The Private Life of Adolf Hitler -- The Intimate Notes and Diary of Eva Braun

171 Pages·1949·4.286 MB·English

by  TABORI, Paul (ed.)

The Private Life
of Adolf Hitler
Copyright 1949
Francis Aldor
The Private Life of
Adolf Hitler
The Intimate Notes and Diary of
EVA BRAUN
Edited by
PAUL TABORI
ALDUS PUBLICATIONS LIMITED
(FRANCIS ALDOR • PUBLISHER • LONDON)
Printed in Great Britain by
S. SIDDERS & SON, LIMITED, 115, SALUSBURY ROAD, LONDON, N.W.6
PUBLISHER'S PREFACE
The Third Reich, as we know now, was built on
a foundation of "bigger and better lies." Hitler,
ignoring Lincoln's sound principles, tried to fool all
the people all the time. No wonder that when the
Nazi regime, which was intended to last a thousand
years, crashed after twelve, the most contradictory
tales emerged about the Nazi leaders, their crimes
and their passions. Much of this material was
deliberately manufactured by sensation-mongers;
a good deal of it served political purposes. The
testimony, the charges and details were so con­
fused that sometimes even genuine disclosures be­
came suspect, and were doubted by those who found
themselves bewildered by contradictory evidence.
There was another reason for this suspicion and
bewilderment. The basic disease of Nazi Germany
was moral insanity. Never before in world history,
not even in the declining days of the Roman Empire,
had such a gang of sadists, sexual perverts and mad­
men gained power over a large country. The Nazis
had no moral inhibitions. Their crazy standards,
their lunatic conception of good and evil, were so
alien to normal men that even to-day we cannot
quite believe the proofs of their depravity.
This applies especially to Adolf Hitler. Except
for the turgid and infamous "Mein Kampf," and
his speeches, the late unlamented Fuehrer has left
no record of his life and thoughts.
Of his personal traits, preferences, aberrations
and ideas we have gained scattered evidence from
the works of Konrad Heiden, Hermann Rauschning
and others. But of his private life, especially after
he came to power, practically nothing reliable has
emerged.
This is the importance of the following work. As
far as it is humanly possible, we have investigated
the authenticity of Eva Braun's diary and—what­
ever degree of authenticity one may attribute to the
proof of her authorship—we are convinced that here
is a first-hand, detailed, shockingly frank account of
Adolf Hitler's love life. It is necessarily fragmen­
tary and scattered over several years, but even so it
gives a vivid picture of the man who unleashed the
untold miseries of the second world war upon
mankind.
We owe the reader an explanation as to how this
diary was preserved and its authenticity established.
Luis Trenker is a well-known Austrian writer,
film-director and film-star who has done the Allies
valuable service during the war. Starting as a
mountain guide and skier, he graduated to writing
books and filmscripts and became one of the favour­
ite outdoor stars of German and Austrian films.
Because of this he had many contacts with leading
Nazis—whom he despised but, for reasons of his
undercover work, continued to frequent. He also
met Eva Braun—how and under what circumstances
you will read in the first part of this book—and in
the winter of 1944/45 spent some days at the same
hotel in Kitzbühel, the famous Austrian skiing re­
sort, where the Fuehrer's mistress was staying.
During these days Eva Braun handed him a sealed
package, requesting him to keep it for her.
In the autumn of 1945 Trenker moved to Bozen.
There, going through his possessions, he came upon
the sealed package again which was marked with the
initials "E.B." As he knew that Eva Braun had
died with Hitler in the Reich Chancellery on April
30, 1945, he took this package in December, 1945,
still sealed, to a public notary in Bozen/Bolzano
and opened it in his presence. They found a pile
of loose pages in typescript, bearing no handwriting,
and no identifying mark. But it soon became evi­
dent that these were the irregular jottings of a wo­
man who was Adolf Hitler's mistress; and further
reading revealed that they must have been written
by Eva Braun.
Luis Trenker put the material at our disposal.
He also provided some data for the first part of this
book which deals with the other women in Hitler's
life, and tries to solve the sexual riddle which he
represented. In this first part we collected all the
material available from first-hand sources, incor­
porating the testimonies of Trenker, Heiden, Rausch­
ning and many others. The second part of the
book contains Eva Braun's diary in literal transla­
tion, except for certain passages which, because of
their obscenity, cannot be reproduced, together with
some explanatory notes about the personalities and
events to which she refers.
We believe that this is a valuable contribution to
the history of Nazi Germany and to the personal
portrait of its Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler.
FRANCIS ALDOR

PART ONE
THE WOMEN IN HITLER'S LIFE
1
PRACTICALLY all the books dealing with Adolf Hitler,
from Konrad Heiden's great biography to Hermann
Rauschning's Conversations contain a chapter about
Hitler's relations to women. This is easy to under­
stand, for in this intimate sphere the character of
any human being is disclosed with fewer inhibitions
than in any other. But it applies especially to a
man who was one of the greatest political mounte­
banks, wearing a thousand masks but never showing
his real face. "In the fight for power it was due
to the votes of women that Hitler succeeded at last,"
Heiden says. Rauschning maintains that "the
Fuehrer was discovered by women; after the first
world war, various ladies smoothed the path of the
still young political adventurer." The wives of some
great industrialists gave him money and, during the
period of the disastrous German inflation, works of
art, to finance his political schemes. It was in a
circle of politically-minded women that the paid
propagandist became a political prophet. "These
women spoiled him, increased his self-importance
by the praise and admiration which they advanced,
so to speak, before he had achieved anything. The
adoration of women, heightened almost into a
pseudo-religious ecstasy, became for him an essen­
tial stimulation in order to overcome his innate
lethargy."
9
This might well be true. But most of these
women were elderly wives or spinsters who sat in the
first row at all the meetings at which Hitler spoke,
and who looked at him with their moist, admiring
eyes as if he were a god. They hardly belong to
the chapter of Hitler's sex life; at the most, they
illustrate the role of eroticism in modern mass pro­
paganda. This evidence does not provide an answer
to the question of whether the Fuehrer achieved
any personal and private success with women.
The official biographers of Hitler keep at a
respectful distance from the delicate problem of sex;
and even the anti-Nazi biographies only indulge in
dark and mostly meaningless hints. They only
agree on one point: that Hitler was not a homosex­
ual. Was he "normal"? We know to-day that he
pretended to be a man without any private life—
which was just as false and untrue as most things
about him. More than one woman had committed
suicide because of him. Konrad Heiden offers the
theory that Hitler was neither homo—nor hetero­
sexual, but a "hörig," man, strongly bound or inhib­
ited in his sexual life. He is certainly right when
he states that all his relations with women were
"dark and mysterious." It is another question
whether Heiden's further conclusions were right.
"His affairs," continues Heiden, "all seem to break
off at a certain stage, almost without exception, and
in many cases it can be recognised that it is Hitler
who was deserted and not the women whom he left.
One of the women who was an intimate friend of his,
declared, when asked about her relations with him,
that she had experienced a disappointment which left
her with little respect for Hitler as a man.
Madame Tabouis, the French authoress and
journalist, went even further. She declared that
according to the personal experience of a lady whom
10