BY A FREAKISH chance, Diana and Unity already knew one of the most intimate secrets of Hitler’s life: that he had a mistress. They had even met the woman who, in her last hours, would become Frau Hitler – Eva Braun, shy, blonde, pretty and twenty-three years the führer’s junior.
Eva Braun’s existence was then virtually unknown. The German people, like the rest of the world, had never heard of her. She was a shadowy figure kept by Hitler so severely in the background that even Frau Wagner,fn1 closer to Hitler than almost anyone and with whom he stayed for the Bayreuth Festival, knew nothing of her. Only a handful of the most senior Nazis had met her and between them was a conspiracy of silence. No one mentioned her; when Party dignitaries arrived she had to remain closeted in her room (next door to Hitler’s bedroom) and she was so fearful of Hitler’s displeasure if her presence became known that she did not dare leave the house. ‘I might meet the Goerings in the hall,’ she would say.
Eva was a sweet, simple girl who literally worshipped Hitler – always referred to in her diary as He. She loved clothes, cosmetics, jewellery and glamour. She was well brought up, with a convent education, and she was athletic: she swam, skated, danced and played tennis. She worked in the shop of Hitler’s ‘court’ photographer and constant companion, Heinrich Hoffmann, and it was here, one evening in 1929, that Hitler had first seen her, perched on top of a ladder reaching for some dusty files. In the early days he had confined himself to dropping in from time to time with flowers or chocolates for ‘my lovely siren from Hoffmann’s’. As the months passed, chocolates and roses were replaced by invitations to supper and visits to the opera – but always with others. It was not until 1932, when Eva was twenty and Hitler forty-three, that they became lovers.
At first, their affair was sporadic. A few months after he came to power he gave her a set of bracelet, earrings and ring in tourmalines for her twenty-first birthday, but despite Eva’s hopes this expensive present did not signify commitment. Long periods would pass without him sending for her and by the autumn of 1934 she was deeply depressed.
Finally, on 1 November, she could bear her ambiguous position no longer. With her father’s pistol, she attempted suicide, shooting herself in the neck and severing an artery. Before she lost consciousness, she telephoned her doctor to say what she had done and he arrived in time to save her.
She could not have contrived anything designed more to appeal to and impress her lover. Her despairing gesture vividly echoed the suicide of the young girl with whom he had earlier been obsessed, his niece Geli – daughter of his half-sister Angela – for whom he had had an incestuous passion. He now determined to take responsibility for Eva and from that moment the tentative affair crystallised into a permanent liaison. The following summer he set her up in an apartment in Munich, close to his own, sending for her whenever he came to the city.
Appearances were still maintained – Eva shared the Munich apartment with her sister and when she went to Berchtesgaden she stayed discreetly at an hotel rather than at Hitler’s private retreat, the Haus Wachenfeld (renamed the Berghof in 1935).
The Haus Wachenfeld was the first home Hitler could have called his own. For years he had spent holidays in the small mountain town of Berchtesgaden; wearing lederhosen, he would wander through the hills amid the peace and the spectacular views of this part of the Obersalzburg. At first he stayed in the Pension Moritz, registering under the name of Herr Wolf;fn2 then, in 1928, he was able to rent the Haus Wachenfeld for 100 marks a month. Angela kept house for him. She disapproved violently of Eva, whom she called ‘die blude Kuh’ (the stupid cow).
Marriage to Eva was out of the question. ‘The worst feature of marriage is the creating of rights,’ Hitler would declare. ‘A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman. Imagine if on top of everything else I had a woman who interfered with my work!’ As for children, he believed that to have any of his own would present insuperable problems.
Diana and Unity had realised Eva’s relationship with Hitler immediately they met her. It had simply been a case of putting two and two together. Unity, in her unceasing exploration of every avenue that would lead her to the führer, had got to know Heinrich Hoffmann. One day, visiting the photographer, she had looked up and seen Eva, whose looks so struck her that in a letter to Diana she described this ‘lovely girl’ she had seen working at the rear of the shop. Shortly afterwards, she saw Eva, beautifully dressed, being driven past in a large and gleaming white Mercedes; immediately, she jumped to the conclusion that this pretty but humble photographer’s assistant must be the mistress of someone important. At the 1934 Parteitag, she realised whose.
Because the tickets Unity and Diana had been given were vouched for by one of the earliest, most trusted members of the Party, they were in the most exclusive section of the stands, reserved for the highest Nazi officials. In the seat next to them was Eva Braun. A few friendly questions and the sisters knew the truth.
The meeting with Hitler that had become the chief goal of Unity’s life was finally achieved on 9 February 1935, at a small restaurant called the Osteria Bavaria. Unity had been planning for it for months. She had familiarised herself as much as possible with the führer’s routine, she had questioned everyone she met who might be able to give her a ‘lead’ as to his habits, in her increasingly fluent German she had spoken to the guards, custodians and doormen who saw him daily.
His routine was surprisingly simple. In Munich, he lived at 16 Prinzregentplatz, a square in one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in the city. His flat, in a corner house, was on the second floor. Its hall was lined with bookshelves, several good pictures – a Cranach, two Brueghels and a portrait of Bismarck, his hero – hung in the long narrow drawing room with its bird’s eye maple furniture. At the far end was a marble-topped table, behind which he sat when receiving guests. He was looked after by the former soldier-servant of a general and the man’s wife, once a lady’s maid. (He had moved into his official residence in the Chancellery in Berlin at the end of 1934, giving his first dinner party there on 19 December – Lord Rothermere and his son Esmond Harmsworth were among the guests in the 100-foot dining room with its red marble pillars, blue and gold mosaic ceiling and Gobelin tapestry from the museum in Munich.)
In Munich, Hitler usually ate out in the middle of the day. Unity quickly discovered that he often lunched at the Osteria Bavaria, an artists’ café full of the drawings and watercolours that Hitler, himself a watercolourist, loved. He would usually arrive at about two-thirty and often later. He was an insomniac, reliant on sleeping draughts, and his whole day was geared round the late rising caused by his inability to sleep before three or four in the morning; he was also naturally unpunctual. His entourage was usually the same: his constant companion the photographer Hoffmann, Martin Bormann, Reich press chief Otto Dietrich, the Bavarian gauleiter Wagner and an aide. They would drive up in two black Mercedes and make straight for their regular table, in a corner of the room shielded by a low partition. In good weather they ate outside in the small courtyard.
When she knew that Hitler was in Munich, Unity would lunch every day at the Osteria Bavaria, lingering over her cup of coffee until, with luck, he strode in. She had begun this routine at the end of 1934, often persuading Diana to come with her. At Unity’s insistence, they would arrive before the führer’s party came in and stay until after it had left – often not until five o’clock. As Unity had carefully chosen a table that Hitler had to pass on the way to his own, this meant that she had two close-up glimpses of him.
Unity was impossible to overlook. A tall, striking, well-dressed blonde, her scarlet mouth and silky powdered complexion contrasted vividly with the scrubbed faces of the women around her as she sat alone at her corner table, her huge blue eyes fixed on the führer as, after gazing lengthily at the menu, he ordered his customary ravioli – in a meat-eating, coffee-drinking culture, he was a vegetarian, subsisting largely on pasta, eggs, salads and fruit, and drinking herb tea. It was not long before he asked one of the waitresses who she was, but, to Unity’s annoyance, the Christmas holidays intervened.
She returned to Munich in January 1935, accompanied this time by her father, whom she took immediately to the Osteria Bavaria. Hitler was there (‘Farve has been completely won over by him and admits himself to have been in the wrong until now’), but her own acquaintance with the führer seemed to have progressed no further than a nod of greeting on both sides.
Then, on a dank February Saturday, everything changed. Yet again Unity had lunched at the Osteria Bavaria and was sitting over a cup of coffee hoping that Hitler would appear. At three o’clock he came in with his usual band of cronies, sat down – and ten minutes later sent the manager to her table. To Unity, his words, ‘The führer would like to speak to you,’ were a summons from Olympus.
Hitler, with his customary politeness to women, rose as she arrived at his table, saluted and shook hands with her. Introducing her to his companions, he asked her to sit next to him and then, in her own words, ‘I sat and talked to him for half an hour . . . I can’t tell you all the things we talked about.’ One of them was Cavalcade, which he told her he thought was the best film he had ever seen; another was that international Jews must never again be allowed to make two Nordic races fight against one another.
After ‘the greatest man of all time’ had left, Unity wrote ecstatically to her father, ‘I am so happy I wouldn’t mind dying.’ She also wrote at once to Diana, begging her to come to Munich immediately so that she, too, could meet Hitler.
Diana was almost as excited as Unity. She spoke to Mosley who urged her to go. She left at once for Paris – she and Mosley often went to Paris and during one weekend there they had seen, in a Champs-Elysées showroom, a little Voisin car so pretty and elegant that Diana immediately craved it, and Mosley had ordered one for her. It was now ready and she determined to drive to Munich despite vile weather conditions, though she took the precaution of taking a Voisin mechanic with her. It was fortunate that she did: on the way they ran into such snowstorms and drifts that at times they were in real danger.
Within a day or two of Diana’s arrival she was introduced to Hitler. Though years later she was to say, ‘Meeting Hitler ruined my life – and that of my husband too,’ at the time his personal magnetism overwhelmed her, and she found her inability to speak more than a few words of German immensely frustrating. There and then, she determined to redouble her efforts to learn the language.
Physically, there was nothing about Hitler to account for his extraordinary, almost mesmeric, personal magnetism. Except for his obsessive neatness and peculiarly white, well-shaped hands, he was unremarkable to the point of ordinariness – a man of about five feet nine inches, with a clear skin, fine dark hair and gold-filled teeth. When not in uniform his clothes, said Randolph Churchill, ‘had all the unpretentious respectability of the German or Austrian middle class’ – grey or dark blue suits, not very well cut, worn with soft-collared white shirts and, instead of an overcoat, a mackintosh. ‘Oh, he’s so sweet, in his dear little old mackintosh,’ Diana would coo. His most striking feature was his eyes, of a greyish blue so dark that contemporary observers often mistook them for brown, dull and opaque when in repose, piercing and vivid when he was speaking to a crowd or an individual.
His great gifts were a superb memory, ferocious concentration and an intuition so highly developed it could be called psychic. Once, flying through fog from Stettin to Hamburg, in the teeth of the pilot’s opposition and with no evidence save his own conviction, he ordered the pilot to turn round and fly back the way they had come because he believed the compass was wrong. They landed at Kiel with ten minutes’ fuel to spare – had it not been for Hitler’s ‘intuition’ they would have run out of fuel far out over the Baltic. Unsurprisingly, he believed in astrologers, consulted the mystic Gurdjieff and had complete faith in the power of instinct. He often told the story of how, during the First World War, an ‘inner voice’, so distinct it sounded like a military order, told him to move to a different place while he was eating dinner with his fellow soldiers; he got up, walked twenty yards down the trench and sat down. Next moment a shell burst over his friends, killing them all.
This talent for seeing beyond the surface and into the inner emotional core gave him a magnetic charm that affected, among others, Anthony Eden and Lloyd George, who described him as ‘a very great man’. To the mass of the German people he was a spellbinder, a saviour, a political magician who had led them out of bankruptcy and despair, who had given them better homes and food, who had built them roads and maternity clinics and given them a transcendent sense of the power that would arise out of unity – in short, the Leader, whom they trusted absolutely. His oracular pronouncements, his deification of the Fatherland, his ability to persuade his compatriots that they, too, were supermen, were all calculated to appeal to a nation resentful of the loss of its former greatness, angry and humiliated by defeat and still smarting under the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
At the same time, his position of lofty isolation allowed him to distance himself from the brutalities of the regime – especially as many of its foulest crimes were perpetrated in such secrecy that many Germans knew nothing of them, while those who did could convince themselves that it was not the führer who was responsible but his subordinates. As late as February 1939 the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, was exonerating Hitler from responsibility for the pogroms (in a letter to Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary).
Hitler himself realised that his mystic Wagnerian ideal of the patriotic hero appealed to the German desire both to dominate and be dominated. ‘Every individual, whether rich or poor, has in his inner being a feeling of unfulfilment,’ he said.
Slumbering somewhere is the readiness to risk some final sacrifice, some adventure, in order to give a new shape to their lives . . . the humbler people are, the greater the craving to identify themselves with a cause bigger than themselves, and if I can persuade them that the fate of the German nation is at stake, then they will become part of an irresistible movement, embracing all classes.
His effect on the German people has often been compared to a kind of mass hypnosis. Jung has a different explanation. ‘The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of individuals,’ he wrote less than two years after the führer’s suicide.
As early as 1918, I noticed peculiar disturbances in the unconscious of my German patients which could not be ascribed to their personal psychology. Such non-personal phenomena always manifest themselves in dreams as mythological motifs also to be found in legends and fairytales throughout the world. I call these mythological motifs the ‘archetypes’.
In his German patients, Jung found again and again archetypes expressing primitiveness, violence and cruelty, ‘to which they were susceptible because the German mentality has a marked tendency to mass psychology. Moreover, defeat and social disaster had increased the herd instinct in Germans.’
When these archetypes occur en masse, said Jung, they draw individuals together as if by magnetic force:
Thus a mob is formed. Its leader will be found in the individual who has the least resistance to such archetypes, the least sense of responsibility and because of his inferiority the greatest will to power . . . However confused the government or political situation around them, most people have a natural orientation towards order. But in those in whom the collective unconscious has long been permeated with feelings of weakness, deprivation and powerlessness, the archetypes of order are missing – and the unconscious is open to invasion by the archetypes of darkness. Hitler was the exponent of this ‘new order’ and that is the real reason why practically every German fell for him.
On women the effect of this rather plain, ordinary little man was uncanny. From them he received adulation of the sort reserved for film stars and royalty. Some would turn up at Berchtesgaden almost naked under their coats to offer him their virginity; others would try to throw themselves under his car in the hope of being first injured and then comforted by the man they regarded as part prophet and part Leader. On his birthday, hand-knitted socks and jerseys would arrive from all over Germany, while love letters, proposals and marriage licences awaiting his signature poured in daily by the sackful, invariably couched in language of the utmost respectfulness. ‘Herr führer Adolf Hitler, a Saxon woman would like to bear your child . . .’ wrote Friedel from Hartmannsdorf. ‘Please, dear Führer, let me come to you,’ begged Luise from Hof. ‘I’m having a front door key and a key to my room made for you, Adolf. In the next letter, you’ll get the first one and in the letter after that you’ll get the room key,’ wrote Margarete from Königsberg. None was answered – indeed over-persistent admirers received a warning from the police – though birthday wishes received a printed note of acknowledgement.
His policies towards these adoring creatures smacked of contempt, a wholesale restructuring of women’s role that amounted to regarding them as a different, inferior species, whose sole duty was to look after their men and bear future soldiers and mothers of the Reich. The emancipated, independent woman was seen as an agent of degeneracy; in Nazi Germany women were thrust firmly back into the home by a combination of chivvying and inducement. Courses in domestic science and biology were compulsory in female education, all forms of birth control were frowned on, slimming and dieting discouraged as possibly contributing to a lowering of fertility, and a generous system of marriage loans introduced.
There were, of course, conditions attached to this liberality. Those applying for these loans had to undergo stringent examination to ensure that they were racially pure. Not surprisingly, there was a thriving black market in documents proving Aryan origin. The ideal German woman was a statuesque Gretchen with a rosy, cosmetic-free complexion and several small blond children clustering round her skirts – these to be of a style and shape advocated by the new German Fashion Bureau, set up in 1933 under the honorary presidency of Hitler’s favourite Aryan blonde, Magda Goebbels (who never wore such clothes herself).
In his private life, Hitler was fascinated by women. He enjoyed female company and had a great eye for a good-looking woman. His physical preferences were for the stereotypical Aryan blonde – tall, blue-eyed and full-figured – as typified by his mistress Eva Braun and by Magda Goebbels (though he did not realise that Frau Goebbels bleached her darkening hair to achieve his preferred shade of ‘Aryan’ gold-blonde). His obvious pleasure in women’s company did not, however, stop the abounding rumours that he was impotent or of ambiguous sexuality. Popular rumour credited him with only one testicle.fn3 ‘His over-compensation for the inferiority complex of an impotent masturbator was the driving force of his lust for power,’ summed up Putzi Hanfstaengl, who had known him for years.
His behaviour towards the women who worked for him or whom he met socially was different from his attitude to men. He was invariably gallant, he would kiss a woman’s hand, first smiling into her eyes before he bent low over her hand to touch it with his lips. He would never sit down if a woman was standing, he would usher women out of the room first and he would always speak to them in kindly, almost caressing fashion. He would shout and rage at his generals, but he was always patient and gentle towards his female secretaries, paying compliments and asking about their families. Not surprisingly, they were devoted to him. The good-looking actresses and cabaret artistes whom he invited to dinners were seated on his right and treated with a flirtatious gallantry that roused the jealousy of Eva Braun.
Most of these women, however, made only one or two appearances. Much more serious from Eva’s point of view was his growing friendship with the worshipping Unity. Eva scented a serious rival in this handsome, self-assured blonde from a social milieu which she, Eva, found terrifying but which clearly fascinated the führer. Eva’s patience was monumental, and she was well accustomed to hanging about – or as she put it, ‘kicking her heels’ – but being kept waiting on account of affairs of state was one thing, preoccupation with a possible new mistress another. ‘Herr Hoffmann lovingly and tactlessly informs me that he has found a replacement for me,’ she wrote in her diary on 10 May:
She is known as the Walkure and looks the part. Including her legs . . .
I shall wait until 3 June, in other words a quarter of a year since our last meeting, and then demand an explanation. Let nobody say I’m not patient.
The weather is magnificent and I, the mistress of the greatest man in Germany and the whole world, I sit here waiting while the sun mocks me through the windowpanes.
fn1 The English daughter-in-law of the composer and an early admirer of Hitler.
fn2 In the early days of 1923 and 1924, Hitler was known as ‘Wolf ’ by close friends and associates; hence Wolfsburg, where the Volkswagen, the car he devised for the people, was manufactured.
fn3 The Soviet commission charged with establishing the facts about Hitler’s death found that: ‘The left testicle could not be found either in the scrotum or on the spermatic cord inside the inguinal canal nor in the small pelvis.’ On the other hand, this defect was not in the medical records kept by Hitler’s own doctors.