When Riefenstahl turned up, she was carrying a huge bunch of flowers. “Her eyes seemed to gaze into the distance,” Luis Trenker said. “Her whole being was transformed. She wanted everyone to know that she had just been through a wonderful experience.”
Riefenstahl went to great lengths to please Hitler. She stopped using make-up because the Fuhrer disapproved. Parisian lipstick, he believed, was made from pig’s urine and he maintained that pure Aryan womanhood needed no cosmetics to improve its beauty.
But the affair did not mature as Goebbels had hoped. The following year, she confided to Jewish reporter Bella Fromm that Hitler “asks me to dinner a couple of times a week, but always sends me away at quarter to eleven, because he is tired”. However, Hitler continued to take an interest in her. He warned her to be careful when she was filming another climbing movie in the Dolomites. She was needed to make Nazi propaganda films, he said. She proved to be the master of the medium. Although she was only shooting a newsreel, her film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics made it look like a triumph of Hitler’s Aryan supermen. Against the demands of Goebbels and other top Nazis, Hitler allowed her to leave in the scenes where the great black American athlete Jesse Owens trounces the best Germany can offer. But the climax of the film is when Hitler greets German javelin thrower Tillie Fleischer, who won two gold medals — surely convincing proof of Nordic superiority.
Hitler was genuinely taken with his vision of Nordic beauty. According to an FBI report, he went to bed with Danish beauty queen Ingrid Arvad, who fled Europe before the war. In America, she became the lover of a young Naval Intelligence officer called John F. Kennedy, who went on to become President of the United States. Lyndon Johnson found out about it and used the information to get himself onto the 1960 Democratic ticket.
In 1938, whet Mussolini visited Munich, Riefenstahl was the only person Hitler personally introduced to Il Duce. The Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda was hers to command.
After the personal intervention of the Fuhrer, she was allowed to film the Polish campaign including, by accident, several Nazi atrocities. At the front, she wore a field grey uniform, like Hitler.
In gratitude for her propaganda films, Hitler gave Riefenstahl a Mercedes and had a villa built for her with a film studio in the garden. During the war, Hitler added a bombproof shelter so that her “immortal pictures” would survive the onslaught; but when the Americans marched into Kitzbuhel, they found her burning the negatives.
After the war, Riefenstahl denied everything, especially her Salome act in front of Hitler and Hanfstaengl. She told American reporter Budd Schulberg: “I wasn’t his type. I’m too strong, too positive. He liked soft, cowlike women like Eva Braun.”
Hitler met Eva Braun in 1929. She was a laboratory assistant in Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographic studio. Hitler was immediately impressed by her pretty ankles and legs. Convent-educated Eva was just seventeen. She was innocent, had few interests, no ambitions and was easily moulded.
Hitler was twenty-three years her senior. From the beginning he kept a very close rein on her. One night at Hoffmann’s, not knowing who she was, Luis Trenker danced with her. He was told that he would be shot for trying to steal the Fuhrer’s mistress. Later, when they met again, Eva found a way to speak to him privately. She warned him never to mention the evening they danced. Becoming quite hysterical, she said, with unintentional irony: “You don’t know what a terrible tyrant he can be.”
Hitler and Eva Braun first became lovers in the spring of 1932, shortly after Geli Raubal died. Eva’s diaries show that she adored Hitler, but at the same time she was tormented by him. She does not go into the details of their sexual relations, only saying obscurely: “He needs me for special reasons. It can’t be otherwise.”
Whatever they got up to, it did not make her happy. On 1 November, 1932, she made the first of several suicide attempts. Shortly after midnight, she shot herself through the neck with her father’s service revolver, narrowly missing an artery. She managed to call a doctor, who informed Hitler that she had tried to shoot herself in the heart, but missed and that he had saved her just in time. Hitler immediately crowed to Hoffmann that Eva had tried to kill herself for the love of him.
“Now I must look after her,” he said. “It must not happen again.”
It did.
After this first suicide attempt, Eva became the exclusive property of Hitler. It made her even more unhappy. On 6 February, 1935, her birthday, she wrote that she had just happily reached the age of twenty three”. Then she ponders whether this “is really a cause for happiness… At the moment I am very far from feeling that way”. All she craved was a little dog to make her less lonely.
That evening she dined with her friend Herta and despaired that she ended her birthday “guzzling and boozing”. It was not until five days later that Hitler turned up unexpectedly. She recorded that they had a delightful evening, but he did not bring her the puppy she wanted and there were no cupboards stuffed with pretty dresses.
“He didn’t even ask if I wanted anything for my birthday,” she wrote. Nevertheless, she basked in the attention. “I am infinitely happy that he loves me so much and I pray that it may always remain so. I never want it to be my fault if one day he should cease to love me.”
But by 4 March, less than a month later, she wrote in her diary: “I am mortally unhappy again and since I haven’t permission to write to Him” — like most German women at the time she capitalized the pronoun, putting him on a par with God and Christ — “this book must record my lamentations.”
She knew that he had been in Munich all that Sunday, but he had not visited her. Nor had he returned the phone calls she had made to the Osteria Bavaria, where he dined. She waited in all day “like a cat on hot bricks. I imagined every moment that he was about to arrive.” When she decided to do something about it, it was too late. She dashed to the station, only to see the tail-lights of his train as it pulled out. That evening, she turned down an invitation to go out and spent the evening alone in her apartment trying to figure out why he was angry with her.
A week later she still had not heard from him. She longed to fall ill so that he might feel guilty for neglecting her.
“Why do I have to bear all this?” she lamented. “If only I had never met him.”
She began taking sleeping tablets so that she did not have to think about her plight. From this time on, she became addicted.
“Why doesn’t the devil carry me off?” she wrote. “Hell must be infinitely preferable; to this… Why doesn’t he stop tormenting me.”
Things got worse. Heinrich Hoffmann told her that Hitler had found a replacement for her. “She is known as the Walkure and looks the part, including the legs. But these are the dimensions he prefers,” Eva wrote.
This could have been either Winifred Wagner, whose father-in-law wrote “The Ride of the Valkyrie”, or Unity Mitford, whose middle name was Valkyrie. Both were tall, full-breasted women, while Eva was slim with a small bust.
“He’ll soon make her lose thirty pounds through worry,” she wrote, “unless she has a gift for growing fat in adversity.”
Eva wrote that her only concern was that Hitler had not had the courtesy to inform her that he had lost his heart to someone else. It can hardly have been a surprise to her. He was pictured in the newspapers daily with other attractive women.