Hitler's Last Secretary (11 page)

The tea-house was a round, stone building and looked ugly from the outside, rather like a silo or an electricity station. Inside, apart from the kitchen, a guardroom and the necessary anteroom and adjoining small offices, there was just one large, round room that you could enter either direct from outside or through a pretty entrance hall leading there from the kitchen quarters. There were some comfortable armchairs with flowered upholstery in this entrance hall, and little tables. A telephone stood here too.

This big, round room was an architectural masterpiece. The ceiling was slightly vaulted, the walls were made of marble picked out in gilt contrasts. Half of the wall had six large windows with a view of the beautiful landscape. On the western side of the room lay the big, open hearth and the entrance door. A huge, low, round table filled the middle of the room. Around it were about twenty deep armchairs, upholstered in alternating beige and terracotta. On the hearth side of the room were four very large chairs with high backs for the Führer and his guests of honour. The staff would have been told in advance of the Führer’s arrival, and the aroma of coffee already filled the house. The table was laid, and coffee was served as soon as we came in. Hitler would seat himself in his armchair right in front of the hearth, with Eva Braun to his left. There was no strict seating plan here either, and Hitler might invite Frau Schneider to sit on his right. The others spread out as they liked around the table. Usually there were several empty places.

Most of us enjoyed a cup of coffee after our walk. Some people drank black tea. Hitler himself would have apple-peel tea or sometimes caraway tea, never anything else. He ate freshly baked apple cake with it, and perhaps a couple of biscuits. The rest of us were given pastries bought in Berchtesgaden, and some of them could be stale and hard to chew.

It was difficult to get a general conversation going here. Every discussion had to be either conducted loud enough for everyone to hear it, or be between groups or couples, leaving silence on the other side of the table.

Eva Braun would try to strike up some interesting, relaxing subject. She talked about the cinema and the theatre, and sometimes tried to persuade Hitler to watch some particularly good movie. ‘You see, you can have it screened in the hall so easily, and this film is art too, it’s not light, it’s a very serious film. I mean, you listen to gramophone records, and I’m sure the German people would have no objection if their Führer saw a movie for once. In fact I’m sure the people would like your colleagues to go to the movies more instead of driving around in big, important-looking cars getting drunk.’ Hitler would always reply, ‘I can’t watch films while the war is on, when the people have to make so many sacrifices and I must make such grave decisions. And I must save my sensitive eyes for reading maps and reports from the front.’

Resigned, Eva would drop the subject, suddenly saying that she had seen some lovely rugs here in the entrance hall, beautiful Scottish tartan, you could make a wonderful lady’s coat out of them, and her dressmaker had a particularly nice pattern for a coat like that. ‘The rugs belong to Bormann, they’re not mine to dispose of,’ was Hitler’s evasive answer. Bormann was all-powerful here on the Obersalzberg, like a version of Rübezahl the wicked mountain spirit. He was administrator of the Platterhof and all the grounds around the Berghof, and was responsible for all technical arrangements, for the construction work now going on and the air-raid shelters. He had a model farm near the Berghof, where he bred pigs and horses, with a huge nursery garden and an apple-juice factory. But although he could be very jovial and good-humoured he wasn’t popular here either. People feared him. Eva Braun never got the rugs for her coat.

Hitler used to say he slept very badly, and if everything wasn’t perfectly quiet he couldn’t sleep at all. But no sooner had the last piece of cake been eaten and the last cup of tea drunk than he would become monosyllabic, close his eyes – he said the reflections from the window panes dazzled him – and usually he soon dropped gently off to sleep.

No one bothered about that. The conversation went on, in muted tones. Eva turned to the company at large or whichever gentleman was sitting on her left. The young adjutants, pretending they had urgent phone calls to make, hurried out to inflict damage on their fit, strong bodies with nicotine, and by now Admiral von Puttkamer the naval adjutant, who was almost never seen without a cigar, would have been sitting for some time out in the kitchen with the guards on duty, wreathed in thick clouds of smoke.

Then Hitler would wake up, unnoticed, open his eyes and immediately join in whatever conversation was going on, as if he had merely closed his eyes while he was plunged in deep thought. No one disillusioned him. Then he asked, ‘What’s the time, Schaub?’ Schaub didn’t even have to look at his watch, for he was just counting the minutes until it was time to set out. ‘Six o’clock exactly, my Führer, shall I have the car brought round?’ And then he would limp out to order it faster than you would have thought possible on his crippled feet.

Hitler drove around the country near the Berghof in a Volkswagen. It was a specially made cabriolet, with black paint and leather upholstery. Apart from the Führer and his chauffeur, only his valet and Blondi ever travelled in it. Cars were available for the other guests, but most of them walked back. The last days of March 1943 were wonderfully fine, and exercise in the fresh air did us good after all that sitting about.

When the walkers got back to the Berghof Hitler would have retired to sleep until the evening military briefing. So all the guests were left to their own devices for a few hours. I usually went to my own room, wrote letters, or did my own private chores like sewing or washing clothes. Sometimes I went to Berchtesgaden to visit friends who were stationed down there and couldn’t come up to the Berghof.

Eva Braun used the hours while Hitler was asleep either to show the films she had taken with her cine-camera, screening them in her own room and inviting all the ladies and gentlemen from Hitler’s entourage – I wasn’t invited myself at first. Or she would often have professional feature films shown down in the basement in what was really a bowling alley. All the staff could watch these films. Some of them were foreign movies that couldn’t be publicly shown. The department responsible at Führer headquarters got the rolls of film direct from the Ministry of Propaganda, and they included a number of German films that we saw before the censor did and were never passed for public screening.

The guests were then told individually, by phone, what time dinner would be. You could usually expect it to be about eight in the evening. Then the same ceremony as at lunchtime began again. The living room slowly filled up. The gentlemen were generally in civilian clothing, the ladies wore their best dresses. It was very difficult for me to compete in this fashion show. No one wore long evening dresses, but all the same Eva Braun was showing off a parade of elegant clothes.

I’d had so little chance to enjoy parties and elegance before the war that all my wardrobe was casual. Now I felt right out of place. Eva almost never wore the same dress twice, even when we spent weeks on the Obersalzberg, and she certainly never wore the same outfit at dinner as at lunch or in the tea-house. I couldn’t help admiring her good taste again, and the clever way she made the most of her best points. She usually preferred dark colours, and liked to wear black best of all. Hitler’s favourite dress was a heavy black silk one with a wide bell-shaped skirt, very close-fitting at the waist, sleeveless, with just two broad, straight shoulder straps in old rose, and two roses of the same colour in the deep square neckline. A short bolero jacket with long, close-fitting sleeves was part of this ensemble.

That reminds me that Hitler had a peculiar attitude to women’s fashions. Eva was devoted to her wardrobe and her appearance. She couldn’t have borne not to have new, different clothes hanging in her wardrobe all the time. Hitler allowed her that pleasure, but he said, ‘I don’t know why you women have to keep changing your clothes. When I think a dress is particularly pretty then I’d like to see its owner wearing it all the time. She ought to have all her dresses made of the same material and to the same pattern. But no sooner have I got used to something pretty, and I’m feeling I haven’t seen enough of it yet, than along comes something new.’

In the same way, Eva wasn’t allowed to change her hairstyle. Once she appeared with her hair tinted slightly darker, and on one occasion she piled it up on top of her head. Hitler was horrified. ‘You look totally strange, quite changed. You’re an entirely different woman!’ He wasn’t at all happy with the change, and Eva Braun made haste to revert to the way she had looked before. He noticed changes in the appearance of all the other ladies too, and either admired or criticized them. Frau Schneider, who also appeared one day with her hair worn on top of her head, won Hitler’s full approval. In this case he thought the change was a new look that pleased his eye.

Supper followed the same course as lunch. Usually there were platters of cold meats and salads, ‘Hoppelpoppel’, which was fried potatoes with eggs and meat, or noodles with tomato sauce and cheese. Hitler often had two fried eggs with creamed potatoes and tomato salad. The glasshouses in Martin Bormann’s model nursery garden provided fresh fruit and vegetables all the year round, as well as garden produce for Führer headquarters, which went all the way from Bavaria back to East Prussia by air. Hitler thought he could digest only very fresh fruit and vegetables, but didn’t want them to come from a market garden that he didn’t know. Of course these consignments from the Obersalzberg were only for Hitler’s personal consumption, but here on the Berghof in March the whole party was enjoying young cucumbers, radishes, mushrooms, tomatoes, and fresh green lettuce.

Hitler ate fast, and quite a lot. One day when I was sitting opposite him I noticed him watching me while the food was being served. ‘You don’t eat nearly enough, child, you’re so thin anyway.’ Eva Braun cast me a scornful glance, for compared to her I was the image of a buxom Bavarian rustic maiden. Hitler took this chance to launch into another conversation about the fashion for being slim. ‘I don’t know what’s supposed to be so beautiful about women looking as thin as boys. It’s just because they’re differently built that we love them, after all. Things used to be quite different in the old days. In my time it was still a pleasure to go to the ballet because you saw lovely, well-rounded curves, but now you just get bones and ribs hopping about on stage. Goebbels was always trying to drag me off to dance events, but I went only a couple of times, and I was very disappointed. Since I’ve been Führer at least I don’t have to pay for it any more. I get free tickets.’ Of course he was exaggerating and caricaturing things in such conversations, but it was still a fact that he preferred definitely womanly figures to the boyish sort.

In light conversation over meals in an intimate circle, Hitler usually preferred trivial and totally non-political subjects. He could tell very charming, witty stories about his own youth, and most of all he liked a little mocking banter with the ladies. When he noticed the red imprint of Eva’s lipstick on her napkin, he began telling us about the ingredients of that item of cosmetics. ‘Do you know what lipstick is made of?’ We thought it might be aphids – Frau Speer
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said she had once heard something of that sort. And Eva Braun said she used a French lipstick, which she was sure was made of nothing but the finest ingredients. Hitler just gave us a pitying smile. ‘If you only knew that in Paris, of all places, lipsticks are made of the fat skimmed off sewage, I’m sure no woman would paint her lips any more!’ But we only laughed a little awkwardly. We knew his tactics from the ‘meateater’ conversations. He wanted to put us off something that he couldn’t actually forbid us. Apart from Martin Bormann’s wife, all the women met their Führer with carefully painted lips.

As the meal came to its end, the adjutants would rise to receive the officers who had come for the briefing. Slowly, conversation died down. Cars drove up outside, soldiers’ boots clattered over the stone flags in the entrance hall. Finally Günsche appeared and reported to the Führer that everything was ready for the conference. Hitler rose and said, ‘Stay where you all are, it won’t take long.’ Then he would go out, stooping slightly, head bent but walking with a firm step. He didn’t want his guests, particularly the ladies, to come into contact with the officers. Here on the Berghof he lived more of a double life than ever. On the one hand he was the genial host and master of the house visiting his country estate for rest and relaxation, on the other, even here, he was still the statesman and military supreme commander waging war on all fronts. Purely from the spatial point of view it was often difficult to reconcile these two opposites. The house wasn’t divided into a private part and an official part, and Hitler’s study was on the same corridor as Eva Braun’s bedroom. So the guests had to be told when to go to bed in case they burst in on an important discussion.

We were left to amuse ourselves for an unspecified length of time after dinner. Sometimes Hitler did say, as he left the dining room, ‘Wait for me here, the briefing won’t take long today.’ From that we deduced that neither the Reich Marshal nor any other high-up military commander was present to hear the reports, and we took that as a sign that the war was going relatively well for Germany. Fräulein Schroeder and I, as the two secretaries on duty, would go off to the adjutancy office to deal with any outstanding office work. It consisted mostly of air reports from all over Germany that had arrived by teleprinter and had to be typed out to be easy for the Führer to read. At the end of March the first good wishes and presents were also arriving for the Führer’s birthday. Most of them went to Berlin, but some found their way to the Berghof or were sent on from the Berlin adjutancy office.