Hitler in Hell

by Martin van Creveld

Speaking of Mussolini, he kept “changing the guard,” as he used to put it. I, by contrast, considered myself lucky in my choice of my senior and mid-level associates. As long as they did not commit major blunders, they normally stayed with me for years, as Göring, Bormann, Speer, Himmler, Keitel, Jodl, and any number of Gauleiters did. They understood my power, of course. But they did not fear me the way Stalin’s subordinates were absolutely terrified of him. Only during the very last months of the war did I have to prohibit some of them from presenting me with their defeatist ideas. To lend weight to my words, I had Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich’s successor as Head of the Reich Central Security Office, sit in on a few of our meetings. The traitors of July 1944 apart, only very rarely did I bother to put any of them on trial. Nor did I lock them in concentration camps or have them taken from their homes and shot.

  I did not want people to question my decisions. Nor, much less, did I desire scandals among my close collaborators that would reflect on the regime. That is why, rather than dismiss senior officials who at one point or another were no longer up to the job, I would take part of their power away from them and give it to someone else. Needless to say, I didn’t inform the loser of what I had done. For example, I did this in 1943 when I backed Milch, Galland, and Kammhuber against Göring, effectively ending the latter’s control over the Luftwaffe. And again in late 1944 when I promoted Speer’s assistants, Xaver Dorsch and Karl Saur, at his expense. This method had the added advantage of forcing my subordinates to compete for my favor. Right to the end, that competition prevented them from uniting against me.

  Other dictators have often made the personnel around them—valets, secretaries, communicators, messengers, even physicians—tremble with fear. Apparently, that was how Stalin died. It was nighttime when, alone in his room, he was felled by a stroke, but his people, not daring to disturb him, left him alone until it was too late. My situation was entirely different. Contrary to what one might think from watching the film, Er ist wieder da (Look Who is Back), I did not treat those people harshly, yell at them, or threaten to fire them. Though life was becoming harder and harder for me, right to the end my relations with them were uniformly cordial and occasionally even light hearted. For example, I was once informed that a former orderly of mine had not one but two ships on which he served (he was a sailor) go down under him. Thereupon, I sent for him, told him I could not afford to have him sink my entire navy, and took him back. Those who were closest to me did not hesitate to have a little fun at my expense. Hoffmann once served me juice colored in such a way that I started berating him before I realized it was not alcohol. Once, one of my adjutants suggested that the blood Morrell took from me might be mixed with a little salt and sold as Führer black pudding!

  I saw to it that those of them who yielded to temptation would be severely punished. For the rest, though, I did not care about their rank but used to address them simply by their surnames. Unlike today’s great democratic leaders, until after the Putsch of 20 July 1944 it never occurred to me to humiliate them by having their persons searched, their bags checked, and so forth. I made sure I remembered their birthdays, and I gave them small presents. To express my appreciation I also had my staff keep a ready supply of more expensive gifts, such as gold watches inscribed with my initials, to hand out to people as the occasion demanded. Staying at my various headquarters during the war, I made sure that my female secretaries, who were surrounded by men, most of whom had not been home for a long, long time, would not be sexually harassed.

  Those of them who were unmarried, such as Walter Hewel, my liaison officer with the foreign ministry, I gently tried to provide with mates. Quite often, my efforts were crowned with success; that having been accomplished, I was happy to act as best man. If I sometimes inadvertently hurt their feelings, I was quick to apologize. I distinctly recall doing so both to Hewel and Traudl Junge. Above all, I knew how to talk to them when, as did happen from time to time, their husbands, fiancés, or other relatives died or were wounded or killed.

  Many, if not most, of the personnel in question were aware that they were living through extraordinary times and kept diaries. Not only didn’t I check on them or stop them, but here in Hell I took the time to read several of their accounts. This includes not just the published versions but the unpublished ones as well. None seems to have had any serious complaint about me. To the contrary, amongst themselves, they often called me USA. Meaning unser seeliger Adolf, our blessed Adolf. Some remained devoted to my memory for decades after my death, notwithstanding the way I am remembered and notwithstanding the problems this stance sometimes created for them.

  This brings me back to Fräulein Braun. As I said earlier, the more famous and powerful I became, the more women competed for my attention. Don’t they always? They are a strange lot, these women. The more one shows one’s contempt for them, the more they run after one. They take contempt as a sign of strength. Among the women who ran after me were some who were very beautiful indeed. The English aristocrat Unity Mitford in particular was a model of Germanic womanhood. Unfortunately, she was also as crazy as a bat and a danger to herself; after she tried to commit suicide in 1939, I had her packed off to Switzerland so that no one would know. In any case, I first met Eva in 1929. At the time she was working in Hoffmann’s studio in Munich. I was forty, she seventeen. Nothing unusual about that. When the aforementioned Kershaw maintained the opposite, he was simply jealous; the same applies to other historians, both male and female. The truth is that great men have always turned to younger women for relaxation. Caesar was 31 years older than Cleopatra. Napoleon was 17 years older than Maria Waleska, Goethe was 54 years older than his last love, Ulrike von Levetzow. Does that mean he was incapable of relating to mature women?

  The attraction is often mutual; for example, Gerdy Troost was 26 years younger than her adored husband. To return to Eva, I liked her from the start but only began seeing her regularly in October 1931 after Geli’s death. From that point our relationship blossomed. Early on she and I used to meet in my flat in Munich. She was what people call a nice girl, blonde—with a little help from peroxide, to be honest—quite good looking, cheerful, modest, and unassuming. She was of lower-middle class origin and neither terribly intelligent nor very well educated. And she was totally uninterested in politics. She did not understand my anti-Semitism, and my speeches bored her. All that was just as I wanted it to be. Having spent so much of my life fighting—first at the front, then in politics, then in the international arena, and finally as warlord—absolutely the last thing I needed near me was a philosophizing Brunhilde à la Mathilde Ludendorff. Much less a gold-digging vixen like Jacqueline Bouvier-Kennedy-Onassis, of whom de Gaulle once said that she would end up on the yacht of some tycoon—as she in fact did—or some half-demented feminist fury always complaining about being discriminated against, oppressed, and “objectified.” Knowing the world as I do, I believe that ninety-nine percent of real men agree with me on this point.

  What Eva did have was a soft heart for dogs, children, and people. I called her Tschapperl, which is Austrian slang for “little girl.” To protect her, I had a small air shelter built in the garden of her house. Rather than use it, though, she would invite her neighbors to come in. She herself used to go up on the roof to see if any incendiaries had fallen; no coward was Fräulein Braun. She also had a sense of humor and would poke occasional fun at me, even in the presence of others. She kept herself trim—a bit too trim, if you ask me—by hiking, swimming, and skiing. Had it depended on her, she would have gone out even when it was snowing heavily. But I, considering it too dangerous, prohibited her from doing so.

  As I said, one of her hobbies was photography. Another was fashion. She knew how to dress tastefully, though not grandly, and kept a meticulous record of the clothes she wore on each occasion. I encouraged her by giving her pocket money to buy jewelry and other trinkets. To keep her company I got her two dogs. They were Black Scottish terriers, which she named Negus and Stasi. In the
mornings they used to wait for her, sitting like bronze statues at her door. I used to tease her by saying they weren’t dogs but dusting brushes; she retorted by claiming that Blondi was not a dog but a calf. Her dogs and mine could not stand one another, with the result that, when I wanted to bring Blondi to some place where she was present, I had to ask for her permission first! Those—I shall not name them—who say I kept her in a “golden cage” at the Berghof are lying. Partly in order to get her away from her parents’ house, which she hated, as early as 1936, I gave her a house in Munich. There she lived with her younger sister Gretl, continuing to visit Hoffmann’s shop when she felt like it. She also had an apartment in the Reichskanzlei, where she stayed from time to time and where one of my orderlies, Rochus Misch, once accidentally caught her in my bed. She also had her own car. During my absence, which was most of the time, she did as she pleased. That included going on long walks, which, when I was around, she could not do.

  What is true is that I could never think of marrying her. I could not even take her around openly. Partly, this was the case because our relationship had to remain secret. And, sweet thing that she was, she was totally unsuited for acting like a grande dame at public functions such as diplomatic receptions and dinners. That is another reason why so many great men have two (or more) women. One is for show and the other for love. This is what German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt did. How much of her life did Anne Pingeot sacrifice for President François Mitterand! The most I could do for Eva was to have her attend the Nuremberg Rally in the company of Morrell and his wife. On other occasions she went with Hoffmann, her former employer. Even so, we had to be careful and could not sit closely together. Add the fact that I was, after all, a rather busy man, and her feeling that I neglected her becomes readily understandable.

  Twice, in 1932 and 1935, she tried to put an end to her life. The first time she used a pistol I had given her, but the bullet merely grazed her neck; the second time, she used sleeping-pills of a kind that were unlikely to kill her. Thus neither attempt seems to have been terribly serious; after all, she was neither the first nor the last woman to try to make her man feel guilty so as to bind him to her. It worked, and our relationship became closer. Partly because I could not help but sympathize with her, and partly because, after what had happened to Geli, I simply could not afford to have another dead woman around me. She was fiercely loyal. While not above criticizing me to my face, even in the presence of others, woe to anyone who dared to criticize me in front of her. I shall not satisfy people’s curiosity by going into detail except to say, “Für die Liebe, hatte ich eine Mädchen in München.” For love, I had a young lady in Munich.

  Absent a representative wife, I turned to Göring’s second wife Emmy, a former actress. And, above all, to Magda Goebbels. Born Magda Ritschel, she attended some of the best available schools for girls before marrying Günter Quandt in 1921. Quandt was one of Germany’s richest men, whose offspring still owns a large part of BMW. By him she had one son, Harald. However, the marriage was not a happy one. She, being twenty years old, wanted to dance and dazzle while hosting parties at their villa in Potsdam. He, eighteen years her senior, wanted to do business. In 1929 he divorced her, leaving her a well-to-do woman. In 1930 she joined the party and started doing volunteer work for Goebbels in his capacity as Chief of Propaganda. In 1931 they married, with me acting as a witness.

  She and Josef had six children. I am, however, sorry to say that the marriage was no happier than Magda’s previous one. Repeatedly, they cheated on one another, quarreled, and were reconciled. She even claimed he beat her; though how, given his dwarfish body and the metal brace he had to wear, he could have done so remains a mystery. At one point he wanted to divorce her. Next, he was going to marry the Czech actress Lida Baarova, with whom he had a steamy affair, and remove himself from the scene by taking up a post as our ambassador to Japan! The idea was ridiculous, and I curtly forbade him from going through with it. Ordinarily, I did not much care much what people did and with whom they did it. But scandal in high quarters was something I could not and would not tolerate. It might give our good, decent Germans some undesirable ideas as to who we, their rulers, were.

  Frau Goebbels was everything Eva was not. That, as well as the obvious way in which they competed for my attention, was why the two women developed a strong dislike for one another. Magda was highly intelligent, very well educated, and one of my most fervent admirers. When she was in my presence, one could hear her ovaries rattle. One of the last things she told me before we both died was that she could not imagine living in a world without National Socialism. Above all, she was every inch a lady. It was this last quality which attracted me to her and made her useful to me. She knew how to dress, how to use makeup, how to present herself, and how to talk. And not just in German either. Her excellent education and manners enabled me to take her as my companion during official events. And yes, during the 1930s I liked to drop in on the Goebbels family home at Schwanenwerder on the Havel when the opportunity offered. But no, a thousand times no. It is not true that I was what we Germans call a Hausfreund. And I did not have an affair with her.

  Nor was I the sick man I have often been portrayed to be. Had I not enjoyed robust health, I never could have summoned one tenth of the stamina needed to acquire the allegiance of millions and reached the position I did. To be sure, as I approached my fiftieth birthday, I could feel my age. There were some minor complaints, chiefly concerning my intestines and digestion. At one point I suffered from severe stomach cramps as well as eczema. I cannot say that I did not worry about them a little. These problems were handled by my physicians, principally the invaluable Dr. Morrell. I was well aware that many of my associates, Fräulein Braun included, did not like him. Neither did some of my other doctors. Motivated by professional jealousy, they were always intriguing against him. He was, in fact, somewhat unsavory—during mealtimes, you could hear him enjoying his food. And he was so fat that he had difficulty getting out of the bath and through the doors of railway carriages. He was almost a German Rasputin, I would say. But to me and Goebbels, whom he cured of dermatitis after twenty-two other doctors had failed to do so, he was a godsend. So effective were his injections that I often started feeling better even before he took the needle out of my arm. Whatever my problems, they certainly did not prevent me from carrying out my duties and presiding over some of history’s greatest military triumphs in 1939-41.

  From that point on things became very difficult. At times the war went well for us; at other times less so. So great was the strain that people who have not gone through it can hardly imagine what it is like. More than once, I felt like Atlas carrying the world on my shoulders! I worried and worked and worked and worried—the latter often at night while lying in bed and plagued by insomnia. I also slowly developed heart trouble, which gradually limited my physical activity. All this was just the opposite of the kind of life I had always thought was the best for me and tried to create for myself. The worst part of it was being unable to share my worries with anyone. At all costs, I had to appear young, healthy, sprightly, and ready for anything. Even during the most difficult moments, as when 6. Army was encircled at Stalingrad and all of us at headquarters were worried half to death. I could not even draw up my last will and testament; doing so would have had a depressing effect on everyone around me. That is why I postponed doing so to the last possible moment. Still, considering the circumstances, my health held up tolerably well. I was still able to do sustained work day in and day out. At no time was there any question of a loss of control, let alone an incapacitating physical collapse.

  Only after the Attentat on my life, which took place on 20 July 1944, did I really start to suffer from all kinds of symptoms. Prominent among them were partial deafness; eyes that, instead of being simply somewhat protruding, seemed to jump out of their sockets; a body which began bending itself forward; and an uncontrollable trembling in my left arm and right leg that my doctors attributed to Parkinson�
�s. That’s not to mention sleepless nights and the kind of nervousness that reflected the unbearable stress under which I was living. But I did not permit even that to wear me down. To the contrary, I felt that, the more vulnerable I became, the more Providence was holding its hand over me for its own purposes. One way or another, life was hard. At times it was only my sense of duty that kept me going. I held out as best I could right to the end.

  Like all VIPs, I attracted visitors as a flame attracts moths. Everyone and his brother wanted to be introduced to me and be photographed with me. And yet I was a lonely man. Many of my biographers have traced my loneliness to my youthful experiences or else to my alleged mental peculiarities, not to say pathologies. My subordinates also took note of how lonely I was. Here is what Ribbentrop, not always the most sensitive of men, had to say about the matter during his trial at Nuremberg. “If I am asked today whether I knew him well—how he thought as a politician and statesman, what kind of man he was—then I am bound to confess that I know only very little about him; in fact nothing at all. The fact is that although I went through so much together with him, in all the years of working with him I never came closer to him than on the first day we met, either personally or otherwise.”

  General Jodl, my closest military aide with whom I used to meet twice a day for several years on end, said similar things. Then there was Speer, my architect and subsequent Minister of Munitions. In his memoirs he wrote that, if I had any friends, he was my friend. And he was right; he was my friend—up to a point, at any rate. With him I could discuss my artistic plans as with no one else. Until, that is, the very end of the war when he disobeyed my “scorched earth” order. At one point he even tried to kill me by feeding poison gas into my bunker. Or so, fighting for his life at Nuremberg, he claimed. Some friend.

  Another close “friend” was Goebbels. Goebbels was a giant locked in a pygmy’s body. As he proudly noted in his diary, with him I talked “man to man” as I did with no one else. True enough. But part of it was calculation, not sentiment. It was a way to keep him absolutely loyal. And it worked. In any case, can a man in my position really have friends? True friendship requires total mutual trust. But could I really trust people all of whom, without exception, wanted something from me? A favor, perhaps? Greater authority to help them against one or more of their rivals? A promotion? Or simply to bask in my glory? On one occasion, during a lunch at the Berghof, I lent Speer a jacket of mine, complete with the emblem I alone was entitled to wear. Thirty years later, in his memoirs, he still recalled the incident. With pride! Friendship, true friendship, is only possible between equals. But I, in all modesty, did not have an equal. How could I when I was still the party’s greatest asset? It was even more impossible after I became Reich Chancellor and was holding the fate of tens of millions in my hands.