Eva Braun’s will of October 1944 reveals yet again her firm decision to die with Hitler. She would presumably have ended her life in Munich if illness or a Soviet attack had killed Hitler in Rastenburg. A future without him apparently never entered her thoughts. Henriette von Schirach later recalled that during her last visit to the Obersalzberg, in the summer of 1943, she had already discussed the future with Eva Braun—the postwar future—and had suggested that Braun could “go into hiding somewhere.” According to Schirach, Braun had answered: “Do you think I would let him die alone? I will stay with him up until the last moment, I’ve thought it out exactly. No one can stop me.”38
11. THE DECISION FOR BERLIN
Eva Braun had thus long since set her personal affairs in order in Munich when Hitler and his entourage left the “Wolf’s Lair” forever, on Monday, November 20, 1944, at 3:15 p.m., and traveled by special train to the capital, arriving at 5:20 a.m. on November 21.1 Only a few days earlier, he had categorically refused to change his headquarters—Nicolaus von Below recalls that he personally heard Hitler say the war was lost and he would remain in East Prussia. But Martin Bormann succeeded in changing Hitler’s mind.2 In fact, Hitler was not yet ready to die. The day after his arrival in Berlin, he underwent an operation on his vocal cords—as he had back in 1935—to remove what Goebbels called “an insignificant lump.” On the day of the operation, November 22, Eva Braun arrived at the Chancellery. Theodor Morell noted briefly in his daily calendar: “E.B. arrived. I left later.”3
Once again, Eva Braun stayed with Hitler in the rooms on the second floor of the Old Chancellery. Hitler was not allowed to speak after the operation, and during the daily briefings he could make himself understood only “by writing on slips of paper.”4 A “Führer bunker” had been specially built in the garden behind this building in late September, 1944, about 25 feet underground. It measured just 2,150 square feet and had fifteen rooms, including a living room and bedroom for Eva Braun.5 For the time being, Hitler and Braun descended into the cramped, damp, and poorly ventilated bunker only during air raids.
The surviving record nowhere mentions when Eva Braun left Berlin again. The secretaries seem not even to have known she was there. However, they had “not been face to face [with Hitler] for three days” after the operation, as Traudl Junge wrote later, and they had no information about whether he was staying in a hospital or in the Chancellery.6 In all probability, Eva Braun left after only a few days, and had long since returned to Munich when Hitler, on the evening of December 10, left Berlin for the “Eagle’s Eyrie” headquarters in Ziegenberg, near the Hessian city of Bad Nauheim.
A week later, the Ardennes Offensive began, with which Hitler intended to take Antwerp and turn the tide of the war. General Heinrich Eberbach—who was interned with other high-ranking German prisoners of war in the British special camp of Trent Park, where British Intelligence eavesdropped on and recorded all of their conversations with each other without their knowledge—commented on Hitler’s decision to wage one last offensive: “It’s not his last. The man never stops fooling himself. When he’s standing at the base of the gallows, he’ll still fool himself that he won’t be strung up on it.”7 And in fact “Operation Autumn Fog” failed after only ten days. There was no chance it would succeed, and Hitler himself probably didn’t believe it would. Late at night in the bunker, Nicolaus von Below recalled, Hitler told him that he knew the war was lost, and what he wanted most was to “put a bullet in his brain right now.”8 But he didn’t do it. Not yet.
The Final Offensive
Instead, Hitler returned to Berlin on January 16, 1945. Eva Braun, too, accompanied this time by her pregnant sister Gretl, traveled from Munich to the capital two days later. Both women traveled in the care of Martin Bormann, who had stayed at the Berghof for a few days. Together with his wife, Gerda, and an SS officer, they arrived in Berlin by “special car” on the afternoon of January 19.9 There is thus no truth to the idea that Eva Braun came to Berlin “unexpectedly and against Hitler’s orders,” as Julius Schaub later claimed.10 She was apparently counting on an even earlier reunion, since even before Christmas she had asked Hitler many times to spend the holidays at the Berghof. Hitler told his secretary that “mainly it’s Gretl behind that, she wants her Hermann there with her.”11 As he could not fulfill his girlfriend’s and her sister’s wishes, he had both women come to Berlin as soon as he was back there. Adjutant Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven later wrote in his memoir that he was surprised to see “two elegantly dressed young women with their hair freshly done” coming down the hall of the Chancellery, while he and the other officers were waiting there for the briefing with Hitler to start.12
If we believe Goebbels’s account, Eva Braun had already decided at that point not to leave Berlin again. The Minister of Propaganda wrote, under the date of February 1, 1945:
I explain to the Führer that my wife is determined to stay in Berlin, too, and even refuses to let our children leave. The Führer doesn’t think this standpoint is the right one, but finds it admirable. He says that Miss Eva Braun has the same view. She also does not want to leave Berlin, especially in this critical hour. The Führer finds words of the deepest recognition and admiration for her. And this is certainly what she deserves.13
The small circle of those who linked their fates to Hitler’s to the bitter end was thus beginning to form, in the face of the ever-approaching enemy armies. Bormann, who had been Hitler’s “shadow” since the start of the war—constantly near him and controlling all access to him to a greater and greater extent—was not, however, among them. True, he did emphasize in a letter to his wife that both of their fortunes and fates were tied to that of the “Führer.” At no point, though, did he intend to bring his family to Berlin.14
Meanwhile, the Soviet offensive against the German Reich—the attack on Berlin—had started, on January 12, 1945. By the end of the month, the German troops in East Prussia were cut off from the Reich. The Red Army encircled Königsberg and had pushed ahead into Pomerania. Large swaths of the East Prussian population fled their homes. The first battalions under General Georgy Zhukov, Commander of the First Belorussian Front, were already at Frankfurt an der Oder, about fifty-five miles from Berlin.15 While the situation was thus coming to a head, Eva Braun celebrated her thirty-third birthday in the capital, on the night of February 5–6, 1945. By then, she and Hitler were spending their nights in the air-raid bunker.16 Alongside Hitler’s “last apartment” in the bunker—two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom—a bedroom had also been set up for Eva Braun, which she equipped with her furniture from the Chancellery.17 They retreated to the bunker more and more often by day as well. Two days earlier, on the morning of February 3, 1945, more than nine hundred American airplanes had attacked Berlin and badly damaged the center of the city, near Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Strasse, with high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Fires raged everywhere, the government district on Wilhelmstrasse was destroyed, the Old Reich Chancellery was partly reduced to rubble, traffic was at a standstill, and the trains and streetcars no longer ran. Berlin was in ruins. Well over 100,000 people were made homeless and, according to official statistics, 2,895 had died in the air attack, which lasted barely an hour.18 Goebbels, seeking out Hitler in his bunker one afternoon shortly thereafter, remarked that “access to the Führer” was “totally blocked with mountains of rubble.” It was “practically like the chaos of the trenches trying to find the path to him.”19