On the same day that Eva Braun left Bavaria, March 7, American troops advancing from the west succeeded in taking the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine intact, and thus established their first bridgehead on the right bank of the Rhine. Soviet tanks were in Pomerania, directly in front of the city of Kolberg on the Baltic. Even so, Hitler continued to radiate optimism among his followers. He was still playing for time, since he knew perfectly well that there would be no life for him after the defeat. In one way or another, death was awaiting him. Without the slightest regard for the millionfold suffering of others, he extended his own life and dramatized the war in his mind as a life-or-death battle for the existence of the German People. A counteroffensive launched in Hungary on March 6 was once again supposed to halt the Red Army’s advance. The production of new weapons, a “miracle weapon” he pinned his hopes on, and internal disagreement in the coalition between the Soviets, the Americans, and the Britons could still bring about a sudden and complete change in the overall course of the war—or so he told himself and those in his circle.40 At the same time, in his so-called Nero Order of March 19, 1945, he ordered the destruction of every “military transport, news, industrial, and supply facility as well as material of any value within the borders of the Reich” that might fall into the enemy’s hands “in the foreseeable future.” He intended to leave a “scorched earth” behind him, to weaken the “enemy’s strike power.” But Speer, who had already declared the war lost in a memo to Hitler, prevented the order from being carried out. By that point, even Himmler—whom Hitler had named Supreme Commander of the Army Group Vistula in January and who was thus responsible, in Hitler’s eyes, for the loss of Pomerania—and Ribbentrop as well, had secretly tried to establish contact with the Western powers via Sweden.41
While his closest followers were thus slowly drawing away, Hitler continued to receive daily briefings about the military situation in the oppressively close quarters of the workroom in the bunker. The briefings began long after midnight and lasted until 6 a.m., and at the “morning teas” that followed—and took up another two hours—Hitler was, according to Christa Schroeder, “almost constantly on edge” and talked “only about dog training, questions of diet, and how bad and stupid the world is.”42 Eva Braun, on the other hand, remained strangely calm in this tense situation, while the bunker constantly shook under air attacks, lights flickering when bombs hit. Even in March, she occasionally escaped the depressing atmosphere underground to her apartment in the Old Reich Chancellery, where she threw small parties with the young secretaries. “And so, while Hitler was in meetings,” Christa Schroeder later wrote, “we played records in her apartment, drank a glass of champagne, and now and then managed a dance with the off-duty officers.”43
A month later, even this was apparently no longer possible. On April 19, Eva Braun wrote to her friend Herta Schneider that they could “already [hear] the artillery fire on the eastern front” and that she “unfortunately” was “ordered to stand ready at every alarm, in case of flooding,” though she would be spending the rest of her life “only in the bunker” in any case.44 The orders came from Hitler personally, who was afraid a bomb hit could break open the bunker and let groundwater come in. Whenever a report of enemy planes came over the radio, Hitler now shaved and dressed in all correctness so as to be able to leave his room immediately when the air raid started.45 Eva Braun seems not to have shared his fear of flooding. Rather, her letter of April 19 gives a carefree, even confident impression. “The secretaries and I are practicing with the pistol every day,” she writes, adding that she was “very happy to be near him, especially now.” She admits that she was constantly being told to save herself at the Berghof, but “up till now I’ve always won.”46 How should we understand these statements? Are they consoling words for the person closest to her, while she kept her real thoughts and feelings to herself? Or had she accomplished her goal in life—to be with Hitler—so that she did not need to pay attention to threats from without? It is difficult to answer these questions from a distance. But it does seem to be the case that she was absolutely at peace about everything, and had arrived where she always wanted to be. Further evidence is provided by the fact that, according to Nicolaus von Below—actually, according to everyone who saw her then—Eva Braun continued “to always take care of herself” in the bunker, to “dress carefully and impeccably,” act “as accommodating and gracious as ever,” and show “not the slightest sign of weakness right up to the final hour.”47 She also seemed to expect from Hitler that he play his part perfectly to the very end. In fact, her conduct helped him rigidly cling to his insane confidence in victory, and reinforced the delusion that he would still “beat back the Russians and liberate Berlin.” She permitted him no weakness and reprimanded him even for slight negligence, such as a fleck of dirt on his uniform. “You can’t copy Old Fritz in everything and run around as unappetizingly as he did,” Braun would say, referring to Hitler’s worshipping of Friedrich the Great, to whom he often compared himself—and Eva Braun would do so even in the presence of Goebbels, Bormann, army Adjutant-General Wilhelm Burgdorf, and the secretaries.48
On the night of April 20, 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday, and into the morning hours, another party took place in Eva Braun’s rooms in the Old Chancellery. Hitler had withdrawn to his bedroom in the bunker, after accepting since midnight the congratulations of his staff, the military, and leading Nazi politicians including Goebbels, Himmler, Göring, Ribbentrop, and Speer. Many of them had advised Hitler to leave Berlin as quickly as possible and go to the Obersalzberg, because all efforts to halt the Soviet advance had failed. In fact, the first Soviet units reached the southern edge of Berlin that night, April 20–21. The attack on the city center was imminent.49 The henchmen were thus ready to scatter; they had long since prepared their departures. Even Hitler now seemed undecided whether or not to leave Berlin, according to his adjutant Below. In the briefing on the afternoon of April 20, he had said, according to Speer: “I shall leave it to fate whether I die in the capital or fly to Obersalzberg at the last moment!”50 And that same day, he had sent his two oldest secretaries to southern Germany, saying that he would need them later and would “follow them in a few days.”51 Erich Kempka, Hitler’s driver of many years who supervised the fleet of cars belonging to the Reich Chancellery (forty cars and sixty drivers), then received orders to bring several cars to carry the secretaries and others to various Berlin airports.52
Some of those who remained joined Eva Braun and Hitler once more for a glass of champagne in his workroom in the bunker: von Below, Schaub, Heinz Lorenz (adjutant to the Reich Press Chief), the secretaries Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge, and Hitler’s dietitian, Constanze Manziarly. But the group broke up before long, since Hitler, as Traudl Junge recalled, was quiet and when asked had replied that he could not leave Berlin, he had to “bring about the decision here—or die!” Then, while the young secretary was shocked by this confession, Eva Braun threw her last little improvised party in the Old Chancellery. It is unclear who was there besides Traudl Junge, Bormann, and Morell. According to Junge, Braun had brought along “anyone she came across.” Boisterously, in a “desperate frenzy,” they drank champagne, laughed, danced to an old hit record from 1929—Junge quotes the line “Blood-red roses caress you all over”—and tried to forget the fear of the end that was fast approaching.53