Heike Görtemaker - Eva Braun

The fact that Magda Quandt included her son Harald in her political activities from the beginning is a further sign of the depth of her engagement, and her enthusiasm for the antidemocratic, anti-Semitic, and anticommunist worldview of her new friends. She brought him with her to Braunschweig, for example, on October 17, 1931, where approximately seventy-five thousand National Socialists, including members of the SS and the SA, would parade before Hitler on the following day. During the course of the rally, violent riots broke out between the Nazis and the Communists, leaving two dead and sixty seriously injured. 38Quandt’s son, in an SA uniform, was standing next to Goebbels in the front row, next to Wilhelm Frick, the National Socialist Minister of the Interior for the state of Thuringia, and Gregor Strasser, the “Reich Organization Leader.” Magda Quandt could hardly have expressed her Nazi convictions, and her trust in Goebbels, more clearly. 39

Nonetheless, Magda Quandt’s precise relationship to National Socialism, both during this period and later, remains uncertain. Did she become a passionate advocate for this ideology herself, or was she only hungry for power and launching a “career as an opportunist” 40in 1931? Can she even be seen as the victim of a cunning psychological maneuver that she herself did not understand? Hitler, according to this argument, manipulated both her and Goebbels in his own personal interest, even to the extent of getting them to quickly marry on December 19, 1931. 41

Another theory, propounded by members of Hitler’s inner circle, maintains that Magda Goebbels was actually in love with the Nazi leader and had married the “limping Goebbels” only to be able to live near Hitler. Goebbels himself, in any case, seems to have been tormented with jealousy and mistrust in the early phase of his relationship with Magda Quandt. A few months before the wedding, he noted in his diary that he was “suffering greatly from” his girlfriend’s acting “not entirely like a lady” with Hitler, and he was afraid she was “not secure in her fidelity.” 42A few weeks later, he even claimed that Hitler was the one in love with Magda Quandt—Hitler had been “crushed” to hear the news of her upcoming marriage to Goebbels. It is unclear, however, how much these remarks had their basis in fact and how much they arose from nothing more than the Minister of Propaganda’s imagination, as a way of emphasizing his own masculinity and perseverance. At least in this case, the little man crippled with a short leg and a deformed foot was victorious, even over the all-powerful “Führer,” by winning Magda Quandt for himself; thus he commented condescendingly of Hitler: “Has no luck with women. Because he’s too soft. Women don’t like that. They need to feel their master above them.” 43

The fact is, since the 1980s much has been written and speculated about the wives of the Nazi leaders and the prominent women in the Nazi regime, often on the basis of unreliable memoirs and autobiographical sources, but there has been little research. A lack of sources has led, in Magda Quandt’s case, too, to contradictory claims, false dates, and the perpetuation of myths. One thing is certain: she was no victim. She acted independently and on her own initiative. The decisions she made from 1930 on, about her own life and the life of her son, stemmed from deep convictions—of that there can be no doubt, especially after 1933 when she and her children worked hand in hand with the Nazi propaganda machine in the service of the National Socialist ideals of mother and family. Also undeniable is the fact that a “bond of friendship and respect,” as Otto Wagener put it, existed between her and Hitler from the beginning. 44The frequent private meetings between Hitler and the Goebbelses in Berlin are enough to substantiate that. And the idea that Hitler used Magda Goebbels or the other people around him for his own purposes, against their will, is groundless. Rather, we must start from the assumption that the wife of the Minister of Propaganda was a fanatical believer in both the authenticity of her “Führer” and the truth of the National Socialist ideology in general.

What was her relationship with Eva Braun? The two women spent the last weeks of their lives together, in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery; that much is certain. Already in the years before the war, the women met occasionally at the Berghof. 45They committed suicide at their husbands’ sides in spring 1945—the only wives of the Nazi leaders to do so. But can we conclude that their underlying political positions were the same? Were there or were there not points of convergence and agreement in the lives of these women before their legendary common demise? Were they even, as is so often claimed, rivals for Hitler’s favor? 46The thought suggests itself naturally enough, since Magda Goebbels was put forward as a symbolic wife and mother for the Nazi state in public appearances at Hitler’s side, while Eva Braun had to live hidden from the public, but there is no actual proof of any such conflict.

Like Magda Goebbels, the tall, blond Emmy Göring, who had acted in the German National Theater for ten years in Weimar, saw herself as the “First Lady” of the Nazi state. Her husband—who performed such various functions as Prussian Prime Minister, Commander in Chief of the Air Force, and a director of the national economy granted absolute, dictatorial powers—was, in the end, far more powerful politically than the Minister of Propaganda. And it seemed clear that Göring would become the next Führer and chancellor of the German Reich should Hitler ever withdraw from power or die. Göring and Goebbels were said to have been bound by a kind of “love-hate relationship,” while their wives, independently of each other, in the mid-1930s led “Berlin salons” frequented by diplomats and politicians from the NSDAP milieu. 47

Emmy Göring, for example, who was already forty-two years old at the time of her marriage and was not yet a member of the NSDAP, regularly invited the spouses of other important Party members, including Ilse Hess, for tea at her Berlin apartment on Leipziger Platz, or at Carinhall, the Görings’ residence in the Schorfheide Forest. 48It is likely that a greater competition existed between Madga Goebbels and Emmy Göring than between Magda Goebbels and Eva Braun, who was, after all, unable to ever appear in public. In her autobiography published in 1967, in any case, Emmy Göring emphasized that despite the frosty relations between their husbands, she and Magda Goebbels “were in perfect harmony” with each other and that she “liked [Magda Goebbels] very much.” 49She was never in contact with Eva Braun, on the other hand, even though the Görings also owned a house on the Obersalzberg. If we are to believe Emmy Göring’s account, she tried many times during the war years to establish a personal connection with Hitler’s young girlfriend, but Hitler immediately put a stop to her efforts. 50In 1939 he granted Emmy Göring her wish to be allowed to join the NSDAP, giving his permission personally, but in her postwar autobiography she said nothing about this decision or what lay behind it. Rather, she presented herself to the public in the 1960s as Hermann Göring’s then-naive, unsuspecting, and entirely apolitical wife, who “never gave a thought” to whether she “was shopping in an Aryan or Jewish shop.” 51