As Roger Moorhouse notes in his introduction, Heinrich Hoffmann could claim to be ‘one of the most important photographers of the 20th century’. He had ‘exclusive and intimate access’ to not just ‘a major Head of State’ but to a key figure in world history. He was an established professional photographer who had photographed the Kaiser and the visiting British Royal family long before he took up with Hitler. He was a pioneer in taking his new Leica outside, for images beyond the established tradition of studio portraits. He stood by Hitler from the earliest days through almost the very end, occupying a unique position in the inner circle.

And he was not just taking photographs of Nazi cronies and, later, State occasions; he was not just keeping a record. He helped shape Hitler’s image worldwide; he introduced him to Eva Braun, his young assistant, and he was a sympathetic ear at, it seems, any hour of the day or night. His photographs were even instrumental in helping Hitler develop his oratorical style.

So ‘Hitler Was My Friend’ is an important document, even though it was completed only after the war, as a collection of reminiscences. The following excerpt describes how he lived alongside Hitler for much of the war:

With the exception of the Felsennest in the Eifel [during the invasion of France], all of Hitler’s Headquarters bore names that had some connection with the wolf - Wolfsschanze, Werwolf, Wolfsschlucht; this was because, at the beginning of his political career, Hitler had used the pseudonym Wolf.

At these Headquarters the invitation to the ‘evening’ cup of tea usually came about three o’clock in the morning, after the last of the situation reports had been discussed. Usually very few people were present, and the party normally consisted of Hitler’s aides and secretaries, a doctor and any liaison officer from Ribbentrop or Himmler who happened to be at Headquarters. Unbeknown to Hitler, these latter had been given the task by their chiefs of intimate circle, reporting every minute detail of what happened in the Führer’s intimate circle.

My own quarters were simple but well-furnished and comfortable, consisting of a sitting-room, bedroom and bathroom, and, to help me to while away my many free hours, I was also given a wireless. In the same barrack with me lived Professor Dr Morell, Admiral Voss, General Bodenschatz, who was Göring’s Adjutant, and Obergruppenführer Wolf, Himmler’s Adjutant and the man who later made the first overtures for an armistice in Italy. My job at Headquarters consisted exclusively of taking photographs of officers and men who had come to be presented with various decorations - hardly a full day’s work!

These talks took place for the most part in the middle of the night and often, by the time I left the Führer’s dugout, the sun was already high in the heavens …

Hitler’s personal quarters were deep underground, with a cement roof 25 feet thick, dark, windowless and devoid of fresh air; night and day they were lighted by electricity, and a pump did its best to keep the atmosphere healthy. I just used to sit and wait until Hitler sent for me, either to take a meal or to have a talk. These talks took place for the most part in the middle of the night, and often, by the time I left the Führer’s dugout, the sun was already high in the heavens, and I would fling myself on my bed sleepy, tired out and in a thoroughly bad temper.

Life in this inner ring was both boring and exhausting. As long as Hitler continued to take his meals with us, there was always something of interest to listen to, but once he had decided to eat alone, boredom reached its zenith. We lived in complere isolation, except for occasional arrivals commanded to attend by Hitler to he decorated by him personally with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, with Diamonds and Swords. While most of these heroes painted the situation at the front in the rosiest of colours, some of them spoke pretty bluntly, much to Hitler’s annoyance. When they had gone, he would say that each man could only see the situation on his own tiny bit of the front and was, of course, in no position to venture an opinion on the whole.

A frequent visitor was Field Marshal Rommel, of whom Hitler had first held the highest opinion. I remember taking photographs when Rommel came to submit a report on his unsuccessful offensive against Egypt in the summer of 1942. Rommel, incidentally, was the only man to whom Hitler gave permission to talk to the international press reporters in Berlin.

After his crushing defeat at El Alamein by General Montgomery, Rome realised that his position in North Africa had become untenable, and he flew at once to Führer-Headquarters - this time to be received very coldly. On various occasions, most of our Field Marshals and senior Generals - von Brauchitsch, von Rundstedt, von Leeb, Mannerheim*, Guderian, who was relieved of his command, and Hoepner, who was dismissed from the Army by Hitler in person - paid us visits, but beyond marking the occasion with photographs, I did not come into contact with any of them.

When, in the winter of 1941 the German armies became bogged down in the snow and terrible cold at the gates of Tula and Moscow, there was a scandal about the inadequacy of the troops winter clothing. Hitler immediately set to work and himself designed the types of clothing that were to be manufactured, but by the time they were in mass production, it was already too late, and many thousands had died of exposure.

Don’t you worry! Nothing like that can happen to us - I’ve studied my history far too well!

Hitler was completely confident of the ability of the German armies to defeat Russia speedily and decisively. Quite early on, I remember, I ventured to say that I hoped we would avoid making the same mistakes as Napoleon. Hitler laughed ‘You sound like one of the western propaganda merchants, my dear fellow,’ he replied. ‘If Napoleon couldn’t do it, Hitler can’t! - That’s the parrot cry with which they are trying to comfort themselves. Don’t you worry! Nothing like that can happen to us - I’ve studied my history far too well!’

© Heinrich Hoffman 1955, ‘Hitler Was My Friend: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Photographer’. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd. Also available as an eBook.

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It had been a busy year for Churchill. A year earlier Britain had stood alone and her cities were devastated by Luftwaffe bombing, just after the British Army had been driven out of France. Hitler, in a non-aggression pact with Stalin, seemed intent on finishing off the last resistance. But that had all now changed.

On the 29th October 1941 Churchill visited his old school, Harrow, where he contrasted the position of Britain that day with the position the country had been in when he had visited the school a year earlier:

You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination.

‘this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.’

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Given the nature and the scale of the work of the Einsatzgruppen, it was inevitable that the mass murder of Jews in the East would become known amongst the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, even if only a minority of them may have actually witnessed the killings. News of such events would inevitably filter back home to Germany, either in soldiers’ letters or when they returned on leave.

On 28th October Friedrich Kellner, a government employee in the district court at Laubach, western Germany, recorded in his diary1:

A soldier on vacation here said he witnessed a terrible atrocity in the occupied parts of Poland.

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On the night of 26/27 October 1941, RAF Bomber Command again visited northern Germany. Nineteen-year-old Canadian Flight Sergeant Dick Lord piloted a Whitley bomber from 77 Squadron1. As they approache…

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Otto Dietrich was Hitler’s press secretary and a Nazi insider - and member of the SS - from 1931 until March 1945. Although he had a much lower public profile, he vied for power with Josef Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister. He was not in Hitler’s inner circle but saw him frequently, enjoying his confidence almost right up to the end of the regime, when Hitler denounced him for ‘defeatism’.

Dietrich, a doctor of political science, had the opportunity to study Hitler over several years. Unlike many others, who became hopelessly devoted to Hitler, he managed to maintain some degree of objectivity. Immediately after the war, he began to re-evaluate his belief in Nazism and became more critical of Hitler.

Dietrich was imprisoned for war crimes after the Nuremberg Trials in 1949 and wrote ‘The Hitler I Knew’ while in Landsberg Prison. This is a unique study, a genuinely critical reflection on Hitler’s abilities based on personal experience. His insights are based on observation and supported by many anecdotes about Hitler’s behaviour.

So The Hitler I Knew: Memoirs of the Third Reich s Press Chief (re-released in 2023) is an indispensable study for anyone interested in Hitler the man.

The following excerpt considers Hitler’s attitude to some of his contemporaries:

Hitler's opinion of the capabilities of various persons would vacillate wildly over the years. Windbags and incompetents he would hail as men of remarkable ability and heap them with honours. Years later, when these same people had shown what poor stuff they were made of, he would cry damnation upon them and discover that they were really just the opposite of what he'd earlier said.

And on the other hand, he would dismiss others, especially his opponents, as political charlatans, lily-livered rascals, and puffed-up nonentities. It would take years of grim experience to prove to him that they were nothing of the kind. When I think over the ideas he had about people, I can only say that the sure instinct which he so prided himself on failed him in nine cases out of ten.

A few words of explanation may be necessary. It is well known that Hitler's cult of personality, the great stress he laid upon individuals, was one of the most important branches of his philosophy. As a socialist Hitler made much of the idea of the "folk community." But for himself as an individual, there was something far more vital than the community-feeling: the individuality of the Herrenmensch, the man born to be a master.

Personality is rooted in individualism; community in sense of the group. To strike a balance between the two and join them in a creative unity was the great aim of Hitler's doctrine. But it also became the great problem of his life, and the one he failed to solve. In going into this matter, we touch upon ultimates, upon the underlying character of Hitler.

...

His egocentricity operated strikingly in his treatment of people around him. No one in the vicinity of Hitler stood a chance of developing into a personality in his own right. Passionate subjectivist that Hitler was, he had no understanding or sympathy for objectivity. Again and again, he stressed that he wanted to cleanse the minds of the German people of all "objectivity nonsense" and educate them to subjective thinking.

… he evaluated people solely by the standard of their usefulness to his ends.

He was the purest subjectivist imaginable, for he evaluated people solely by the standard of their usefulness to his ends. That alone explains his disastrous misjudgments and the wild ups and downs of his favours.

Göring, who during the First World War had been a good fighter pilot, and who later was not a bad politician, was hailed by Hitler as the greatest genius in military aviation. Ten years later, when Göring could no longer deliver victories, Hitler decided that he was the greatest failure on record.

...

… Churchill's stirring wartime speeches. Hitler read them carefully, … he secretly admired them.

His grotesque verdicts upon his contemporaries and opponents in international affairs, verdicts which he would burst out with during ‘table-talk’, now have only historical interest.

He had Chamberlain labelled as the prototype of the hide-bound British conservative. He felt himself affronted because the British prime minister would not grant him hegemony on the continent and would not make a deal with him on a land-and-sea partnership between England and Germany. After Godesberg he was furious with Chamberlain, whose efforts to keep peace on the continent he denounced as betrayal and fraud. On the whole, however, he admired the British Tories and their skill at governing throughout the world. He never ceased to hope that British conservatism would eventually become his ally in Europe.

Churchill he hated as the greatest antagonist of his life, a man whose whole style of life was diametrically opposed to his own. Churchill's earlier life as a war correspondent, writer, and critic aroused antipathy and feelings of rivalry in Hitler, the orator, and he would rant against Churchill on this account.

… when he saw a picture of Churchill bent over a prayer book, praying for victory, he became absolutely rabid.

Oddly though, he was enraged at the idea that Churchill sold his articles for large sums - although Hitler himself, when the "Movement" was in need, had accepted payments of several thousand dollars for his interviews with American journalists. Churchill, so fond of good living and good whisky, with his inevitable cigar in his mouth, was an offence in the eyes of Hitler, the anti-smoker and teetotaler. When he heard that Churchill was in the habit of dictating in the mornings from his bathroom, and when he saw a picture of Churchill bent over a prayer book, praying for victory, he became absolutely rabid.

I always handed him the texts as well as the summary of Churchill's stirring wartime speeches. Hitler read them carefully, and I gathered from his entirely superficial and irrelevant remarks that he secretly admired them. But he would never discuss them in any serious way.

Since the majority of his associates showed they were impressed by these speeches, Hitler himself preserved an icy silence on the subject. He would only pick away violently at random weak points in the speeches. He could not bring himself to admit that Churchill had the qualities of a great man.

Before the war, Churchill had once received a Gauleiter of Hitler's in his London studio and had said, "Your Führer will be the greatest statesman in Europe if he preserves the peace of the world." Peace had not been preserved. In the war with Germany, the same Churchill who had hurled imprecations against Bolshevism formed an alliance with Stalin against Hitler. For this manoeuvre, Hitler so detested Churchill that objective judgment was out of the question.

Roosevelt was. … merely the capitalistic tool of “international Judaism”

Roosevelt was, to Hitler's mind, merely the capitalistic tool of "international Judaism" Bolshevist Moscow being the other, the proletarian end of this conspiracy. To expose and defeat this double-barreled international plot was, he felt, the mission of his life.

With each presidential election in America, he hoped to see Roosevelt trounced. Sooner than provide Roosevelt with anything which would be useful to his cause, he forbade the German press and the German radio to attack Roosevelt during the election campaigns against Willkie and Dewey. Roosevelt's sudden death aroused in Hitler one of his last hopes, and to this he clung almost up to his own death.

With Stalin Hitler felt a certain sense of solidarity, although he appraised the Russian's personality differently depending on his own political direction of the moment. As the high priest of Marxism and the enemy of his own ideology, Stalin was someone to be hated. After the nonaggression pact, Hitler was full of praise for his ally. When Stalin became his deadly foe again, he did not stop respecting him, but he refused to say a good word for him.

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© *Roger Moorhouse 2023, ‘The Hitler I Knew: Memoirs of the Third Reich’s Press Chief ’. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd.

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Almost 130 years earlier, the bloodiest battle of the Napoleonic Wars had been centred on the fields around the village of Borodino. Napoleon invaded Russia in June 1812 with nearly 300,000 troops and marched toward Moscow all summer. On 7 September 1812, the Tsarist Army finally gave battle sixty miles from Moscow, and both sides suffered devastating losses. Stretched thin at the end of an increasingly difficult supply line, the French had no way to replace their losses. The Russians retired to rebuild their forces.

The French had just enough strength to occupy an abandoned, burnt-out Moscow for five weeks. But they could not force Russia to surrender, and they were eventually forced into a humiliating retreat, with the greater part of the army succumbing to cold, starvation and disease on the long march home. As Tolstoy1 put it:

After the shock that had been received, the French army was still able to crawl to Moscow; but there, without any new efforts on the part of the Russian troops, it was doomed to perish, bleeding to death from the mortal wound received at Borodino.

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Continuing a short series about Hitler, this week’s feature comes from Tim Heath’s Creating Hitler’s Germany - The Birth of Extremism. Heath specialises in German eyewitness accounts of life under the Nazis, publishing a series of books that give a candid insight into the lives of ordinary Germans under Nazism and after the war.

This excerpt comes from the very earliest days when the German public first encountered Hitler, when he began to make speeches in the Beer halls of Munich immediately after the First World War:

Munich was to become the spiritual home of the Nazis. It was in Munich, on 16 October 1919, that Hitler gave his first pre-arranged public speech. Hitler had joined the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei [German Workers Party] the previous month. Otto Rische lived in Munich with his wife and three children. He was another disgruntled soldier who had fought in the First World War and had witnessed the decline in Germany’s fortunes in the preceding years:

It was several friends of mine, who I had served with in the army, that persuaded me to go with them to listen to this new speaker. It was at the Hofbraukeller, a restaurant in Haidhausen owned by the Hofbrau brewery. I believe this was Hitler’s first official public speech and there were a hundred or so people in attendance. When we arrived, we bought ourselves beer and settled down to listen to what the man had to say. My initial thoughts when I first saw Hitler was that he didn’t look much. I was going to drink my glass of beer and go home, but my friends told me I must wait. I sat back down and as Hitler came in I waited to listen. There was some raucous applause and cheering from the crowd as he entered the room.

When he began to talk, it was like being hit on the head. This unassuming man with his small, black, well-trimmed moustache instantly grabbed your attention. He was very outspoken about the Weimar government. In a most skilled rhetoric, he poured scorn on Weimar, the Treaty of Versailles and the Communists.

Everything he said appealed to us, but here, in this place, were barely one hundred people. I can remember thinking to myself, what possible difference could he and this small workers party make in the current political state? It was a whirlpool of clashing ideologies rather than one defined one.

We were like sheep running in all directions from a wolf. I thought, what he was saying was right and he was certainly passionate about what he was saying. My friends just said we have to support Hitler, as the more of us who join him, the louder a voice and greater political influence we will have. I would say that’s how many joined in the political group that would become the Nazi Party. Just a hundred or so people, but then the hundreds grew to thousands.

Otto Rische was just the kind of German that Hitler had hoped to influence. He had been a shopkeeper before going to war in 1914, after which his parents took over the business. After 1918, the business began to struggle in the poor economic climate. The Rische family had to adapt in order for their business to survive the depression that followed and Hitler seemed like a light at the end of a dark tunnel. He offered hope and promised prosperity for all Germans. Otto wrote of the situation, ‘I hate nothing as much as I hate our government right at this moment!’

Another Munich resident, Albert Friest, who worked at a Munich bank, also succumbed to Hitler’s charisma:

After Hitler had spoken, people were left almost star struck by the man. He was surrounded by his supporters, some of whom would become familiar faces in the future Third Reich.

At these early meetings, it was quite easy to approach Hitler, shake his hand and congratulate him. Naturally, he wanted to court every piece of support from society as he could. He had a firm yet courteous nature, smiled and was happy to engage in conversation. Even in these early meetings, anti-Semitic language was prevalent. He had to find political scapegoats and Jews and Communists fitted this perfectly. He made no effort to hide his dislike of Jewry and Communists.

I felt that this was a man that hated a lot of things about Germany at that time. He hated the fact we lost the war, he hated the fact that Jews had thrived and prospered over what he termed indigenous Germans and he hated seeing the German people suffering man full of hatred, yet I had to admire his tenacity in getting from the consequences of Versailles. Yes, I would say he was a up in public and speaking out for Germans and Germany. It’s no surprise his popularity soared over the years. Once you heard him speak, that was it, you were captivated.

Ingrid Altmann worked as a secretary for a legal firm in Munich. She recalled accompanying her then boyfriend, Andreas Hoess, to hear Hitler speak, on 24 February 1920. This was one of his larger meetings, with around two thousand people in attendance. The venue was the Hofbrauhaus in Munich and this was also the date that the new National Socialist German Workers Party [NSDAP or Nazi Party] was officially founded.

The Sturmabteilung, or SA, were there. These men were often referred to as Braunhemden, or Brownshirts’, due to the colour of their uniform shirts. The SA became the paramilitary wing of the fledgling Nazi Party. Their role was to provide protection for Hitler, his staff and his supporters at the rallies. They were also employed to disrupt meetings of the opposing political parties. The SA soon became adept at using violence and intimidation, not just against political opponents, but also Germany’s Jewish population. The SA would later be dissolved after a bloody purge that saw many of its founding members murdered or imprisoned during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.

Ingrid wrote of the event on 24 February 1920:

I was angry with Andreas. All men appear to have this political preoccupation. They read politics and discuss politics, even in the cinema. I would have rather been taken out to dinner than witness some war veteran tell us all the things we Germans already know: I could not have been more wrong. Contrary to being boring, this Adolf was quite some show!

He whispered softly, like a man would do in his lover’s ear, then he would explode into fury, deriding the old German attitude, cowardice and betrayal of 1918. Shaking his fist in the air he grasped his audience and held them all by the throat before calming down and letting them gather their breath. I was hypnotized by this man and somewhat intrigued. His enemies called him the failed artist, the bastard, but he was actually very charming.

Andreas had associates who were friends of this Adolf and they introduced us after his speech. As I explained, he came across as the perfect gentleman. He took my hand and bowed his head and kissed my knuckles. At the end of the evening, I removed the white gloves I was wearing and never washed or wore them again. Why I did that, I’m not sure. It was strange; this Adolf was not exactly an attractive man, yet I felt an attraction of sorts towards him, which was quite inexplicable.

Andreas sensed this and I’m sure he was jealous. I was not the only woman to be granted an audience, but he made you feel like you were the only woman in the room. When he greeted you it was unconditional sincerity.

Ingrid Altmann would be among the first of thousands of German women and girls to fall under the Hitler spell.

Not everyone was spellbound, however, as Melitta Jorg wrote in a letter to her friend in Norway:

There is a thuggish air about the National Socialists. Their leader is a man named Adolf Hitler. He is not a German but Austrian, yet he is telling us that my father’s generation are traitors. He wants Germany to be great again and says he will rebuild her to her former glory. How will he accomplish this task? War? It makes me squirm when you see these high society darlings grovelling to him and how he stares them in the eyes. It would appear that he is making love to them with his eyes as he clasps their hands and kisses them graciously, as if a kind of statesman. The man is quite repulsive, supports racial theories, hates anything Jewish and incites violence in my opinion. My old friend Bernd loves the man and she goes to listen to him talk. She will have nothing said against the man. We argue, I say he is ugly inside and out and she protests to the contrary. Poor deluded darling, sigh!

Melitta Jorg, described by her great-granddaughter as a charming socialite, would later flee Germany after Hitler and the Nazis came to power. Her family was of Jewish ancestry and under no illusion as to what was going to happen to them. They packed up their belongings and left their home for France, only to move again as Hitler’s army spread across Europe. Melitta and her family were among the lucky ones, finally arriving in England sometime in the late 1930s. The word ‘war’ in Melitta’s letter was strangely prophetic.

© Tim Heath 2019, ‘Creating Hitler’s Germany - The Birth of Extremism.’. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd.

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