Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

In 1976 this ‘hybrid of money and journalism’, as one of his left-wing writers called him, was sixty-three. He had never been a member of the Nazi Party, but he had a past which sat uneasily with his present position as purveyor of radical chic. He had appeared as a sports announcer in Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He had written articles praising Hitler in Kunst dem Volk (Art for the People), a Nazi magazine. During the war he had worked for a military propaganda unit. Stern, under his guidance, gave extensive coverage to the Third Reich and there were some who detected an ambivalence in his fascination with the period. ‘It was subconscious,’ claimed Manfred Bissinger, Nannen’s left-wing deputy at the time. ‘For Nannen, the less bad the Nazi past turned out to have been, the less bad his role in it was.’ He had a powerful personality and Heidemann revered him: according to Braumann, ‘he obeyed his great master Nannen’s every word’.

Heidemann had been pestering Nannen to visit Carin II for months. In the summer of 1976, Nannen finally agreed. He was, in his own words, ‘surprised and fascinated’ by what he saw. Heidemann had turned the yacht into a kind of shrine to its first owner. Goering’s dinner service was on prominent display, as were Goering’s tea cups and Goering’s drinking goblets. On the table was Goering’s ashtray, in the cupboard, his uniform. The cushion covers were made out of Goering’s bathrobe. Working from old photographs, Heidemann had even tried to fill the bookshelves with the same books Goering had kept there. Most of these mementoes had been given to Heidemann by Edda Goering; the rest had been acquired from dealers in Nazi memorabilia. Heidemann showed Nannen an album filled with photographs and newspaper cuttings about the yacht which included a picture of Princess Margaret on a trip to Basle. ‘Simply everything was there,’ said Nannen later. ‘The photographs didn’t just come from one source. They couldn’t have been forged. He’d actually collected the whole lot. I found it an incredible journalistic performance.’

Having put his employer in this receptive mood, Heidemann outlined his plan. Nannen recalled:

Heidemann told me he needed a loan of 60,000 marks, otherwise he would be in difficulties. He was having to pay the interest on a loan of 300,000 marks he’d taken out to pay for the renovation of the Goering yacht. He needed money to put a new engine into his boat.

Heidemann proposed that he should write a book for Stern based upon the conversations he was holding with Mohnke, Wolff and other old Nazis. He told Nannen that he had already begun tape recording some of these reminiscences and had some interesting material on the Odessa network, the supposed Nazi escape route to South America. ‘Because Heidemann had already reported on this subject for Stern ,’ said Nannen, ‘I agreed.’

On 12 October 1976 Heidemann concluded an agreement with Stern ’s parent company, the large Hamburg publishing house of Gruner and Jahr. He undertook to write a book provisionally entitled Bord Gespräche ( Deck Conversations ) with the subtitle ‘Personalities from History Meet on Goering’s Former Yacht Carin II ’. The contract was unusually generous towards Heidemann. He was paid an immediate advance of 60,000 marks, but no date was stipulated for the delivery of the manuscript and he was not required to return the money should he fail to write the book. All he had to do was undertake to maintain Carin II in a satisfactory condition. The contract was signed, on behalf of Gruner and Jahr, by Henri Nannen and by the company’s managing director, Manfred Fischer.

With the official blessing and financial support of his employers, Heidemann’s descent into the world of the old Nazis now began in earnest.

WHILE HEIDEMANN POURED whisky and adjusted his tape recorder aboard Carin II , another journalist was also busy tracking down survivors of the Third Reich. One hundred and fifty miles south-east of Hamburg, in his office in West Berlin, James P. O’Donnell, bureau chief of Newsweek magazine, was compiling a card index of more than 250 people who had been with Hitler during his last days in the bunker. His researches were to have important consequences for Heidemann.

O’Donnell’s first assignment in Berlin for Newsweek , in July 1945, had been to visit the Führerbunker. The memory of those forty-five minutes beneath the ground – the stench of blocked latrines whose effluent flooded the narrow corridor, the blackened walls, the tiny rooms littered with broken glass and bloodied bandages – had stayed with O’Donnell ever since. ‘Adolf Hitler’, he wrote, ‘exercises over my mind, and that of many others, I suspect, a curious kind of fascination.’ He decided to write a book, an expanded version of The Last Days of Hitler , describing what had happened in the bunker. Between 1972 and 1976, operating out of Berlin, he visited scores of eyewitnesses, ‘cruising Hitler’s old autobahns, clocking more than 60,000 miles’.

Like Heidemann, he found himself increasingly fascinated by the network of characters he uncovered. Thirty years after the end of the war many of the people close to Hitler still kept in regular contact. Gossiping amongst themselves, divided into cliques, their relationships still traced ancient patterns of loyalty and animosity forged in the heyday of the Third Reich. Once, while he was interviewing Albert Speer at his home in Heidelberg, the postman arrived and handed Speer a package which turned out to contain an autographed copy of his book, Inside the Third Reich. Speer had sent it to Christa Schroeder, his favourite among Hitler’s secretaries, whom he had not seen since his arrest and imprisonment in 1945. She had sent it back with a brief covering note saying that she was sorry, but she was returning the book because she had been ‘ordered to do so’. ‘Who has the power to issue such orders?’ asked O’Donnell. ‘The Keepers of the Flame,’ replied Speer: the adjutants, orderlies, chauffeurs and secretaries who had formed Hitler’s inner circle and who habitually referred to themselves as ‘die von dem Berg ’, ‘the Mountain People’, in memory of their pre-war days at Berchtesgaden. Speer, once Hitler’s favourite, was generally detested for his ‘betrayal’ of the Führer at Nuremberg. For his part, Speer contemptuously dismissed them as the Chauffeureska .

It was this group that O’Donnell, and later Heidemann, succeeded in penetrating: the adjutants, Otto Guensche and Richard Schulze-Kossens; the pilot, Hans Baur; the valet, Heinz Linge; the chauffeur, Erich Kempka; and, above all, the secretaries, who maintained a fierce loyalty to their dead employer. To them he was still der Chef : the Boss. The oldest, Johanna Wolf, had been recruited to work for Hitler by Rudolf Hess in 1924 and had remained his principal private secretary for more than twenty years. Stern was reputed to have offered her $500,000 for her memoirs. She turned them down. ‘I was taught long ago’, she explained to O’Donnell, ‘that the very first and last duty of a confidential secretary is to remain confidential.’ None of Hitler’s four main secretaries had married after the war; none had much money. When O’Donnell finally persuaded Gerda Christian to meet him at the home of an intermediary in 1975 she was working as a secretary in a bank in Dortmund. Of all the Keepers of the Flame, she was the most fanatical. ‘Do nothing to let the Führer down,’ was Frau Christian’s repeated exhortation to her colleagues. She had divorced her husband, a Luftwaffe general, in 1946, and like the other secretaries, she chose to remain single. O’Donnell once asked her why. ‘How could any of us have remarried,’ she replied, ‘after having known a man like Adolf Hitler?’