The most exclusive social event in Nazi Germany took place on June 3, 1944, not in Berlin, but high in the Bavarian Alps. The wedding of SS General Hermann Fegelein to Gretl Braun, the younger sister of Hitler’s mistress, was the crowning celebration of the secluded mountain community that had grown around the Führer’s private residence, the Berghof, near Obersalzberg. The ceremony was held in the Marble Hall of Mirabell Palace in Salzburg, conducted not as a Christian rite but in the pagan style favored by senior SS officers. Heinrich Himmler himself officiated, with Martin Bormann among the witnesses.
The bride was one of two sisters who had become central figures in Hitler’s private world. Eva Braun, the elder, had been with Hitler since 1929, when she worked as an assistant to Nazi photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. Twenty-three years younger than Hitler, she had first caught his attention after a suicide attempt in 1932, and by the end of that year they were lovers. A second suicide attempt in 1935, prompted by what she felt was his neglect, secured his lasting commitment.
He gave her an apartment in Munich, then a villa in Bogenhausen, and eventually she became the permanent mistress of the Berghof, where staff and locals called her the Queen of Obersalzberg. Few Germans knew she existed at all. Her younger sister Gretl was different. Vivacious and flirtatious, she enjoyed the luxury that Eva’s relationship brought, partying with military officers and living at the center of the Nazi social circle.
Her romantic life would become entangled with some of the most powerful men in Hitler’s inner circle, and each relationship ended in ways that revealed the strange and unforgiving nature of that world. Her first serious romance was with Fritz Darges, an SS adjutant who had fought in France and Russia. Despite Hitler’s pressure to marry, Darges refused. Hitler was old-fashioned about such matters and pressed his associates to settle down.
The relationship ended, and Darges soon suffered a dramatic fall from grace. On July 18, 1944, two days before the famous bomb plot against Hitler, Darges was at a military conference at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia when a fly landed on Hitler’s shoulder. Annoyed, Hitler ordered Darges to shoo it away. Darges replied, apparently in jest, that since it was a fly, it was the business of the Air Force, and Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant should deal with it.
Hitler dismissed him on the spot and sent him to a fighting post on the Eastern Front. The real reason for his downfall was likely his refusal to marry Gretl Braun, a slight the Führer had not forgiven. Darges survived the war and died in 2009 at the age of ninety-six. Gretl’s next romance was with Walther Hewel, a senior Nazi diplomat and popular member of Hitler’s inner circle.
Hewel had originally wanted to marry Sigrid von Laffert, whom Hitler approved of, but she married a German aristocrat instead. Hitler pressed Hewel to marry Gretl, reportedly even promising him an ambassadorship in Rome if he did. Hewel refused and married another woman. Hitler banished him from the inner circle, though he later forgave him.
Hewel remained with Hitler until the end, and after the Führer’s suicide he joined a group trying to escape the ruined city. Captured by Red Army soldiers on May 2, 1945, he shot himself rather than surrender. The third man in Gretl Braun’s life was Hermann Fegelein, and this relationship ended in the most violent and dramatic fashion of all. Fegelein was a former jockey who had risen through the SS to become a general.
His past was dark. During the invasion of Poland in 1939, his regiment was involved in the massacre of some seventeen hundred civilians in the Kampinos Forest. He was formally reprimanded for looting, having sent stolen trucks, Mercedes-Benz cars, food, coffee, clothing, and furs back to the SS cavalry school. Himmler protected him from prosecution.
During the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, his regiment killed nearly fourteen thousand Jews and over three thousand men classified as partisans in Belarus. Wounded by a sniper in December 1941, he later commanded the 8th SS Cavalry Division Florian Geyer. After being wounded again in October 1943, he was appointed Himmler’s SS liaison officer at Hitler’s headquarters. Fegelein was popular, arrogant, and handsome, and he had been awarded the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves.
He became close to Martin Bormann and joined his regular drinking sessions. Eva Braun herself admitted to a friend that she had fallen in love with him, though she was careful not to cross Hitler. Fegelein flirted with both sisters but was careful to maintain the correct relationship with the Führer. Before long, he began a relationship with Gretl.
Many in Hitler’s circle disliked Fegelein intensely. Albert Speer called him one of the most disgusting people in Hitler’s entourage. Fegelein performed his duties well and showed deep respect for Hitler, but he made no secret of thinking himself too good for the job. Despite all his flaws, he decided to marry Gretl.
The likely reason was that the marriage placed him in an unrivaled position of power and influence at the Führer’s side. He was a realist with a strong survival instinct. Eva Braun planned the wedding meticulously. After the ceremony in Salzburg, the bridal couple drove to the Berghof to pay their respects to the Führer.
The reception was held in the Great Hall, the largest room in the building, with the famous picture window overlooking the valley and mountains. Afterward, the wedding party, minus Hitler, took the elevator up to the Eagle’s Nest, the mountaintop teahouse officially known as the Kehlsteinhaus. They celebrated there for three days. The main hall where the party was held still exists, now used as a restaurant.
On June 6, 1944, the festivities came to an abrupt end. News arrived that the Allies had landed in Normandy. Hitler left the Berghof on July 14, 1944, for the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia and never returned. Fegelein went with him.
Six days later, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in the conference room at the Wolf’s Lair. Hitler survived by a narrow margin. Fegelein was present during the explosion and suffered a minor wound to his left thigh. Through the final months of the regime, Fegelein remained on Hitler’s staff, moving between various Führer headquarters, rarely seeing his pregnant wife.
By January 1945, with the failure of the Ardennes offensive in the west and the massive Soviet winter offensive in the east, Hitler moved into his last headquarters in Berlin. On January 19, Gretl arrived at the Reich Chancellery with Eva Braun. On February 9, Hitler sent both women back to Berchtesgaden to escape the danger, but Eva eventually returned to stay with Hitler. As Soviet forces closed in on Berlin in late April 1945, Fegelein found his position untenable.
Trapped in the Führerbunker with a deteriorating Hitler, he decided to save himself, knowing Hitler had ruled out any escape from the capital. On April 27, three days before Hitler’s suicide, Fegelein tried to leave Berlin without permission. When Hitler called for him during a conference, he was nowhere to be found. A squad of Hitler’s bodyguards went to his apartment in the city and found the general drunk in bed with his mistress.
The young woman escaped through the bathroom window, but Fegelein was arrested and brought back to the bunker. With him were the proofs of his intended flight: a suitcase full of money, civilian clothes, and false identity papers. Eva Braun pleaded with Hitler to spare him, arguing that he was the father of her sister’s unborn child. Hitler relented, for the moment.
But on the evening of April 28, word arrived that Heinrich Himmler had been negotiating a secret surrender with the Western Allies. Hitler flew into a rage and ordered Himmler’s arrest. Himmler was free in northern Germany with loyal guards and associates, beyond reach. Hitler could at least take revenge on Fegelein, Himmler’s SS liaison, who was suspected of complicity in his boss’s plot.
Fegelein was brought before a hurried court-martial in the bunker, convicted of desertion, and sentenced to death. His medals and honors were stripped from his uniform, his shoulder boards torn off, and he was dragged upstairs in disgrace by Hitler’s SS bodyguards. In the garden of the Reich Chancellery, amid Soviet shelling, an SS officer shot him in the back of the neck. His body was kicked into a shell crater and hastily covered with dirt and debris.
The next day, April 29, 1945, another Nazi wedding took place, this time between Hitler and Eva Braun. Both would be dead in the bunker by the following afternoon. Gretl Fegelein gave birth to a daughter on May 5, 1945, in Obersalzberg. She named the child Eva, in memory of her sister.
She later married a businessman named Kurt Berlinghoff and lived quietly in Munich. Her daughter Eva committed suicide in 1975 after her boyfriend died in a car accident. Gretl Berlinghoff died in October 1987 in Steingaden, Bavaria, at the age of seventy-two.