Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

  Exercising leadership is a gift one must be born with. But it is also an art that must be studied and mastered. A talent for speaking and organization apart, it demands two contradictory things. First, one must be, or appear to be, easygoing and accessible. The days when the Kaiser sought to make an impression by means of his glittering uniforms, of which he had a vast collection, are gone. Nor will plumes, gilded carriages, or high-stepping horses do the trick. One must, at all costs, present oneself as a man of the people. For me doing so was not very difficult. After all, a man of the people I was and have always remained.

  But popularity must not be confused with familiarity. No one, they say, is a hero to his servant. Nor has anyone has ever become a successful leader while wearing his heart on his sleeve. That is why it is necessary to keep one’s own council, something I was always very good at doing. It is also necessary to maintain a certain distance and to create a certain mystique of the kind that will attract followers and give one a certain advantage in dealing both with friends and opponents. That, and not shyness, as so many people thought, is one reason why, in my entire adult life, I allowed very few people to address me with the familiar Du.

  In the modern world, one of the key tools leadership can and must use is photography. My right hand in doing so was the aforementioned Hoffmann. Hoffmann’s father, like mine, prevented him from becoming an artist, a fact that created a bond between us. He was also something of a buffoon in whose company I could relax; I never made him address as me as Mein Führer as almost everyone else did. I used to visit him at his home and liked him and his wife, Lelly, very much. She was a much more ardent National Socialist than he; in this respect she resembled the wives of several other of my collaborators. Unfortunately, she died in 1928. Though Hoffmann did remarry, he never quite got over the blow and ended up drinking far more than was good for him.

  In October 1923 I appointed him my official photographer, a position he held for the next twenty-two years. How many photographs of me he and his assistants took only God knows. Initially, I demanded that he publish none of them without my permission. Later, as our acquaintance deepened, I could trust him to do what had to be done. Accompanying me everywhere, he was the only press photographer permitted to operate without the appropriate armband. As I once told him, his armband was me. In time, his monopoly over my pictures made him a very wealthy man. For me the arrangement had the advantage of enabling me to avoid the error of some senior Weimar politicians, who allowed themselves to be caught in their bathing trunks playing Neptune in the water. Instead, I only presented myself to the public the way I wanted, i.e. properly clothed and in dignified poses suitable to the occasion. As for those pushy pests, the so-called paparazzi… what else are bodyguards and concentration camps for?

  Our success in the various election campaigns remained modest enough. But I did not allow this to discourage me. Hard as doing so sometimes was, I always looked on the bright side. In this I was assisted by Goebbels, whom I had made our Gauleiter in “Red” Berlin. He had to be content with a tiny little flat in Caputh near Potsdam, yet no one could be more inventive in devising ways to advertise us and to play tricks on our opponents. Another encouraging factor was the SA. The dedication and self-sacrifice of our brown-uniformed men, all of them volunteers and all of them serving for very little pay indeed, cannot be praised highly enough. They always gave me hope and inspiration.

  Personally, too, these were among the happiest years in my life. My income from the sales of Mein Kampf was fairly modest, especially after the first year or two. It would, of course, pick up later on. And how! However, in 1928 that was still Zukunftsmusik, future music, as we Germans say. Meanwhile, Amman and Rosenberg paid me generously for the articles I wrote. Above all, there were the funds which the Party put at my disposal and to which I helped myself as I saw fit and as my task demanded. Once way or another, the financial cares that had clouded so much of my previous life were gone. In fact I was growing rich. But wealth did not turn me into a miser, as often happens to people who have known poverty as I did. If anything, to the contrary; I always insisted on paying those who performed services for me even when, as sometimes happened, they themselves refused to take a fee.

  I was able to rent, and later to buy, a villa at Berchtesgaden, a village not far from the lovely Königssee and very close to the Austrian border, to which I had originally been introduced by Dietrich Eckart. The house had the advantage of being located on the north side of a hill, meaning that it was always in the shade. I renamed it the Berghof, meaning, Mountain Court, redesigned it myself, and filled it with the kind of beautiful objects that elevated the mind and inspired me in carrying out my great task. It served me well on weekends, and in time it became my favorite place to stay. Foreigners who visited it before the war, such as the English journalist George Ward Price, also liked it. I asked my widowed half-sister, Angela Raubal, to come and run the place for me, and she did. I also had a succession of valets. After all, someone had to select and prepare my clothes, collect them after I used them, choose the diet of the day, clean my rooms, make doctors’ appointments, and look after a thousand similar small but indispensable details. In 1929 I also rented an elegant nine-room apartment at the Prinzregentenplatz in the center of Munich.

  But beauty and show are not the same. As the same visitors noted, never at any time did I live in any but modest luxury of the kind, let us say, a prosperous businessman might enjoy. I did not change my uniforms several times a day or cover myself with orders and jewels. Unlike a certain English degenerate whose name I shall not mention, I always opened my own tube and put my own toothpaste on the brush. Nor, for that matter, did I ever tell any woman that I wanted to be her feminine hygiene product. My villa did not, by a long shot, compare with the magnificent houses that some of my associates, such as Göring and Amman, later built for themselves. Nor did it compare with the lifestyle of the imperial Hohenzollerns, who, at the time they were finally deposed, owned well over a hundred castles and palaces all over Germany. Just taking the Kaiser’s loot across the Dutch border took up entire trains, with a total of 59 wagons, I am told.

  Working as Party leader and political journalist during the late 1920s, I used to stay in fairly modest hotels. For example, the room I regularly took at Weimar’s Haus Elephant had running water but neither a bathroom nor a lavatory. Leaving my room or returning to it, people on both sides of the corridor would line up to salute me, obliging me, an embarrassed smile on my face, to walk the gauntlet while doing the same! Others would gather in the adjoining square and chant:

  Lieber Führer

  Komm heraus

  Aus dein Elefantenhaus!

  Which is to say, Dear Führer, do come out, of your elephant house. Later, I had the hotel modernized.

  Traveling the country, I used a Mercedes which I changed every few years. We were often accompanied by another car or two carrying bodyguards, guests, and friends. How often did we not find some nice spot, spread a blanket on the ground, and have a picnic in the open! My schedule, though quite busy, was not nearly as crowded as it became later on when I rose to be, first the leader of a large mass party and then Chancellor of the Reich. And it was not nearly as stiff and formal; since my entourage was small, I had little difficulty changing my plans at a moment’s notice. It was small enough, too, to mislead stalkers by taking one route while my entourage took another. Best of all, I was not yet obliged to meet an endless number of snobbish officials, diplomats, and high-ranking officers. They are the sort of people whom I have always disliked and who, however much they were obliged to fawn on me, have always disliked me.

  I also met any number of women. During my youth in Linz I had been too shy to approach them. All I had ever dared do was send poor Stephanie a letter in which I promised her to become an architect and asked her to wait for me! In Vienna, Munich, and the army things were different. Particularly in the former, not to notice the existence of any number of half-naked prostitutes was impossible. T
hat was just why my main concern during those years was to keep my body pure.

  Some idiots, reading Mein Kampf, have claimed that I had all sorts of sexual hang-ups. That even applied to the NKVD officers who, not long after the war, prepared a report on me for Stalin to read. Others alleged that I was fascinated by syphilis and the prostitution that spread it. Supposedly, I ranted on and on about the subject. As if they themselves, by taking me up on it, did not do the same! What these gentlemen overlook is the plain fact that the disease was rife in large cities in particular. It was no wonder, for the Jews were deliberately spreading it as part of their campaign to weaken the German race and to establish their own dominion over the world. They also forget that, in the age before antibiotics, there was no real cure. That is why, according to some American figures, seventy percent of those who did not get treated within three years of contracting the disease were “doomed.” Briefly, syphilis was to society what AIDS is today. Only, since it was much more widespread, it was worse.

  During the war, in spite of all the precautions taken by the High Command and its attempts to deal with the issue, about a million—one in twelve—of all those who wore the German uniform contracted venereal diseases. At any one time, the equivalent of entire divisions were incapacitated. Proportionally speaking, the English Army suffered even more. Serves those hypocrites right! How serious the problem was can be gauged from the following episode. A few weeks before his country was attacked at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Thomas Parran, said to be “among the most revered figures in the history of sexually transmitted diseases,” went on the record as saying that, in 1917-18, the U.S. had waged two wars. One was against Germany, which it had won. And one was against syphilis, which it had lost. That was why, during the 1930s, the Federal Government, through its Work Projects Administration (WPA), produced more posters addressing this problem than any other public health issue. As for me, no one can say that I have ever shirked away from battle, either military or political. When it came to VD, though, I chose not to be a combatant.

  As far back as I can remember, I have always liked women. What real man doesn’t? The more so because, in the person of my own mother, I had the best possible example of what true womanhood is. Had her name been Mary rather than Klara, she could have played the part. I cherished women and was always polite to them. I also did what I could to protect them from the hardships of life. Above all, I knew exactly how to charm them. It was easy: a hand-kiss here, a little compliment there. I made them feel important and desirable. Jewesses apart, I never treated them nearly as harshly as, when the occasion demanded, I did men.

  A rich man can support a woman and offer her a comfortable life. But the best aphrodisiac is not money. It is power, physical or social. Physical power is what at least two Roman empresses, Agrippina and Faustina, looked for when they took up with gladiators. It was also what Princess Stephanie of Monaco, supermodel Heidi Klum, and, according to rumor, Princess Diana of England sought when they started liaisons with their bodyguards. Social power, meaning the kind that involves wielding authority over other men, is even better. A powerful man makes a woman feel safe to surrender herself, conceive, and bear the children which, if she is normal and not some sort of unnatural creature, are her greatest wish in life. Such a man is like a piece of outsized jewelry. A woman can put him on and show him off to her friends, making them jealous. Look what I’ve got! Last, but not least, he is someone she can look up to. A real woman, meaning one who obeys her instincts and does not allow herself to be brainwashed by feminists, wants to be governed and restrained. She even desires, under some circumstances, to be punished. How else can she feel her man’s strength?

  In short: every woman adores a Fascist. That even includes most feminists, of course, however much they may deny it. As to the few exceptions—who said they are women? They are nature’s blunders, that’s what they are. What organ they have they do not use as they should; what organ they do not have they unconsciously crave. No sooner had I started making my mark in the world than women began buzzing over me like maidens around a maypole. For the society ladies who invited me to speak in their drawing rooms I played the role of Mr. Savage—precisely the one they wanted.

  Another excellent example of the way these things work is provided by Göring. His first wife, Baroness Karin von Kantzow, was married to a very rich man indeed. She fell in love with Göring after he flew her brother home during a snowstorm when no other pilot dared take off. Nor is it an accident that she was Swedish. Sweden has not seen a war for a very, very long time. As a result, so weak are Swedish men that their women keep running away. To cap it off, the men do not even get angry at the women. Instead of giving them a sound thrashing as they deserve, they forgive them, as Karen’s husband also did. No wonder Sweden’s divorce rate is among the highest in the world. Göring, of course, was as rapacious as any man in history. But he was basically monogamous and never had more than one woman at a time; both his marriages were extremely happy. In that he differed from a great many others in his position or similar ones.

  Liking women as I did, I surrounded myself with artwork that depicted them in all their glory. That included works by the sculptor Eugen Henke as well as the painters Anselm Feuerbach, Franz von Stuck, and Adolf Ziegler. The latter’s famous The Four Elements, each represented by a young, nude woman, hung in my Munich flat. Women themselves were well aware of my weakness for them and often asked me for favors. Here and there I probably allowed them to exercise too much influence over me. Doing so is always a symptom of weakness and, therefore, a mistake. One example was the admirable Frau Troost, one of only two women whom I ever allowed to visit my military headquarters. So fast did she talk that I could hardly get a word in! On several occasions she intervened on behalf of Jews. Once she went so far as to ask me to read a letter written by one of them in her presence. She had some cheek.

  Another was Winifred Wagner. English-born, highly intelligent, and enterprising, for several years after 1924 she, along with her husband Siegfried, were the closest thing to a family I had. Driving from Munich to Berlin and back, I used to spend the night at Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth. Later, they even built an annex to their house to lodge me and some of my people. Their young sons, Wieland and Wolfgang, used to call me Uncle Wolf. I told them many a story and have nothing but pleasant memories of them. But she kept complaining about how weak Siegfried, who, incidentally, was a homosexual, was. Perhaps that is why, after his death in 1930, there were rumors that I was going to marry her. What nonsense.

  I often attended the Bayreuth Festival and can testify that Frau Wagner managed it well enough. More than once I helped by making the necessary funds available to her. My very presence of course, was one factor that attracted a crowd. The problem was that she tried to meddle in politics, about which she, like most other artists, did not have a clue. She was, it is true, an enthusiastic National Socialist. And she was one of the few with sufficient courage to remain so not only to the end but, in some ways, beyond it. But she was also very kindhearted and kept pressing me to do favors for all sorts of people, including, I am sorry to say, quite a few Jews. That was why, after 1941, I no longer saw her or answered her letters. She could count herself lucky. Making use of the fact that few people knew about the breach between us, she went on helping Jews as much as she could. I knew this full well but decided to turn a blind eye. In so far as running the festival was concerned, though, more and more often I dealt with her sons rather than with her. They proved to be good choices.

  A third woman I liked very much was Henriette von Shirach. I first met her in the house of her father, Heinrich Hoffmann. She was nine years old, and I used to call her “my blonde angel.” Much later, I introduced her to Baldur, and they got married in 1932. She was very pretty and lively. However, like Frau Wagner, she did not know her proper place. At some point in 1943 I invited her to have tea at the Berghof. She had just been to Amsterdam on a shopping spree. There, she had the misfortune
of witnessing a raid during which some elderly Jewish women were rounded up and loaded onto trucks on their way to the transit camp prior to resettlement in the east. Young and tender, she was deeply affected. There were some of my men in the company, and I had no alternative but to stand firm. So I told her that, with thousands of our best German soldiers dying every day, the biological balance in Europe was being upset. Whereupon what had to be done had to be done. After that, I refused to see her. It was not because I did not care about her but because I cared too much.

  Before proceeding with this theme, I want to put it on record that, at the time, sex did not receive nearly as much public attention as, in large part “thanks” to Dr. Freud, it did later on. Educated people did not boast about the “openness” with which they discussed it. To the contrary, as Streicher ended up by learning to his cost, doing so was considered to be in very bad taste indeed. My assistants here in Hell, using Google N-Gram as their source, tell me that even the word itself was much less current than it later became. Instead, all kinds of euphemisms were used. Nor were public figures praised for the number of affairs they had, as they so often are today. To the contrary, not becoming involved in them, at least not openly, was considered not only a plus but a prerequisite for success. Decency had to be preserved. The press, which today has nothing better to do than expose the leaders’ peccadilloes, was more or less cooperative. The days when tots in kindergarten are obliged to learn about sex, specifically including all its sickening variations, were, thank God, still in the future.