Women Close To Hitler

WOMEN CLOSE TO HITLER

By Ken Ford

Copyright 2013 Ken Ford

Published by KFMB at Smashwords

Cover design by Katelyn Buenfeld

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

FRANCE 1946

THE EARLY YEARS

THE MAKING OF A POLITICIAN

EVA BRAUN

WOMEN AT THE BERGHOF

HITLER BEFORE THE WAR

HITLER’S WAR

HITLER’S SECRETARIES

DEATH IN THE BUNKER

DR KARL BRANDT

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

We know all there is to know about Adolf Hitler. He was a tyrant, a megalomaniac, a fascist dictator, a sadist, a racist, a serial killer and the exterminator of millions of people. We know all this and will readily agree to any other despicable act that can be laid at his door, so what is there new to find out about him? Well, for one thing, he was actually quite a gentleman when it came to dealing with women who were close to him. He had a private persona that was in stark contrast to his public image.

The modern serial killer is often discovered to be a good husband and father to his wife, family and friends, living a life far removed from his secret night-time urges to kill and torture the innocent. After he has completed his butchery he returns home to bounce his baby son on his knee. So it was with Hitler. He could give the order to wipe out whole communities or demand that close comrades be shot like dogs and then retire to the companionship of his mistress and his secretaries for a pleasant evening of sipping tea and gossiping about the latest scandals in the film world. Those private moments of Hitler’s personal life are far removed from how he is regarded today. It is a strange suggestion, but a fact nonetheless, that he actually mellowed considerably when he was close to women.

Many previous books have been written that included details of a few of these women, ranging from brief descriptions of individuals to lengthy biographies on the more famous of them. Hitler’s relationships and his attitude to women have been scrutinised by psychologists, feminists, revisionists and many others, each of them trying to understand the complex personality of this most complex of men. Was he a father figure, a misogynist, a homosexual, a celibate, a sexual pervert or indeed some other type of personality defined by an obscure psychological stereotype? Who knows?

Did any of these women have any real influence over him? I believe they did not. Like most other men Hitler was fascinated by women, by everything about them and, contrary to some historical opinion, found intimate pleasure with them, but they remained separate from his other life and he took no notice whatsoever of their attitudes and opinions. They became close to him, or so they thought, and lived in a sheltered world that few outsiders even knew existed. He was sometimes lavish with his gifts for them. He sent them flowers when they were ill; brought them presents when they visited him; took them to the finest restaurants and would even travel from Berlin to their home to extend his birthday greetings. These women who graced Hitler’s inner circle have remained enigmatic and distant to the post-war world; they have now faded into insignificance, overshadowed by the enormity of his crimes.

Whilst researching military history at the National Archives in London a few years ago, I came across a document outlining the Allied interrogation of Dr Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal surgeon. It was titled ‘Women around Hitler’ and described the women that Brandt had lived alongside whilst working for Hitler. It contained his personal insights into many of the women described in this book; pen pictures of Hitler’s closest ‘lovers’, secretaries and acquaintances. I have freely used Brandt’s observations to help illustrate the relationships between Hitler and these women, along with others who were close to him during one of the most fascinating periods in History.

After the war, those participants from within the Third Reich who survived wrote their memoirs with a view to how posterity would see them. As any historian will tell you, truth becomes obscured by the passage of time. Actions that are recalled later are always modified and re-presented to suit the storyteller. Contemporary accounts written at the time of great events have much more veracity than those recounted later. Time allows anecdotes to be embellished and borrowed; what was personally experienced by one individual often turns up in the autobiographies of others as though the incident was their own.

Brandt’s observations were remarkably candid and informative, worthy of a wider audience. What makes them most remarkable is that Brandt was under arrest as a prisoner of war and was being interrogated on serious charges relating to the programme of euthanasia of the mentally ill and disabled. He wasn’t being questioned as an expert on Hitler’s female relationships, but was being interviewed at length simply as someone who was part of the dictator’s inner circle. Brandt was enlightening his captors as to who had access to Hitler and who may have been able to exert some influence over him. His contact with the women was informal, which meant that he could observe each of them in a dispassionate way. He was able to recall their behaviour, their personality, and their relationship with Hitler, at a time soon after the end of the conflict before they could ‘rewrite’ history to their own ends.

FRANCE 1946

Some time just after the Second World War, when Nazi Germany had been totally destroyed and much of Europe lay in ruins, Charlotte Lobjoie felt that the time was right to confess to her illegitimate son the rightful name of his father. She spoke of how, as a sixteen year-old girl during the Great War, she and her friends had been cutting hay in the fields around the small village of Fournes-en-Weppe and had seen a German soldier sitting by the roadside with a sketch pad and pencil. The girls were curious to know what he was drawing and urged her to go and speak to him. Charlotte discovered that the soldier was on leave from the front line trenches in Picardy and was using his free time to paint and illustrate local scenes. He was sketching a picture of the church. He told her that he hoped at some time to become an architect.

Charlotte explained to her son, Jean-Marie, that she had met the soldier again that day and they had taken a walk together through the fields and lanes around the village. They were two young people enjoying each other’s company far away from the rumble of the guns, finding a brief spell of peace in the turmoil which surrounded their lives. Charlotte explained that their friendship had grown day by day until they eventually became lovers. She confessed to Jean-Marie that he was conceived during a ‘tipsy evening’ in June 1917. The affair was short lived and soon the soldier disappeared from her life forever. ‘And what was my father’s name?’ asked her son. ‘Adolf Hitler’, replied his mother.

THE EARLY YEARS

Adolf Hitler, the most reviled man in history began his life just like any other boy. He lived in a lower-middle class family with many of the same problems as boys today: he had a stern, often abusive, father; a doting, docile, mother and older and younger siblings born to different mothers. Little about him singled him out to be anything other than perhaps another middle ranking civil servant like his father. There was nothing there in his early years to suggest he would be responsible for the mass murder of millions. He was a boy like any other.

With almost all men – there are obvious exceptions - the most important woman to them during the first two decades of their life is their mother. This was certainly true of Adolf Hitler. He was very close to his mother for good reason, for he was often mistreated by his father. Hitler’s mother Klara was his refuge from the stern beatings he received and the tenderness she showed him made his early life tolerable. ‘I honoured my father, but my mother I loved’, he later admitted. At the end of his days, when he finally shot himself through the head in a dank concrete bunker alongside his dead wife, the last thing he saw was the picture of his mother in a silver frame on his desk, her expressionless eyes watching his sordid exit from life.

Adolf Hitler’s mother Klara was an undemanding, compliant and hard working woman, just like most other wives and mothers in nineteenth century Austria. She was a rather timid woman once described by her doctor as being ‘gentle, sweet, and affectionate’. This was also later said of Hitler’s future wife, Eva Braun, by his personal surgeon Dr Karl Brandt. He thought that Eva had a natural and pleasant manner, while her ‘charm and graceful figure’ enchanted all who knew her. Both women remained in the background; Klara as a wife and mother to her husband Alois and her children and Eva as the mistress of a dictator who was never seen by the public as his companion in her lifetime. Quiet, unassuming and above all supportive, they lived for the men they chose to love and comfort, a role that Hitler required of all German mothers: ‘Work only for your husband and your children’, he demanded.

Hitler’s mother was not the only woman from his family who helped to shape his future. There was another woman who later caused some uneasiness in his life, a woman he had never met who had died years before he was born, his grandmother Maria Schicklgruber. She had lived her life in obscurity as an insignificant countrywoman, but she eventually proved to be something of an enigma. Like most country people in the nineteenth century, Maria Schicklgruber lived and died leaving little trace of her existence, save a few entries in birth and death registers. But whoever she was, she left her grandson with a legacy that later came to haunt him and his followers.

Maria Schicklgruber was born of simple peasant stock. She spent her adult life working as a servant or cook in various middle class households. When she was forty-two years old, the unmarried Maria became pregnant for the first time in her life and gave birth to a son whom she called Alois. In the registry at the parish church in Dollersheim in Austria, where she registered the baptism in 1837, the name of the child’s father was left blank. Five years later Maria, then forty-seven, married Johan Georg Hiedler. He was five years her junior. Hiedler was an itinerant miller who moved from place to place exercising his trade. After the marriage Hiedler did not adopt Maria’s five-year old son as his own and so Alois kept the Schicklgruber surname. Surprisingly, in view of later developments, the young Alois did not live with Johan Georg and Maria, but was sent to be raised by Hiedler’s brother Johan Nepomuk Hiedler. Maria’s husband appears to have regarded Alois as his stepson, a result of her previous relationship with some unknown man. When Maria died five years later Alois was just 10 years old. Johan Georg continued his wandering life leaving his stepson with his brother. He appears to have had little paternal association with Alois from then on.

The illegitimate Alois Schicklgruber grew to manhood and prospered, later establishing himself as a servant of the government. When he was 39 years old he returned to Dollersheim for the purpose of changing his name. By this time his stepfather was long dead, but Alois now wished to register the fact that Johan Georg Hiedler was indeed his father. Alois affirmed that although Johan Georg had never formally acknowledged him as his son and had spent little time helping to raise him, he had always wanted Alois to take his name. Alois brought with him three signed affidavits to prove the matter. After some deliberation, which involved higher dispensation from the Catholic Church, the name change was granted and Alois Schicklgruber became Alois Hiedler forty years after his birth. Even then he was not happy and later altered his surname from Hiedler to Hitler.

All of these changes did not help later Nazi genealogists and Hitler critics to establish Adolf Hitler’s actual family tree with any certainty. There had been for some time local gossip as to who Alois’ father actually was. Names other than Hiedler were being put forward, one of which was the son of Maria’s employer at the time she became pregnant. Unfortunately for her grandson Adolf, the employer in question was a Jew. This