Hermann Goring, Hitler's right hand man, was a jovial, jolly, boisterous, violent, drug addicted thug who seemed unable to avoid giving his critics straight lines. For example, in March of 1933 (two months after Hitler became German chancellor) he attended a reception at the American embassy in Berlin to celebrate the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt, and his attempt at an insult was thrown right back at him. "So!" he said to the American ambassador, William Dodd, "you have a new president! Do you think your country will do well being ruled by a cripple?"
"A physical cripple?" asked Dodd blankly. "We'll get on fine. And as for being ruled by an emotional cripple, how will you do?" Goring's face grew red as a beet, and he stormed out of the embassy.
A few years later Goring hosted a dinner for a number of European ambassadors, but even though he was the host he arrived late. "I am terribly sorry," he said to the assembled guests. "I was detained. I was hunting."
"Oh?" said the British ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps. "Animals?"
Italo Balbo was marshal of the Italian air force and was thus responsible for proposing the annual aviation budget. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that Balbo was popular and Mussolini was jealous, Il Duce chose to be displeased with the 1934 budget proposal. When he was peremptorily summoned to Rome for a meeting with his boss, Balbo knew he was in for a reprimand. He was not prepared, however, to find that Mussolini had ordered all the seats other than his own removed from his office, so that Balbo would have to stand like a frightened school boy before an angry principal to receive his rebuke. This Balbo's sense of self-respect would not tolerate. He walked into the office, quickly assessed the situation, strode forward, and promptly sat down—on Mussolini's desk!
Even though he ruled Italy for decades, there was never during his rule a street named for Benito Mussolini in Italy. The words Via Mussolini never appeared on a street sign anywhere, for one very simple reason: the Italian word Via means street; it also means "away with."
Stalin had always been paranoid, but as he grew older his paranoia grew more and more intense. It was generally known among his closest associates (those he had not yet killed) that the slightest hint of suspicion on Stalin's part might result in a death sentence.
On one occasion in the early 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev was walking through the Kremlin on the way to his office when he met Stalin in the hallway. Smiling broadly, he said, "Good morning, Comrade Stalin!"
Stalin stopped in his tracks and glared at Khrushchev. "What are you smiling about?" he snapped. "What are you up to?"
Khrushchev stammered a light-hearted demurral. After glaring at him for a few more moments, Stalin walked on.
Khrushchev managed to avoid Stalin for the next few days (out of sight, out of mind, as it were), but he could not avoid attending the meeting of the Politburo later that week. The other members were laughing at a joke someone had told, but Khrushchev made a point of not joining in the laughter, maintaining instead a dour demeanor.
He took his seat, to find Stalin glaring at him again. "What's wrong?" Stalin demanded."What's the matter? What aren't you telling me?"
As the old saying goes, damned if you do, damned if you don't.
In addition his well-known love of opera, Hitler also enjoyed movies, musical comedies in particular. He eventually had private movie theaters installed in both his Alpine villa, the Obersaltzburg above Berchtesgaden, and in the Chancellery in Berlin; but for the first year after he became chancellor he actually "went to the movies." Of course, he did not do this as an average person would. A typical night at the movies for Hitler went as follows: An hour or so before the film began someone on Hitler's staff would call the manager of the theater (he always went to the same one in Berlin) and inform him that the Führer would be attending that night. The ushers, whose job it was to seat the patrons, would then rope off the last three rows of seats. After the house lights dimmed Hitler and his entourage would enter, take their seats, and enjoy the show.
In theaters back then some sort of expression of patriotism preceded the film. (In the U.S., for example, a picture on the screen of the American flag accompanied by the strains of the Star-Spangled Banner was commonplace well into the late 1950s.) In the darkened theater in Berlin, a picture of Hitler standing before the Nazi flag, accompanied by the national anthem Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles, began the show, and everyone in the theater was expected to stand and give the image the Nazi salute; everyone except, of course, Hitler, who could not be expected to stand and salute himself.
On one occasion a new usher, a fellow unfamiliar with the procedure, saw that one patron (Hitler) was not standing and saluting. Not knowing who he was, the usher crept up behind Hitler in the darkness and whispered in his ear, "Listen, I hate the Schweinhund too, but it's safer if you stand up."
As is commonly known, the German word Schweinhund means "pig-dog." The fate of the usher is not known, but can be surmised.
Generalissimo (i.e., supreme general) Francisco Franco led the victorious reactionary forces in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, and ruled Spain until his death. He would never have won that war, however, were it not for the active support and assistance of Mussolini and Hitler. It was reasonable to assume, therefore, that the Spanish dictator would consider joining his fellow fascist dictators in the war against Britain.
To that end Hitler met with Franco at the Franco-Spanish border soon after the German defeat and occupation of France. He pressured the Spaniard, wheedled, enticed, harangued, made promises, and turned on every bit of his charismatic charm, which was considerable; but Franco refused to be seduced into anything more than carefully chosen (and vacuous) expressions of solidarity and well-wishes. After the meeting ended, Hitler said, “I would rather go to the dentist and have my teeth extracted than speak to that man again.”
Franco apparently made the correct choice in keeping Spain out of World War Two. His friends Hitler and Mussolini predeceased him by thirty years, the former by suicide, the latter by summary execution. Franco died in bed of old age in 1975.
Kemal (or Kamal) Atatiirk, the founder of the modern TurkishRepublic, was a somewhat unpredictable, mercurial, and dangerous man, as this story illustrates:
In 1926 an unsuccessful assassination attempt convinced him that his opponents in the government had to be eliminated, so he ordered the arrest and hanging of the opposition leaders, including some people who had been close friends and allies in the struggle against the Sultan.
Turkey thus became in essence a dictatorship. But Kamal did not want a dictatorship. He wanted a republic. So in 1930 he proceeded to create an opposition party, even to the extent of naming its leadership. He could not understand why they subsequently did not oppose him with sufficient vigor.
Two of the enduring myths about Adolf Hitler are that he was part Jewish and that his real name was Adolf Schicklgruber. Here is the truth on both scores:
Hitler's father was born out of wedlock, and the identity of Hitler's paternal grandfather is unknown. Hitler's paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, was employed in Strones, Austria, as a domestic servant at the time she became pregnant in 1837. The family for whom she worked was named Bloch, a name not uncommon among German Jews, but one quite common among other Germans.
His father thus grew up as Alois Schicklgruber. In 1876 he was adopted by Johann Georg Hiedler, a relative who married his mother Maria Anna. Thus Alois Schicklgruber became Alois Hiedler, which later morphed into Hitler. (Consistency of spelling was not common among the rural Austrian lower classes.) Adolf Hitler's name at birth was, therefore, Hitler.
But the possibility that his grandfather was a Jew gnawed at Hitler his entire life. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, he instructed Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo, to track down the identity of the man who impregnated his grandmother. Himmler ordered the investigation, but to no avail. The identity of Hitler's paternal grandfather remains unknown.
The grave of Hitler's parents in Leon
ding, Austria, remains to this day. But the graves of all other relatives were demolished on Himmler's orders. The town cemetery in Strones, in fact, was used as an artillery range.
A German physician who treated numerous Nazi officials told this story, for which there is no other documentation.
In 1943 Heinrich Himmler went to his physician in a state of nervous exhaustion. The subsequent physical examination yielded disturbing results. His blood pressure was seriously elevated, his pulse was much too rapid, and he was running a low grade fever. When asked if something out of the ordinary was bothering him, he confided that he was supposed to exterminate "a certain segment of the Hungarian population", i.e., Jews, before the end of the year. When the doctor expressed horror and revulsion at this confidence, Himmler objected impatiently. "You don't understand," he said. "I am swamped with work! It is impossible for me to accomplish this by the end of the year!"
Adolf Eichmann was a major figure in the black-shirted S.S. during the era of the Third Reich and was deeply involved in the Holocaust. He was put in charge of the mass deportation of Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe to the death camps in Poland. It is estimated that between two and two and a half million men, women, and children were transported to their deaths under his direction.
Eichmann escaped from Europe at the end of the war and lived under various pseudonyms as well as his own name for the next fifteen years until he was located and kidnapped by the Mossad, the Israeli secret service. He was taken to Israel where he was tried for murder, convicted, and hanged.
When his trial began he was asked, as are all defendants in criminal trials, to identify himself on the witness stand. He did so, and he was then asked to describe his role in the government of Nazi Germany. Without hesitating or blinking an eye, he replied, "I was regarded as an expert on transportation."
This story goes under the category of "once a Nazi, always a Nazi." (It is also one of the few anecdotes for which the author can provide an unimpeachable personal source, namely the young French soldier mentioned at the end of the tale. He recounted this story to the author when they became acquainted in Paris in 1976.)
The surviving members of the leadership of the Third Reich were put on trial in Nuremberg after the War, and most of them were condemned to death by hanging. But it was a fair trial; three of them were acquitted and several others sent to prison. Rudolf Hess was one of the prominent Nazis spared the hangman's noose.
Hess was one of the alte Kämpfer, the old fighters, who were with Hitler in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. He voluntarily joined Hitler in prison in 1924, where Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to him. He was appointed Deputy Leader (Vizeführer) of the Nazi Party, and basically ran the Party on a day-to-day basis.
But in assessing guilt and meting out punishment at Nuremberg, the judges had a problem. Hess was a prominent Nazi, the number five man in the state after Hitler, Goring, Goebbels, and Himmler, but he was basically just a political hack. He had nothing to do with planning, starting, or waging the Second World War, and was uninvolved in war crimes or the Holocaust. To have hanged him would have smacked of the drum-head justice of a kangaroo court. But on the basis of the indictment, that the entire Nazi government was itself a vast conspiracy to do all those things, Hess was sentenced to life in prison. He was incarcerated in Spandau Castle on the outskirts of Berlin, where he remained until his death by suicide in 1987.
By the mid-'70s, Hess was the only inmate left in the prison. All the others (Speer, Raeder, Doenitz, von Schirach, etc.) had either been released or had died. But by the Allied agreement reached in 1946, the four powers occupying Berlin served three month shifts guarding the prison, guarding by that time one little old man.
So. Once a Nazi, always a Nazi... ?
In 1975, when the French armed forces were guarding Spandau, a young French soldier, bored by the tedium of his assignment, left his assigned position to watch Hess as the old man took his daily walk around the courtyard. Hess looked up, noticed him, and then reported the soldier to his commanding officer for leaving his post.
Hitler's grasp upon reality was always tenuous at best, as illustrated by two stories recounted by his friend August Kubizek. Kubizek and Hitler were very close friends in Linz, Austria, during their teenage years, and they both fancied themselves artists. Hitler came up with a wonderful idea: he would buy a house, large enough for the two boys and other like-minded young artists to live in. The house would be staffed by pretty young maids, and he and Kubizek would host lavish parties to be attended by beautiful women and notable men. To finance this expensive scheme, Hitler hit upon an infallible solution, certain of success.
He bought a lottery ticket.
When he (needless to say) did not win the lottery, he was outraged and almost beside himself with anger. He blamed the Austrian government, the polyglot population of the Hapsburg Empire, and, of course, the Jews.
Such setbacks did not stifle Hitler's normal adolescent drives (well, somewhat normal, anyway), and in 1908 he fell in love with a beautiful girl named Stephanie Rabatsch. He adored her after the manner of romantic, courtly love, and he was convinced that she loved him as well with the same degree of passionate intensity.
There was one thing that interfered with their relationship: they didn't have one. She did not know he was alive. Hitler never approached her, never spoke to her, never introduced himself. He would follow her around Linz, staring at her, watching her, and would then rhapsodize about their love to Kubizek. Hitler's friend remembers him composing a long, florid, childish, melodramatic poem entitled "Hymn to the Beloved," which, of course, he did not show her. When Kubizek tactfully suggested that Hitler's passion might have a better chance of succeeding if Stephanie knew him, Hitler demurred.
In 1908, just before leaving for Vienna, he wrote her a letter confessing his love and his intention to marry her when he graduated from Art School. As is well known, Hitler was not even accepted into Art School. He never attempted to contact Stephanie again (if it can be fairly said that he ever attempted to contact her at all: his marriage proposal had been anonymous). In later years an elderly Stephanie Rabatsch was asked about this, and she recalled that in her youth she had indeed received an unsigned marriage proposal from some oddball. She threw it out.
Very little is usually written about the families of the great dictators because, unlike monarchs, their office is not hereditary, and when they die their families cease to be important. Some relatives are less obscure than others, however. It is generally known that Stalin's daughter Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva defected to the United States in 1967, that Mussolini's son Romano became a very successful jazz pianist and that his granddaughter Alessandra, an actress, singer, model, and European Playboy centerfold, was elected to the Italian parliament in 2003. One of her campaign slogans was "Fascists are better than Faggots."
But most interesting of all is the story of the Hitlers.
Hitler himself had no children. Indeed, he did not marry until shortly before his suicide. His bride, Eva Braun, had been in love with him for years, but had been treated by him dismissively. Marrying him was the high point of her life. On the marriage certificate, which has survived, she began to sign her name "Eva B..." but then crossed out the "B" and wrote "Eva Hitler." Then she and the groom killed themselves.
But Hitler had brothers and sisters. His half-sister Angela Raubal and half-brother Alois Hitler had children, two girls for the former and two boys for the latter. Angela's daughter, Geli Raubal, had a torrid and well-publicized love affair with her Uncle Adolf in the late '20s, and committed suicide for reasons still unclear. (She may have been murdered to eliminate a public embarrassment to the Nazi Party.)
Alois Hitler alternated his residences between Germany and England. He ran a beer hall in Berlin in the early days of the Third Reich, an establishment that attracted a large storm trooper clientele for obvious reasons. ("Heil Hitler, Herr Hitler," was the way they greeted him.) Alois was a bigamist and had two sons by
two different wives. By his German wife Maria he had a son named Heinz, who served in the German army during World War Two and died in a Soviet P.O.W. camp.
By his other wife, an Irish woman named Bridget whom he met and married in Liverpool, he had a son named William Patrick. Willy Hitler moved to Germany with his father and became involved in numerous unsavory and shady schemes, including an attempt to blackmail his uncle. Eventually Willy Hitler went to the United States, where he made propaganda films for the U.S. government. Hitler's comment on this: "We were always very disappointed in Willy."
Willy Hitler served in the U.S. Navy during the war, and then moved to Patchogue, Long Island, where he and his wife raised four sons. He changed his name from Hitler to William Stuart-Houston (but did name his first son Alexander Adolf), lived a long and presumably happy life, and died in 1987. He is buried in the Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Coram, Long Island, New York.
None of his children themselves had children. The Hitler line will end with them.
One final comment on Hitler that, perhaps better than any other, exemplifies his cold-bloodedness:
The Germans are a very formal people, and the proper use of the various forms of the second person pronoun is a matter of great social significance. In most Indo-European languages there are two different ways to say the pronoun "you," namely polite and familiar. (In French, for example, the polite form is vous and the familiar is tu; in Spanish, usted and tu; in English, you and, though rarely used today, thou.) In German, the polite form, both singular and plural, is Sie, while the familiar singular is du and the familiar plural is ihr. Making the social transition from Sie to du is a major step in any German relationship, outside one in the immediate family.
Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun Page 7