In the meantime, Eva Braun’s currency at Hitler’s court continued to rise. Christa Schroeder, who had no domestic life of her own since she had constantly been on call for Hitler for years, commented in her memoir that Eva Braun grew “more certain of her influence over Hitler” during the war years. She became “more self-confident,” Schroeder wrote, took a greater part in mealtime conversations, and often expressed her displeasure “when Hitler continued to discuss one of his favorite topics after the meal was over, rather than getting up from the table.” As soon as Eva Braun intervened, by loudly “asking the time” or looking rebukingly at Hitler, he brought “his monologues” to an end “on the spot.”86 Eva Braun thus seems to have been the only person who dared to put a stop to his well-known talkativeness; no other member of the mealtime group at the Berghof would have done so. But it did not gain her any sympathy from the others; it only emphasized the intimacy of her relationship with Hitler and showed up the obsequious behavior of everyone else. Not a few of them held it against her that she dimmed the “Führer’s” radiant glow by treating him like a longtime husband.
This is not the least significant reason why Eva Braun was later called capricious, spoiled, and “very much focused on trivialities.” Baldur von Schirach, for example, a member of Hitler’s inner circle from the age of eighteen who continued to visit the Obersalzberg occasionally until 1943 with his wife, Henriette, said after the war that Eva Braun sometimes supplied the people at the table “with the latest gossip and scandal from the film world for hours on end.” And if she “couldn’t get a word in with her gossip stories,” Schirach said, “she acted bored and complained about migraines, and Hitler worriedly patted her hand again and again while he was talking with his associates.”87 They now addressed each other with the informal “du,” and the rest of the guests could relax from the “formal fireside gatherings” only when Hitler and Braun withdrew upstairs together at night.88
Eva Braun and Martin Bormann were the only people in Hitler’s private world who became more and more important to the Nazi leader in these years. Bormann had taken over for Rudolf Hess after Hess’s bizarre flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941, and now ran the “Party Chancellery of the Führer.” Hess had apparently intended to conduct negotiations on his own in order to secure peace in the west for Hitler’s upcoming war against the Soviet Union in the east, but he was now regarded as a traitor. For months, Bormann mercilessly pursued every suspected “collaborator in this act of insanity,” on Hitler’s orders.89 But while Hess’s adjutants and others in his circle were arrested, his wife, Ilse Hess, was more or less left alone, notwithstanding a lot of harassment from Bormann. She owed this consideration in large part to her National Socialist attitudes, about which no one had any doubt. But Eva Braun, too—nicknamed “Everl” in a postwar letter of Ilse Hess’s—seems to have spoken up for her and supported her.90 It is doubtful that she did so without Hitler’s knowledge—“behind Hitler’s back,” as Albert Speer later claimed—since Ilse Hess continued to be in direct contact with Hitler. For example, she wrote to a friend in early August 1941 that “the Führer” had permitted her to write to “the big” (as she called her husband) in England.91 Hitler’s paranoid suspicions thus seem to have remained within limits in the case of his fugitive deputy’s wife.
Even though it was possible to get around Bormann in this case, Bormann became, with Hitler’s increasing isolation in his various headquarters, Hitler’s primary connection with the outside world. He was almost entirely unknown to the German public but was constantly with Hitler, as the most influential relayer of his orders and a liaison whom no one could bypass—not even Eva Braun.92 Still, she apparently found her own way to get a hearing with Hitler from afar. From time to time in the headquarters, according to Speer, “letters from Eva Braun gave rise to the most annoying interruptions.” She wrote from Munich about, among other things, “cases of blatant stupidity on the part of officials,” which “would send Hitler into a fit” every time until he finally ordered Bormann to investigate her accusations.93
Hitler left the Berghof again for several months on June 20, 1942, to command the planned summer offensive against the Soviet Union—“Operation Blue”—and Eva Braun left the next day for her last trip to Italy.94 It is no longer possible to reconstruct how she traveled, and with whom. Christa Schroeder later claimed that at any given time Eva Braun had always had only one “favorite” among the women at the Berghof who then also accompanied her on her annual trip to Portofino.95 This time, as in previous years, Eva Braun stayed in Italy for almost four weeks, returning to Germany only on July 17.96 In the middle of the war, such long pleasure trips abroad were unusual and, above all, expensive. They had to be reported to the authorities in advance, and approved; a passport, visa, and travel permit were all needed, and so was foreign currency, since it was forbidden to take German currency out of the country—in the case of normal tourism, the limit was set at only ten marks, a measure that made it impossible to leave the country unchecked. The German Workers’ Front, which organized Mediterranean cruises on its own KdF steamships (for example, a “cruise around Italy” from January 22 to February 1, 1939, on the Wilhelm Gustloff), allowed its guests to bring up to 100 reichsmarks in coins, but it was “absolutely forbidden” to bring paper money.97 Eva Braun, in contrast, kept all her travel privileges intact, and she could hardly have realized at the time that she would never again visit the south in her life.
For in the summer of 1942, Hitler continued to be confident, even optimistic, about the progress of the war. While his girlfriend enjoyed the Italian sun, he ordered Army Group B to march on Stalingrad with the Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus. But on November 22, the Sixth Army, with more than 250,000 soldiers, was trapped in Stalingrad by Soviet troops. Paulus capitulated in late January 1943, and ended up as a Soviet prisoner of war along with more than 110,000 soldiers. Hitler then withdrew to the Obersalzberg in spring 1943, for three months in total, through late June.98 The young secretary Traudl Humps experienced “the decampment and relocation of a massive organization in the last days of March, 1943,” and recalled: “We were supposed to arrive in Munich around noon. It was nine. I quickly got dressed and went to breakfast. People were talking about the Berghof and about Eva Braun. I was curious to meet her. She was going to get on the train in Munich and come with us to Berchtesgaden.” Humps’s future husband, Hans Hermann Junge, an SS member since 1933 and one of Hitler’s orderlies, explained to her that Eva Braun was “the mistress of the Berghof and tacitly recognized as such by all the guests.” She went on: “I needed to prepare myself for the fact that this was the Führer’s private household, that we all had to see ourselves as his guests, and that everyone would eat meals together. But all this was true for only a very small circle.”99