Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  Heidemann began to hold regular Third Reich soirées on Carin II. About a dozen friends and former Nazis would be invited, with Wolff and Mohnke as the guests of honour. ‘We started to have long drinking evenings on board,’ recalled Heidemann, ‘with different people of quite different opinions talking to each other. I had always been a passionate reader of thrillers. Suddenly I was living a thriller.’ He started to devour books on the Third Reich. ‘I wanted to be part of the conversation, not just to sit and drink whisky.’

  Heidemann’s only problem was the continuing cost of the yacht. Merely servicing the debts he had incurred in buying it was proving ‘a bottomless pit’. In the hope of a solution, he decided, in 1976, to seek help from Henri Nannen.

  The Stern of 1976 was very different from the Stern which Heidemann had joined in the 1950s. With the advent of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, it had begun sprinkling its pages with glossy pictures of nudes. Following the growth of protest politics, its editorial line had swung to the left, with strident articles on student unrest, the Vietnam war, and the perfidy of the NATO alliance. The magazine’s financial strength was a reflection of the power of the West German economy. It sucked in enormous advertising revenue and regularly produced issues running to 300 pages. Always abreast of the latest fashion, with a circulation of over 1.5 million, it easily outsold its major competitors. Its publisher, Henri Nannen, shaped the magazine in his own image: prosperous, bulging, glossy and bumptious.

  In 1976 this ‘hybrid of money and journalism’, as one of his left-wing writers called him, was sixty-three. He had never been a member of the Nazi Party, but he had a past which sat uneasily with his present position as purveyor of radical chic. He had appeared as a sports announcer in Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He had written articles praising Hitler in Kunst dem Volk (Art for the People), a Nazi magazine. During the war he had worked for a military propaganda unit. Stern, under his guidance, gave extensive coverage to the Third Reich and there were some who detected an ambivalence in his fascination with the period. ‘It was subconscious,’ claimed Manfred Bissinger, Nannen’s left-wing deputy at the time. ‘For Nannen, the less bad the Nazi past turned out to have been, the less bad his role in it was.’ He had a powerful personality and Heidemann revered him: according to Braumann, ‘he obeyed his great master Nannen’s every word’.

  Heidemann had been pestering Nannen to visit Carin II for months. In the summer of 1976, Nannen finally agreed. He was, in his own words, ‘surprised and fascinated’ by what he saw. Heidemann had turned the yacht into a kind of shrine to its first owner. Goering’s dinner service was on prominent display, as were Goering’s tea cups and Goering’s drinking goblets. On the table was Goering’s ashtray, in the cupboard, his uniform. The cushion covers were made out of Goering’s bathrobe. Working from old photographs, Heidemann had even tried to fill the bookshelves with the same books Goering had kept there. Most of these mementoes had been given to Heidemann by Edda Goering; the rest had been acquired from dealers in Nazi memorabilia. Heidemann showed Nannen an album filled with photographs and newspaper cuttings about the yacht which included a picture of Princess Margaret on a trip to Basle. ‘Simply everything was there,’ said Nannen later. ‘The photographs didn’t just come from one source. They couldn’t have been forged. He’d actually collected the whole lot. I found it an incredible journalistic performance.’

  Having put his employer in this receptive mood, Heidemann outlined his plan. Nannen recalled:

  Heidemann told me he needed a loan of 60,000 marks, otherwise he would be in difficulties. He was having to pay the interest on a loan of 300,000 marks he’d taken out to pay for the renovation of the Goering yacht. He needed money to put a new engine into his boat.

  Heidemann proposed that he should write a book for Stern based upon the conversations he was holding with Mohnke, Wolff and other old Nazis. He told Nannen that he had already begun tape recording some of these reminiscences and had some interesting material on the Odessa network, the supposed Nazi escape route to South America. ‘Because Heidemann had already reported on this subject for Stern,’ said Nannen, ‘I agreed.’

  On 12 October 1976 Heidemann concluded an agreement with Stern’s parent company, the large Hamburg publishing house of Gruner and Jahr. He undertook to write a book provisionally entitled Bord Gespräche (Deck Conversations) with the subtitle ‘Personalities from History Meet on Goering’s Former Yacht Carin II’. The contract was unusually generous towards Heidemann. He was paid an immediate advance of 60,000 marks, but no date was stipulated for the delivery of the manuscript and he was not required to return the money should he fail to write the book. All he had to do was undertake to maintain Carin II in a satisfactory condition. The contract was signed, on behalf of Gruner and Jahr, by Henri Nannen and by the company’s managing director, Manfred Fischer.

  With the official blessing and financial support of his employers, Heidemann’s descent into the world of the old Nazis now began in earnest.

  FIVE

  WHILE HEIDEMANN POURED whisky and adjusted his tape recorder aboard Carin II, another journalist was also busy tracking down survivors of the Third Reich. One hundred and fifty miles south-east of Hamburg, in his office in West Berlin, James P. O’Donnell, bureau chief of Newsweek magazine, was compiling a card index of more than 250 people who had been with Hitler during his last days in the bunker. His researches were to have important consequences for Heidemann.

  O’Donnell’s first assignment in Berlin for Newsweek, in July 1945, had been to visit the Führerbunker. The memory of those forty-five minutes beneath the ground – the stench of blocked latrines whose effluent flooded the narrow corridor, the blackened walls, the tiny rooms littered with broken glass and bloodied bandages – had stayed with O’Donnell ever since. ‘Adolf Hitler’, he wrote, ‘exercises over my mind, and that of many others, I suspect, a curious kind of fascination.’ He decided to write a book, an expanded version of The Last Days of Hitler, describing what had happened in the bunker. Between 1972 and 1976, operating out of Berlin, he visited scores of eyewitnesses, ‘cruising Hitler’s old autobahns, clocking more than 60,000 miles’.

  Like Heidemann, he found himself increasingly fascinated by the network of characters he uncovered. Thirty years after the end of the war many of the people close to Hitler still kept in regular contact. Gossiping amongst themselves, divided into cliques, their relationships still traced ancient patterns of loyalty and animosity forged in the heyday of the Third Reich. Once, while he was interviewing Albert Speer at his home in Heidelberg, the postman arrived and handed Speer a package which turned out to contain an autographed copy of his book, Inside the Third Reich. Speer had sent it to Christa Schroeder, his favourite among Hitler’s secretaries, whom he had not seen since his arrest and imprisonment in 1945. She had sent it back with a brief covering note saying that she was sorry, but she was returning the book because she had been ‘ordered to do so’. ‘Who has the power to issue such orders?’ asked O’Donnell. ‘The Keepers of the Flame,’ replied Speer: the adjutants, orderlies, chauffeurs and secretaries who had formed Hitler’s inner circle and who habitually referred to themselves as ‘die von dem Berg’, ‘the Mountain People’, in memory of their pre-war days at Berchtesgaden. Speer, once Hitler’s favourite, was generally detested for his ‘betrayal’ of the Führer at Nuremberg. For his part, Speer contemptuously dismissed them as the Chauffeureska.

  It was this group that O’Donnell, and later Heidemann, succeeded in penetrating: the adjutants, Otto Guensche and Richard Schulze-Kossens; the pilot, Hans Baur; the valet, Heinz Linge; the chauffeur, Erich Kempka; and, above all, the secretaries, who maintained a fierce loyalty to their dead employer. To them he was still der Chef: the Boss. The oldest, Johanna Wolf, had been recruited to work for Hitler by Rudolf Hess in 1924 and had remained his principal private secretary for more than twenty years. Stern was reputed to have offered her $500,000 for her memoirs. She turned them down. ‘I was t
aught long ago’, she explained to O’Donnell, ‘that the very first and last duty of a confidential secretary is to remain confidential.’ None of Hitler’s four main secretaries had married after the war; none had much money. When O’Donnell finally persuaded Gerda Christian to meet him at the home of an intermediary in 1975 she was working as a secretary in a bank in Dortmund. Of all the Keepers of the Flame, she was the most fanatical. ‘Do nothing to let the Führer down,’ was Frau Christian’s repeated exhortation to her colleagues. She had divorced her husband, a Luftwaffe general, in 1946, and like the other secretaries, she chose to remain single. O’Donnell once asked her why. ‘How could any of us have remarried,’ she replied, ‘after having known a man like Adolf Hitler?’

  It was in the autumn of 1972 that O’Donnell first heard the story of Sergeant Arndt’s ill-fated mission to fly the ten metal trunks out of Berlin. From Heinz Linge he had obtained the address of Rochus Misch, the bunker’s switchboard operator. Misch, by then in his fifties, turned out to be the proprietor of a paint and varnish shop less than a mile from O’Donnell’s Berlin office. Misch was happy to talk about his wartime experiences. The interview began in his shop and continued during a walk through the city. From a vantage point in Potsdamer Platz the two men stood for a while, looking out across the Eastern sector, to the grassy mound in the shadow of the Berlin Wall which is all that now remains of Hitler’s bunker. It was not until the early evening, when they were sitting in O’Donnell’s office, that Misch mentioned the loading of the chests on to the lorry and described Arndt’s departure from Berlin.

  In my office [recalled O’Donnell] I had for years been using my own US Army officer’s standard-issue footlocker to store back-copies of the overseas editions of Time and Newsweek. Misch spotted this, and in order to describe the German chests pointed to the footlocker: ‘Something like that, only cheaper, and with wooden ribs.’ To get the heft and thus a guess at the weight, Misch and I together were just able to lift it three feet into the air to simulate the 1945 loading operation.

  Using this as a rough guide, O’Donnell estimated that Arndt had been escorting almost half a ton of documents. He decided to pursue the story further and a few months later drove down to the Bavarian village of Herrsching, on the shores of Lake Ammersee, to see Hans Baur.

  Baur had tried to break out from the Führerbunker two days after Hitler’s death but had been cut down by Russian machine-gun fire. He was hit in the leg and the wound had turned septic. ‘There was no surgeon available,’ Baur wrote later, ‘so the German surgeon amputated with a pocket knife.’ O’Donnell found a tough and irascible old man of seventy-seven, who used his wooden leg as if it were an elaborate stage prop, noisily tapping it with his signet ring or occasionally hobbling round the room on it to enact some dramatic scene. In November 1945 he had been taken by cattle truck to Moscow’s Lubianka prison where, night after night for weeks on end, he had been interrogated about Hitler’s final hours. He was made to put his account down on paper, only to have the pages snatched off him and torn up before his eyes. Sometimes he was grilled on his own; sometimes the Russians dragged in other bunker survivors: the commander of Hitler’s SS bodyguard, Hans Rattenhuber, his naval attaché, Admiral Voss, Otto Guensche and Heinz Lingé. The questioning went on for three and a half years. In 1950 he was asked if he had ever flown Hitler to meet Mussolini. Baur answered that he had, four times. He was promptly accused of ‘having taken part in war preparations, because during those discussions Hitler and Mussolini had hatched their criminal plot to attack the Soviet Union’. Despite Baur’s horrified protests that he ‘bore no more responsibility than a train driver’, he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a labour camp. In the end, he spent ten years in Soviet captivity. He was released in 1955 and shortly afterwards he decided to write his memoirs. They were not designed to be a work of scholarship or history, but – as he told Trevor-Roper soon after his return to the West – a book to be read ‘by the fire, in the evening, with pipe in mouth’. It was in this book, Hitler’s Pilot, buried amid the anecdotes of his adventures with the Boss, that Baur had first described Hitler’s reaction to the news that Arndt’s plane was missing.

  The original manuscript had contained ten pages on Operation Seraglio, but his publishers had cut them – as they cut more than two-thirds of his rambling reminiscences. Baur told O’Donnell that he had been anxious to set matters straight because of accusations from the relatives of some of those killed that the operation had been poorly planned. He had contacted the Luftwaffe’s Graves Registration organization who told him – erroneously as it turned out – that the aircraft had crashed in a Bavarian forest (it had in fact crashed in what is now East Germany). That was all he knew. He had no idea what Hitler had meant by ‘valuable documents’ for ‘posterity’.

  O’Donnell considered what could possibly have been of such value to Hitler that its apparent loss could cause such distress.

  From the autumn of 1942 onwards, a team of stenographers had taken down every word uttered during the military conferences at the Führer’s headquarters. These verbatim transcripts were compiled at Hitler’s insistence as a means of establishing his strategic genius and his generals’ incompetence: ‘I want to pin down responsibility for events once and for all,’ he explained to one of the stenographers. If there was one set of records which Hitler intended as ‘a testament to posterity’ it was this. He stated at the time that his words were to be ‘taken down for later historical research’.

  One of Hitler’s secretaries, Christa Schroeder, told O’Donnell that in her view it was these transcripts that were on board the crashed plane. Else Krueger, Martin Bormann’s former secretary, agreed with her. She rejected O’Donnell’s initial theory that the papers might have been the missing notes of Hitler’s ‘Table Talk’ from 1943 to 1944: these were Bormann’s responsibility and would have been among his files, not Hitler’s.

  At this point, in 1975, with the deadline for the completion of his book looming, O’Donnell decided he had taken the story as far as he could. He was content to have obtained a minor historical scoop: establishing for the first time a link between Baur’s account of Hitler’s reaction to the loss of Arndt’s plane, and Misch’s description of the evacuation of the ten heavy chests. To round off the story, and to cover all possible eventualities, he ended his account of the episode with what he hoped was an appropriately teasing last paragraph:

  As all police reporters know, documents have a way of surviving crashes in which humans are cremated. While even metal melts, a book or a notebook does not burn easily, above all when it is packed tightly into a container excluding oxygen. Paper in bulk tends, rather, to char at the edges… One is left with the nagging thought that some Bavarian hayloft, chicken coop, or even pigsty may well have been waterproofed and insulated with millions of words of the Führer’s unpublished, ineffable utterances, simply hauled away at dawn as loot from a burning German transport plane.

  O’Donnell’s book was published in Germany under the title Die Katacombe in 1976. Not long afterwards, General Mohnke, one of the book’s main characters, presented a copy to Gerd Heidemann.

  SIX

  O’DONNELL WAS AWARE of Stern’s increasing interest in the survivors of Hitler’s court. ‘During the years when I was on the road talking to the “Mountain People”, and above all from 1975 on, Stern approached at least a dozen of the old Hitler retainers and encouraged them, in the words of Heinz Linge, “to get something, anything on paper”.’ Linge, who lived in Hamburg, recalled one occasion when he joined Wolff, Mohnke, Hanna Reitsch (the famous Nazi test pilot) and ‘several others’ aboard Carin II for a day trip to the North Sea island of Sylt. Linge described the yacht as ‘a kind of sentimental bait for all of us old Hitler people’. In the course of the two-hundred-mile voyage, Heidemann ‘between bouts of champagne and caviar’ tried to entice his guests to dictate their memories into his tape recorder. The results were disappointing: hardly surprising, observed Linge, ‘with so mu
ch champagne flowing’.

  The Sylt excursion was, unfortunately for Heidemann, fairly typical. The rambling and tipsy old Nazis enjoyed his hospitality but produced little of practical value. By 1978 it was becoming apparent that Henri Nannen’s 60,000 mark investment in Heidemann and his ‘deck conversations’ was not paying off. Around this time, Erich Kuby, an experienced Stern writer, joined forces with Heidemann to investigate the Nazis’ relations with Mussolini. Carin II was supposed to be the key which would unlock the participants’ memories. SS Major Eugen Dollmann, formerly a senior officer in the German security service in Rome, was among those lured aboard. In the visitors’ book aboard the yacht Kuby wrote that ‘on this calm and quiet sea – if one can ever describe the Elbe as such – in the company of General Wolff, we allowed the Third Reich to come alive again’. But despite Kuby’s melodramatic description, these sessions also proved to be largely worthless.