Now Hitler stood at the window of his sitting room, as he often did, gazing north toward Braunau. am Inn, his birthplace, and then east toward Vienna, remembering with rage the words which had once torn at his heart.
Nicht zur Prufung zugelassen.
He tapped a forefinger on his cheek and chuckled with self-satisfaction. Ingersoll! One of the world’s most famous actors at his command, on his way to the Berghof, he thought. Now it was he who humiliated those miserable middle-class fools in the Waldviertel who had laughed at him when he was young, called him the “cemetery fool” because he sometimes sat all night on the wall surrounding the medieval graveyard staring at the stars and dreaming. They had ridiculed his dreams of becoming another Rembrandt as had the stupid masters at the Vienna Academy whose words, even after twelve years, still stung.
Nicht zur Prufung zugelassen.
“Not admitted to the examination”
Twice the Academy in Vienna had rejected him, twice they had humiliated him. The bastards had refused to even let him take the examination for admittance to art school! He gazed across the foothills and forest toward the place he still hated. Waldviertel, “the wooded quarter,” that borderland of brutal soil, medieval architecture and narrow minds where he was born, that dreary and depressing corner of Austria which had rejected and humiliated him.
He had only bad memories of that hard land and its people who had once thought of him only as an argumentative, willful, arrogant and bad-tempered young man, so disliked that they ridiculed him behind his back. Even his one friend, August Kubizek—old Gustl—thought he was a bit strange.
None of them understood. Then.
But they did now.
He laughed aloud, pounding a fist into the palm of his other hand.
None of them knew his torments as a child. None of them understood his dreams.
“Imbeciles!” he said aloud as he paced the room. He frequently talked to himself in the privacy of his office.
In the dark corners of his mind, Hitler sometimes planned the most vicious kind of retaliation for the officials at the Vienna Academy who had smashed his early dreams, forcing him to sell his hand-painted postcards on the streets to earn enough to eat and pay the two kronen it cost to spend the week in the cold, filthy men’s home along the Danube. They had sentenced him to three years in the gutter, a derelict wandering Vienna in a mindless trance, cold and hungry. He still feared and hated the winter. And he hated the Jews who bought his postcards. He hated them because they had pitied him. Pity was a word that turned to ashes in his mouth.
Well, nobody, nobody laughed at him anymore. Five nights before he had stood in the window of the Chancellery for four hours while thousands marched by under torchlight, screaming his name and singing the “Horst Wessel” song, the Nazi anthem. The excitement of that night still clung to him. Now they threw flowers at his feet, exhibited his early architectural paintings in a special section of the Vienna museum, raised their arms in stiff salute and howled Hell Hitler when he drove through the city. And in the Waldviertel they pointed to the place where he was born, now a cheap, pink-plastered inn, and bragged that the life of the new savior of Germany had begun in that very house. Perhaps that was retribution enough.
He stood at the window, smiling, his groin throbbing with excitement, and incanted softly to himself:
“Heil Hitler, Hell Hitler, Heil Hitler.” And giggled.
The 150-kilometer drive to Berchtesgaden had taken two hours and by midmorning they were on the way up the dirt road toward the mountain stronghold. As they drove through the eight-foot wire fence with its top strands of electrified wire, past the guard dogs and the sentries, and up the dirt road that led to Hitler’s retreat, Ingersoll could see the Berghof, Hitler’s mountainside chalet, etched against a thick forest of pine trees. The house itself was smaller and simpler than he expected, but the setting, perched as it was 3,300 feet above the village in the Bavarian Alps, was stunning.
Staring at the chalet, Ingersoll recalled a recurring theme from Hitler’s speeches:
“Absolute authority comes from God, absolute obedience comes from the Devil.”
It was one of Hitler’s favorite aphorisms for it justified what he called Machtergreifung, his seizure of power in Germany.
Was this the hideaway of God or the Devil, Ingersoll wondered? Was Hitler’s vision for Germany ordained or Mephistophelian?
Not that it made any difference. For Germany now had a leader who scoffed at the Allies and trampled the miserable Versailles treaty underfoot. His was a divine vision, regardless of its roots.
Ingersoll was an avid student of neo-German history, knew that much was based on lies or, rather, “propaganda.” He knew that the “Horst Wessel” song was named after a miserable pimp who had been elevated to martyrdom by Nazi lies, that even the Machtergreifung was a lie. Hitler had not seized power, he had bought and bartered it. But Ingersoll accepted Hitler’s manipulations as the actions of a political genius who had to resort to sordid intrigues to win; to sellouts in smoke-filled rooms, to millions of marks in graft from the Ruhr’s wealthy industrialists like Krupp and bankers like von Schroeder, to his use of the brownshirt storm troopers who terrorized the population, to lies about the power the Jews never had. Hitler wove fantasies around them, blamed them for the rise of Marxism and Communism in Germany and for the desperate depression that by now had twenty million Germans unemployed and near starvation.
Ingersoll accepted that, too, since his hatred of Jews was as virulent as was Hitler’s, just as he recognized that misery and destitution had become Hitler’s strongest allies. The more helplessly the Germans were mired in poverty, the more they turned to this strange political agitator who sometimes made five or six speeches in a single day, orchestrated by goose-stepping storm troopers waving swastikas, and who proclaimed that he would single-handedly rid Germany of her debts and her enemies, grant land to farmers, socialism to workers and anticommunism to the wealthy, although he never explained how he planned to accomplish any of this. And while he had never actually won an election, he had won enough votes to manipulate the aging and senile Hindenburg into naming him chancellor of Germany, the new head of the Reichstag.
Hitler was a mere step away from becoming dictator.
Ingersoll accepted that inevitability as a small price to pay. If chicanery and lies were the road to success, Ingersoll earnestly believed that in Hitler Germany had found the perfect leader to exploit them. And he felt a kindred link to him since Ingersoll’s own good fortune had paralleled Hitler’s.
Now he was to be the personal guest of Germany’s new chancellor. His nerves hummed with the electricity of expectation as they approached the chalet.
Professor Vierhaus knocked softly on the door to the sitting room, usually a forbidden place to everyone but Eva Braun. But on this morning he had been invited to have coffee with the Führer and talk about der Schauspieler—the Actor—which is how Hitler referred to Ingersoll. Vierhaus was flattered. Hitler, a late sleeper, usually arose around eleven A.M. looked over the morning reports, and didn’t appear until noon.
“Come, come,” was the impatient response.
He had only been in Hitler’s private sitting room once before. Entering it now, he remembered how surprised he had been the first time he had seen it. The sitting room was small and rather bleak with high ceilings, a simple chandelier and thick double doors. Two French windows overlooked the valley, their heavy drapes and cotton curtains pulled back. His desk was angled in one corner near the windows. T1iere was an easy chair, a bookcase and a sofa with three hand-sewn throw pillows. That was it. Two expensive but worn Oriental rugs partially covered the brilliantly waxed dark oak floors. There was a rather dreary landscape over the sofa. A wolf painting near the desk. A photograph of Hitler addressing a meeting somewhere hung on the wall beside the desk. A coffee service was set on the corner of the desk. Nothing more.