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Eva Braun on the Obersalzberg, ca. 1937 (Illustration Credit 9.3)

From the start, Hitler showed no political restraint or secretiveness around his two young secretaries, either. They had accompanied him to his headquarters at the front, and while eating breakfast or having an afternoon coffee with them, he explained “what a great danger Bolshevism posed to Europe” and that, if he had waited another year, “it would probably have already been too late.” Christa Schroeder wrote in a letter to a friend that the women “first heard what the boss had to say about the state of affairs” over breakfast. Then, “around one o’clock,” they went with him “to the general briefing” that took place in the map room, where either the chief-adjutant of the armed forces, Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, or Hitler’s army adjutant, Major Gerhard Engel, gave his “situation report.” These “briefing lectures,” in which Bormann, Morell, and Schaub also took part, were “extremely interesting” to Christa Schroeder.74 The military officers, in contrast, disliked such loose conduct on the part of their commander in chief, and put a stop as soon as they could to Hitler’s bringing his secretaries along to military meetings. Nonetheless, Christa Schroeder described “evening discussions with the leader” in July 1941, which “always [went on] insanely long.”75 And on August 20, after nine weeks in the “Wolf’s Lair,” she put Hitler’s raw and unadulterated views, as she had internalized them, in a private letter:

There is nothing I want more deeply than for the English to propose peace once we’ve taken care of Russia…. I just can’t understand why the English are being so unreasonable. Once we’ve spread out to the east, we won’t need their colonies. It’s much more practical, too, to have everything nice and contiguous, it seems to me. The Ukraine and Crimea are so fertile, we can grow what we need there, and get everything else… in trade with South America. It’s all so simple and makes so much sense. Please God, let the English come to their senses soon.76

The goals of this deliberate war of exploitation and annihilation against the Soviet Union, in all its contempt for humanity, could not have been formulated any more clearly and unambiguously. Incidentally, this contemporaneous letter from Schroeder also proves something else: the claim made later that Hitler never touched on political topics in the presence of women was merely another self-protective lie.

The Beginning of the End

Presumably, Eva Braun and Hitler did not see each other during the next five months. Only twice—in October, shortly after the start of the great offensive against Moscow, and in November—did he leave his wooden barracks in the Rastenburg swamps, and only for one day each time, to travel to Berlin and Munich. In early December 1941, he stayed for about a week in Berlin.77 The New Year’s party that always took place at the Berghof, with its accompanying group photograph, did not happen for New Year’s 1941–1942: Hitler stayed in East Prussia. He apparently phoned Eva Braun in Munich every night at around ten.78 The blitzkrieg had meanwhile failed; the air war against England was lost; and Hitler had declared war on the United States after the Japanese attack on the American Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, without being forced or even obliged by treaty to do so. By late April 1942 when he once again traveled to the Bavarian capital and the Berghof for a few days, more than a million German soldiers had fallen in battle. The SS murdered almost as many civilians in mass shootings in the occupied territories by the end of the year. In spite of the enormous losses, lack of reserve troops, and shortages of matériel on the German side, a new summer offensive was supposed to reach Stalingrad and bring about a final decision in the war.79

In Munich and on the Obersalzberg, however, there was not yet any sign of the war in spring 1942. While Lübeck, Rostock, Cologne, Essen, Bremen, and other major German cities had already undergone nighttime carpet bombing from the British Royal Air Force, the “capital city of the movement” had not experienced a single air attack. Hitler thus met undisturbed with August Eigruber, the NSDAP Gauleiter of the Upper Danube, on April 27 and 28 to discuss the “construction of an operetta theater” in Linz and to determine the “street profile of the grand boulevards” there, which were to have arcades and upscale businesses on all sides. “The most ideal stroll in the world will be in Linz,” he enthused, stressing to Eigruber that he, Hitler, was first and foremost an architect and master builder. Even his “military operations” would not have succeeded had he “not [remained] primarily an artist”: that was the only way it had been possible “to survive this winter and emerge victorious.” Hitler believed that he alone had prevented a military disaster in the winter of 1941–1942, by managing everything himself;80 in fact, to his generals’ annoyance, he had constantly interfered in operations despite having hardly any insight into larger strategic considerations. In the First World War, after all, he had been only a private.

The world of the Upper Bavarian Alps seemed just as intact as Munich. As before, streets and estates were being built on the Obersalzberg under the aegis of Martin Bormann. Bormann’s instructions were even declared to be a “war-critical construction program of the Führer”; unlike everywhere else in the Reich, there were no shortages of labor or restrictions on construction materials, food, or objects of daily use there. This was true first and foremost for Hitler and his entourage—their stay on the “mountain” continued to be idyllic.81 What’s more, in the early summer of 1942 Eva Braun posed Hitler in front of her camera as a devoted paterfamilias and sympathetic private person. She even asked Walter Frentz, a young photographer who had worked as a cameraman for Leni Riefenstahl and had accompanied Hitler as a photographer since the start of the war, to take photographs of herself as well as her friend Herta Schneider’s young daughter, and Hitler.82 Since Eva Braun preserved these pictures in a separate photo album she started specially for them, it is reasonable to assume that she was thereby recording her own desire for a normal family life, and that, during the long periods of separation caused by the war, she took as much delight in her fantasy world on celluloid as Hitler did in his models of Linz. In addition, she herself often photographed and filmed Hitler with her school friend’s children, or the children of other visitors to the Berghof.83 Another reason she did this was apparently that it made the “Führer” appear the way she wanted him to be: pleasant, relaxed, private. At the same time, though, she sold these pictures to Heinrich Hoffmann, who then published them in his propaganda photo books. The assertion that Hitler knew nothing about her fake-family pictures is thus hard to believe.84 If nothing else, he was obviously willing to make himself available to pose for her in this way. Eva Braun, for her part, clearly got vicarious satisfaction from this constant filming, which Hitler always put up with since he could not offer her a fulfilling private life in other ways.85