Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun (10 page)

 

A comparison of the dietary habits of the three major dictators of early 20
^th
century
Europe
is interesting.

Mussolini was athletic and health conscious. He was stricken by a stomach ailment in
1923, and from that point on ate almost entirely fruit and cereal, with very little meat but copious amounts of fish sautéed in olive oil. Red wine in moderate amounts was not uncommon. He was
in fine physical condition right up until partisans stood him up against a wall and shot him to
death in 1945.

Hitler was a strict vegetarian who neither drank nor smoked and regarded killing for food
as cruelty to animals (!). His only indulgence seems to have been a fondness for sweet, creamy
pastries, which he consumed in vast quantities. When he hosted dinners for his entourage he ate a
vegetable plate as they consumed a normal German meal, and would say, "I hope you are all enjoying your carrion."

In stark contrast to Mussolini's health-conscious abstemiousness and Hitler's sugar-based vegetarianism, Stalin ate like a pig, drank like a fish, and smoked like a chimney, which may be
as much as reflection of Russian culinary habits and table manners as his own behavior. Evening dinners at his
dacha
rarely ended with any of his guests able to stand up or walk straight (or walk
at all, for that matter.)

Stalin lived well into his seventies, and died in bed. There is a lesson in there somewhere.

 

The shadow of nuclear annihilation lay across the world through the entire era of the
Cold War. Leaders on both sides usually exercised decorum when discussing the so-called nuclear option, but there were occasions when a more sinister perspective became evident.

At a meeting of the
Cominform
leaders in Moscow in the 1950s, Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao
Tse-tung
(Mao
Zedung
) told Czech Communist Party head
Klement
Gottwald
that China did not fear a nuclear exchange with the west. "We could lose 300 million lives and still have over half our population
left."

"But Comrade Mao,"
Gottwald
said, "your population is huge. Mine is small, only 15
million. In such a war Czechoslovakia would be wiped from the face of the earth!"

Mao nodded sympathetically and then said, "Sacrifices must be made."

 

Lenin, the father of Soviet Communism, was once asked if he enjoyed listening to music (which meant, of course, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, etc.) "Yes," he replied, "but I do so
infrequently. It makes one soft. You can't listen to music and then go out and smash heads."

 

The bizarre racial theories of Nazi Germany involved a detailed system of racial categorization, with everyone in the country fitting into some place in the descending
nomenclature from Aryan at the top to Jew and Gypsy on the bottom. The ancient Aryan race of
blond-haired, blue-eyed giants no longer existed, the Nazis said, because of interbreeding with lower forms of humans over the millennia. (This ancient race actually never existed at all, of course.) This explains why Hitler, for example, despite his piercing, hypnotic blue eyes, had brown hair, or why Herrmann Goering, through robust and powerful, was only 5'8".

But a problem arose with Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and one of the
most powerful men in Germany. He was short, skinny, dark haired and sallow-complexioned.
After racking their brains for an appropriate description, the regime's anthropologists came up with a category to which Goebbels and Goebbels alone belonged: he was
ein
Nachgedunkelte
Schrumpfgermane
,
which translates roughly as "a dwarf-like Germanic who darkened."

 

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
Turkish
Republic
, 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
Leonding
, 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.