Selling Hitler

by Robert Harris

  Before lurching off into the Führer’s private quarters with his girlfriend, Schaub handed Gretl a letter which had been entrusted to him in Berlin two days earlier by Eva Braun. ‘My darling little sister,’ it began

  How it hurts me to write such lines to you. But there is nothing else to do. Each day and each hour may be our last, and so I must use this last opportunity to tell you what must be done… Please keep your head high and do not doubt. There is still hope. It goes without saying, however, that we will not let ourselves be captured alive.

  In what was effectively her last will and testament, she provided a list of friends who were to receive her effects.

  In addition I must request the following. Destroy all of my private correspondence, especially the business papers… Destroy also an envelope which is addressed to the Führer and is in the safe in the bunker. Please do not read it. The Führer’s letters and my answering letters (blue leather book) I would like packed watertight and if possible buried. Please do not destroy them….

  In a reference to Gundlfinger’s plane and its cargo of Hitler’s property, Eva asked her sister if Arndt had arrived ‘with the letter and suitcase? We heard here only that the plane had been attacked.’ The letter ended ‘with heartiest greetings and a kiss’. A few days later, Eva Braun achieved her life’s ambition and married Adolf Hitler. On 30 April, the couple killed themselves and their bodies were set alight.

  The following morning, at almost exactly the same moment as the charred corpses of the newly-weds were being interred in a shell hole in Berlin, their personal effects were being burned in Berchtesgaden. The rooms of the Berghof were systematically emptied of clothes, furniture, linen and crockery. The contents were taken outside and destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of the approaching Americans. Hitler’s library of 2000 books, along with his collection of press cuttings, was hidden in a nearby salt mine. (These volumes, each with a garish swastika bookplate bearing the inscription ‘Ex Libris Adolf Hitler’, were later found by American troops, transported to Washington, and in 1953 catalogued as a collection by the Library of Congress.)

  On this same day, 1 May, Gretl decided the time had come to comply with her sister’s last request. For assistance she turned to a young SS major named Johannes Goehler. According to a post-war investigation by US intelligence, ‘Gretl said that she would like him to take charge of the safekeeping of a large chest of letters which had been entrusted to her. They were letters between her sister, Eva Braun, and Hitler. The chest, about the size of an officer’s trunk, was in a cave near the Berghof.’ Goehler promised to help. He rang one of his subordinates, SS Captain Erwin Haufler, and instructed him to send a truck to Berchtesgaden immediately. That night Eva Braun’s chest, along with a clothes basket, was evacuated to the local SS headquarters in Fischhorn Castle in Austria.

  For the next week they stood, objects of intense curiosity, in a corner of Haufler’s office. The basket, which was open, was found to contain Eva Braun’s photograph albums of life at the Berghof, ‘a few small framed pictures’ and some rolls of film. The trunk was locked. After several days of speculation, Haufler and his SS cronies eventually plucked up the courage to break it open. Inside was a treasure trove of Hitler memorabilia. There was an assortment of the Führer’s architectural drawings: ‘made in pencil,’ Haufler told the Americans after the war, ‘depicting floor plans and the like. I saw one sketch which seemed to represent a church.’ There was a box of Hitler’s stationery. There was a book belonging to Mussolini and another, in Eva Braun’s handwriting, in which she had made notes of her letters to Hitler. There was an album entitled ‘Enemy Propaganda in Stamps’. ‘Then there was a pair of black trousers,’ recalled Haufler, ‘badly ripped, or rather slit, and also a coat, which was field grey,’ bearing the insignia of the German eagle. This, the SS men correctly assumed, was the uniform Hitler had been wearing at the time of the attempt on his life in July 1944: in an emotional moment, the Führer had sent it to Eva to keep as a souvenir. But what most captured the soldiers’ interest were the letters. The trunk was three-quarters full of them: ‘at least 250,’ estimated Haufler, with another thirty or forty postcards. These were Hitler’s letters to Eva Braun, a lovingly preserved record of their ten-year relationship. Haufler picked up one. ‘My dear Pascherl,’ it began, ‘I send you my heartiest greetings.’ It was signed ‘your Adolf Hitler’.

  Precisely what happened next is unclear. According to Haufler, he handed the trunk over to his administrative officer, Franz Konrad, with instructions to burn it to prevent its contents falling into Allied hands. But Konrad, a notoriously corrupt SS captain, whose activities during the German occupation of Warsaw had earned him the title ‘King of the Ghetto’, disobeyed him. In the final hours of the war he sent a truck loaded with looted treasure to his brother’s house in the nearby Austrian town of Schladming. Hidden among the canned food, the liquor and the radios were two suitcases and a metal trunk with Eva Braun’s name tag attached to it. ‘Make sure you get through,’ the driver alleged Konrad told him. ‘If you get stopped on the way, take the two bags and the chest and make off. If everything else should go wrong, you must save those three things.’

  Acting on this information, on 24 August 1945, agents from the US Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) raided the home of Konrad’s brother and seized the Hitler uniform, Eva Braun’s private photograph albums, her silverware, the notes she had made of her letters to Hitler, and the stamp collection. A second cache of material, which Konrad had given to his mother to hide, was recovered in October. This haul included twenty-eight reels of colour film – Eva Braun’s home movies of her life with Hitler. All these objects were turned over to the American Army and shipped back to the United States. But of Hitler’s letters, by far the most interesting items, there was no sign. Thirty years later, David Irving once more set out to track them down. His conclusion, after months of inquiry, was that they were discovered near Berchtesgaden by one of the CIC officers who promptly stole them for himself. They have now disappeared into the archives of a private collector in the USA.

  In addition to the property of Eva Braun, Konrad also appears to have stolen the correspondence between Hitler and the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. The files had been transferred for safekeeping from Himmler’s headquarters to the library at Fischhorn Castle where they were kept in a steel cabinet, guarded by Himmler’s orderlies. After Hitler’s suicide, Konrad was assigned to help destroy them, but admitted to the Americans after the war that he put a set of the most interesting documents to one side. Shortly afterwards he turned up at the home of his secretary, Martha von Boskowitz, and gave her a package ‘about 18 inches long, 6 inches thick and 4 inches wide’. He told her that the tightly wrapped parcel contained his ‘personal letters’ and asked her to hold on to them, ‘in case anything should happen to me’. About six weeks later another SS man called and took the package away. It, too, has disappeared.

  In the course of their investigations, the CIC also began picking up rumours of the existence of Hitler’s ‘diaries’. According to Colonel Wilhelm Spacil of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) Franz Konrad boasted to him at the beginning of May 1945 that, in addition to all his other treasures, he was in possession of ‘the diary of Hitler, written on very thin paper’ which he had hidden in a specially made zinc box. The CIC asked Captain Haufler what he knew of such diaries. Haufler described how two weeks before the end of the war he had been at the Berghof when an air raid alarm sounded. He and Gretl Braun, along with the Berghof’s housekeeper, Frau Mittelstrasser, took shelter in the underground bunker. The two women showed him around part of the labyrinth of tunnels which extended for nearly two miles beneath the mountain.

  I was only allowed to stand at the doorway to the Führer’s room [recalled Haufler]. Frau Mittelstrasser pointed out several things in the room: for example, there were 5000 phonograph records stored there. Among other things, she pointed out the ‘personal notes’ of the Führer. These were
contained in four or five large books which stood near the desk. Of course, everyone knew that Hitler kept a diary. The books were firmly bound, and not quite as big as a Leitz-Ordner [a loose-leaf filej. I can’t tell you anything more about them, for I only saw them from a distance, and didn’t even have them in my hand. I never saw these books again.

  In the absence of any other hard information, the CIC investigation petered out. Gretl Braun dismissed Haufler’s story. ‘Hitler didn’t keep any diaries,’ she told a CIC agent. ‘The books which were standing in the air raid shelter in the Berghof were not diaries, but rather minutes of the day’s activities, which were kept by whoever was the Führer’s adjutant at the time.’ And Franz Konrad, despite prolonged interrogation, insisted that he knew nothing of such books, that Spacil was mistaken, that he must be muddling the ‘diaries’ with Eva Braun’s notebooks which he confessed to having stolen. At the height of the debate over the Hitler diaries’ authenticity in 1983, the Sunday Times clutched at the straw offered by the CIC files. Quoting only the testimony of Spacil and Haufler, the paper used the information to try to refute claims that there had never been any suggestion that Hitler kept a diary. But given the paucity of evidence, and even allowing for the unreliability of the witnesses, the likelihood is that the references to ‘diaries’ which creep into a couple of CIC reports are actually the result of a misunderstanding.

  The Third Reich had dissolved into chaos. In Berlin, in Munich, in Berchtesgaden, Allied soldiers as well as German picked through the detritus of Hitler’s Germany and carried off whatever seemed of value. A gang of Russian women soldiers ransacked Eva Braun’s apartment in the Berlin bunker and emerged, according to one witness, ‘whooping like Indian squaws’, waving Frau Hitler’s underclothes above their heads, carrying off lamps, vases, bottles, carpets, crystal glass, Hitler’s monogrammed silver, an accordian, a tablecloth, ‘even a table telephone’. At the Berghof, French and American troops wrenched off light-fittings and doorknobs and pulled out the springs from the Führer’s bed. Eventually, every inch of plaster was stripped from the walls; stairs and handrails were torn up; the members of one enterprising unit even took a sledgehammer to Hitler’s marble fireplace and sold off the pieces as ashtrays. At the Führerbau, the monumental stone building on the Konigsplatz in Munich where Hitler had met Chamberlain and Daladier, dozens of GIs plundered the storerooms, using a wooden crate as a stepping stone as they explored the waterlogged basement. When one anonymous soldier from the US 14th Division staved in the lid of the crate he found yet another hoard of Hitler’s private property: two gold-plated pistols, a swastika ring, a miniature portrait of the dictator’s mother painted on ivory, a framed photograph of Hitler’s favourite dog, Blondi, a gold watch bearing the initials ‘A.H.’ and valuable monogrammed crystal glasses, carefully wrapped in newspaper. ‘The next thing I picked up was a diary,’ recalled the soldier, many years later. ‘It was a red diary with gold lettering and Hitler’s insignia on it, his initials on it. But I flashed right through it and it was all in German. I just threw it right aside and it dropped into the water on the floor.’ He returned to retrieve it some time later but the ‘diary’, or whatever it was, had gone. There are many such stories. As recently as 1984, a family in British Columbia found a crateful of personal papers belonging to Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s court photographer, lying discarded in their attic: it had been brought back by their father at the end of the war and forgotten. Years later it is impossible to guess how much of historical value may have been carted away from the wreckage of Nazi Germany and may still come to light.

  Reviewing such documentary evidence as exists, it is conceivable that of five sets of Hitler documents supposedly destroyed in the spring of 1945, four of them – the private files held at the Berghof, the letters to Eva Braun, the correspondence with Himmler and even possibly part of the cargo entrusted to Arndt – may actually have survived. Only the contents of the safe in Berlin, whose incineration was personally supervised by the Führer, can definitely be regarded as lost.

  This tantalizing state of affairs was to provide the perfect scenario for forgery.

  TWO

  OUTSIDE THE ENTRANCE to the Führerbunker in Berlin, a shell crater was strewn with sheets of charred paper. Rummaging beneath the blackened litter, a Russian soldier discovered a pair of scorched and crumbling bones. He called his commanding officer over. ‘Comrade Lieutenant Colonel!’ he shouted, ‘there are legs here!’

  Thus, on 2 May 1945, if the Soviet writer Lev Bezymenski is to be believed, Private Ivan Churakov of the ist Byelorussian Front stumbled on the most sought-after Hitler relic of them all. ‘So!’ exclaimed Stalin when he first heard of the Führer’s death, ‘that’s the end of the bastard. Too bad that we did not manage to take him alive.’

  Disinterred from the crater, the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun were placed in a pair of rough wooden boxes and taken to the Soviet Army headquarters in the northern Berlin suburb of Buch. Hitler’s corpse had been so badly damaged by fire that parts of it disintegrated on the mortuary table. According to the official autopsy report, the left foot was missing; so was the skin: ‘only remnants of charred muscles are preserved.’ The mouldering cadaver was displayed in a clearing in a wood outside Berlin at the end of May to one of the Führer’s bodyguards. By August it was in Moscow, where, quite probably, it remains to this day. (‘Hitler’s body’, boasted one Russian official in 1949, ‘is in better keeping with us than under the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.’) Hitler’s teeth – a bridge of nine dentures in yellow metal and a singed lower jaw consisting of fifteen teeth – were handed over to the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, SMERSH. These, together with the dictator’s Iron Cross, his party insignia and the teeth of Eva Braun, were last seen in Berlin in May 1945 in a cigar box, being offered around by a SMERSH officer to fashionable German dentists for identification.

  But, abetted by the Russians, even in this reduced form, Hitler was still capable of making mischief. The autopsy report and the various proofs of Hitler’s death were suppressed by the Soviet Union for more than twenty years: officially, to have them ‘in reserve’ in case an imposter appeared claiming to be ‘the Führer saved by a miracle’; in reality, to embarrass the British and Americans. At least twice in the Kremlin and once at the Potsdam Conference, Stalin lied to the Allies, telling them that Hitler had escaped and was in hiding. As part of his campaign against fascist Spain, he even suggested that Hitler was being sheltered by General Franco. Senior Soviet officers in Berlin, who had at first admitted to the discovery of the body, hastily changed their stories and followed Stalin’s line. The Soviet newspaper Izvestia went so far as to allege that Hitler and Eva Braun were living in a moated castle in Westphalia in the British Occupation Zone of Germany.

  The post-war appetite for stories about Hitler and the Nazis, which was to culminate in the diaries fiasco, found its first sustenance in this confusion. Throughout the summer of 1945, newspapers trampled over one another to bring their readers the ‘true story’ of the Führer’s fate. First Hitler was said to be working as a croupier in a casino in the French resort of Evian. A few days later he resurfaced as a head waiter in Grenoble. Then, in bewildering succession, he was reliably reported to be a shepherd in the Swiss Alps, a monk in St Gallen, and an Italian hermit living in a cave beside Lake Garda. Some newspapers maintained that Hitler was posing as a fisherman in the Baltic, others that he was working on a boat off the west of Ireland. He had escaped by airplane. He had escaped by submarine. He was in Albania. He was in Spain. He was in Argentina.

  Hitler’s progress across the world’s front pages was followed with increasing embarrassment in Whitehall. When the Russians hinted that the British might be shielding him in Westphalia, the Government decided to act. In September 1945, Brigadier Dick White, a senior official in the British security service, later to be chief of both MI5 and MI6, was asked to prepare a report on what had happened to Hitler. He was given six weeks to complete the task. White de
legated this urgent mission, code-named Operation Nursery, to a particularly bright young intelligence officer named Hugh Trevor-Roper.

  At the outbreak of war Trevor-Roper had been at Oxford completing a biography of Archbishop Laud. Recruited into British signals intelligence, the twenty-six-year-old research student was obliged to switch his mind from the study of seventeenth-century clerical politics to the analysis of intercepted German radio traffic. He became one of the foremost experts on the German intelligence service, the Abwehr. He had a penetrating intellect, a sharp tongue, and a natural combativeness which caused one of his superiors in the Secret Intelligence Service to threaten him with court martial.

  He arrived in Germany in the middle of September. His method of solving the mystery of Hitler’s fate owed something to the novels of Agatha Christie. He was the amateur detective; the Führerbunker the country house where the crime had been committed; its survivors the witnesses who could provide the vital clues. He quickly demolished the stories of some of the more obvious fantasists: the doctor who claimed to have treated Hitler for a lung wound sustained during fighting around the Berlin Zoo; the female Gestapo agent who swore she could take him to the Bavarian estate where Hitler was living in a secluded foursome with Eva, Gretl, and Gretl’s husband, Hermann. To uncover the truth he compiled a list of everyone who had attended Hitler in his final days and travelled the country tracking them down. He interrogated Keitel, Jodl, Doenitz and Speer. In their prison camps he questioned the Führer’s SS guards. At Berchtesgaden he caught up with two of Hitler’s secretaries, Johanna Wolf and Christa Schroeder; he almost captured a third, Gerda Christian, when he turned up at the home of her mother-in-law – he missed her by only a couple of days. By the time he came to write his report he had found seven witnesses who were with Hitler in the final week of his life, including the chauffeur, Erich Kempka, who provided the gasoline with which his master’s body was burned, and a guard, Hermann Karnau, who witnessed the funeral pyre.