At Home with the F??hrer
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
At Home with the Führer The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin from the Interrogation of Hitler's Personal Aides Edited by Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhi Translated by Giles...
...The second act of the prewar drama soon followed...
...Slovakia was granted independence as a Nazi satellite...
...Moscow and Leningrad slipped from the Fiihrer's grasp...
...Braun is described as a "sporty sort" who dressed tastefully, with a slim figure and a fresh complexion...
...Whether he read it is open to question...
...They'll chicken out...
...THE CURTAIN rose on the third act early in 1939...
...Life was closer to normal during his visits to the Berghof, where he enjoyed the company of Eva Braun...
...He suspected poison everywhere, in the lavatory cistern, on the soap, in his shaving cream or in the toothpaste, and demanded that these be minutely investigated as well...
...After signing a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union, Hitler invaded Poland and divided it with Stalin...
...The Führer went with no regrets for plunging Europe into a bloodbath, let alone the harm he inflicted on the German people...
...He almost certainly would not have survived it if not for the stimulating injections his personal physician, Dr...
...It seemed Hitler and his generals could do no wrong—until he launched the Battle of Britain in the air as a prelude to invasion...
...It overwhelmed Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France...
...For nearly 12 years he lived as a demigod amid the diurnal humdrum and banal diversions of the petit bourgeois that he was and always remained, even as he ran the War...
...In those days, when she visited him in Munich, the dossier says he had "hot chocolate and tea, cognac, fruit, and cold champagne ready...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent This latest of a thousand or so books about the Nazi Führer is surely one of the most remarkable...
...The Hitler Book (Russian dyelo, or case) did not come to light until 1991, when it was discovered in the Communist Party archives by German historian Matthias Uhi...
...Stalin, about to initiate his own anti-Semitic purge, might not have welcomed the hint that he was walking in Hitler's footsteps...
...In the spring of 1940 the German war machine, the most lethal the world had ever seen, brought blitzkrieg to the quiescent Western Front...
...He took a step back from the table and cried out in a faltering voice, 'Nothing like this has ever happened before...
...He would not go with them to the mess any more and ate his lunch alone in his study...
...The War is lost!'" On April 28 Hitler married Eva Braun, who had come to Berlin to share his fate...
...Most of the dossier deals with his management of the War, his domination of the generals, and his decline to a shrieking wreck as things went awry...
...His cynical self-infatuation found expression in his comment that they had shown themselves unworthy of his genius and that, the best having fallen, only the dregs were left...
...At Home with the Führer The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin from the Interrogation of Hitler's Personal Aides Edited by Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhi Translated by Giles MacDonogh PublicAffairs...
...By 1942 things had gotten worse: "Hitler now completely withdrew himself from the generals and spent his time in isolation...
...By 193 8 Hitler had built a new Germany, smashing the Treaty of Versailles, rearming the Reich and reoccupying the demilitarized Rhineland...
...Written for Stalin, the dossier avoids such embarrassing material as the Soviet leader's role in helping start World War ?, his faithfully supplying Germany with strategic minerals while Hitler was conquering Europe, and his refusal to believe his ally would turn on him...
...Tensions reached fever pitch: France called up its Army reservists, and Britain placed its fleet at the ready...
...Hitler must have known the War was lost after Stalingrad...
...He shared his palatial mountain retreat, the Berghof, as well as villas in Munich, with his mistress, Eva Braun, and he amassed great wealth from enforced sales ofhis manifesto, Mein Kampf...
...Then Hitler read the evening papers, while Eva made herself comfortable at the fireside table, pecking at this and that...
...Czechoslovakia, already deprived of the Sudetenland, was completely dismembered...
...A single copy of the work was delivered to Joseph Stalin in 1949...
...The Kremlin line at the time held that Hitler was not dead but in hiding, perhaps in the hands of the English and Americans for some nefarious anti-Soviet purpose—despite Moscow's having forensic evidence of his death...
...For hours the two of them walked around the room hand in hand...
...Chamberlain seemed prepared to cede Germany the Sudetenland...
...There are no references to the Holocaust...
...Then it was Poland's turn...
...A crescendo of threats against Czechoslovakia brought Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to the Berghof to find out what Hitler had in mind...
...In the main, however, the facts of the narrative are straight, although their selection was largely a matter of political choice...
...That was the paper he waved in the air upon returning to London, declaring "peace in our time...
...Only after midnight did Hitler withdraw to his bedroom where Linge had, as usual, prepared him tea, fruit and stimulants prescribed for him by his [then] new personal physician, Dr...
...He stayed up all night drinking tea with his secretaries and took to sleeping until midday...
...After months of futility, he turned eastward to take what he always considered his main prize: the Soviet Union as far east as the Ural mountains...
...When officers tried to kill him at the Wolf's Lair on July 20,1944, he survived the bomb blast and saw this as a divine mandate to press on...
...He ran his trembling hands over the map...
...And you stand in my way...
...In the evenings he asked Linge to put on gramophone records of funeral music...
...He began to suffer nervous stomach cramps...
...But he remained in command, calling his generals cowards and incompetents amid ongoing defeats on all fronts...
...He was breathing heavily, his face scarlet and his eyes wide open...
...Chamberlain met Hitler again a week later, at Bad Godesberg in the Rhineland, and listened to further demands...
...the Russians concluded that he simply had a low libido...
...Suddenly he straightened and threw the colored pencil away...
...The report spans the period from the Fiihrer's taking power in 1933 to 1945...
...If not then, surely after the catastrophic defeat in the gigantic tank battle of the Kursk in July 1943...
...Now he was ready for expansion—first, to Greater Germany...
...370 pp...
...The attacks of nervous irritation increased...
...As Russian shells fell around his bunker under the ruins of the Reich Chancellery, "Hitler stood up and leaned over the table...
...Hitlerbuilt a wall of mistrust...
...ButtheRussianwinterhalted the German Army — unprepared for the harsh cold—in its tracks...
...The obliteration of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad had a dreadful effect on the Führer...
...27.50...
...They decided they would die together...
...Not until April 22,1945, did Hitler realize the jig was up...
...The next day, Chamberlain suggested a joint declaration with Hitler calling Munich "symbolic for the wishes of both our peoples never again to wage war on one another...
...Austria's Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, already undermined by Nazi insurgents, wanted to preserve his country's independence...
...He lived in a world of his own imagining, demanding that his battered troops hold their ground, expressing optimism that the enemy alliance would break up, that new superweapons would change his luck or that the shattered, phantom divisions he moved around on his maps would yet eclipse the Red Army...
...There, in 13 hours of negotiation, Czechoslovakia was sold out...
...the next his trousers were too long...
...Hitler screamed, thumped his fist on the table and accused his generals ofbeing incapable of fighting...
...I, Austrian by birth, have been sent by providence to create the Greater German State...
...Under these circumstances I cannot command any more...
...One moment Hitler's collar was too tight...
...He had contemptuously withdrawn from the League of Nations and furnished ground and air forces to Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War...
...I will crush you!'" A month later, German troops marched into Austria...
...After he left, Eva Braun and her women friends "who had observed Chamberlain through the window, made fun of the oldfashioned Englishman who was so attached to his umbrel la...
...Morell...
...Its 413 pages lack the marginalia that typically embellished documents he looked at...
...He could not bear the thought that the Russians might exhibit him as a caged curiosity...
...There is no suggestion that Hitler was to any degree homosexual...
...Mussolini proposed a four-power conference in Munich on September 29...
...Henceforth, stenographers recorded every word spoken at the briefings...
...occupied Bohemia and Moravia became a German protectorate...
...Receiving notes from French and British ambassadors calling for German withdrawal from Poland, Hitler remarked, "We will now see if they come to Poland's aid...
...On April 30, it was done...
...Furious at the setback, Hitlerblamedthemilitary: "The [general staff] conferences on the situation on the Eastern Front became ever stormier...
...Placed in Stalin's personal file...
...From his Wolf's Lair field headquarters in East Prussia, Hitler directed a dynamic campaign that initially enjoyed spectacular success...
...Theodor Morell, administered every other day after breakfast...
...To prevent them from displaying even his dead body, he ordered it burned...
...Their main source was testimony wrung from a pair of men who were very close to Adolf Hitler: his valet Heinz Linge and his permanent SS adjutant Otto Günsche...
...Born in 1912, she became Hitler's lover in 1932...
...When he was summoned to the Berghof, the dossier recounts, "It was not long before Hitler's thundering voice could be heard all over the first floor of the house: 'Merciful God, what are you thinking of...
...Because he was in extreme pain, Morell prescribed opium...
...The dossier was undertaken as an investigation of the Fiihrer's "disappearance...
...He complained that his skin itched...
...It was written by two Soviet secret police officers after the War...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
