Eva’s Marionettes
by Patrick Best
Lives can be shattered like clay pots. No matter how much time and care is put into their molding and glazing, each one can be broken into tiny pieces. That is the way it was for Johannah the ballet dancer, Gabrielle the pianist, and Eliana the opera singer. They had plans and dreams, and they were happy and content when they were kidnapped from their homes in Paris by SS officers the night of June 24, 1940. They were personally selected by Adolf Hitler to become members of what may be the most secret club the world has ever known. All three were Jews.
The club’s name came from an offhand remark made by Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, after their first of many performances at a party in The Berghof, Hitler’s vacation residence in the Bavarian Alps. Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, took great pains to ensure that the remarkably talented women, who would live in a guarded and locked room in the cellar for the next four years, put on an unforgettable performance for The Führer and his special guests. She selected their clothing, their hairstyle, and even the songs and dances they would perform for Goring, Goebbels, Himmler and other distinguished members of the party.
“I am quite impressed with your lovely Jew marionettes, Eva,” Goebbels said to the amusement of The Führer and others within earshot. From that day forward they were known to Hitler and his inner circle as Eva’s Marionettes.
They were instructed to only perform pieces by Richard Wagner during their first show. "We have a special treat for you," the Führer announced as he smiled and spread his arms wide. The uniformed men with their milky white faces and slicked back hair lifted their chins and grinned at their leader as they gently cupped the elbows of their wives and mistresses. "Our Jew girls will be performing Wagner this evening. You will be amazed by the beauty that our nation's greatest composer can inspire... even from Jews"
The audience erupted in laughter.
The performance that evening was so wonderful that the audience members quickly forgot that others just like Eva's Marionettes were being starved, shot and gassed in concentration camps scattered all over Germany and the rest of the occupied nations in Europe. Hitler thought of the Jewish girl named Stefanie that he'd been obsessed with as a teenager in Linz, Austria, and for a brief moment, while Eliana was singing, he even wondered if Himmler's "Final Solution" might need to be reconsidered. It was a fleeting thought that went away when the music stopped.
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“It is amusing to me that Eva has requested that three Jews be present in our final hour,” Hitler said flatly. “I’m sure some would say it’s even poetic.” He was sitting on the small couch in his personal study in the Führerbunker next to his wife of less than two days. The two had pistols on their laps and a cyanide capsule in the palms of their left hands. The Russian forces were less than block away. They were preparing to commit suicide together.
Gabrielle, Johannah, and Eliana were huddled next to each other near the closed steel door on the other side of the same small room.
“There are no poems to describe the depths of our love, my dear Führer,” Eva said as she caressed the side of his face with the back of her hand. He closed his eyes tightly at her touch. He wasn’t overcome with warm feelings for her. Her display of affection in front of the Jewish women had simply embarrassed him. But he did not pull away this time.
“Thank you for your loyalty and devotion, Eva,” he said, nodding in her direction.
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The same day Johannah became the club’s first member, Serge Lifar, the famous Russian dancer and director of the Paris Ballet, told her that he planned to make her “the youngest Prima Ballerina in the history of the world”. He had been her teacher and mentor since she’d joined the company at age 10. She was six months shy of her 18th birthday and still living at home when the SS soldiers burst through her parents’ front door. They had just started dessert.
Johannah watched in horror as a soldier not much older than she shot her father as he sat in a chair beneath an oil painting of her in an arabesque pose. She remembered her mother fainting as a needle was shoved into her daughter’s thin pale wrist. Then everything went black.
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Johannah, Gabrielle, and Eliana were still wearing the matching pink silk dresses they’d been instructed to wear for Hitler’s wedding in the early morning hours of the day before.
“I have a gift for you,” Eva said as she leaned forward and picked up a piece of paper from the coffee table. She extended her hand toward the women who had been at her beck and call for nearly five years. They had served as her entertainers, her dress-up dolls, her confidants, and, finally, her bridesmaids.
“I knew from the moment I met the Führer that we were destined to be together forever. Even when my heart ached because he didn’t come to see me or call me for months, I knew there could be no one else in this world for me,” Eva moaned to them on countless occasions. Johannah, Gabrielle, and Eliana would feign pity and grief for her during those moments, but they felt neither for her. The pain and suffering the object of Eva’s affection had caused them would never allow it.
Gabrielle accepted the piece of paper on behalf of the others and held it up so Johannah and Eliana could read it, too. The note was brief, but the words made a meteoric impact. They recognized the looping and feminine handwriting as Eva’s, but it was signed at the bottom by Adolf Hitler. It said that upon the death of The Führer and his wife, Eva Hitler, the Jewish prisoners named Johannah, Gabrielle and Eliana were to be escorted out of the Führerbunker to beyond the Reich Chancellery garden and released.
"You can go home to your families now," Eva said. Her lips were trembling and in her eyes were filled with tears. "Everything will be good again."
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Gabrielle started playing piano by ear when she was three years old. Her parents were respected members of the Paris Orchestra, but Gabrielle’s talents far exceeded those of her violinist father and flutist mother. She could play the complete works of Beethoven by the age of 13. And she had earned enough money from her concerts and recordings to purchase a two-story apartment near the Eiffel Tower when she was 20. Her two older sisters and an artist friend named Thomas were at her new home celebrating her good fortune when the German soldiers stormed through her front door.
“We need you to come with us, Gabrielle,” an SS officer said in perfect French. He was holding a pistol, but it was resting leisurely against his thigh. “Someone thinks you are a very special Jew.”
“What is this all about?” Thomas asked as he stood defiantly in front of his three female companions.
The SS officer stepped forward and shot Thomas in the left temple without hesitation. “Die fairy Jew!” one of the machine gun-toting soldiers shouted gleefully. Gabrielle was grabbed by her shoulder-length curly brown hair and dragged through the ever-growing puddle of blood around the head of her dead friend. Her sisters were handcuffed and kicked to the ground by two soldiers who now wore their guns strapped to their backs.
“Your prissy Jew friend is a bit out of his head, don’t you think?” the officer whispered to Gabrielle.
“Fuck you, Nazi beast!” Gabrielle spat. She believed the officer was killing her when he plunged a syringe into her neck. She welcomed the darkness when it came.
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After reading the letter that promised their freedom, the women who’d spent four years living like caged canaries at The Berghof – and the last three months in the Führerbunker – looked up at the faces of their wardens.
“I have one last request,” Eva said with a pleading smile. “I would like for one of you to take my pistol and shoot me… if the cyanide fails to work. I don’t trust myself to do it, and I don’t want my dear Führer to be left with yet another responsibility.”
Eva stood again and held out the brown wooden handle of her small pistol in the direction of the women. Eliana did not hesitate to accept it.
“So you will do it, Eliana?” Eva asked with appreciative tears in her eyes.
“Yes,” she replied. “I will do it.”
“Thank you,” Eva said as she returned to the couch. With a look of melancholy satisfaction she placed the cyanide capsule in her mouth and looked once more in the direction of her gray and dejected husband. As Eva’s eyes began to roll back into her head and her body began to clench in convulsions, Eliana lifted the small black barrel.
"You don't deserve to take your own life," she spat as she pulled the trigger.
Blood erupted from the right side of Adolf Hitler’s head, spraying the wall and couch with the dark red liquid that pumps from the heart of even the world’s most evil man. His own pistol clattered on the floor as his forehead came down on the coffee table.
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When SS soldiers kicked their way into Eliana’s home in their black uniforms and shiny black leather boots, she was putting her two-year-old son into his crib. Her husband had been in his study reading a novel when she rose from her chair and tiptoed up the stairs with their toddler in her arms. Her husband, a physician and aspiring novelist, joked to her that morning that if he could write as well as she could sing he would never have to pick up a stethoscope again. Eliana had laughed and replied, “If I could heal people like you, I would never wake up with a sore throat again.”
At 25, Eliana was the oldest member of Eva’s Marionettes. In the years before the war and the birth of her only child, she had travelled throughout Europe performing in the world’s most prestigious opera houses. She had received standing ovations in Vienna, Amsterdam, Milan, and London. She had not left Paris since the war had begun, and she believed she would be content if she never left it again.
She had believed an automobile had crashed into their house when she first heard the breaking glass and splintering wood of the front door being knocked off its hinges. When she ran to the balcony to investigate, her husband was running up the stairs toward her, his eyes wide, his mouth shouting loud and sharp words that sounded like a braking train mixed with a lion’s roar. Soldiers with gritted teeth and skull and crossbones on their hats lifted their guns and fired repeatedly into her husband’s legs and back. She watched as the love of her life twisted and jerked in agony until he crumbled into a lifeless pile of blood-soaked clothing and tattered flesh.
Her initial impulse was to run to his aide, but she didn’t need to be a doctor to know that there was nothing she could do to help him. The cries of her awakened child reached her ringing ears just as she noticed the men in the black uniforms leaping up the stairs toward her, their boots making bloody footprints on each wood plank they touched. She struggled to break free, but their hands were like steel talons on her arms.
The last thing she remembered about that night was seeing her son’s tear-streaked face as he cried and screamed for her while they were being carried out of the house.
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Eliana continued to point the gun in the direction of the dead man she knew was responsible for the death of her husband, and so many more. Johannah buried her face into her hands and wept as Gabrielle slowly plucked Eliana’s fingers away from the pistol’s grip.
When Gabrielle tossed the gun toward the bodies of Adolf and Eva Hitler, she noticed that it bounced one time on the couch then spun around in an almost elegant, artful way before it lay still on the flower-printed cushion next to Eva’s leg.
They heard footsteps approaching the room, and for a moment Gabrielle thought about going to retrieve the weapon she’d just thrown away. When the door opened, Hitler’s over six foot tall SS adjutant, Otto Günsche, quickly entered the room with his own pistol drawn. His muscles seemed to be fighting to break free of his black uniform with each movement he made. He barely glanced at Eva’s Marionettes as he walked by them toward the couch. He stopped in front of the coffee table and stared down at the leader he’d served and revered since 1933.
When he turned around, Gabrielle was holding out the paper that Eva had given her before she bit into the cyanide capsule. He stared at the words for several seconds then he looked around the room like he’d just caught a glimpse of the ghost of his dearly departed Führer.
“As you wish, my Führer,” Günsche said as he looked coldly into Gabrielle’s eyes. “It is over, isn’t it?”
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When Johannah, Gabrielle, and Eliana woke up, the first thing they saw was a grotesquely fat man in a sand brown Nazi uniform waving smelling salts in front of their noses. The women were tied to wooden chairs that faced the largest picture window any of them had ever seen. Through the glass they could see a breath-taking view of the snow and tree-covered Alps.
“Isn’t the view beautiful, ladies?” the fat Nazi said in French. “My name is Dr. Theodor Morell.”
“What have you done with my son?” Eliana asked.
A door opened behind them. The doctor’s face brightened and he immediately gave the straight-armed salute the women recognized from newsreels about the Nazis. “Welcome, my Führer!” the man shouted. The words echoed in the huge room.
“I see Eva’s gifts have arrived,” a cheerful voice said in German from behind the women. All three were fluent in the language, something Adolf Hitler knew before he’d ordered his SS henchmen to collect them. “I trust they were delivered in good condition.”
“Yes, my Führer, perfect condition,” Dr. Morrell gushed. “Not a scratch.”
“I will make sure Himmler’s men are given something special for their restraint,” Hitler said as he walked past the bound and seated women toward the giant window. “We shall have a small ceremony on their behalf.”
“That sounds wonderful,” Dr. Morrell replied as he wiped sweat from his forehead with a yellowed handkerchief. “You are so good to our boys, my Führer.”
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When Günsche returned to the room he told them it was time to leave the bunker. They walked through the door and into the area where they had given their last performance the day before. A crowd of mourners had gathered – Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Heinz Linge, Traudl Junge, Erna Flegel, Rochus Misch – and many were weeping, their heads bowed, shoulders moving up and down. Bormann was holding the letter Eva had written and Hitler had signed. He lit it on fire with his lighter as Günsche and the women advanced toward the stairs.
When they exited the Führerbunker they could hear the sound of fighting in every direction. Explosions and machine gun fire were constant and close. The air was filled with smoke, and the trees and sky and buildings looked like they were covered with the ashes of a million cigarettes. They held each other’s hands as they followed the lumbering giant Nazi through the overgrown Reich Chancellery garden.
As they ran down the streets of Berlin past the bombed out buildings and abandoned cars they cried and laughed and cried again. They thought about their loved ones and whether they'd been kept alive as the Nazis had promised. Eliana's son would be seven years old now. She imagined him riding a bicycle with his father in a park. She knew that was impossible because she had watched the soldiers murder her husband. Eva had once told her that her boy had been taken to her mother's home, and that he was under the watchful eye of SS soldiers that would not let them be harmed. Eliana forced herself to believe her. It was the only thing that kept her from attempting to escape or take her own life. All three had stories they told themselves. They had no photographs from their past lives, so stories and dreams became their most precious possessions.
Eva's Marionettes' strings had been cut, and they were free in a city and world that knew nothing about where they’d been or what they’d done. They knew full-well that they may not make it to see another day, but they were alive and Hitler was dead. And in that small way, they had just won the war.
