Eva Braun’s life with Hitler thus gives us deep insight into the dictator’s personal life, which was carefully concealed in the Nazi state and whose very existence was officially denied. Contrary to the later protestations from members of Hitler’s “royal court,” this personal life was not and could not be separated from his political life. There was no private sphere in which politics was not discussed and Nazi ideology played no part. The idea, spread by Speer in particular, that Hitler never touched on political topics in his private circle and especially when women were present, has to be considered a myth. Rather, not only the men but also the women around Hitler identified with the anti-Semitic, racist worldview and aggressive expansionist politics of the Nazi regime, laid out in full view during long evening conversations (or monologues) by the fire.
This is especially true for Eva Braun. Why would she, less educated than the others, doubt that Hitler’s explanations and arguments were justified when even an officer such as Nicolaus von Below, an educated aristocrat, was convinced by Hitler’s explanation of the “constant threat” of “Jewish Bolshevism” hanging over the German People?4 Every member of the inner circle was at least familiar with the “Führer’s” basic ideas about the world situation, not least the secretaries to whom Hitler often expressed “his innermost fears” after the war started during their “usual coffee breaks,” for example that “Russia seemed monstrous and uncanny to him, kind of like the ghost ship in The Flying Dutchman.”5 Finally, the idea that no one could “influence or convince” Hitler of anything—that even Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler were weak and helpless against him—primarily served former committed National Socialists as a tool to exculpate themselves after the war. That does not mean it was true.6
Hitler does seem to have prevented his girlfriend from the start from intervening openly in political debates—an attitude that makes him not essentially different from other men of his time. Nor was there any question of Eva Braun’s joining the NSDAP—the same as with any of Hitler’s relatives. It is hard to determine from the available sources whether Eva Braun, in these circumstances, “consciously” refrained from expressing herself on political matters, as her sister Ilse claimed before the court after the war, or whether her silence merely indicated a lack of interest on her part.7 Likewise, the question of whether she knew about the Holocaust remains finally unanswered.
But there can be no doubt that Eva Braun, at twenty years old, presumably with the vigorous support of her boss Heinrich Hoffmann, used self-inflicted violence to fight her way to a place at Hitler’s side that many envied her for. She had “very many opponents,” according to a later statement by her friend Herta Schneider.8 Indeed, the opinion was widespread among Hitler’s followers that Eva Braun was not good enough for the “Führer”—that she lacked the stature to appear publicly at his side. This opinion, which comes up frequently among the memoirs of the surviving parties, later found its way—astonishingly—into the accounts written by professional historians. In truth, it was largely Hitler himself who assigned this thankless role to his girlfriend, a fact that reveals less about her inadequacies than about his own anxieties and lack of self-confidence as a parvenu. Caught between power and powerlessness, but in the end acting decisively—vain and in no way a victim—Eva Braun assured herself of a place, even if a questionable place, in history.
NOTES
In the original German edition, Heike Görtemaker cites sources in German, including German translations of English original texts. For this English-language edition, sources originally written in English (e.g., Nerin E. Gun’s biography of Eva Braun and Ian Kershaw’s biographies of Hitler) are quoted from the English texts. Selected major sources for which there are English translations, such as Speer’s memoirs, are also cited from the existing English translations, but no attempt has been made to use an extant translation of every German-language source.
INTRODUCTION
1. See Lew Besymenski, Die letzten Notizen von Martin Bormann (Stuttgart, 1974), p. 148; Nerin E. Gun, Eva Braun: Hitler’s Mistress (New York, 1968), p. 181; Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York, 1970), p. 465; Mario Frank, Der Tod im Führerbunker (Munich, 2005), p. 284.
2. Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 465.
3. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York, 1999), p. xx.
4. These include Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York, 1952); Helmut Heiber, Adolf Hitler: Eine Biographie (Berlin, 1960); Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, Hitlers letzte Tage (Frankfurt am Main, 1965); Werner Maser, Adolf Hitler: Legende, Mythos, Werklichkeit, 6th ed. (Munich and Esslingen, 1974); Joachim C. Fest, Hitler: Eine Biographie (Berlin and Vienna, 1973); Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945 (New York, 2000).
5. See Maser, Adolf Hitler, p. 318.
6. Guido Knopp, Hitlers Frauen und Marlene (Munich, 2001), p. 83.
7. See Angela Lambert, The Lost Life of Eva Braun (London, 2006); Johannes Frank, Eva Braun (Preussisch Oldendorf, 1988); Jean Michel Charlier and Jacques de Launay, Eva Hitler, née Braun (Paris, 1978); Glenn Infield, Eva and Adolf (New York, 1974). Gun’s Eva Braun: Hitler’s Mistress is regarded by many as the only serious biography. See also “Eva Braun: Die verborgene Geliebte,” in Anna Maria Sigmund, Die Frauen der Nazis (Vienna, 1998–2002), vol. 1, pp. 235–284.
8. Fest, Hitler, pp. 17, 698, and 708.
9. Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936, pp. xxvf. Alan Bullock also claims that Hitler was unable to have a relationship, in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London, 1991), pp. 502f.
10. Albert Speer, Albert Speer: Die Kransberg-Protokolle 1945, ed. Ulrich Schlie (Munich, 2003), p. 12.
11. Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), p. 80.
12. See Sigmund, Die Frauen der Nazis, p. 248.