Thankfully, such once-pressing concerns are now history themselves. And, moreover, historical tastes have shifted once again and memoirs and first-hand accounts are once more seen as being of particular value. Though Christa Schroeder was perhaps not as insightful or perspicacious as the modern reader might have hoped, her memoir will certainly not disappoint, not least because so few memoirists stood as close as she did to the very heart of the Third Reich. Her book is engagingly written and contains much of interest: from thumbnail sketches of the characters of Hitler’s entourage to an insider’s view of the great events of the day, and an illuminating, highly personal portrait of Hitler himself. It fully deserves its place in the canon of first-hand accounts of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
Editor’s Introduction
A FEW YEARS AGO I was asked by Walter Frentz, a former Luftwaffe newsreel correspondent attached to Führer-HQ, if I would escort a lady to meet him in Munich. In this way I chanced to know Frau[1] Emilie Christine Schroeder. As her first name, uncommon in Germany, suggests, she was no ordinary person and did not resort to cliché. Educated, musically gifted, always on the quest for truth and the meaning behind matters, she was also tough and extremely critical of people, the modern environment, of herself and her own past. Sometimes she could be direct and wounding in her own way, but the rough exterior hid a nervous, often insecure and sensitive being within.
I was the author of many technical and historical works and was working at that time on a book about Hitler’s planned broad-gauge railway for Europe. Thus Frau Schroeder found in me somebody with whom she could converse about her life, her past and Hitler himself. Frau Schroeder was a fanatic for truth. In a newspaper cutting which I found later in her papers she had underscored twice in red the following passage, adding a marginal note: ‘This is the correct definition of Truth.’
The truth is an amazing thing. You can bend it, hide it, trim it, pluck the feathers from it and shake it to pieces. But you can’t kill it. Eventually it always resurfaces, one day somewhere it breaks through. There are times when the truth◦– frequently in the interests of a State◦– grows dim, when it becomes a target for destruction. But some day it reappears. The same may be said for our private and business lives.
‘Lies and deceit plough the soil of the world’ is an old German proverb. The lie will always be with us, but we should never lose patience in waiting for Truth’s hour. ‘The truth may sink, but it never loses its breath,’ reads an inscription over the portals of a patrician’s house: and we should remember the old saying, ‘The truth must have a thick skull, for how many times is it stood on its head?’
Christa Schroeder wanted to get to the very roots of a thing; she hated distortions, but basically could never come to terms with her own past. Whether that would actually be possible after twelve years close to Hitler is another matter.
She was not a National Socialist in the true sense. She often said: ‘If the job offer had been made to me in 1930 by the KPD and not the NSDAP, perhaps I would have become a Communist.’ She was a woman who looked at things critically, observed them, pronounced on them, could analyze them, and so found herself tossed back and forth between Hitler, the friends and events of yesteryear, the Nazi system, the consequences of the war and the cruelty of the extermination programme for the Jews. In her notes she stated:
After three months I was told that I had to join the Party since only NSDAP members could be employees. Since I knew nothing of politics and did not want to lose my job I signed the application form and all was well. It changed nothing in my life. As I was a member of the Reich Leadership Section I never came into contact with the small centres and was only asked once or twice to take part in gatherings and suchlike. I suppose I went a few times to the big assemblies in the Zirkus Krone, but I felt nothing in common with the speakers or the masses and I must have appeared terribly stupid.
An alternative view of her appears in the US Army intelligence report of 22 May 1945[2] in which it is reported that: ‘Mr Albrecht… interrogated her. She was rather stupid, dumpy and an ardent Nazi.’
In her shorthand notes, Frau Schroeder wrote of this event: ‘After the interrogation was over, Lt Albrecht brought me back to Hintersee and had a very friendly conversation with me. When I expressed regret that my whole life, all the years, had been for nothing, he replied, “No, everything has a purpose, nothing is wasted.” He added that his wife had assured him so.’
In her note of 18 February 1979, Frau Schroeder perhaps admits her inner turmoil, the sporadic progress of her self-set task and her quest for truth:
For years everybody has urged me to write down everything I know about Adolf Hitler. Some time ago I began transcribing my shorthand notes from 1945. But instead of devoting myself to the task, and working industriously at it for two to three hours daily, I became aware repeatedly of the many layers of Hitler’s character. It plunged me into depression.
I was in that psychic condition which the Russian author Ivan Goncharov described in his 1859 novel about Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, who constantly planned great things for tomorrow or the day after, but then proceeded with his life ‘in a certain capricious torpor’, preferably spending his time in bed, always exhausted and drunk thinking over his fine plans, intentions and prospects.
It was my mistake to assume that I could unveil the ‘true face’ of Adolf Hitler. It is simply impossible, because he had so many.
She considered that in Hitler’s personality of many layers and pluralities the spectrum extended from extreme kindness and concerned attentiveness to ice-cold brutality. In her copy of the disputed Zoller book mentioned at greater length below she corrected her copy of the text at pages 10–12 and left the following passage standing:
For a long period he was the only string-puller behind all events which occurred in the Reich. Everything to him was calculation and subtlety. To his death he played the role of the theatrical director. Hitler had the gift of a strange magnetic radiance. He had a sixth sense and a clairvoyance which was often decisive for him. He weathered all dangers which threatened him, observed in some mysterious way the secret reactions of the masses, and fascinated his conversation partners in a manner which defies description. He had the sensitivity of a medium and the magnetism of a hypnotist. If one reflects on the series of extraordinary strokes of luck which kept him safe during all the many attempts on his life, and from which he concluded that Providence had selected him for his mission, then one can perceive the significance which the imponderables assumed in his life. These were, I believe, the most prominent characteristics of the peculiar person who almost undermined the basic foundations of the world. There was not just one Hitler, but several Hitlers in one person. He was a mixture of lies and truth, of faithfulness and violence, of simplicity and luxury, of kindliness and brutality, of mysticism and reality, of the artist and the barbarian.
She asked her friend Anni Brandt for her impression:
1
Christa Schroeder never married. The practice of addressing women as ‘Fräulein’ or ‘Frau’ depending on their marital status was current into the 1970s but has become discontinued in modern Germany as part of the process of female emancipation, and all women out of their teens are now accorded the prefix ‘Frau’ irrespective of their civil status.
2
Univ. Pennsylvania, Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library, microfilm 46M-11FU US Army 101st Airborne Division, Counter-Intelligence Corps, 22.5.1945.