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Whether in Berlin, on ‘the Berg’ at Berchtesgaden or in the Wolfsschanze HQ at Rastenburg, Linge was rarely more than a click of the fingers or a whispered instruction away from his master.
Hitler was accidently put through on the telephone to another caller from the SS entourage, who evidently assumed that Hitler’s standard greeting of ‘This is the Führer’ was a joke, and started laughing. Hitler’s surprisingly measured and humorous reaction to the incident rather belies the image of him as a rabid and ill-tempered ‘carpet-biter’.
If this apparent humanity offends our preconceptions, then perhaps our preconceptions need altering.
I decided to accept the offer of an Englishman who had expressly agreed in writing to publish only what I had approved previously. He kept to the bargain, as did other foreign publishers and journalists. Only a German publisher thought my memoir should be ‘rephrased’ and the content changed.
Ten years had passed since the day when I began my service with Hitler and this moment, 1545 hours on 30 April 1945. A whole world lay between the man to whom, as a member of the SS-Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, I had sworn to be faithful unto death, and this corpse which I had now to wrap in a blanket, carry up the dark, narrow bunker stairway, lay in a shell crater, dowse with petrol and set alight.
It was very important for me whenever possible to avoid being drawn into gossip, which was dangerous to everybody.
Hitler is dead, but at the time of writing (1980) many of his former collaborators who influenced events of the time survive. Many have set out to justify their role in postwar publications with varying degrees of success. Scarcely a general can be found amongst them who admits that he lost a battle by his own bad leadership. The lost war, and all the lost battles, are placed almost exclusively at Hitler’s door.
Rudolf Hess once told me that just before the seizure of power, Hitler, Hess, Heinrich Hoffmann and Julius Schaub were all nearly killed in Hitler’s Mercedes due to an error by a lorry driver. Hitler was injured in the face and shoulder but with great composure calmed his co-passengers, still paralysed with shock, with the observation that Providence would not allow him to be killed since he still had a great mission to fulfil.
Admittedly, anyone who wanted to remove Hitler ‘eye to eye’ would have had to sacrifice his own life. This kind of suicide mission found no takers and was probably the only reason that Hitler survived to die by his own hand in April 1945.
I read often after the war that Hitler was so fearful of assassination attempts he always had the window blinds let down when he travelled by train. This was not the reason: his eyes were intolerant of sunlight.
In the basement was his ‘sports centre’, a bowling alley. Hitler, who had no interest in sport except for the expander under his bed, loved bowling, although he did not want this known about. ‘If the bowling associations get wind of it’, he said, ‘they will make me honorary president of every club.’
know today that he made mention of an incident after the death of his mother15 when he had been ejected from a property in Vienna by social-democrat building workers for arguing about politics and contradicting their opinions.
All this building work also served the ends of propaganda and made the Third Reich appear to be in the throes of expansion.
He paid his closest staff handsomely. ‘My people’, he remarked once, ‘have a standard of living with me which I consider the correct one. Working at my side they should have an adequate income. Nobody should have to succumb to temptation, allow themselves to be corrupted or engage in unfair practices for need of money. If they do, I reserve the right in such cases to punish harshly and pitilessly.’ And he did so.
It was difficult to understand him. On the one hand he pandered even to the most unimportant things while on the other he was excessive and unfeeling. He might show the most fatherly concern for a female secretary who had stubbed her toe but be utterly ice-cold when issuing orders which sent thousands to their deaths. The ‘privilege’ of experiencing his concern was not necessarily an enjoyable affair.
Those of us in Hitler’s circle permanently knew his ‘song’, which he repeated often and vehemently, that the meat-free diet was the best recipe for health. The ‘most disastrous stage in human development’, he said, according to the notes I saw, was ‘the day when man first ate cooked meat’.
Wine tasted to him ‘so sour’ that he thought it could be improved ‘with a spoonful of sugar’. Beer, as he often informed us, he had liked very much when he was young, but now he found it ‘too bitter’. As for nicotine, he agreed with Goethe that the odour of tobacco smoke was the vilest of all.
At officials functions at the Berghof, in Munich or Berlin, at receptions and social occasions, Eva Braun would not appear. A Führer who was married or involved in a permanent liaison with a woman, Hitler used to say, would be rejected by a section of his female followers.
She kept her promise and came back even though she knew – or at least suspected – that it would mean the end of her life. She was then thirty-three years of age, a beautiful, mature but rather afflicted woman. The years with Hitler had left their mark.
The natural beauty, the nobility, the harmony of movement and the power of the horse as an artistic subject fascinated Hitler the painter.
The result of our conversation was his instruction that the marriage must be annulled, which was done. The divorced husband remained with the lady, however, which Hitler was prepared to overlook. After the war I saw the couple again. After the SS-Führer’s release from internment, they remarried. ‘What people do in their beds’, Hitler used to say, ‘does not interest me so long as relationships do not prejudice the State and its leadership.’ And he kept to that.
He wore them as necessary in private but would never appear in public wearing them. ‘The Führer’, he explained to me, ‘does not wear glasses.’ Nevertheless when in a small circle he would toy with them in his hands which often resulted in their being broken when he got tense. I had to carry a reserve with me everywhere so that he would never be without reading glasses when he needed them. I also had to make sure that atlases, a magnifying glass, compasses, writing materials and red, green and blue coloured pencils were always to hand. Psychologists may draw conclusions from something Hitler
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Often he would say that one must allow people ‘almost every idiosyncrasy’ but he would not forgive everything: criticism of National Socialism, of himself as Führer and his state – this had to be punished.
All the same, I cannot say that there was never any friction. Frequently I would receive a ‘rocket’ which appeared to me unjustified. When Hitler once inferred from my behaviour that I considered myself to have been unjustly treated, he told me: ‘Linge, you are with me. Therefore, even when you are innocent I have to bawl you out. And I have to do it with sufficient vigour to ensure that you will take steps to pass it on to the culprits below you. I cannot always look for them myself.’
That Goebbels attempted to turn Hitler against Göring I saw from early on. I wondered at the thinly disguised enmity between the ‘little doctor’ and ‘Hermann’, equally beloved amongst the people, most of whom were even prepared to forgive him for the poor showing of the Luftwaffe.
On a trip I once heard him say: ‘Unfortunately the Führer has too many sentence-finishers around him.’ He said this so loudly and clearly that Hitler had to hear it, and I saw that he heard. When the Reich Chancellery became the FHQ in 1945, Goebbels was Hitler’s closest confidante.
One day Hitler’s travelling physician Karl Brandt came and proposed that the women whom SS officers wanted to marry should be obliged beforehand to qualify for marriage by winning the Reich sports badge. Hitler asked me: ‘Linge, what’s your mother’s best time for the hundred metres?’ When I said I did not know he said cheerfully: ‘My mother didn’t have a sport badge either, but nevertheless I think I turned out to be quite a good German.’
The extent of his complicity I discovered only after the war, for Hitler only discussed with him in absolute privacy that of which I would never have believed Himmler capable – the mass annihilation of the Jews. Himmler issued the orders to kill the Jews although he would have found it against the grain to kill anyone by his own hand.
What went on in the concentration camps during the war remained – as they did to everybody in Hitler’s circle – a mystery. The conferences in this respect between Hitler and Himmler were held in private. For us, Himmler was the man behind the scenes. Not until my spell in Soviet captivity did I discover that gas chambers and ovens had been installed in the camps. It may appear rather incredible, but during my service with Hitler I knew nothing of the dreadful events which were to provoke such outrage throughout the world. Repeatedly I have heard it said that Hitler could not have known
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RUDOLF HESS WAS A completely different kind of personality. Born at Alexandria, Egypt, he had been imprisoned with Hitler at Landsberg in 1923/4 and at Hitler’s dictation had typed out the manuscript for Mein Kampf with his forefingers.
lugubrious,
In the ten years that I knew him, but especially from 1936, Hitler was constantly worried about his health.
When the doctors advised Hitler to include at least a little animal fat in his diet he waved the suggestion away.
His decision to start the war had been very difficult for him to take, although as we know today he had done everything he could to engineer it. Undoubtedly he was hoping for the Poles to attack Germany, and thus relieve him of the burden.
I had the sensation of going through a wood in which the trees had been felled. That the greater part of our cities and much of Europe would look the same a few years later, and that this war would last six years as the Second World War, and cost 40 million people their lives, I could not anticipate.
I was not only deeply influenced by Hitler but was also sworn to total, uncritical obedience to him. I could only reason with myself: my position does not allow my personal doubts to affect my composure. And that was how I left it to the bitter end. I could not under any circumstances permit my actions to deviate from any decision made by Hitler, a man to whom I was specially bound as his subordinate, having sworn an oath to sacrifice my life for him at any time and under any conditions should the occasion require me so to do.
Hitler recalled how in 1937 he had offered to sell the 600,000 German Jews to Britain as a workforce for Palestine. This had seemed a good way to clear the Jews out of the Reich and do a deal with London, but in the upshot, as he said with a laugh, ‘our cousins over there did not welcome the idea’.
Thirty-seven years later I found out for whom he had been searching: Charlotte Lobjoie, a woman who had born him a son, Jean Marie, in March 1918.
To Hitler’s exasperation, between 10 June 1940 when Italy declared war on Britain and France, and 13 June, when German troops occupied Paris, the Italian operation was revealed at last. Their plan was to do nothing.
After bowing to each other the delegations resumed their seats. Keitel then read out the preamble to the armistice conditions as Hitler left the wagon, saluting the French delegation as they rose. I gave the honour company a signal, commands were barked out and at once the band struck up ‘Deutschland über alles’. Hitler left the wood and returned to FHQ. He who had enjoyed the hour of satisfaction had set out the procedure in detail himself. He wanted to bring home to the French by his haughty demeanour the humiliation which in his view they had made him and the German people suffer in 1918.
At the midday meal, attended by a host of military commanders and other influential guests, Hitler ordered me to find out at once who had been on watch outside our bunker at five in the early hours. The sentry had ‘made such a racket’ that it had woken him up and he had not been able to get back to sleep. I was horrified, for I had been the culprit.
The adjutant handed Hitler the receiver, believing that Speer was on the line. When Hitler announced himself, ‘The Führer speaking’, there was a bellow of laughter from the other end. This was the paymaster who, still laughing, shouted into the receiver: ‘You’re crazy!’ I feared an outburst of rage with serious consequences, but Hitler merely returned the receiver with the observation: ‘Just someone else who thinks I’m mad.’ No outward annoyance and no negative consequences followed, which I found surprising since this episode occurred after the 20 July 1944 bomb plot.
Hitler’s self-confidence helped secure these successes, but he embittered the military commanders by letting them know more clearly than before that he, ‘the untrained general staff man’, as he occasionally described himself, knew their trade at least as well as they did. From then on he increased his interference in their affairs until eventually it was too much.
Then I went to the barrack hut to see the ‘crime scene’ for myself. There were still some soldiers outside, groaning. Berger, the stenographer who had been seated opposite Hitler, was dead. The bomb had torn off his legs. The chief of the Luftwaffe general staff, whose legs had been crushed, was groaning close to death. He and Dr Karl Brandt, who had been standing next to Hitler and had taken most of the blast, died immediately afterwards. Schmundt, who lost an eye and a leg, died two weeks later in the military hospital at Rastenburg.
Hitler said: ‘When I go over it in my mind and think that everybody received serious injuries except me, that some even lost their lives, I have to say that I have escaped death in a miraculous manner. This makes me certain that nothing can happen to me, that Providence has selected me to conclude our common aim victoriously.’ Visibly affected, Mussolini assured him: ‘I am totally of your opinion. It is a sign from heaven.’
What gave me pause for thought occasionally was the fact that Hitler did not lead and govern as the people thought. To a great extent he gave ministers, Reichsleiters, Gauleiters and governor-generals a free hand, and not seldom they turned on each other tooth and nail.
A theory has been cultivated in certain circles, similar to the ‘stab in the back’ legend, that in the final phase of his life the Führer was no longer master of his senses – that this is the only way by which the catastrophic end of the Third Reich can be explained. This is a fable. Up to that final moment when he took his pistol, held it to his right temple and pulled the trigger, he was Adolf Hitler, one hundred per cent compos mentis.
Soon after the execution Hitler called me into his study. After I had entered and reported myself in military fashion he said without any preamble: ‘I would like to release you to your family.’ I now did something I had never done before by interrupting him to declare: ‘Mein Führer, I have been with you in good times, and I am staying with you also in the bad.’ Hitler looked at me calmly and said only: ‘I did not expect anything else from you.’ Then, standing at his writing desk, he went on: ‘I have another personal job for you. What I must do now is what I have ordered every commander at
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There was no point in explaining to him that Hitler’s decision to marry Eva Braun ‘properly’ resulted from quite different motives. It is certain that the ceremony and its consequences meant nothing at all to him. He merely wanted to fulfil Eva’s wish that after coming to him in Berlin, she should die at his side as his lawful wife.
The ‘hour of truth’ had come. Firstly, however, there was a last midday meal to be taken together. Hitler delivered a monologue about the future. The immediate postwar world would not have a good word to say for him, he said: the enemy would savour its triumph, and the German people would face very difficult times. Even we, his intimate circle, would soon experience things that we could not imagine. But he trusted to ‘the later histories’ to ‘treat him justly’. They would recognise that he had only wanted the very best for Germany. Not until after my release from captivity did I understand
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