The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  Eva Braun was never in Wahnfried or in the Siegfried Wagner Haus (annexe) and, as far as I know, never in Bayreuth. Hitler never introduced her to me and never spoke about her. I never met her. Unity never stayed at Wahnfried or in the Siegfried Wagner Haus, where Hitler lived when he visited the Festspiele. She visited me in Wahnfried, but I never met her in the Siegfried Wagner Haus when Hitler lived here.

  Therefore whatever and whoever was seen by the ‘maid’ it was certainly not Unity Mitford or Eva Braun. When the Sunday Express announced its serialization of Eva and Adolf, I wrote to the editor telling him there were numerous mistakes in the chapter about Unity. On 9 September I expressed a letter to him with Frau Wagner’s words, showing that the Bayreuth episode never in fact happened. He acknowledged this in a letter dated 11 September, but nevertheless published the story in the Sunday Express on 14 September. In a second, subsequent letter Frau Wagner is categoric: she never had such a maid. Mr

  Infield’s book has some rather interesting passages; all the more curious that he should include the silly story of ‘what the maid saw’.

  Eva and Adolf, Infield, G. Books and Bookmen (1975)

  Truth, Lies and Opinions

  Otto Dietrich, German Reichspressechef, was a pleasant, mild, well-mannered, modest little man, with (as was once said with less reason of an English politician) plenty to be modest about. After the war, finding himself in an English prison camp, he wrote this gossipy book about his twelve years at Hitler’s court. It was meant, presumably, to explain away his past.

  Apart from a few disobliging references to various colleagues he devotes himself to a lengthy attack on the Führer, whom he suddenly discovered, while he sat in prison, to have been the devil incarnate. His book would not be worth mentioning were it not that the gossipy facts it contains are true. Dr Dietrich’s opinions, on the other hand, are of no interest, except to show how far sycophancy can go. Unfortunately they make up the bulk of his apology.

  Many of them are incredibly naive. For example, he gives as his reasons for thinking democracy the best form of government the fact that Hitler did not consult the German electorate before he went to war. Perhaps he imagined that the English voters were consulted before Chamberlain declared war on Germany? If so, he was ignorant of the democratic way of life. The Americans, of course, had the benefit of a presidential election in November 1940, but Roosevelt, the successful candidate, pledged himself not to send American ‘boys’ overseas to fight in Europe’s quarrels. He may have been determined to bring his country into the war, but he had to pretend that he was determined to keep it neutral.

  Dr Dietrich says that Hitler’s suicide was a shirking of his responsibility. ‘His departure from life was in terms of: After me the deluge. Europeans all through history have chosen what Germans call the Freitod in like circumstances, and this judgment in itself clearly shows that Dr Dietrich’s conception of honour and of duty is faulty, even if his whole book did not demonstrate this.

  The translators have done an excellent job, though they appear to be unaware that daemon and demon are not the same thing.

  The Hitler I Knew, Dietrich, O. (1955)

  Hitler’s Court Jester

  ‘Hanfstaengl was a gay and amusing companion,’ writes Mr Brian Connell, the man who has set down these reminiscences in English. ‘People have said I was Hitler’s court jester,’ adds Dr [Putzi] Hanfstaengl himself.

  The Hanfstaengl family belong to Germany’s intellectual middle class; they print art reproductions and sell them in a Munich shop. Putzi’s mother was American: he was sent to Harvard and remained in America to manage the New York branch of the business. He was 27 when the first war began; he stayed on in the shop in Fifth Avenue. During and after the second war he spent seven years of considerable hardship in English, Canadian and American concentration camps, except for a short time when his offer to help the Allies in their ‘psychological warfare’ against Germany was rather half-heartedly taken up by Roosevelt. (The Central European Jews who ran this side of the war never cared much for Putzi.)

  His claim to fame is that he knew Hitler well, and saw a good deal of him between 1923 and the middle 30s. More than twelve years have passed since Hitler died, and it may seem astonishing that Dr Hanfstaengl should still feel obliged to write with such exaggerated spite about the man he was once so proud to call his friend. But in so far as he was a close associate of the Führer (and ‘court jester’ neatly sums up this association) or in so far as he was a National Socialist, he evidently feels bound to excuse himself to his Anglo-Saxon readers. It is as if he imagined they were lying in wait to see what he would say, ready to pop him back behind bars if he is not abusive enough. This attitude of his places him in a dilemma. He wishes to sell his memoirs, therefore he must write about the only interesting thing that ever happened to him—his connection with Hitler. He has to have been an intimate, yet the Führer must be a monster; he has to have been an influential counsellor, whose courageously sharp criticisms and sage foresight were nevertheless ignored; he has to have been prominent in the Nazi hierarchy, yet all the time devoted to the American way of life. Thus he calls upon memory for fact, upon imagination for fiction, and the unity of his book suffers in consequence.

  It is a safe guess that most readers will skip the pages about the Hanfstaengl pedigree to get to the man in the shabby suit, spell-binding his Munich audiences and charming Putzi’s dollars out of his pocket to pay for a printing press for the Party newspaper. It is the eye-witness account of the famous Bürgerbräukeller meeting, the Putsch, Hitler’s trial and his imprisonment in Landsberg which, historically, is the valuable part of the book.

  On the 9th of November 1923 the marching column of demonstrators, led by Ludendorff and Hitler, was fired on by the police in the narrow street near the Feldherrnhalle; sixteen men were killed, among them Scheubner-Richter whose arm was linked in Hitler’s. His fall dislocated Hitler’s shoulder, and it was in this condition that he made his way to the Hanfstaengls’ country cottage at Uffing. Putzi, along with many others including the badly wounded Goering, had fled to Austria. Frau Hanfstaengl took Hitler in, and it was at the Uffing villa that the police arrested him two days later.

  Dr Hanfstaengl’s was far from being the only family of substance to support Hitler at that time. On the eve of his trial, for example, Frau Bechstein* visited him in prison. She gave him a bouquet of flowers and embraced him, saying: ‘Wolf! Wir stehen immer zu Dir!’ [‘We shall always stand by you.’] Back in his cell, Hitler discovered half a bottle of champagne concealed among the flowers, which he drank next morning before going into court. The Führer told me this story himself.

  Months later, when Putzi visited him in Landsberg, ‘the place looked like a delicatessen store. You could have opened up a flower and fruit and a wine shop with all the stuff stacked there. People were sending presents from all over Germany.’

  Apart from the loan of his invaluable dollars at a time of galloping inflation Hitler liked Dr Hanfstaengl’s company and his piano-playing and his drollery. Hitler himself, as Putzi relates, ‘was a gifted mimic with a sharp sense of the ridiculous. His star turn was a sort of symposium of the type of patriotic orator then very common in Germany, and by no means extinct since—the politically conscious, semi-professorial figure with a Wotan-like beard. Hitler’s nationalism was practical and direct, but they would boom away about Siegfried’s sword being drawn out of its scabbard and lightning playing round the German eagle and so forth. He could invent this mock rhodomontade ad infinitum and be very funny about it.’ He would also recite a poem written to him by one of his admirers ‘with embellishments of his own, and have us in tears of laughter.’ But Hanfstaengl, not content with being the boon companion of a leisure hour, hoped (so he says) to influence Hitler politically; an idea which anyone who knew both men would find grotesque.

  When the National Socialists came to power he was given the job of foreign press relations officer. In a way he was well fitted for this;
he spoke excellent English, knew many American newspaper men, and was popular and hail-fellow-well-met. What, then, went wrong with this enthusiastic Nazi, wearing a smart uniform he designed himself, enjoying his new status to the full (he says his telephone never stopped ringing, even the barest acquaintances were anxious to claim friendship with the man who was the Führer’s friend), and playing the part—this I can vouch for myself—of der treueste aller Treuen [the most faithful of the faithful]—what went wrong?

  This book provides the answer. Dr Hanfstaengl, while professing love and loyalty to Hitler himself, loathed with bitter hatred every single person in his entourage. Men like Goering and Himmler, who seldom saw the Führer, are let off lightly, but those who were frequently in his company, from the brilliant Dr Goebbels to the faithful Schaub, are heaped with scorn and abuse. He made no secret of his feelings, and it appears that he regaled foreign press correspondents with every kind of tittle tattle and stories of real or imagined strains and stresses within the Party. Naturally enough, this came to Hitler’s ears, and the enemies Putzi so recklessly made saw to it that his attacks on members of the government were repeated to the victims. Annoyed by these reports, Hitler invited him less and less often, thereby increasing his bitterness. After a time his post virtually ceased to exist; foreign journalists were directed to other channels. For old time’s sake this was done gradually and unobtrusively; the only wonder was that it had not happened sooner. A modern English equivalent would be the appointment of Mr Malcolm Muggeridge as Buckingham Palace press relations officer.

  Not long afterwards he left Germany; the result of a practical joke. Court jesters seldom care about jokes against themselves.

  Hearing one evening that Putzi was in the habit of saying that he wished he could have fought in the 1914 war, but that keeping a shop in New York of which the window was smashed by anti-German Americans had been more disagreeable than life in the trenches, Hitler said that if he really longed for battle he had his chance at last: he could volunteer to fight in Spain where civil war was raging. He then imagined how funny it would be to pretend to gratify this life-long wish, to pretend to be flying him to Spain to be parachuted behind the Red lines while in reality he was flown from one German airfield to another. Probably after elaborating this idea in his inimitable way and acting Putzi in the Kampfzeit when he thought there were Reds lurking round the next corner, the whole thing went out of Hitler’s head. Among those who heard him, however, there were several with old scores to pay off. The practical joke was carried out. Starting from Berlin on a ‘special mission’ to Salamanca, headquarters of the Franco press, Putzi was told in the aeroplane that he was to be dropped behind the Red lines. By the time he landed (at Leipzig) he was in a great stew. He took the first train to Switzerland, convinced that the Gestapo was after him. Goering, contrite that the joke had gone with such a bang, wrote begging him to come home and offering him a job in the Four-year-plan. He refused.

  Dr Hanfstaengl announces with pride (or at any rate with satisfaction) to his Anglo-Saxon audience that after the war he found his name on a Gestapo blacklist. Probably it was there because during the war he was released from the Allied concentration camp for a time in connection with the Americans’ psychological warfare, an activity which can take a very dangerous turn according to which side loses the war. But Putzi’s hosts, of course, won the war.

  Back in Munich since 1946, he has now broken his long silence. Some people might think he has got his values mixed up. He is ashamed of what he should be proud of, proud of what he should be ashamed of. However that may be, his book contains interesting material about events and scenes he lived through. Where he is forced, through lack of first hand evidence, to speculate about Hitler’s private life, we cannot do better than quote Mr Brian Connell once again, when he praises Putzi for his ‘inextinguishable capacity for embroidering an anecdote and total lack of inhibition in his remarks and comments.’

  * Frau Bechstein belonged to the piano manufacturing family. Hitler: The Missing Years, Hanfstaengl, E. (1957)

  The Lie Merchant?

  Are these diaries genuine? The reasons for asking are twofold. First, where have they been all these years? Second, they would have been very easy to invent. They contain nothing that could remotely be called new. The bulk is made up of the OKW [Oberkommando der Wehrmacht] reports, which are frankly, in 1978, rather dull reading because everyone knows what was happening in Germany in March 1945. The Russians were nearing Berlin, having overrun Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, raping and plundering and destroying everything they could lay hands on. The Allies were ‘area bombing’, with fire storms burning hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and demolishing the houses of those who survived. Roads were choked with refugees, everything had broken down. American and British armies were advancing in the West. There was nothing left of Germany, it was done for. The future was epidemics, starvation, humiliation, disaster.

  This was the apocalyptic background of the diaries, which begin on the 27 February and end on 9 April, 1945. Anyone vaguely familiar with Goebbels could have written them; they are not in his hand but are supposed to have been dictated to a secretary, which makes them long-winded. Probably they are genuine. I expect they would have been spicier if they had been invented, and more in the style of I Was Hitler’s Maid.

  Why did Hitler, supported by Goebbels and others, not capitulate sooner? Probably because, knowing that confrontation between Russia and the West was inevitable, they thought the Allies might move to prevent the Soviets from occupying half of Europe. This was, of course, a delusion, but it was not so fanciful as it is sometimes made out to be. In 1954 Winston Churchill made a speech in his constituency in which he said:

  Even before the war had ended, and while the Germans were surrendering by hundreds of thousands… I telegraphed to Lord Montgomery directing him to be careful in collecting the German arms, to stack them so that they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance continued.

  There was a fuss about this speech at the time, and the telegram to Montgomery could not be found. But it shows the trend of Churchill’s thoughts after Yalta, and that his thoughts had been rightly guessed by Hitler and Goebbels. They did not reckon with the Americans, infinitely more powerful than the British, who in 1945 were so pro-Russian that on various sectors of the front they halted in order to give the Russians time to advance further into Europe.

  In a way the most interesting part of this book is the introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper. It is more than thirty years since he wrote The Last Days of Hitler. Although with the passage of time a fairly objective view might have been expected, the Professor sums up Goebbels’s propaganda as ‘crude and violent in form, utterly unscrupulous in substance, and quite indifferent to truth’. This is evidently still the accepted point of view; it has not been thought necessary to give examples of Goebbels’s mendacity.

  It is something of a mystery why Goebbels is always supposed to have been such a liar: a ‘lie merchant’. I am very much opposed to a government-controlled press and to censorship, but there is no doubt that during the years 1933 to 1943 Dr Goebbels had such a success story on his hands that he had no need to lie. The economic revival of Germany under the National Socialists was speedy and impressive. Hitler’s thesis, that a country’s riches consist of the quality of its people (Volk), made him reject the idea that Germany was ‘ruined’ just because it had no foreign exchange, a stagnant economy and six million unemployed when he took over. It was their work that could enrich it. Industry, agriculture and the building of a modern infrastructure absorbed the unemployed, and Germany became prosperous in a remarkably short time. Although without doubt Goebbels as propaganda minister saw to it that ‘the Whig dogs got the worst of it’, he had no reason to lie.

  During the first years of the war when German armies were winning battles the same thing applied. He only had to tell the truth. When the tide turned he had m
ore reason to lie because of the importance of morale on the home front. But here again he was rather truthful; for example he did not seek to underrate the disaster to German arms at Stalingrad.

  Describing Goebbels’s character and personality, Mr Trevor Roper several times says he had an ‘inner emptiness’. I am not quite sure what this means. Goebbels was an educated man, a doctor of philosophy, well-read. He was extremely busy and he obviously enjoyed his work. Was he suffering from ‘inner emptiness’? Very hard to say.

  I knew him fairly well. He was clever, good company, always ready with a sarcastic witticism. His wife and children loved him, his associates, several of whom I knew, admired and liked him. One of them, Prince zu Schaumburg-Lippe, wrote a book eulogizing him when this was an unpopular, even dangerous, thing to do, after the war.

  I stayed with the Goebbels at their villa at Schwanenwerder on Wannsee—‘luxuriously furnished’, according to Trevor-Roper. It was comfortable, but by no effort of the imagination could it have been called luxurious. He also says that in Berlin Goebbels had ‘his palatial residence near the Brandenburg Gate’. Palatial? I knew the house: it was his official residence as minister. It was not as palatial as number 11 Downing Street, where I also stayed long ago when Churchill was chancellor of the exchequer. To English readers a palatial residence means a big house, Londonderry House for example, or even a house in Belgrave Square or Grosvenor Square. The Goebbels’s house in Hermann Goeringstrasse was not in the same league as any of these. Why get it so very wrong?