The Pursuit of Laughter (30 page)

This book provides the answer. Dr Hanfstaengl, while professing love and loyalty to Hitler himself, loathed with bitter hatred every single person in his entourage. Men like Goering and Himmler, who seldom saw the Führer, are let off lightly, but those who were frequently in his company, from the brilliant Dr Goebbels to the faithful Schaub, are heaped with scorn and abuse. He made no secret of his feelings, and it appears that he regaled foreign press correspondents with every kind of tittle tattle and stories of real or imagined strains and stresses within the Party. Naturally enough, this came to Hitler’s ears, and the enemies Putzi so recklessly made saw to it that his attacks on members of the
government
were repeated to the victims. Annoyed by these reports, Hitler invited him less and less often, thereby increasing his bitterness. After a time his post virtually ceased to exist; foreign journalists were directed to other channels. For old time’s sake this was done
gradually and unobtrusively; the only wonder was that it had not happened sooner. A modern English equivalent would be the appointment of Mr Malcolm Muggeridge as Buckingham Palace press relations officer.

Not long afterwards he left Germany; the result of a practical joke. Court jesters
seldom
care about jokes against themselves.

Hearing one evening that Putzi was in the habit of saying that he wished he could have fought in the 1914 war, but that keeping a shop in New York of which the window was smashed by anti-German Americans had been more disagreeable than life in the trenches, Hitler said that if he really longed for battle he had his chance at last: he could volunteer to fight in Spain where civil war was raging. He then imagined how funny it would be to pretend to gratify this life-long wish, to pretend to be flying him to Spain to be
parachuted
behind the Red lines while in reality he was flown from one German airfield to
another
. Probably after elaborating this idea in his inimitable way and acting Putzi in the
Kampfzeit
when he thought there were Reds lurking round the next corner, the whole thing went out of Hitler’s head. Among those who heard him, however, there were several with old scores to pay off. The practical joke was carried out. Starting from Berlin on a ‘special mission’ to Salamanca, headquarters of the Franco press, Putzi was told in the aeroplane that he was to be dropped behind the Red lines. By the time he landed (at Leipzig) he was in a great stew. He took the first train to Switzerland, convinced that the Gestapo was after him. Goering, contrite that the joke had gone with such a bang, wrote begging him to come home and offering him a job in the Four-year-plan. He refused.

Dr Hanfstaengl announces with pride (or at any rate with satisfaction) to his
Anglo-Saxon
audience that after the war he found his name on a Gestapo blacklist. Probably it was there because during the war he was released from the Allied concentration camp for a time in connection with the Americans’ psychological warfare, an activity which can take a very dangerous turn according to which side loses the war. But Putzi’s hosts, of course, won the war.

Back in Munich since 1946, he has now broken his long silence. Some people might think he has got his values mixed up. He is ashamed of what he should be proud of, proud of what he should be ashamed of. However that may be, his book contains interesting material about events and scenes he lived through. Where he is forced, through lack of first hand evidence, to speculate about Hitler’s private life, we cannot do better than quote Mr Brian Connell once again, when he praises Putzi for his ‘inextinguishable capacity for embroidering an anecdote and total lack of inhibition in his remarks and comments.’

* Frau Bechstein belonged to the piano manufacturing family.
Hitler: The Missing Years,
Hanfstaengl, E. (1957)

Are these diaries genuine? The reasons for asking are twofold. First, where have they been all these years? Second, they would have been very easy to invent. They contain nothing that could remotely be called new. The bulk is made up of the OKW [
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
] reports, which are frankly, in 1978, rather dull reading because everyone knows what was happening in Germany in March 1945. The Russians were nearing Berlin,
having
overrun Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia, raping and plundering and destroying
everything
they could lay hands on. The Allies were ‘area bombing’, with fire storms burning hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and demolishing the houses of those who survived. Roads were choked with refugees, everything had broken down. American and British armies were advancing in the West. There was nothing left of Germany, it was done for. The future was epidemics, starvation, humiliation, disaster.

This was the apocalyptic background of the diaries, which begin on the 27 February and end on 9 April, 1945. Anyone vaguely familiar with Goebbels could have written them; they are not in his hand but are supposed to have been dictated to a secretary, which makes them long-winded. Probably they are genuine. I expect they would have been
spicier
if they had been invented, and more in the style of
I Was Hitler’s Maid
.

Why did Hitler, supported by Goebbels and others, not capitulate sooner? Probably because, knowing that confrontation between Russia and the West was inevitable, they thought the Allies might move to prevent the Soviets from occupying half of Europe. This was, of course, a delusion, but it was not so fanciful as it is sometimes made out to be. In 1954 Winston Churchill made a speech in his constituency in which he said:

There was a fuss about this speech at the time, and the telegram to Montgomery could not be found. But it shows the trend of Churchill’s thoughts after Yalta, and that his thoughts had been rightly guessed by Hitler and Goebbels. They did not reckon with the Americans, infinitely more powerful than the British, who in 1945 were so pro-Russian that on
various
sectors of the front they halted in order to give the Russians time to advance further into Europe.

In a way the most interesting part of this book is the introduction by Hugh
Trevor-Roper
. It is more than thirty years since he wrote
The Last Days of Hitler
. Although with the passage of time a fairly objective view might have been expected, the Professor sums up Goebbels’s propaganda as ‘crude and violent in form, utterly unscrupulous in
substance
, and quite indifferent to truth’. This is evidently still the accepted point of view; it
has not been thought necessary to give examples of Goebbels’s mendacity.

It is something of a mystery why Goebbels is always supposed to have been such a liar: a ‘lie merchant’. I am very much opposed to a government-controlled press and to censorship, but there is no doubt that during the years 1933 to 1943 Dr Goebbels had such a success story on his hands that he had no need to lie. The economic revival of Germany under the National Socialists was speedy and impressive. Hitler’s thesis, that a country’s riches consist of the quality of its people (
Volk
), made him reject the idea that Germany was ‘ruined’ just because it had no foreign exchange, a stagnant economy and six million unemployed when he took over. It was their work that could enrich it. Industry,
agriculture
and the building of a modern infrastructure absorbed the unemployed, and Germany became prosperous in a remarkably short time. Although without doubt Goebbels as propaganda minister saw to it that ‘the Whig dogs got the worst of it’, he had no reason to lie.

During the first years of the war when German armies were winning battles the same thing applied. He only had to tell the truth. When the tide turned he had more reason to lie because of the importance of morale on the home front. But here again he was rather truthful; for example he did not seek to underrate the disaster to German arms at Stalingrad.

Describing Goebbels’s character and personality, Mr Trevor Roper several times says he had an ‘inner emptiness’. I am not quite sure what this means. Goebbels was an
educated
man, a doctor of philosophy, well-read. He was extremely busy and he obviously enjoyed his work. Was he suffering from ‘inner emptiness’? Very hard to say.

I knew him fairly well. He was clever, good company, always ready with a sarcastic
witticism
. His wife and children loved him, his associates, several of whom I knew, admired and liked him. One of them, Prince zu Schaumburg-Lippe, wrote a book eulogizing him when this was an unpopular, even dangerous, thing to do, after the war.

I stayed with the Goebbels at their villa at Schwanenwerder on Wannsee—‘
luxuriously
furnished’, according to Trevor-Roper. It was comfortable, but by no effort of the
imagination
could it have been called luxurious. He also says that in Berlin Goebbels had ‘his palatial residence near the Brandenburg Gate’. Palatial? I knew the house: it was his
official
residence as minister. It was not as palatial as number 11 Downing Street, where I also stayed long ago when Churchill was chancellor of the exchequer. To English readers a palatial residence means a big house, Londonderry House for example, or even a house in Belgrave Square or Grosvenor Square. The Goebbels’s house in Hermann Goeringstrasse was not in the same league as any of these. Why get it so very wrong?

Maybe there is not much evidence to blast him with, and he must be blasted. Goebbels was against the war in 1939, as Speer has testified. His courage and his loyalty cannot be impugned. Hence the ‘inner emptiness’ and the ‘palatial residence’. Goebbels’s reading (Carlyle and Schopenhauer are mentioned) is disapproved of; it is not what we should wish an English propaganda minister to indulge in.

His opposite number in England during the war was Brendan Bracken, a man I also happened to know rather well. I was quite fond of Brendan, but even his best friend could not claim that he was truthful. His whole life was one long lie; he pretended to be an Australian orphan whereas in reality he was Irish and had a mother living in Templemore, Co Tipperary. While he was minister of propaganda a misfortune occurred. Illustrated pornographic leaflets, which had been concocted in his ministry by
German-speaking
émigrés, and which were supposed to be dropped on German soldiers stationed on the Spanish frontier in order to ‘weaken their resistance’ (sic), blew away in a freak storm, and one of them landed on a golf course in Surrey. J.B. Hynd, a prim Labour MP, went to complain to the minister.

Brendan was quite ready for him. He told Mr Hynd:

Mr Hynd was contrite. This tale is from Andrew Boyle’s
Poor, Dear Brendan
, indispensable reading for anyone interested in lie merchants.

The Goebbels Diaries,
ed. Trevor-Roper, H.
Books and Bookmen
(1978)

One chapter in Father Brocard Sewell’s delightful autobiography is ‘At odds with the Red Hat’. There’s none called ‘At odds with the Triple Tiara’,* but there very well might have been. Father Brocard regrets, as all lovers of beauty and tradition must, the abandonment of the ancient liturgy. Because it was in Latin, it made the Catholic Church truly universal, with the same services in the same words the whole world over. He bitterly regrets the impoverishment of religious life in its outward manifestations. The distress caused by the Vatican Council was widespread. It killed Evelyn Waugh.