In these circumstances, the birthday celebration on the night of February 5 must have been an eerie and ghoulish affair. The small party took place in Eva Braun’s living room on the second floor of the Old Reich Chancellery, which had survived the air raid unharmed while the rooms in the “Führer apartment” had been gutted by fire.20 Hitler thus now took his midday meals with his girlfriend and the secretaries in the “adjutant wing” of the Old Chancellery, which had likewise survived intact—eating “with the curtains drawn and electric lights,” as Christa Schroeder later recalled—and the military briefings were moved to the monumental workroom in the New Chancellery. Only Eva Braun joined him for dinners.21 Martin Bormann wrote to his wife, who had already returned to Bavaria on January 27 and was back on the Obersalzberg, about the birthday party, that the few guests had included Hitler; Eva Braun’s sister Gretl and Gretl’s husband, Hermann Fegelein; and Karl and Anni Brandt.22
Apparently, Brandt, despite having been fired from his position as Hitler’s personal physician, had in no way fallen entirely into disfavor and been expelled from Hitler’s innermost circle, as his biographer Ulf Schmidt claims.23 But the longtime close friend’s days were numbered. On April 16, Hitler had Brandt arrested by SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, the man responsible for carrying out Himmler’s orders to send people to concentration camps. The charge was high treason. Brandt had dared to give Hitler an honest report of the catastrophic situation in the Reich regarding medical supplies, and was also accused of having sent his wife and child to Thuringia, already occupied by U.S. troops, so that they and he could defect to the Americans.24 The following day, Hitler summarily court-martialed him, with Goebbels presiding, and Brandt was sentenced to death. He was to be shot on the morning of April 19. But it never happened—the execution was repeatedly postponed and, in the terrible chaos at the end, was never carried out.25 Hitler’s notion that he was surrounded by traitors who were responsible for the impending defeat thus ended up reaching all the way into his closest circle.
In this regard, Eva Braun was by no means a calming influence on Hitler, as her few statements in the surviving correspondence show. In the case of Karl Brandt, for example, she did not intervene in his favor but rather described his behavior, in a letter to her friend Herta Schneider, as “a real foul trick.”26 In other words, Eva Braun, now in Hitler’s innermost trusted circle along with Bormann and Goebbels, only reinforced his delusions. She also seems to have stirred up Hitler’s suspicions against people whom she herself did not like; even Albert Speer was now in her sights. When, as Speer wrote later, she asked him in Hitler’s name “where my family was,” he lied to her and said that they were staying “in the vicinity of Berlin.” As a result, Hitler wanted to make sure “that we too [Speer and his family] would go to Obersalzberg when he retreated there.”27 Martin Bormann likewise wrote to his wife on February 6 that Eva Braun had been in a good mood at her birthday party but had criticized various (apparently absent) people with a brusqueness unusual for her.28 Was Eva Braun now, in the middle of her downfall, lashing out at her former enemies for belittling her role as Hitler’s mistress? We will never know, especially since Bormann expressed himself in only vague terms and was, of course, deeply suspicious of her.
After three weeks in Berlin, on the evening of February 9, 1945, Eva Braun and her sister left the destroyed city. Bormann, on Hitler’s orders, took care of the women’s return trip to Munich.29 Braun had sat up until six in the morning with Hitler, Speer, Bormann, and the architect Hermann Giesler;30 presumably, they viewed the gigantic model of Linz after its planned renovations that Giesler’s associates had set up that night in one of the basement rooms of the New Reich Chancellery. Giesler later said that, exhausted, he had presented the model to Hitler and his companions “from the angle that his ‘City on the Danube’ would have been seen at from his retirement residence.” In the following days, Hitler returned again and again to this basement room with the architect and other visitors, including the head of the security police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who had himself lived in Linz in the late 1920s as a lawyer and was frequently taking part in the briefings. The photographer Walter Frentz’s images show a greatly aged Hitler, standing bent over or sitting in a chair and apparently totally withdrawn from the world, staring at this figment of his imagination.31 Instead of ending the war that had long since been lost, he apparently continued to talk about how the Oder front could be held, and still dreamed of making Linz the most beautiful city in Europe. Speer told his American interrogators in Kransberg, half a year later, that by then Hitler “had left his life behind and descended into an imaginary world that knew no bounds.”32
Life Underground
On March 7, 1945, Eva Braun returned to Berlin for good. She had already said goodbye to her family and friends in Munich. Only four weeks had passed since her previous visit. Her arrival was not in the least unexpected, as was claimed after the war.33 Hitler himself had told Goebbels and Bormann that she intended to stay with him in Berlin; Bormann wrote to his wife only a week after Braun’s departure for Munich that Hitler had told him Eva Braun wanted to come back to Berlin as soon as possible, but Hitler had told her to stay in Munich for now.34 Her decision to experience the end with Hitler—if need be, to die with him, wherever that might be—had been made long before. It is unclear, though, whether she traveled to Berlin in early March against Hitler’s will or whether they had agreed upon it first. Julius Schaub later said that she came “from Munich by airplane in early March.” “She had asked whether she could come,” he said, “but Herr Hitler had refused. In spite of that, she appeared one day and then lived in the small room next to his.”35 Bormann, in contrast, wrote that she had arrived one night in a “diplomatic car.”36
Not only the circumstances of Eva Braun’s arrival in Berlin but also her motive for returning to a capital city in flames have unleashed much speculation since her death. Henriette von Schirach wrote, with unconcealed distaste, that Braun wanted to die with Hitler to finally be able “to stand with him for all to see.” So she had to “force her way into Hitler’s death.”37 Speer, too, wrote in his Inside the Third Reich that when she arrived in Berlin “in the first half of the month of April,” “everyone in the bunker knew why she had come”: she was “figuratively and in reality… a messenger of death.”38 But how did he know? As the organizer of the total war effort, he was traveling most of the time between the various armament facilities throughout Germany as well as to the front lines being pushed farther and farther into the Reich. Thus he went, Below noted, “very much his own way during the last three months.” Moreover, Speer could rarely gather firsthand information about the mood in Hitler’s bunker as he met only occasionally with Hitler then, either there or in the Chancellery. Eva Braun, on the other hand, could have hardly been a “messenger of death” in the bunker since the plan was still, through mid-April, for Hitler to retreat to the Obersalzberg and lead the “final struggle” he had sworn to fight from his Alpine fortress.39