Hitler

The Memoir of the Nazi Insider Who Turned Against the Fuhrer

Ernst Hanfstaengl

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781611450552
• eBook ISBN: 9781628721393
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

Of American and German parentage, Ernst Hanfstaengl graduated from Harvard and ran the family business in New York for a dozen years before returning to Germany in 1921. By chance he heard a then little-known Adolf Hitler speaking in a Munich beer hall and, mesmerized by his extraordinary oratorical power, was convinced the man would some day come to power. As Hitler's fanatical theories and ideas hardened, however, he surrounded himself with rabid extremists such as Goering, Hess, and Goebbels, and Hanfstaengl became estranged from him. But with the Nazi's major unexpected political triumph in 1930, Hitler became a national figure, and he invited Hanfstaengl to be his foreign press secretary. It is from this unique insider's position that the author provides a vivid, intimate view of Hitler—with his neuroses, repressions, and growing megalomania—over the next several years. In 1937, four years after Hitler came to power, relations between Hanfstaengl and the Nazis had deteriorated to such a degree that he was forced to flee for his life, escaping to Switzerland. Here is a portrait of Hitler as you've rarely seen him.

CHAPTER X

LOHENGRIN PREVAILS

Poacher and gamekeeper – Prejudices strengthened – The Prussians of Asia – Peripatetic boredom – The court minstrel – Assertion at arm’s length – Encounter with Churchill – A message from Roosevelt – Split with Strasser – Buskers in the Kaiserhof – Two organized disappointments – No mate for the glow-worm.

IT WOULD be reasonable to ask why, in view of all my misgivings about the character and intentions of Hitler and his circle, I continued for so long in close association with them. It is a question which could be put in one form or another to many other people: the industrialists who supplied him with funds; the many perfectly respectable and orthodox Conservative politicians who, when the time came, entered into coalition with him; the members of families with impeccable pedigrees, from the Hohenzollems downwards who associated themselves with his movement; the millions of unemployed workers and members of the proletarianized middle class who came to believe he provided the only alternative to the Communists as a solution to the ghastly depression of the early 1930’s, and, last but not least, the 43.9 per cent of the population which voted his confirmation in power.

I was an idealistic National-Socialist, I make no bones about it. It is a term which meant many things to different men, and I was no politician, but a piano player and art lover with ambitions to become a historian. I had a better eye for effects than causes. I had seen Germany degraded and destituted, and wanted to see the return of the comfortable and traditional values of my youth, combined with an honoured and respected position for what were then still called the working classes. Behind a cloud of words and threats and exaggerations, I thought this was what Hitler wanted. Above all, in his second surge of political activity, I was convinced again that nothing was going to prevent him from reaching the top. If only the radicals like Strasser and Goebbels and the crackpots like Rosenberg and Hess could be off-set by people of more cosmopolitan views, in which I included myself, I believed the social revolution he preached would be orderly and beneficial. I was convinced, to use the old phrase, that there was every possibility of this poacher becoming a reliable gamekeeper.

Too many of us, the monarchists, industrial leaders, the Papens and Schachts and Neuraths, thought we could tame him. There never will be a limit to wishful thinking. We all hoped to be the sage advisers of an unruly but irreplaceable genius. Instead we had a tiger by the tail. I pulled it once too often, let go and paid the consequences with ten years of exile. I am not trying to make excuses, and do not need to rely on my own account for the evidence that I tried to fight the Nazis’ excesses when they came to power. I criticized them to their faces, Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, all of them. For quite a time I got away with it, partly because I had been around a long time and still played the piano for Hitler and entertained him with my jokes, partly because I shared the Bavarian background of some of the leaders, was uninhibited, outspoken and emotional anyway, and partly, I suppose, because I controlled no faction, was no orator, and although a lot of people thought as I did, we could not combine and therefore represented no real threat.

I became a member of the inner circle again largely on personal grounds. After the crisis of Geli Raubal’s suicide, Hitler seemed to suffer a temporary fit of nostalgia for the old days. His infatuation for my wife, which had never been entirely stilled, brought him increasingly into our lives again. Nor was he the only Party leader in the throes of a domestic loss. Goering’s wife Karin died in the middle of October 1931. She and Helene had revived their friendship and Goering sought solace for his personal isolation with us. He was still not entirely accepted in the Party and our house continued to offer him a useful retreat. So it was that at the beginning of the fifteen months which were to bring them to power they both, if for dissimilar reasons, sought our company.

Hitler emerged from the shadow cast by his niece’s death, to find a political situation tailored to his order. The Nazi’s position as the second largest party in the Reichstag had not, in spite of all their agitation and accretion of strength, brought them any nearer to power. But the defences of the established forces were breaking up. No stable coalition could be found to deal with the economic collapse and the four million and more unemployed, and neither Hindenburg nor General Schleicher, who had emerged as his and the Army’s political adviser, was convinced that the emergency powers accorded Chancellor Brüning provided any long-term solution. Their increasing weakness coincided with the growing surge of political radicalism and the final hardening of Hitler’s character into the savage urge to impose himself on all those with whom he came in contact, which was the only outlet to his repressions and superhuman energy.

He was still making a virtue of legality. That was one of his many postscripts to Machiavelli. He did not make a revolution to acquire power, but acquired power in order to make a revolution. It was a process which very few people foresaw. His great catch-phrase at the time concerned the necessity to umorganisieren – to reorganize the State – a seemingly acceptable necessity in view of the Weimar Republic’s increasing decrepitude. But then he gave his own meaning to the words he used. Careful though he was to disguise his thoughts and intentions, I found it, in my renewed association with him, more and more difficult to penetrate his mind and put over my own ideas. His personal manner in a room had not noticeably changed. He could still relax and look back on earlier stages of his struggle and talk about them with charm and humour. But in his view of the future he had become more abrupt, the underlying extremism and radicalism had tightened up, the old Hess and Rosenberg prejudices had become sharpened. Here the new influence was Goebbels, and the nearer we got to Berlin and power, and Goebbels and his Sportpalast tirades, the more Hitler was lost to me.

The first personal recognition of Hitler’s importance on the national front came towards the end of 1931, when, after preliminary talks between Schleicher and Roehm, who still eagerly fostered his Army contacts, Hitler was granted interviews with Hindenburg and Brüning. The only positive result was a violent outburst of jealousy on the part of Goering, who could not bear to think that his Bavarian rival had provided the sort of contact he regarded as his exclusive right. Hitler made a bad impression and received a worse one: “They are all bourgeois. They consider us as troublemakers and disturbers of order, to be treated in the same way as the Communists,” he told me. “They have got it into their heads that we are all equal before the law. If they cannot see that the Communists are out to destroy the State entirely and that we wish to give it a new content on a German patriotic basis then there is nothing to be done with them. “Hanfstaengl, Sie hätten dabei sein sollen” – “Hanfstaengl, you ought to have been there,” which is what he usually said when something had gone badly wrong.

My own position was somewhat anomalous. I was never a member of the Party organization, but had a purely advisory capacity as foreign press chief directly under Hitler. I had a constant battle to hold my own, as not only did Hitler until the end of my days with him have a total incomprehension of the ways of the press abroad, but everyone else in the Party within striking distance wanted a piece of my job. Otto Dietrich wanted a share in it as home press chief, although he was small fry and easy to deal with, and Goebbels thought it ought to be part of his propaganda organization, and he of course was a very different proposition. Baldur von Schirach also had ambitions, with a certain amount of tacit encouragement from Hitler, who used him as interpreter at some of his interviews. This was typical of Hitler’s divide and rule methods. He did it with everyone. He would never delegate clear functions and they all overlapped, so that he was able to maintain final control as arbiter.

Schirach was a great trial to me. He used to insinuate himself into conversations with visitors whenever he could. When I would try and tone down some of Hitler’s more radical pronouncements, in the hope of avoiding too much china being broken, Schirach used to tattle this to Hitler afterwards. There was one occasion when Hitler was talking about the Jews to a visiting British M.P., whose name I forget, and I was being very careful to emphasize that the Nazis only demanded the reduction of their representation in the professions to the same proportion as their strength in the population – which was the accepted party numerus clausus policy – when Schirach broke in on his own account: “We students don’t wish to have any Jewish professors at all.”

Fortunately one of my early interventions stood me in good stead for a long time. In November 1931 the State authorities in Hesse seized a series of documents drawn up by the local Party headquarters which threatened an armed coup d’état by the S.A. They became known as the Boxheim Papers and caused a political scandal of the first magnitude. In view of Hitler’s very clear instructions to the S.A. at the time to refrain from violence, this is one of the few instances when I think his disclaimer was probably genuine. The Party press was still insignificant and all the other papers were howling for the Nazis’ blood. We were in Berlin at the time and I called the foreign press to the Kaiserhof Hotel, which Hitler was already starting to use as his headquarters, for a conference. He came in and talked brilliantly, lucidly, rationally and with complete conviction. Their stories went out with such effect that the German opposition papers were obliged to reproduce them on the rebound with banner headlines. It was a complete break through of their normal policy of either denigration or silence concerning Hitler and he was of course ecstatic at this success: “Das war sehr gut, Hanfstaengl, das haben Sie wirklich fein gemacht” The trouble was that that was the sort of effect he expected me to produce every time.

The next major interview set me right back on my heels. We were in Munich again and Hitler rang for me to come and interpret at an interview in his flat with a Japanese professor named Momo, whose visit had been sponsored by his embassy. “But I don’t speak Japanese,” I complained. – “He talks English and this is very important,” Hitler countered, so I went along and this little character came in, hoicking and hissing like something out of the Mikado’, and they started a dreadful mutual admiration session. “I have come to discuss your movement, the heroic spirit of which we Japanese admire so much,” said Momo. So Hitler went into a brazen eulogy of Japanese culture and samurai swords, warrior codes and the Shinto religion, all the drivel he had picked up from Haushofer and Hess. Momo needed little encouragement. “We are both the victims of democracy, we both need living space and colonies, we must have raw materials to ensure our future. It is Japan’s destiny to lead all Asia.…” This was awful and I tried to persuade Hitler to be more reticent, but he was in full flood: “Asia and the Pacific Ocean is a sphere in which we Germans have no demands,” he ranted. “When we come to power we shall respect Japan’s legitimate aspirations there.” This of course was meat and drink to Momo, who fired off a great report. He was, needless to state, a Government emissary disguised as a newspaperman, and at the time of the anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 he turned up again. I had, of course, been appalled. Here were my worse fears taking shape, but in my protestations to Hitler I might just as well have been talking in Hindustani. My expostulations that such a policy would finally alienate American sympathy fell on deaf ears. Hitler brushed them all aside: “Hanfstaengl, today we have made history,” he said fatuously.

As an antidote I tried to farm in as many American correspondents as I could. There was Harold Callender of the New York Times, who came at the end of November 1931, and of course Knickerbocker, probably the best informed, most conscientious and expert journalist of his day. I got Hitler to see him for the first time on the basis of a typewritten list of questions and the interview went very well. Knickerbocker spoke excellent German, and Hitler liked his lively way and red hair. The only back-lash I had was over photographs. Knickerbocker had James Edward Abbé with him, one of the best photographers I have ever known. I had long since wanted to have something else available, other than the dreadful things often taken by Heinrich Hoffman, which showed Hitler with a clenched fist and a distorted mouth and flaming eyes, looking like a madman.

I had told Hitler in one of his quieter moments that he must have some pictures taken which made him look like a statesman, the sort of man with whom foreign diplomats felt they could do business, and in the end we got them by a trick. Abbé pretended that he was taking the photographs of Hitler talking quietly to Knickerbocker, but aimed most of the time at Hitler alone, and I thought the results were first class. He looked normal, intelligent and interesting. What happened? I was called round when the prints arrived and found Hitler furious. “I don’t look like that,” he shouted. “What is this?” – “Of course you look like that,” I told him. “They are much better than those things that make you look like a fakir.” The reason of course was that Heinrich Hoffmann had been enraged at this breaking of his monopoly and Hitler was taking it out on me. More to the point was the fact that Hitler apparently had an arrangement with Hoffmann to share in the proceeds of his work and this in due course was to provide a very handsome side income.

The tempo of the year 1932 was determined by its four national elections, two rounds for the Presidency, and two for the Reichstag, plus voting in the individual States. By train, by car and for the first time by plane, Hitler conducted a series of campaigns which rocked the rival Parties and exhausted companions and opponents alike. I accompanied him almost everywhere as a sort of right interference guard for the foreign press.

The first step he took was to make himself a German citizen. He disappeared from the Kaiserhof on February 22, 1932, and spent part of the afternoon at the representation in Berlin of the State of Brunswick, where the Nazis wielded sufficient power to have him appointed an Oberregierungsrat in the local civil service, an established post which carried with it the automatic grant of citizenship. The original plan had been to give him a nominal post as professor of arts in the Brunswick education service. However, when I threatened to greet him with ‘Heil, Herr Professor’, after all the years he had spent making fun of academicians, the idea was modified. He displayed his warrant when he returned in the evening, and from that time on I sometimes addressed him by his new title as a joke. I must have been the only person to get away with it. “Now at last you can stop singing the Blue Danube and learn the Wacht am Rhein,” I told him, which put him such good humour that he signed a photograph for my son which I still have. It says: ‘For my young friend Egon Hanfstaengl, with my best wishes.’

The boredom and confusion of the election tours was such that I can no longer sort them out in my mind. The team, with occasional additions and subtractions, was Brückner and Schaub, the adjutants, Sepp Dietrich, the later S.S. General, as bodyguard, Otto Dietrich, Heinrich Hoffmann, Bauer the pilot and myself. We must have visited every city in Germany several times, and it was always claimed afterwards that Hitler was the first politician to come to power who knew the country inside out. Of course he knew nothing of the sort. – It might just as well have been the Bürgerbräu or the Sportpalast wherever we went, whipping up mass hysteria within the confines of four walls and travelling and sleeping in between. When he was not speaking he was in the hotel behind closed doors trying to iron out quarrels in the local Party organizations.

Like the leadership itself they were all split into nationalist and socialist wings – it is very necessary to bear in mind that hyphen in the name of the party, because the two groups were intrinsically quite separate and only combined out of self-interest. The hyphen of course was Hitler. The regional leaders used to drive him mad, and more than once he would say to me: “I know why these Gauleiters are always harrying me to speak for them. They take the biggest hall in town which they could never fill themselves. I cram it to the roof for them and they pocket the proceeds. They are all at their wits’ end for money and I have to tear round Germany like a maniac to see that they don’t go bankrupt.”

I think it was probably only in the later elections that we travelled everywhere by plane. Often in the early stages we went in a great convoy of cars, which was usually met at the outskirts of a town by a pilot to take us through back streets to the meeting hall. Hitler left nothing to chance and always had a street plan on his knee ready for use. The precaution was probably not exaggerated as the Communists were always waiting to attack us and on two occasions, in Breslau and Cologne, wrong turnings took us into red beflagged streets which we got through in the midst of fisticuffs and uproar. It should not be forgotten how strong the Communists were in these years. In ‘red’ cities like Chemnitz, people did not even dare to display Christmas trees for fear of being attacked by fanatics.

In Nuremberg a bomb was thrown from the roof of a house and hit Streicher’s car, which only had the driver in it, and once in Bamberg late at night we had a couple of windscreens shattered with revolver shots. On these occasions Hitler would berate the local Gauleiter at the top of his voice. His use of a map was of long standing and I can remember when we arrived at Brunswick, while Emil Maurice was still the driver and there was no map. Hitler began to yell imprecations but Maurice, who was an old hand and allowed himself a number of liberties, said: “Herr Hitler, what are you getting so excited about. Just remember Christopher Columbus.” Hitler stopped in full spout. “What do you mean Columbus?” – “Well, Columbus had no map but that did not stop him discovering America.”

Sometimes we would still stop en route for a picnic. There was one not far from a monastery or theological seminary, with a couple of teams of young clerics playing football in long habits. I think it was near Eichstätt. I pointed them out to Hitler but he refused to be entertained. “We’ll teach them asceticism if we come to power,” he said. “I am not going to have a lot of fat monks loafing around looking like characters out of a Grützner picture. They can keep up their social service if they like or work in the hospitals as practical Christians. But I am not going to have them holing themselves up in abbeys pretending they are superior to the rest of us, and they are going to be kept away from the new generation. We Nazis will see to their education. Of course the finest propaganda of all would be if the Pope were to excommunicate me.” I looked at him astonished, but it was a phrase I was often to hear him use later. “If you feel like that why don’t you announce officially that you have withdrawn from the Church?” I asked. “Why should I deprive him of the pleasure?” Hitler answered, “let him do it.” What he meant was that if he proclaimed himself an atheist he would lose Catholic votes, but that as a mere heretic he might get away with it.

The plane journeys were misery. There were always protracted security precautions to ensure that the machine had not been tampered with. That was Bauer’s responsibility and when he slept I do not know. Hitler used to sit in the left- or right-hand front seat and either doze or pretend to doze, look out of the window or back at his map and hardly talk at all. The others would sometimes try and attract his attention with a letter or a photograph to push their pet peeve, but then he would retire behind a newspaper or some document or other. The most extraordinary thing about him was that he never had a notebook. He never wrote a thing, never took notes, never had a pencil and only occasionally a fountain-pen to sign his autograph with. His notebook was Schaub – Schaub make a note of this or that – he never wrote it down himself. I got used to the requirement and always had six or seven pens or pencils in my pocket.

The atmosphere used to get on my nerves. It smacked of a low-grade orderly-room, with this stupid, inartistic, inarticulate bunch. We were in all these towns and never went to a museum or historical house. I used to carry two picture postcards with me of Goethe’s workroom in Weimar and when I could stand the boredom no longer take them out and look at them for minutes at a time to relax in their mood of classical repose, while this rattle-trap of an aircraft plugged on. Of course the others used to jeer at me. At first I sprinkled Yardley’s Lavender on my handkerchief to keep out the smell of petrol, but even Hitler objected to this, so in the end I resorted to smelling-salts. The others were not above a sniff at the bottle too, as it would of course have been very infra dig and very un-National-Socialistic to be airsick.

One incident which I think has never been recorded is how we nearly crashed in the Baltic on the way back from Königsberg. We had made a brief stop at Danzig and were, as I recall, bound for Kiel. The weather was very bad and overcast, but Bauer got above the clouds and we flew along in bright sunshine. What had not been taken into account was the increa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION BY JOHN TO LAND
• FOREWORD TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION
• INTRODUCTION TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION
• LETTER TO THE AUTHOR FROM HERMANN GOERING
• I Harvard’s Gift to Hitler
• II Tristan in the Thierschstrasse
• III One Side to a Statue
• IV Particular Generals
• V Fiasco at the Feldherrnhalle
• VI Twilight at Landsberg
• VII Hitler and Henry VIII
• VIII The Bohemian at the Brown House
• IX Geli Raubal
• X Lohengrin Prevails
• XI Disillusionment at Nuremberg
• XII Circus at the Chancellery
• XIII A Murderer’s Welcome
• XIV The Last Chord
• XV Wilderness and Flight
• XVI The Catoctin Conversation
• AFTERWORD BY EGON HANFSTAENGL