Hitler often spoke of people in his wider circle. Of Speer he once remarked:
He is an artist and his soul is linked to mine. I have the closest human relationship towards him because I understand him so well. He is a man of architecture as I am, intelligent, modest and not a dour military head. I did not think he would master his great objective so well, but he has a great talent for organisation and grew to the task. If I show Speer a plan and give him the job, he reflects a while and then says: ‘Ja, mein Führer, I believe it is possible’, or he objects: ‘Nein, it cannot be done like that’ and then provides the full reason.
Speer was a convinced follower of Hitler and even in internment I could see how deeply Hitler’s words ‘I take full responsibility for everything!’ still had their effect on him. This promise extinguished all feelings of guilt in Hitler’s followers, and imbued in them a kind of faith equivalent to belief in God. While Hitler lived, Speer saw in him ‘The Extraordinary’, but with Hitler’s death Speer’s fascination for Hitler died too.
Hitler also spoke frequently about photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. ‘Hoffmann was once a crazy young man’, he told me, ‘then he was still slim and agile and went tirelessly about his work with his complicated old apparatus. He had to slip under the black cloth and go through the most neck-breaking operations with the heavy camera to get good photos.’ Hoffmann liked his drink. Hitler told him once: ‘Hoffmann, your nose looks like a rotten cucumber. I think that if I put a lighted match to your breath it would explode, and soon red wine will replace blood completely in your arteries.’ This was said after Hoffmann turned up the worse for drink at the dining table. He had not done so before in Hitler’s presence, and it shocked Hitler to see Hoffmann in such a state. Finally he ordered Schaub and Bormann: ‘Please ensure that Professor Hoffmann is sober when in my presence. I have invited him so that we can converse, and not so that he can let himself go.’ How wounded Hitler must have been only became clear much later.
Professor Hoffmann collected nineteenth-century paintings and bought up all the watercolours Hitler had painted. On visits to his villa on Munich’s Ebersberg-Strasse he never neglected to show them. He was extraordinarily proud of the collection. I also remember conversations in which Hitler told Hoffmann not to pay such exorbitant sums for his watercolours since he himself had only received 20 or 30 RM for each. What became of Professor Hoffmann’s collection is a mystery, but I think it probably finished up together with all the other paintings and works of art which I saved from destruction at the Berghof after the war. A footnote about a conversation between Hitler and Professor Hoffmann on 12 March 1944 at the Berghof which I noted down indicates Hitler’s attitude to his earlier works:
Obersalzberg, 12 March 1944 Rü/Wag
During lunch today Professor Hoffmann showed Hitler a watercolour painted by the Führer in 1910. Professor Hoffmann obtained the picture recently in Vienna.
Der Führer: Hoffmann, I hope you did not buy that picture?
Hoffmann: I received it as a gift, that is to say, the seller told me that for the price it is a gift.
Der Führer: Even today these things should not fetch more than 150 to 200 RM. It is madness if one pays more. It was not my ambition to be a painter. I only painted these things to support myself in my studies. I would not have received much over 12 RM then. I only ever painted enough to cover my necessities; 80 RM would have kept me for a month; 1 RM would have bought me lunch and supper. I used to study all night. My architectural sketches which I made then, those were my most precious possessions, the fruit of my mental efforts which I would never sell as I did the paintings. One should not forget that all my thinking today, my architectural plans, evolved from the concepts created in night-long work in those years. If I am in a position today to sketch the ground plan of a theatre, it is not done by me while in a trance, it is exclusively the result of my earlier studies. Unfortunately nearly all my sketches of that time are lost to me…!
I can confirm that Hitler was very attached to his architectural sketches and would not have disposed of them. When at the end in 1945 Schaub emptied the contents of Hitler’s strong box at the Berghof and burned the material on the terrace, many of Hitler’s architectural sketches were amongst them, and I saved a bundle from Schaub’s bonfire. I did not keep them, however: Albert Zoller failed to return half and the rest I rather stupidly sold to Dr Picker.
In the summer of 1942, Hitler advanced his command post to FHQ Wehrwolf at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine.
Letter. FHQ Wehrwolf, 14 August 1942:
I am only glad that you are sympathetic to my mental inertia. In the four weeks since we have been at the new HQ I have not found the energy for writing private letters, yet I feel really good physically and mentally. I just lack somebody to plug the drain on my spiritual resources and revive me spiritually. Unfortunately so many here have fallen victim to languor that no help can be expected from this quarter. Since the two thick Benrath tomes I have not really read anything. I lack inner calm and the will for it.
The films served up are ancient, stupid, spiritless. The last two evenings Johanna and I have reverted to watching the old silent movies, but only because there is nothing better. The worst is when you get hot under the collar at the stupid films and start to itch everywhere but stay seated because the only alternative is bed. Right, now I shall give you a short report on our new HQ and about the removal to here, etc.
On 17 July, sixteen or seventeen aircraft got ready to fly to the east. It was a very impressive scene on the airfield, all the great machines clustered together, all ready to take off, motors running, the air filled with the deep humming of vibrating wings and wires until one machine after the other rolled down the airstrip and lifted off into the air. The pilot invited me to sit in the cockpit which naturally I accepted gratefully, for from there you get a quite different picture. The fuselage windows give a view to one side only, and a small section at that, but the panorama from the cockpit is greater and freer. And here you really feel that you are flying.
I found it interesting to follow the flight on a map. This is a science I would never be able to master. People who understand it impress me very much, for to say that the landscape below looks like a map is a platitude. Naturally there is a certain similarity, but the reality has a confusing mass of detail which makes it difficult to match the two. Highways coloured red on the map prove to be grey and inconspicuous below (the easiest to spot were railway lines). Here and there the landscape is darkened when clouds hide the sun, or ground mist obscures the ground for a while until a piece of terrain reappears: but where we were on the map I could never determine.
I have wandered completely off the subject. After many hours we reached the destination airfield. Here we had to search for our car, and eventually set off in a heavy Krupp which is not at all suitable for Russian ‘highways’. For Johanna Wolf, who had not felt well during the flight, this was the last straw. She was totally exhausted and unable to lend a hand for the first few hours.
Her depression got worse, and mine began, when we saw our office. To the left and right a door opened to reveal a small aperture containing a narrow bed with nightstand and a rack for the cases. This was our world. The office was so narrow and small that we could hardly move in it. Our luggage, giant office cases, crates and five typewriters filled it up completely. Since we have lived long enough in dark, airless bunkers, our hopes were for bright rooms with large windows. Instead, the bedroom had a single square window twenty-five centimetres along each side and covered with a green gauze. This ‘window’ was our greatest disappointment. Thank God we could have a look round, and after I moved into another room temporarily for eight days finally I ferreted out a decent office with an alcove behind a curtain. By virtue of my organisational skill and experience I have been able to convert it◦– say it quietly◦– into the most snug room in the whole HQ.