berlin, Munich, and the Obersalzberg as he had before the war. On the Obersalzberg, he passed the time with Eva Braun and the other guests. Heinrich Hoffmann, in his postwar work Hitler Was My Friend, writes that he “gave [Eva Braun] time off, at Hitler’s request,” for the occasion.58 But this, like many of Hoffmann’s other later statements, seems to be excessive bluster. In any case, the start of the war did not yet bring about any fundamental changes to the situation at the Berghof, as Hitler did not abandon his bohemian lifestyle from one day to the next. However, apart from continuing to be busy with his architectural plans, he now devoted himself primarily to the war that he had been working toward for so many years. Thus the perception that the successful Poland campaign was never discussed within the trusted circle on the Berghof is less than credible. So are the claims made after the war by the surviving main players that Hitler’s further war plans—the invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg on May 10, 1940, and the attack on France—came as a complete surprise to them.
Hoffmann, for example, maintained that on the evening of May 9, while the usual company was taking the special train from Berlin via Celle and Hannover to Cologne, they had no idea where they were going, and thought they were going to Norway. Otto Dietrich similarly stated that he realized the “great offensive” had begun only on the morning of May 10, when “the first squadron of airplanes flew in the cloudless sky” overhead over the Eifel mountains “toward the west.”59 Since Hoffmann and Dietrich were both always at Hitler’s side, if only because of their jobs, and since they had various channels for receiving information even aside from their proximity to Hitler, these accounts are not very convincing. In fact, Hitler’s legendary obsession with secrecy often seems to be nothing more than a self-protective claim of his inner circle, invented after the war. Nicolaus von Below, who spent Easter 1939 at the Berghof with his wife, also doubts that Hitler’s camouflage of the journey “was believed.” In fact, every person traveling along had “his own private ties with the ‘initiates,’ ”60 that is, Schaub, Bormann, and Below himself, who as Hitler’s military adjutant and conversation partner had precise knowledge about what Hitler was considering. Speer, too, busy since December 1939 with the construction of the first fixed “Führer headquarters” (the “Rocky Eyrie” or Felsennest, on a mountain peak near Rodert, a village near Bad Münstereifel), was clearly in the loop about Hitler’s further plans.61
The blitzkrieg against France, justified as a preventive strike, ended on June 22, 1940, with the signing of a German-French ceasefire in Compiègne, a site rich with symbolism since it was where the armistice ending World War I was signed. In the space of a few weeks, roughly one hundred thousand French and twenty-seven thousand Germans had fallen in battle. Hitler, who had carried out the western campaign over the objections of the army’s high commander, Generaloberst Walther von Brauchitsch, and wiped clean the disgrace of World War I with his victory, was now regarded as the “greatest military leader of all time.”62 It is easy to imagine how this new highpoint of Germany’s “Führer” euphoria would have affected the circle on the Obersalzberg. Wolf Speer, a nephew of Albert Speer’s, recalled that there were photographs in his grandmother’s drawing room “of her successes in the highest society, and at the time that meant the Obersalzberg,” including pictures of Hitler with Eva Braun. Luise Mathilde Speer, who herself had been invited to the Berghof several times in the spring of 1939, later remarked, according to her son Albert, that she “did not want to see any of the people gathered there in her own house.” Still, she had apparently admired the “great Führer,” and added, “Who knows how evenings went with Bismarck or Napoleon!”63
As early as July 11, 1940, five days after his grand reception in Berlin where hundreds of thousands had wildly cheered him, Hitler arrived back on the “mountain.” Through late October he again traveled back and forth between his refuge at Berchtesgaden and the Chancellery in Berlin; Eva Braun sometimes accompanied him to Berlin as well.64 A twenty-two-year-old member of the Waffen-SS named Rochus Misch, part of the “Führer military escort” since early May, stayed on the Obersalzberg for the first time in summer 1940, and Eva Braun was introduced to him as a “housekeeper.” She changed her outfits several times a day, he later reported, and always wore makeup. Thus she did not, in Misch’s judgment, fit the “ideal of a German girl”: “naturalness and rootedness in the soil” were “not her style.”65 In fact, these two qualities had nothing whatsoever to do with Hitler’s personality, either. Misch also observed that Eva Braun’s behavior changed “lightning fast” as soon as Hitler left the Berghof: “You could still see the limousines driving down the winding roads and already the first preparations were being made for various amusing activities. Proper as a governess a moment before, now she was turning everything upside down. And she was cheerful, happy and relaxed, almost like a child.”66
On October 21, 1940, after Hitler departed to meet with acting French Prime Minister Pierre Laval, the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, and French head of state Marshal Philippe Pétain, Eva Braun threw a party the same evening with the Berghof staff.67 She was dancing on the volcano’s edge, since Hitler failed to bring France and Spain into the war, nor could he knock Great Britain out of the war on his own. The air war against England was in full swing and British bombers had struck Berlin for the first time on August 26. With these events in the background, the lifestyle—even the very existence—of this young, sometimes effusive girlfriend must have seemed like an anachronism in the life of the idolized “Führer and Reich Chancellor.”
Until the attack on the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941, Hitler conducted his war in large part from the Berghof. In fact, he spent the first few months of 1941 at the Berghof almost without interruption.68 This was where he considered his next steps, talked them out in the presence of his highest military officers, and formulated the goal of destroying Russia. At no point since the 1920s had he lost sight of his declared main ideological enemy, “Jewish Bolshevism.” Only when Soviet Russia was cast down “in a quick campaign,” he believed, would the English give up their struggle against Germany.69 He estimated that the blitzkrieg in the east would take about three months to reach victory. There were neither battle plans nor any thought of supplies and reinforcements for the period after that; everything was staked, literally, “on the first strike.”70
In summer 1941, for the first time, Hitler stayed for months at a time in his perfectly camouflaged, permanent headquarters, the “Wolf’s Lair,” near Rastenburg in East Prussia.71 In light of the earlier victories, most of the military officers, the Nazi leadership, and especially the members of the Nazi leader’s private circle were absolutely convinced that this was another masterstroke. For example, Below, deeply familiar with the dictator’s worldview and war plans from their many conversations together, admitted in his memoir that at the time he thought “Hitler was sharply and soberly calculating.” On top of everything, Below “in that period” often “marveled at [Hitler’s] calm demeanor” and found him “humane and sympathetic.”72 Given such uncritical acclaim, it is no wonder that Hitler barricaded himself at the Berghof for months in the lead-up to the campaign—he clearly needed this seclusion and blind agreement from his selected entourage. When and to what extent he revealed his war plans to Eva Braun during these months remains unknown to this day. But there is no doubt that, in one form or another, he let his loyal girlfriend in on the facts at some point before he left Berlin on the special train to East Prussia. Maria von Below, in a private (and apparently tapped) telephone call with her relatives, is said to have communicated weeks earlier the exact date of the upcoming German attack on the Soviet Union. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the military secret service, later complained to Hitler about the incident during a visit to the “Wolf’s Lair,” at which point Hitler, to everyone’s surprise, “brushed it aside with a wave of his hand.”73