At the end of April 1945, with the Red Army closing in on Berlin, Adolf Hitler gathered his most loyal followers for the last time. He told them they were free to leave the city or die with him. Few chose to go. His secretary prepared the final documents.

His new wife, Eva Braun, whom he had married only the day before, had already made her choice. The man who had once insisted he was never alone would not be alone in death. Josef and Magda Goebbels, who had poisoned their six children hours earlier, waited in the next room. Martin Bormann would die that night trying to escape through the burning streets.

And when the shooting stopped, those who survived would spend the rest of their lives constructing a story about who Hitler really was—a story that the historical record, piece by piece, would later tear apart. For decades, it was claimed that Adolf Hitler had no private life, that he was a socially distant figure who kept everyone at arm’s length. The truth was very different. The dictator maintained close contacts and friendships throughout his life.

He had to be understood as part of a group—not so much an entourage as a circle of friends, in which he was equal among equals. The support of this inner circle was essential to his role as leader. After every public appearance, Hitler withdrew into this circle. He never went anywhere alone.

In short, he was constantly in company. The question that has haunted historians is whether the dictator’s political decisions—even his crimes—were influenced by the people around him. In Hitler’s environment, there was never a distinction between political and private life. There was no one at his court who was not involved.

There was no one at the court who was not also a believer. Those who belonged to the conspiratorial community around Hitler and Eva Braun were considered unconditionally loyal. Hitler was, after all, a product of this environment—sponsors, friends, followers. He was by no means the Führer from the very beginning, a figure who somehow created distance between himself and these people.

He needed them. For better or worse, the believers tied their fate to the Führer’s fate. Faced with war and genocide, there was no turning back on the road to ruin. The Nazis knew they were murderers.

They already knew they had blood on their hands. And their thoughts now turned to a single question: how do we get out of this in one piece? That was why the survivors later claimed that only Hitler was responsible for everything. In the summer of 1939, private photographs from Eva Braun’s collection showed another world entirely.

At the Berghof, Hitler’s mistress decided who belonged to the inner circle and who did not. After the Nazis came to power, the Führer surrounded himself in his free time primarily with followers who owed him their careers. The company at the Berghof included Hitler’s closest associates and their wives, as well as secretaries and personal assistants. After 1933, when he was appointed Chancellor of the Reich, Obersalzberg remained his refuge.

But now the circle around him had changed. There was plenty of money. Essentially, everything was possible. There was little morality, and the idea was: we rule the world and we are allowed to do whatever we want.

The daily routine in the now completely isolated Obersalzberg was almost always the same. Hitler rose late. After lunch, he liked to take walks with visitors. The company was carefully chosen and unconditionally loyal to the dictator.

Anyone who did not constantly prove their loyalty was removed from the inner circle. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was one of those particularly diligent followers. No one in Hitler’s inner circle was there by chance. They were mostly people he had known for a long time, people who had relationships with trusted individuals.

Wilhelm Brückner was someone who had proven himself absolutely loyal and also capable. He was a good organizer and a very central figure in the inner circle until 1940. The personal adjutant and bodyguard were almost always near the dictator. Hitler trusted him, and Wilhelm Brückner enjoyed his special position at court.

The Führer appreciated the good manners and organizational skills of the blue-eyed giant. Brückner was one of those who controlled access to Hitler. His rise was typical of the circle around the dictator. As far as is known today, Wilhelm Brückner entered Hitler’s innermost circle through Ernst Röhm, a figure who is often overlooked but who had moved in Hitler’s inner circle as early as 1922.

Röhm was the SA leader in Munich and essentially organized the security for all of Hitler’s appearances. It was he who commanded the SA in Munich. Brückner became Hitler’s right hand in 1930, after Ernst Röhm returned from Bolivia, where he had been temporarily employed as a military adviser. After the Nazis seized power, the SA Chief of Staff left no doubt that he wanted a share of power.

In March 1933, Munich’s faithful waited for the arrival of the Reich Chancellor at the airfield. Even when Hitler traveled by plane, Wilhelm Brückner was part of the entourage. During the flight, he sat in one of the back rows, so he could be on hand whenever the dictator wanted something. Upon arrival in Munich, Brückner left the aircraft shortly after the dictator.

His loyalty now belonged entirely to his boss. For Hitler, the so-called time of struggle was over. Many old comrades were now losing influence. The existence of the Führer’s mistress was hidden from the public.

Only in Obersalzberg could Eva Braun play her role completely freely. Officially, she worked as a housekeeper. Her secret love affair with Hitler was not a problem there. Wilhelm Brückner also liked to present himself at the Berghof as a man who loved fun, always ready for mischief.

The adjutant was actually married, but he was attracted to young women, to whom he pretended to be a bachelor. The moral code, especially sexual morality, was very relaxed. There was almost no one who did not have extramarital affairs, and that included Wilhelm Brückner. Brückner was clearly a ladies’ man.

At the Berghof, he often had with him his longtime mistress Sophie Storck, an artist from Munich who also belonged to the inner circle. When the chief adjutant left Eva Braun’s girl—when Hitler married a younger woman in 1937—Hitler was furious. Josef Goebbels wrote in his diary: Brückner married in Baden-Baden, but the Führer did not even congratulate him. He is sharply against this marriage, which is a real abnormality.

He is 53, she is 18. Whether the bride knew Brückner’s dark secret remains unclear. The husband literally had a skeleton in the closet—a death that remains unsolved to this day and was only discovered 70 years later. Twenty-two-year-old Gerda Sommer probably met Wilhelm Brückner, who was almost 30 years older, in a Berlin nightclub.

The daughter of a bank clerk regularly sought acquaintances with wealthy men there. On June 5, 1934, Gerda Sommer and Wilhelm Brückner returned from a trip to the Baltic Sea. Two days later, her body was discovered. In 1934, the body of a young woman was indeed found in Brückner’s apartment—a friend he had met weeks earlier, and whose death and the circumstances of that death he actually covered up.

The only known photograph of Gerda Sommer shows a laughing blonde. When Wilhelm Brückner entered his apartment on June 7, 1934, he found the body lying on his bed. The police were not called until the next day. The parents were informed too late, mostly only a day later.

The corpse lay in Wilhelm Brückner’s apartment for 24 hours. The parents later tried again and again, through acquaintances, to contact Brückner and the Reich Chancellery in general, to find out what had happened and whether their only daughter had perhaps been murdered. This is how things worked in Hitler’s inner circle. In the Reich Chancellery, the death came at an inconvenient time, because precisely in those days, the murder of Ernst Röhm, Brückner’s former patron, was being planned.

There could not be a dead girl on his bed, whether she was killed or committed suicide. Gerda Sommer was buried a few days later in a cemetery outside Berlin, without an official determination of the cause of death. For Wilhelm Brückner, this was indeed an uncertain situation in 1934. In June 1934, it looked as if Hitler was about to disempower Ernst Röhm and destroy the SA.

Brückner was Röhm’s close friend. He himself belonged to the SA, and the fact that a dead girl had now been found in his apartment could also become a problem for him. Under its chief of staff, the SA had meanwhile developed into a state within a state, and Ernst Röhm controlled the paramilitary organization like an autocrat. To the anger of the Reichswehr, Hitler decided to eliminate his companion.

On June 30, 1934, he personally arrested his former friend and had him shot in his cell the next day. Shortly afterwards, the dictator traveled to Bayreuth, as he did every year. When Winifred Wagner asked him, “Wolf,” about the murders and the bloody purges that accompanied them, Hitler replied that only 77 people had been executed who were allegedly planning a coup against him. Röhm had broken his oath of loyalty and could not be saved.

Winifred Wagner accepted her friend’s explanation and remained loyal to him her entire life. After Röhm’s murder, the cleansing of Obersalzberg began. Hitler no longer surrounded himself with old patrons, old friends who had essentially seen him as a weak sausage during his rise. He surrounded himself with a new circle of people who owed their careers entirely to him, along with their social advancement in the world.

Rare photographs show the extensive construction work at Obersalzberg in the mid-1930s. The small Wachenfels house was integrated into plans for a more representative residence from which the dictator could conduct government business. Hitler’s Berghof, with its huge panoramic window, was created. To make it the centerpiece of the area, surrounding estates were expropriated, or their owners were forced to sell.

Martin Bormann threatened anyone who refused to part with their house with a concentration camp. The former agricultural worker from Thuringia had come a long way since the Nazis came to power—first as chief of staff to Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess, and finally as organizer and kingpin at Obersalzberg. Bormann was 100 percent dedicated to him. He was unscrupulous, endlessly diligent.

He worked insanely hard. He had an incredibly good memory, and he also made excellent use of his position in his own way. There is this quote of his: No one comes to the Führer except through me. He performed his function as Cerberus magnificently, and he did what Hitler could not.

Hitler was, after all, everything but a systematic worker at his desk. Bormann also took care of Hitler’s financial affairs and thus secured his long-term position at court. He was considered an impeccable National Socialist who mercilessly persecuted traitors and relentlessly carried out all his master’s orders. “Whatever or whoever serves the movement is good,” he declared.

“Whoever harms it is a pest and my enemy. ” He entered the Führer’s closest circle by marrying the right woman. With his family, Bormann lived in a house not far from the Berghof, whose owner was also forced to sell. Gerda Bormann had already borne her husband six children and was a fervent Hitler supporter, as well as a convinced anti-Semite who believed she belonged to a superior master race.

Her husband maintained a friendly relationship with Eva Braun, who admired the radicalism of the Bormann couple. Gerda was the daughter of Walter Buch, the highest party judge of the NSDAP. In 1929, she married Martin Bormann, with Adolf Hitler as best man. The fact that Hitler repeatedly appeared as best man for his closest comrades shows how close the relationships were, that they were friendships, human connections and relationships.

Here there was no leader standing apart from his entourage. This was a community. He was part of a community. And that was evident in the fact that private relationships were cultivated, that much was written, that a great many pictures were taken.

These were essentially family gatherings. So it was in 1935, when Hitler’s deputy Hermann Göring married the actress Emmy Sonnemann. As the First Lady of the Reich, Mrs. Göring took on representative duties and received heads of state and diplomats at the Karinhall estate.

The Görings also owned a large house at Obersalzberg, but there was almost no private contact with Hitler and his court. Although the estate was not far from the Berghof, Emmy Göring never personally met Eva Braun. To the great disappointment of Hitler’s entourage, the corpulent Göring was popular among Germans, who even forgave him his eccentric lifestyle. During the course of the 1930s, fewer and fewer of the supporters and friends who had promoted Hitler’s rise managed to gain access to the Führer’s inner circle.

One exception was Josef Goebbels, who was also a welcome guest at the Berghof. He had no personal ambitions and was unconditionally loyal. Although Goebbels was married, he repeatedly had extramarital affairs. Finally, the minister fell in love with the Czech actress Lída Baarová.

His wife threatened him with divorce. Josef Goebbels had married Magda Quandt in 1931. Hitler was evidently particularly attracted to her. When the marital crisis culminated in 1938, the Führer sided with Magda.

Magda Goebbels was also a convinced National Socialist. She got along very well with Hitler, which is why he stood up for her. Magda Goebbels was really relatively close to him. The wives of Hess and the others played a not entirely unimportant role in this society.

It was the time of the Munich Agreement, and therefore particularly inappropriate for Goebbels to leave with a Czech woman. He was a great womanizer in other respects as well. In the world of film stars, the minister was known behind closed doors as the Buck of Babelsberg. For years, Magda Goebbels had endured her husband’s love affairs because of her position and her children.

But now she traveled to Hitler in Berchtesgaden and asked him for help. Goebbels was summoned to the Berghof. There he was, the propaganda minister with his six children and his wife. And Hitler did not want this to simply fall apart.

That suddenly such a libertine should appear among them, constantly running after other women, and simply let this model family disintegrate. He had relatively good contact with Magda Goebbels, and her husband was very important to him. After all, the propaganda minister was crucial for the stability and self-expression of the regime in many situations. He simply wanted to stabilize the whole situation.

Hitler put his foot down. Goebbels obeyed and ended the affair. Magda won, and she repaid the Führer with fanatical loyalty unto death. After killing their six children, Magda and Josef Goebbels committed suicide in 1945, just like Hitler and Eva Braun.

Amateur films shot at Obersalzberg suggest a relaxed private life in which politics played no role. After the fall of the Third Reich, this is exactly what the surviving courtiers would claim. But the films tell a different story to those who look closely. At Obersalzberg, Hitler’s companions were always present.

There was no distinction between political and private life at court. Everyone had a function. The case of Karl Brandt, the Führer’s personal physician, is also typical of the rise of a near-unknown into the immediate vicinity of power, with monstrous consequences. In Brandt’s case, it is difficult to determine when he actually met Hitler.

His wife, Annie Brandt, had known Hitler since the mid-1920s. She was a famous swimming champion in Germany. Annie Brandt was on vacation in Italy with Eva Braun’s family. Hitler’s mistress traveled south with her mother Fanny and her sister Gretel.

A few girlfriends were allowed to accompany them. Gretel Braun had been part of the inner circle for years, just like Annie Brandt. Under her maiden name, Annie Rehborn, she had been a successful athlete in the 1920s, winning eight German swimming championships. At the 1927 European Championships, she won a bronze medal with the relay team.

At this point, she was already in close contact with Hitler—a friendship that developed not only with Annie Rehborn, as she was then called, but also with her family. After Annie Brandt met her future husband Karl, it is very likely that Karl Brandt also met Hitler within the Rehborn family. The handsome surgeon joined the SS for his career and eventually became Hitler’s physician. He shared with his patient the perverse conviction that killing the terminally ill was inevitable.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler had already claimed that a physically healthy person was worth more than a weak-minded weakling. Now he planned the destruction of those unworthy of life. Hitler’s ambition was always to appear invincible. This also included not being seen as directly involved in murders.

That is why he always surrounded himself with his inner circle, which did not need much convincing. He was surrounded by a circle of already convinced people. The same was true of the euthanasia program. Hitler had very clear convictions, already stated in Mein Kampf, that in his opinion the sick and disabled should not be allowed to reproduce.

And that opinion was shared by the people in his circle. Since coming to power, the Nazis had put their radical ideological delusions into practice. In inflammatory films, propaganda labeled the mentally or physically disabled as outsiders of the national community. For years, thousands of helpless victims were forcibly sterilized on the orders of the authorities.

After the start of the war, the plan for a secret euthanasia program matured. The foundation of National Socialism was anti-Semitism and the idea of a healthy—what they considered healthy—nation. Anything sick, anything disabled simply should not be part of it; it should basically be killed, eliminated. Karl Brandt was also convinced that euthanasia was a good idea.

But that was the opinion of the majority in the inner circle. Hitler was not the only one with such views. Euthanasia was organized by Karl Brandt and Philipp Bouhler. Hitler himself, of course, was never presented as a murderer.

He reluctantly signed a written order stating: “In human judgment, the terminally ill may be granted mercy killing. ” As a result, between 1939 and 1941, around 70,000 disabled persons were gassed in specially equipped psychiatric institutions and cremated. There is no doubt that Hitler was the driving force behind the murder order. It remains unclear whether it was openly discussed within the inner circle.

The close relationship between Karl and Annie Brandt with Hitler and Eva Braun gives rise to the assumption that everyone at court actually knew about it. While disabled and mentally ill people were being killed throughout Nazi Germany, Karl Brandt was skiing with his wife at Obersalzberg. In 1945, Brandt was arrested and taken to Nuremberg. Karl Brandt was also someone who stood by his position in the postwar period.

He clearly explained why it was necessary to form a new national community, to cleanse the national body, as he called it. A doctor who interviewed Karl Brandt in Nuremberg at the time later said that Brandt could not distinguish the human soul from the human being. In 1946, he was brought before the court—the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg. In the large jury courtroom, the first trial against 23 leading National Socialist physicians began.

The first day was reserved for reading the indictment. It was prepared by the chief American prosecutor, General Telford Taylor. The 23 defendants faced trial for human experimentation and the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Among the crimes listed in the indictment were countless murders and crimes in concentration camps, hospitals, and experimental institutions, as well as inhuman medical experiments committed on helpless men and women.

The presiding judge called each defendant individually and asked whether he pleaded guilty or not guilty. Karl Brandt, former personal physician of Adolf Hitler, Lieutenant General of the Waffen-SS and Reich Commissioner for Medical and Health Services: guilty or not guilty? “Nicht schuldig”—not guilty. He had entered into a relationship, for better or worse, with Hitler.

Brandt defended himself. Euthanasia, he argued, was not a crime against humanity. The court saw things differently and sentenced him to death. Brandt was executed in 1948.

Probably the most controversial figure at Hitler’s court was the architect Albert Speer. With his memoirs—worldwide bestsellers in the 1960s and 70s—he shaped a distorted picture of the history of the Third Reich and its dictator for decades, downplaying his own involvement in the crimes. After 1945, Albert Speer always behaved as if he had entered the circle around Hitler quite by chance, that Hitler had chosen him by accident. He claimed Hitler found him sympathetic and then asked him to sit at his table in the Reich Chancellery.

The fact is that Speer had been in this environment for a relatively long time. He had been a member of the NSDAP since 1932. When he met Hitler during 1933, he was essentially already tried and tested. He had already proven himself a convinced National Socialist.

Only from that situation did Hitler ask him to come to his table. The dictator saw himself more as an artist than a politician. And so the young, charismatic Speer had no problem positioning himself in Hitler’s immediate vicinity. With his first commissions, Speer gained the Führer’s trust and, starting in 1934, designed monumental buildings for the party rally grounds in Nuremberg.

Of course, the chemistry was right, but there were also shared interests. Here was a young architect—something Hitler himself wanted to build for himself. This idea of building a new Reich, also architecturally, had existed for a long time. And in Speer, he now essentially saw a kindred spirit who could put these ideas, these desires, into practice.

Contrary to later claims that he was completely apolitical and unaware of the Nazi racial mania, Speer was a devoted Hitler disciple from the very beginning. His monstrous buildings perfectly reflected the dictator’s bizarre fantasies of power—brutality in stone. Speer was fascinated by the idea of building for the dictator. Of course, there were no limits for him—financially certainly not, and otherwise as well.

And proximity to the dictator was decisive for possessing power within such a system. Speer moved with his family into a house with a studio at Obersalzberg and was therefore constantly available to his client. Speer’s wife was also a member of the court and became friends with Eva Braun. Throughout her life, Margarete Speer did not want to talk about her husband’s entanglements.

With the words “I can’t,” she once evaded the burning questions of Speer’s biographer. For her husband, proximity to power was a guarantee of money and influence. The children also played their part. Speer made sure he was always in that inner circle.

He himself sought contact with Hitler. He included his family in this. That was important to Hitler—to always be part of a family, since he didn’t have one of his own. Albert Speer truly succeeded in building a friendship with Hitler.

But not only with Hitler. Speer was also friends with Bormann. And he was also friends with Karl Brandt. In fact, with everyone in that inner circle.

Although Eva Braun’s films and photographs, especially at Obersalzberg, were supposed to be destroyed in 1945, part of the collection fell into American hands after the end of the war. These images and films from Obersalzberg—photographs after New Year’s gatherings—were not intended for publication. They were private pictures that not only Eva Braun, but everyone who appeared there, stuck in their albums. It was something to be proud of—that one belonged to this famous circle, to the Führer’s circle, as Albert Speer once called it.

It also served to reassure oneself, but it was decisive for the cohesion of this circle. This togetherness: we are one. We are a social and political circle. Together we work on a new Germany.

The court was always available. Everyone easily adapted to the Führer’s daily routine and waited for his appearance. Eva Braun played her role as hostess perfectly, organizing the private life of her lover. As soon as the dictator appeared, everything revolved around him.

Political decisions and criminal plans were also discussed. Everyone at court participated. In the case of Albert Speer, we still live off his memories, his postwar stories of absolution, in which he made it clear that he was not involved at all—that he knew nothing about the invasion of Austria and only learned of it from the newspapers. He always found out everything afterwards.

He was never involved, certainly not in the planning of aggressive wars. But if we take the pictures seriously as sources, they show that Speer, just like everyone else, was always at Hitler’s side. On August 22, 1939, when Hitler clearly set out his war aims before 50 leading officers at the Berghof—the attack on Poland, and also the already announced attack on France and England—not only these officers were present, but also the circle of friends. Everyone was with him that day.

Although the dictator’s construction activities gradually ceased during the war, Speer did not lose his influence; he even managed to increase it. As Minister of Armaments, he had constant access to the Führer’s headquarters. Speer organized an army of millions of slave laborers for German industry, also from SS extermination camps. He claimed he knew nothing about the genocide.

Hitler never sat alone at his table in his headquarters during the war. The man simply was never alone. In the Wolf’s Lair, already at the beginning of the war; in the Führer’s train—evenings, noons, nights—he was always surrounded by his inner circle. Decisions were made there too.

Himmler appeared, Bormann took notes. Extermination policy was essentially organized there. It is utterly incredible that no one could have heard anything about it. Albert Speer and Karl Brandt, for example, were present when SS chief Heinrich Himmler and his most important men came to Obersalzberg in August 1939 to discuss the extermination plans for the upcoming Polish campaign.

There is also evidence that the genocide of European Jews was discussed at the Berghof. The court simply did not want to hear anything about it. It is quite incredible that Hitler’s associates did not know about the Holocaust. None of the comrades, followers, or friends could admit after 1945 that they had been part of the killing machinery, that they had known about the mass extermination, the mass murder.

It must also be assumed, if one actually looks at contemporary letters, that these people at the time had a completely different view of these events—that they were convinced it was right, that they actually thought Jews had no place in Germany, that one had to get rid of them somehow. Since they did not leave voluntarily, they had to be destroyed in some other way. While Margarethe and Albert Speer enjoyed skiing and climbing at Obersalzberg, the architect’s employees, on behalf of the Armaments Minister, evicted Berlin Jews from their apartments or organized building materials for Auschwitz and the other SS death factories. The court around Hitler and Eva Braun was complicit in the dictator’s crimes against humanity.

But anyone who openly spoke about the deportations incurred the Führer’s wrath. For decades, photographer Heinrich Hoffmann and his family had been part of Hitler’s inner circle. His daughter was married to Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi Gauleiter in Vienna. This is a strange story: Henriette von Schirach, in the summer of 1943 at Obersalzberg, essentially provoked a scandal by addressing Hitler about the fact that Jewish women in the Netherlands were being mistreated and that she had observed the deportations there.

In fact, her own husband had signed the deportation lists, acting as Gauleiter in Vienna. The whole story of Henriette von Schirach and her husband at Obersalzberg in 1943 can only be understood in the sense that here the rats were essentially leaving the sinking ship. In the summer of 1943, it was clear to any clear-headed person, even in Hitler’s environment, that the war was actually lost. After the defeat at Stalingrad, the Führer almost completely withdrew from public.

His court became all the more important to him—now consisting mostly of secretaries, assistants, and a few confidants. It also included carefully selected doctors who treated the now physically ill dictator daily. Karl Brandt later said, as did others, how close they were, how they protected him. They experienced him in his weaknesses—when he became more and more insecure, when he allowed injections to restore his health, so to speak.

They experienced his breakdowns. In a nurse’s notebook it says: We must protect him. He is currently not reacting, or is understandably depressed because of the war situation. We must protect him.

We must distract him from things. While Hitler visibly deteriorated, Albert Speer was in top form as Armaments Minister. “Speer intoxicates us all with his figures,” the propaganda minister Goebbels wrote enviously in his diary. Speer, of course, was also in fine form.

He was actually, in a way, the greatest criminal after Hitler—the one who prolonged the war by two years, because he simply accelerated arms production so brutally, relentlessly, and skillfully that the war machinery was able to hold out so long against an enemy that was several times superior, at least after the United States entered the war. Together with Josef Goebbels, Albert Speer was now the star of Nazi propaganda. The dictator of the home front and armaments willingly took on the task of delaying certain defeat. They were among the most loyal believers who gathered around the only slightly injured Führer after the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944.

The conditions in this inner circle at the end of the war were somewhat strange. This can be seen after the assassination attempt on Hitler. The reaction in that circle was: what will happen to us when he is gone? Not the idea—what a pity it failed, and that misery would finally end.

No, they feared what would happen, in what kind of world they would end up when Hitler left. What will happen to us then? Fear spread. Panic spread.

For better or worse, they were connected to Hitler. They knew it. Karl Brandt knew it. Albert Speer knew it.

And that is why they did everything they could, even though it was already practically impossible for the war to be won. In December 1944, Speer personally traveled to the Ardennes to support the last major Wehrmacht offensive. To the end, he repeatedly traveled to Hitler’s Reich Chancellery to confirm his loyalty. The dictator was determined to end his life in Berlin, and his court remained with him.

Above all, Eva Braun, who wanted to go to death with Hitler. He thanked her shortly before their suicide by marrying her. His last appearance in the newsreels shows a broken man, sending still-fanatical young men into a senseless battle. When the end finally approached, he left his closest associates the decision whether to leave Berlin or die with him.

When Adolf and Eva Hitler died, Josef and Magda Goebbels also shot themselves. Martin Bormann died trying to escape the Red Army. The survivors remained a conspiratorial community. After 1945, it was essential for the former comrades and associates of Hitler to distance themselves, to seem credible in their separation from the Nazi system and from Hitler himself.

And so the legend of the inaccessible leader Hitler emerged—a man no one actually knew personally, to whom no one came close beneath the enormous cloak of the Führer. Legends appeared that Hitler actually did not communicate at all, that he only held monologues, that others just sat there, listened to him, were essentially completely passive. In reality, however, you cannot convince anyone with monologues alone. No one can be convinced by someone who is completely socially incapable, who cannot develop friendships.

That is quite improbable. One really must distinguish these postwar narratives of the former comrades—which are, after all, narratives of absolution, webs of lies, as we know today. Albert Speer lied. Heinrich Hoffmann lied, and yet they are still quoted today.

Albert Speer entered the defendants’ dock in Nuremberg in November 1945. There, the Allies tried the leading Nazis. Among them were Hermann Göring, Baldur von Schirach, and Rudolf Hess—unscrupulous mass murderers, obedient military officers, and pathological anti-Semites. Albert Speer gave the impression that he did not belong there at all.

Hermann Göring, of course, took the lead. “You must admit guilt or innocence. ” Although Hitler’s second man had been stripped of power for treason, he was sentenced to death and committed suicide in his cell. Rudolf Hess, because of his crazy flight to England, had fallen from favor.

Albert Speer also joined the phalanx of the accused. He was free to go. But to the great astonishment of the Nazi magnates around Göring, the former Armaments Minister followed his own strategy. Although he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people, he shifted the blame onto others and pretended to have reformed.

He had prevented something worse; he had even wanted to kill Hitler, he boldly claimed. He got away with 20 years in prison and, after his release, presented himself as the good Nazi. The center of Hitler’s court lay in ruins in 1945. Most of the files and documents kept at the Berghof were eventually destroyed by a loyal assistant.

The evil spirit that emanated from there lived on in former employees, friends, and confidants. They remained convinced Hitler followers until their death.