"Eva Braun: Life with Hitler" by Heike Görtemaker - a review

Albert Speer is said to have once opined that generations of future historians would be “disappointed” by Eva Braun.  Hitler’s wife, he implied, was a nobody: someone who – for all her proximity to great events – had exerted no influence, for good or ill, upon them.

I was reminded of this comment when I finally got around to reading Beate Görtemaker’s biography of Eva Braun last week: “Eva Braun: Life with Hitler”, which was first published a couple of years ago.  Görtemaker touted her biography as the first serious study of Braun’s short life (she died aged 33) and in this respect she is absolutely correct.  Previous studies by Angela Lambert and US journalist Nerin Gun cannot boast the integrity and the rigorous approach of Görtemaker’s.  So, in that respect, the book is most certainly to be welcomed.

The book tells the story of Braun’s life well: her rise from middle-class Munich shop girl to Hitler’s mistress, her attempted suicides, her shadowy role as the ‘lady of the house’ at the Berghof above Berchtesgaden and her sordid death at Hitler’s side in the Reich Chancellery bunker in Berlin in 1945.  Görtemaker appears as an assiduous researcher, who is evidently keen to submit existing accounts and persistent myths to vital, critical scrutiny.

However, the book makes some rather grander claims: most notably that Braun was not the passive, “see no evil – hear no evil” character that history has thus-far perceived.  This is an interesting suggestion, and Görtemaker does well to analyse the various memoir accounts of those in Hitler’s entourage – such as his secretary Christa Schroeder and his architect Albert Speer – in trying to prove this point.  Many of those accounts, like Speer’s, are patently self-serving, dissembling and self-exculpatory – not least in claiming that life in the Third Reich’s inner circle was an interminable round of boring vegetarian lunches where no political matters were ever discussed.  

Yet, though the point about self-serving memoirs is well-made, Görtemaker fails to convince with her wider point about Braun’s possible knowledge of and involvement in Nazi politics.  Essentially, though it is well-written and engaging, the book is feeding off scraps.  Due to Hitler’s order at the end of his life that all his personal correspondence was to be destroyed, the evidential base for Görtemaker’s study is extremely thin.  Consequently, she is forced to rely far too much on speculation and guesswork, and as a result the book reads – at times – like a retreaded brief history of the Third Reich with a somewhat unconvincing ‘Eva Braun twist’.

This is a shame, but is perhaps inevitable given the lack of available material.  Despite the book’s shortcomings, this is still the best and most serious biography of Eva Braun that is available.  Yet, that said, it is hard to disagree with Speer’s alleged comment – Eva Braun does appear as a disappointment to history.

© Roger Moorhouse 2013

What to do with Hitler's House?

There was a furore in Austria last week, after the mayor of the small Austrian town of Braunau-am-Inn declared that he thought that an 18^th century house in the town should be converted into flats.

Hitler's 'House' in Braunau

Small place Austria, but even that story would not make the news were it not for the toxic association with Austria’s most infamous son, Adolf Hitler.  The house in question – formerly the Gasthof zum Pommer – was where Hitler was born in April 1889, and where he spent the first three years of his life. 

Naturally, this connection has loomed large over the years.  In the Third Reich, the house was purchased by the Nazi Party, festooned with swastikas and became a place of pilgrimage for the Nazi faithful.  Hitler himself, visited in 1938 at the time of the Anschluss with Austria, but never returned.

After the war, the connection was largely forgotten, until the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung reached even this pretty corner of Austria in the late 1980s.  Close to the centenary of Hitler’s birth in 1989, the then mayor of the town had a large piece of Mauthausen granite erected on the pavement outside the house, bearing the legend “Nie wieder Faschismus” (Fascism, never again). 

Since that time, the building – now privately owned once again – has served in a number of capacities, not least as a workshop for disabled people.  But now, once again, stands empty – hence the intercession of the town’s mayor last week and the resulting furore.

To my mind, there are a couple of points here.  First of all - to be clear, Hitler lived in Braunau as a baby, moving to Passau when he was 3.  He did not spend his formative years there, did not go to school there, did not become a Nazi there.  He returned to the house only once - for a photo opportunity - in 1938.  It obviously did not mean much to him. 

Bearing this in mind, it strikes me that some of the various suggestions for the building's use – 'inter-cultural understanding workshop', disabled centre, and so on – risk fetishising the poor benighted building (on the flimsiest of evidence) just as much as the Nazis did.  The idea of putting something in that building that Hitler would have despised – a spurious act of posthumous revenge – seems faintly ridiculous and, I think, says much more about us than it does about him.   

Secondly, if something is to be made of the building - let it at least be relevant to that history.  Germany (and Austria) have made great strides in recent years in the thorny process of ‘coming to terms with the past’ – the famed Vergangenheitsbewältigung.  The information boards erected in the last decade at places like the Berghof on Obersalzberg and the site of the Chancellery Garden in Berlin are testament to a growing confidence in dealing openly and honestly with this most toxic legacy.  Also, the excellent “Documentation Centres” (museums) at former Nazi sites around Germany are an imaginative and educational way of handling that difficult past.  Perhaps it’s too soon for a “Documentation Centre: Hitler” at Braunau – and as I’ve said, the connection is a rather tenuous one – but, in another decade or so, maybe that idea will not seem quite so outlandish.  Time will tell.

Lastly, one has to remember that this story really is a bit of a storm in a camomile teacup.  For all the discussion, the politically-correct suggestions and the hand-wringing, the house is still in private ownership – back in the hands of the family that it was purchased from by the Nazis in the 1930s – and they are apparently not selling.  So, until something changes there, all of this is merely politically charged hot air…

© Roger Moorhouse 2012

Hitler in Lederhosen

Alot of newspaper editors had fun this week with pictures of Adolf Hitler in a variety of outfits - lederhosen, for instance, or a very fetching SA cap. The Telegraph covered it here, as did the Times and the Daily Mail here It was all very amusing - and a chance to dust off a few old puns; "Camp Commandant" said the Daily Mirror, "Mein Camp" quipped The Sun.

Yet, behind the dictator-themed mirth there is an important historical point to be made about these pictures. The photographs were taken by Hitler's photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, in the 1920s and - along with a number of other shots showing Hitler in dramatic poses (as here) - they show Hitler 'working' on his public image.
The concept of a politician honing their public persona does not come as a surprise to our modern minds - its what they do - they preen themselves, construct an acceptable, appealing public persona and then get on with the business of baby-kissing and getting elected.

Yet, the important point to make here is that Hitler was operating at a time when few politicians had any idea at all about public image. Most of his fellow German politicians were top-hatted, frock-coated throwbacks to the 19th century - and the idea that they might experiment with different 'looks' or introduce dramatic gestures into their public speaking routines would have appeared faintly ludicrous to them.

But, Hitler (like Mussolini, in this regard) was of a very different stamp. He worked incessantly on his public persona, practised his public speaking, managed his image - even employing Heinrich Hoffmann, a talented and successful photographer, to help him. Hoffmann served as a visual sounding board for Hitler, photographing him in various outfits and various poses, and then helping him to decide what 'worked' and what didn't (The Lederhosen and the SA cap, by the way, did not 'work' and were duly consigned to Hoffmann's archive). This, then - far from being just an opportunity to have a giggle at Hitler looking silly - is a glimpse into Hitler's political modus operandae. This was how he marked himself out as a 'new' breed of politician. This was how he made himself appealing to the German people, with disastrous consequences.

If we can understand that - and have a laugh at his expense - then fine. But, in our rush to find humour in Hitler, let's not miss the important historical point that these pictures convey.


The book from which the pictures come, by the way, is Heinrich Hoffmann's memoir "Hitler was my Friend", published this week by Pen & Sword Books.  Oh, and it has an introduction on Hoffmann by yours truly...