Rosa Bernhardine “Bernile” Nienau (1926-1943) was a Jewish German girl who became known as “the Führer’s daughter” because of her close friendship with Hitler that lasted for six years from 1933 to 1938. The daughter of Karoline (nee Helwig) Nienau, a nurse, and Bernhard Nienau, a physician who died shortly before her birth, she moved to Munich in 1928 with her mother and her maternal Jewish grandmother, Ida (née Morgenstern) in 1928. Ida had converted to Roman Catholicism and although Bernile was only “one-quarter Jewish,” she was “of mixed race of the second degree” and therefore Jewish according to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. (Moreover, according to halacha, Ida remained a Jew notwithstanding her conversion and, as such, her granddaughter Bernile, though raised Catholic, was also indisputably Jewish.)
On April 20, 1933 – Hitler’s birthday – the blond-haired, blue-eyed Bernile (she had a rare genetic disorder that caused her to have strikingly blue eyes) pressed to the front of the stream of visitors to Obsalzberg, best known as Hitler’s mountain residence and popularly known as the “Eagle’s Nest” in Bavaria about 75 miles from Munich and close to the Austrian border. The classically beautiful six-year-old caught the Führer’s attention and she was chosen to have a closer visit with him, notwithstanding the fact that Hitler already knew that she was Jewish. (Later, on April 19, 1938, Hitler’s aide, Fritz Wiedemann, defended Hitler’s indifference to her Jewish ancestry as “a purely human attitude toward the child.”)
From that initial contact, Bernile, who shared the Führer’s birthday, developed a five-year “friendship;” she referred to him as “Uncle,” he would affectionately call her “sweetheart,” and he refused to cut off contact with her even after he was advised that she was Jewish. In the Berlin Federal Archives, there are seventeen letters that she wrote to him and his chief adjutant, Wilhelm Brückner, between January 18, 1935 and November 12, 1939. For example, on September 27, 1936, she wrote:
Dear Uncle Brückner!
Today I have a lot to tell you. During the holidays we were on the Obersalzberg and I was twice allowed to see dear Uncle Hitler! Unfortunately, you have never been up… I am already working on the Christmas work… I am knitting Uncle Hitler some socks again, because I asked him if they fit him last year. He said yes! This year I can knit with finer wool, Mummy only helps me with the heel. They are going to be very warm, and since he always travels so much, it’s important that his feet aren’t cold… Mummy also sends you greetings and many greetings and kisses from your Bernile!
However, when Martin Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary, was informed about Bernile’s lack of pure German blood – let alone her Jewish blood – he forbade Karoline and Bernile from ever appearing in the Berghof, Hitler’s summer residence in the German Alps. Around May 1938, Karoline was officially ordered to cease all contact with Nazi party leaders and to discontinue all visits to Hitler’s home at the Berghof.
The illustrated book, Jugend um Hitler (“Youth Around Hitler,” 1934) by Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffman (see discussion below), contains several photographs of Hitler with Bernile, which alarmed Bormann to the point that he wanted to destroy all copies of Hoffmann’s books that included photographs of the Jewish girl. Later, in his 1955 book, Hitler Was My Friend, Hoffmann captioned a photograph of “Uncle” Adolf with Bernile, as “Hitler’s Sweetheart,” adding that “it delighted him to see her at the Berghof until some busybody found out she was not of pure Aryan descent” (almost certainly referring to Bormann).
But the Führer wasn’t advised about the blacklisting and, after some time, when he wondered what had happened to his favorite child, he learned about Bormann’s action when Hoffmann complained that Bormann had forbidden him to continue publishing photos showing Hitler with “his sweetheart.” Hitler was furious with Bormann and, as Hoffmann wrote in his book, Hitler as I Saw Him, the Führer remarked that “There are people who have a positive genius for spoiling all my little pleasures.”
Hoffmann (1885-1957) was a “Reichsbildberichterstatter,” a Third Reich photographic reporter and intimate member of Hitler’s inner circle who played a leading role in the Führer’s propaganda campaign. His famous – or infamous – 11 ¾” x 9 ½” photograph of Bernile, “The Führer’s Daughter,” a copy of which is exhibited here, was taken on April 20, 1933 at Berghof. Hitler’s face is turned to his right, dipping to the top of her head, while she’s looking directly at the camera, her mouth open, eyes lit up, and grinning widely. The photograph also has dried edelweiss flowers and a four-leaf clover pressed onto the photo held behind a piece of glass, which Bernile added upon receipt of the picture. Most exciting for collectors, Hitler had inscribed the photo in dark blue ink – “To the dear and considerate Rosa Nienau, Adolf Hitler Munich, the 16th June” – before it was embossed in a Hoffmann Studio envelope and mailed to Karoline in Munich.
Goebbels’s most successful propaganda tool was his establishment of the “Führer cult” that was centered upon Hitler as the German savior. Articles in magazines and newspapers, books, films, posters, postcards, and paintings presented the Nazi leader as both an ordinary man and the messiah. At a time when Hitler was being presented to the world as a sympathetic and caring figure, Hoffman frequently snapped pictures of the Nazi leader and Bernile holding hands, exchanging kisses on the cheek, or just smiling happily at each other. This photo, and others featuring the Führer and his beautiful German “daughter,” was deployed as propaganda to depict Hitler as a humanizing father figure to the German people in general and to children in particular.
Bernile, who became a technical draftsman, died of spinal poliomyelitis in Schwabing Hospital on October 5, 1943 at age 17 and was buried in the Munich West Cemetery.
The story of the relationship between Hitler and Bernile had been generally unknown until the Alexander Historical Auction House auctioned this photograph to an anonymous, international buyer for a winning bid of $11,520 on November 13, 2018. Alexander had received the consignment of the photograph from Germany and spent months confirming its authenticity and the inscription before putting it up for auction.
The general question of the sale of antisemitica continues to rage and, notwithstanding the fact that many auction houses refuse to handle such material, Alexander decided to auction off the Hitler-Bernile signed photo. As a result, it received significant backlash from critics, who condemned the auction house for profiting from the loathsome Nazi regime of mass murder, but I agree with Alexander’s principled argument that the sale of such items is essential to the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust, lest people forget. (One could argue that the significant collections of antisemitica on exhibit in Holocaust museums across the world – including in Yad Vashem and the National Holocaust Museum in Washington – serves this very purpose.) Indeed, the important story of Hitler and his beloved “Jewish daughter” would hardly have been known but for Alexander’s sale of the photo inscribed by Hitler.
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Heinrich Hoffman’s father had acquired the title of Court Photographer to the King of Bavaria, and Heinrich’s own first commercial photograph, taken at age 12, was of Buffalo Bill, who was on a tour with his Wild West troupe. Hoffmann’s photographic career began in 1909, when he founded a studio in Munich and commenced work as a press photographer before he was conscripted into the German Army in 1917 and served as an aerial photo correspondent.
Hoffmann first met Hitler in 1919; became one of the first to join the Nazi party, becoming a member in April 1920; participated in the infamous Beer Hall Putsch as a photographic correspondent; and went on to serve as among the Führer’s most devoted and indefatigable followers. He represented the Nazi Party in the district assembly of Upper Bavaria (November 1929), served as a city councilor of Munich (December 1929 to December 1933), and became a member of the Nazi Reichstag (1940).
After Hitler took control of the Nazi Party in 1921, he named Hoffmann his official photographer, a position he held for over 25 years. Hoffman, who adopted the title Reichsbildberichterstatter (“Reich Picture Reporter”), became the only person authorized to take official photographs of the Führer. After the existing press agencies were nationalized, his company, with him as its sole shareholder, became the largest private company of its kind. The company had two divisions, one which supplied editorial photographs and the other which published photo-propaganda books, and his photographs were published as postage stamps, postcards, posters and picture books, making him a millionaire several times over. Hitler received a royalty on all postage stamps featuring his image, which went to his Cultural Fund, instituted in 1937, and the Fund received at least 75 million marks during the course of his reign. At the end of the day, the entire world came to see Hitler primarily through the lenses of Hoffmann’s camera.
During the Third Reich, Hoffmann published many photo-books on Hitler, including The Hitler Nobody Knows (1933), a book which critics say played an important role in Hitler’s crafty and well-controlled effort to manipulate his image, and, in particular, to turn his conspicuously non-Nordic-looking foreignness into charisma. In the illustrated book, Jugend um Hitler (“Youth Around Hitler,” 1934), a series, which served to lionize the Führer and to humanize him as a family-oriented man, he compiled 120 photographs of Hitler around children at youth rallies, parades, schools and at Hitler’s home.
No other photographer was permitted to photograph the Führer, and even Hoffmann was prohibited from taking candid shots of him. For example, Hoffman once took a photograph of Hitler playing with Eva Braun’s little terrier and the Führer ordered him not to publish it because “a statesman does not permit himself to be photographed with a little dog; a German sheepdog is the only dog worthy of a real man.” Braun and her younger sister, Gretl, had worked in Hoffmann’s photo studio for years, and it was he who introduced Braun to Hitler in the autumn of 1929. It was also Hoffman who, at the end of the war and with Berlin about to fall to the Allies, made arrangements at Hitler’s request to remove Braun to Munich – but she opted to remain with her beloved Führer in Berlin and the two committed suicide together shortly thereafter.
Hitler and Hoffmann became close friends, cemented by the photographer’s absolute loyalty and lack of political ambition, and Hoffmann was part of the small group that greeted Hitler upon his release from Landsberg Prison on December 20, 1924. He often dined with the Führer, including taking meals at the Hoffmann home, one of the very few private residences that Hitler would visit, and he accompanied Hitler on his unprecedented air election campaign during the presidential election when Hitler defeated Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg in 1932. (Hitler was elected Chancellor democratically, a fact forgotten by many people.)
According to Hitler’s biographers, the Führer had a camera phobia because he had a pathological fear for his life and, particularly in his early years, he eschewed photographs in order to increase public attendance at party meetings; people would show up out of curiosity to see who he was (and to hopefully leave the meeting as registered members of the Nazi Party). Hitler insisted on being privately photographed in any new suit before he would wear it publicly; in 1933, he ordered the withdrawal from circulation of all images of himself wearing lederhosen; and he expressed disapproval of Mussolini permitting himself to be photographed in his bathing suit. Hoffmann’s attempts to portray Hitler as the personification of the German people was also often a difficult uphill battle because the Führer lacked the classic blond and blue-eyed profile of the Nordic race, which the Nazi “New Order” sought to promote and preserve. Hoffmann portrayed Hitler in the best light by focusing on his intense eyes, which the public found to be dreamy and hypnotic, and on his characteristic moustache.
Hoffmann’s photographs were an important part of Hitler’s earliest propaganda campaign to present himself and the Nazi Party as a significant mass phenomenon beginning in 1926, when his images of the Party’s rally in Weimar, which showed the impressive march of 5,000 stormtroopers – who were saluted by Hitler for the first time with what came to be recognized as the straight-armed Nazi salute – were printed in leading Nazi newspapers and distributed by the thousands throughout Germany. That rally was the first of the Nazi Party’s annual mass rallies that were staged in Nuremberg. Hoffmann’s propaganda photographs were not limited to Hitler portraits; for example, he traveled to Whitechapel, the Jewish quarter in London, to shoot pictures, such as a Jew sifting through garbage, unkempt Orthodox Jews, and filthy streets, which were selectively chosen to portray the Jews as unclean vermin.
The House of German Art, which was designed from sketches made by Hitler himself, had just been built in Munich to provide a setting for a large annual exhibit of what Hitler called “healthy German art.” In 1937, after the selection jury angered Hitler with its choices for the first Great German Art Exhibition to inaugurate the opening of the House of German Art, he dismissed the panel and placed Hoffmann in charge; however, Hoffmann had little knowledge of painting and Hitler angrily dismissed some of his choices, including particularly various modern paintings, but he remained in charge for subsequent annual Great German Art Exhibitions. However, his choices remained controversial among many of Germany’s leading artists, who disapproved of his selection of what they characterized as “Goebbels’s Munich-school kitsch.” In May 1938, when Hitler decreed the “Law for the Confiscation of the Products of Degenerate Art,” Hoffmann was one of the commissioners named to centralize the condemnation and confiscation process.
In one comical incident underscoring the insanity of Hitler’s racial preoccupation, Hitler ordered Hoffman – over Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s vociferous objection – to accompany von Ribbentrop on his trip to the Soviet Union to negotiate the infamous Non-Aggression Pact with Molotov in 1939, which led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The Führer specifically asked Hoffmann to accompany von Ribbentrop so that he could take a close-up photograph of Stalin’s earlobes, through which he thought he could determine if the Soviet leader was Jewish. Earlobes that were “attached” would indicate Jewish blood, while those that were “separate” would be Aryan, and Hoffmann’s image apparently enabled Hitler to determine to his satisfaction that Stalin was not Jewish.
The high personal esteem that Hitler held for Hoffmann may be seen through his granting permission to the photographer in 1935 to issue a limited edition of a portfolio of seven paintings Hitler had made during World War I, even though, since becoming Chancellor, he had downplayed his desire to become a painter in his youth – and, in later years, Hitler issued a blanket prohibition against the publication of, or commentary on, any of his work as a painter. Moreover, for Hoffmann’s 50th birthday in 1935, Hitler gave him one of his own paintings of the courtyard of the Alte Residenz (the “Old Royal Palace”) in Munich, a favorite subject of Hitler’s and one he had painted many times when he was a struggling artist. Hoffmann came to own at least four of the Führer’s watercolors, but all his paintings were later seized by the U.S. Army at the end of the war along with the central image archive of his company that contained an archive of some half a million photographs.
However, after about 1941, Hoffmann began to lose favor with Hitler, primarily because Bormann did not like him, as discussed above in the Bernile Nienau case. Bormann increasingly controlled all access to Hitler, and he fed him misinformation and innuendo about any rivals for Hitler’s attention, such as Hoffmann. Another problem that Hitler had with Hoffmann was that the artist had become a notorious alcoholic.
After World War II, Hoffmann was arrested by the United States Army on May 10, 1945 and was imprisoned by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in October. He was tried and convicted for war profiteering in January 1947 by the Munich Spruchkammer; sentenced to ten years in prison; and, except for 3,000 marks, his entire fortune was confiscated, including six million marks, houses in Strasburg, The Hague, Amsterdam, Munich and in the rest of Bavaria; and, of course, his paintings.
On appeal, his sentence was reduced to four years on the grounds that he lacked an “official” position within the Third Reich. (Hoffmann had cleverly and strategically refused all such positions.) He figured prominently in the 1945-46 report issued by the Office of Strategic Services Art Looting Investigation Unit, an American special intelligence unit during World War II, whose mission was to gather information and write reports about Nazi art looting networks. These reports remain an important source for research into the history of the restitution of looted art from the Nazi era.
When Hoffmann was released from prison on May 31, 1950, he settled in Epfach, a small village in southern Bavaria. Unbelievably, in 1956 the Bavarian State ordered that all art under its control and formerly possessed by Hoffmann be returned to him. Many artworks looted from Jewish collectors passed through Hoffmann, and Jewish restitution claims were always met with great resistance. For example, Hoffmann, to whom the Nazis had given Jan van der Heyden’s famous painting, View of a Dutch Square, which had been confiscated from its Jewish owners, Gottlieb and Mathilde Kraus, had passed the painting on his daughter. Finally, in 2020, after years of negotiations, the painting was returned to its rightful owners, the heirs of the Kraus estate.
