Speer, whose father made a fortune as an architect and whose mother was fixated on every nuance of social status, had grown up in a richly furnished mansion run by a fleet of uniformed servants. He said the atmosphere at the Berghof reminded him of “the summer residence of a prosperous industrialist”—relaxed, that is, and far less formal than one would expect from the great and remote ruler of the Reich. His mother took a different view: as an occasional guest at the Berghof she found the place appalling. It was the errors of class that offended her. “How nouveau riche everything is there,” she remarked. “Even the way the meals are served is impossible, the table decorations crude. Hitler was terribly nice. But such a parvenu world!” Maybe she was thinking of the containers of toothpicks on the table. Even Traudl Junge was a little surprised to see those.
Hitler had no wish to project an image of himself as someone who lived amid the trappings of the elite. He avoided showing off a luxury-laden table, and the food was largely unpretentious. He did want to be able to mingle comfortably with the rich, since their support was crucial to the Nazi Party, and early in his rise he made a point of learning the courtly manners he believed the role demanded. (Speer recalled that when Hitler met Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister, he greeted her using a highly ornate German he hoped would be suitable: “Most gracious and respected madam, what a pleasure to have the privilege of finding you in the best of health in your esteemed home.”) But guests and staff who mention the meals in their memoirs typically recall dumplings, sausages, meatballs, roast pork, stews, and spaghetti—classic home cooking of the pre-Nazi era. There were no restaurant chefs at the Berghof: Hitler’s half sister, Angela Raubal, did the cooking when he first moved there, but she got along badly with Eva and didn’t last long once Hitler’s mistress began spending more time in Obersalzberg. Later he installed husband-and-wife teams to run the household, and the wives customarily took charge of the food.
Arthur Kannenberg, who acted as majordomo at the Reich Chancellery and did the same at the Berghof when important guests were scheduled, was the only culinary professional on staff, apart from the special-diet cooks who prepared Hitler’s vegetarian meals. Kannenberg had been a restaurateur: he understood formal entertaining and oversaw the waiters in Hitler’s households, who had been recruited from the SS and trained in professional table service. He also made sure that the floral arrangements were properly lavish, however simple the menu might be—the staff was convinced, in fact, that the flowers cost more than the food. Once Kannenberg tried to liven up a dinner menu by introducing the Führer to caviar. Hitler loved it and downed it by the spoonful whenever it was served, until he found out how much it cost. Thereupon he banished it—not so much because of the expense, but because of the image. “The idea of a caviar-eating Leader was incompatible with Hitler’s conception of himself,” wrote Speer.
Hitler knew his eating habits would be talked about, along with everything else the public could glean about his personal life, and by the early 1930s an official version of his daily life had been established, casting him as a man of modest ways and simple tastes. Reporters from the foreign press who tapped their sources for human-interest stories about the Führer invariably “discovered” that he was a vegetarian who lived with monklike austerity. William L. Shirer, the CBS correspondent, said he learned from “my spies” that Hitler got up early and had a seven a.m. breakfast of rolls and marmalade with a glass of milk or juice. “He is of course a vegetarian, teetotaller, and non-smoker,” Shirer reported. In truth Hitler never got up before noon, but the propaganda decreed otherwise.
Meanwhile the pro-Nazi journalists who supplied British and American publications with admiring profiles of Hitler throughout the 1930s were coming up with a range of flattering ways to describe his eating habits. Food struck them as an excellent rhetorical instrument for civilizing and humanizing a dictator. “Even in his meatless diet, Hitler is something of a gourmet,” explained George Fitz-Gerald, who published widely under the pseudonym “Ignatius Phayre.” “His Bavarian chef, Herr Kannenberg, contrives an imposing array of vegetarian dishes, savoury and rich, pleasing to the eye as well as to the palate, and all conforming to the dietic [sic] standards which Hitler exacts.” This story appeared in the British magazine Home & Gardens, and Fitz-Gerald concocted a similar one for Country Life, in which he described how Hitler rose at dawn and headed out for a solitary ramble in the hills, breakfasting on a few tomato sandwiches that he brought with him. Another author, identified as “Hedwig Mauer Simpson,” which was probably a pseudonym, wrote a piece in much the same spirit for The New York Times Magazine. No early morning tomato sandwiches here; instead she said that Hitler emerged from his bedroom around nine a.m. for a nutritious breakfast of oatmeal and prunes. “He is not indifferent to meals,” she was eager to assure the Times’ readers. “He likes well-cooked dishes; he can eat a gooseberry pie or a well-done pudding with relish, and he makes no secret of being fond of chocolate. He likes to see color on his table, and excellent tomatoes are supplied from near-by greenhouses, in which rows of ultra-violet lamps ripen fruit for his table. A fresh salad is served with almost every meal.”
George Ward Price, the foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail, one of Britain’s most enthusiastically pro-Hitler newspapers, attended a formal dinner party at the Chancellery in December 1934 that was clearly staged for propaganda purposes, though he was happy to take it at face value. Hitler was in evening dress, he emphasized, not Nazi uniform—in other words, here was a gentleman—and arrangements of “trailing pink begonias” decorated the table. “The menu, too, was of up-to-date simplicity. It consisted of a cup of thick white soup, fish, roast chicken and vegetables, and an ice, and was accompanied by white and red German wine.” Mrs. Beeton herself could have catered this meal, and not a morsel of it would have looked unusual, much less threatening, to any reader living comfortably in England. David Lloyd George, the former British prime minister who called Hitler “the greatest German of the age” and likened Mein Kampf to the Magna Carta, had a different though equally stageworthy experience when he visited the Berghof in 1936. His party stayed for tea and was offered a meal so simple it was practically rustic—“slices of cold ham and halves of hard-boiled eggs,” noted Thomas Jones, a former deputy secretary of the cabinet, who accompanied Lloyd George. “The Führer himself had what looked like Zwiebacks and petit beurre biscuits and butter and ate very little.” Normally Hitler ate cakes with abandon at teatime, but on this occasion he apparently wanted the British to see him as humble and abstemious—again, a man whom nobody need fear.
While the Führer was indeed a vegetarian, he interpreted the term as loosely as most vegetarians have done for centuries. He loved the sausages of Munich, as his loyal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann was well aware when he sent Eva out to fetch the Leberkäse that morning in 1929; and if he happened to eat at the party’s guesthouse at the Berghof, he would order the liver dumplings. Not until around 1931 did he launch his vegetarian diet, partly because he hoped it would cure his chronic intestinal distress. He was what the nineteenth century would have called “dyspeptic”—perpetually assailed by digestive problems, real or imagined. Often he decided he was strong enough to take normal food, such as his favorite spaghetti or a few eggs and potatoes; other times he wanted gruel and crispbread, and sometimes it was a whole meal made up of potatoes, strawberries, and ice cream. He ate fast and he ate a lot. Franziska Braun said she was always surprised to see how much he put away—second helpings of everything, including the pudding he always had for dessert.
Nor was he a firm teetotaler, despite many reports that had him refusing alcohol in any form. He didn’t drink often, but he had no objection to it on principle and avoided wine only because it was “sour.” Once an associate saw him spooning sugar into a glass of fine Gewürtztraminer and drinking it down happily. Hitler’s addiction was to sweets: he had a perpetual, ferocious craving for cakes, pastries, and biscu
its. Franziska Braun described him at tea one afternoon piling her own plate high with all his favorites, far more than she could eat, telling her how good each one was, and urging her to try it. Friedelind Wagner, the composer’s granddaughter and a fervent anti-Nazi, remembered Hitler eating two pounds of pralines a day when he was visiting Bayreuth. While planning the invasion of Norway, his aide Heinz Linge wrote, he kept darting out of the conference room to gobble sweets in his study. Linge asked if he was hungry, but Hitler said no. “For me, sweets are the best food for the nerves,” he explained. Even in the bunker, as the Russians approached and his own death loomed, he was stuffing himself with cake.
At the Berghof, the food on Hitler’s personal tray came from a special-diet kitchen built alongside the main kitchen. He was intensely concerned about what he was served each day and often complained about his meals, fuming about how difficult it was to find a good vegetarian cook. When Ion Antonescu, the Romanian dictator, came to dinner in 1943, he said that he, too, had suffered from stomach problems until he hired a young Viennese woman named Marlene von Exner, who had been trained in dietetics. She had cured his ailments in three months. Hitler immediately hired von Exner and was delighted with the food, especially her soups and her fine Viennese desserts. Christa Schroeder, a secretary close to Hitler for twelve years, said he raved about von Exner’s apple pies—“very thin pastry with thick layers of apple slices and if possible a small topping of whipped cream.” A year or so later, however, a background check on the cook revealed the possibility of Jewish blood on her mother’s side. Von Exner’s family was actively pro-Nazi; nonetheless Hitler told her, regretfully, that he had to let her go because he couldn’t bend the law against employing Jews without attracting criticism. He did instruct Bormann to issue documents that would aryanize her whole family, so they wouldn’t run into this problem again. (After the war, von Exner was arrested and sent to an internment camp for a year. “The reason was that Frau von Exner had not poisoned the Fuehrer,” Junge told an interviewer on Musmanno’s team. “She answered, ‘I was employed as cook and not as murderess.’”) Von Exner’s replacement in the diet kitchen was Constanze Manziarly, who came from the southern Tyrol and tilted her cooking toward what Junge called “the Italian way.” Hitler liked her cooking very much, and Manziarly became one of his most faithful employees, making spaghetti for him on the day he died.
Eva refused to share Hitler’s obsessions—she found his dietary regimen disgusting and said so—but she had her own complicated relationship with food, a combination of covetous delight and rigorous avoidance. She adored the special treats that came her way as the Führer’s favorite, but nothing was more important to her than being able to show off a slender figure. The woman who starred in her daydreams as leading lady of the Reich was always picture-perfect, a term we can take literally in Eva’s case, for as we’ll see, she loved being on camera. So she ate with care, as lightly as possible from a menu often dense with pork and potatoes; and if her weight went up at all, she ate even less. Her cousin Gertrude, who visited Eva at the Berghof in 1944, keeping her company when nobody else was around, said she was always fixated on her figure and at mealtime wanted only salad and fruit. “She hated fat women and was very proud of being slim and dainty,” wrote Traudl Junge. Hitler used to say he preferred women who looked like women, not boys, and once he told Junge she was too thin and should be eating more. “Eva Braun cast me a scornful glance, for compared to her I was the image of a buxom Bavarian rustic maiden.”
At the same time, however, Eva never denied herself anything she really wanted, and when she was at home in Munich, Hitler made sure her kitchen was amply supplied. In 1942, as German soldiers plundered the Ukraine, he had special food parcels sent to Eva, with an extra stash of Ukrainian bacon since she was very fond of it. She liked to feel pampered. For the drive from Munich to Berchtesgaden, she always ordered her maid to pack a substantial snack—sandwiches, coffee or tea, some chicken—though she was rarely hungry and the food often went uneaten.
• • •
She resisted sweets, she resisted fatty foods, but like everyone else she knew, Eva drank champagne. Heinz Linge, Hitler’s aide, used to see her sitting with Hitler in his study at night, wearing a dressing gown, having champagne while he drank tea. She and her cousin Gertrude drank champagne every night when the two of them were alone at the Berghof; and when the house was full of company, as it usually was, champagne appeared regularly. Guests were offered a glass before lunch and dinner, and again at the evening’s entertainment, typically a movie or two, unless Hitler felt like listening to a recording of one of his favorite operettas. (He loved The Merry Widow.) When he and Eva finally retired to their private quarters, to everyone’s relief, the group relaxed into conviviality and more champagne was poured. It was the social fuel of the Reich.
Many Germans, to be sure, used the term “champagne” to indicate any sort of sparkling wine, from locally produced Sekt to the finest French vintages. Often, in fact, people seem to have used “Sekt” and “champagne” interchangeably—the original sin in the French wine industry, which has long insisted that only sparkling wines from the Champagne region deserve the honored name of “Champagne,” always capitalized. But casual drinkers in other countries have typically ignored this distinction. In the original German-language version of the incident quoted at the start of this chapter, for instance, Eva greeted Speer in the bunker with an offer of “Sekt.” What arrived was a bottle of Moët & Chandon, as she surely knew it would. Hence it’s not always easy to determine precisely what was in the glass when the term “Sekt,” “champagne,” or “sparkling wine” turns up in a diary or memoir. But judging from the context as well as the nature of those doing the drinking, it’s usually possible to make a good guess; and some recollections were indeed specific. Writing in his diary in Spandau Prison, Speer remembered quite clearly that Göring had appropriated vast quantities of vintage Roederer, while Hitler’s household “had to make do with Moët et Chandon.”
Few of the Nazi officials swarming the Reich after 1933 had grown up drinking champagne of any sort, but with their political legitimacy they suddenly had access to high society and all its glamour. (Hitler’s professed antielitism did not filter down very far into the ranks.) Bella Fromm, the anti-Nazi journalist who became Berlin’s first society columnist in 1928 and covered the diplomatic scene for the next ten years, watched with disgust as the city’s most resplendent homes opened their doors to the new elite. “Torrents of champagne bubbled down their greedy throats,” she wrote in her diary after a reception attended by numerous high-booted Nazis. At the time, they had been in power only ten months, and a longtime diplomat standing next to her observed that an abundant supply of champagne was, in fact, the main attraction of the evening. “Most of the new gang did not know before January, 1933, that things like champagne, caviar, and the like would ever be within their reach,” he commented as the guests pounded up the marble stairway to the bar. “They knew them only from window displays in expensive shops.” Fromm had Jewish ancestry, but thanks to numerous useful connections she was able to keep working until 1938, when friends arranged an American visa for her. Meanwhile she went everywhere, met everyone, including Hitler (who kissed her hand, to her horror), and took notes on all of it, including the grotesque birthday party Göring threw for himself at the Berlin State Opera, in 1937—“cleared of seats for the occasion,” she noted. “Dinner started with mountains of caviar. Champagne ran in a continual gushing stream all night long. The lavishness was on a scale almost bordering on insanity.”
Three years later the Nazis took over France, and champagne became the celebratory leitmotif of the occupation. When the first German soldiers arrived in Paris on June 14, 1940, it was dawn and nothing was open, but by lunchtime they were sitting in cafés ordering champagne. “It’s like a liquid symbol of their conquest of Gay Paree,” wrote Janet Flanner in The New Yorker. “They demand and expect champagne whe
rever they go. As one peasant said, ‘Ces cochons, they come into my cottage and ask me for champagne—I, who have never given myself anything better than a bottle of mousseux, even for my son’s first Communion.’” In the province of Champagne, which was located in the northern two-thirds of France that came under direct military occupation, soldiers looted homes and cellars freely all summer until more organized forms of plunder could be put into place. By autumn Germany was demanding regular shipments of champagne, up to two million bottles a month, to be paid for at the low prices guaranteed by manipulating exchange rates. The Nazis also soaked up most of the other wine being produced, as well as all the wine held in reserve. Harry Flannery, the CBS reporter who replaced Shirer in Berlin, was on Wilhelmstrasse one day in 1941 when he saw “huge trucks, filled to the top with cases of French wines . . . being unloaded in front of the Propaganda Ministry.” Soon afterward he found he was drinking that very wine, served with ample quantities of roast beef, at a banquet staged by the head of the Nazi press office. The French themselves were permitted to buy only two liters a week, and the wine ration, like that for tobacco, was restricted to men. Concurrently the Nazis were making sure that France was stripped of nearly everything else it produced. Up to three-quarters of the nation’s cattle, pigs, vegetables, fruits, grains, and cheese were shipped to Germany during the war, forcing the French to make do with ersatz coffee, ersatz beer, bean soups, and the rutabagas they were accustomed to giving their livestock. Loading the famous cider apples of Normandy and Brittany onto trains bound for Germany, French farmers managed to scrawl a bitter joke on the outside of the car—“For Ribbentrop, ersatz champagne.” (Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had married into a Sekt-producing family and considered himself a distinguished oenophile.)
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