HITLER came from a petty bourgeois Austrian milieu. In point of fact he never left it all his life, even when he attained the highest point in his political career. That this emphatically southern German adopted the Prussian military tradition in order to attain his political ends is but another sign of his paradoxical personality. In the end he was left without any tradition—neither that of Austrian diplomacy nor that of Prussian militarism—which could help him extricate himself from his gruesome adventure.
Hitler’s Austrianism emerged unmistakably in two of his traits. One of these was the persuasive, charming, jovial manner he employed in private life to cover up his basically inflexible political toughness; toward artists and women, particularly, he practiced an almost exaggerated courtesy. And the second was his absolutely astonishing inability to run his life and work according to any kind of schedule.
During his lifetime the public, and journalists particularly, were eager for information on Hitler’s personal life, his habits, the pattern of his day, and similar details. People would sometimes apply directly to Hitler for such material. He always put his foot down against any such publicity.
In my opinion he led the strangest private life of any man in a high political office. He seemed unable to distinguish between his official and his private life. He carried on official business in the midst of his private life, and lived a private life in the midst of his public affairs. This was so partly because Hitler reserved virtually all decisions on political, military, cultural, or other matters to himself alone. The inevitable consequence of such absolutism was that problems were incessantly being presented to him for decision all through the day. Since he thus imposed upon himself so enormous a burden of work, he had to handle it after his own fashion, which meant by highly personal methods. That is why he did not—as he so often said of himself—have any private life, why his life was devoted to service to the nation.
By nature Hitler was a bohemian. He allowed himself to be governed almost exclusively by emotional considerations. Regular work and office hours were foreign to his nature. He often said that a single brilliant idea was more valuable than a whole lifetime of conscientious office work. Only diplomatic receptions, which were arranged by the chief of protocol, were held punctually. Most other visitors, whether they had been sent for or had come of their own accord to discuss their various tasks with Hitler, had to wait for hours in anterooms, adjutants’ rooms, or similar places until they were admitted to Hitler’s presence or promised an interview some other time. Ministers and other holders of high office were often not received for weeks and months, in spite of their persistence. His adjutants had strict orders to admit no one without his express permission. If Hitler did not want to see someone, that person would be kept waiting for years.
On the other hand, Hitler was far from being antisocial. In fact, he could not bear being by himself. His fear of solitude was striking. It often seemed to me that he was afraid of facing himself. For that reason, he made a practice of never retiring until three or four o’clock in the morning, and he expected his entourage to remain with him until he went to bed. He often said that he could not go to sleep before dawn.
Since Hitler literally turned day into night, he could not arise before noon. Generally, he did not leave his bedroom until noon or later. His breakfast consisted of a glass of milk or a cup of tea, taken with a slice or two of zwieback. This he would hastily snatch on his way to his office, because he knew that at this time of day a great many tasks were waiting for him. As a result of this strange schedule, the authoritarian machinery of government regularly did not function during the morning. Anyone who understands the importance of the morning hours for work in government offices and military headquarters will realize what confusion and road-blocks such a routine will produce. Just as an example, there is the recognized practice of a government’s stating its position on the important political events of the previous day, news of which is generally published in the morning. Publicity releases, replies, denials, and so on are practically excluded from international discussion unless they are prepared in time for press conferences and the afternoon newspaper deadlines. The daily Armed Forces communiqué, for example, was often delayed so long that it was not ready for the two o’clock radio news broadcast and could not be published by the afternoon papers. The chief of the OKW always had this communiqué by one o’clock, but Hitler insisted on looking it over and correcting it before it was released. The result was that it was usually not ready in time for publication.
The first persons Hitler spoke to were his adjutants, who were generally waiting in the corridor outside his door with the most urgent questions or requests. They would call his attention to the most important matters for the day, and he would instruct them as to the day’s visitors. Hitler himself made up his own appointment list, decided whom he would see and whom refuse to see or put off until later. He provided for no special visiting period during his day. Everything depended upon the way he was feeling, his moods, and his attitudes; he never gave any explanation for his decisions in such matters.
There would then follow—regularly but not punctually the report of the chief of the Chancellery during peacetime in Berlin, and during wartime at his headquarters the daily situation conference with the High Command. Since Hitler usually went on talking and talking, sounding off about an endless variety of subjects, these conferences lasted for hours. For many years, consequently, the time for beginning lunch oscillated between two and four o’clock. In Berlin Hitler generally lunched in his apartment with his immediate entourage and casually invited guests; at headquarters he dined in the casino with the officers of the OKW. Since at table, too, Hitler often talked for a long time, these simple lunches extended well into the afternoon, although they could easily have been completed in half an hour. Customarily Hitler did not get up from table for a good two hours. Since the same thing happened at dinner, his table-companions found this almost unendurable; they had, after all, a great deal of pressing work waiting for them. During the last years of the war Hitler introduced a second daily situation conference which was to take place in the evening. Given his habits, it usually began at night, later and later with each passing day. During the last half year of the war Hitler fixed one o’clock in the morning as its starting time. Afterwards, however, Hitler did not go to bed; instead he asked a restricted group, including his female secretaries, to join him in his living room, as his private guests, so to speak. In the special train these little gatherings were held in the small salon adjoining Hitler’s bedroom compartment. At Berchtesgaden nightly gatherings around the fireplace served the same purpose of keeping him from being alone until it would be possible for him to fall asleep. I shall have much to say later on about these gatherings.
Hitler did not issue his orders in writing, directed to the proper authorities. Instead he impulsively gave them orally, off the top of his head, to whoever happened to be standing near him, with instructions to pass on the order personally or by telephone to the appropriate official. No special time of the day was fixed for the disposition of such matters; he would issue orders at any time, as they happened to occur to him or in response to conversations. This habit did not precisely contribute to clarity. Officers accustomed to receiving written and signed orders ran into difficulties because such casual instructions, given out by Hitler in the course of conversation were not recognized as orders and were consequently not carried out.
Visitors to Hitler would often seize the opportunity offered by the Führer’s being in good humor; they would extract some promise from him which they would then pass on independently as a “Führer’s order.” Many such a “Führer’s order” was diametrically opposed to another “Führer’s order.” So many complaints and so much unpleasantness resulted from this practice that Hitler eventually directed the chief of his chancellery to issue special regulations concerning requests for his personal decision. Henceforth department chiefs were to ask him for orders only after having come to an agreement with their opposite numbers, against whom such orders were usually aimed. Since “agreement” between two rivals whose jurisdiction covered the same field was normally impossible, this Solomon’s judgment only relieved Hitler personally of some annoyance; in the administration itself it merely added to the confusion.
All through the day, from noon to past midnight, Hitler insisted on having the latest foreign broadcasts and the most recent items from the foreign press. These reports were delivered in writing to his personal servant, who always remained close by him and kept them ready at hand for him. In the morning they had to be at his bedroom door, in case Hitler awoke early. There has probably never been a head of government who was so swiftly and completely informed on public opinion throughout the world as Hitler.
He did not want summaries; he had to have the original news items, word for word. In addition he was kept posted on the newspaper opinion of almost every country; editorials were telephoned or teletyped to Berlin several times a day, and from Berlin transmitted to wherever Hitler happened to be staying at the moment. Hitler valued this news from the outside world so highly because it gave him a certain check on the reports he received from his own department heads, especially those concerned with foreign and military affairs. Since I was well aware of his dangerous inclination toward one-sidedness and his tendency to exaggerate, I was particularly careful to transmit all reports to him with a precise indication of their source and an estimate of their importance.
Hitler did not work at a desk, although he had many handsome offices whose furnishings he himself had planned. These offices were only stage sets. Hitler could not concentrate sitting down and keeping silent—he had to be moving about and talking.
Almost every German is familiar with Hitler’s speeches. In the course of years I heard hundreds of them, and their character is firmly impressed upon my memory. They had a style of their own, their own special form, and unvarying construction. They are, in a sense, the embodiment of Hitler. They were conceived on the grand scale, but were concerned less with actual problems than with emotional effects. Not a single one began by a statement of subject. Instead they started out in a sweeping manner, always invoking the same philosophical ideas and historical examples, repeating the usual social criticisms, and employing the familiar, belligerent Hitleresque language. The audience was being worked on; it was being won over to his general political conceptions. Generally this broad introduction, entirely ideological in outlook, took up the greater part of the speech. Hitler had, as it were, to “idle” for a while in order to warm up and really get going. Once he was properly “warm,” he would switch to current political questions. Always he would pick out the weakest points in his political adversaries’ argument and attack them from his own point of view, with which his audience had meanwhile been indoctrinated. With sarcasm, biting irony, and often personal vituperation, always brilliantly formulated, he so overwhelmed the audience that serious political controversy and a real clarification of the problem no longer seemed necessary. After these oratorical fireworks came the climaxes that everyone remembers: those prophecies against the effective background of his own fabulous rise and his signal triumphs, those appeals to faith and those solemn vows. In the end the speech would mount to an apotheosis of the nation, which for any patriotic German would put an end to concrete objections—supposing that he had had the impulse to object.
At least 80 percent of Hitler’s speeches were delivered extemporaneously. I repeatedly called attention to the dangers—especially for foreign policy—inherent in a responsible statesman’s making impromptu declarations which could not be checked beforehand and phrased in a considered fashion. Hitler always disregarded these cautionings; he knew how effective his extemporaneous oratory was for the audience at mass meetings—whose response in turn stirred Hitler to even more passionate flights. These speeches which Hitler delivered without a prepared manuscript had to be revised for style before they were released to the German press. Before release Hitler always demanded to see the press version in order to make final corrections himself. It was often difficult to persuade him to eliminate offensive phraseology. He would flare up at any such objections and insist on keeping the original text. Any criticism of his speeches, of which he was especially proud, was painful to his vanity.
Although Hitler read so many newspapers every day, his hostility toward the press as an institution was well known. He might sometimes make concessions to newspapermen to save face, but among his intimates he stubbornly maintained his animosity toward journalism in general. One of the reasons he gave for this attitude was that newspaper criticism had vilified so many geniuses in their day. For this reason—as an act of compensatory justice, he said—he made the propaganda minister decree a complete ban on all art criticism in the press. Criticism was to be replaced by neutral “observation of art”—simple description. This decree was hardly a service to the artists. Hitler made no attempt to conceal another of his motives: During his struggle for power he had been the object of furious attacks by the press which had left him with an undying hatred of newspaper writers. There was nothing I could do, try as I might, to persuade him to revise this attitude, which certainly did no good for Germany in world public opinion. I several times pointed out to him how inconsistent it was to expect the foreign press to report his speeches favorably and in detail when in these very speeches he sneered at the men responsible for reporting them as “Jewish journaille” (a portmanteau word made up of journalist and canaille). But Hitler refused to listen to such arguments.
The few important public speeches which Hitler prepared in writing and delivered from manuscript were dictated by him directly to his stenographers, often in one draft and without assistance from anyone. As he spoke he would pace the room rapidly. Usually he did this work the night before the speech was to be delivered, and the manuscript was generally not ready until the last minute before the meeting. No one knew beforehand what he was going to say. In earlier years Hitler had given his associates a chance to look at the text and propose changes. But in later years he allowed less and less interference of this nature. He would lock himself in while dictating.
Sometimes, while the manuscript copy was being proofread and typed clean by the stenographers, I would have an opportunity to get a brief look at it—on the sly, as it were. In such cases I sometimes persuaded Hitler’s adjutant or one of the stenographers to call his attention to certain objectionable phrases. The time his last Memorial Day speech was being prepared, he refused to see me although I implored him, through his personal servant, to give me a hearing in the interest of the Cause. Hitler sent back a contemptuous dismissal of my plea. His stenographer finally said to me, her voice heavy with resignation, “Leave it; it’s no use. You know how he is.” For Hitler, the most important aspect of a speech was its power to ignite the broad masses of his listeners by its simplifications. His appeal was to the people; he believed that the applause of the masses was his justification as a statesman. The intoxication of words mattered more to him than the vital interests of the nation.
I have mentioned Hitler’s speeches here because they derived very much from his private life. They were not the spontaneous creations they seemed to be if judged by the fluent manner in which he dictated them. Rather, the ideas in them and their arrangement matured gradually in his mind, within the peculiar rhythm of his daily life. The speech that he dictated directly to the typist in the course of one night contained subject matter he had spoken of for days and weeks before to the people in his entourage. For hours, by day and night, Hitler would pace back and forth in the large rooms he was so fond of, almost always surrounded by his adjutants, orderlies, close associates, or chance visitors, by his doctors and often by dinner guests, officials of the Party or the Government whom he had invited to remain. To this rather haphazard circle, whom Hitler kept about him more out of habit than by choice, and whom he needed solely as listeners, he spoke incessantly, not giving anyone a chance to interject more than a comment now and then. Before such audiences he shaped, in the course of expositions that sometimes ran on for hours and were frequently repeated, the elements of the addresses he would later deliver in public.
Hitler’s conversations were monologues. They were characterized by endless digressions and repetitions of the same basic ideas. Even the most edifying patriotic ideas lose force when they are trotted out on all occasions, suitable and unsuitable. For thinking persons in Hitler’s entourage, years of listening to those reiterated discourses represented a considerable burden, which led to their absenting themselves as often as they could, or to trying to cut Hitler short—attempts which would rarely succeed. But Hitler was so wrapped up in himself that he was unaware of the strain his egotistic talking imposed upon others. In the course of years Hitler used up a great many listeners. I have seen many guests come enthusiastically and depart burned out, so to speak. The endless conferences by day and night were also physically exhausting. Newcomers to the circle would say how they envied those who were fortunate enough to be in the presence of Hitler all the time. And when, after years or months, they turned up less often, they would let fall some remark to the effect that they pitied those who had to give up their private lives and spend all their time in the nerve-racking atmosphere that Hitler engendered. Göring, Hess later on, and some others had the best of it; they could afford to call on Hitler once every few weeks. They would then be treated as rare and favored guests, while those who were constantly around Hitler were scarcely noticed by him. However, Hitler jealously saw to it that his audience was always sizable and always at his disposal. Chance visitors who were involved by Hitler in a prolonged philosophical or political conversation often took it into their heads that he placed some special value on their opinion. In reality they were merely members of that large body of extras whom Hitler needed as sounding-boards, so that he could intoxicate himself with his own ideas and try out the effect of his words. In talking, Hitler was indefatigable; talk was the very element of his existence.
Hitler’s official quarters in Berlin were in the Chancellery. His private residence was in Munich, on the second floor of No. 1 Prinzregentenplatz. In Berchtesgaden he had the Berghof, situated on the Obersalzberg at an altitude of 3,300 feet. During the war he lived in his various headquarters, to which the OKW followed him as it did when he went to any of his three residences. In addition to the special train, where he spent much of his time, he also had seven different field headquarters in the course of the war—five in the West and two in the East.
Until the outbreak of the war Hitler spent the greater part of every year traveling. His habit of being almost constantly on the go had developed out of his incessant activity as a speaker at political meetings during the early years. There was no real need for him to move about so. Rather, it was due to his inner restlessness, so that he constantly sought pretexts for moving from place to place. Up to 1939 Hitler was everywhere, and nowhere at home. His adjutants, in addition to working out the itineraries of his official trips and electoral campaigns, were kept constantly busy planning his private journeys. He covered hundreds of thousands of miles by automobile. It may be said that he felt a certain link with highways which later resulted in his vast program of road construction.
During the early years, when Hitler was not so well known in Germany, he often stopped his car on the highway to hand out small sums of money or packs of cigarettes—although later he became a fanatical opponent of smoking—to young hikers. On one of these trips, he encountered a man who was walking along in pouring rain, and stopped his car to give the stranger his own raincoat. Longish stops for picnic lunches amid the beauties of the landscape were a part of the enchantment of travel for Hitler. As his entourage grew in size, he would take along the steward of his Berlin household, who would have a special car equipped as a mobile kitchen. After his assumption of power Hitler’s cavalcade would be greeted by the well-known demonstrations of mass enthusiasm. In a Swabian village a butcher’s apprentice jumped square in front of the car, crying, “Over my dead body.” Hitler’s car was barely brought to a halt in front of the boy, whereupon the entire village swarmed around the Führer. In Heilbronn a girl jumped on the running board of the open car to give him a kiss in front of a crowd numbering thousands—a feat, incidentally, that an American girl almost duplicated during the Berlin Olympics.
In his tours through the Reich, Hitler touched at many places. Munich, Berchtesgaden, Berlin, Nuremberg, Weimar, Bayreuth, and Godesberg, and later Linz and Vienna, were his favorite cities, to rank them according to the frequency of his visits. There were years in which he did not remain at any one place or at any one residences longer than three or four days at a time; consequently one could with fair accuracy tell in advance when he would issue the order to his companions to get ready for another move. Sometimes he himself did not know where he was heading for. Sometimes, when his restlessness drove him on, he would decide between two destinations by tossing a coin—leaving the decision to chance or, if you will, to the hand of fate. Once the decision was made it was unalterable. This was, by the way, the only concession Hitler made to superstition. Of course he often expressed supreme belief in himself and his “racial destiny.” But contrary to widespread opinion, he would have nothing to do with astrology or any kind of occultism. I have mentioned that he had a low opinion of Hess because he leaned heavily on such mystical business. Because it so happened that the days of his mass demonstrations were for years blessed with fair weather, the people coined the expression “Hitler weather.” But Hitler himself was deeply worried at this run of good luck with the weather, fearing that faith in it would become so firmly established among the people that the inevitable reverses would harm his reputation.
Hitler himself once compared his mode of traveling around and stopping at a large number of particular places in Germany with the progress of medieval German emperors from one imperial estate to the next.
Weimar was one of Hitler’s regular stopping places. What attracted him to Weimar was the cultural atmosphere of the city, and the fact that it was the home of a group of his early followers. He always stayed in the historic Hotel Elephant, which was later renovated and made into one of the finest hotels in Germany. When in Weimar he regularly attended the performance at the German National Theater, and would afterwards invite the actors and actresses to join him at social gatherings in the lobby of the hotel. Such parties often lasted until nearly dawn.
In contrast to his pronounced fondness for things artistic, Hitler had amazingly little inclination toward the things of the mind. He saw all intellectual matters only through the spectrum of his nationalism. Not once was I ever able to involve him in a serious conversation about such matters. Science he respected and regarded only if he needed it immediately for military or other utilitarian purposes. Otherwise “professors” were for him an object of goodnatured mockery, although as head of state he himself was often cast into a professorial role.
Hitler read a great deal, usually late at night after he had retired and was unable to fall asleep. His personal reading consisted of technological matter, biographies of all sorts, and studies of his favorite arts: architecture, painting, sculpture, music, the theater, and the cinema. But he ignored on principle theoretical or belletristic works. He had a special antipathy for novels, which he never read, and for poetry; poems were an abomination to him. In the earlier years of his reign he once more read through all the volumes of Karl May’s Indian tales, which had been his favorite boyhood reading. Bernard Shaw’s social and socialist satire aroused his enthusiasm both in print and on the stage.
He felt no kinship at all with the titans of German literature. From his nationalistic point of view Schiller was much to be preferred to the universalist and cosmopolitan Goethe. I never heard Hitler say a word about Goethe.
On his visit to Weimar Hitler almost always paid a brief call upon Frau Foerster-Nietzsche, the sister of Nietzsche. But from the works of Nietzsche Hitler culled only the cult of personality and the doctrine of the superman; he was not interested in other aspects of the philosopher’s writings. He presented Mussolini, on the latter’s birthday in 1944, with a fabulously expensively bound edition of Nietzsche’s collected works. Aside from Nietzsche the only philosopher I ever heard Hitler mention was Schopenhauer. When he went to war in 1914, he used to say, he carried a paperback “Reclam” edition of Schopenhauer’s works in his pack. But what interested him in Schopenhauer was not the doctrine of pessimism, or the epistomology and ethics, but solely the brilliant language of the aphorisms, the cutting irony with which he attacked the professorial science of his time, the ruthless criticism and acid polemical style of that witty philosopher. That was the limit of Hitler’s contact with the world of the intellect.
He proclaimed a new weltanschauung—but scarcely ever deigned to mention the great thinkers of mankind from Plato to Kant and Goethe. The loftiest truths, the greatest wisdom, the sum of human intellectual labors for centuries, simply did not exist for Hitler unless they happened to fall into line with his nationalistic ideology.
He built temples of art—but despised the cathedral of the spirit! For all his emphasis upon culture and fondness for art, he had not the slightest feeling for spiritual values or ethics. Instead he claimed to have a sixth sense for the highest good of his people and an inner receiving apparatus which kept him abreast of the highest racial ideals.
Hitler’s frequent stays in Bayreuth were an indication of his love for classical music. He was an enthusiastic Wagnerian and in peacetime regularly attended the festivals for two weeks. There was no doubt that he was extremely musical, for he was able to reproduce the Meistersinger, for example, completely from memory, humming or whistling all the motifs. That particular opera he must have heard over a hundred times. In addition to Wagner he favored Beethoven’s and Bruckner’s symphonies. For a change he would also listen with pleasure to Italian opera and the classical Viennese operettas. As an oddity I may mention that within a six-month period he saw a particularly good production of The Merry Widow no less than six times. Modern atonal music he did not like.
Hitler did a great deal for the German theater, which he vigorously supported in line with his own ideas. His regular public receptions for actors in Berlin, Munich, and Bayreuth helped to give them social prominence. Once the war began, however, Hitler attended the theater only once. At Bayreuth in July 1940 he heard the last opera of his life. It was—what a fateful symbol!—Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung!
In Bayreuth Hitler stayed at Wahnfried as the guest of Frau Winifred Wagner, with whose family he was on terms of friendship. He had known the four grandchildren of Richard Wagner since their childhood, and after the death of their father Siegfried he took an almost paternal interest in them. These four, when they were grown men and women, were among the very few persons who used the familiar pronoun du in addressing Hitler. He would take part in intimate dinners at the Wagner home, exactly like one of the family. He was greatly shocked when, some time before the war, the eldest daughter left house and home and from abroad came out publicly against him. It is well known that through the Wagner family Hitler met Houston Stewart Chamberlain, from whom he borrowed part of the intellectual basis of his anti-Semitism.
Bayreuth was also the seat of the National Socialist Teachers Association and the House of German Education. However, Hitler took little interest in the German educators; his attitude toward teachers had been one of hostility from childhood. By his own account, Hitler as a boy had been wild and hard to control. He often spoke of his crazy pranks and his untamable, adventurous disposition. His conflicts with school and church had begun early.
He was once suspended from school for carrying his mischief too far. Attending a parochial school, he functioned for a while as a ministrant. However, at confession, out of sheer youthful devilry he asked the priest some very embarrassing questions. On that occasion his uncle (who was his guardian) had to intervene, persuade him to make an apology, and have him taken back. His teachers and neighbors called him a good-for-nothing. Since he felt immeasurably superior to these people, he found equally unflattering names for them. His prejudiced opinion of his teachers—with the exception of his history teacher—remained with him all his life and was later to produce some violent outbursts. He went so far as to declare that the teaching profession was basically unmanly, that actually only women should be permitted to go into the field of education. He intended later on to attempt to put this idea into practice.
The head of the National Socialist Teachers Association, Gauleiter Wächtler, speaking at a teachers’ conference in Vienna, once commented upon the bad things former pupils have to say of their teachers. “The revenge of the last row, last seat,” he called it. Hitler, hearing about this, merely made fun of the speech; he did not feel that he himself had been hit. I may mention as a fact which may or may not have any connection with this speech that in the last year of the war Hitler ordered Wächtler to be shot without trial on account of his alleged refusal to defend Bayreuth.
From his boyhood, Hitler had not the slightest positive relationship to family and school. Since his father died early and he found himself at sixteen thrown upon his own resources, this is to some extent natural. Later on his interest in the training of youth was restricted to their political education alone. Children were taken from parents and school at a very early age dubbed Pimpfe and Jungmädel (boys and girls under fourteen), and reared in conformity to Hitler’s ideas. They would be henceforth kept to those patterns of thinking and conduct. There was no room in Hitler’s mind for the traditional German schooling.
Hitler was fond of ideas with cosmic sweep. He spoke of human beings as “planetary bacilli” and was a passionate adherent of Hörbiger’s Universal Ice Theory. His evolutionary views on natural selection and survival of the fittest coincided with the ideas of Darwin and Haeckel. Nevertheless, Hitler was no atheist. He professed a highly general, monotheistic faith. He believed in guidance from above and in the existence of a Supreme Being whose wisdom and will had created laws for the preservation and evolution of the human race. He believed that the highest aim of mankind was to survive for the achievement of progress and perfection. From this belief there was a sense of his own mission to be the Leader of the German people. He was acting, he believed, on the command of this Supreme Being; he had a fixed conception of this Being, which nothing could change. In his speeches he often mentioned the Almighty and Providence. But he personally was sharply hostile to Christianity and the churches, although the Party program came out for a “positive” Christianity. In private conversation he often remarked sarcastically, in reference to churches and priests, that there were some who “boasted of having a direct hook-up with God.” Primitive Christianity, he declared, was the “first Jewish-Communistic cell.” And he denied that the Christian churches, in the course of their evolution, had developed any genuine moral foundation. Having ordered trials of certain Catholic priests on charges of immorality, he used the findings of the courts as the basis for the broadest generalizations. He considered the Reformation Germany’s greatest national misfortune because it “split the country and prevented its unification for centuries.”
At the beginning of his reign he tried to promote a Protestant National Church which would be tied to the state. But he very quickly abandoned this project. At the time that he was thinking about Catholic matters, during the course of his negotiations with Rome, he had much to say about the impressive appearance of Catholic bishops and cardinals, and asserted that Catholicism had such a power over the masses because of its elaborate ceremony. His feeling about the Protestant ecclesiastical dignitaries is indicated by the following typical story:
A group of Protestant dignitaries called upon President von Hindenburg to complain about Hitler. Hitler himself was to attend the audience. Shortly before, he was brought a transcript, obtained by wire-tapping, of a private telephone conversation between some of the visitors. They had discussed, in rather disrespectful fashion, what approach they would use with Hindenburg. One of them had remarked over the telephone that in regard to Hitler they would try to give the “Old Man extreme unction.” During the interview with Hindenburg Hitler audaciously took the transcript of the conversation from his pocket and held it under the noses of the heads of the Protestant Churches, in the presence of the embarrassed Hindenburg. This little gesture—so Hitler said—won the day for him.
In view of the highly complicated emotional problems involved, Hitler remained outwardly restrained toward the religious groups. He permitted the publication of Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century only upon the author’s insistent urging. Hitler himself had grave doubts about the matter and stipulated that the doctrines therein must not be considered official. On the other hand he did not hold back the hotheads in the Party, Himmler and especially Bormann, who incessantly attacked the churches. On the contrary, he supported them and encouraged them by his private, violently antichurch remarks. In the early days he had to endure attacks on National Socialism by bishops and cardinals. He could take no measures against them without alienating some of his followers. But he threatened to take his revenge later on.
Considerable unofficial pressure was brought to bear upon functionaries to leave the churches. Hitler himself, for reasons of political strategy, never actually carried out his withdrawal from the Catholic church. He repeatedly took part in official Protestant and Catholic church ceremonies such as weddings, baptisms, and so on. Many National Socialists who had been urged to leave their own churches blamed him severely for this.
At one time Hitler was informed that the mother of the manager of the Party hotel in Nuremberg, the Deutscher Hof, had inserted in a Catholic family magazine an advertisement for chambermaids. The Führer flew into a rage entirely disproportionate to the importance of the matter; the manager was dismissed out of hand and professionally blacklisted. It was only due to my intervention that this man later succeeded in getting another job in the hotel business.
Another time the gauleiter of Northern Westphalia, Joseph Wagner, was accused of maintaining private relations with Catholic Action circles. At Bormann’s instigation, Hitler took occasion during a gauleiters’ meeting in Munich to make a scene and expel Wagner from Party leadership. The charges against the man were that his wife had attended a papal audience in Rome, and that this same wife had driven their daughter from the house for wishing to marry an SS officer who had withdrawn from the Catholic Church.
Hitler was convinced that Christianity was outmoded and dying. He thought he could speed its death by systematic education of German youth. Christianity would be replaced, he thought, by a new heroic, racial ideal of God.
Hitler’s attitude toward Charles the Great [Charlemagne] can more easily be understood now, although in the past it puzzled many people. Charles had imposed Christianity upon the Germans with the sword. Because of his bloody struggle against the Saxon Widukind he was referred to by some German publicists as the “Butcher of the Saxons.” Hitler imposed a strict ban upon the use of such epithets. He revered Charles as one of the very great figures in German history, the unifier of the Germans and the creator of the Reich. For the sake of this supreme national goal Hitler quite approved of his hero’s having used ruthless force, as well as his introduction of Christianity—for it was clear that Charlemagne had used Christianity as a spiritual bond to insure national unification. Consequently, he would stand for no criticism of Charlemagne’s bloody massacres; who could have suspected that he was already unconsciously seeking justifications for the monstrous mass extermination that he himself would order some years later? Who could have suspected that he was already looking for precedents for the annihilation of an entire race whom he called “ferments of decomposition”?
Yet he must have recognized that these inhumane crimes were inexcusable and unforgivable. He must have thought that after a victorious war he would be able to clear himself before the bar of history by virtue of might. And so he maintained absolute silence about them, never mentioning these matters to any of his associates. Toward the end of 1944 the first allegations about the crimes in Poland began appearing in the foreign press—although the stories were not nearly as terrible as the reality that was revealed later. I handed these reports to him and took occasion to ask him twice whether those assertions should be denied. Each time he replied indignantly that the reports were typical “propaganda lies and distortions of the enemy, intended to cover up their own crimes at Katyn Forest.”
All the roads Hitler traveled between Munich and Berlin passed through Nuremberg. The city had a special significance in Hitler’s life. Originally he had chosen the city for Party meetings because of its central location, its historical significance as the location of the imperial jewels, and its firm circle of old Party members, National Socialists of many years standing in the group around Julius Streicher. Founder of an anti-Semitic sectarian party, Streicher had early thrown in his lot with Hitler, bringing with him his entire group in a body. Hitler had always allowed Streicher to cultivate his fanatical anti-Semitism and had never censored Streicher’s newspaper, Der Stürmer. Streicher’s “primitive method,” Hitler declared, was the most effective way to reach the “little man.” In Nuremberg Hitler always found a group of credulous, highly suggestible people who hung upon his lips and listened worshipfully to his pronouncements. Of course he had such groups more or less everywhere in Germany; they fed his mania for speechmaking.
The first two Party Days in Nuremberg in 1927 and 1929 had proved eminently successful and suggested that the city was a fine place for holding mass demonstrations. After coming to power, Hitler decided to develop the open terrain on the outskirts of the city, and as the work proceeded, Hitler’s megalomaniacal nature cast up more and more grandiose plans. Passionately given to lavish architecture, he began reveling in superlatives. The “greatest arena in the world,” the “most gigantic hall of assembly,” and the “most stupendous athletic stadium in the world” were to be built here. He himself sketched the first plans for Nuremberg, as he did for his superprojects almost everywhere else in the Reich. Professional architects had to work out the details.
There is no doubt that Hitler possessed a great talent for architecture. This was recognized when he was only seventeen by the Vienna Academy of Art where he failed the admission examination in painting but was told that his talents lay in the direction of architecture. He repeatedly said of himself that if he had not become the foremost politician of the Reich, he would have become its foremost architect. In Nuremberg he literally wanted to build for the millennia. Stone and building materials were selected especially for their durability. The overall plan was to link Old Nuremberg with the new world of towering steel and iron buildings—to link the First Reich with the Third—by means of a majestic concrete highway spanning the Nuremberg ponds. Watching the progress of this work, holding conferences with the local architects, and inspecting the models was endlessly fascinating to Hitler. It was his interest in the project that drew him so frequently to Nuremberg, in addition to the times he visited it for the Party meetings. In this city, even more than in Berlin and Munich, Hitler gave vent to his passion for architecture. But architecture was not only a passion; it was also his one real relaxation, the one thing which took him outside the realm of politics and theories in which he was otherwise steeped.
In early days he took frequent pleasure trips to visit the Bavarian royal palaces of Neuschwanstein, Hohenschwangau, and Herrenchiemsee, as well as Ludwig the Second’s “Valhalla” at Regensburg. Hitler felt a spiritual closeness to Ludwig and believed firmly that the king had not committed suicide in Starnberger Lake in a moment of insanity, but had been done away with by his political enemies of the clerical party.
Wherever Hitler stopped, whatever he was busy with at the moment, all his other interests were dropped as soon as his architects appeared. His personal servant had to keep a drawing pencil and set of compasses ready at hand at all times, for at any moment the impulse might strike him to sketch monumental façades, victory columns, triumphal arches, theaters, models of tanks, concrete bunkers, or revolving turrets for warships. There was hardly a book on architecture that Hitler had not read, and he took the keenest interest in all new publications. In Nuremberg, Berlin, and Munich there were large halls filled with models of National Socialist buildings, and in peacetime he would spend several hours almost every day, or rather every night, looking over these things.
As is well known, Hitler favored a classicistic and monumental style. He always laid stress on the nordic origin of classical Hellenism’s great cultural creativity. In conversation he was fond of describing with vivid detail the profound impression a few hundred Teutonic farmers’ sons must have made, in gray antiquity, upon the frightened inhabitants of Greece and the Peloponnesus when they appeared at the Ismuth of Corinth in the course of their migration from north to south.
Hitler considered Professor Troost of Munich, the builder of the House of German Art and of the National Socialist Patty buildings on Königlicher Platz in Munich, as the great architectural genius of our age, whom he himself had discovered. Troost died comparatively young. At the laying of the cornerstone for the House of German Art, the hammer handle broke in Hitler’s hand. This was seen to be an evil omen—and caused much talk among the people—not only in Munich. The story went that this unfortunate incident dealt Troost such a psychological shock that it hastened the progress of a disease from which he already suffered.
Architects were high in Hitler’s favor. It was through architecture that Speer became so intimate with Hitler that the Führer later entrusted him—under his own direct supervision, of course—with a wide variety of the most important military and economic tasks; with, in fact, such a burden of work as can hardly be given to any one man without unfortunate results.
While inspecting the Storm Trooper Stadium which was being built in Nuremberg, and which he intended to be the largest stadium in the world, Hitler dropped a remark which was indicative of his narrowness, his attitude toward sports, and the split in his personality. That was the year of the Olympic Games in Garmisch and Berlin, which had gone off so brilliantly. Everybody except Hitler had hailed the spirit of the athletes and the international character of the Games. Hitler sneered at the “trembling old men” of the Olympic Committee; he had been expecting to meet hale and hearty, well-preserved former athletes. A few months later, standing in the vast area at Nuremberg where the colossal stadium was being built, I heard him say, “That was the last international Olympics in which Germany will take part. In the future we ourselves shall put on the finest sports program in the world and the biggest athletic competition that has ever taken place. We shall do it right here in Nuremberg, and we shall run the whole show.” He refused to understand that international competition was the very essence of the Olympic Games and that the records made at these games were important precisely because they were world records.
Sports were quite alien to Hitler’s nature. Great athletic feats meant little to him. He liked watching Sonia Henie and Maxi Herber perform on ice, but otherwise he cared about sports only because they helped produce national physical fitness. He forbade his close associates to go in for sports badges—because of the danger of accidents, so he said. At the Olympic Games he made an ostentatious fuss over the victors, in order to convey the impression that he was deeply concerned with sports, but in fact he was not so at all. He himself did not go in for any kind of game or physical exercise; the reason, he said, was that he could not permit himself to participate in any sport unless he could be superior to all competition. During the Olympics he attended a soccer game because he had been told that the German team was expected to win. When it lost, he was angry and scolded those who had persuaded him to come for having made him the involuntary witness of a German defeat. There was no room in his nationalistic narrowness for any conception of fair play.
Alongside dreamy, hoary old Nuremberg Hitler erected the colossal monuments of his volcanic nature, assembly points for monster National Socialist demonstrations. Had these demonstrations been prompted by a constructive international spirit, had they been designed to bring to the attention of the world new ideas for peaceful progress—as Hitler said of them when he gave audiences to guests of honor and foreign correspondents—they might have served a noble purpose. But the unrestrained drum-beating, the needless chest-thumping, and the superfluous military displays were not the symbol of new, peaceful, and progressive ways of life; they were the tangible expression of Hitler’s lust for power and therefore a warning to all other nations to beware.
If we add up all Hitler’s stops in Nuremberg, it is evident that he spent a considerable part of each year in that city. The Deutscher Hof hotel had a special suite reserved for him. In the evenings he liked to sit in its fine, spacious lobby and hob-nob with architects and theatrical people.
On the way from Nuremberg to Munich Hitler would pause at the old episcopal seat of Eichstätt in Franconia, and at Ingolstadt on the Danube. Or else he would drive through the Upper Palatinate by way of Neumarkt and Regensburg. Here he would often stay at the historic Rathaus where the German Emperors held their Diets and where special rooms were reserved for him. He was a special patron of the famous boys choir, the Regensburg Cathedral Sparrows, as they are called, and often attended their performances.
Whenever he stopped at the small town of Neumarkt in the Upper Palatinate he visited the grave of Dietrich Eckart, who had been born in that place. Eckart was the man who according to Hitler’s own statement had had the greatest influence upon his career. He had been Hitler’s best friend and may well be called Hitler’s spiritual father. His fanatical racist patriotism and his radical anti-Semitism guided Hitler at the very start of his political career.
Eckart had distinguished himself as a writer, as editor of the magazine Auf gut Deutsch (Plain Words). He had done the German stage adaptation of Ibsen’s fantastic nordic drama Peer Gynt. It was he who obtained financial support for Hitler in the early days when he was building up his party. Eckart was acquainted with a group of wealthy men to whom he had appealed for subsidies for his newspaper; he introduced Hitler to these men. They were the first backers who, out of general patriotic considerations, lent aid to Hitler. Hitler was fond of telling how Eckart used to introduce him with the words: “This is the man who will one day liberate Germany.” Eckart also brought Hitler together with the Baltic German, Alfred Rosenberg. With Eckart, Hitler piled into an open sporting plane and flew off to Berlin in order to be on hand for the Kapp putsch. (This was Hitler’s first flight.) Kapp had set up his headquarters in the lobby of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. While waiting there Eckart and Hitler saw Kapp’s newly-appointed press chief, Trebitsch-Lincoln, going up the stairs to Kapp’s rooms. Trebitsch-Lincoln was reputed to be Jewish. Eckart promptly gripped Hitler’s arm and drew him toward the door, saying, “Come on, Adolf, we have no further business here.” Whereupon they left Berlin. Hitler often described this incident in conversation.
Eckart was a drug addict. Persecuted after the Munich putsch, he died soon afterwards in Berchtesgaden. It is worth noting that the pilot of Hitler’s plane the day of that first flight to Berlin was Ritter von Greim who in the last days of the war—he was then a colonel general—Hitler appointed Göring’s successor as Air Force commander-in-chief. In the dread days of April 1945, Greim flew to join Hitler in besieged Berlin and committed suicide at his master’s side.
In Eichstätt Hitler also liked to visit a small outdoor restaurant located on the outskirts of the town, in the meadows along the Altmühl River. Here, sitting at one of the long garden tables, he often invited passing boys and girls, members of the Hitler Youth, to join him in coffee and cake. After such occasions he used to remark that, to judge by the biological specimens he had observed, the youth of Germany, at least in the last generation, had grown physically “taller and more beautiful.” Hitler loved the German youth, but he did not regard them with the loving eye of a parent and the thoughtful responsibility of a family man. He judged them only in relation to the future of his nation and saw them as instruments for the furtherance of his ambitions in power politics.
Hitler’s tours often took him into the western part of Germany. The places he preferred throw interesting sidelights upon his mode of life. When his fleet of automobiles started off from Munich toward West Germany, his first stop was Augsburg where he put up in the famous Fugger Hotel, the Drei Mohren. During the war he was greatly concerned about the bombing of the Augsburg Rathaus which he considered one of the finest monuments of German culture. He had many photographs taken of it, with a view to later rebuilding it.
From Augsburg Hitler proceeded either via Nördlingen and Rothenburg, where he stayed at the historic Hotel Eisenhuth, or else he went via Würzburg, through the Spessart Mountain Range made famous by the fantastic tales of Wilhelm Hauff. Or he might take the southern route passing by the Cathedral at Ulm and thence on to Stuttgart. At Stuttgart he always stayed at the Christian Hospice where—as he ironically remarked—the Bible was always to be found on his night table. From Solitude, the pleasure palace in Stuttgart, he often enjoyed the view over the fertile farmlands of Württemberg. In the vicinity of the Pforzheim he would regularly visit the Monastery of Maulbronn, and walk in the famous old cloisters. When he rode on through the Neckar Valley to Heidelberg, he stopped at the former imperial manor at Wimpfen.
In Mannheim Hitler was interested in the Mercedes Works which he often inspected when he passed through that city. He was a devoted motorist. Before 1933 he could never resist urging his chauffeur to race and pass every car on the highway; he loved speed. Later, after a run of automobile accidents which took the lives of many leading personalities in the Reich, Hitler went to the opposite extreme and ordered speed limits of twenty-five miles per hour in all towns. Thereafter, even when he was proceeding at a snail’s pace he refused to allow his cavalcade to pass any cars at all—which often resulted in troublesome traffic jams. When Frank, the Governor General of Poland, violated this order and passed Hitler’s car on a Munich street, Hitler ordered Frank’s automobile to be confiscated on the spot, and threatened to treat every other government and Party leader in the same way.
Hitler honored Daimler and Benz as the inventors of the automobile and was concerned for their world reputations. He considered the Mercedes the foremost German quality automobile; moreover, at the beginning of his political career the firm had obligingly permitted him to acquire his first automobile by installment payments. This sentimental factor may have prompted Hitler to drive nothing but Mercedes, and to prefer them to all other automobiles in the world. He would make a point of attending the annual German Automobile Show. At national and international automobile races he made no secret of his partiality. For reasons of national glory he wanted to improve the Mercedes cars more and more and establish the firm as the foremost automobile company in the world. On the other hand, he was guided by entirely different principles in his efforts to popularize the Volkswagen, the construction of which he personally directed down to the smallest details. If Hitler had devoted only a part of the effort he expended on automobiles to improving the quality and standardizing the production of airplanes, the war in the air might well have taken an entirely different course.
The numerous victories of German racing cars at the peacetime international auto races had, incidentally, a fateful and unfortunate aspect. From these victories, Hitler drew wrong conclusions about the state of technological development and industrial potential in the United States. Those “gladiatorial” successes of the German automobile industry, which had created specially boosted racing cars, seemed to him to prove the clear superiority of German industry over American industry. With pride and satisfaction he decided that Germany was far ahead of America. Some persons who were familiar with the true state of affairs tried to warn him. He replied that he would not believe “typical American exaggerations, propaganda, and bluff”—until, during the war, he was confronted with the facts in all their enormity. Shortly before the war I was present at a private motion picture showing in the Chancellery. There was a view of New York as seen from the air. Hitler was visibly impressed by the enormous vitality and power radiated by those buildings which, by European standards, are truly colossal. Afterwards Hitler made remarks ostensibly intended to correct the statements of others, but in reality directed at himself. Later on he repeated several times the conclusions he had come to under the impact of these new impressions. But in the floodtide of events this too-brief insight was soon forgotten. It may have been this which made him try to keep the United States out of the war.
Magnificent specimens of Mercedes automobiles were Hitler’s standard gifts to chiefs of state and crowned heads. His fleets of automobiles, of which he kept several stationed in Munich, Berlin, and other cities, consisted of six or eight of these elegant, open black monsters. Hitler himself usually sat up front beside the driver; only when accompanied by very important guests would he sit in the rear, to their left. His valet usually sat directly behind him to hand him anything he might need during the ride, and beside the valet his chief adjutant, along with anybody else he had invited to join him in the car. Directly behind the Führer’s automobile came a car filled with men of his SS bodyguard, and behind that the police; then came a car reserved for adjutants, his doctor, and other companions, including the head of the Party Chancellery, representatives of Göring, the Supreme Command, Ribbentrop, and so on. Hitler also had a special radio car for press agency representatives, and one or two of his stenographers, so that during the drive he was always prepared to work. On longer trips another car carried provisions.
In late years Hitler’s seat in the front of the car was protected by armored walls and bulletproof glass. Several more armored limousines were built and Hitler insisted that these be used by his high officials, including Göring, Himmler, and Goebbels. However, no attempt was ever made on Hitler’s life while he was out driving. On a ride through the Berlin Woods to Schorfheide, where Göring lived, some object the size of a bullet once pierced the then unprotected windscreen; but whether it was a shot or just a pebble thrown up by the wheels could not be determined. I assumed the latter, since nothing more was heard of the matter. Aside from the attacks of November 8, 1939 in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller, and of July 20, 1944 in Hitler’s headquarters, there were no assassination attempts, although in the course of his journeys (until the last years of the war, when he avoided showing himself to the people) he was often so closely surrounded by huge crowds that he seemed in danger of being crushed.
In peacetime I witnessed dramatic scenes of this sort during Hitler’s automobile trips. The crowds were thickest when he drove along main throughways which ran through the centers of towns. Then the people in the towns and villages along the road would telephone ahead to inform others of his coming. That was the case on the mountain road which he liked to use when coming from Heidelberg, or on the narrow Rhine Drive from Mainz to Cologne, wine-growing country sprinkled with many villages. In Darmstadt and the vicinity, where tens of thousands of people blocked the streets, there was once a near catastrophe which Hitler averted only by standing up in his car and driving for hours at a walking pace, calming the fanatical crowds and warning people away from the wheels of his car. By the time we arrived at the Hotel Rose in Wiesbaden late that night, having proceeded by side roads and literally sneaking into the town, Hitler was completely exhausted.
At Bad Godesberg, to which Hitler often proceeded by Rhine steamer from Mainz or Coblenz on fine summer days, the Hotel Dreesen was his regular headquarters. Rudolf Hess, who had gone to school here in the Siebengebirge, had recommended this hotel to him, and in the early years of his struggle for power he had often stayed there. Later he kept to this habit. His rooms looked out over the Rhine, and at coffee time in the afternoons he often drove out to the Petersberg. At the peak of Petersberg hill is a hotel with the finest view in western Germany. Chamberlain stayed here during his meetings with Hitler. The hotel had been closed at the time, but on Hitler’s orders it was made ready for Chamberlain within a few hours.
Hitler had been at Godesberg in the winter of 1932 when he left for Cologne to hold his first secret, decisive conference with von Papen at the home of the banker von Schroeder. He left his entourage waiting for two hours on the highway to Düsseldorf; no one knew where Hitler had gone. That same year he went to Düsseldorf to attend the famous conference of industrialists at the Park Hotel; he made a speech to these leaders of German industry and won their support. In the West German industrial area Hitler addressed captains of industry for the first time in 1926 in my home town of Essen. It may be of interest for me to tell what I know about his relations with heavy industry.
It all stemmed from Hitler’s friendship with Emil Kirdorf, senior head of the Ruhr Coal Syndicate. Kirdorf was already retired; in 1927 and 1929 he was present as an interested onlooker at the Party Days in Nuremberg. Hitler was a frequent guest at his house in Mühlheim-Saarn near Duisberg. His connection with Kirdorf enabled Hitler to address a sizable group of leaders of industry at the Saalbau in Essen and to attempt to win them to his cause. But as far as I know this presentation of ideas led to no material support worth mentioning. The key men in industry were politically cool and restrained; they preferred to wait and see. Hitler’s propaganda affected the masses and his comrades in the Party; they were the ones who made the necessary financial sacrifices. For a long time he was dependent upon Party contributions and the collections at mass meetings. Not until 1932, after Göring had established close ties with Fritz Thyssen, the leader of the Stahlhelm [the German equivalent of the American Legion], who then openly came out for Hitler at a meeting of Düsseldorf industrialists, was the ice broken. Sympathy among the participants at that meeting was aroused, and a fund was collected at the door. But the contributions, though well-meant, were insignificant in amount. Beyond that, there was no question of any significant subsidizing of Hitler’s political efforts at that time by “heavy industry,” although undoubtedly local Party Organizations may have obtained smaller or larger contributions from individual sympathetic industrialists. Hitler’s large-scale propaganda tours in the decisive year of 1932 were financed solely by the entrance fees at the gigantic mass demonstrations at which fantastic prices were often paid for seats in the first rows. Assertions have often been made that Hitler came to power on money from heavy industry. On this question I can contribute the following personal details.
Up to August 1931 I had been working as an editor in Essen. When I shifted to Munich and became “Chief of the Press Bureau in the National Headquarters of the National Socialist Party,” opposition newspapers wrote that I was the “liaison man of Rhineland heavy industry,” that I had previously negotiated the support and financing of Hitler by the “coal barons,” and had now been called by him to Munich in order to establish even closer links between himself and the industrialists. In reality my only income at that time, as an editor and publishing house employee, was my salary of between 600 and 800 marks a month—and my employers were often in arrears about paying it. I did not even have a bank account, let alone a fortune. I had nothing whatsoever to do with heavy industry. Hitler had contacted me at the suggestion of Hess and I offered to serve the Party without pay if I were able to earn my living in Munich by resuming my former work as a correspondent for foreign newspapers. Hitler would not hear of this arrangement on principle; he asked me to devote all my time to Party work in return for compensation equal to what I had been earning. I mention this unimportant personal matter only because it was the sole financial problem I ever discussed in my life with Hitler.
The true facts emerge even more clearly from a small incident that took place during the election campaign in Lippe in December 1932. At that time I accompanied Hitler as press reporter to the public meetings and could therefore watch the process by which, from one meeting to the next, he literally scraped up the money to cover his traveling expenses. Just seven weeks before he came to power Hitler was spending the night at the Grevenburg near Detmold when his chief adjutant came to me and in great embarrassment asked whether I could advance him 2,000 marks since Hitler had not got another pfennig and the local Party organization had been unable to pay the rental for the hall where the next day’s demonstration was slated to be held. How could such a financial predicament at such a decisive moment be conceivable if Hitler had been receiving money from industry!
In Berlin Hitler often put up for weeks, with his entire staff, at the Hotel Kaiserhof—which cost sizable sums. Several times he raised the money for the hotel bill only by granting exclusive copyrighted interviews to American news agencies or newspapers, for which he received several thousand dollars.
Naturally conditions changed fundamentally once Hitler became head of the government. For a brief transition period government orders had a pump-priming effect on the nation’s industry, which then ran on at full speed under its own impetus. In 1934 I heard that “business” had voluntarily donated to Hitler—in gratitude, so to speak, for the boost he had given to the economy—a fund of several million marks annually which was to be at his personal disposal, to use as he saw fit. Hitler himself in no way requested these funds and so far as I know never himself directed the spending of them. Under the name of the Adolf Hitler Industrial Fund the sum was administered by Rudolf Hess, then chief of staff, and later Party secretary, Martin Bormann. Bormann, acting as trustee, used the money for Hitler’s personal projects. I shall return to this subject in connection with the building of the Berchtesgaden eyrie, a project which Hitler demurred at for a long time.
Looking back and seeing the thing as a whole, I believe I am justified in saying that, granting everything else that may he said against him, Hitler never allowed financial considerations to affect his decisions. The industrial barons did not buy him and bend him to their will. Far from it. On the contrary, he slowly but surely imposed his will upon “business.” He fitted business into a planned economy and placed it under absolute government control which in the long run could only smother all economic initiative and which culminated in a total war economy.
What was his general attitude toward economic questions? I think he felt that in the course of its evolution society had already outgrown the traditional form of autonomous, private capitalism, and that reason demanded a new and more functional economic order, in other words a planned economy. The economic System he had in mind might be termed as follows: private enterprise on principles of common welfare under government control. But the hypernationalism with which he imbued everything, the haste and excessiveness that he displayed in everything, led here as in politics to an effect opposite from what he intended. Hitler was aware that we are living in a transitional period between two ages. He recognized the economic problem history has posed. But he saw it in a warped political perspective as a German problem, not as a universal problem calling for broad readjustments. His was the outmoded, narrow point of view of extreme nationalist, racist autarchy. And in a progressive era like the present, autarchy cannot any longer be fruitful.
In Essen Hitler stayed at the Evangelischer Vereinshaus (Protestant Hostel) in the early years, and later on at the Hotel Kaiserhof. After he became chancellor he was a frequent guest at Villa Hügel, Krupp’s residence. The day before the Röhm purge in 1934 Hitler was in Essen for the wedding of Gauleiter Terboven, and attended both the civil and the religious ceremonies. He had a high opinion of Terboven’s bride, who had formerly been Goebbels’s private secretary; she had taken confidential dictation for Hitler during the negotiations in Berlin which led to his taking over the government. The real reason for his much-publicized presence at this wedding in the Catholic Cathedral at Essen, however, was his desire to cover up his plans. No one could suspect that the attack on Röhm was already on his schedule. That same evening he drove to Godesberg and then to the airfield of Hangelaar near Bonn. His destination was Munich. We who were in his party had no idea what was up until his adjutant told us, while we were sitting in the plane, that we had better release the safety catches on our guns.
Hitler’s capable chauffeur, Kempka, who served him for so many years, came from Oberhausen near Essen. Kempka was one of sixteen children of a miner’s family. Seated before the wheel of Hitler’s many Mercedes, he could not have guessed that on April 30, 1945 he would perform a last service for the Führer—carrying Hitler’s body, wrapped in a carpet, out of the bunker of the Chancellery in order to consign it to the flames in the garden.
During the early years of his struggle Hitler had met the former German women’s swimming champion, Anni Rehborn. She spent her vacation at Berchtesgaden one year and Hitler invited her to visit the Berghof. She brought along her fiancé, Dr. Brandt, who was at that time a resident physician under Professor Magnus at the Welfare Hospital in Bochum. Hitler kept Brandt at his side, appointing him his permanent personal physician and later, during the war, making him civilian head in charge of the military medical corps.
One of the basic ideas in Hitler’s national economic system was the manipulation of demand to drain off the surplus purchasing power of the masses. For when the country itself could not produce sufficient necessities and luxuries, surplus purchasing power constituted a permanent threat to the price structure and the stability of the currency. That, along with social-welfare considerations, was one of the most important reasons for the enormous build-up of the Strength Through Joy organization. Hitler wanted to divert the masses of wage earners and salaried employees from the markets; instead of offering them material goods, instead of providing more bread, butter, and meat, which could not be obtained without foreign exchange, he persuaded the people to buy intangibles—entertainment, travel, art, and knowledge—at prices they could afford. Thus social welfare was combined with practical economic aims. The best theaters and concert halls were rented; big ships were built, and huge beach developments to provide swimming for the masses were projected. During the years of peace Hitler twice took a North Sea cruise on one of the big Strength Through Joy boats. He visited the islands of Helgoland and Borkum, shared in the common life of the Strength Through Joy travelers, and entered into their evening entertainments aboard the ships. These were among the very few occasions when he came into contact, privately and on an easy basis, with life outside the peculiar circle which he had created for himself. He had become acquainted with the North Sea coast before 1933; he used to spend several days at a time at Horumersiel, staying at the inn on the dike run by “Father Tjark,” a famous skipper of life-saving craft. There he met Leni Riefenstahl, with whom he maintained a warm platonic friendship for many years. Hitler also saw the Norwegian fjords, though only from the sea; he went on a battleship which was cruising along the Norwegian coast in order to obtain an impression of the landscape. A Norwegian pilot who was taken on board reported meeting Hitler, and the story was published in a foreign newspaper.
On board his dispatch boat, the Grille (Whimsy), from which he witnessed the naval maneuvers near Skagen, Hitler set sail for Copenhagen and studied the silhouette of the city through his binoculars. He drove frequently to Wilhelmshaven, Hamburg, and Kiel to inspect ships and attended launchings. In Hamburg, where he stayed frequently, his quarters were always in the Hotel Atlantik on the Alster; he was particularly fond of the tea for which this hotel was famous. When in Hamburg he usually invited the family of Bismarck’s grandson to be his guests. For Hamburg Hitler was planning a gigantic steel bridge across the Elbe. Incidentally, while at Hamburg he discovered in the storeroom of the Town Hall a colossal painting by one of his favorites, the Viennese painter Mackart. This painting, the Entrance of Charles V into Antwerp, he promptly had placed in a prominent position in a gallery.
During a flight from Königsberg to Kiel in 1932 in a Junkers 52, I went through a dramatic adventure with Hitler. Flying blind, the pilot took a wrong bearing and instead of following the coast of Jutland turned north and headed far out into the open sea. Fuel was running low; we were flying under a dense bank of clouds only a hundred and fifty feet above the surging waves. We had no way of knowing our whereabouts. At this point Hitler went up to the cockpit and instinctively ordered the pilot to head south. He had acted just in the nick of time. We reached the German Baltic coast near Wismar with just half a gallon of gasoline left in the tank.
Hitler twice spent a few days at the bathing resort of Heiligendamm on the Baltic coast. There his then foreign press chief, “Putzi” Hanfstaengl (in whose villa on Staffel Lake Hitler had been arrested after the 1923 Munich putsch), introduced him to Fräulein von Laffert, for whom he felt a friendly affection for many years. He wished to see her married to some member of his entourage, but she chose otherwise.
Dramatic events of fateful significance link Hitler’s life with East Prussia. When this Austrian German visited the region in the spring of 1932, the German frontier population hailed him as their veritable champion. How different it was a decade later, when Hitler returned to this same land of many lakes. This time he lived in bunkers and wooden barracks in the heart of the mysterious forest, cut off from all contact with the population. Under such conditions he spent more than three full years, the most depressing and wearing years of his life.
In Königsberg in 1932, when he was still only the leader of the National Socialist Party, Hitler established personal contact with the generals of the tiny German army which had been permitted under the Versailles Treaty. At the East Prussian estate of a former World War I general, von Litzmann, he met Colonel von Reichenau, and through the latter he was introduced to the District Commander in Königsberg, General von Brauchitsch. Under his regime both were promoted to general field marshals, the one as commander of the blitzkrieg army, the other as the conqueror of Warsaw—until Hitler himself replaced von Brauchitsch.
During Hindenburg’s lifetime Hitler was frequently the old president’s guest at Neudeck. He also paid visits to Danzig, Elbing and Marienburg. One of his favorite stopping places in East Germany was Finckenstein Palace. If he happened to be traveling in the vicinity, he made a point of staying there for a few days. A Prussian general and war minister named Finckenstein had built the elegant, spacious palace in the heart of the woods and lakes of West Prussia, with money given him by his king. On his way to Russia in 1812 Napoleon stayed there for several weeks, living with the Polish Countess Walewska. It is said that when the Emperor first caught sight of the palace he exclaimed: “Enfin un chateau!” Hitler enjoyed the spaciousness of the palace, which breathed refined culture and historic atmosphere. He spent many pleasant hours there in 1932 as a guest of the family of Count Dohna-Finckenstein. But even in these relaxing surroundings his talk was not free of the excitable political note so characteristic of him.
Hitler’s favorite city in Saxony was Dresden. He loved the drive across the Elbe bridge into the beautiful quarter around the palace. He always put up at the Hotel Bellevue, and invariably visited the opera and the Zwinger [the Museum of Natural History]. Through Dresden’s rich artistic life Hitler was brought into touch with the more private and human sides of life.
Then there was Austria, his homeland, to which he would return as conqueror in 1938. After the Anschluss he frequently visited the places where he had spent his childhood: Braunau on the Inn, where the local newspaper still had in its files the original birth notice sent in by his father, an Austrian customs official—refutation of the spiteful rumor that his birth was illegitimate. He saw again the monastery school at Lambach where he had been a pupil, and Leonding; where his parents were buried. Graz, Klagenfurt, Salzburg, and Innsbruck were other favorite cities of his in his native land. He was also very fond of Vienna. He stored up happy impressions of that city in the form of pleasant days spent in the royal suite at the Hotel Imperial, receptions at Prince Eugen’s Belvedere, drives around the Ring, outings with groups of artists to the Kahlenberg, the Burgtheater, and the Opera. The great cultural and architectural wealth of the old imperial city exercised a great fascination upon him. Hitler did much for the city of Vienna, architecturally and otherwise. But never did he altogether overcome his prejudices, the provincial Austrian’s more or less justified dislike for traditional Viennese centralism. Even in his youth he had hated this centralism, and in his later political measures he always favored the Austrian states as against the capital. His policy in the new Greater Germany was aimed at tying the new “provinces of the Ostmark” to the Reich rather than to Vienna.
Toward Linz, the city of his young manhood, he felt special obligations. He himself drafted a new city plan, providing for a new bridge over the Danube and sending his own architects to the city. He established the gigantic Hermann Göring Steel Works at Linz, and made a personal gift to the city of a picture gallery of German Romantic painters, including the finest Spitzwegs in the world. Hitler said he wanted this gallery to be unique of its kind, the equal to any metropolitan gallery and a place of pilgrimage for all lovers of Romantic painting.
Hitler was able to extend such generous patronage to German art and artists by means of a “cultural fund” which Postal Minister Ohnesorge had on his own initiative set up. With Hitler’s permission Ohnesorge had printed a special stamp for collectors bearing a picture of Hitler. This stamp could be bought at all post offices in the Reich; the sale of it yielded several million marks which Ohnesorge turned over to Hitler for his own use every year.
Munich was Hitler’s chosen home, the city he loved above all others and which he held to be the pearl of Germany. He had come from Vienna to Munich as a member of the artistic proletariat, so to speak, an artist who virtually peddled his water-colors and drawings on the street and among the art dealers of the city. Here he lived the life of a lonely man going his own way; here in August 1914 he hailed the outbreak of the war which promised him an outlet for his morbidly intensified vanity. He returned from the war a corporal with the Iron Cross, First Class, and amid the turbulence of revolution he delivered patriotic lectures at barracks and demobilization camps as an “indoctrination officer.” Here he discovered his gift for oratory and the power of his words over people. His instinctive, demonic will to dominate the masses fused with his genuine pride as a German and his obsession with racist ideas to create the conviction that he was fated to carry out a great political and national mission.
In the political atmosphere of Munich his star began to rise. But “nationalistic” Munich was not only the starting point of his fabulous political career. The city of art and culture on the Isar was also the soil in which the private and personal aspect of his life struck its few roots. There if anywhere was the fixed axis in Hitler’s unstable life.
In Munich Hitler felt himself at home. Once they reached the door of his apartment on the Prinzregentenplatz, which he occupied for fifteen years, his adjutants and traveling companions took their leave and left him in the care of the good couple who managed his household, Frau Winter and her husband. Here Hitler would settle down in his rooms for at least a few hours during the day and arrange by telephone his schedule and private visits from among his circle of Munich acquaintances. While in Munich he would telephone me at my hotel and ask me to bring him the latest press items. When I arrived at his apartment I would often find him dining alone, whereas elsewhere he never deviated from his custom of taking his meals amid a sizable group.
Here in Munich he lived the life of a bachelor who did not care for any sort of family life. For example, on Christmas Eve he would give all his followers leave to visit their families; then he and his adjutant Brückner would go motoring through the countryside because he wished to escape the Christmas atmosphere, which he thoroughly disliked. No amount of talk could change his attitude in this matter.
In order to make Christmas festive for him, the custom arose of holding a Christmas dinner in his name at a beer hall in Munich. This afternoon affair was scheduled for December 24, and Hitler never failed to attend. After dining he would deliver a talk half political, half a tribute to comradeship. But his refusal to have a Christmas tree persisted even after he had assumed power, when his house would pile up with gifts and flowers sent to him with compliments of the season. On the other hand, Hitler was very attentive to his friends at Christmas as regards gifts. His Berlin household steward would spend weeks going through Hitler’s gift list, which included his numerous political associates, the personnel of his household, his closer acquaintances, and many artists. One Christmas during the war years Hitler gave each person on his list a package of coffee from a shipload that a Near Eastern shah had sent to him as a personal present.
When I settled in Munich in 1931 Hitler’s sister, Frau Raubal, was staying with him at his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz. Later she kept house for him on the Obersalzberg for several years. Also with him at this time was his stepniece Angelika, a young Viennese girl whom I myself never met. Hitler was extremely fond of her and she was almost always with him when he went to the theater, the cinema, or the coffee house. Whether his feelings toward her went beyond those of kinship, I do not know.
One morning in the fall of 1931 Hitler left his apartment bright and early to go on one of his automobile trips. On the way to Würzburg he was stopped at Ansbach; a telephone message had come through for him. It seemed that shortly after his departure from Munich Angelika had shot herself. She had used a revolver from the drawer of his night table to take her own life. Hitler was—his chauffeur told me—shaken to the core by this news; he turned back at once and throughout the entire three-and-a-half-hour return trip spoke not a single word. Hess, Gregor Strasser, and others were waiting for him at his apartment. When Strasser returned to the Brown House he reported that Hitler had declared that, in view of the scandal caused by this dreadful event, he must resign the presidency of the National Socialist Party. Strasser said he had had the greatest difficulty rousing Hitler from his severe depression. The explanation for the suicide which was heard at the time was that Angelika had been in a state of emotional disturbance because Hitler had forbidden her return to Vienna, where she had fastened her affections upon a young doctor. Hitler was granted a two-day entry permit by the Austrian government and went to Vienna for the funeral. Later on, whenever he was in the Austrian capital, he never failed to visit the cemetery and lay a wreath upon Angelika’s grave.
The small group of personal acquaintances with whom Hitler regularly associated while in Munich was really limited to the family of Heinrich Hoffmann, the photographer, whom he visited almost every day. Hoffmann had been close to Hitler since the earliest days of his struggle and for almost two decades had enjoyed a monopoly on the right to photograph Hitler. Before he met Hitler he had made a specialty of sensational news photographs, a branch of photography which he had learned in London. One of his most famous pictures was the shot he had succeeded in taking, back in 1905, of Czar Nicholas II with Kaiser Wilhelm when the two were hunting together in the park at Fürstenberg Palace in Donaueschingen. Before 1923 no pictures at all had been taken of that new political revolutionary, Adolf Hitler. In order to protect himself against the political police, Hitler had systematically avoided photographs. Hoffmann lay in wait for him one day and snapped a picture of him in the doorway of the Party business office in Munich. The plate was promptly taken from him by Hitler’s companions. Some time afterwards Dietrich Eckart recommended Hoffmann to Hitler, who promised the photographer the “privilege of the first picture.” That privilege Hitler allowed him to retain for many years after the days of struggle lay in the past.
To Hitler’s great concern, Hoffmann fell seriously ill in 1936. Hitler expressed his sorrow that Hoffmann, who had been at his side during the hardest period of the struggle, might not live to experience with him “the decade of Germany’s rise.” When Hoffmann’s physician, Doctor Morell, restored the photographer to health, Hitler was so impressed that he appointed Doctor Morell his own permanent personal physician. The same Hoffmann who had snapped Czar Nicholas in Germany, and published the photograph against the Czar’s will, accompanied Ribbentrop to Russia and secured a picture of Marshal Stalin at table in the Kremlin. However, Stalin asked that the picture should not be published, with which wish Hoffmann complied.
Many old adherents of the Party lived in Munich. Among them were supporters of the Movement to whom Hitler paid visits from a sense of deep obligation. With such persons he would occasionally stay to tea. Among these was the wife of the publisher Brückmann, in whose salon I first met Hess. There were also the Hanfstaengls, whom he visited frequently in the early days, and the home of Gauleiter Wagner where in later years he enjoyed meeting artists, whose company he found relaxing.
He was a constant visitor, however, at Hoffmann’s home. Almost every afternoon and evening during his stays in Munich would find him there. He prized Hoffmann’s conversational gifts and his knowledge of painting. Hoffmann lived for a time in Schwabing and later in Bogenhausen, in the immediate vicinity of Hitler’s home. Hitler would drop in there whenever he could no longer stand being alone in his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz. Long before 1933 he had met in Hoffmann’s studio the latter’s assistant, Eva Braun. She was the daughter of a respected secondary school master, a goodlooking girl, vivacious, interested in culture, and altogether nonpolitical—a trait Hitler appreciated highly in women.
It was only natural that the bachelor Hitler should take pleasure in Fräulein Braun’s company while at the Hoffmann’s. But the deeper emotions he later felt for her sprang from an attempt at suicide on her part. Believing herself rejected by him, the young woman attempted to cut open the arteries of her wrists. I heard about this incident and about the shaking effect it had had upon Hitler from his own lips in the course of a private talk with him. From that time on Hitler spent more of his time with Fräulein Braun, who later moved with her sister into a small house near his, across the street from Hoffmann’s. He invited her out on automobile trips and, with growing frequency, to his house on the Obersalzberg above Berchtesgaden. In Munich, however, she was never seen publicly in Hitler’s company.
Munich was the one city in the Reich where Hitler, even after he became chief of state, could openly visit restaurants and coffee houses as a private person, without being besieged by the curious. Naturally certain police precautions were necessary in order to guard him against surprises. Incidentally, I have never found out why for fifteen years, up to the very first months of his reign, Hitler always carried a dog-whip in his hand wherever he went; it was fastened to his wrist by a strap. Once he himself recounted, he had used it to threaten and fend off some quarrelsome members of a Munich student Korps. Hitler, his secretary, Rudolph Hess, and some ladies had been sitting at a Munich café when these young men had come along and made nuisances of themselves by molesting the ladies of the company. Hess had angrily ordered them to stop and they had retaliated by demanding satisfaction. It was on this occasion that the dog-whip came in handy. Hitler was firmly opposed to dueling; when he came to power he fought the lingering tradition for it in Germany and issued general orders banning it.
Hitler’s daily program in Munich in peacetime was as follows: He rose around noon. Toward one o’clock he regularly went to Troost’s studio where the architects were awaiting him with the latest models of projected buildings. He was passionately ambitious to see a still more brilliant Munich arise, expressing all the force of the Third Reich. To that end he had many structures torn down which the people of Munich loved, but which interfered with his plans. His projects for rebuilding the heart of Munich absorbed him constantly, and he paid no attention to the feelings of the citizens.
From the studio he went to lunch at the Osteria Bavaria, located on the same street. There his usual table companions would be waiting for him. The cooks at this modest eating-place had learned in the course of years to cater to his vegetarian tastes. A table was always reserved for him in the idyllic little garden of the tavern.
After lunch Hitler paid official or private visits. He would drop in at his home briefly and later in the afternoon go either to the Carlton Tearoom opposite the Café Luitpold on Brienner Strasse or the outdoor café of the House of German Art. Or else he would visit Gauleiter Wagner at his home on Kalbachstrasse. It may be noted incidentally that in 1943 there was considerable ill feeling in Munich when Hitler personally ordered that Wagner’s residence, which had been hit in the bombings, be given priority for rebuilding.
Hitler’s afternoon “coffee” session usually lasted for several hours. Unless he chose to spend his evening at home—an exceptional thing for him—he dined at the Hoffmann’s, or at the House of Artists on Lembachplatz, or more rarely at the restaurant in the House of German Art, if not at the Osteria Bavaria. In earlier years he also frequently ate in the small basement canteen at the Brown House, later on in the comfortable casino of the new Führer’s Building. On the traditional holidays of the Party he regularly went to the Café Heck for the evening. On Sunday afternoons and regular holidays Hitler customarily went for a drive out to Tegernsee with the Hoffmann family and their friends. There he was warmly welcomed by a number of Party friends—who formed almost a colony out there, all living in wooden houses built in the charming Upper Bavarian style. The latter part of the evening was usually spent at Hoffmann’s house.
Throughout such a day as this the business of government was not neglected, any more than it was during his travels. Conferences or audiences which he thought important were fitted into the schedule and held either at his home or amid the luxurious surroundings of the “Führer’s Building.” Important messages and questions were delivered to him constantly and often answered by him in the presence of others; similarly, he might issue orders at table. This casual and somewhat sketchy way of conducting the government—the Cabinet in Berlin had simply been placed on ice—is indicative of the peculiar nature of Hitler’s dictatorial rule.
The permanent atmosphere of unreal, forced, self-deceiving sociability with which he surrounded himself, was an elaborate precaution against serious, hard-and-fast, uncomfortable discussions. He was thus enabled to take up only such matters as suited him and to pretend not to know about and brush aside those matters which were inconvenient. He exaggerated or belittled, boasted of all his successes but changed the subject or cast blame on someone else when things went wrong. His administration was a peculiar compound of political seriousness and private casualness, of hard, authoritarian sternness, artistic slackness, and personal irresponsibility. Surrounded by external distractions but with his gaze always turned inward, Hitler often made his decisions purely on impulse, in large matters as well as in small.
Just one example. Sitting one day at table in the Osteria Bavaria, he spontaneously ordered Bormann to stop publication of the Frankfurter Zeitung. He paid no attention to the remonstrances of the specialists on press matters who were present. The reason for this order was a complaint by the wife of Troost, the architect, who had taken offense at something in a column of that newspaper.
At this same table in the Osteria Bavaria Hitler made the acquaintance of the Englishwoman Unity Mitford, daughter of Lord Redesdale, a member of the British House of Lords. Unity Mitford was an enthusiastic follower of the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley and a fervent admirer of Hitler. She had many private conversations about Anglo-German relationships with Hitler, whose secret itineraries she usually guessed with great acuteness. Over the years Hitler frequently included her among the guests who accompanied him on his travels. She introduced Hitler to her father, Lord Redesdale, and her brother, when the two were passing through Munich. Her elder sister, who had been the wife of the British industrialist Guinness, was divorced and later married Sir Oswald Mosley. The informal wedding party of Mosley and his bride was held in Hitler’s apartment in Berlin, Hitler and his close associates being guests. On September 3, 1939, the day of England’s declaration of war against Germany, Unity Mitford sat down upon a bench in a Munich park and put a bullet through her temple. The suicide attempt failed. After a long, slow recovery she was returned to her family in England, Hitler arranging the matter through neutral diplomats.
Hitler’s relationship to art was, on the whole, perhaps the least ambiguous side of his character. Culture and art, of which Munich was to be the shining symbol visible throughout Germany, were to Hitler a particularly important factor in the life of the nation. In 1934, after returning from a visit to Hess’s newly decorated home in the Isar Valley near Munich, he mentioned that he could not make Hess his successor as Führer because the latter’s house betrayed such a lack of feeling for art and culture. Göring, whom he respected for his broad grasp of the political significance of art, was shortly afterwards appointed Hitler’s successor.
Hitler’s fierce stand against “degeneracy” in the plastic arts was certainly sincere in intent. It was a reaction to the excesses of the age. But it was also rooted in a highly questionable conception of what art is.
Hitler certainly possessed aesthetic sensibility. But he raised his own ideal of beauty into a dogma everyone had to follow. He wanted to issue commands, even in a field where personal taste and individual sensitivity are what count. Consequently, he did not limit himself to merely guiding popular taste. The state, if it wishes to throw the realm of art open to the masses of the people, is entitled to curb certain obvious excesses. But that is as far as art policy ought to go. Hitler, however, as in so many other fields, showed no moderation at all. In his radical intolerance he went far beyond the measures needed to accomplish his purpose. He smashed images like the iconoclasts of old and threw out the baby with the bath water. Architecture and sculpture were stimulated by the scale and lavishness of his support, and in these fields every unbiased observer must admit that he was able to awaken certain impulses in the artists. But with painting he had no such success; do what he might after his “purge,” he was unable to set creative forces in motion. Aside from a few isolated specimens, the level of painting remained low. Among his intimates he resignedly admitted the fact—though this opinion of his was jealously guarded from the ears of the public.
Hitler had made the “Great German Art Exhibition” in Munich the showcase for German plastic art. It was to open the way to public recognition for the German artist. Hitler personally was the jury; professional artists must be rigorously excluded from juries, he declared, so that they would not be able to exercise a deciding vote in their own affairs. Only the masses, insofar as they were interested at all in art, and the public of art buyers and patrons, should decide who deserved the honor of having his work shown. Hitler considered himself the representative of all art-lovers.
In practice the selection of paintings and sculptures took place as follows.
Every year Hitler appointed Heinrich Hoffmann as his preliminary examiner. All the works submitted were left in the basement of the museum where Hoffmann sifted through them and made a first selection. The works he considered worthy to be looked upon by the Führer were then taken upstairs to the exhibition rooms and provisionally hung so that Hitler himself could judge them. It always affected me most unpleasantly when Hitler, going the rounds for hours, would let fall one personal opinion after the next upon the paintings, thereby deciding the fate of the artists. Hitler’s inspection sometimes took place only a few days before the opening, though usually he would get around to it several weeks before. He had in effect nominated himself the pope of art. The things he liked would be exhibited; what he rejected was second-rate, and therefore the artist was also second-rate. The works that were not shown to Hitler at all were not even considered art.
Gradually, this state of affairs aroused widespread dissatisfaction among the artists. When Hitler heard of this, he flared up. Those artists who had said they would no longer send work to the show were no longer to be mentioned at all in the press or over the radio, he ordered.
Hitler’s judgment of art was not guided fundamentally by aesthetic principles, but by his nationalistic and racial feelings. The national character of the observer is, of course, the soil out of which his ideas and feelings spring and will therefore always play a part in his reaction to a work of art. But Hitler as supreme judge of art was so entirely convinced that all cultural creativity sprang from nordic-Germanic roots alone—he traced the great flowering of classical Greek and Italian art to the same roots—that this racial fanaticism blinded him to all other possible standards. I realized the extent of his aesthetic blindness when I witnessed his complete rejection of the modern Italian art show at Venice, which he attended in the course of his first meeting with Mussolini. His reaction to a Japanese art show held in Berlin a few years later was equally incomprehensible. Incomprehension might be forgivable. But he went further, denying that the work had any of the qualities of art—simply because he felt no personal associations with the objects represented or the Japanese landscape, culture, and way of life. We may concede to any ordinary citizen the right to hold such a view. But the man who claims supreme authority in the world of art should not be so limited.
Hitler regarded art only from the point of view of the spectator, never from that of the artist. From the spectator’s point of view he rightly demanded that a work of art must have beauty of form and that the object depicted must be one of inherent beauty. But he overlooked the fact that the artist can create such beauty only according to his own inner laws. Hitler’s complete indifference to all the more human aspects of people is the key to his denseness in the realm of aesthetics. His policy was directed toward arousing interest in art among the people. In line with this he demanded fine craftsmanship and technical ability from painters. He also insisted that they deal with popular subjects. This was supposed to create a kind of art which would appeal to the masses, with their natural, unspoiled feeling for beauty. But this dictatorial conception of art utterly ignored those elements which go beyond the representation of nature and which are peculiar to the creative artist. It is the presence of these elements which marks all genuine art. For the real value of a work of art inheres not in the external image of the form it reproduces, but in the essence it radiates from within the object and communicates to the spectator. A truly good painting, for example, reveals the special quality of a landscape; a truly good portrait exposes the inner nature of a person—as distinguished from a photograph which is usually only the mirror image of his outward appearance. It is no accident that all but one of the portraits of Hitler were copied from photographs. He sat for a portrait to only one painter, Professor Knirr, who came and stayed at Berchtesgaden for that purpose. Beauty lives within a work of art only to the extent that the artist, out of his own intuitive perception, has breathed that beauty into it. But Hitler considered the essence of art to be grounded in national character. His ideal of beauty, which was to be binding upon all, was the aesthetic embodiment of Rosenberg’s indefinable “racial soul.” Since Hitler had no sensitivity whatsoever to the human aspects of aesthetics, all he could do for the artists who followed him was to crown them with outward prestige; he could not inspire them with any creative impulses. In his arrogance Hitler had wanted to be master of art and to use it for his ends. But the divinity which is in art would not bend to his will!
It is about a hundred miles by automobile from Munich to Berchtesgaden. Along this entire stretch there is a clear view of the greater part of the German Alps. I do not know how many hundreds of times Hitler drove along this road in an open car, nor what he felt at the sight of those majestic mountains. But it may surely be said that those rides, taken together over two decades, were an important part of his private life.
The small group of Munich guests whom he regularly invited to his home on the Obersalzberg usually waited for him on the highway just outside the environs of Munich and there joined his column of automobiles. The panorama along this drive extends from the Zugspitze massif to the Watzmann. In the distance the Wetterstein and the Karwendel, the Rotwand and Wendelstein mountains can be seen; along the highway are the Wilder Kaiser and the Kampenwand. Soon the unfathomable gray-blue of Chiemsee is reached, that strangely moody lake which exercised a great attraction upon Hitler. For many years he regularly made a stop at the Lambach inn on the north shore of the lake, where a Stammtisch was reserved for him and his guests—a table which in the course of time gathered more and more associations. Hitler was sitting at this table in 1932 when the message came to confer at once with President von Hindenburg. Six miles away along the lake Hitler planned to build the first of his mammoth universities; he wanted to move university life out of the great cities and plant these new universities in the heart of the open country. They were to be provided with the most modern technical and athletic equipment. The execution of this interesting idea he left to Rosenberg, and in Rosenberg’s mind they vanished in the ideological fog of his “myth.”
When Hitler built the Reich’s first autobahn, from Munich to Reichenhall, he made it run along the southern shore of the Chiemsee. Halfway along the route a huge hotel, the Gasthaus am Chiemsee, was put up. It was provided with a pavilion-like Führer’s room, but after visiting it twice Hitler never went there again because the room had glass walls and he did not like the public looking in on him while he dined. This highway is also graced by a monument to the ground-breaking ceremony. At the time of the building of the autobahn, all Hitler’s thoughts were turned upon the program of peaceful construction which won him a place in the hearts of the people. Five years later the autobahn was extended to Salzburg. By then Hitler was already caught up in the intoxication of power, and as his road went beyond the borders of the Reich he himself was already gazing with his inward eye to more distant, more alluring, but ruinous goals.
Beyond Chiemsee the German Alpine Highway branches off from the autobahn to the south, entering the mountains near Inzell. This road was the product of Hitler’s dream of opening the beautiful German Alps to tourist traffic by constructing a splendid system of highways. A cross-alpine highway from Lindau to Berchtesgaden was begun but died a premature death when the war began.
According to Hitler’s own account, it was Dietrich Eckart who introduced him to the mountain near Berchtesgaden known as the Obersalzberg. Eckart himself hid out there after the failure of the Munich putsch. The Bechstein family owned a mountain villa nearby. In those days the Bechsteins called Hitler by the name of “Wolf,” for which reason he later gave his headquarters the names “Wolf’s Bastion” and “Wolf’s Ravine.” In an idyllic situation some three hundred feet above the Bechstein villa, on a steep sloping meadow, was the small wooden house called Wachenfeld. Hitler liked it so well that he rented it, and several years later bought it. In memory of the early years he later retained the fireplace and veranda of this house, though otherwise it was entirely rebuilt. After 1933 he added to it and made alterations several times, until it attained the form of the Berghof, as it was later called. Fourteen days before the end of the war the Berghof was smashed within ten minutes by the concentrated bombing of a hundred special enemy planes.
Hitler paid for the Berghof out of the income from his book, Mein Kampf. This raises the question of his habits and ideas with regard to money, capital, and private property—a subject that has been much discussed. Actually it may be said that money meant nothing to Hitler. He never had a bank account. He did not use a wallet. Whenever he needed ready cash for contributions to the Winter Relief or for some similar purpose, it was slipped to him by his adjutant, or else he reached for loose change in his trousers pocket. The administrator of his property and his money was Max Amann in his capacity of director of the Eher Verlag, which published Mein Kampf. Once or twice a year Amann would drop in on Hitler to present his accounts. At such times he would always bring up his wishes with regard to newspapers and book publishing and would ask Hitler for authority in various matters. He was seldom or never refused. Whether his unassailable position with Hitler was due more to his capacity as the Führer’s business agent or to his having been the sergeant of Hitler’s company during the First World War, was a subject much discussed among Hitler’s intimates. In financial matters Hitler was ignorant, but generous. As a private person he did not know how to handle his own money, and as head of state he could not manage the government budget.
Other funds were used to extend Hitler’s private domain on the Obersalzberg beyond the actual Berghof property and to build up that mysterious cordoned-off area on the mountain. This work was tied up with Martin Bormann’s rise to the point of becoming one of Hitler’s closest intimates. I have mentioned earlier that as chief of staff for Rudolf Hess, Bormann was in charge of the Adolf Hitler Industrial Fund. Bormann had formerly been administrator of the SA Relief Fund. Using the millions of the Industrial Fund to enlarge Hitler’s private holdings around the Berghof, Bormann skillfully wheedled his way into Hitler’s favor. He established himself so securely that Hitler more and more came to consider him indispensable. As a result the brainless Bormann won more and more political influence. Hitler trusted him right down to the end, recognizing in Bormann a blindly obedient instrument who would pass on and execute his commands without the slightest deviation. In Hitler’s will, which bears Bormann’s signature as a witness, Hitler recommended him to posterity as his “most loyal Party comrade.”
In 1936 Bormann came to Berchtesgaden armed with money from the Industrial Fund. He bought parcel after parcel of land around Hitler’s house and began literally to bore holes into the mountain. Hitler watched these proceedings with some initial doubts, but after a while he let Bormann have his head. He would often pun on the name, saying Bormann was certainly a man for boring.
The changes in the landscape around the mountain which started in 1936, and which certainly did not improve its appearance, had their parallel in the change in Hitler’s mode of life and inward attitude which began coming into evidence at about that time. The peace of the remote mountain was replaced by noisy bustle. The farmers of the area were bought off and had to leave their lands. The village of Obersalzberg vanished; it was leveled to the ground. In its place there grew up barracks housing an entire SS guard battalion. The peaceful idyllic paths through the meadows were transformed into wide driveways and concrete roads. Where teams of oxen had moved along at their meditative pace, huge trucks now rattled by. Flowery mountain pastures were transformed into monstrous dumps; the woods were cut down to build camps. The silence of the mountainside was shattered by the rumble of dynamite explosions. After a while Hitler directed Bormann not to undertake any blasting before noon, so that he would not be awakened from his sleep. The pace of the work, the gigantic earth-moving projects, increased rather than diminished with the years. For as the work progressed Bormann’s importance to Hitler increased. It will give some idea of the extent of the undertaking to consider that no less than five thousand workers, most of them foreign laborers, were employed well into the war years on the Obersalzberg, that industrial oasis in the heart of the mountains.
What was the result of all the tremendous effort? The area around Hitler’s house which had been a lovely bit of nature was transformed into an artificial park with driveways and gravel paths. The whole was hermetically enclosed within a huge cordoned-off area ringed by many barbed-wire fences and dozens of guarded gates. Until 1937 anyone had had the right to move freely in this area, and from 1933 to 1937, whenever Hitler was staying at the Berghof, thousands of people from far and near daily climbed the mountain in the hope of being able to greet him in the afternoon, when he used to take short walks on the road in front of his house. At such times he would be photographed playing with children. He would personally accept letters and petitions from people. He would invite groups of girls and boys to join him on his terrace. He was also in the habit of going for walks in the vicinity, with just a few people for company. The reconstruction project put an end to these contacts with the public. Bormann had built Hitler a golden cage, and Hitler never went outside it again.
Hitler sought out isolation and laid more stress on his uniqueness as The Leader as he became conscious of his almost uncanny influence upon the masses, his unlimited power over people, and his growing military strength—which he himself considered invincible. This change in inward attitude was reflected in many outward symbols. Inside the fences of his mountain residence, a good quarter of a hour’s walk from the Berghof, a small tea pavilion was erected. On clear days, Salzburg could be seen from here. If no urgent business detained him, Hitler would visit this pavilion with his guests almost every day. Nearby a set of farm buildings was erected—at an altitude of 3,300 feet. It was intended to be Hitler’s model farm—but Hitler himself was not particularly interested in it. He was more pleased with the extensive hothouses which were built some three hundred feet above his house and which, summer and winter, supplied fresh vegetables for his vegetarian diet. A handsome building with a wonderful view had stood near Hitler’s house and had served as a privately run rest-home for sailors. It was removed, and the plans called for building in its place a gigantic, unique mountain hotel which would attract tourists from all over the world. But when the outlines of the new hotel were painted on a gigantic screen, Bormann discovered that viewed from the valley the projected building would far outshine Hitler’s own residence, the Berghof. Construction was stopped at once and for years nothing but rubble heaps remained. In place of the suspended hotel, the nearby “Platterhof” where Dietrich Eckart had once lived was bought and built up.
In 1939 I was present when Hitler was the recipient of a “surprise”—a “tea house” built for him on the peak known as the Kehlstein, some 6,600 feet high. For more than two years the most difficult imaginable of roads had been blasted out of the rock of the mountain. One day Bormann invited Hitler to inspect and take possession of this rocky eyrie, as intimate as it was grandiose. Situated on the peak of the Kehlstein, it was visible for a great distance. The way up from the Berghof wound along a broad asphalt road with a magnificent view of the Alps, past steep precipices, and through many tunnels, to a spacious parking area at an altitude of nearly six thousand feet. This road ended abruptly in front of a huge, heavy brass door set into the living rock. The door opened upon a brilliantly illuminated corridor five hundred feet long leading into the heart of the mountain. At the end there was a second door belonging to a huge elevator which carried us swiftly up through the rock to the vestibule of an original, striking, and quite pretty stone tea house. It was furnished in choicest taste. There was a dining room, a sun terrace, and precisely upon the peak of the mountain a huge circular hall with fireplace. Numerous big windows let into massive stone walls gave a magnificent view out over the beautiful mountainous landscape on all sides.
Before the war Hitler visited this “tea house” only two or three times, taking guests up there for brief stays. François Poncet, who was for many years French ambassador to Berlin, was invited to tea there for a farewell audience. This was a sign of special favor; Hitler thought highly of Poncet’s elegant and witty conversation. Poncet has written about his visit to the tea house. The last time Hitler visited his unique and beautiful eyrie he was accompanied by the British journalist Ward Price, who published a sensational article in the Daily Mail describing the place. Hitler refused to permit stories about it to be published in the German press.
The five thousand workers in the huge construction camp on the mountain also built a sizable network of private roads deep into the mountains. Some of these were never completed. Roads were, however, finished to Eckernsattel, Goellhaus, and Rossfeld, and during the war anti-aircraft batteries were posted in these places. As a final gigantic project I heard of a road which was to lead past the Jenner and Gotzenalm peaks, high above the Königssee, to what is known as the Stone Sea (Steinernes Meer). Hitler would sometimes say that he intended at some future date to open these roads to the public.
During the last years of the war there were many rumors abroad about huge underground military installations being built at the “mountain fortress of Obersalzberg.” There was no truth to these stories. In 1944, directly behind the Berghof, living quarters were cut into the rock. These were intended simply as air-raid shelters, and special rooms were provided for Hitler. However, he never moved into them.
No less striking than the external transformations in the landscape were the changes in the domestic routine of the Berghof during those later years. In the days when the small house called Wachenfeld on the slope had been a quiet, modest place designed for family living, Hitler’s sister kept house for him there; she had moved from the house on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich after her niece Angelika’s suicide. Hitler praised her conscientiousness and her Viennese pastries. As the number of guests in the enormously enlarged house continued to swell, and as Hitler’s future wife, Eva Braun, gradually began assuming the direction of things, a housekeeper and steward were added to the household. Hitler’s sister returned to Vienna and a few years afterward married a Dresden doctor. Bormann had meanwhile settled down in a house of his own a few hundred yards away. Subsequently the Hoher Göll Inn, the Bechstein house—where Mussolini later stayed—and various local tearooms were made into adjuncts of the growing Berghof, since quarters were needed for a sizable squad of guards. Bormann then assumed economic and financial direction of the entire “household of the Führer.” He was especially attentive to the lady of the house, anticipating her every wish and skillfully helping her with the often rather complicated arrangements for social and state functions. This was all the more necessary since she herself tactfully kept in the background as much as possible. Bormann’s adroitness in this matter undoubtedly strengthened his unassailable position of trust with Hitler, who was extraordinarily sensitive about Eva Braun.
During this period Hitler’s habits of life, hitherto so informal and unconstrained, took on strict conventional forms. For every private noon and evening meal in his house the seating order was fixed according to his instructions, and written down. Before every meal Hitler regularly asked his adjutant to show him the seating plan, so that he could check it over once more. The guests gathered in the small room with the traditional chimney-corner. When all were present, this fact was reported to Hitler. For lunch, which was at about three o’clock, after Hitler had finished his “morning” conferences, there were generally more than ten and less than twenty persons. The composition of the luncheon party emphasized the private nature of Hitler’s life at Berchtesgaden, for there were more women than men present. Here at Berchtesgaden Hitler deliberately sought feminine company for relaxation; the masculine guests were more or less subsidiary.
The virtually permanent house guests at the Berghof consisted actually of the small group from Munich who had gathered around Eva Braun. They included her younger sister, one of her schoolgirl friends, and one or two married women of her acquaintance. In addition there was the Hoffmann family, including Hoffmann’s daughter, whom Hitler had known as a child and who was now married to the youth leader Baldur von Schirach. Hoffmann frequently brought Hermann Esser and his wife. Also regularly included in the circle of guests who dined with Hitler were Bormann, the two physicians who lived at the Berghof, Hitler’s adjutants (who lived in adjoining buildings), and the wives of these men. There were also his secretaries and a few of Hitler’s official associates, including myself. When Hitler was at the Berghof I stayed at the hotel in Berchtesgaden. Speer, who had his house and architect’s office nearby, frequently came with his wife and sometimes brought with him Arno Breker and Josef Thorak, two sculptors who were friends of his. Goebbels, who was not particularly fond of the Munich atmosphere, preferring to see Hitler in private or among the circle of artists in Berlin, would come for only brief visits. He always brought his wife, whom Hitler liked. Robert Ley (the Minister of Labor) and his wife, with whom Hitler was also extremely friendly, were frequently invited. Although as far back as 1933 Hermann Göring had built a house in the immediate vicinity, upon a ridge which he baptized the “Adolf Hitler Peak,” he never was one of the restricted circle of dinner guests. Hess remained to dine only when he came on official business. The same was true of Ribbentrop, who regularly set up his headquarters hear the Fuschlsee in the Salzburg area whenever Hitler stayed at Berchtesgaden.
Such was in general the composition of the group whom Hitler asked to table at the Berghof when his servant reported to him that all was ready. The gentlemen would then offer their arms to the ladies and follow Hitler down the broad colonnaded corridor to the dining room, which was paneled in natural wood. Each time they went in to dinner, Hitler would give his arm to another of the ladies, who would then have the privilege of sitting on his right. Another lady was always placed opposite him, unless a special guest were honored with this place. Eva Braun always sat on his left; her partner at table was invariably Bormann. In this circle dominated by the fair sex Hitler was a charming host. The ladies always had to be served first; the smallest breaches of this rule would stir Hitler to angry reproofs of his servants. With the ladies he made a point of conversing about nonpolitical matters. Since they were in awe of him and hence a bit abashed, and since he felt a certain social embarrassment, the conversation sometimes sounded forced and halting. But often, when he found a suitable subject, it went along smoothly and interestingly.
Hitler was a complete vegetarian; he never ate meat or fish. He lived almost entirely on vegetables and certain cereals; even bread and butter would give him indigestion. Zwieback and knaekkebroed, honey, tomato ketchup, mushrooms, curds, and yogurt were for a long time the basic elements in his diet. In later years he could no longer stand coffee, and only limited amounts of milk. All his food was specially prepared; even his soups were not the same as those served to the other guests. In his last years he had a special Viennese dietetic cook who even at military headquarters would prepare the Führer’s meals in a special small kitchen. Incidentally, in 1932 when Hitler was living at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin and suspected a plot to poison him, Frau Goebbels used frequently to prepare his meals at her home and spirit them up to his hotel room.
I have often wondered how, given his austere diet and his insomnia, Hitler managed to summon up the strength and the tremendous force of will that he manifested for so many years. His energy verged on the abnormal. The only possible biological explanation for it was that he must have been consuming his physical reserves at a pace which would surely lead to premature bodily degeneration.
Hitler exerted no pressure upon his guests with regard to vegetarianism, although he often talked with them about it and teased them about their food habits, calling them “corpse eaters.” Only a few persons followed his custom at table. Among these was Bormann—although everyone knew that at home Bormann would not turn down a good steak. Hitler provided his guests with a substantial but never luxurious cuisine, and of course observed the wartime one-dish meal. Even at the greatest state banquets he never permitted at his table more than one main course, along with soup or entrée, and a dessert. At one time his doctors recommended him to eat caviar for its nutritional value. It did him good, but after a while he stopped having it, saying it was “sinfully expensive.” Hitler also despised alcohol, the taste of which was repugnant to him. On ceremonial occasions when he had to drink a toast, his glass was always filled with mineral water. But in this respect also he let his guests follow their own tastes. However, they were restrained in the use of alcohol at his table. His opposition to smoking was much stronger. He considered nicotine extremely harmful, saying he would offer cigars and cigarettes only to his worst enemies, never to his friends. He forbade smoking in his rooms. There were exceptions to this rule only at important official functions in Berlin or Munich, and then separate smoking rooms were provided, which Hitler gave a wide berth. At the entrance to his bunker Berlin there hung, toward the end of the war, a sign reading: “No Smoking.”
I have already mentioned that Hitler restricted the conversation at table to nonpolitical topics. For this interlude at least he wanted to shake off the political and military problems with which his mind incessantly toiled. If serious matters were brought up, he curtly and angrily evaded them. If one had to listen to the table conversation fairly often, it soon became rather dull, revolving around a number of fixed topics to which he would always refer. He spoke a great deal about food and diet—an obvious subject at any dinner table; about the differences in foods and their preparation in various parts of the country; and about vitamins and calorific content. At this point Hitler would usually draw his doctors into the conversation, asking for expert opinions. He himself would argue in favor of a vegetarian diet, saying it had been the primeval diet of the human race and was to be desired as the diet of the future because it was both wholesome and economical. One of his favorite subjects of conversation—to the distress of Göring—was his vigorous condemnation of hunting unless it involved the hunter’s actually risking his own life. He said he could never harm so beautiful an animal as a deer, and forbade all hunting on the Obersalzberg. He sneered at the amateur sportsmen, while he had words of praise for poachers, who at least killed for food. During the war he had poachers released from the prisons and placed in probationary battalions. During the last years of the war, irritated by some newspaper article, he suddenly forbade all mention of hunting in the press except for plain advertisements of game being sold for meat.
In peacetime he spoke often and intensely about the protection of animals and antivivisection. He vigorously opposed vivisection—which won him much applause from the ladies—unless experiments with animals served some military purpose. To animals he ascribed the ability to think, and for them he felt sympathy—not for human beings. He was sensitive to the sufferings of animals and expressed his sympathy in the most decided terms. But he never wasted a word on humanitarianism except, on one occasion, to characterize it as a mixture of cowardice, stupidity, and intellectual conceit. And that indeed was his fundamental view of it. He studiously avoided the subject of the concentration camps.
Hitler would brighten up the conversation by telling stories about his life and his experiences while traveling. Insofar as I had been present at some of these incidents he described, I noted his distinct tendency to exaggerate; he often adorned his tales with extravagant imagination. Music, the cinema, the theater, painting, and architecture were also topics of conversation, or rather afforded him the chance to express his purely personal views. Such conversations, however, were seldom very fruitful, since there were strict limits to how far his interlocutors dared go in replying to him. Hitler made an effort to be humorous. Some of the guests, Hoffmann in particular, had natural gifts for light, witty conversation; as long as Hitler spoke with them, all went well. However Hitler’s wit was distinctly artificial, more often the product of his sarcastic disposition than of genuine humor. He would taunt certain persons at table, go out of his way to find barbed gibes, and since he kept up this banter with some obstinacy, and it was impossible to pay him back in the same coin, the result was often great embarrassment on all sides.
Hitler would rise from the table and kiss the hands of the ladies on either side of him to signify the end of the meal. He would leave the dining room after the last of the ladies, but before all the men. Immediately afterwards he would go out to the yard to feed his German police dog himself. Later he took this dog with him to his field headquarters in East Prussia and the Ukraine.
Hitler never took a nap after lunch, although this might have been expected, since he slept so little at night. During the last years of the war, when he was already very much on the decline physically, he would take a rest at the rather unusual hour of nine to ten at night.
When at the Berghof, Hitler would usually hold a few brief administrative conferences after lunch. He might, for example, discuss Party matters with Bormann, with his chief of the Reich Chancellery, Lammers—who maintained a branch office of the Berlin Chancellery at Berchtesgaden—or have a talk with Ribbentrop, who would drive up from the Fuschlsee in response to a telephoned summons.
In the afternoon, often shortly after lunch, Hitler took his one walk of the day to the small tea pavilion, about fifteen minutes away at a leisurely strolling pace. In order to combine business with pleasure, Hitler usually took his stroll in the company of some official visitor who happened to be present. A short distance behind him followed the ladies and gentlemen of the private circle. The tail of this odd “procession,” as it was often jokingly called, was formed by his bodyguard.
The party would remain for an hour or two in the pavilion. The conversation in this unvarying circle would often be on the dull side, and Hitler would frequently doze off in his chair by the big round table in front of the fireplace. As a rule an automobile would bring the party back the short distance to the Berghof. Thereafter Hitler, unless he had some special visits or conferences, would withdraw to his two private rooms on the first floor of the house—a master’s sitting room with fireplace and balcony, and a bedroom. He would remain in these rooms until around 8:30 in the evening, when the same circle of guests would assemble for dinner. A new set of seating arrangements would meanwhile have been drawn up. The ladies dressed for dinner.
Fräulein Braun owned a pair of droll little Scotch terriers, one of which was named “Negus.” When dinner was delayed, Hitler was fond of playing with this amusing but snappy little beast which would respond only to its mistress’s orders.
During the war Hitler sometimes stayed at the Berghof when state receptions at Klessheim Castle near Salzburg or Party affairs at Munich were being held. At such times the headquarters of the Wehrmacht also followed him to Berchtesgaden. It was housed in a barracks, and in the Berchtesgaden annex of the Chancellery. The members of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht would come up to the Berghof at noon and late in the evening for the regular situation conferences with Hitler. Hitler had accordingly issued instructions that from noon until about two o’clock, when the conference was over and the generals had left, the ladies were to remain in their rooms. In the evenings it was so arranged that the members of the OKW arrived at the Berghof while Hitler was dining with his private guests. The adjutant would then report that the generals were all assembled in the main salon. After dinner Hitler would go to them while the ladies waited in the dining room until the end of the conference or, if they were regular residents, went to their rooms on the first floor. The heart of the house was the main salon. It had red marble steps and a huge sliding picture window which brought the whole landscape into the room like a tremendous painting. There, beside an outsize globe, Hitler worked standing at the large table by the window. There he signed papers, corrected drafts, scanned memoranda; on that desk he unfolded architects’ plans and military maps. At that table stood Stauffenberg a few days before his attempt of July 20, 1944 to assassinate Hitler. In that salon Hitler had received the visits of Mussolini, King Carol and his son, and many others of the crowned and uncrowned heads of Europe. In it Schuschnigg was received and Austria’s fate decided. There on New Year’s Eve at the end of 1940 Hitler raised his glass, for once filled with champagne, to toast victory, which he thought would certainly be his in 1941. There, in May of that year, he unsuspectingly opened a letter that struck him like a blow in the face—Hess’s letter announcing his flight to England. There, among his guests, he sat through that terrible night which I shall never forget when the proud Bismarck, after sinking the Hood, drifted rudderless at sea, sending Hitler one radio message after the next. There was nothing he could do for those thousand brave sailors who were looking death in the eye, no way he could help them in their heroic struggle; he could only send them a last greeting. There he also heard the first news of the great Allied invasion of France, which marked the beginning of the end. And there too he received the dreadful news of the irrevocable collapse of the German Eastern Front at the Baranov bridgehead—though during the first three days of the Russian breakthrough he did not consider the situation of the German army serious enough to warrant his flying back at once to his field headquarters in East Prussia.
Over the years much else took place in that imposing room. It was the silent witness of Hitler’s transports of joy at times of success, and his outbursts of rage when luck went against him.
A great deal has been written about Hitler’s rages, and they were always much talked about. I witnessed them often and felt the intensity of his fury directed against my own person. They represented the revolt of his demonic energies against the world of crude reality, this emotion being vented against some human object. They were the thunder of a hard will being shattered by the still harder reality of things. Hitler’s mind stirred up his heart; his blood in turn inflamed his brain. The fury raged itself out in a hurricane of words that contradiction only lashed to greater intensity. At such times he would crush all objections simply by raising his voice.
Such scenes might be produced by little as well as big things. They occurred whenever events took a course different from that which Hitler had willed and predicted, whenever in his endless distrust he scented sabotage (he always preferred to hide his own defeats by charging sabotage), or whenever human inadequacy got on his nerves. When he was in such a state, trivial blunders and oversights would be branded damnable crimes. Death penalties or the concentration camp were as often the result of his uncontrollable rages as of his “ice-cold” reflection—to use his own phrase.
The most insignificant incidents could have a shattering effect upon his temper. During the war years, for example, the death of the opera singer Manowarda, of whom Hitler thought highly, was not recorded with banner headlines on the first pages of the newspapers. This omission threw Hitler into a frenzy of rage against the press. His fury lasted for hours and made him literally incapable of work for the rest of the day. Another time, at his house on the Obersalzberg, his police dog Blondi refused to come to heel when he called. I saw the blood rush to his head at this defiance of his command. There was a crowd of several thousand people around Hitler who was about to take his customary walk past these visitors. Two minutes later, when a woman handed him a petition, he suddenly screamed out at one of his closest associates, who happened to be standing behind him. Without giving any explanation, disregarding the amazement of the crowd, he gave the man a ferocious bawling out over nothing.
In none of these rages, however, did Hitler ever let himself be carried away to the point of inflicting physical abuse. The one exception to this was June 30, 1934 at the Ministry of the Interior in Munich. There I saw him rip epaulets and war decorations from the uniforms of the top SA leaders with his own hands. The story that in his rages Hitler would throw himself on the floor and bite the rug is an invention which is no truer for having been repeated so frequently.
It is hard to imagine a greater contrast in one and the same person than that between the frenzied splenetic and the Hitler whose pleasant and likable traits emerged in conversation or on public occasions. This man, so often brutal, inflexible, senselessly furious, would appear as a deeply sympathetic, artistically sensitive being, the kindly father of his people, ever ready to extend a helping hand to those in trouble. People who had known him only in the second phase could not possibly imagine what the other Hitler was like.
Over the years there was a great deal of public speculation about Hitler’s being a sick man. On the basis of much observation of his life and of my constant association with his doctors I do not believe that his states of violent agitation were the symptoms or the consequence of some acute physical illness. On the contrary, these outbursts of emotion were the cause of his frequent physical distress; they were his disease. Those explosive blasts of an overcharged brain, which left him in a state of exhaustion, affected the nerves of his stomach, and deranged his digestive system. Then the physical disability exerted a reciprocal effect, intensifying his tendency to outbursts of rage.
Hitler’s physical health was extraordinarily unstable. He was sick as often as he was well. Almost invariably his complaint was indigestion. In 1937, on the advice of Doctor Morell, he underwent a “mutaflor” cure for several months, taking pills to renew his destroyed intestinal flora. Afterwards he said he felt “reborn” and for several years was able to eat many foods that had previously made him ill. Later, as a result of the excitements and spiritual trials of the war years, his condition deteriorated again. He was given vitamin injections but by no means relied on intravenous feeding, as rumor had it. On the contrary, he did well on the food prepared for him by his Viennese diet cook. The rapid physical degeneration which brought him to the verge of collapse during the last year of the war was the result of his obstinately overstraining himself, and of the constant agitation which followed the attempt upon his life of July 20, 1944. One day early in 1945 his doctor was suddenly called to his bunker at the headquarters in the Forest of Rastenburg. From a remark later dropped by the doctor I gathered that Hitler had recovered from a very light cerebral stroke. Hitler himself once said in my presence that he had restrained himself during a violent dressing-down of a “criminally incompetent” general only because he feared he would bring a stroke on himself. For a considerable time his close associates suspected that Hitler was suffering from cancer of the larynx. A stubborn growth had made it impossible for him to talk loudly. This fear, however, proved unfounded. The well-known Berlin specialist, Doctor Eicken, who operated on Hitler for this condition, told me during a train ride from the headquarters to Berlin that the growth had been benign, a typical polypus of the larynx; he had, he said, over the years twice performed relatively simple operations upon this growth and had been able to prove it completely.
The evil in Hitler’s life was not the outcome of any serious physical disease. The fatal dynamism of his whole existence was conditioned by his very nature; it was a psychological phenomenon. In the end his demonic will consumed his body as well as everything else it touched. Hitler’s whole mode of life was unhealthy, virtually suicidal, and he would not listen to his doctors’ advice. The burden of work which he carried, and which he increased by insisting upon making all decisions himself, was not so great that it need have crushed his health. His “ser vice to the race and the nation” need not have kept him from living reasonably. If he had only understood how to organize his time, if only he had set aside for rest and recuperation a fraction of the days and nights he wasted in boring, artificial “sociability,” his physical condition would never have deteriorated as it did. During the more than ten years that I sat at his table, Hitler took his meals with grotesque irregularity, often not lunching before four or five o’clock in the afternoon, not dining before midnight. It was only under pressure from his associates that he reluctantly and very gradually began keeping to a somewhat more even schedule in the conduct of his life.
Every evening after dinner Hitler would see one or two movies. In the Chancellery in Berlin there was a motion picture room; at the Berghof the main salon would be used. In a sense, movies provided contact with normal life in the world outside, which otherwise he never encountered. Occasionally it was proposed that he should disguise himself and go about among the public, seeing Berlin unattended, as a private citizen. He would not hear of it. He never had a double, as rumors abroad persistently maintained; the idea never even entered his head.
During the war Hitler deliberately gave up this pleasure. During all those years he saw only a single motion picture. That was one evening at the Berghof when Mussolini was visiting. If I remember rightly the movie was the successful comedy Napoleon is to Blame for Everything. Instead of films he preferred recorded concerts of classical works or grand opera. He also frequently called in a first-rate amateur conjuror to put on a performance. These performances so captivated him that he issued a strict ban forbidding the newspapers from disillusioning the masses about the art of magic by publishing “explanatory” articles.
Around midnight—seldom earlier and often later—there began Hitler’s nightly gathering around the fireplace. During the last peacetime years this would take place after the movies had been shown; during the war, after the end of the military conference. Some fifteen to twenty persons, those I have already described, would assemble round him on the fireplace side of the main salon, in the circle of light cast by the flaming logs. The walls around the room glowed with the rich colors of classical paintings by German and Italian masters. Over the mantelpiece a madonna by an unknown Italian looked down upon the company. On the left was Feuerbach’s Nana and a portrait of King Henry, the “founder of cities,” holding compass and rule; on the right a female nude by Botticelli and the sea-nymphs from Böcklin’s Play of the Waves. In the dark background of the room the bronze bust of Richard Wagner seemed to come to life.
In the muted semidarkness it was again Hitler who held the floor, as he had done all day long; the rest of the company were largely listeners, there only to give him an excuse for talking. Yet I often had the impression that his mind was absent while he spoke, that his thoughts were elsewhere. Now and then, when the conversation lagged, Hitler would request reports from the OKW, the foreign office, or the press. He would then retire briefly to an adjoining room with one of his adjutants, if he thought it necessary to issue orders.
He seldom violated his basic principle that conversation here among the ladies must remain on the lighter side. This obviously feigned insouciance was a difficult attitude for many of the others to maintain during the grave crises of the latter years of the war. As a result some of them accepted invitations to the Berghof only when they were issued as express requests from Hitler, virtually command appearances. His adjutants were kept busy trying to fill the gaps in the dinner company and the fireplace gatherings whenever the ranks began to thin. Although these sessions often dragged on until dawn, Hitler never asked whether any of those present felt tired and wished to retire. This was his one failure in courtesy and consideration toward the ladies. Their time was their own only when Hitler rose and took his leave. To listen to him and stay by him until he thought he could sleep was the tribute which he unsparingly exacted of his guests.
Hitler certainly had innumerable opportunities for conversation with important and interesting people. I have never understood why he never made use of these opportunities. Instead, for years he abstained from anything which might have added to his personal experience. He remained perpetually in the same company, among the same faces, in the same atmosphere, and, I may almost say, in the same state of monotony and boredom, producing eternally the same speeches and declarations. Only the abnormality of his disposition can explain this.
Sometimes, at a very late hour, Hitler would turn his attention solely to the ladies who sat close by him and would engage them alone in a quiet, intimate conversation. The other persons in the room would talk in whispers in order not to disturb him. At such times a note of real human warmth would enter his voice. Aside from Eva Braun, this favored feminine circle included Frau Goebbels and Frau Ley. Fräulein von Laffert, who was part of his group in Berlin, and Unity Mitford, whom Hitler saw frequently in Munich, did not enter the Berghof circle.
Since Hitler’s death a great deal has been written about his alleged amours with actresses, dancers, and other women. If we wish to stick to the sober facts, these tales must be relegated to the realm of fable. Those so-called mistresses—whether in Berlin, Berchtesgaden, Munich, or elsewhere—were ladies who happened to attend the Führer’s evening parties whose pattern I have just described. There was no possibility for an affair under these conditions. Except for the time he spent with the woman whom he later married, there was hardly an hour in Hitler’s life when he was not surrounded with people. As for his intimacy with Eva Braun, this most personal of human relationships even the chronicler must respect; there his obligation to history stops.
In peacetime Hitler held an annual grand reception for the artists of the Reich, either in his apartment in the Chancellery in Berlin, or in the Führer’s Building in Munich. Only practicing artists were invited, not their wives or husbands. In addition, he frequently paid more or less private visits, accompanied only by a small entourage, to the building dedicated to the “comradeship of German artists” on Victoriastrasse in Berlin, and to the Künstlerhaus (Artists’ House) on Lembachplatz in Munich. At these places he would engage in free and easy conversation with women artists, and often men as well. At home he was usually glad to see artists who came to him to talk over professional or personal matters. In Berlin he frequently had afternoon tea with Leni Riefenstahl by his fireside, and would advise her about her film problems. He had the greatest respect for Maria Müller, Madame Ursuleac, and other great singers; he admired Henny Porten, considering her a splendid motion picture actress. When Brigitte Helm faced manslaughter charges for a fatal automobile accident, Hitler saw to it that the case was dropped. At Goebbels’ house he met Olga Tschechowa, Jenny Jugo, and many other actresses. Gossips whispered that he had intimate relations with all these women. The stories are utterly false.
Out of respect for them as genuine artists, Hitler furthered the interests of dancers and variety stars. For example, he had a law passed forbidding tightrope performances without a net. He wished to see ballet dancers elevated in the social scale and made a decree to this effect. He made Dinah Grace and other dancers perform specially for him at his home in Berlin. But in all these relationships he never overstepped the bounds of polite social behavior toward ladies. We cannot be so bigoted as to maintain that a chief of state has not as much right to the company of ladies as any ordinary citizen.
There is no doubt that Hitler had a weakness for women, but not in any morally reprehensible sense. He was gallant toward them, but restrained; an admirer but not a lover. As vegetarian and teetotaler Hitler was little inclined toward tête-à-têtes or dinners for two. The magnitude of his goals shut out the small pleasures of life—as his will to power excluded pettier vulgar aims. It must be said, however, that his relationship toward women had a dual aspect, like everything else in his life. He shunned publicity in regard to his private life; in the interests of the state and of his reputation, he kept his private life invisible. In public life—which was for him another plane—he put women into the uniform of the League of German Girls and the National Socialist Women’s Organization; he ordered them to stick to Kinder and Küche. But in private life he did not inquire into their political views; he liked to see women dress beautifully and expensively. Nevertheless, he was no Don Juan; rather, he was a queer sort of monk who rather enjoyed being suspected of many amours—although no one in his immediate circle ever noticed signs of such intimacies.
Whatever charges may be leveled against Hitler as man and politician, in the sphere of morality and in his personal relations with women no one can throw a stone at him. Hitler had a great many ardent followers among women. As a bachelor he received many fantastic love-letters, usually from somewhat elderly ladies. These letters, which often passed the bounds of discretion and good taste, were tactfully taken care of by his secretaries. He himself often said half jokingly, half seriously: “I cannot afford to marry; if I did I would lose half of my best and most loyal adherents.”
In the summer of 1944 the wedding of Eva Braun’s sister to Himmler’s liaison officer with Hitler, was celebrated at Salzburg and Berchtesgaden. Pictures taken from Hoffmann’s private collection have since been published in the newspapers. Taken together, they give the impression of a riotous revel. The facts about this affair are as follows.
Eva Braun had never fully reconciled herself to Hitler’s decision not to marry. Since she could never have a wedding of her own, she asked Hitler’s permission to arrange for a sizable celebration of her sister’s wedding. Hitler gave his assent, but he himself did not take part in the celebration. Instead, he only invited the couple to a simple lunch at his table, at which occasion he tendered his congratulations in a few suitable phrases. The ceremony itself was performed at Salzburg. The wedding party, to which a fair number of guests outside the immediate family were invited, was held at Bormann’s house on the Obersalzberg, and in the tea house eyrie. This wedding was the one party which was ever given up there. Some of the guests from Munich, including the actor Handschuhmacher, were killed a few days later during an air raid on Munich.
It is hard to imagine a more contrasting pair than Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. The ideal woman, according to Hitler’s ideas, should be tall and blonde, although he did not prize extreme slimness. Eva Braun had a very well-proportioned figure, but she was petite rather than tall, and brunette. Hitler would frequently take her to task for her passion for high-heeled shoes. Hitler’s mind was obsessed with weighty ideological problems; she, on the other hand, was a creature of pure emotion and joie de vivre. She always dressed becomingly and in the latest fashion, whereas he cared little about his outward appearance. Even in front of others she would frequently scold Hitler for his naturally ill-fitting uniforms and suits, and his drab ties. He always accepted such criticism with forebearing courtesy. Unlike Hitler, Eva Braun did not refrain from alcohol. She smoked heavily when he was not about and loved dancing, whereas he had a distinct aversion to social dancing and never set foot upon a dance floor. In spite of all these temperamental differences, the two apparently got along well; in the course of many years no serious disputes between them came to light. Eva Braun was not unintelligent. She belonged to no Party organizations—not actively, at any rate—and seldom or never said a word about politics. Undoubtedly she had an influence upon Hitler in social and cultural matters, especially in regard to the theater and the cinema, but none whatsoever in public and political life.
Nevertheless, I believe that Hitler paid a high price for not being married. He absolutely lacked any feeling about family life, his alienation from it extending even to the members of his own family. This went so far that, for example, his step-brother Alois Hitler, who ran a restaurant on Wittenbergplatz in Berlin, could never even be mentioned in Hitler’s presence. This absence of family ties severed him from the general run of mankind, for he could have no inner sympathy with the way normal people live. If he had been married, the influence of a wife, the raising of children, and the duties and cares attendant upon family life, might have provided him with a natural counterpoise to his one-sided political fanaticism. Participation in the natural and human aspects of life might have affected his work for the national community and guided his public activities into more moderate and fruitful channels. As it was, the violent impulsiveness of his will ranged on unchecked to the final catastrophe. He chose to remain single throughout life and married only on the point of death. That act rounded out the profound human tragedy which comprehended even his personal relations with women. Of the six women who stood in a close human relationship to him in his life, five died by suicide, or had attempted suicide.
As chief of state Hitler had to appear at state functions. These were the responsibility of his Staatssekretär and later Staatsminister Meissner. Meissner was assisted by a Chief of Protocol who was formally subordinate to the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
In peacetime the most important of these functions was the New Year reception for the Diplomatic Corps. It was regularly held in Berlin in the marble rooms of the New Chancellery, which were as grand in scale as they were handsome in their appointments. They had been designed by Speer especially for such official functions. For Hitler’s receptions as leader of the Party there was a set of rooms which duplicated those designed by Professor Troost in the Führer’s Building on Königlicher Platz in Munich. Since Hitler almost always spent the New Year holiday in the mountains, where the Berchtesgaden farmers fired cannon-salutes for him at midnight, he shifted the New Year reception for the diplomats from January 1 to January 10. The foreign ambassadors and ministers were happy about this change, since they preferred to have the New Year holiday free for personal trips. Hitler never thought these formal gatherings, with their prepared speeches, very fruitful politically. Afterwards he would often mention that some representatives of other Powers had attempted, while shaking hands with him, to bring up particular matters, but that he himself had either answered according to whim and the way the political winds were blowing at the moment, or had passed over the matter in silence.
Such formal receptions for heads of state and delegations considerably increased in frequency during the war as the result of the Anti-Comintern Pact and the Three Powers Pact. When the Axis was initially “forged” and put into energetic operation, ceremonial receptions were held in Vienna at the Palais Belvedere, that gay and beautiful summer palace built by the famous Austrian general Prince Eugene. Later on, since Hitler preferred staying in Berchtesgaden, he had Klessheim Palace near Salzburg furnished specially for that purpose. He did not consider his private house at Berchtesgaden the right place for large official functions.
Klessheim Palace could be reached from Berchtesgaden in half an hour by automobile. Situated just a few miles outside of Salzburg, it had been built by Fischer von Erlach as a pleasure palace for the prince-bishops of Salzburg, who had a penchant for the lighter sides of life. With its splendid park and the panoramic mountain views from its many terraces and lawns, it inspired all visitors with admiration for this beautiful corner of the world. The palace had last been a possession of the House of Hapsburg. A feeble-minded archduke had been confined there; he had died only a few years before Hitler took it over. Neo-Renaissance in style, the edifice had been planned for impressiveness. There was an imposing entrance drive and a grand stairway that dominated the facade. The reception hall on the first floor was a tremendous oval reaching up into the open vault of the roof. The living quarters, on the other hand, were so limited that when Hitler had guests only the chiefs of state themselves could be sheltered in the palace. Delegations and entourage lived in a somewhat distant outbuilding which had been equipped with all conveniences. Also built in the days of the prince-bishops was a charming little ladies’ pavilion in the shape of a four-leafed clover, tucked away in a quiet corner of the gardens. It was restored, and the first person to stay in it was the Italian ambassador Alfieri who enjoyed the reputation of being a great man for the ladies.
The state suite on the first floor of the palace—a suite containing only a salon and a bedroom—was at various times occupied by Mussolini, Horthy, King Boris, and others. Basking in the warm glow of political sunshine, taking their ease amid the sparkling circlet of mountains, it is no wonder that they felt optimistic when Hitler lectured them on the military situation in the small room behind the oblong dining hall, inspiring them with his own conviction of victory. But on other, later visits to the palace, they lay awake in that same state bedroom, while outside the tempests of the Salzburg mountains raged, through nights of evil premonitions and profound depression. For when the situation grew critical, the Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht would have summoned them only to conjure up for them the darkest prospects and demand ultimate efforts and sacrifices from their nations.
At table at Klessheim Palace I saw the Italian Duce. How well I remembered the southern emotionalism of his conversation with Hitler ten years before in Venice. Now he sat silent and hunched, a broken Caesar, letting Hitler’s torrent of words roll over his head. Here at the Palace I listened over afternoon coffee to the merry talk of the likable Bulgarian king. Boris was fond of driving locomotives, or taking the stick from the pilot of Hitler’s plane when it was sent to Sofia for him. He would jokingly speak of Hitler as “my Führer.” Here also I met the melancholy Norwegian Quisling and the slowmoving Tiso. On the afternoon of the first day of the Allied invasion I heard Göring, surrounded by the tense faces of men from many of the countries of Europe, expound for almost an hour on the hopeful prospects—a mobile German armored division was going to save the situation. Goebbels, meanwhile, stood in the circle with a look half of relief, half of doubt. And in the main hall of the palace I saw the seventy-year-old Admiral Horthy, ordinarily so charming and lighthearted, come from his apartment in a mood of deadly earnest. Resisting Hitler’s demands, he ordered his special train to be made ready for departure. The train was delayed on account of “technical difficulties”; it did not leave until many eventful hours later, when Horthy declared his willingness to recognize the situation for what it was and act accordingly.
A separate railroad station had been built for this palace, so that the special trains could come directly to it. Guests who came by plane landed at the Salzburg airfield. Before the annexation of Austria Hitler had built the airport of Ainring near Freilassing for his own use when he wished to come by plane to Berchtesgaden. It also served a military purpose. Unless there were compelling reasons for leaving at a particular time, Hitler made a great point of flying only in perfect weather. He would not take off until reports had come in of uniformly favorable weather along his entire route. His last plane was a four-motored Focke-Wulff Condor specially built for him; under his seat was a trapdoor for parachute jumps, and the window wall could be opened by a special, patented handle. Before this plane, he had used a Junkers 52 for ten years; he considered it the most reliable commercial plane in the world until his pilot talked him into discarding “that old crate.”
During the last years of the war there was much talk that Hitler was preparing to escape by plane to Japan or Spain. Was there anything to these stories? Only persons completely ignorant of Hitler’s nature can imagine him guilty of personal cowardice. As for having any intentions to flee, as long as I was a member of his entourage, which was until March 30, 1945, that shameful idea never entered his mind, let alone crossed his lips. His pilot was at his disposal in Berlin up to the very last day. Hitler did not require his services; he never considered fleeing from Berlin.
When Hitler was at Berchtesgaden with the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the army chief of staff would remain behind at his field headquarters. As soon as the military situation demanded, the chief of staff would request his return. Then Hitler and the generals would take off from Salzburg airport to fly back to the field headquarters. For security reasons Hitler never announced beforehand the time of his departure from Berchtesgaden, not even in peacetime. It always took place suddenly, a wild flurry that was over within two hours. Hitler’s special train, which he used far more frequently than the plane, always stood ready and under steam at the railroad station in Berchtesgaden or in some hidden spot nearby. Usually Hitler ’s private guests used this train to return from the Berghof to Munich, and sometimes went right along with him to Berlin. In that case the customary nightly tea and conversation at the fireplace would be held or continued in his saloon car.
This special train comprised some ten or twelve specially outfitted cars. Behind the locomotive and bringing up the rear of the train were two anti-aircraft cars armed with 2 cm. cannon. They never had occasion to go into action while Hitler was aboard the train. Hitler’s living quarters consisted of a saloon paneled in walnut, with twelve seats around a table, a sleeping compartment, and an adjoining bath compartment. Sleeping compartments for adjutants and servants filled out the rest of this car. Adjoining it was the military car which contained a large room for the situation conferences, and compartments for radio communications and teletypes. Behind this were four or five large sleeping cars and two dining cars in which were housed the OKW, all Hitler’s permanent companions and co-workers, and his temporary guests. During the last years, when the OKW was aboard this train for months, a special bathing car with baths and showers was added. At the tail end, before the service car, was a special car equipped with more radios and teletypes so that press messages could be received without interruption. In order to camouflage Hitler’s movements, these press reports were continuously sent out from Berlin on a special wave length even when Hitler had not been on the train for months.
When this special train made a halt somewhere, it was often housed in railroad tunnels for protection against planes. Hitler used the train for his headquarters throughout the Polish campaign and the Balkan war of 1941. In it he rode all across France to Montoire, where he met with Pétain; he traveled in it as far as the Pyrenees and the Bridge at Irun, where he had conversations with Franco in the latter’s own special train. During the battle for Berlin it was placed in a forest near Rosenheim in Bavaria. There, early in May 1945, after having been bombed heavily by low-flying planes, it fell into the hands of American troops.
Berlin had been the first city in North Germany that Hitler visited; it was also to be the city in which he spent his last moments. In 1917, after having lost his Austrian citizenship by entering the German army, he was at his own request given a furlough to Berlin; when he made out his leave certificate, he claimed no family relationships. He wanted to see the metropolis of the Reich, the city of his heart, the city that he had already chosen as the field of battle where his ideas were to win victory. For while it is generally believed that Hitler’s interest turned to politics only during the Revolution of 1918, this was not the case. In June 1940, when Hitler revisited his old frontline positions and resting areas in the vicinity of Lille, where he had been posted in 1915, several comrades from his old company pointed out to me the garden arbor of a certain house where the eccentric young soldier had spouted his ideas to them, ideas which he later so forcefully developed to a larger public. As if in confirmation of their story the modest living room of that same French home displayed a photograph of Hitler in uniform taken in 1915.
On his first visit to Berlin Hitler wandered through the museums and drank in the life of the city. But he was very much disappointed by its architectural qualities. Before he became master of the Reich in 1933 he seriously considered the possibilities of making Munich the capital of the Reich, or else building an entirely new seat of government somewhere in the heart of Germany. The pressing economic and political problems which were thrust upon him as soon as he took office frustrated these plans. But the architect in Hitler had long before conceived of a gigantic reconstruction of the metropolis, and from the first day of his government this vast new city plan became a major point in his cultural program.
A mighty north-south avenue starting at the Brandenburger Tor was to complement the existing east-west axis and form the focal point for the reshaping of Berlin. All railroads were to be diverted from the heart of the city and concentrated in a single central railroad terminal at the southern end of the new boulevard, where the new government quarter would also be built. Hitler also intended to enlarge the gauge of the German railroads from 1.4 to the enormous width of more than 3 meters. This change would, he believed, so increase speed, safety, and capacity that the efficiency of the railroads would at one stroke be multiplied many times over. Two-story passenger cars were to be built, and freight cars so enlarged that the contents of a single freight train would fill the holds of a 10,000 ton freight steamer.
In regard to his transformation of the capital, Hitler once remarked: “Ten years from now no one will be able to say he knows the wonders of the world unless he has seen our new Berlin.” He never suspected, when he said these words, in what a sense they would come true. Megalomaniac that he was, he thought he could impose the wild schemes of his artistic imagination not only on the city of Berlin but upon the sober and dead-earnest sphere of military power-politics. His Berlin was going to be a city like no other. What prophetic words! As a result of the fantastic development of modern air warfare, Berlin was smashed into prodigious ruins which do not have their like anywhere on earth. This visionary statesman who thought himself blessed among men never saw as far as this.
In 1940 Hitler visited Paris for the one and only time in his life. He stayed just three hours. At six o’clock in the morning he drove through the almost deserted city, went to the tomb of Napoleon, and looked down upon the city from the Eiffel Tower. In his plane on the way back he remarked that he had been little impressed by the Champs Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Place de la Concorde; he had imagined them far grander and more magnificent. Later I heard that he immediately afterwards made some changes in the general city plan for Berlin, widening the grand boulevard from 40 to 120 meters.
Hitler’s relationship to monarchy and the development of his attitude toward it is closely linked with his stays in Berlin. A number of hitherto unrecorded facts will throw light on that aspect of his thinking.
Born and raised in Austria, the son of an official, Hitler was early taught to think in terms of a Greater Germany. Nevertheless, he remained inwardly more or less rooted in tradition; his attitudes were conditioned by an underlying conservatism. In November 1918 he had been unable to endorse the overthrow of royal dynasties and princely houses which had played such a glorious part in German history. This was a point he often stressed. Nevertheless, for all his hatred of German Social Democracy, he unconditionally agreed with its liquidation of the petty states which had made a patchwork quilt of Germany. That was, in his mind, a significant historic act.
Before the first balloting for the presidential election in 1932 Hitler wavered for a long time trying to select the National Socialist candidate who would oppose Hindenburg. Suddenly the name of the German crown prince bobbed up. There was a first-class sensation when Gregor Strasser produced a cavalry captain who declared he had come from the former crown prince who wished to offer himself as a candidate. But the negotiations came to nothing because Hitler then decided to enter the arena and run himself.
During the election campaign in Mecklenburg in that same year, behind-the-scenes negotiations with Schleicher had progressed to such a point that Hitler was expected to take over the government at any moment. Late one night Hitler sat with Goebbels and a small group of other persons in the living room of the manor house at Severin Estate, his headquarters at this time. Exhausted by the many meetings that had been held during the day, Hitler dozed off. While the others were sitting in silence he suddenly started up, as if waking from a dream, and said abruptly in all seriousness to Goebbels: “But then I will not have you making me an emperor or king!” Goebbels, usually so glib-tongued, stammered a few embarrassed words, and the subject was dropped.
Prince August Wilhelm of the House of Hohenzollern was an active storm trooper. In 1932 Hitler was a guest at his house in Potsdam several times. He also met the prince’s likable sixteen-year-old son Alexander. One evening when Hitler was returning from Potsdam to Berlin he informed us that he intended to make Prince Alexander the successor to Kaiser Wilhelm II. In the next few months he spoke of this idea several times as if it were an established plan. After he came to power in 1933 he never mentioned the matter again. Thereafter his relationship with Prince August Wilhelm cooled, in fact became distinctly unfriendly. He stopped addressing the prince as “Royal Highness,” as he had formerly done, told others that the prince was too much of a pusher, no longer issued invitations to him, and forbade his adjutant to have anything to do with him. This rather irrational change in his conduct toward the prince was indicative of a sudden shift in his monarchist views. He began making more and more spiteful remarks against the prince and the nobility as soon as he felt sure of the power he now held. Earlier he had not disdained the help of such people; as soon as he felt that he had won the people’s favor, he grew cold toward the nobility. There were other causes for his change of heart. He smarted from certain petty personal slights on the part of members of the House of Hohenzollern. In the political salon of a noble lady of his acquaintance he was one day unexpectedly introduced to the former Empress Hermine—and was thoroughly discomfited by the deep court curtseys made by all the ladies present. Then, shortly before he took power, he was invited to tea at the home of Crown Princess Cäcilie. Later a servant of the household let him know that after his departure the crown princess had ordered all the windows to be opened “so that the stench of those creatures will leave the house with them.”
These personal experiences may have helped alter his attitude toward monarchy. The primary fact is, however, that immediately after taking power Hitler threw overboard all his political and social ballast. He changed from head to foot and adopted the guise which had meanwhile been made ready for him, that of tribune of the people. On his very first visit to Venice he expressed regret that Mussolini had not had the courage to throw out the House of Savoy. Royalty put all kinds of checks on his personal regime, Hitler said, and represented a latent peril to fascism.
During the crisis in the British royal family Hitler passionately sided with the Prince of Wales, reproaching him only for not fighting the thing through and, supported by the sympathetic working class, making the government and the traditions of the Royal House “bow to reason.” However, he strictly forbade the German press to intervene in any way. With his characteristic extremism he even banned all news stories, in order to keep or win the sympathies of the British Government at a time when he himself was busy rearming Germany.
Hitler’s aversion to crowned heads increased during the political developments that preceded the Balkan campaign, and developed into intense hatred when Italy deserted the cause. For King Boris of Bulgaria alone he felt sincere liking. King Boris died shortly after a visit to Hitler’s headquarters, and it was rumored that Hitler had had him poisoned. In view of the harmony I observed between the two men during this last visit, and of the many cordial and friendly remarks Hitler made about the king after his departure, these stories are absurd. On the contrary, Hitler was much depressed by the news of Boris’s death. In fact, he accused the “queen and her court clique” of having committed political assassination by poisoning.
The middle-class atmosphere of the city of Berlin always remained distasteful to Hitler. Completely at ease as he was in Munich, during all the time he held power he never went to public places of entertainment in Berlin, except for theaters and concert halls. In 1933 he did have tea several times in the lobby of the Hotel Kaiserhof, but then he was frightened off by the dubious tale someone told him that in his absence the chairs he had sat in were rented out to elderly spinsters. His private life in the capital centered almost entirely upon the home and family of Goebbels. Hitler was a witness at Goebbels’s wedding and as early as 1932 was virtually a daily guest in the Goebbels’s flat on the square later known as Adolf Hitler Platz, or at their summer cottage in Caputh. Later on he went with them to Kladow and Schwanenwerder. Cruises on Wannsee in Goebbels’s small motor yacht were among the few purely personal recreations Hitler was capable of.
Goebbels put Hitler in touch with the theatrical and cinema set of Berlin, and people from this set often made up the party for the evening film showings and the fireplace gatherings in his apartment. Aside from a few obligatory visits to Göring at Karinhall and later on somewhat more frequent visits to Dr. Ley, Hitler had no other social life in Berlin.
Hitler’s apartment in Berlin was at 71 Wilhelmstrasse, on the first and second floors of the old Chancellery. Hindenburg had lived there for a few months during the reconstruction of the presidential palace. When Hitler moved in, Hindenburg warned him to “tread carefully”; in the course of the years, the stairs had become distinctly rickety and the floors were beginning to give. Hitler used to become quite indignant over the fact that the Prussian kings had assigned as a residence for their premiers and later their chancellors the building which had been used for their royal stables. He himself promptly had Bismarck’s apartment rebuilt, with no respect whatsoever for its historical associations. It was also newly furnished in a severe classicist style, with interesting color schemes by Munich interior decorators. Hitler himself made sketches for the new furniture. After the completion of the New Chancellery the reception room and study on the ground floor were converted into a large auditorium for movies. Toward the back a spacious glassed-in porch was built, and adjoining it, for state receptions, a huge and dramatic dining hall with mighty columns of red marble. In the Chancellery garden Hitler ruthlessly ordered the cutting-down of the venerable oaks and beeches which Bismarck had loved. The trees had grown infirm, but a great many people were sorry to see them go. In their place Hitler had a fountain and pool constructed in the middle of the lawn. On the other hand, he fed the squirrels which made their way over from the nearby Tiergarten and trustfully came almost to the door of the apartment. No Providence and no sixth sense warned him in those promising years of peace that only a few years later he himself would find his grave among the roots of those historic trees, roots churned up by bombs and shells.
Hitler’s private apartment, consisting of a study, a library, a bedroom, and a guestroom, adjoined the historic hall where the Congress of Berlin had been held. During the war, when he had his headquarters in Berlin, he would go from this apartment at noon, as soon as he got up, to the Congress Hall where the maps were already spread out and the generals were awaiting him for the situation conference. In that hall during the winter of 1939-40 his first plans for the campaign in France took shape. Here, too, in all probability—since this was where he planned his strategy—the ideas for the Norwegian campaign, the Balkan war, and the ill-fated Russian adventure were first born in his mind. Today it seems like the hand of Fate that the first of the bombs which struck the Chancellery in 1944 fell upon this historic chamber and smashed it completely.
When Hitler first moved into Wilhelmstrasse in 1933, he went about his unaccustomed tasks with diligence and punctuality. As long as Hindenburg was virtually his neighbor—their offices were separated only by those of the Foreign Office—Hitler appeared at his desk every morning at ten o’clock. He regularly, though reluctantly, conducted cabinet meetings; at that time he did not yet have a majority in the cabinet and had to accept compromises, infuriating though these were to him. For that reason he later on called cabinet meetings more and more rarely, and after 1937 not at all. Before and during the entire war he scornfully referred to the cabinet as a “club of defeatists.” During the first days of his government he also attended the meetings of the Reichsrat and made a speech to that body. But when the representative of Prussia committed the sin of raising an objection to something he had said, he never again allowed the Reichsrat to meet. In the Reichstag he engaged in one blazing verbal battle with the deputies of the various parties and bullied them into passing the Ermächtigungsgesetz, the Enabling Act giving his administration the power to pass legislation. Thereafter he no longer needed the Reichstag. The new Reichstag, whose election he ordered, was only a farce; Hitler personally drew up the list of candidates. Henceforth the Reichstag was to be merely a sounding board for his declarations on domestic and foreign policy.
He called the leaders of industry to the Chancellery for a conference in which they were to set forth their views. Afterwards he remarked that it had amused him to see how each of these supposed captains of industry had recommended something different—usually the opposite of what the previous speaker had proposed—as the only right economic policy. Amid this confusion, he said, it had been easy for him to put across his own opinion and his own authoritarian conception, and he had then sent the lot of them packing.
At the beginning of his administration he attended a press conference for the first and last time, accompanied by Funk, who was then his press chief. Feeling his position still insecure, he wanted to introduce himself to the press as the new chief of state, and to make a gesture of good will. But it never remotely occurred to him to establish anything like real contact with the press, such as President Roosevelt and other heads of government maintained on an almost daily basis, for the good of their country. He considered it beneath his dignity to explain the reasons for his acts to journalists, to argue or even to discuss anything before the public. In spite of many requests he could never be induced to hold any regular press conferences. He gave a few interviews, the subject matter of which was outlined beforehand, if he thought they would help his reputation. In Berlin and in Nuremberg during the Party Day he would briefly receive accredited representatives of the foreign press, and after repeated urgings he once invited German journalists to the Führer’s Building in Munich. He ruthlessly demanded the utmost of the journalists, for they were supposed to rally the people to supreme fulfillment of their duties. But he never opened his mind to them or recognized that they had any kind of intellectual mission or responsibility.
At the end of 1933 Hindenburg, whose health was failing, retired to East Prussia. That was the end of Hitler’s hard-working schedule. He once more returned to his habit of rising at noon and during the day entered his offices only for important receptions. All other work was taken care of in his apartment as he stalked about his rooms, dropping a word here and a word there, settling important matters in the most casual fashion.
I describe an incident from my own career because it is typical of Hitler’s way of running a government. In September 1937, when Schacht resigned, Funk was promoted from press chief to minister of economics. News of this shift had not yet been made public. Before lunch, about 1:30 P.M., I entered Hitler’s apartment in the Chancellery and passed the fireplace room on my way to another room. Hitler was standing at a big marble-topped table, pen in hand. He was signing papers. Seeing me passing, he gestured to me to come over to him. Without interrupting his work, he said abruptly to me—he had never sounded me on this question at all—“I have just appointed you Staatssekretär. Minister Goebbels has not yet signed the appointment, but he will sign, you can depend on that.” Whereupon he shook hands with me and without another word went on signing the documents, while his adjutant blotted each signature.
This rather tart remark about Goebbels, who would have liked to block my appointment, requires explanation. At this particular time Hitler was on bad terms with Goebbels because of Goebbels’s family difficulties arising out of his involvement with the Czech movie actress Lida Baarova. Not wanting public scandal, he had forbidden Frau Goebbels to sue for divorce. Those few months were the only time during which Hitler’s friendship with Goebbels was strained. At all other times Hitler praised Goebbels for his talents as an orator (he really had a great gift for demagogy), publicly hailed him as his greatest friend, and backed up his hysterical theatricality.
Hitler’s personnel policies were as high-handed as this story indicates. The idea of anyone’s “accepting” an office did not exist for him, any more than anyone could resign without his permission. Hitler recognized only unconditional submission to whatever he himself defined as duty to the nation.
Adjoining the room with fireplace and red plush carpets, which Hitler preferred for floor-covering in all his rooms, was his dining room. It too was the scene of historic table-talk, especially in times of peace. During the war years such non-official gatherings were transferred to the casino at Hitler ’s headquarters, wherever that happened to be at the moment. The dining room in the Chancellery was a plain, whitewashed room. It contained a long sideboard that Hitler himself had designed. One entire wall was covered by a colossal painting of Aurora, the Dawn, driving through the clouds in the heavenly chariot, accompanied by a large entourage. In the center of the room was a generous-sized round table which seated fifteen persons. Fifteen red armchairs would be drawn up to this table between four and six o’clock in the afternoon, and between eight and ten o’clock at night, these being the usual hours for meals. The members of this “Round Table” were almost entirely male, and changed frequently. Some persons were constantly present in their official capacities. Others were members of the government or the Party whom Hitler had had in for a conference. The casual visitors might be ministers, gauleiters, ambassadors, generals, artists, or economists. Göring seldom stayed; Goebbels came over from his ministry on Wilhelmsplatz almost every day. Not infrequently, guests, after waiting for Hitler for several hours, would take their leave before the meal simply because they were too hungry to wait any longer.
Here in the Chancellery—in contrast to the Berghof—the table-talk was political; it centered around current social, economic, cultural, or foreign affairs as often as around general subjects. But here too Hitler held the floor. It is difficult to define the peculiar quality of these gatherings. No other dinner parties or luncheon parties I have ever attended were like these meals in the Chancellery. No one at this table felt free. In the atmosphere that surrounded Hitler people who were naturally vital and interesting individuals were transformed into taciturn listeners. People were abashed and remained in their shells, while Hitler spoke and bound them with the words and gestures he had tried and tested a thousand times before. Habitués of the circle knew that the conditions of discussion were unfair; there was no question of equal rights between Hitler and his table companions. Consequently, Hitler’s well-known views alone were aired; there was seldom a profitable exchange of ideas. The visitors let Hitler talk; they themselves contributed nothing. The exception was Goebbels. As Gauleiter of Berlin and propaganda minister he would toss cues to Hitler during the conversation, would take up Hitler’s ideas, carry them still further, and take advantage of the opportunity to obtain oral decisions from Hitler on the most diverse matters. If Hitler did not speak and Goebbels did not put in his oar, there were often prolonged, embarrassed silences which the host expected to be broken by the interjection of jokes. The photographer Hoffmann would then tell South German jokes and Viennese anecdotes about “Count Bobby.” Or Goebbels would repeat the latest political witticisms in Berlin jargon—though he made a point of picking only the innocuous stories and those that were about Göring and not himself. Göring was magnanimous and maintained a private collection of jokes about himself. The person of Hitler was always sacrosanct. During meals Hitler had a habit of chatting with his household steward, who was a typical Berlin “original”; this man had formerly worked at the well-known outdoor restaurant Onkel Toms Hütte (Uncle Tom’s Cabin). The steward often provided humor and a kind of low-level entertainment that relaxed and amused his guests.
One day at this table I had the following experience. It was the birthday of one of the adjutants. Goebbels, wishing to embarrass me, whispered to Hitler that I should be asked to stand up and deliver a birthday speech. Hitler fell in with the idea; he wrote a few words on a place card and passed me a categorical written command to stand up and speak. But Goebbels was fooled. I improvised a fairly nice little speech and managed to come out of the affair tolerably well. Moreover I took my revenge by making the whole table stand up twice to toast the health of the adjutant. . . .6
Hitler ’s humor at table was forced, not to say savage. Other characteristics of his also came to the fore on these occasions. He would criticize judicial verdicts, from which he would then go on to vent his hatred of men of law. He also sometimes discussed his right of amnesty. There were certain crimes which he chose to think well of, especially those concerning women or poaching or other actions which he felt sprang from the “sound instincts of the people.” In such cases he would intervene, and see that only petty punishments were meted out. But most of the time he was not in favor of leniency; rather, his harsh outlook emerged.
There was, for example, the case of a confidence man who claimed he could distill gasoline out of water and even sold his idea to several prominent personages. Then there was a chemist who claimed he could make gold out of lead. Hitler ordered these men to be imprisoned “until they can make gasoline and gold.”
The general conclusion Hitler invariably drew was: “What we as a nation need is not softness and sentimental weakness, but hardness and ruthlessness.” “Praised be what makes us hard”—this was his thesis. He hoped to breed toughness in the German people, who, he maintained, had hitherto taken too passive an attitude in the battle of life.
Hitler’s personal unpretentiousness, his exterior simplicity, have often been taken as the reflection of inner modesty. In fact he was far from modest in his estimate of himself. He made it abundantly clear that he considered himself one of the very great men of history and used to speak, though with a pretence of irony, about the monuments that would be erected to him. I once happened to make a remark about the advantages of a modest demeanor, and mentioned the aphorism attributed to Moltke, “Be more than you seem.” Hitler promptly retorted that any such modesty in great men could only spring from an “inadequate consciousness of their own value” and an “unbecoming sense of inferiority.” He also corrected me on a point of fact, saying that the phrase was not Moltke’s, that it had been used by Schueffen in his memorial address on Moltke to characterize the deceased general. A check-up proved that Hitler was right.
An understanding of human beings has always been considered one of the prime requirements for the politician and statesman. In the course of years I observed a lack of such understanding in Hitler which was at least as great as his prodigious belief in his own penetration. Persons whom he had grown accustomed to over the years he would as a rule not allow to leave his side. He drew new members into his entourage only if they had been around him so much that they had gradually grown into his peculiar life. In general his judgments about people were purely arbitrary.
He had respect for creative achievements; at any rate he proclaimed that he had. But he hailed people with above-average talents as great geniuses just because they happened to be successful and lucky at the moment. And he prematurely condemned persons of merit because they had not achieved popularity and were not serving his ends of the moment. His attitude resembled Napoleon’s in this respect. The story goes that an officer once wanted to enter Napoleon’s service. Questioned about his military career, he explained that unfortunately he had had a good deal of bad luck in the past. Napoleon replied that he could not use officers with whom bad luck was a habit. Hitler had the greatest scorn for boasters on the side of his enemies, but he himself was an easy mark for such individuals, provided that they flattered him or seemed ready to do what he wanted.
Hitler ’s opinion of the capabilities of various persons would vacillate wildly over the years. Wind-bags and incompetents he would hail as men of remarkable ability, and heap them with honors. Years later, when these same people had shown of what poor stuff they were made, he would cry damnation upon them and discover that they were really just the opposite of what he’d earlier said. And on the other hand he would dismiss others, especially his opponents, as political charlatans, lily-livered rascals, and puffed-up nonentities. It would take years of grim experience to prove to him that they were nothing of the kind. When I think over the ideas he had about people, I can only say that the sure instinct which he so prided himself on failed him in nine cases out of ten.
A few words of explanation may be necessary. It is well known that Hitler ’s cult of personality, the great stress he laid upon individuals, was one of the most important branches of his philosophy. As a socialist Hitler made much of the idea of the “folk community.” But for himself as an individual there was something far more vital than the community-feeling: the individuality of the Herrenmensch, the man born to be a master. Personality is rooted in individualism; community in sense of the group. To strike a balance between the two and join them in a creative unity was the great aim of Hitler’s doctrine. But it also became the great problem of his life, and the one he failed to solve. In going into this matter we touch upon ultimates, upon the underlying character of Hitler.
Personality can be considered a social concept, for it operates effectively only in the community. (That is, a person is a personality only insofar as he has accomplished something for the community; prestige is, as it were, conferred by the community. Otherwise a man may be an original, an eccentric, a virtuoso, or something of the sort, but not a personality.) Suppose then, that a man’s greatness has been acknowledged by the community. The man is still of the community and as such cannot place himself outside and above it. He cannot compel the community to serve as the object of his personal need for domination—even if he should disguise that compulsion in the mythical trappings of fervent nationalism. Hitler was incapable of subordinating the forces of his own ego to the community which he had created. He arrogated to himself the right to be sole master; all others were to serve. On the plane of daily life he proclaimed the principle of community: the common good comes before the good of the individual. But in the sphere of the highest leadership he placed his personal drive to dominate far above the welfare of the people. Therein was revealed the flaw in his system. In his own person the two worlds of individual and community collided, and since he was too domineering to recognize his obligations to the community, the two worlds broke against each other.
The problem of all philosophical knowledge is that of the relationship of subject to object—that is, the incapacity of human beings as parts of the universe to place themselves above this universe as knowing subjects. In the sphere of national order Hitler, too, faced this problem. He wanted the impossible, but not even he could jump over his own shadow. His imperious nature could not strike a compromise between the individual and the community. At the very bottom of his soul the dualism of his character could not be overcome, and its effects were radiated outward for all to see.
His egocentricity operated strikingly in his treatment of people around him. No one in the vicinity of Hitler stood a chance of developing into a personality in his own right. Passionate subjectivist that Hitler was, he had no understanding or sympathy for objectivity. Again and again he stressed that he wanted to cleanse the minds of the German people of all “objectivity nonsense” and educate them to subjective thinking. He was the purest subjectivist imaginable, for he evaluated people solely by the standard of their usefulness to his ends. That alone explains his disastrous misjudgments, and the wild ups-and-downs of his favors.
Göring, who during the First World War had been a good fighter pilot, and who later was not a bad politician, was hailed by Hitler as the greatest genius in military aviation. Ten years later, when Göring could no longer deliver victories, Hitler decided that he was the greatest failure on record. Ribbentrop, who was stupid and gauche, touchy and servile, and who went about like a miniature edition of his master, wearing the expression of a frustrated Caesar, was a favorite of Hitler’s. His obstinacy was proverbial. Once he had determined on a course, however misguided, nothing could budge him.
Hitler always judged Goebbels accurately. He recognized him as a person with a unique talent for oratory, admired his “gift of gab,” and made use of it to the end.
Ley was a garrulous dullard, the type of German much in evidence during the last ten years, who had not a thought of his own and did not want to have any, and who “worshipped” Hitler. Hitler called him his “greatest idealist.”
Himmler toadied up to Hitler intellectually. From my observation of him, the man had distinct traces of insanity. Hitler had a ridiculously high opinion of him. Only at the very end, after Himmler had vainly tried his hand at being a soldier and had failed as organizer of the last resistance, did Hitler recognize him for what he was, a “blank and a disappointment.”
Koch he called his best gauleiter and Speer his most competent minister. Bormann, his secretary and Party manager, the unseen organizer of his private life, the witness at his wedding, and at the last the director of his funeral, Hitler characterized as his “most loyal Party comrade.”
His testament affords the clearest proof that he was wrong about people down to his last breath.
His grotesque verdicts upon his contemporaries and opponents in international affairs, verdicts which he would burst out with during table-talk, now have only historical interest.
He had Chamberlain labeled as the prototype of the hide-bound British conservative. He felt himself affronted because the British prime minister would not grant him hegemony on the continent and would not make a deal with him on a land-and-sea partnership between England and Germany. After Godesberg he was furious with Chamberlain, whose efforts to keep peace on the continent he denounced as betrayal and fraud. On the whole, however, he admired the British Tories and their skill at governing throughout the world. He never ceased to hope that British conservatism would eventually become his ally in Europe.
Churchill he hated as the greatest antagonist of his life, a man whose whole style of life was diametrically opposed to his own. Churchill’s earlier life as a war correspondent, writer, and critic aroused antipathy and feelings of rivalry in Hitler, the orator, and he would rant against Churchill on this account. Oddly enough, he was enraged at the idea that Churchill sold his articles for large sums—although Hitler himself, when the “Movement” was in need, had accepted payments of several thousand dollars for his interviews with American journalists. Churchill, so fond of good living and good whisky, with his inevitable cigar in his mouth, was an offence in the eyes of Hitler, the anti-smoker and teetotaler. When he heard that Churchill was in the habit of dictating in the mornings from his bathroom, and when he saw a picture of Churchill bent over a prayer-book, praying for victory, he became absolutely rabid.
I always handed him the texts as well as the summary of Churchill’s stirring wartime speeches. Hitler read them carefully, and I gathered from his entirely superficial and irrelevant remarks that he secretly admired them. But he would never discuss them in any serious way. Since the majority of his associates showed they were impressed by these speeches, Hitler himself preserved an icy silence on the subject. He would only pick away violently at random weak points in the speeches. He could not bring himself to admit that Churchill had the qualities of a great man. Before the war Churchill had once received a gauleiter of Hitler’s in his London studio and had said, “Your Führer will be the greatest statesman in Europe if he preserves the peace of the world.” Peace had not been preserved. In the war with Germany the same Churchill who had hurled imprecations against Bolshevism formed an alliance with Stalin against Hitler. For this maneuver Hitler so detested Churchill that objective judgment was out of the question.
Roosevelt was, to Hitler’s mind, merely the capitalistic tool of “international Judaism”—Bolshevist Moscow being the other, the proletarian end of this conspiracy. To expose and defeat this doublebarreled international plot was, he felt, the mission of his life. With each presidential election in America, he hoped to see Roosevelt trounced. Sooner than provide Roosevelt with anything which would be useful to his cause, he forbade the German press and the German radio to attack Roosevelt during the election campaigns against Willkie and Dewey. Roosevelt’s sudden death aroused in Hitler one of his last hopes, and to this he clung almost up to his own death.
With Stalin Hitler felt a certain sense of solidarity, although he appraised the Russian’s personality differently depending on his own political direction of the moment. As the high priest of Marxism and the enemy of his own ideology, Stalin was someone to be hated. After the nonaggression pact, Hitler was full of praise for his ally. When Stalin became his deadly foe again, he did not stop respecting him, but he refused to say a good word for him.
Mussolini was Hitler’s great love in politics. He honored the Duce as a great friend, a man of his own stature. He called him a “genuine Roman Caesar,” and considered their community of interest a pledge of loyal friendship. After 1934 when their relationship became an entirely cordial one, Hitler more and more drew Mussolini under the spell of his own demonic personality. His psychological hold over Mussolini was such that the Italian was a will-less tool in his hand. But in the international sphere I always considered Mussolini a moderating influence upon Hitler. During the Sudeten crisis Mussolini interceded at the eleventh hour; it was he who arranged the Munich conference. He tried to restrain Hitler in his conflict with Poland, and attempted to hold Hitler back before the campaign against France. Then he too was swept away by the Hitler successes. After his fall and his rescue by Hitler, he was nothing but a living wreck; he scarcely spoke a word at table and was utterly submissive to Hitler. Mussolini’s terrible death in Milan was very much in Hitler’s mind when he resolved to put an end to his own life.
Upon Victor Emmanuel, whose guest in the Quirinal he was at one time, Hitler concentrated all his dislike for kings.
Horthy he valued as a person, but could not really like because of his deep-seated prejudice against Hungarians.
Antonescu struck him as a great political figure. His subsequent disillusionment with the man was as great as his over-estimation had been.
After meeting Franco on the Spanish border in 1940, Hitler no longer thought very well of him.
Hitler had a place in his heart for the “old fighters” in his Party. He went on cherishing many of them long after there was any reason for him to do so. On the other hand, there were many instances in which he was altogether unjust and ungrateful. For example, he made an ugly scene about a trivial blunder in the service at table, jumped on his adjutant Brückner for it, and dismissed the man. Brückner had stood at his side day and night, through bad times and good, for more than ten years. Another time Hitler flew into a fury in Dessau because the Hitler Youth were marching in the wrong place in a parade. He turned upon his constant companion of twenty years, Schaub, who had the ill luck to be standing right behind him, and reduced his rank in the SS then and there in the presence of the crowd—although Schaub had nothing whatsoever to do with the incident.
One certainly had the feeling that Hitler was bothered by inferiority complexes. These would be revealed on social and diplomatic occasions. During his second visit to Italy, when he was invited to the Royal Palace in Naples, the chief court marshal made what Hitler thought was an international slip-up in the arrangements. Hitler had saluted the crowd in his ordinary street clothes. On his way to change for the evening reception, he was obliged to pass by the guests who had already arrived. Hitler made a veritable international incident out of his having been given no time to change his clothes, and demanded a formal apology. Before that, in Rome, he had made a similar fuss, this time out of solidarity with the Duce. In reviewing the parades from the platform, Mussolini was supposed to stand behind the female members of the Royal House, while Hitler was to be given a place of honor in front. Hitler declared that he would not accept this place of honor when Mussolini was given a subsidiary place. Mussolini had to stand beside Hitler himself or beside the king.
Early in March 1945 an American bomb destroyed Hitler’s dining room. It struck the table toward noon, putting a definitive end to that “Round Table.”
Directly behind the dining room a stairway led down to the underground bunker which Hitler had ordered built for himself. There in the months of March and April 1945 the last act of the drama was played.
Some fifteen to twenty narrow steps, with several interposing gastight doors, separated this bunker from the street level. It was an underground cavern in the truest sense of the word. There Hitler’s collapse took place. In striking contrast to the large, colorful rooms which he loved, those in the bunker were small, boxlike chambers painted a chalky white. His private quarters, a living room and bedroom, were situated at the lowest spot in the shelter, directly underneath the marble columns of the opulent dining hall where he had spent so much of his time in the years of peace, flanked by the highest dignitaries of Germany and foreign countries.
The bunker contained a somewhat larger reception room, where Hitler conferred during those last weeks with the generals of the army and air force, the admirals and officers of the OKW, who had continued to meet in his splendid offices in the New Chancellery up to February. Now the maps were spread out on a simple table between those four austere white walls. Hitler himself received reports from individuals in a tiny square concrete box hardly large enough to hold six persons. It too could be closed by a gastight bulkhead, and was the last cubicle in the shelter-directly adjoining the small flight of steps which led to the garden of the Chancellery.
In the other direction this bunker beneath the old Chancellery was connected by a rough corridor with the large shelter which had been built beneath the New Chancellery in the course of its construction. This shelter was entered from Voss Strasse. From 1942-44 Hitler had turned it over to Berlin schoolchildren as a regular night shelter for them. There they were cared for by the NSV (National Socialist People’s Welfare) and other welfare organizations.
During the last years of the war the building of bunkers had been Hitler ’s hobby. The bunkers at his headquarters were constantly being strengthened with new layers of concrete. He expected incessant air raids, for it would be only natural, he thought, for his enemies to make every effort to attack his headquarters and eliminate him. Many hundreds of workers of the Todt Organization spent years working on the big headquarters in the Forest of Rastenburg. Ultimately his bunkers there were covered, in the shape of a cone, with more than twenty-five feet of concrete.
In addition to this headquarters where Hitler lived, after his return from the West, until February 1945, there were several other headquarters being built up and extended. One of these, in Silesia, was being blasted into rocky cliffs. Whenever there was the slightest danger from the air, Hitler insisted on everyone’s going to the bunkers. He himself spent many hours in poorly ventilated, dark, and unhealthy rooms. It was from such living conditions, it may well be said, that his health broke down.
I saw that breakdown approaching step-by-step. It was in the Ukraine in October 1942 that Nature gave her first sharp warning. German reverses in the Caucasus had taken a toll of Hitler’s nervous system. He no longer felt up to the long conversations of the daily dinners at the casino. An argument with General Jodl provided him with the initial excuse for withdrawing from the company. Henceforth he dined alone in his room. When he wanted company he would ask one or another of his female secretaries to eat with him.
The twentieth of July, the day of the attempt to assassinate him at his headquarters in East Prussia, was the point of crisis. That the attempt did not take place in a bunker, where Hitler was spending most of his time those days, undoubtedly was his salvation. For once, the situation conference was being held in a lightly constructed barracks room; the floor was of wood, with an open space underneath, and in the adjoining room the windows were open. As a result, the explosion produced no blast pressure, merely a sudden sharp flame. Had the bomb gone off in a concrete bunker, none of those present would have escaped with their lives; the blast pressure would have torn them to pieces. This is what happened:
About ten minutes to one in the afternoon I was in my bunker, some hundred yards away from the room where the situation conference was being held. Suddenly I heard a violent explosion that seemed to shake the whole forest. I ran out and raced toward the conference room, from which I saw a huge cloud of black smoke rising vertically. General Field Marshal Keitel, his hair singed, emerged from the barracks and came toward me. I heard him saying, “It was not yet to be this time.” General Jodl was making a big to-do to the effect that such a disaster could not possibly take place “on his own grounds.” Injured men were being carried out on stretchers, and I helped out with the first-aid work. When Hitler’s chief military adjutant was carried past me on a stretcher, I saw at a glance that he would not be long among the living.
I asked about Hitler. He had already been taken to his bunker next door. I went in to find out how he was. He was sitting on a chair in his small living room, and he seemed to me to be fairly composed. His legs were almost bare, his trousers ripped into ribbons and shreds. His left arm was injured; it had received a severe blow from the tabletop on which he had been leaning his elbow when the bomb went off under the table only five feet away from him. His ear drums had burst, and his face had been cut by flying splinters of wood. He was completely controlled while the doctor examined him. He was thinking the matter over and discussing what might have happened; the enormity of the incident was gradually beginning to dawn on us. Meanwhile Göring and Himmler had arrived.
When we went into the shambles of the map room to inspect the scene, we discovered under the big map table a circular hole about twenty inches in diameter. Apparently half of the force of the explosion had been expended in the hollow space under the floor. At first the workers in the headquarters area were suspected. But in the course of the afternoon the picture was clarified.
Colonel Stauffenburg had arrived by plane from Berlin during the morning and had been given an appointment with Hitler. Accompanied by Keitel, he entered the conference room at 12:30 P.M. He placed his briefcase under the map table, to Hitler’s right. While the army chief of staff was reporting, he busied himself for a moment with his briefcase. He then remarked that he had to make a telephone call. The telephone orderly observed him leaving the room. He went to his car which was parked a hundred and fifty yards from the barracks and waited there until the explosion went off. Then he drove quickly past the column of smoke to the exit from the camp. Although a cordon had meanwhile automatically sealed off the entire area, an officer of the guard intervened to let Stauffenberg through. He drove to the airfield some two miles away. On the way he threw his second bomb into the underbrush where it was found during the next day’s search. His plane was waiting for him; he flew to Berlin bringing word that Hitler was dead. The rest of the story is well known.
For Hitler, the after-effect was more serious than the immediate shock. When his left arm was freed from the sling, he was left with a nervous quivering of his hand which did not go away and obviously hampered him. His whole posture lost its tautness; his knees were thereafter weak and somewhat sagging.
The effect upon his spirit, however, was the reverse; his reaction was a powerful rallying of the will. After he had seen to it that the conspirators were rooted out and sternly punished, he gathered up his resources for one last great military effort. He drafted the plans for the final offensive in the West, hoping to turn the tide of battle there. On December 12, 1944 he went to the headquarters he had picked in the Taunus Mountains, near Bad Nauheim. It was a place remote from the world, on the slope of a forested height, a small, well-camouflaged colony of modest blockhouses. After the failure of this offensive he then returned to East Prussia for a few weeks. Although this headquarters was already threatened by the Russian advance, he stayed on in order to provide a good example for the population and the defenders of East Prussia. Not until February, when the situation temporarily eased for a few days, did he move the headquarters back to Berlin. His new chief of staff, Guderian, who until then had devoted all his energies to defending the German eastern front, now began opposing Hitler repeatedly during the situation conferences. He plainly no longer shared Hitler ’s confidence, or rather outward show of confidence. In the middle of March Hitler dismissed him, replacing him by his closest associate, General Wenck, and later by Wenck’s deputy, General Krebs, who remained with Hitler to the very end.
Hitler had taken a resolve to remain in Berlin and to stand or fall with the capital. No one could persuade him otherwise, although many persons tried. He wanted to provide an example of steadfastness, and sharply rebuked those who urged him to leave. Well into April he went on displaying an iron composure and apparently continued to believe that by the force of his own will he could yet bring about a turn in destiny. He refused to consider any other thought. In the arrogance of better times he had said he would never capitulate. He was not going back on his word. In Berlin he wanted to defy fate, and he really believed in a miracle.
In this desperate situation he now carried his old fighting methods to their extremity. With Goebbels he started the insane “werewolf ” movement. He categorically ordered all bridges to be blown up, wherever the enemy was advancing, and woe to him who questioned the senseless destructiveness of such an order. The tension between existing conditions and the inflexibility of Hitler’s will had become unbearable. The breaking-point was approaching.
After telephone communications broke down, Hitler sent a radio message ordering the arrest of Göring, who was in his home on the Obersalzberg. Göring, having received no word from Hitler for days, had inquired by telegram whether or not he should prepare to take over as his successor. During those last days Hitler also expelled Himmler from the Party because Himmler, on his own initiative, had commissioned Schellenberg in Stockholm to sound out the possibilities of peace. Finally he had Himmler’s liaison officer executed. This was General of the Waffen-SS Fegelein, Hitler’s own brother-in-law.7
Two days after his fifty-sixth birthday, on April 22, there came a report of a deep breakthrough by a Russian division to the north of the capital. All at once the spirit, which had been maintained so far only by superhuman forces of the will, gave way completely. Hitler now admitted that everything was lost and wanted to commit suicide. But the military men in his entourage urged him not to throw away his last card.
He had one last resurgence of his old powers. During the night he sketched out a final strategic plan, which was condemned to failure by his own obstinacy even before it could be put into action. This was the plan to deploy the armies outside Berlin in such a way as to defeat the Russians there and block their retreat.
On his orders the High Command left Berlin so that it could conduct the operation from the north. He himself, with only a few others, remained behind in the bunker of the Chancellery, obviously to prepare himself for the end. The group included Goebbels with his entire family; during all the last weeks Goebbels lived in two tiny rooms directly adjoining Hitler’s private quarters.
Hitler’s external appearance was that of a man on his last legs physically. His complexion was chalky white; the traces of sleeplessness were plain in the pallid swellings under his bloodshot eyes. He walked in stooped posture, his knees shaking, his left hand quivering.
Now that the dream of rule was almost over and the content of his life had fled, the people were no longer in his mind. He left them to their fate. They could no longer serve his adventurous ambitions. They had been ruined by his will to power. When his last hopes vanished, there vanished also his ideas of national existence as an exclusively heroic process. He turned to his own personal life, at its most mortal and unheroic level. His last days were devoted to his departure from life.
Eva Braun had spent the last two months with him in the bunker in Berlin. She had come there of her own accord. Her human and spiritual relationship to him at this time deserves respect. Her attitude made these last days easier for him to bear. In order to dignify her in the eyes of posterity and to remove all cause for evil gossip, Hitler decided that their marriage should take place at last. Bormann, as always, made all the preparations for the ceremony; he fetched a civil official and was one of the witnesses to the marriage, Goebbels being the other. The wedding was conducted during the night of April 28-29, in the bunker. That same night Hitler dictated his testaments. As I know his habits, these documents were products of the mood of the moment, dictated directly to the typist. For days those around him had been expecting him to apply himself to this last task. Now he suddenly decided to set it down in one headlong rush, without careful consideration. The political section follows the pattern of all his speeches. There, in his “last will,” the terrible, abnormal dichotomy of his nature is given full rein. The dark side of his split personality which had remained more or less hidden throughout his life, is fully revealed.
The testament takes no notice whatsoever of the terrible plight of the German people. It willfully ignores the realities of the situation. It orders further resistance in the face of a predicament so frightful that Hitler himself is preparing to take his own life to escape from it. Hitler had appointed himself the leader of a rising, victorious nation; he feels no concern for the eighty million defeated people whose ruler he has been. He can find no word of sympathy, of helpfulness, of counsel or encouragement for the Germans he is leaving behind in sorest straits. He has no thought of his own responsibility for the conditions that arose out of his own dictatorial course. On the contrary, his testament simply repeats the very doctrines he had preached to the people all his life—repeats them at a moment when Hitler should surely have realized that these doctrines had brought doom to the German people.
He instructed Goebbels to set up a cabinet, although he knew full well that Goebbels had resolved to join him in taking leave of life. Even in the face of death he clung to his fantasies and closed his eyes to the grim realities. A victim of the psychosis of treason, he accused his most faithful followers; reviling them, he thrust them into the outer darkness. The purpose of that “delirium of betrayal,” of which Goebbels speaks in his own testament, was to clear himself in the eyes of posterity.
Then, without fear or hesitation, he put an end to his own life. Bormann had already been ordered to burn his mortal remains in the garden of the Chancellery.