The Young Hitler I Knew

by August Kubizek

  Thus our fine, adolescent friendship came to an end that was anything but beautiful, but with the passing of time I became reconciled. Indeed, I came to feel that this sudden termination of our friendship by Adolf was of much more significance than if it had finished through our growing indifferent towards each other, or if it had ceased to mean anything to him. Certainly such an end would have been harder for me to bear than that forced farewell, which was really not a farewell at all.

  * * *

  Chapter 25

  My Subsequent Life and Reunion with My Friend

  After an intensive four-year course of study at the Vienna Conservatoire, in October 1912 I was engaged as deputy conductor at the Marburg an der Drau city music theatre and made my debut conducting Lortzing’s Der Waffenschmied. When my contract there ended in the spring of 1914, I was contracted to Klagenfurt, which had a good forty-man orchestra, a fine opera house and modern stage. Thus all my dreams were becoming reality.

  It was quite another kind of music I was to experience that summer, however, facing the Russian guns in Galicia as a mobilised reservist of the Landwehr Infantry Regiment No. 2. During the fearful Carpathian winter campaign of 1915 I was wounded at Eperjes in Hungary, and endured an horrific seven-day ride in an ambulance train to Budapest. The train made regular stops to unload the dead. I survived, but my strength was gone for ever.

  After months of convalescence I returned home to find everything changed. My father, exhausted by work and robbed of his ambition to hand over to me, his only son, the business he had built up, had retired in 1916 and bought a small-holding at Fraham near Eferding in the hope of recovering his health and spirits. I returned to the front and during my absence he died in September 1918, surrounded by the grief and misery of the time. How I wish I could have granted him a better evening of his life!

  I was attached to a mechanised corps in Vienna when discharged from military service on 8 November 1918. What to do now? My prospects were non-existent. The provincial theatres were closed. I scoured Vienna for work but nothing was available except in the dance orchestras of the larger coffee houses, which was not for me. For a while I conducted a six-man orchestra in the pit at one of the new cinemas. In vain I sought a position as viola player or even as a relief, and nobody wanted private tuition.

  I was at my wits’ end when a letter arrived from my mother. She stated that the post of district secretary was being advertised at Eferding near Linz. She had already spoken to the Bürgermeister about my musical virtuosity, the latter having expressed the hope that the successful applicant would set about reorganising the music society, which had been disbanded, and take over as its director. I went home and considered it. The salary was poor, the artistic possibilities very modest, but I had meanwhile abandoned the idea of being a career conductor and so, more for my mother’s sake than anything else, I applied for the position and then returned to Vienna to look for work.

  In January 1920 I received notification from the Bürgermeister that the district committee had selected me for the position of secretary from amongst thirty-eight other applicants, and so I became a civil servant. Gradually I found my feet in the post and a few years later I passed the provincial government’s examination for a district officer. So modest an existence was it, however, that I had plenty of time to indulge my musical inclinations. I built up a respectable orchestra, and soon the musical life of the small town was looking up – from the house recitals of a string quartet to the brass band in the town square and the festival performances of the local choir, I had a wonderful, successful occupation.

  I had had no further news of the friend of my youth who had left me in such a strange manner, and finally I gave up the search. I had no means of tracing him. His brother-in-law Raubal was long dead, and Angela, his half-sister, no longer lived in Linz. What might have become of him? He would certainly have been a better soldier than I, but perhaps he lay amongst the ranks of the dead as did so many young men.

  Now and again I heard talk of a German politician by the name of Adolf Hitler, but I thought this must certainly be another man who happened to have the same name; the surname was not rare, and in any case I expected that he would be an important architect by now, or an artist, not an unimportant politician, and especially not in Munich. One evening in the bookshop at Eferding I glanced at a copy of the Münchner Illustrierte. On the front page was the photograph of a man in his mid-thirties with narrow, pale features whom I recognised at once. It was Adolf, scarcely changed. I worked out how long it had been – fifteen years! His face seemed stronger, more manly, more mature, but not really much older. The caption below the photograph read: ‘The well-known orator of the National Socialists, Adolf Hitler’. So my friend was one and the same as that notorious politician.

  I regretted very much that he had not been able to pursue an artistic career any more than I had. I knew only too well what it meant to bury all one’s hopes and dreams. Now he earned his living addressing the mob – a bitter bread, even though he was a good, convincing speaker. His interest in politics I could understand, but politics was a dangerous and thankless business.

  I was glad that my professional position as civil servant kept me out of local politics, for as head of the municipal office I had to treat everybody the same. My friend, on the other hand, steamed full ahead into politics, and it came as no surprise to me when his impetuous behaviour, about which I had read in the newspapers, landed him in Landsberg prison.

  Yet he rose again. The press began to take notice of him, more than ever. That his political ideas were gradually taking hold in Austria did not surprise me either, for they were basically the same ideas, if then somewhat confused and high flown, as he had preached to me in Vienna. When I read the text of his speeches, I could visualise him holding forth as he strode up and down between door and piano in our room at 29 Stumpergasse. At that time I was his only audience, now millions listened. His name was on everybody’s lips, and everybody was asking: ‘Where does this Hitler come from?’

  I had, perhaps, more to tell on that score than many others. In my attic at Fraham – my mother had sold the small-holding and moved in with my family – I kept in a large wooden chest the old correspondence with my friend and his sketches. After some reflection, I decided to leave them where they were. Through the newspapers I followed his career – he amassed millions of supporters, and without having trodden Austrian soil for the purpose, his radical ideas and opinions had brought speculation and unrest to what was now a small country. It may seem strange that I did not contact my erstwhile friend now that he had made a name for himself, but really our common interest had been music and not politics. I had nothing to offer him in respect of the latter.

  Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, and at once I remembered that midnight experience on the Freinberg in 1905 when he had prophesied to me that like Rienzi of Wagner’s opera he would rise to be Volkstribun – the leader of the people. What the sixteen-year-old had seen in a visionary trance had become reality. I took pen and paper and wrote a few lines to ‘Reichkanzler Adolf Hitler in Berlin’ but I expected no reply, for German chancellors had better things to do than write letters to old friends from twenty-five years back. Nevertheless it seemed to me right and proper, as a family friend of his youth, to pay my respects by offering him my congratulations. One day, to my great surprise, I received the following letter dated 4 August 1933 from Nazi Party headquarters, The Brown House, Munich:

  My Dear Kubizek,

  Only today was your letter of 2 February placed before me. From the hundred of thousands of letters I have received since January it is not surprising. All the greater was my joy, for the first time in so many years, to to hear news of your life and to receive your address. I would very much like – when the time of my hardest struggles is over – to revive personally the memory of those most wonderful years of my life. Perhaps it would be possible for you to visit me. Wishing yourself and your mother all the best
, I remain in the memory of our old friendship.

  Your,

  Adolf Hitler

  He had not forgotten me, and that he remembered despite the burden of his office gave me great pleasure. To visit him as he had suggested was not so easy. I could hardly just turn up at Obersalzberg and say ‘here I am’, and in any case my own life, compared to his, was dull and uninteresting. News about Eferding would bore him. So I put the matter to one side, deciding that his kind invitation was merely an act of formal courtesy just as, twenty-five years earlier, he had never forgotten to sign off in his letters with a respectful greeting to my parents.

  On 12 March 1938, Adolf Hitler crossed the frontier into Austria at the spot in Braunau am Inn where his father had been a customs official. The German Wehrmacht had moved into Austria. That same evening, he spoke to the townspeople of Linz from the balcony of the city hall. I would have loved to have gone to Linz to hear this address but had my hands full arranging accommodation for the German troops and so was unable to leave Eferding. On 8 April 1933, when he visited Linz for the second time, after a political rally at the Kraus locomotive factory workshop, he retired to the Hotel Weinzinger, and I decided to call on him there. I found a huge crowd gathered in the square facing the hotel. After working my way through to the line of SA security people, I told them I wanted to speak to the Reich Chancellor. At first I got a strange reception – they obviously considered me to be a madman – but once I had shown them Hitler’s letter an officer was summoned. After reading it he led me at once into the foyer of the hotel where the activity was like a beehive. Generals stood around in groups discussing events, ministers of state whom I recognised from the newspapers, Nazi Party bosses and other uniformed officials came and went. Adjutants, identifiable by their shining aiguillettes, flitted here and there busily. And all this exciting industry revolved around the very man with whom I wished to speak. My head spun and I saw that my enterprise was senseless. I had to realise, I told myself, that the erstwhile friend of my youth was now Reich Chancellor, and that this highest of all offices of state put a gap between us which could not be bridged. The years in which I had been the only person to whom he had dedicated his friendship, and entrusted his personal affairs of the heart, were over. Therefore the best thing to do would be to withdraw quietly and no longer bother these highly-placed gentlemen, who doubtless had very important matters to attend to.

  One of the senior adjutants to whom I had given my letters, Albert Bormann, returned after a while and told me that the Reich Chancellor was a little unwell and was not receiving guests today, but I should come again tomorrow at noon. Bormann then invited me to have a seat for a moment, since he wanted to ask me something. Had the Reich Chancellor always slept in so late in his youth, he asked with a whine, for he never went to bed until after midnight and then slept in very late next morning while his entourage, who had to keep the same hours he did at night, were obliged to be up bright and early next morning. He went on to complain at Hitler’s outbursts of temper, which nobody could quieten, and about his strange diet which was vegetarian with a flour basis and lots of fruit juices. Had he always been like that? I said that he had, except that he used to like meat. With that I took my leave. Albert Bormann was the brother of Reichsleiter Martin Bormann.

  Next day I returned to Linz. The whole city was in the streets, and the closer I got to the Hotel Weinzinger, the greater was the crush. Finally I fought my way through to the hotel foyer, where the excitement and activity were even more hectic than the night before. Today was the eve of the Austrian plebiscite. That all great decisions revolved around Hitler’s person made one think. I could not have found a more unfavourable time for the reunion than this. I calculated back. It had been at the beginning of July 1908 that we had parted in the station hall of the Westbahnhof. Today was 9 April 1938. There were therefore almost thirty years between that unexpected last parting in Vienna and today’s meeting, should it take place, of course. Thirty years. A generation! And what revolutionary changes had those thirty years brought about. I had no illusions about this meeting with Hitler. A brief handshake, perhaps a friendly clap on the shoulder, a few warm words spoken quickly as I was shown the door – I should have to satisfy myself with that.

  I had already prepared a few words, but the form of address worried me. I could hardly call the Reichskanzler ‘Adolf, and I knew how upset he could get at any breach of protocol. As Hitler emerged suddenly from a room at the Hotel Weinzinger, he recognised me at once, and with the joyful cry, ‘It’s you, Gustl!’ he gestured for his following to remain behind and took my arm. He grasped my right hand with both of his and looked into my eyes. His gaze was as bright and penetrating as ever. That he was as moved as I was I could hear in his voice. The worthy gentlemen in the foyer looked at each other in astonishment. Nobody knew this strange civilian whom the Führer und Reichskanzler greeted with a heartiness that many envied.

  I regained my composure and made my little prepared speech. He listened carefully and gave a small smile. When I finished, he nodded, and I left it at that – any further sign of intimacy on my part seemed to me improper. After a brief pause he said, ‘Kommen Sie!’ Although he had addressed me with the familiar ‘Du’ in his letter of August 1933, the formal ‘Sie’ in reply to my use of it in the little speech came as a relief to me. The Reich Chancellor led me to the lift and we went up to his suite on the second floor. The personal adjutant opened the door; we entered and the adjutant left. We were alone. Again, Hitler took my hand, gave me a long look and said, ‘You haven’t changed, Kubizek. I would have recognised you anywhere. The only thing different is that you’ve got older.’ Then he led me to a table and offered me a chair. He assured me how much pleasure it gave him to see me again after so many years. My good wishes had pleased him especially, for I knew better than anybody else how difficult his path had been. The present time was unfavourable for a long talk, but he hoped that there would be an opportunity in the future. He would contact me. To write to him directly was not advisable, for all his mail was dealt with by his aides.

  ‘I no longer have a private life and cannot do what I like as others can.’ With these words he rose and went to the window, which overlooked the Danube. The old bridge with its steel bars, which had so annoyed him in his youth, remained in use. As I expected, he mentioned it at once. ‘That ugly footbridge!’ he cried, ‘It’s still there. But not for much longer, I assure you, Kubizek.’ With that he turned and smiled. ‘All the same, I would love to take a stroll with you over the old bridge. But I can’t, for wherever I go, everybody follows me. But believe me, Kubizek, for Linz I have many plans.’ Nobody knew that better than I. As expected, he drew forth from his memory all the plans which had occupied him in his youth just as though not thirty, but no more than three years, had passed since then. Shortly before receiving me he had driven through the city to see the architectural changes. Now he revised the individual schemes. The new bridge over the Danube, to be called Niebelungenbrücke, must be a masterpiece. In detail he described how he wanted the two bridgeheads. Then he turned – I knew exactly the order he had in his head – to the Landestheater, which as a first step would receive a new stage. When the new Opera House, which would replace the ugly railway station, was completed, the theatre would be used only for plays and operettas. Besides that, Linz needed, to merit being called a ‘Bruckner-city’, a modern auditorium. ‘In the cultural respect I want Linz to have a leading role, and will make the necessary preparations.’

  I thought that this brought the discussion to an end, but Hitler now came to speak about a new symphony orchestra for Linz, and the conversation turned to personal matters. ‘What have you actually become, Kubizek?’ he asked. I told him that since 1920 I was a municipal official, more recently in the post of Stadtamtsleiter.

  ‘Stadtamtsleiter. What’s that then?’ Now I was in difficulties. How could I explain, in a few words, what this title meant. I fumbled in my mental dictionary for suitable terms. He interrupt
ed me. ‘So, you are a civil servant, a clerk. That doesn’t suit you. What did you make of your musical talents?’ I answered truthfully that the lost war had thrown me off course. If I didn’t want to starve, I had to change horses. He nodded gravely and repeated, ‘Yes, the lost war.’ With a look he added, ‘You won’t be ending your career as a municipal clerk, Kubizek.’ Moreover he wanted to see this Eferding for himself. I asked him if he meant it.

  ‘Naturally I will visit you, Kubizek,’ he declared, ‘but only you. Then we will have a walk along the Danube. I can’t do it from here, they never leave me in peace.’

  He asked if I was as keen on music as I had always been. This was my pet subject, and I related in detail the musical life of our small town. I was worried that my account would bore him, seeing how many international problems of great moment he had to decide upon, but I was wrong. When I summarised something to save time, he would take me up on it. ‘What, Kubizek, you even perform symphonies in your little town? That’s amazing! Which ones?’ I counted them off: Schubert’s Unfinished, Beethoven’s Third, Mozart’s Jupiter, Beethoven’s Fifth.

  He wanted to know the strength and composition of my orchestra, was amazed at what I told him and congratulated me on my success. ‘I really must help you, Kubizek,’ he said, ‘make out a report and tell me what you’re short of. And how are things with you personally? You’re not in need?’ I told him that my job provided me with a satisfying, if modest, existence and that I had no wish for anything more. He looked at me in surprise. He was not used to somebody having no wishes to be fulfilled. ‘Have you any children, Kubizek?’ Yes, three sons.’

  ‘Three sons!’ he cried emotionally. He repeated the words several times and with an earnest expression. ‘You have three sons, Kubizek. I have no family. I am alone. But I would like to help with your sons.’ He made me tell him everything about them. He was delighted that all three were talented musically and two of them were skilled sketch-artists.