The mood at the Berghof was entirely different than it had been in the previous year. After the “catastrophe on the Eastern Front” as Joseph Goebbels noted, premonitions of downfall and death began to spread on the “mountain” for the first time.100 Meanwhile, Munich, too, had been bombed. Eva Braun’s house at Wasserburger Strasse and Hitler’s private residence at 16 Prinzregentenplatz were damaged. Hitler continued to present himself to others as certain of victory, but he barely ever appeared in public anymore. Even the “Führer Address” that took place every year on the anniversary of his having been named Chancellor was omitted in 1943, for the first time in ten years. Hitler was already contemplating a possible catastrophe and the “ending of his own life” that would then be necessary. Bormann, too, unsure what “turn” the war was going to take, discussed the consequences of his own possible death in a letter to his wife, Gerda. According to Hitler’s orders, Bormann wrote, the widow of a Reich minister or Reich chancellor was not permitted to keep her husband’s official residence. Thus, in the case of his own death, she would have to leave the house in Pullach immediately—their formal villa in the neighborhood of the Party elite, built in 1938. She would also need to vacate the house on the Obersalzberg, since she would have to reckon with harassment from Eva Braun.101 This letter reveals how strong the rivalry was between Braun and Bormann, and how poisoned the atmosphere in Hitler’s innermost circle must have been with suspicion and enmity.
Goebbels, on the other hand, who had proclaimed “total war” in a fanatical speech in the Berlin Sportpalast on February 18, 1943, painted a positive picture of Hitler’s girlfriend in his “Diaries.” He mentions Eva Braun there for the first time in an entry dated June 25, 1943, noting that she was “extraordinarily well read, extraordinarily clear and mature in her judgment on aesthetic questions,” and made “the best impression” on him. She would certainly be, he wrote, “a valuable support for the Führer.”102 Apparently Eva Braun’s status had risen so high that Goebbels finally could refer to her by name in the document he was preparing for posterity, after having kept silent about her existence until then. Ultimately, the Minister of Propaganda was trying to expand his own position and power in the immediate environment of the shattered leader.103 Thus his diary returned to Eva Braun again, six weeks later, in the course of recording his judgment on everyone in the Nazi elite in view of the military “crisis.”
Allied troops landed in Sicily in July 1943, and Mussolini was deposed and arrested. At almost the same time, the last army offensive on the Eastern Front, ordered by Hitler, failed.104 Now, according to Goebbels, the Nazi leader was “generally thinking about who could replace whom, if someone should fall.” In this context, Goebbels recorded Hitler’s dissatisfaction, even indignation, with Baldur von Schirach and his wife, who were said to be attending “a social gathering” in Vienna that was “anything but National Socialist.”105 In fact, the break between Hitler and the Schirachs had come in June, when Baldur von Schirach told the Nazi leader that he had to end the war. Hitler commented to his adjutant Below: “How could he imagine that? He knows as well as I do that there is no longer any way except to put a bullet in my brain.”106 Henriette von Schirach even claims in her memoir (which is, however, thoroughly self-justifying from start to finish) that she brought up the “deportation of Jewish women” from Holland during one of the evening gatherings at the Berghof; Hitler supposedly screamed, “You are being sentimental! What do you care about Jewish women in Holland!”107
The end of the decades-long and almost familial connection between Hitler and the Schirachs, however it actually came about, shows the increasing tension within the inner circle in light of the desperate course the war was taking. “The Führer, on the other hand,” Goebbels dictated on August 10, 1943, “points out most forcefully Eva Braun’s calm, intelligent, and objective way of being.” He called her “a clever girl who means a lot to the Führer,” whereas Hitler was “through with Schirach, both personally and politically.”108 What had Eva Braun actually done to earn this praise? Apparently she not only stayed loyal but also continued to act unconcerned about external events. Gerda Bormann, for example, reported from the Obersalzberg to her husband in the “Wolf’s Lair” that there were constant air raids in Munich but Eva Braun was going swimming in the Königssee with her friends.109 Apparently, in an oppressive situation where the only military task was to make “the impossible possible” Eva Braun and the carefree attitude she displayed so openly was a relief for Hitler. Just like him, she had subscribed to the motto “All or nothing,” and in so doing she impressed Goebbels as well, who indulged in expressions of undying loyalty and felt that the Nazi leader’s “closest friends” now had the duty to form “an iron phalanx” around their “Führer.”110
10. THE EVENTS OF JULY 20, 1944, AND THEIR AFTERMATH
While thus in 1943 and 1944, power struggles were breaking out not only in Hitler’s political environment but also in his private circle, which even at the Berghof was showing its first signs of falling apart, resistance to the war was growing among the leading military and diplomatic circles. Many people understood that the war was lost, and they blamed Hitler’s political and strategic missteps for the loss. Among the general population, too, the defeat at Stalingrad marked a turning point in the popularity of the Nazi regime. The expectation that the state-run German press had fostered for years—that the war would be swift and victorious—had not been met. The aura of an invincible “Führer” had been shattered.1
The climax of this development was the assassination attempt that took place on July 20, 1944. On a hot and humid summer day, Lieutenant Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who was chief of staff to the Commander of the Replacement Army, left behind a briefcase with explosives during a briefing with Hitler in the “Wolf’s Lair” headquarters, intending to kill the Nazi leader and help end the war. The attempt failed, and Hitler survived the explosion only lightly wounded.2 Stauffenberg and three other conspirators were shot the same day, and the other two hundred or so people involved in the plot were then rounded up and hanged after a show trial at the Nazis’ so-called People’s Court in Berlin.3 A camera recorded their deaths in Berlin’s Plötzensee prison. This film, and photographs of the hanged men, were at the “Wolf’s Lair” in August 1944, but no one knows for sure whether Hitler saw them. It is an authenticated fact, however, that one man was delighted by them: SS-Obergruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison officer in the headquarters and Eva Braun’s brother-in-law.4
The Inner Circle’s Reaction
Fegelein had married Gretl Braun in Salzburg on June 3, 1944, with Bormann and Himmler as witnesses. The ensuing celebrations took place in Bormann’s house and in the teahouse on the Kehlstein peak—the “Eagle’s Nest”—and lasted three days, an inappropriately long time for a wedding party during the war. Eva Braun, who apparently brought her sister and Fegelein together, had arranged the party. Fegelein was a highly decorated member of the Waffen-SS and commander of the SS cavalry forces including the First SS Death’s-Head Cavalry Regiment. According to Speer, he had paid court to all of the single women at the Berghof, and rumors even circulated that he and Eva Braun had found favor with each other.5 Eva Braun remarked at the time, according to Christa Schroeder: “I want this wedding to be as beautiful as if it were my own.”6 Her own prospects of one day living with Hitler as his wife in Linz after the so-called final victory were looking slim. On the very night of June 3–4, the Allies took Rome, and on June 6 the long-expected invasion of the Continent began at Normandy.