Appendices

Appendix 1

Preface

Publisher’s Note

The following is the author’s preface to the original German edition, which was published in 1955.

THE MAJORITY of the German people had put their trust in a single man, had revered him like a saint and loved him like a father. This man then led them into the greatest catastrophe in their history. That is the naked, brutal, and shocking fact, and the German people, reeling from the terrible blows of the war, groping among the ruins of their past, must face it. Millions are now seeking reasons and explanations for this unexampled collapse. Their search, however, follows the line of their preconceptions.

I am convinced that only a thorough and uncompromising knowledge of Hitler’s personality, of his innermost nature and his true character, can explain the inexplicable. We can reach an understanding of the truth, of the guilt and destiny of Germany, only by understanding the uncanny magnetism of Hitler’s personality. The mystery of Hitler is the prism in which all the rays of tentative knowledge are broken up. Only when these have been reunited can we arrive at the historical truth of recent events. Only Hitler’s innermost nature can reveal to us the hidden background; only a true portrait of this man can explain the tragedy of the German people.

This titan has been overthrown, but the German people still lack any clarity about Hitler. Such clarity is the indispensable prerequisite for any successful emergence from the débris-choked past into a better future. In all aspects of life real accomplishments can be achieved only if there is genuine concern and passionate devotion to a job. The German people will find the strength to rise again out of their tribulations and make their way into the community of peaceful nations only after they have overcome the past within themselves, out of their own deepest convictions. And to do that they need full knowledge of Hitler’s character and works.

As fate would have it, I spent many years in a position which has enabled me to make a contribution to that necessary knowledge. For twelve years I was, as a publicity man, in Hitler’s immediate entourage. I did not thrust myself forward to obtain this post. On January 30, 1933, when Hitler appointed Funk the new press chief of his government, he himself ordered me to remain in his personal following. Perhaps even then he thought of me as his future biographer. I came to esteem his likable traits and his efforts for the welfare of the people; but in the course of the years I also came to recognize how he had changed inwardly, and to hate his despotic nature. In spite of repeated attempts on my part to break free, he did not permit me to leave. I heard a great deal, but by no means learned everything; for things that were not meant for the public to know were kept from the ear of a newspaperman. Hitler knew how to keep silence. With rigid strictness he carried out the principle: “Nobody need know more about important matters than is absolutely necessary for the performance of his duties. If only two persons need know something, no third person is to hear of it.”

I took no notes. But out of a thousand details of Hitler’s public and private life during more than twelve years I absorbed the essence of the personality of this mysterious man—until that thirtieth of March 1945 when, in the small room of his concrete bunker under the Chancellery, he stripped me of my functions—after a violent dispute.

Hitler’s stupendous achievements during six years of extraordinary peacetime successes obscured his weaknesses. Six year of warfare brought to the fore his equivocal character traits and the excesses of his demonic personality. He was the standard-bearer, and as long as some hope remained of fending off a dire fate, innumerable Germans believed it was their solemn duty not to desert the flag.

Up to the last moment his overwhelming, despotic authority aroused false hopes and deceived his people and his entourage. Only at the end, when I watched the inglorious collapse and the obstinacy of his final downfall, was I able suddenly to fit together the bits of mosaic I had been amassing for twelve years into a complete picture of his opaque and sphinxlike personality. Revelation of the bestialities in the concentration camps at home and in Poland opened my eyes, and showed me in firm outline the shifting contours of this man’s character. When we study his portrait in retrospect, the lights and shades fall quite differently from the way we used to see them. Up to the end, we were looking at the portrait from an entirely different angle. The uncanny duality of his nature and the monstrousness of his true being suddenly become apparent.

I have spent much time in recent months considering whether I as a German ought to make public my analysis and my private knowledge of Hitler. My personal observations are neither completely comprehensive nor absolutely final. But I trust that they have some point insofar as they dispel the last shreds of glamor from the myth of Hitler—if that myth is still alive and still exerts some fascination for posterity. What I have to say will help consign his figure to the doleful shades. For this reason I have come to feel that my knowledge must not be withheld from the people—for the people’s own sake. If my contemporaries, with their eyes fixed upon the past, fail to understand me, those who come after will surely profit from this account.

Facts are more powerful than theories. The course of world history has turned out very differently from what Hitler imagined. National Socialism was carried to excess; when it took off into the stratosphere of racist ideas, it lost touch with the solid ground of practical reality. Philosophical and psychological blinkers blinded it to the international aspects of man’s recent history. It could not see that as progress and technology have increasingly overcome space and time and the peoples of the globe have moved closer to one another, the community within the borders of each separate nation has necessarily been tending toward a general community of all nations. For Hitler all human problems stopped at the very point where in modern times they truly begin. Today the significant and fateful questions of man’s future progress will not be decided on the national plane, as Hitler thought, but on the international plane. This is an age of world-shaking—though possibly also world-wrecking—inventions. Universal cooperation has become an inescapable necessity, if the nations are not to exterminate one another. And democracy in the broadest sense has become the only viable political form for a rational humanity. Within its flexible framework personalities and creative achievements will continue to stamp their impress upon history as they have always done. But in the future no politically mature nation will ever commit itself unreservedly to the hand of a single man and of an authoritarian government. Henceforth the democratic rules alone will regulate the game upon the chessboard of world politics. That is now a fact which needs no discussion; events have made it so. Consequently, if the German people do not wish to shut themselves out for all time from the community of nations, if after this collapse they desire to rebuild their life upon a new basis so as to share with other nations the benefits of culture and civilization, they must abandon all thought of going back to an absolutist leader-state of the Hitler type. They must recognize any propaganda for such a state as the spawn of a reactionary imagination. To revert to authoritarianism would bring about the final political suicide of the German nation. The memory of how tragically they went astray in the recent past ought to serve the German people as a historical lesson for all times: never again to entrust a single man with power, thereby surrendering to him their destinies and their lives. For the human weaknesses of even the greatest of mortals can wreak woe on a nation if that one man holds sole power over life and death, war and peace. It was precisely such power Hitler held in his own hands. He came to power as a socialistic popular leader, as the creator of new ideas. Because he rescued them from a dire economic catastrophe, the people believed his promises, hailed him as a bearer of good fortune, favorite of destiny, and conferred upon him total power. In the course of the years, as his character and his aims changed, he used this power to ruin the nation.

He was not the greatest of mortals as he imagined himself to be. For all his genius, he had no moral greatness, and his strength was without blessing. He fell victim to the intoxication of power, was led into conflicts which he could not control and which sucked the entire nation into the whirlpool of destruction. The people were dazzled by his great triumphs in the field of social welfare and his nationalistic achievements. His outward show of likable personal traits deceived them in regard to his great but ruinous political tendencies. Hitler’s development, his gradual transformation from a social-minded popular leader to a Herostratus in the realm of power politics, took place over the course of many years. The process was imperceptible; it is not possible to pick any given time and say, “He had changed.” The steps were hard to define, but the changes were real. The true measure of his political genius is his completed work, as we see it before us in Germany; and the true measure of his human and moral stature can be seen in the kind of death he chose and the legacy he left.

The German people had a right to expect that Hitler would not leave them to face alone their utter wretchedness, or at least that he would not go without a word of justification for himself and exoneration for them. He had, after all, demanded blind obedience from them, and until the last he had continued to hold out the prospect of victory. But even in the face of his own death, and with the death-agony of his nation before his eyes, he refused in his obstinacy to listen to reason. His legacy in death was a judgment upon his life. He departed without having fulfilled this last obligation to his people, without any feeling for the sufferings of the people; he abandoned the nation in its hour of need, burdening it with all the crimes for which he should have answered.

I have tried to imagine how harshly, how ruthlessly Hitler would have judged anyone else who in his position acted as he did toward his own people. And I believe the people will understand if the truth about their former leader is revealed with equal harshness and ruthlessness.

I have a responsibility to myself as well as to the German people to draw this portrait as faithfully as I know how. As a publicist who believed in the Nazi cause I consistently presented the more decent and likable sides of Hitler to the people, thereby helping to bring him closer to the hearts of many Germans. At that time I sincerely believed that my task was in the best interests of the nation. But my pro-Hitler writings have since, due to the change in the times and the change in the man, become a heavy burden on my conscience. I therefore feel obliged to present the darker aspects of the man which were later revealed, to draw in the shadows in order to finish the picture. In 1933 I wrote a book entitled With Hitler on the Road to Power, in which I enthusiastically described Hitler ’s peaceful struggle for the soul of the German people. I presented National Socialism as imbued with the desire for peace. At that time I honestly believed this. Now I owe to the public the tragic sequel to that book, the second part of the drama, which alone explains Hitler’s plunge into the abyss and the collapse of the German Reich. I shall write this tragic sequel with the same passion, with love of truth and a sense of obligation toward the justice of history.

Appendix 2

Publisher’s Note

Readers of The Hitler I Knew: The Memoirs of the Third Reich’s Press Chief may also enjoy Heinz Linge’s With Hitler to the End (2009). The following extracts are taken from Linge’s memoir.

THE next day, April 30 1945, I went to Hitler in the early morning. He was opening the door as I arrived. He had lain on the bed fully dressed and awake as he had done the night before. While Bormann, Krebs and Burgdorf kept loaded pistols within reach, safety catches off, and dozed on sofas near his door, and the female secretaries made themselves as comfortable as possible while awaiting the events that must soon come (at any moment the Russians could reach the bunker entrance), he signalled to me to accompany him, finger to his lips, indicating I should be careful not to disturb the sleeping figures. We went to the telephone exchange, where Hitler rang the commandant, who told him that the defense of Berlin had already collapsed. The ring that the Russians had laid around the city could no longer be penetrated, and there was now no hope of relief. Arthur Axmann did offer to “bring the Führer out of Berlin” using about 200 Hitler Youth volunteers and a panzer, but Hitler declined, murmuring quietly, “That is no longer an option, I am remaining here!”

The “hour of truth” had come. Firstly, however, there was a last midday meal to be taken together. Hitler delivered a monologue about the future. The immediate postwar world would not have a good word to say for him, he said: the enemy would savor its triumph, and the German people would face very difficult times. Even we, his intimate circle, would soon experience things that we could not imagine. But he trusted to “the later histories” to “treat him justly.” They would recognize that he had only wanted the very best for Germany. Not until after my release from captivity did I understand what he meant when he said: “You will soon experience things” that “you cannot imagine.”

Immediately after this Hitler and I went into the common room where Goebbels appeared and begged Hitler briefly to allow the Hitler Youth to take him out of Berlin. Hitler responded brusquely: “Doctor, you know my decision. There is no change! You can of course leave Berlin with your family.” Goebbels, standing proudly, replied that he would not do so. Like the Führer he intended to stay in Berlin—and die there. At that Hitler gave Goebbels his hand and, leaning on me, returned to his room.

Immediately afterward followed the last personal goodbyes. My mouth was dry. Soon I would have to carry out my last duty. Anxiously I gazed at the man whom I had served devotedly for more than ten years. He stood stooped, the hank of hair, as always, across the pale forehead. He had become gray. He looked at me with tired eyes and said he would now retire. I asked for his orders for the last time. Outwardly calm and in a quiet voice, as if he were sending me into the garden to fetch something, he said: “Linge, I am going to shoot myself now. You know what you have to do. I have given the order for the break-out. Attach yourself to one of the groups and try to get through to the west.” Hitler took two or three tired steps towards me and offered his hand. Then for the last time in his life he raised his right arm in the Hitler salute. A ghostly scene. I turned on my heel, closed the door and went to the bunker exit where the SS bodyguard was sitting around.

I opened the door and went in, Bormann following me. He turned white as chalk and stared at me helplessly. Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were seated on the sofa. Both were dead. Hitler had shot himself in the right temple with his 7.65-mm pistol. This weapon, and his 6.35-mm pistol which he had kept in reserve in the event that the larger gun misfired, lay near his feet on the floor. His head was inclined a little towards the wall. Blood had spattered on the carpet near the sofa. To his right beside him sat his wife. She had drawn up her legs on the sofa. Her contorted face betrayed how she had died. Cyanide poisoning. Its “bite” was marked in her features. The small box in which the capsule had been kept lay on the table. I pushed it aside to give myself room.

I reached below Hitler’s head, two officers from his SS bodyguard lifted the body, wrapped in a gray blanket, and we carried him out. Immediately in front of the bunker door, in the Reich Chancellery garden, his body was laid next to Eva’s in a small depression where gasoline was poured over the cadavers and an attempt was made to set light to them. At first this proved impossible. As a result of the various fires in the parkland there was a fierce wind circulating which smothered our attempts to set the bodies alight from a few metres’ distance. Because of the relentless Russian artillery fire we could not approach the bodies and ignite the petrol with a match. I returned to the bunker and made a thick spill from some signal papers. Bormann lit it and I threw it onto Hitler’s petrol-soaked body, which caught fire immediately. Standing at the bunker entrance we, the last witnesses—Bormann, Goebbels, Stumpfegger, Günsche, Kempka and I—raised our hands for a last Hitler salute. Then we withdrew into the bunker.

For Dr Joseph Goebbels, the new Reich Chancellor, it was not apparent until now that he and his wife Magda would commit suicide in Berlin this same day. After the experiences of recent days and weeks hardly anything could shock us men any more, but the women, the female secretaries and chambermaids were “programmed” differently. They were fearful that the six beautiful Goebbels children would be killed beforehand. The parents had decided upon this course of action. Hitler’s physician Dr Stumpfegger was to see to it. The imploring pleas of the women and some of the staff, who suggested to Frau Goebbels that they would bring the children—Helga, Holde, Hilde, Heide, Hedda and Helmut—out of the bunker and care for them, went unheard. Once there she sank down in an armchair. She did not enter the children’s room, but waited nervously until the door opened and Dr Stumpfegger came out. Their eyes met, Magda Goebbels stood up, silent and trembling. When the SS doctor nodded emotionally without speaking, she collapsed. It was done. The children lay dead in their beds, poisoned with cyanide. Two men of the SS bodyguard standing near the entrance led Frau Goebbels to her room in the Führer-bunker. Two and a half hours later both she and her husband were dead. The last act had begun.