Helene and Edwin Bechstein (21.5.1876 Düsseldorf – 20.4.1951 Berchtesgaden) and Bechstein, Edwin (11.2.1859 Berlin – 15.9.1934 Berchtesgaden)

The Berlin piano manufacturer Edwin Bechstein and his wife Helene Bechstein were among the early supporters and promoters of the Hitler movement. In 1921, Dietrich Eckart, a family friend, acquainted the Bechsteins with Adolf Hitler. During their stays in Munich, they frequently entertained Hitler at the Four Seasons Hotel. But Helene Bechstein also invited Adolf Hitler to her salon in Berlin.

Helene and Edwin Bechstein were close to Pan-German circles and shared ethnic-chauvinist views. Additionally, Helene Bechstein shared with Hitler the reverence for Richard Wagner and his music. In the following years, the Bechsteins were among Hitler's most loyal supporters and generous benefactors. Helene Bechstein viewed herself as a maternal friend and counselor and would have liked to marry Hitler to her daughter. She mediated crucial connections for Hitler to the upper middle class, including the Wagner family in Bayreuth.

Edwin Bechstein supported Hitler multiple times by financing the Völkischer Beobachter (Nazi party newspaper), while Helene Bechstein handed over art and valuables to Hitler, which he then converted into money. Even after the ‘Hitler putsch,’ the Bechsteins remained loyal to Hitler. The couple visited him several times in 1924 during his imprisonment in Landsberg and sent gifts. After his release, Edwin Bechstein assumed the surety for the acquisition of a Mercedes costing 20,000 marks and for a personal loan of 45,000 marks for the impoverished party leader. Helene Bechstein covered the printing costs of My Struggle. In July 1926, the Bechsteins attended the Reich Party Congress of the Nazi Party in Weimar and acquired a house in Obersalzberg in 1927.

Beyond the 1933 seizure of power, the Bechsteins remained associated with Hitler. Adolf Hitler participated in the funeral of Edwin Bechstein on September 19, 1934, in Berlin and presented Helene Bechstein — even though she was not a party member at the time — with the Golden Party Badge the next day. Helene Bechstein did not officially join the Nazi Party until mid-1943. After the seizure of power, Helene Bechstein sometimes also expressed criticism towards Hitler, but due to their long-standing association, this had no consequences for her. In 1935, Helene Bechstein provided Hitler with the 'Villa Bechstein' in Obersalzberg. Until the destruction of her house in 1944 as a result of an Allied air attack, Helene Bechstein lived in Berlin, thereafter in Brambach in the Vogtland.

Following the war's end, she returned to Berchtesgaden and died there in 1951. Seven years later, the Berlin tribunal imposed an atonement payment of 30,000 marks, to be paid from the estate of Helene Bechstein, on the grounds that the comprehensive support of Hitler by the Bechsteins before 1933 had facilitated the rise of National Socialism.