Traudl Junge - Hitler's Last Secretary - A Firsthand Account of Life with Hitler [aka Until the Final Hour]

Gretl Braun said she didn’t want to live into old age if she couldn’t smoke, life would be only half as much fun, and anyway she was very healthy although she’d been smoking for years. ‘Yes, Gretl, but if you didn’t smoke you’d be even healthier, and just wait and see, once you’re married you won’t be able to have children. And the smell of tobacco isn’t a flattering perfume for women. I was once at an artists’ reception in Vienna. Maria Holst (a Viennese actress) was sitting beside me◦– a really beautiful woman. She had wonderful chestnut-brown hair, but when I leaned over to her great clouds of nicotine wafted out of it. I said to her: “Why do you do it? You ought to stop smoking and preserve your beauty.”‘ And when Hitler actually claimed that alcohol was less harmful than nicotine, all the smokers◦– and there were quite a few around him◦– banded together to oppose the idea. I said, ‘My Führer, alcohol breaks up marriages and causes traffic accidents and crimes. At the worst nicotine just damages the smoker’s own health a little.’ But he was not to be convinced by our arguments, and in fact he decided that the Christmas parcels distributed in his name to the Leibstandarte troops would contain chocolate and schnapps but no cigarettes. We tried to tell Hitler that the soldiers would probably take the first opportunity of swapping their chocolate for cigarettes or tobacco, but it was no good. Himmler handed out parcels containing tobacco products to the soldiers on his own initiative, and if he hadn’t I’m sure the combat strength of the SS would have suffered.

Hitler always looked forward to his little tea-party every night like a child. ‘I never take a holiday, I can’t go just anywhere to relax. So I divide up my holidays into the hours I spend here by the fire with my guests,’ he said.

He loved his Great Hall with its fine pictures. ‘Isn’t Nanna wonderful? I keep looking at her. She’s in just the right place here above the hearth. Her hand is as radiant as if she were alive,’ he said, looking appreciatively at Feuerbach’s picture. ‘After my death I want the pictures to go to the new gallery in Linz. I shall make Linz a fine city and give it a gallery that people will flock to see. I regard the pictures hanging here in my house as only on loan, something that brightens my life. After my death they will belong to the whole German nation.’ He was speaking to himself rather than the rest of us. No one would have known what to say in any case.

Professor Morell got very sleepy after a glass of port. He would be fighting off his drowsiness with his fat, hairy hands clasped over his huge paunch. He had the curious ability to close his eyes upwards, from below. It looked horrible behind the thick lenses of his glasses. So he wasn’t much fun to talk to. Sometimes Colonel von Below [40] Nicolaus von Below, b Jargelin 20 September 1907, d Detmold 24 July 1983; air cadet at the German School of Commercial Aviation until 1929; 1933 commissioned as lieutenant; 1933–1936 in the Reich Air Ministry; 1936–1945 Luftwaffe adjutant to Hitler. With his wife is a member of Hitler’s close entourage at the Berghof. 1946–1948, interned by the British Army. nudged him gently, and then he would briefly wake up and smile, thinking that the Führer had cracked a joke. ‘Are you tired, Morell?’ Hitler asked. ‘No, my Führer, I was only thinking,’ Morell would quickly assure him, and then he would tell a story of his experiences as a ship’s doctor in Africa, one that we all knew already. […]

Eva Braun took a lot of trouble to amuse the Führer. Once she tried to draw the photographer Walter Frentz and her friend Herta into a conversation about new films. Hitler began quietly whistling a tune. Eva Braun said, ‘You’re not whistling that properly, it goes like this.’ And she whistled the real tune. ‘No, no, I’m right,’ said the Führer. ‘I bet you I’m right,’ she replied. ‘You know I never bet against you because I’ll have to pay in any case,’ said Hitler. ‘If I win I must be magnanimous and refuse to take my winnings, and if she wins I have to pay her,’ he explained to the rest of us. ‘Then let’s play the record and you’ll see,’ suggested Eva Braun. Albert Bormann was the adjutant on duty. He rose and put the record in question◦– I forget what it was – on the gramophone. We all listened hard and intently, and Eva Braun turned out to be right. She was triumphant. ‘Yes,’ said Hitler. ‘So you were right, but the composer composed it wrong. If he’d been as musical as me then he’d have composed my tune.’ We all laughed, but I do believe Hitler meant it seriously.

He was genuinely convinced that he had an infallible musical ear. Heinz Lorenz suggested, ‘My Führer, you ought to give a concert in the Great Hall. After all, you could afford to invite the best German musicians, Gieseking, Kempff, Furtwängler and so on. You don’t go to the opera or the theatre any more, but you could listen to music. It wouldn’t strain your eyes either.’ Hitler rejected the idea. ‘No, I don’t want to trouble such artists just for me personally, but we could play a few records.’ A thick book listed all the records that the Führer owned. There must have been hundreds of them. The wooden panelling of the wall turned out to be a cupboard holding records, with a built-in gramophone that was invisible till the cupboard doors were opened. The black discs stood in long rows, labelled with numbers. Bormann operated the gramophone.

Hitler nearly always had the same repertory played: Lehár’s operettas, songs by Richard Strauss, Hugo Wolf and Richard Wagner. The only pop music he would let us play was the ‘Donkey Serenade’. It usually formed the conclusion of the concert.

Hitler’s colleagues enjoyed the musical evenings with the records even less than those conversations round the hearth. One after another they would leave the Hall. You could hear them laughing and giggling and talking in the living room, where the deserters assembled to amuse themselves in their own way, leaving their boss alone with the sleeping Morell and the faithful Eva, the duty adjutant and the von Below and Brandt ladies. I must admit that I sometimes slipped quietly away myself, until the valet came in to say, ‘The Führer misses his company, and back there in the Hall he can hear your noise.’ Then the ‘faithful’ reluctantly went back on duty again.

‘No, my entourage isn’t very musical,’ Hitler said, resigned. ‘When I was still going to official festival performances of opera I usually had to keep an eye on the men with me to see they didn’t go to sleep. Hoffmann (he meant the press photographer Heinrich Hoffmann) once almost fell over the balustrade of the box during Tristan und Isolde, and I had to rouse Schaub and tell him to go over and shake Hoffmann awake. Brückner [41] Wilhelm Brückner, b Baden-Baden 11 December 1884, d Herbstdorf, Chiemgau 18 August 1954; member of the civil defence (Freikorps Epp) until 1919; 1923 joins the NSDAP, regimental leader of the SA in Munich at the time of Hitler’s putsch; 1930 adjutant to Adolf Hitler, SA Obergruppenführer; 1936 member of the Reichstag; 1940 dismissed as chief adjutant; 1941 appointed to the Wehrmacht as lieutenant colonel; 1945–1948 interned by the US Army. was sitting behind me snoring, it was terrible. But no one went to sleep during The Merry Widow because there was a ballet in it.’

I asked Hitler why he only ever went to hear Die Meistersinger or other Wagnerian operas. ‘It’s just my luck that I can never say I like something without finding that I’m stuck listening exclusively to one piece of music or hearing one particular opera. I once said that Meistersinger is really one of Richard Wagner’s finest operas, so since then it’s supposed to be my favourite opera and I don’t get to hear anything else. The same thing happened with the Badenweiler March. And I was once invited to visit Frau Ley. [42] The dancer and actress Inga Ley, who committed suicide in 1942. She was the wife of Robert Ley, b Niederbreidenbach in the Rheinland 15 February 1890, d Nuremberg 25 October 1945 (suicide); studies chemistry in Münster; 1914 to 1918 fights in the First World War; 1923 gains a doctorate, first post with I.G. Farben; 1925 Gauleiter of the Rhineland; 1930 member of the Prussian Landtag; 1932 organization leader of the NSDAP; 10 May 1945 arrested in Salzburg. Hangs himself in his cell at Nuremberg. She had a Scotch terrier bitch with seven puppies and was very proud of them. Just to be polite I said: “Those are really delightful little creatures”◦– although I think they’re horrible, like rats. Next day she sent me one as a present. Frau Braun, Eva’s mother, has the dog now. I’d never have let myself be photographed with a dog like that, but it’s really touching to see how fond of me the little fellow still is.’