Selling Hitler

ONE

ON 20 APRIL 1945, Adolf Hitler celebrated his fifty-sixth and final birthday. Russian artillery shells were falling on the centre of Berlin and 6000 Soviet tanks were moving into the outskirts of the capital. Bremen and Hamburg in the north were about to fall to the British; Stuttgart, in the south, to the French. The Americans had captured Nuremberg and the Stars and Stripes was being unfurled over the podium from which Hitler had once addressed the annual Nazi Party rally. To escape the constant Allied air attacks, the Führer and his staff were now forced to live cooped-up in a bunker fifty-five feet beneath the Reich Chancellery. ‘It was not’, observed Martin Bormann in his diary, ‘exactly a birthday situation.’

At 2 p.m. Hitler shuffled out of his bedroom exhausted from lack of sleep. His doctors gave him three injections, including one of glucose. His valet administered eyedrops. He wrapped himself in a heavy grey overcoat, turned up the collar, and slowly climbed the spiral staircase out of the bunker and into the Chancellery garden to inspect a waiting contingent of Hitler Youth. Their leader, Arthur Axmann, was shocked by his appearance: ‘He walked with a stoop. His hands trembled.’ He passed along the short line of boys and patted a couple of them on the cheek. He uttered a few hoarse and scarcely audible words about his faith in an ultimate victory, turned, and retreated back underground to preside over the day’s main war conference.

That same afternoon, while Hitler and his generals were surveying what remained of the German armed forces, Sergeant Rochus Misch, the bunker’s switchboard operator, took the opportunity to slip upstairs into the fresh air for a cigarette. He was standing smoking amid the rubble of the Ehrenhof, the Chancellery’s Court of Honour, when two men appeared. One was Sergeant Wilhelm Arndt, a wounded veteran of twenty, who acted as one of Hitler’s personal servants. The other was a young soldier-valet named Fehrs. Between them they were dragging a large metal trunk. Misch offered to help.

There were approximately ten trunks which had to be loaded on to the back of an antiquated, three-wheeled delivery truck parked in the courtyard. It was heavy work. Misch reckoned that each of the metal containers weighed over one hundred pounds. To heave one on to the back of the truck took two men. Misch did not ask what was in them and Arndt did not tell him. ‘It was only’, he recalled, ‘when Arndt, now in full field uniform and armed with a machine pistol, clambered on top of the chests, that I realized it must be a mission with a one-man escort.’ The truck drove out of the courtyard. Misch watched it disappear. ‘Poor Arndt,’ he reflected years afterwards. ‘At the time we all thought he was the lucky one, escaping embattled Berlin and heading for the mountains.’

Arndt was taking part in a mission known as Operation Seraglio: the evacuation from the Berlin bunker of about eighty members of Hitler’s entourage, together with a mass of official government papers, personal property and valuables. Their destination was the so-called ‘Alpine Redoubt’ in the south of Germany, near Berchtesgaden, where the Nazis had a half-formulated plan to establish a new centre of command in the event of the capture of Berlin. The evacuation was being conducted by air. General Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot, who was responsible for the provision of aircraft, had managed to muster ten planes for the operation, dispersed between four different Berlin airstrips. The lorry carrying Arndt and the metal trunks was directed towards a grass runway at Schoenwalde, about ten miles north of the city. Two planes were waiting there. One was to be piloted by a Luftwaffe flying officer named Schultze; the other by a veteran of the Russian front, Major Friedrich Gundlfinger.

Allied aircraft had been celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday all day with an almost continuous stream of air raids on Berlin. At 10 p.m. they struck again. Arndt and the other passengers heading in convoy for Schoenwalde were obliged to stop and seek shelter. The raid lasted four hours. At the airfield, Schultze and Gundlfinger were growing increasingly anxious. Time was running short. They had to take off under cover of darkness to avoid the Allied fighters which now had command of Germany’s skies during the day. The two pilots discussed tactics. Schultze favoured flying high to make use of every available scrap of cloud cover. Gundlfinger preferred hedgehopping at low altitude.

The passengers finally began struggling on to the airfield shortly before dawn. Arndt attended to the stowing of the trunks in Gundlfinger’s plane, then clambered in after them. He was one of sixteen passengers. Schultze took off first. Gundlfinger followed a few minutes later, at about 5 a.m. on the morning of 21 April. His destination lay 350 miles to the south: Ainring, near Salzburg, the airfield closest to Berchtesgaden.

In the event, Gundlfinger completed less than one-third of the journey. He had been in the air for little more than half an hour and had just passed what was left of the city of Dresden when something went wrong. Possibly the plane was shot up by a patrolling American fighter; possibly it was hit by fire from a German anti-aircraft battery which mistook it for an enemy plane. At any rate, it was next seen shortly before 6 a.m. skimming the treetops in flames before crashing into the Heidenholz forest close to the Czech border. Villagers from the nearby hamlet of Boernersdorf ran to the scene. The plane – a large Junkers 352 transport aircraft – had ploughed nose-first into the ground and was burning fiercely. Trapped in the wreckage, a figure writhed and screamed at the onlookers for help. But the intense heat and the ricochets of exploding ammunition made rescue impossible. The aircraft had to be left to burn itself out.

Schultze, meanwhile, had also run into trouble. Shortly after taking off he had discovered that one of his fuel pipes was fractured. He was forced to divert to Prague, then still in German hands, to refuel. It was 8.30 a.m. when he finally landed at Salzburg, expecting to find Gundlfinger waiting for him. All the other eight planes were there. But of the major and his aircraft there was no sign. This information was relayed to General Baur in Berlin and he, in turn, broke the news to Hitler that one of the planes involved in Operation Seraglio was missing. Hitler, he recalled, ‘became very pale’ and asked which one. Baur said it was the one with Arndt on board, at which Hitler appeared ‘very upset’. According to Baur, he then uttered the words which were to cause so much mischief almost forty years later. ‘In that plane,’ he exclaimed, ‘were all my private archives, that I had intended as a testament to posterity. It is a catastrophe!’

‘After I’d seen how much that affected the Führer,’ said Baur, ‘I tried to calm him and explain that Gundlfinger was an old fox from the First World War, that the Americans wouldn’t have got him that easily: probably he’d made an emergency landing somewhere. But we didn’t know, and our investigations were without success.’

On 22 April, the day after Arndt’s disappearance, with heavy fighting reported in the suburbs of Berlin and with no sign of the counter-attack he had ordered, Hitler at last admitted defeat. ‘That’s it,’ he shouted, scattering a handful of coloured pencils across the map table. ‘How am I supposed to direct the war in such circumstances? The war’s lost.’ He walked out of the military conference. At about 4 p.m. he summoned Julius Schaub, the crippled soldier who had been his secretary, bodyguard, companion, messenger boy and valet for more than twenty years. Together they opened the steel safe in Hitler’s bedroom. Four feet high and three feet wide, it was brimming with his personal papers. The material was stuffed into suitcases, carried up into the Chancellery garden, tipped into a bomb crater and set on fire. Hitler stood for a while in the fading light, watching as this record of his private affairs went up in smoke. ‘Richelieu once said, give me five lines one man has penned,’ Hitler is reported to have lamented subsequently. ‘What I have lost! My dearest memories! But what’s the point – sooner or later you’ve got to get rid of that stuff.’ To complete this task, he instructed Schaub to fly to Berchtesgaden and destroy all his remaining personal files.

Schaub is believed to have arrived at the Berghof on his errand of destruction on the night of 26 April. Berchtesgaden, which had been subjected to a 300-bomber raid the previous day, was in a chaotic state. The homes of Bormann and Goering had been badly damaged. One wing of the Berghof was wrecked. Schaub was in an equally dilapidated condition. Eva Braun’s sister, Gretl, who met him in the Führer’s apartments, was shocked to discover him drunk and on the arm of his mistress. He had flown down bearing Hitler’s keys but whether he actually carried out his master’s instruction and destroyed everything is unclear. According to a US intelligence report, Gretl confided to an American undercover agent a few months after the war that in her view ‘Schaub probably selected the most interesting things with the help of his mistress and hid them away.’ In the 1970s, the British historian David Irving, an indefatigable hunter of original documents, received information that Schaub had ‘sold Hitler’s papers to a former magistrate now living on Lake Starnberg in Bavaria’. The magistrate, however, ‘proved unapproachable’.

Before lurching off into the Führer’s private quarters with his girlfriend, Schaub handed Gretl a letter which had been entrusted to him in Berlin two days earlier by Eva Braun. ‘My darling little sister,’ it began

In what was effectively her last will and testament, she provided a list of friends who were to receive her effects.

In a reference to Gundlfinger’s plane and its cargo of Hitler’s property, Eva asked her sister if Arndt had arrived ‘with the letter and suitcase? We heard here only that the plane had been attacked.’ The letter ended ‘with heartiest greetings and a kiss’. A few days later, Eva Braun achieved her life’s ambition and married Adolf Hitler. On 30 April, the couple killed themselves and their bodies were set alight.

The following morning, at almost exactly the same moment as the charred corpses of the newly-weds were being interred in a shell hole in Berlin, their personal effects were being burned in Berchtesgaden. The rooms of the Berghof were systematically emptied of clothes, furniture, linen and crockery. The contents were taken outside and destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of the approaching Americans. Hitler’s library of 2000 books, along with his collection of press cuttings, was hidden in a nearby salt mine. (These volumes, each with a garish swastika bookplate bearing the inscription ‘Ex Libris Adolf Hitler’, were later found by American troops, transported to Washington, and in 1953 catalogued as a collection by the Library of Congress.)

On this same day, 1 May, Gretl decided the time had come to comply with her sister’s last request. For assistance she turned to a young SS major named Johannes Goehler. According to a post-war investigation by US intelligence, ‘Gretl said that she would like him to take charge of the safekeeping of a large chest of letters which had been entrusted to her. They were letters between her sister, Eva Braun, and Hitler. The chest, about the size of an officer’s trunk, was in a cave near the Berghof.’ Goehler promised to help. He rang one of his subordinates, SS Captain Erwin Haufler, and instructed him to send a truck to Berchtesgaden immediately. That night Eva Braun’s chest, along with a clothes basket, was evacuated to the local SS headquarters in Fischhorn Castle in Austria.

For the next week they stood, objects of intense curiosity, in a corner of Haufler’s office. The basket, which was open, was found to contain Eva Braun’s photograph albums of life at the Berghof, ‘a few small framed pictures’ and some rolls of film. The trunk was locked. After several days of speculation, Haufler and his SS cronies eventually plucked up the courage to break it open. Inside was a treasure trove of Hitler memorabilia. There was an assortment of the Führer’s architectural drawings: ‘made in pencil,’ Haufler told the Americans after the war, ‘depicting floor plans and the like. I saw one sketch which seemed to represent a church.’ There was a box of Hitler’s stationery. There was a book belonging to Mussolini and another, in Eva Braun’s handwriting, in which she had made notes of her letters to Hitler. There was an album entitled ‘Enemy Propaganda in Stamps’. ‘Then there was a pair of black trousers,’ recalled Haufler, ‘badly ripped, or rather slit, and also a coat, which was field grey,’ bearing the insignia of the German eagle. This, the SS men correctly assumed, was the uniform Hitler had been wearing at the time of the attempt on his life in July 1944: in an emotional moment, the Führer had sent it to Eva to keep as a souvenir. But what most captured the soldiers’ interest were the letters. The trunk was three-quarters full of them: ‘at least 250,’ estimated Haufler, with another thirty or forty postcards. These were Hitler’s letters to Eva Braun, a lovingly preserved record of their ten-year relationship. Haufler picked up one. ‘My dear Pascherl,’ it began, ‘I send you my heartiest greetings.’ It was signed ‘your Adolf Hitler’.

Precisely what happened next is unclear. According to Haufler, he handed the trunk over to his administrative officer, Franz Konrad, with instructions to burn it to prevent its contents falling into Allied hands. But Konrad, a notoriously corrupt SS captain, whose activities during the German occupation of Warsaw had earned him the title ‘King of the Ghetto’, disobeyed him. In the final hours of the war he sent a truck loaded with looted treasure to his brother’s house in the nearby Austrian town of Schladming. Hidden among the canned food, the liquor and the radios were two suitcases and a metal trunk with Eva Braun’s name tag attached to it. ‘Make sure you get through,’ the driver alleged Konrad told him. ‘If you get stopped on the way, take the two bags and the chest and make off. If everything else should go wrong, you must save those three things.’

Acting on this information, on 24 August 1945, agents from the US Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) raided the home of Konrad’s brother and seized the Hitler uniform, Eva Braun’s private photograph albums, her silverware, the notes she had made of her letters to Hitler, and the stamp collection. A second cache of material, which Konrad had given to his mother to hide, was recovered in October. This haul included twenty-eight reels of colour film – Eva Braun’s home movies of her life with Hitler. All these objects were turned over to the American Army and shipped back to the United States. But of Hitler’s letters, by far the most interesting items, there was no sign. Thirty years later, David Irving once more set out to track them down. His conclusion, after months of inquiry, was that they were discovered near Berchtesgaden by one of the CIC officers who promptly stole them for himself. They have now disappeared into the archives of a private collector in the USA.

In addition to the property of Eva Braun, Konrad also appears to have stolen the correspondence between Hitler and the leader of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. The files had been transferred for safekeeping from Himmler’s headquarters to the library at Fischhorn Castle where they were kept in a steel cabinet, guarded by Himmler’s orderlies. After Hitler’s suicide, Konrad was assigned to help destroy them, but admitted to the Americans after the war that he put a set of the most interesting documents to one side. Shortly afterwards he turned up at the home of his secretary, Martha von Boskowitz, and gave her a package ‘about 18 inches long, 6 inches thick and 4 inches wide’. He told her that the tightly wrapped parcel contained his ‘personal letters’ and asked her to hold on to them, ‘in case anything should happen to me’. About six weeks later another SS man called and took the package away. It, too, has disappeared.

In the course of their investigations, the CIC also began picking up rumours of the existence of Hitler’s ‘diaries’. According to Colonel Wilhelm Spacil of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) Franz Konrad boasted to him at the beginning of May 1945 that, in addition to all his other treasures, he was in possession of ‘the diary of Hitler, written on very thin paper’ which he had hidden in a specially made zinc box. The CIC asked Captain Haufler what he knew of such diaries. Haufler described how two weeks before the end of the war he had been at the Berghof when an air raid alarm sounded. He and Gretl Braun, along with the Berghof’s housekeeper, Frau Mittelstrasser, took shelter in the underground bunker. The two women showed him around part of the labyrinth of tunnels which extended for nearly two miles beneath the mountain.

In the absence of any other hard information, the CIC investigation petered out. Gretl Braun dismissed Haufler’s story. ‘Hitler didn’t keep any diaries,’ she told a CIC agent. ‘The books which were standing in the air raid shelter in the Berghof were not diaries, but rather minutes of the day’s activities, which were kept by whoever was the Führer’s adjutant at the time.’ And Franz Konrad, despite prolonged interrogation, insisted that he knew nothing of such books, that Spacil was mistaken, that he must be muddling the ‘diaries’ with Eva Braun’s notebooks which he confessed to having stolen. At the height of the debate over the Hitler diaries’ authenticity in 1983, the Sunday Times clutched at the straw offered by the CIC files. Quoting only the testimony of Spacil and Haufler, the paper used the information to try to refute claims that there had never been any suggestion that Hitler kept a diary. But given the paucity of evidence, and even allowing for the unreliability of the witnesses, the likelihood is that the references to ‘diaries’ which creep into a couple of CIC reports are actually the result of a misunderstanding.

The Third Reich had dissolved into chaos. In Berlin, in Munich, in Berchtesgaden, Allied soldiers as well as German picked through the detritus of Hitler’s Germany and carried off whatever seemed of value. A gang of Russian women soldiers ransacked Eva Braun’s apartment in the Berlin bunker and emerged, according to one witness, ‘whooping like Indian squaws’, waving Frau Hitler’s underclothes above their heads, carrying off lamps, vases, bottles, carpets, crystal glass, Hitler’s monogrammed silver, an accordian, a tablecloth, ‘even a table telephone’. At the Berghof, French and American troops wrenched off light-fittings and doorknobs and pulled out the springs from the Führer’s bed. Eventually, every inch of plaster was stripped from the walls; stairs and handrails were torn up; the members of one enterprising unit even took a sledgehammer to Hitler’s marble fireplace and sold off the pieces as ashtrays. At the Führerbau, the monumental stone building on the Konigsplatz in Munich where Hitler had met Chamberlain and Daladier, dozens of GIs plundered the storerooms, using a wooden crate as a stepping stone as they explored the waterlogged basement. When one anonymous soldier from the US 14th Division staved in the lid of the crate he found yet another hoard of Hitler’s private property: two gold-plated pistols, a swastika ring, a miniature portrait of the dictator’s mother painted on ivory, a framed photograph of Hitler’s favourite dog, Blondi, a gold watch bearing the initials ‘A.H.’ and valuable monogrammed crystal glasses, carefully wrapped in newspaper. ‘The next thing I picked up was a diary,’ recalled the soldier, many years later. ‘It was a red diary with gold lettering and Hitler’s insignia on it, his initials on it. But I flashed right through it and it was all in German. I just threw it right aside and it dropped into the water on the floor.’ He returned to retrieve it some time later but the ‘diary’, or whatever it was, had gone. There are many such stories. As recently as 1984, a family in British Columbia found a crateful of personal papers belonging to Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s court photographer, lying discarded in their attic: it had been brought back by their father at the end of the war and forgotten. Years later it is impossible to guess how much of historical value may have been carted away from the wreckage of Nazi Germany and may still come to light.

Reviewing such documentary evidence as exists, it is conceivable that of five sets of Hitler documents supposedly destroyed in the spring of 1945, four of them – the private files held at the Berghof, the letters to Eva Braun, the correspondence with Himmler and even possibly part of the cargo entrusted to Arndt – may actually have survived. Only the contents of the safe in Berlin, whose incineration was personally supervised by the Führer, can definitely be regarded as lost.

This tantalizing state of affairs was to provide the perfect scenario for forgery.

TWO

OUTSIDE THE ENTRANCE to the Führerbunker in Berlin, a shell crater was strewn with sheets of charred paper. Rummaging beneath the blackened litter, a Russian soldier discovered a pair of scorched and crumbling bones. He called his commanding officer over. ‘Comrade Lieutenant Colonel!’ he shouted, ‘there are legs here!’

Thus, on 2 May 1945, if the Soviet writer Lev Bezymenski is to be believed, Private Ivan Churakov of the ist Byelorussian Front stumbled on the most sought-after Hitler relic of them all. ‘So!’ exclaimed Stalin when he first heard of the Führer’s death, ‘that’s the end of the bastard. Too bad that we did not manage to take him alive.’

Disinterred from the crater, the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun were placed in a pair of rough wooden boxes and taken to the Soviet Army headquarters in the northern Berlin suburb of Buch. Hitler’s corpse had been so badly damaged by fire that parts of it disintegrated on the mortuary table. According to the official autopsy report, the left foot was missing; so was the skin: ‘only remnants of charred muscles are preserved.’ The mouldering cadaver was displayed in a clearing in a wood outside Berlin at the end of May to one of the Führer’s bodyguards. By August it was in Moscow, where, quite probably, it remains to this day. (‘Hitler’s body’, boasted one Russian official in 1949, ‘is in better keeping with us than under the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.’) Hitler’s teeth – a bridge of nine dentures in yellow metal and a singed lower jaw consisting of fifteen teeth – were handed over to the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, SMERSH. These, together with the dictator’s Iron Cross, his party insignia and the teeth of Eva Braun, were last seen in Berlin in May 1945 in a cigar box, being offered around by a SMERSH officer to fashionable German dentists for identification.

But, abetted by the Russians, even in this reduced form, Hitler was still capable of making mischief. The autopsy report and the various proofs of Hitler’s death were suppressed by the Soviet Union for more than twenty years: officially, to have them ‘in reserve’ in case an imposter appeared claiming to be ‘the Führer saved by a miracle’; in reality, to embarrass the British and Americans. At least twice in the Kremlin and once at the Potsdam Conference, Stalin lied to the Allies, telling them that Hitler had escaped and was in hiding. As part of his campaign against fascist Spain, he even suggested that Hitler was being sheltered by General Franco. Senior Soviet officers in Berlin, who had at first admitted to the discovery of the body, hastily changed their stories and followed Stalin’s line. The Soviet newspaper Izvestia went so far as to allege that Hitler and Eva Braun were living in a moated castle in Westphalia in the British Occupation Zone of Germany.

The post-war appetite for stories about Hitler and the Nazis, which was to culminate in the diaries fiasco, found its first sustenance in this confusion. Throughout the summer of 1945, newspapers trampled over one another to bring their readers the ‘true story’ of the Führer’s fate. First Hitler was said to be working as a croupier in a casino in the French resort of Evian. A few days later he resurfaced as a head waiter in Grenoble. Then, in bewildering succession, he was reliably reported to be a shepherd in the Swiss Alps, a monk in St Gallen, and an Italian hermit living in a cave beside Lake Garda. Some newspapers maintained that Hitler was posing as a fisherman in the Baltic, others that he was working on a boat off the west of Ireland. He had escaped by airplane. He had escaped by submarine. He was in Albania. He was in Spain. He was in Argentina.

Hitler’s progress across the world’s front pages was followed with increasing embarrassment in Whitehall. When the Russians hinted that the British might be shielding him in Westphalia, the Government decided to act. In September 1945, Brigadier Dick White, a senior official in the British security service, later to be chief of both MI5 and MI6, was asked to prepare a report on what had happened to Hitler. He was given six weeks to complete the task. White delegated this urgent mission, code-named Operation Nursery, to a particularly bright young intelligence officer named Hugh Trevor-Roper.

At the outbreak of war Trevor-Roper had been at Oxford completing a biography of Archbishop Laud. Recruited into British signals intelligence, the twenty-six-year-old research student was obliged to switch his mind from the study of seventeenth-century clerical politics to the analysis of intercepted German radio traffic. He became one of the foremost experts on the German intelligence service, the Abwehr. He had a penetrating intellect, a sharp tongue, and a natural combativeness which caused one of his superiors in the Secret Intelligence Service to threaten him with court martial.

He arrived in Germany in the middle of September. His method of solving the mystery of Hitler’s fate owed something to the novels of Agatha Christie. He was the amateur detective; the Führerbunker the country house where the crime had been committed; its survivors the witnesses who could provide the vital clues. He quickly demolished the stories of some of the more obvious fantasists: the doctor who claimed to have treated Hitler for a lung wound sustained during fighting around the Berlin Zoo; the female Gestapo agent who swore she could take him to the Bavarian estate where Hitler was living in a secluded foursome with Eva, Gretl, and Gretl’s husband, Hermann. To uncover the truth he compiled a list of everyone who had attended Hitler in his final days and travelled the country tracking them down. He interrogated Keitel, Jodl, Doenitz and Speer. In their prison camps he questioned the Führer’s SS guards. At Berchtesgaden he caught up with two of Hitler’s secretaries, Johanna Wolf and Christa Schroeder; he almost captured a third, Gerda Christian, when he turned up at the home of her mother-in-law – he missed her by only a couple of days. By the time he came to write his report he had found seven witnesses who were with Hitler in the final week of his life, including the chauffeur, Erich Kempka, who provided the gasoline with which his master’s body was burned, and a guard, Hermann Karnau, who witnessed the funeral pyre.

On the night of 1 November 1945, Trevor-Roper presented a summary of his findings to an audience of sceptical journalists in the Hotel-am-Zoo in Berlin. One of them, the Newsweek correspondent, James P. O’Donnell, later recalled the confident impression he made: a ‘dapper’ figure in his wartime uniform, crisp and sarcastic, ‘a master of tart understatement’.

That evening, Trevor-Roper told for the first time the story of Hitler’s death which has since become familiar: the final appearance of the Führer, accompanied by Eva Braun, to say goodbye to his staff; their retirement to his sitting room; their deaths – his by a revolver bullet, hers by poison – and their subsequent cremation in the garden of the Chancellery. Trevor-Roper fixed the time of death as ‘shortly after 2.30p.m. on 30 April 1945’ and he concluded with a magisterial rebuke to the press:

‘As of that evening,’ wrote O’Donnell, ‘most of the international press stationed in Berlin was finally convinced that Hitler was indeed dead.’ His handling of the case earned Trevor-Roper the title ‘The Sleuth of Oxford’.

The inquiry was an unprecedented opportunity for an ambitious young historian. With the permission of British intelligence Trevor-Roper turned the information he had collected into a book. The Last Days of Hitler appeared in 1947. It was hailed in Britain as ‘a masterpiece’. In the United States, Arthur Schlesinger Jr declared it ‘a brilliant professional performance’. The book has since been reprinted thirteen times in Great Britain alone. By 1983 its world-wide sales amounted to almost half a million copies. Trevor-Roper bought a Bentley on the proceeds and for a while was said to hold the record for driving from Oxford to London in under an hour.

Behind the Iron Curtain, the book was banned. ‘The Polish edition was stifled in the publisher’s office,’ wrote Trevor-Roper, ‘the Bulgarian edition destroyed by the police on its appearance.’ The Russian position remained unchanged. ‘It was never allowed that Hitler might be dead. It was assumed, and sometimes openly stated, that he was alive.’ This doctrine officially remained in force until 1968 when the communist author Lev Bezymenski was allowed to publish the autopsy report in his book The Death of Adolf Hitler. Even then the truth had to be distorted for political effect. In his anxiety to avoid being captured alive, Hitler appears to have simultaneously pulled the trigger of a revolver held to his head and bitten on a glass ampoule of cyanide clenched between his teeth. But despite the unanimous evidence of the witnesses in the bunker that they heard a shot, despite the fact that the autopsy report itself stated that ‘part of the cranium’ was ‘missing’, Bezymenski insisted that Hitler had only taken poison and had thus died ‘like a dog’: it was apparently still important to the Soviet Union that Hitler should be depicted as too cowardly to take the soldier’s way out. Twenty-three years after the concealment of its discovery, the corpse had not lost its propaganda value.

Researched at first hand in the interrogation cell and the secret service registry, The Last Days of Hitler was unique: the insight of an historian combined with the scholarship of an intelligence officer on active service. Trevor-Roper was given access to the diaries of Goering’s chief of staff, General Koller, as well as those of Schwerin von Krosigk, the Minister of Finance. He was the first to make use of the diary kept by Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, discovered by a British officer amid the ruins of the Chancellery in September 1945. In the middle of November, after the completion of his original report, he was summoned back to Germany from leave in Oxford to authenticate Hitler’s last will and testament. Shortly afterwards, in pursuit of two missing copies of that document, he led a group of CIC officers in a midnight raid on a house near the Austrian border. After a long interrogation session he finally broke the resistance of a German major who admitted possessing a copy of Hitler’s will. The major led him into the garden of his home and in the darkness broke open the frozen ground with an axe to retrieve a bottle: ‘breaking the bottle with the axe, he drew out and handed to me the last missing document….’

Such colourful adventures set Trevor-Roper apart from more conventional academic historians. His experience taught him that Nazi documents could surface unexpectedly in all manner of unlikely places. He also appreciated that it was sometimes necessary to deal with unorthodox and even unsavoury characters. One could not afford to be too squeamish. In 1952, he met Francois Genoud, a Swiss lawyer whom he described at the time in the Sunday Express as ‘an unrepentant Nazi sympathizer’. Genoud, a former member of the SS, whose name was later to be linked with the Palestine Liberation Organization, had obtained over a thousand type-written pages known as the Bormann–Vermerke: the ‘Bormann Notes’. They were meticulously kept in Martin Bormann’s personal custody and he had written upon them, ‘Notes of fundamental interest for the future. To be preserved with the greatest care.’ They proved to be the transcripts of more than three hundred of Hitler’s mealtime monologues: the interminable, rambling soliloquies which had passed for conversation at the Führer’s dinner table and which had been recorded on Bormann’s orders as if they were Holy Writ. The material legally belonged to Genoud. After the war he had acquired the copyright in Hitler’s literary estate from the dictator’s sister, Paula. Similar contracts had been agreed with Bormann’s widow and the heirs of Josef Goebbels (‘these poor people,’ Genoud later called them, ‘whose rights and property have been plundered’). Trevor-Roper edited, introduced and helped arrange publication of Genoud’s material, which appeared in 1953 as Hitler’s Table Talk.

Fascinating, yet simultaneously tedious and repellent in its grinding prose and vertiginous imagery, the book captures the authentic voice of Hitler. Lunch might find him lecturing Dr Porsche on the superiority of the air-cooled engine; over dinner he would hold forth on the origins of the planet. He had an opinion about everything: the inability of the English to perform Shakespeare, the ‘harmfulness of cooked foods’, the legends of ancient Greece, the toad (‘a degenerate frog’), Winston Churchill (‘an utterly immoral, repulsive creature’), the ‘negroid’ appearance of Eleanor Roosevelt, prelunar civilization and the mental capacity of a dog. In his brilliant introductory essay, Trevor-Roper depicted Hitler’s mind as ‘a terrible phenomenon, imposing indeed in its granitic harshness and yet infinitely squalid in its miscellaneous cumber – like some huge barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse – old tins and dead vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure – the intellectual detritus of centuries’.

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.’

THREE

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.

The effects of the Hitler Wave were felt across the world. In America more than twenty new books about Hitler were published. Two film producers, Sandy Lieberson and David Puttnam, released a documentary, Swastika, which included the Eva Braun home movies seized by the CIC in 1945: the cans were discovered by a researcher in the archives of the US Marine and Signal Corps. In February, Frank Finlay starred in The Death of Adolf Hitler. Three months later, Sir Alec Guinness appeared in Hitler: The Last Ten Days. The film was banned by the Jewish management of the ABC–EMI cinema chain. The Israelis denied it a licence. ‘The figure of the assassin’, complained the Israeli Censorship Board, ‘is represented in a human light without giving expression to the terrible murders for which he is responsible.’

Guinness confessed that in playing the part he had found it ‘difficult not to succumb to Hitler’s charm. He had a sweet smile and a very sentimental Austrian charm.’ The BBC, despite protests, showed Leni Riefenstahi’s Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. To Hutchinson’s commercial pleasure but editorial embarrassment, the reissued Mein Kampf, despite an artificially high price to discourage mass sales, had to be reprinted twice. A delegation from the British Board of Deputies tried to dissuade the company from bringing out a paperback edition. They failed, and Hutchinson’s sold a further 10,000 copies. Foreign language editions appeared in Denmark, Sweden and Italy. The Sunday Telegraph wrote of ‘the astonishing resurgence of the Hitler cult’. Time reported a ‘worldwide revival’ of interest in the Nazi leader: ‘Adolf Hitler’s presence never vanishes. His career is still the fundamental trauma of the century.’

The 1970s also witnessed a corresponding boom in sales of Hitler memorabilia. In the immediate aftermath of the war this activity, too, had been discouraged by the German authorities. In 1948 a ruling by a denazification court that ‘Hitler was an active Nazi’ enabled the State of Bavaria to seize his personal property – principally his private apartment in Munich, some money owed to him by a Nazi publishing company, and a few valuable paintings. (Eva Braun’s home, bought for her by Hitler in 1935, was also confiscated and donated to a restitution fund for the victims of Nazism.) Three years later, the Bavarian government made use of its powers to prevent Hitler’s former Munich housekeeper, Frau Anni Winter, from selling a trunkful of the Führer’s private property. Under the terms of Hitler’s will, she was entitled to ‘personal mementoes’ sufficient ‘for the maintenance of a modest middle-class standard of living’. She inherited such relics as Hitler’s gun licence, his Nazi Party membership card, some of his watercolours, a copy of Mein Kampf and the original letter from President Hindenburg inviting Hitler to become Chancellor in 1933. For these and other treasures, Frau Winter was offered $250,000 by an American collector. The authorities promptly intervened and impounded the bulk of the collection, leaving her, bitterly resentful, with what they imagined to be a handful of valueless scraps.

But following Frau Winter’s death, in 1972, these supposedly worthless items were put on sale at an auction in Munich. Telephone bids were taken from all over the world for lots which included family photographs, an eleven-word note for a speech and a War Loans savings card. Prices were reported to have ‘exceeded all expectations’. The average price simply for a signed Hitler photograph was £450.

In the succeeding years the Nazi memorabilia market took off spectacularly. Hitler’s 1940 Mercedes touring car – five tons of armoured steel and glass, twenty feet long with a 230 horsepower engine and a 56-gallon fuel tank – was sold in Arizona in 1973 for $153,000. A rug from the Reich Chancellery fetched $100,000. A millionaire in Nevada paid $60,000 for the crateful of Hitler’s personal property rescued from the basement of the Führerbau. The Marquess of Bath acquired Himmler’s spectacles, removed from his body after his suicide. He also bought a tablecloth which had belonged to the Commandant of Belsen concentration camp. A military dealer in Maryland, Charles Snyder, sold locks of Eva Braun’s hair for $3500, and – following a deal with the official American executioner – strands from the ropes which hanged the Nuremberg war criminals.

It was against this background, in 1973, with the Hitler Wave at its height, that Mr Billy F. Price of Houston, Texas, heard of a new prize about to come on the market. Mr Price – owner of Hitler’s napkins and cutlery and on his way to possessing one of the world’s largest collections of Hitler paintings – discovered through contacts in Germany that Hermann Goering’s old yacht was for sale. Price expressed an interest. But before he had time to put in a bid, the boat was sold. The purchaser, he learned later, was a figure hitherto unknown in the close-knit memorabilia market: a German journalist named Gerd Heidemann.