Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

Webb explained that Stern was offering to sell the foreign serial rights in the diaries. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Times Newspapers, was considering bidding not merely for the British and Commonwealth, but possibly for the American rights as well. The syndication negotiations were about to begin. In the meantime the diaries themselves were being kept in a bank vault in Switzerland. Webb said that Murdoch wanted an expert’s opinion before making an offer for the diaries. Would Trevor-Roper, as an authority on the period and a director of the company, be willing to act as an adviser? Would he fly out to Zurich and examine the material?

Trevor-Roper said he would.

In that case, said Webb, Stern would expect him in Switzerland at the end of the following week.

By the time Adolf Hitler had passed his fifty-second birthday, there was no longer a human being left in history who could provide a precedent for his impact on the earth. In January 1942, whilst he picked at his customary vegetarian supper at his headquarters in East Prussia, his soldiers were guarding U-boat pens on the Atlantic coast, shivering in dugouts on the approach roads to Moscow, sweating in tanks in the Libyan desert. In less than twenty years, he had passed from brawling provincial politician to imperial conqueror. He was remaking the world. ‘Mark my words, Bormann,’ he announced one evening over dinner, ‘I’m going to become very religious.’

‘You’ve always been very religious,’ replied Bormann.

But Hitler was not thinking of himself as a mere participant in some future act of worship: he was to be the object of it.

‘I’m going to become a religious figure,’ he insisted. ‘Soon I’ll be the great chief of the Tartars. Already Arabs and Moroccans are mingling my name with their prayers. Amongst the Tartars I shall become Khan…’

When the warm weather returned he would finish off the Red Army. Then he would ‘put things in order for a thousand years’. Giant roads would be built into Russia and the first of twenty million Germans, ‘soldier-peasants’, would start making their homes in a colony whose frontier would extend 250 miles east of the Urals. The Russians, denied churches and schools, educated only to a point at which they could read road signs, would be confined to vast, disease-ridden cities, patrolled from the air by the Luftwaffe. The Crimea would be exclusively German. Moscow would be razed to the ground and turned into an artificial lake. The Channel Islands would be handed over to the Strength Through Joy organization ‘for, with their wonderful climate, they constitute a marvellous health resort’. Every nation would have its part to play in Hitler’s New Order. The Norwegians would supply Europe’s electricity. The Swiss would be hotel keepers. ‘I haven’t studied the problem as regards Sweden,’ joked Hitler. ‘In Finland, unfortunately, there is nothing to be done.’ Opponents would be confined behind barbed wire in the lengthening chain of concentration camps now opening up in the Eastern territories. At the first sign of trouble, all inmates would be ‘liquidated’. As for the Jews, they would simply be ‘got rid of’. The future was a vista of endless conflict. A man’s first encounter with war, stated Hitler, was like a woman’s first experience with a man: ‘For the good of the German people, we must wish for a war every fifteen or twenty years.’ And in Berlin, renamed Germania, at the centre of this ceaselessly warring empire, would sit the Führer himself, in a granite Chancellery of such proportions that ‘one should have the feeling that one is visiting the master of the world’. The Berghof, his private home on the Obersalzberg, would, in due course, become a museum. Here, propped up in bed, while the rest of the household slept, Hitler had found the inspiration for his dreams, gazing out ‘for hours’ at ‘the mountains lit up by the moon’. When his dreams were reality, it would become a place of pilgrimage for a grateful race. ‘I can already see the guide from Berchtesgaden showing visitors over the rooms of my house: “This is where he had breakfast…” I can also imagine a Saxon giving his avaricious instructions: “Don’t touch the articles, don’t wear out the parquet, stay between the ropes…”’

Almost half a century has now passed since Adolf Hitler and his vision were buried in the rubble of Berlin. All that remains today of the Berghof are a few piles of stone, overgrown with moss and trees. But the repercussions of his career persist. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,’ concludes Alan Bullock’s study of Hitler: ‘If you seek his monument, look around.’ The division of Germany, the exhaustion of British power, the entrenchment and paranoia of Soviet Russia, the denials of freedom in the Eastern half of Europe, the entanglement of America in the Western half, the creation of the State of Israel and the consequent instability of the Middle East – all, in a sense, have been bequeathed to us by Adolf Hitler. His name has become a synonym for evil. Even the physical act of uttering the word ‘Hitler’ necessitates a grimace. In 1979, the British historian J. H. Plumb described him as a ‘curse’, the ‘black blight’ that overshadowed his youth:

The trauma of Hitler stretched over fifteen years for my generation, breaking lives, destroying those one loved, wrecking my country. So it has been difficult, well-nigh impossible, to think calmly of that white, moustachioed face, eyes ablaze like a Charlie Chaplin turned into a nightmare. Even now when I recall that face and hear that terrifying, hysterical, screeching voice, they create a sense of approaching doom, disaster and death.

Yet, hard though it may be, Hitler has to be understood….

In an attempt to come to terms with this phenomenon there were, by 1980, according to one estimate, over seventy biographies of Adolf Hitler in existence. There are twice as many biographies of Hitler as there are of Winston Churchill; three times as many as there are of Roosevelt and Stalin. Only Jesus Christ has had more words devoted to him than Hitler. The public appetite for these books is enormous. In 1974, Joachim Fest’s biography sold over 250,000 hardback copies in Germany alone. Two years later, John Toland’s Adolf Hitler sold 75,000 copies in the United States (at $15 each) and went into four printings within weeks of its publication. When David Irving began work on his study he wrote that ‘it was possible to speculate that “books on Hitler” outnumbered page for page the total original documentation available. This proved a sad underestimate.’ By 1979 the British Library and the Library of Congress listed over 55,000 items relating solely to Hitler and the Second World War. There are specialist books about Hitler’s childhood, his years in Vienna and his service in the army; at least half a dozen works are devoted specifically to his last days and death. There have been investigations into his mind, his body, his personal security, his art. We have first-hand accounts from his valet, his secretary, his pilot, his photographer, his interpreter, his chauffeur and a host of adjutants, ministers and generals. From one doctor (Morell) we know all we ever want to know – and considerably more – about the movement of Hitler’s bowels; from another (Giesing), the appearance of the Führer’s genitalia. We know that he liked cream cakes, dumb blondes, fast cars, mountain scenery; that he disliked lipstick, modern art, opinionated women and the screech of an owl.

The detail is immense and yet, somehow, the portrait it adds up to remains oddly unconvincing. Despite the millions of words which have been poured into explaining the gulf between Hitler, the private individual, and Hitler, the political prodigy, the two remain unreconciled. ‘We seem to be left with a phantom,’ wrote J. P. Stern, ‘a centre of Nothing.’ This inner emptiness helped enable Hitler to use himself like a tool, changing his personality with shocking abruptness to suit the task in hand. The charm of an Austrian gentleman, the brutality of a gangster, the ranting of a demagogue, the assurance of a diplomat succeeded one another in a kaleidoscope of performances which left his innermost thoughts a mystery. In the 1930s, an astonished official watched him carefully work himself into an artificial rage for the sole purpose of frightening an English diplomat; the performance over, he returned to his advisers chuckling, ‘Gentlemen, I need tea. He thinks I’m furious .’ Hitler remained an enigma, even to his most intimate advisers. ‘I got to know Adolf Hitler more closely in 1933,’ wrote Joachim von Ribbentrop at the end of the war.