Robert Harris - Selling Hitler

For Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk was the first of a series of such commissions. In 1954, he edited Martin Bormann’s letters. In 1956 he wrote the introduction to the Memoirs of Dr Felix Kersten, the faith-healer and masseur who treated Himmler and other senior Nazis. When Genoud produced what purported to be the final entries of the Bormann–Vermerke in the late 1950s, covering the last few weeks of the war, Trevor-Roper provided the foreword. For more than thirty years, if a publisher had documents from the Third Reich whose presentation required the imprimatur of a well-known academic, he was the first person they turned to. In the 1970s, when the West German company of Hoffmann and Campe acquired, from mysterious sources behind the Iron Curtain, 16,000 pages of Josef Goebbels’s diaries, Trevor-Roper was appointed to edit the section devoted to 1945. And all the time he continued to turn out articles and essays about the Nazis and their Führer, many of them written in a vituperative style typical of academic debate in general, and of Trevor-Roper’s technique in particular. He denounced the so-called ‘memoirs’ of Hitler’s sister-in-law Bridget as a fake. He ridiculed the inaccuracies of A Man Called Intrepid. He attacked A. J. P. Taylor’s thesis about the origins of the Second World War as ‘demonstrably false’. Errors were punished, positions defended.

‘Trevor-Roper’, complained Taylor in 1983, ‘thought he had taken out a patent in Hitler.’

HITLER’S BUNKER IN Berlin was blown up by the Russians in 1947, his house at Berchtesgaden by the Americans in 1952. The motive in each case was to deny any renascent Nazi movement a shrine. But interest in Hitler could not be destroyed. It continued to grow, like weeds amidst the rubble.

Although The Last Days of Hitler put a stop to much of the outlandish speculation about the Nazi dictator’s fate, it did not end it entirely. A close personal following of cranks, misfits, fantasists and criminals continued to attend Adolf Hitler in death as in life. In December 1947 a German pilot calling himself Baumgart swore in an affidavit that he had flown Hitler and Eva Braun to Denmark a few days before the end of the war. ‘Baumgart afterwards retired to a lunatic asylum in Poland,’ noted Trevor-Roper. Six months later a film actor from the South Tyrol named Luis Trenker produced what he claimed were Eva Braun’s diaries. Wochenend , a romantic magazine for women, based in Munich, undertook to publish them. For a short time, Wochenend ’s breathless readers were treated to Eva’s intimate reminiscences: how Hitler forced her to wear leather underwear, how naked dances at the Berghof turned into midnight orgies, how Hitler feared water but loved having his feet bathed. It was exotic drivel of a high order, but unfortunately a few weeks later it was officially declared a forgery. In 1950 the proprietor of Tempo Der Watt , a pro-Nazi magazine, claimed to have heard from Martin Bormann that Hitler was living in a Tibetan monastery. ‘We shall not give up the fight as long as we live,’ Bormann was quoted as saying. A French magazine reported sightings of Hitler, minus his moustache, in Caracas, Buenos Aires and Tokyo. In 1956 The Times reported rumours that recordings of Hitler’s voice, allegedly made in the previous twelve months, were being produced and sold in West Germany.

Another German periodical, Herzdame , adopted a fresh approach in the autumn of 1949. Hitler, it revealed, had fathered an illegitimate son in Munich some time before the First World War. The son, Wilhelm Baur, had committed suicide shortly after his father, in May 1945, but his children – the Führer’s grandchildren – were still alive, ‘somewhere in Germany’. This baseless story nevertheless engendered a spate of imitations until, by the mid-1970s, there were enough Hitler children clamouring for attention to fill a sizeable nursery. Most were straightforward confidence tricksters like Franz Weber-Richter who swindled 15 million pesos and 50,000 marks out of a group of ex-Nazis in Argentina: their suspicions apparently were not aroused even by his additional claim to have spent eighteen months on the planet Venus. In 1965 the daughter of Tilly Fleischer, a famous German sportswoman who had competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was persuaded by her boyfriend to compile a book, Adolf Hitler Was My Father. Extracts appeared in a German picture magazine under the headline ‘If Only Hitler Knew’, before police put a stop to the hoax. Claimants were still coming forward twelve years later. In 1977 a Frenchman, Jean Lorret, told an international press conference in a fine display of filial loyalty that he had decided to reveal the secret of his parentage in order ‘to let the world know that Hitler was not impotent’. The stories have varied over the years but two characteristics have remained constant: their inherent implausibility and the willingness of someone, usually a journalist, to believe them.

Mercifully, despite the fears of the Allies, the post-war interest in Hitler generally centred on the man rather than his ideology. To this day there has been no popular resurgence in support for Hitler’s ideas. In 1983, the West German government estimated the number of active neo-Nazis at less than 2000, a feeble legacy for a movement which once dominated every level of German society and conquered much of continental Europe. One of the most singular features of the Nazi phenomenon was the extent to which National Socialism ultimately proved to be totally dependent upon its creator. Hitler occasionally used to picture himself as a spider at the centre of an enormous web. Without him, in the spring of 1945, this complex system of interlocking institutions, which had once appeared so powerful, simply melted away. It was not merely Hitler’s state which died with him: the beliefs which had underpinned it died too. As Professor J. P. Stern put it, people who had once followed him had ‘real difficulty in recalling the message now that the voice was gone’. Afterwards this served to focus yet more attention on Hitler. How did he do it? What was he like?

To begin with, in Germany at least, the enormity of Hitler’s career made it difficult even to ask such questions. The period from 1933 to 1945 was largely ignored in school curricula. Anyone displaying Nazi mementoes or even publishing photographs of the period was liable to prosecution. Hitler was a subject of acute sensitivity. As late as 1962 the West German embassy in London felt compelled to make an official protest over a British television play, Night Conspirators, which imagined that after seventeen years of exile in Iceland, Hitler had returned to Germany. Mein Kampf was banned. When Hutchinson’s, owners of the British copyright, decided to republish it, the Bavarian State authorities declared their ‘strong opposition’. ‘The German authorities regret our decision,’ acknowledged the publishers in a note at the front of the book, ‘thinking that it may prove damaging to new understandings and friendships.’ In 1967, when a publisher in Spain also proposed a new edition, the Bonn government intervened and bought the Spanish rights itself to stop him.

But in the decade which followed, this reticence about the past was gradually transformed. The curiosity of a generation born after the collapse of the Third Reich coincided in 1973 with the fortieth anniversary of the Nazis’ rise to power. That year saw an unprecedented surge of interest in Adolf Hitler, a tide of books, articles and films which the Germans dubbed the ‘Hitler-Welle’ : the Hitler Wave. Joachim C. Fest, a former editor-in-chief of NDR television, published his monumental biography, the first comprehensive account of Hitler’s life in German to appear since 1945. Fest began his book with a question unthinkable a decade earlier: ‘Ought we to call him “great”?’ Hitler became a bestseller, serialized in Stern and described as ‘the Book of the Year’ at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Führer’s domination of the display stands at Frankfurt was such that the German satirical magazine Pardon hired an actor to impersonate him. Their ‘Hitler’ visited the Fair to demand a share of the royalties. He was arrested.