The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (3 page)

Very few guests, with the possible exception of some official spouses, were compelled against their will to attend upon the
fuhrer. Grouse as they might about the restraints and enforced idleness, they were all there because they had actively petitioned
to be there, and for every invitee who might be asked up for the last time, there were tens of thousands waiting to take his
place. To that extent, Hitler had no need to extend the graces of a traditional host. Simply by allowing them into his presence
he was giving them precisely what they sought. If you were stupid enough to offend the host - as Henriette von Schirach learned
after she deplored the plight of Jewish refugees she had seen in Holland - you risked being summarily banished by an adjutant
("You have made him very angry. Please leave at once!"), but you really had no one to blame but yourself.

And yet, by all accounts, Hitler could be the very model of charm and graciousness when he chose to. Many were the guests
who, having driven up the steep and often icy road from Berchtesgaden and past the forbidding SS barracks, were amazed to
find the fuhrer himself awaiting them at the head of the Berghof stairs. He was always concerned with their health and ready
with medical and nutritional advice. And while he neither smoked nor drank, and was never too tired to launch into a numbing
diatribe against these vices, he had a ready supply of beer, wine, and liquor for his guests and tolerated their smoking on
the terraces. Only Eva Braun felt it strictly necessary to pop a breath mint before slipping back inside. Hitler clearly saw
himself as a congenial and tolerant man, his hospitality reflecting his vision of an Aryan society so ethnically pure that
it could afford to indulge a few, relatively harmless vices. The Berghof was his prototype for postwar Germany, and his hospitality
the model of the tolerant system by which it would be governed.

This "tolerance" is most tellingly highlighted by his attitude toward meat and meat-eating. If you run the words "Hitler"
and "vegetarian" through an Internet search engine, you will find any number of essays by prominent vegetarian intellectuals
denying that Hitler was one of theirs. Their principal argument seems to be that, because Hitler may not have been a perfect
vegetarian, he was not one at all. In fact, all of the evidence points to his having been a committed vegetarian and a vocal
defender of vegetarianism. Joseph Goebbels in his diary records several pro-vegetarian rants, while Doctor Theodor Morell,
Hitler's personal physician, who spent an inordinate amount of time recording his patient's eating habits and analyzing his
bowel movements, never once indicates the presence of any meat in his diet and explicitly calls him a vegetarian. It is true
that Hitler came to vegetarianism gradually, only slowly losing his taste for liver dumplings, but after the 1931 suicide
of his beloved niece and paramour Geli Raubal, he seems to have abandoned meat-eating altogether. "It is like eating a corpse!"
he said of his breakfast ham the day after her death. The famous 1936 photo of Hitler sharing a meat-laden
Eintopf with
Goebbels at the Chancellery in Berlin has been identified as having been posed for propaganda purposes.

In fact, there had been a venerable association in Germany between vegetarianism, anti-Semitism, and virulent nationalism
since the mid-nineteenth century. Gustav von Struve and Richard Wagner were both passionate animal-rights activists whose
"sympathy with all that lives" did not extend to Jews. Goebbels, Hermann Goring, and Heinrich Himmler were all dedicated to
advancing animal rights. As Master of the German Hunt, Goring tightened laws on hunting, restocked forests, prohibited vivisection,
and banned cruel hunting practices. "He who tortures animals wounds the feelings of the German people," he insisted with touching
empathy. Hitler, of course, was an ardent admirer of Wagner and subscribed to his theory that human migration northward had
led to "that thirst [for flesh and blood] which history teaches us can never be slaked, and fills its victims with a raging
madness, not with courage." This was the kind of paradox with which Hitler was apparently comfortable; another was his conviction
that meat-eating caused chronic constipation and flatulence, from which he nevertheless suffered mightily throughout his vegetarian
years. "After eating a vegetable plat­ter," Morell noted of Hitler in his dairy, "constipation and colossal flatulence occurred
on a scale I have seldom encountered before."

I also happen to believe - admittedly without direct evidence that Hitler at some point fell under the influence of the renowned
Swiss nutritionist Dr. Max Bircher-Benner, the inventor of muesli. Hitler's view that energy came from a vegetarian diet,
that "meat-eating is harmful to humanity," and that "much of the decay of our civilization [can be attributed] to meat-eating"
largely parallels Bircher-Benner's theory that "All kinds of meat, as well as fish and poultry, bring about a slow decay of
the vital tissues of the human organism," and that "MEAT THEREFORE DOES NOT GIVE STRENGTH." The 1934 cookbook of "health-giving
dishes" served at Bircher-Benner's sanatorium lists innumerable recipes known to be among Hitler's favorites. Despite almost
relentless epigastric pain, Hitler ate a great deal of raw vegetables, a practice highly endorsed by Bircher-Benner. In view
of their mutual obsession with "poisoning of the juices," it is easy to see how theories on the purity of body and the purity
of blood were conflated. It is no coincidence that, under a vegetarian dictator, the National Health Department adopted as
its slogan "The wholesome life is a national duty."

Like ideologues of every stripe, militant vegetarians can be as judgmentally superior and as absolutist in their rejection
of relative values as any ayatollah. One might therefore be forgiven for expecting a brutal Nazi megalomaniacal vegetarian
despot to exploit his powers to enforce his views, especially to the benefit of the entire
Volk.
In fact, Hitler did nothing of the kind. He was remarkably forbearing and accommodating with meat-eaters, who naturally made
up the majority of his guests. At the Chancellery and at the Berghof, there were always two menus, one vegetarian, the other
not, served with mineral water, beer, and wine.

In
The Vegetable Passion: A History of the Vegetarian State of Mind,
Janet Barkas quotes from Berghof menu cards that she obtained from a privileged source. The meals, hardly haute cuisine, seem
to have been quite typical of both dining rooms:

July 13, 1937

Consomme with marrow dumplings

Stuffed peppers

Home-fried potatoes

Green salad

Vegetarian:

Soup

Noodles with cream of wheat

Green salad

Cheese - Fruit

July 14, 1937 (Lunch)

Potato soup

Baked fish

Stuffed breast of veal

Potatoes

Mixed salad

Vegetarian:

Consomme with noodles

Baked squash

Potato salad

Filling made of rolls

Salad

Fruit tarts

July 14, 1937 (Dinner)

Asparagus soup

Potato puffer

Cranberries

Mixed cold cuts

Cheese - fruit

Vegetarian:

Consomme with noodles

Home-fried dumplings made of rolls

Green salad or potato puffer

Applesauce

Hitler often did lecture his guests on the evils of meat-eating, once turning the stomachs of an entire audience with his
description of a slaughterhouse he had visited in the Ukraine. At mealtimes, however, he did not pressure them to follow his
example, though many apparently abstained from meat-eating in his presence, only to later retire to another room to gorge
on flesh out of his sight. It is not at all clear that such sycophancy was warranted. In her memoirs, Goring's wife Emmy relates
a 1933 visit to the Berghof at which she made her distaste for vegetarianism apparent to the fuhrer:

"It looks to me as though you would prefer a good steak."

"I certainly would," I said. "I can not understand how you can get enough to eat just from all these vegetables."

Everyone around the table looked at me reproachfully and shocked. It was as though I had committed a crime of
Use
majeste,
for all the others were silently eating their raw vegetables.

"Bring Frau Sonnemann a large beefsteak," said Adolf Hitler to the butler.

"And one for me too," Hermann called out, "and above all a glass of beer."

Hitler laughed heartily. From then on I was given both at mid-day and in the evenings such an enormous steak that I could
hardly manage it.

At the Berghof, Hitler himself did not partake of these meals. Instead, he ate dishes prepared exclusively from fruits and
vegetables grown in Martin Bormann's model garden and greenhouses. His tastes in food hovered somewhere between the mundane
and the revolting. All historians seem to agree that he had an inordinate passion for oatmeal gruel and linseed oil, which
he doused liberally over his orange juice, baked potatoes, and cottage cheese. He was also fond of pea soup - which, served
up as "Hindenburg grenades" during the First World War, must have been his madeleine, recalling his happiest days in the trenches
- but dared not eat it because of his flatulence. Dr. Morell recalls Hitler being served "pickles without meat, all mashed
up, but he doesn't feel like trying it yet, so it was stuffed empanadillos (Pfannkuchen-Taschen) with pureed carrots and mashed
potatoes, rounded off with strawberries." According to Janet Barkas, his favorite dishes included asparagus tips and artichoke
hearts in cream sauce. He also liked eggs, fried or boiled with mayonnaise, and rice pudding with herb sauce. Dessert was
often an apple, stewed, baked, or in cake, or a slice of gooseberry pie. He never inflicted these preferences on his guests,
for which they must have been truly grateful.

Like any good host, Hitler knew his guests and what they would and would not tolerate, even from him. It was one thing to
exhort, cajole, berate, and generally infantilize a nation of faceless worshippers; quite another to try it on his private
guests, close personal associates who knew him far too well already. The last thing he wanted was to read their intimate opinion
of him - a ruthless dictator who ate baby food; a bloodthirsty vegetarian; a commander of armies who looked at his breakfast
and saw his lover's corpse - reflected in their eyes across the dining room table. The fear of being "recognized" may have
been another source of his tolerance of meat-eaters in his own home when he was so intolerant of deviance in any other sphere.

He had a reasonably realistic sense of his own limitations in another way, too. The Berghof was hard to reach, often frozen
in, and comparatively modest in its fare and amenities. There is a limit, after all, to how often you can ask visiting statesmen
to go bowling. Even had he wanted to offer something more, and saucier, his public image as the chaste, faithful, and eremitic
bridegroom of the German people would never have permitted the least suggestion of decadence. When such decadence was called
for, when he needed something more to impress and sweet-talk a foreign dignitary, Hitler turned to his Reichsmarschall and
designated successor, Hermann Goring. In the game of Nazi hospitality, Goring was Hitler's alter-ego, Mr. Hyde to Hitler's
Dr. Jekyll, with license to deploy the kind of opulence and excess that the fuhrer could never be seen to condone. In fact,
Hitler not only sanctioned Goring's behavior, but also promoted it as an extension of his own hospitality into forbidden territory.

Goring's "hunting lodge," Karinhall, stood some eighty-five kilometers northeast of Berlin in Schorfheide. Like the Berghof,
Karinhall was a private residence converted at state expense into a semiofficial Nazi entertainment hall. When Hitler needed
to soften up staunch adversaries or potential allies, he sent them to Goring, who often received guests in flamboyant silk
robes or a full leather suit, his lips apparently painted and cheeks rouged. The front entrance was hung with massive oaken
doors, like something out of
The Hobbit.
The dining hall was finished in white marble and hung with Gobelins tapestries. The house had its own cinema and the best
Berlin caterer, Horcher, at its disposal. At least three notables - the Duke of Windsor, Charles Lindbergh, and Japanese foreign
minister Yosuke Matsuoka - were treated to a delightful day playing with Goring's spectacular model train set, with salutary
results for Nazi foreign policy.

Unlike Hitler, Goring's tastes in catering ran to the excessive. His marriage to Emmy Sonnemann in 1935 included a seventy-five-plane
flyover, a gala performance
of Lohengrin,
and a wedding breakfast at the Hotel Kaiserhof for 316 at which lobster, turtle soup, turbot, pate de foie gras, roast chicken,
ices, and Welsh rarebit were served. For his party to celebrate the 1936 Olympics, Goring transformed the gardens of his palace
on the Leipziger Platz into "a sort of Oktoberfest beer garden, with a fairground in the middle, helle and dunkel beer on
tap (as well as champagne and liquors), sausages, roast game, corn on the cob, and mounds of potatoes and sauerkraut," according
to historian Leonard Mosley. The guests were entertained with performances by the principal dancers and corps de ballet of
the Berlin Opera and were later assembled on the lawns to enjoy an aerobatics display by the famed pilot Ernst Udet. The party
broke up shortly before dawn.

On January 12, 1945, Goring threw a lavish, desperate last party at Karinhall. "This is no time to deny ourselves," he said.
"We will all be getting a
Genickschuss
(a shot in the neck) very soon now." While most Germans were scrambling for scraps, Goring's guests were treated to "caviar
from Russia, duck and venison from the Schorfheide forests, Danzig salmon and the last of the French pate de foie gras." They
also enjoyed "100 bottles of French Champagne, 180 bottles of vintage wines, eighty-five bottles of French Cognac, fifty bottles
of imported liqueurs, 500 imported cigars and 4,000 cigarettes." Occupying American troops found twenty-five thousand bottles
of champagne in the wine cellar of his home in Berchtesgaden the following May.