Hitler's Last Secretary (12 page)

When there hadn’t been enough time for a film between the visit to the tea-house and dinner, Eva Braun had the list of movies available brought to her after we had eaten and, with the other ladies and the gentlemen who weren’t at the briefing, she chose a film to be screened in the bowling alley. ‘Please tell me when the conference is over,’ she would ask the orderlies, and then a small party of about eight to ten people would go down to the basement to watch a movie. We were a very critical, choosy audience. The kitchen staff, chambermaids and soldiers joined us, and if we were lucky we could watch the film through to the end. But sometimes the shrill sound of the telephone ringing would break into it. ‘The conference is over and the Führer expects his guests in the Great Hall,’ the servant said. Then, although regretfully, we cut the screening short, Eva Braun hurried briefly into her room to freshen her make-up, her sister Gretl swiftly looked for a corner where she could smoke a cigarette in peace and then poppeda peppermint into her mouth, and finally everyone assembled in the living room again. The rather old-fashioned but cosy lamp hanging low over the corner table was on, and the Speer, Bormann and Brandt ladies would be sitting on the bench that ran around the corner talking about how their children were doing. The curtain to the Great Hall was still drawn, for Hitler was always detained after the official end of the briefing by one or other of the men who had been present and who wanted to put in a quick request, or discuss a problem for which there was no official opportunity.

By the time Hitler finally entered the living room it was usually midnight. Now we would just be waiting for the Braun sisters, then the Führer led the company down into the Hall for a nocturnal chat around the hearth. By now the fire in it had been lit. Broad sofas and deep armchairs had been drawn up in a large semi-circle, grouped around a big circular table, generally with some other, smaller tables off to the sides. Far to the back of the room, in the corner, a single standard lamp was switched on, and several candles flickered on the mantelpiece and in the middle of the table. You could see the shapes of the people sitting round it only indistinctly.

Hitler himself sat on the right, in deep shadow, and to the right of him, very close to the fire, Eva Braun nestled into her deep armchair with her legs folded under her. Everyone else chose anywhere they liked to sit. Somewhere under the table or in front of the fire lay Eva’s two Scotties, Negus and Stasi, looking like tangled black balls of wool. Blondi wasn’t admitted to this company; the mistress of the house’s dogs took precedence. But sometimes Hitler would ask, quite humbly, ‘Can I let Blondi in for a minute?’ Then Eva Braun took her pets out, and Blondi could make an appearance.

This was where Hitler drank his tea. The rest of the company could have anything to drink that they fancied. There was no ban on alcohol here; you could drink sparkling or still wine, cognac or strong spirits. Cakes and pastries were served with the drinks, and Hitler had his favourite apple cake again. Sometimes Eva Braun managed to persuade the Führer that at this late hour a few sandwiches would be much more welcome than sweet things. She was expressing the wish of the whole company, and Hitler would go along with her.

In this large company it was difficult to get a general conversation going. The dim light, the thick carpets that swallowed up any loud footsteps, and the gentle crackling of the logs on the hearth tempted you to stay silent. But Hitler didn’t care to be left to his own thoughts. He wanted distraction. He would talk quietly to the woman next to him, perhaps Frau Bormann. But what could she tell him? She mustn’t let the Führer know about the anxieties and problems she had with her husband. And anything she had to say about the ten children she had brought into the world one by one during her marriage to the Reichsleiter was quickly over. She was a silent woman, and every year in spring, when we moved to the Obersalzberg, she was pregnant with another child. Pale and inconspicuous, with thick braids of hair wound round her head, she would sit in her armchair beside the Führer counting the hours until she could finally leave this circle of elegant, carefree women. Professor Blaschke, a gentleman in his sixties, was the scholarly type. His hair was greying at the temples, while his thick eyebrows and carefully tended moustache were like black bars marking his pale, thin face. In himself he was a reserved, quiet man. But during these sessions round the hearth Hitler sometimes drew him into a conversation in which he was one of the few to defend his own point of view firmly, even when it was not in line with the Führer’s. Professor Blaschke was a vegetarian too, but for other reasons. He claimed that human dentition was intended for plant food, and that such food was more easily digested by the human body. In this he agreed with Hitler to a great extent, although he often ‘abused his own body’ by eating meat, and he didn’t count poultry as meat at all. But when Hitler wanted Professor Blaschke to agree with him that smoking was one of the most harmful abuses of all and had a particularly bad effect on the teeth, he met with firm opposition. Blaschke himself was a heavy smoker, and perhaps therefore more tolerant than he should have been from a medical point of view. He claimed that smoking was positively good for you, because it disinfected the oral cavity and stimulated the blood supply. In a normal context, he said, smoking wasn’t at all harmful. But Hitler wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Smoking is and always will be one of the most dangerous of habits, and quite apart from the fact that I personally find the smell of cigar or cigarette smoke disgusting, I wouldn’t offer anyone I value or love a cigarette or cigar, because I’d be doing him no service. It has been shown for certain that non-smokers live longer than smokers, and are much more resistant to illness.’

Gretl Braun said she didn’t want to live into old age if she couldn’t smoke, life would be only half as much fun, and anyway she was very healthy although she’d been smoking for years. ‘Yes, Gretl, but if you didn’t smoke you’d be even healthier, and just wait and see, once you’re married you won’t be able to have children. And the smell of tobacco isn’t a flattering perfume for women. I was once at an artists’ reception in Vienna. Maria Holst (a Viennese actress) was sitting beside me – a really beautiful woman. She had wonderful chestnut-brown hair, but when I leaned over to her great clouds of nicotine wafted out of it. I said to her: “Why do you do it? You ought to stop smoking and preserve your beauty.”‘ And when Hitler actually claimed that alcohol was less harmful than nicotine, all the smokers – and there were quite a few around him – banded together to oppose the idea. I said, ‘My Führer, alcohol breaks up marriages and causes traffic accidents and crimes. At the worst nicotine just damages the smoker’s own health a little.’ But he was not to be convinced by our arguments, and in fact he decided that the Christmas parcels distributed in his name to the Leibstandarte troops would contain chocolate and schnapps but no cigarettes. We tried to tell Hitler that the soldiers would probably take the first opportunity of swapping their chocolate for cigarettes or tobacco, but it was no good. Himmler handed out parcels containing tobacco products to the soldiers on his own initiative, and if he hadn’t I’m sure the combat strength of the SS would have suffered.

Hitler always looked forward to his little tea-party every night like a child. ‘I never take a holiday, I can’t go just anywhere to relax. So I divide up my holidays into the hours I spend here by the fire with my guests,’ he said.

He loved his Great Hall with its fine pictures. ‘Isn’t Nanna wonderful? I keep looking at her. She’s in just the right place here above the hearth. Her hand is as radiant as if she were alive,’ he said, looking appreciatively at Feuerbach’s picture. ‘After my death I want the pictures to go to the new gallery in Linz. I shall make Linz a fine city and give it a gallery that people will flock to see. I regard the pictures hanging here in my house as only on loan, something that brightens my life. After my death they will belong to the whole German nation.’ He was speaking to himself rather than the rest of us. No one would have known what to say in any case.

Professor Morell got very sleepy after a glass of port. He would be fighting off his drowsiness with his fat, hairy hands clasped over his huge paunch. He had the curious ability to close his eyes upwards, from below. It looked horrible behind the thick lenses of his glasses. So he wasn’t much fun to talk to. Sometimes Colonel von Below
⁴⁰
nudged him gently, and then he would briefly wake up and smile, thinking that the Führer had cracked a joke. ‘Are you tired, Morell?’ Hitler asked. ‘No, my Führer, I was only thinking,’ Morell would quickly assure him, and then he would tell a story of his experiences as a ship’s doctor in Africa, one that we all knew already. […]

Eva Braun took a lot of trouble to amuse the Führer. Once she tried to draw the photographer Walter Frentz and her friend Herta into a conversation about new films. Hitler began quietly whistling a tune. Eva Braun said, ‘You’re not whistling that properly, it goes like this.’ And she whistled the real tune. ‘No, no, I’m right,’ said the Führer. ‘I bet you I’m right,’ she replied. ‘You know I never bet against you because I’ll have to pay in any case,’ said Hitler. ‘If I win I must be magnanimous and refuse to take my winnings, and if she wins I have to pay her,’ he explained to the rest of us. ‘Then let’s play the record and you’ll see,’ suggested Eva Braun. Albert Bormann was the adjutant on duty. He rose and put the record in question – I forget what it was -on the gramophone. We all listened hard and intently, and Eva Braun turned out to be right. She was triumphant. ‘Yes,’ said Hitler. ‘So you were right, but the composer composed it wrong. If he’d been as musical as me then he’d have composed
my
tune.’ We all laughed, but I do believe Hitler meant it seriously.

He was genuinely convinced that he had an infallible musical ear. Heinz Lorenz suggested, ‘My Führer, you ought to give a concert in the Great Hall. After all, you could afford to invite the best German musicians, Gieseking, Kempff, Furtwängler and so on. You don’t go to the opera or the theatre any more, but you could listen to music. It wouldn’t strain your eyes either.’ Hitler rejected the idea. ‘No, I don’t want to trouble such artists just for me personally, but we could play a few records.’ A thick book listed all the records that the Führer owned. There must have been hundreds of them. The wooden panelling of the wall turned out to be a cupboard holding records, with a built-in gramophone that was invisible till the cupboard doors were opened. The black discs stood in long rows, labelled with numbers. Bormann operated the gramophone.

Hitler nearly always had the same repertory played: Lehár’s operettas, songs by Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf and Richard Wagner. The only pop music he would let us play was the ‘Donkey Serenade’. It usually formed the conclusion of the concert.

Hitler’s colleagues enjoyed the musical evenings with the records even less than those conversations round the hearth. One after another they would leave the Hall. You could hear them laughing and giggling and talking in the living room, where the deserters assembled to amuse themselves in their own way, leaving their boss alone with the sleeping Morell and the faithful Eva, the duty adjutant and the von Below and Brandt ladies. I must admit that I sometimes slipped quietly away myself, until the valet came in to say, ‘The Führer misses his company, and back there in the Hall he can hear your noise.’ Then the ‘faithful’ reluctantly went back on duty again.

‘No, my entourage isn’t very musical,’ Hitler said, resigned. ‘When I was still going to official festival performances of opera I usually had to keep an eye on the men with me to see they didn’t go to sleep. Hoffmann (he meant the press photographer Heinrich Hoffmann) once almost fell over the balustrade of the box during
Tristan und Isolde,
and I had to rouse Schaub and tell him to go over and shake Hoffmann awake. Brückner
⁴¹
wassitting behind me snoring, it was terrible. But no one went to sleep during
The Merry Widow
because there was a ballet in it.’

I asked Hitler why he only ever went to hear
Die Meistersinger
or other Wagnerian operas. ‘It’s just my luck that I can never say I like something without finding that I’m stuck listening exclusively to one piece of music or hearing one particular opera. I once said that
Meistersinger
is really one of Richard Wagner’s finest operas, so since then it’s supposed to be my favourite opera and I don’t get to hear anything else. The same thing happened with the
Badenweiler March.
And I was once invited to visit Frau Ley.
⁴²
She had a Scotch terrier bitch with seven puppies and was very proud of them. Just to be polite I said: “Those are really delightful little creatures” – although I think they’re horrible, like rats. Next day she sent me one as a present. Frau Braun, Eva’s mother, has the dog now. I’d never have let myself be photographed with a dog like that, but it’s really touching to see how fond of me the little fellow still is.’

The hours passed by, and it would be four or five in the morning by the time Hitler rang for his valet to find out whether any air raids had been reported. He asked this question every evening before going to bed, and never retired for the night before he was told that the Reich was clear of all enemies. Sometimes the presence of a few aircraft or attacking enemy formations was kept from him, or the day would never have come to an end. Finally he would rise, say good night, shake hands with everyone and go upstairs.

Within a short time thick tobacco smoke would fill his living room, and everyone had woken up. Suddenly there was a cheerful atmosphere that would have delighted Hitler if he had been there.