Breakfast was taken in the Winter Garden. Wilhelm Brückner used to say that ‘breakfast is the nicest time of year’ and he would readily accept any excuse to be delayed in the Winter Garden. In the afternoon Hitler held most of his talks strolling its length. He only used his office when Secretary of State Lammers made an appointment for him there expressly. When I was settled into the Personal Adjutancy in the spring of 1934, the regular mealtimes were initially taken with Sepp Dietrich, Dr Dietrich, the SS-Führers and men of the SS-Begleitkommando, the adjutants and servants. We ate in the basement of the Department for Economics at the Radziwill Palace. On Hitler’s orders guests and staff in the basement dining room received the same fare as was served in the dining room to the Führer-apartment. There was no difference in the menu. In later years we secretaries would eat mostly in the Staircase Room which, as I mentioned previously, was at the entrance to the adjutancy wing. We also took our afternoon tea there.
One day Hitler happened to pass the Staircase Room, saw us sitting there and asked if he might join us. This hour of easy chatter, which developed quite naturally, was so much to his liking that he would often come by at this hour and later came to tea almost daily. The afternoon tea hour in the Staircase Room became a fairly fixed ritual. Usually we two secretaries would keep Hitler company, later occasionally all three, namely Johanna Wolf, Gerda Daranowski and myself.
Actually the Staircase Room was rather functional. It had a very high ceiling and was only used for visitors in an emergency because it had no bath, only a washstand with mirror. The simple furnishings were a chintz-covered couch, a wardrobe, a safe, the typists’ table, lamp standard and octagonal table with wickerwork chairs. From when war broke put in 1939 we secretaries served mostly at the current FHQ then in use, or on an alternating roster. The Staircase Room was our permanent office for when we were in Berlin, although purpose-built work rooms were planned for us in the new Reich Chancellery they proved too far away. There was no fixed eight-hour day. We were on call twenty-four hours and had to be permanently at Hitler’s disposal, and since Hitler stayed in his apartment, except when engaged in official conferences, we were closer to him in the Staircase Room than the new Reich Chancellery and within immediate reach. His study, the library, his bedroom and later alongside it Eva Braun’s apartment were all on the first floor of the Radziwill Palace.
Despite the simple furnishings of the Staircase Room Hitler liked it very much. It was a place where he could relax and I always had the impression that he felt unburdened there. He used to talk about the experiences of his youth and the past, subjects which he might never mention again, or would touch upon later in the evening tea circle and at table in the FHQ officers’ mess. One felt that what he said in the Staircase Room came from a secret memory box which at all other times he kept locked shut.
Hitler regretted very much not being able to wander the city and go shopping. ‘How wonderful that used to be with Geli,’ he would often say. She would drag him into a hat shop and try them all on only to discover that none suited her. Once when he said: ‘You cannot do that and just leave without buying something,’ she laughed and replied: ‘That’s what the salesgirls are there for.’
In the Staircase Room he told us of the pranks he played in late childhood. He said once that his aversion to the clergy stemmed from that time. He mentioned a professor of religious instruction at school who was always unkempt. He would have food stains on his jacket and carried a handkerchief so incredibly filthy and encrusted that he would have to tug it open before use. The professor had admonished the class for not kneeling in the approved manner in church. Hitler replied with a straight face that he did not know how one should kneel and would like the professor to demonstrate. The professor, pleasantly surprised that this boy was so interested in being taught the correct position took out his filthy handkerchief, opened it, spread it on the floor and knelt on it. At that moment the school bell rang for break. The master stood up, laid his handkerchief on a small stool and left the room to converse with colleagues, as was his custom. As his classmates looked on, Hitler picked up the handkerchief by its extreme tip and approached the group of teachers, offering the handkerchief to the teacher with a smile: ‘The Herr Professor has forgotten his handkerchief.’
A much-loved activity at his school was reflecting the sun with a hand-mirror. Hitler was so keen on ‘mirroring’ that a teacher felt compelled to make an entry in the class register. During the break the boys looked at the entry, and to their delight saw that the master had unintentionally made a rhyme of it: ‘Hitler ist ein Bösewicht, er spiegelt mit dem Sonnenlicht’ (Hitler is mischievous, mirroring the sunlight). When the master returned, the boys chanted the rhyme in unison.
Hitler recalled that as a twelve year old he wagered his classmates that he could make the girls laugh during a religious service. He won the bet by intently brushing his non-existent moustache whenever they glanced at him. On the subject of drinking and smoking he admitted:
As a boy I did once smoke a cigarette, or part of one. It made me feel terrible, I ran home and was sick repeatedly. My mother was very concerned, and so I told her that I had eaten deadly nightshade. She sent for the doctor, who examined me, checked my mouth and looked at me suspiciously. Then he went through my trouser pockets and found the cigarette butt. Later I bought a long porcelain pipe. I smoked like a chimney even when I was in bed. Once I fell asleep smoking and woke up to find the bed on fire. That was the moment when I swore never to smoke again, and I have kept my promise.
He went on:
After our final exams I went with my classmates to a tavern to celebrate with schnapps. It made me feel sick and I went to the manure heap behind the house to vomit several times. Next morning I looked in vain for my school-leaving certificate which my father wanted to see. All my enquiries met no success, and so I went to the headmaster to request a copy. There I experienced the greatest shame of my youth, for the headmaster produced the original certificate. The farmer had found it in his manure heap and had returned it to my school. I swore to myself then and there that I would never touch another drop.
He also spoke of his mother, to whom he was very attached, and of his father’s violence:
I never loved my father, [he used to say,] but feared him. He was prone to rages and would resort to violence. My poor mother would then always be afraid for me. When I read Karl May once that it was a sign of bravery to hide one’s pain, I decided that when he beat me the next time I would make no sound. When it happened◦– I knew my mother was standing anxiously at the door◦– I counted every stroke out loud. Mother thought I had gone mad when I reported to her with a beaming smile, ‘Thirty-two strokes father gave me!’ From that day I never needed to repeat the experiment, for my father never beat me again.
Later when he understood how hard life could be, Hitler said that he had the greatest respect for his father for having worked his way up from being an orphan child to a customs official. Hitler also liked to speak of the abilities of his mother as a housewife, who gradually increased the family property.