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Interview du
Waffen SS General Leon Degrelle
Who was
Adolf Hitler ?
- "Hitler -- You knew him -- what was he like?"
- I have been asked that question a thousand times since 1945,
and nothing is more difficult to answer.
Approximately two hundred thousand books have dealt with the
Second World War and with its central figure, Adolf Hitler. But
has the real Hitler been discovered by any of them? "The enigma
of Hitler is beyond all human comprehension," the left-wing
German weekly 'Die Zeit' once put it.
Salvador Dali, art's unique genius, sought to penetrate the
mystery in one of his most intensely dramatic paintings.
Towering mountain landscapes all but fill the canvas, leaving
ony a few luminous meters of seashore dotted with delicately
miniaturized human figures: the last witness to a dying peace. A
huge telephone receiver dripping tears of blood hangs from the
branch of a dead tree; and here and there hang umbrellas and
bats whose portent is visibly the same. As Dali tells it, "Chamberlain's
umbrella appeared in this painting in a sinister light, made
evident by the bat, and it struck me when I painted it as a
thing of enormous anguish."
He then confided: "I felt this painting to be deeply prophetic.
But I confess that I haven't yet figured out the Hitler enigma
either. He attracted me only as an object of my mad imaginings
and because I saw him as a man uniquely capable of turning
things completely upside down."
What a lesson in humility for the braying critics who have
rushed into print since 1945 with their thousands of 'definitive'
books, most of them scornful, about this man who so troubled the
introspective Dali that forty years later he still felt
anguished and uncertain in the presence of his own hallucinatory
painting. Apart from Dali, who else has ever tried to present an
objective portrayal of this extraordinary man who Dali labeled
the most explosive figure in human history?
LIKE PAVLOV'S BELL The mountains
of Hitler books based on blink hatred and ignorance do little to
describe or explain the most powerful man the world has ever
seen. How, I ponder, do these thousands of disparate portraits
of Hitler in any way resemble the man I knew? The Hitler seated
beside me, standing up, talking, listening. It has become
impossible to explain to people fed fantastic tales for decades
that what they have read or heard on television just does not
correspond to the truth. People
have come to accept fiction, repeated a thousand times over, as
reality. Yet they have never seen Hitler, never spoken to him,
never heard a word from his mouth. The very name of Hitler
immediately conjures up a grimacing devil, the fount of all of
one's negative emotions. Like Pavlov's bell, the mention of
Hitler is meant to dispense with substance and reality. In time,
however, history will demand more than these summary judgements.
STRANGELY ATTRACTIVE Hitler is
always present before my eyes: as a man of peace in 1936, as a
man of war in 1944. It is not possible to have been a personal
witness to the life of such an extraordinary man without being
marked by it forever. Not a day goes by but Hitler rises again
in my memory, not as a man long dead, but as a real being who
paces his office floor, seats himself in his chair, pokes the
burning logs in the fireplace.
The first thing anyone noticed when he came into view was his
small mustache. Countless times he had been advised to shave it
off, but he always refused: people were used to him the way he
was. He was not tall -- no more
than was Napoleon or Alexander the Great.
Hitler had deep blue eyes that many found bewitching, although I
did not find them so. Nor did I detect the electric current his
hands were said to give off. I gripped them quite a few times
and was never struck by his lightening.
His face showed emotion or indifference according to the passion
or apathy of the moment. At times he was as though benumbed,
saying not a word, while his jaws moved in the meanwhile as if
they were grinding an obstacle to smithereens in the void. Then
he would come suddenly alive and launch into a speech directed
at you alone, as though he were addressing a crowd of hundreds
of thousands at Berlin's Tempelhof airfield. Then he became as
if transfigured. Even his complexion, otherwise dull, lit up as
he spoke. And at such times, to be sure, Hitler was strangely
attractive and as if possessed of magic powers.
EXCEPTIONAL VIGOR Anything that
might have seemed too solemn in his remarks, he quickly tempered
with a touch of humour. The picturesque world, the biting phrase
were at his command. In a flash he would paint a word-picture
that brought a smile, or come up with an unexpected and
disarming comparison. He could be harsh and even implacable in
his judgements and yet almost at the same time be surprisingly
conciliatory, sensitive and warm.
After 1945 Hitler was accused of every cruelty, but it was not
in his nature to be cruel. He loved children. It was an entirely
natural thing for him to stop his car and share his food with
young cyclists along the road. Once he gave his raincoat to a
derelict plodding in the rain. At midnight he would interrupt
his work and prepare the food for his dog Blondi.
He could not bear to eat meat, because it meant the death of a
living creature. He refused to have so much as a rabbit or a
trout sacrificed to provide his food. He would allow only eggs
on his table, because egg-laying meant that the hen had been
spared rather than killed.
Hitler's eating habits were a constant source of amazement to
me. How could someone on such a rigorous schedule, who had taken
part in tens of thousands of exhausting mass meetings from which
he emerged bathed with sweat, often losing two to four pounds in
the process; who slept only three to four hours a night; and who,
from 1940 to 1945, carried the whole world on his shoulders
while ruling over 380 million Europeans: how, I wondered, could
he physically survive on just a boiled egg, a few tomatoes, two
or three pancakes, and a plate of noodles? But he actually
gained weight! He drank only
water. He did not smoke and would not tolerate smoking in his
presence. At one or two o'clock in the morning he would still be
talking, untroubled, close to his fireplace, lively, often
amusing. He never showed any sign of weariness. Dead tired his
audience might be, but not Hitler.
He was depicted as a tired old man. Nothing was further from the
truth. In September 1944, when he was reported to be fairly
doddering, I spent a week with him. His mental and physical
vigor were still exceptional. The attempt made on his life on
July 20th had, if anything, recharged him. He took tea in his
quarters as tranquilly as if we had been in his small private
apartment at the chancellery before the war, or enjoying the
view of snow and bright blue sky through his great bay window at
Berchtesgaden. IRON
SELF-CONTROL At the very end of
his life, to be sure, his back had become bent, but his mind
remained as clear as a flash of lightening. The testament he
dictated with extraordinary composure on the eve of his death,
at three in the morning of April 29, 1945, provides us a lasting
testimony. Napoleon at Fontainebleau was not without his moments
of panic before his abdication. Hitler simply shook hands with
his associates in silence, breakfasted as on any other day, then
went to his death as if he were going on a stroll. When has
history ever witnessed so enormous a tragedy brought to its end
with such iron self control?
Hitler's most notable characteristic was ever his simplicity.
The most complex of problems resolved itself in his mind into a
few basic principles. His actions were geared to ideas and
decisions that could be understood by anyone. The laborer from
Essen, the isolated farmer, the Ruhr industrialist, and the
university professor could all easily follow his line of thought.
The very clarity of his reasoning made everything obvious.
His behaviour and his life style never changed even when he
became the ruler of Germany. He dressed and lived frugally.
During his early days in Munich, he spent no more than a mark
per day for food. At no stage in his life did he spend anything
on himself. Throughout his 13 years in the chancellery he never
carried a wallet or ever had money of his own.
COMPUTER-LIKE MIND Hitler was
self-taught and made not attempt to hide the fact. The smug
conceit of intellectuals, their shiny ideas packaged like so
many flashlight batteries, irritated him at times. His own
knowledge he had acquired through selective and unremitting
study, and he knew far more than thousands of diploma-decorated
academics. I don't think anyone
ever read as much as he did. He normally read one book every day,
always first reading the conclusion and the index in order to
gauge the work's interest for him. He had the power to extract
the essence of each book and then store it in his computer-like
mind. I have heard him talk about complicated scientific books
with faultless precision, even at the height of the war.
His intellectual curiosity was limitless. He was readily
familiar with the writings of the most diverse authors, and
nothing was too complex for his comprehension. He had a deep
knowledge and understanding of Buddha, Confucius and Jesus
Christ, as well as Luther, Calvin, and Savonarola; of literary
giants such as Dante, Schiller, Shakespeare and Goethe; and
analytical writers such as Renan and Gobineau, Chamberlain and
Sorel. He had trained himself in
philosophy by studying Aristotle and Plato. He could quote
entire paragraphs of Schopenhauer from memory, and for a long
time carried a pocked edition of Schopenhauer with him.
Nietzsche taught him much about the willpower.
His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. He spend hundreds of
hours studying the works of Tacitus and Mommsen, military
strategists such as Clausewitz, and empire builders such as
Bismark. Nothing escaped him: world history or the history of
civilizations, the study of the Bible and the Talmud, Thomistic
philosophy and all the masterpieces of Homer, Sophocles, Horace,
Ovid, Titus Livius and Cicero. He knew Julian the Apostate as if
he had been his contemporary.
His knowledge also extended to mechanics. He knew how engines
worked; he understood the ballistics of various weapons; and he
astonished the best medical scientists with his knowledge of
medicine and biology. The
universality of Hitler's knowledge may surprise or displease
those unaware of it, but it is nonetheless a historical fact:
Hitler was one of the most cultivated men of this century. Many
times more so than Churchill, an intellectual mediocrity; or
than Pierre Lavaal, with him mere cursory knowledge of history;
of than Roosevelt; or Eisenhower, who never got beyond detective
novels. THE YOUNG ARCHITECT
Even during his earliest years, Hitler was different than other
children. He had an inner strength and was guided by his spirit
and his instincts. He could draw
skillfully when he was only eleven years old. His sketches made
at that age show a remarkable firmness and liveliness. He first
paintings and watercolors, created at age 15, are full of poetry
and sensitivity. One of his most striking early works, 'Fortress
Utopia,' also shows him to have been an artist of rare
imagination. His artistic orientation took many forms. He wrote
poetry from the time he was a lad. He dictated a complete play
to his sister Paula who was amazed at his presumption. At the
age of 16, in Vienna, he launched into the creation of an opera.
He even designed the stage settings, as well as all the
costumes; and, of course, the characters were Wagnerian heroes.
More than just an artist, Hitler was above all an architect.
Hundreds of his works were notable as much for the architecture
as for the painting. From memory alone he could reproduce in
every detail the onion dome of a church or the intricate curves
of wrought iron. Indeed, it was to fulfill his dream of becoming
an architect that Hitler went to Vienna at the beginning of the
century. When one sees the
hundreds of paintings, sketches and drawings he created at the
time, which reveal his mastery of three dimensional figures, it
is astounding that his examiners at the Fine Arts Academy failed
him in two successive examinations. German historian Werner
Maser, no friend of Hitler, castigated these examiners: "All of
his works revealed extraordinary architectural gifts and
knowledge. The builder of the Third Reich gives the former Fine
Arts Academy of Vienna cause for shame."
In his room, Hitler always displayed an old photograph of his
mother. The memory of the mother he loved was with him until the
day he died. Before leaving this earth, on April 30, 1945, he
placed his mother's photograph in front of him. She had blue
eyes like his and a similar face. Her maternal intuition told
her that her son was different from other children. She acted
almost as if she knew her son's destiny. When she died, she felt
anguished by the immense mystery surrounding her son.
HUMBLE ORIGINS Throughout the
years of his youth, Hitler lived the life of a virtual recluse.
He greatest wish was to withdraw from the world. At heart a
loner, he wandered about, ate meager meals, but devoured the
books of three public libraries. He abstained from conversations
and had few friends. It is
almost impossible to imagine another such destiny where a man
started with so little and reached such heights. Alexander the
great was the son of a king. Napoleon, from a well-to-do family,
was a general at 24. Fifteen years after Vienna, Hitler would
still be an unknown corporal. Thousands of others had a thousand
times more opportunity to leave their mark on the world.
Hitler was not much concerned with his private life. In Vienna
he had lived in shabby, cramped lodgings. But for all that he
rented a piano that took up half his room, and concentrated on
composing his opera. He lived on bread, milk, and vegetable soup.
His poverty was real. He did not even own an over-coat. He
shoveled streets on snowy days. He carried luggage at the
railway station. He spent many weeks in shelters for the
homeless. But he never stopped painting or reading.
Despite his dire poverty, Hitler somehow managed to maintain a
clean appearance. Landlords and landladies in Vienna and Munich
all remembered him for his civility and pleasant disposition.
His behavior was impeccable. His room was always spotless, his
meager belongings meticulously arranged, and his clothes neatly
hung or folded. He washed and ironed his own clothes, something
which in those days few men did. He needed almost nothing to
survive, and money from the sale of a few paintings was
sufficient to provide for all his needs.
SEARCH FOR DESTINY Impressed by
the beauty of the church in a Benedictine monastery where he was
part of the choir and served as an altar boy, Hitler dreamt
fleetingly of becoming a Benedictine monk. And it was at that
time, too, interestingly enough, that whenever he attended mass,
he always had to pass beneath the first swastika he had ever
seen: it was graven in the stone escutcheon of the abbey portal.
Hitler's father, a customs officer, hoped the boy would follow
in his footsteps and become a civil servant. His tutor
encouraged him to become a monk. Instead the young Hitler went,
or rather fled, to Vienna. And there, thwarted in his artistic
aspirations by the bureaucratic mediocrities of academia, he
turned to isolation and meditation. Lost in the great capital of
Austria-Hungary, he searched for his destiny.
During the first 30 years of Hitler's life, the date April 20,
1889, meant nothing to anyone. He was born on that day in
Braunau, a small town in the Inn valley. During his exile in
Vienna, he often thought of his modest home, and particularly of
his mother. When she fell ill, he returned home from Vienna to
look after her. For weeks he nursed her, did all the household
chores, and supported her as the most loving of sons. When she
finally died, on Christmas eve, his pain was immense. Wracked
with grief, he buried his mother in the little country cemetery.
"I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief," said his
mother's doctor, who happened to be Jewish.
A STRONG SOUL Hitler had not yet
focused on politics, but without his rightly knowing, that was
the career to which he was most strongly called. Politics would
ultimately blend with his passion for art. People, the masses,
would be the clay the sculptor shapes into an immortal form. The
human clay would become for him a beautiful work of art like one
of Myron's marble sculptures, a Hans Makart painting, or
Wagner's Ring Trilogy. His love
of music, art and architecture had not removed him from the
political life and social concerns of Vienna. In order to
survive, he worked as a common laborer sided by side with other
workers. He was a silent spectator, but nothing escaped him: not
the vanity and egoism of the bourgeoisie, not the moral and
material misery of the people, nor yet the hundreds of thousands
of workers who surged down the wide avenues of Vienna with anger
in their hearts. He had also
been taken aback by the growing presence in Vienna of bearded
Jews wearing caftans, a sight unknown in Linz. "How can they be
Germans?" he asked himself. He read the statistics: in 1860
there were 69 Jewish families in Vienna; 40 years later there
were 200,000. They were everywhere. He observed their invasion
of the universities and the legal and medical professions, and
their takeover of the newspapers.
Hitler was exposed to the passionate reactions of the workers to
this influx, but the workers were not alone in their unhappiness.
There were many prominent persons in Austria and Hungary who did
not hide their resentment at what they believed was an alien
invasion of their country. The mayor of Vienna, a Christian-Democrat
and a powerful orator, was eagerly listened to by Hitler.
Hitler was also concerned with the fate of the eight million
Austrian Germans kept apart from Germany, and thus deprived of
their rightful German nationhood. He saw Emperor Franz Josef as
a bitter and petty old man unable to cope with the problems of
the day and the aspirations of the future.
Quietly, the young Hitler was summing things up in his mind.
First: Austrians were part of Germany, the common fatherland.
Second: The Jews were aliens within the German community.
Third: Patriotism was only valid if it was shared by all
classes. The common people with whom Hitler had shared grief and
humiliation were just as much a part of the fatherland as the
millionaires of high society.
Fourth: Class war would sooner or later condemn both workers and
bosses to ruin in any country. No country could survive class
war; only cooperation between workers and bosses can benefit the
country. Workers must be respected and live with decency and
honor.
Creativity must never be
stifled. When Hitler later said
that he had formed his social and political doctrine in Vienna,
he told the truth. Ten years later his observations made in
Vienna would become the order of the day.
Thus Hitler was to live for several years in the crowded city of
Vienna as a virtual outcast, yet quietly observing everything
around him. His strength came from within. He did not rely on
anyone to do his thinking for him. Exceptional human beings
always feel lonely amid the vast human throng. Hitler saw his
solitude as a wonderful opportunity to meditate and not to be
submerged in a mindless sea. In order not to be lost in the
wastes of a sterile desert, a strong soul seeks refuge within
himself. Hitler was such a soul.
THE WORD The lightning in
Hitler's life would come from the word.
All his artistic talent would be channeled into his mastery of
communication and eloquence. Hitler would never conceive of
popular conquests without the power of the word. He would
enchant and be enchanted by it. He would find total fulfillment
when the magic of his words inspired the hearts and minds of the
masses with whom he communed. He
would feel reborn each time he conveyed with mystical beauty the
knowledge he had acquired in his lifetime.
Hitler's incantory eloquence will remain, for a very long time,
a vast field of study for the psychoanalyst. The power of
Hitler's word is the key. Without it, there would never have
been a Hitler era.
TRANSCENDANT FAITH Did Hitler
believe in God? He believed deeply in God. He called God the
Almighty, master of all that is known and unknown.
Propagandists portrayed Hitler as an atheist. He was not. He had
contempt for hypocritical and materialistic clerics, but he was
not alone in that. He believed in the necessity of standards and
theological dogmas, without which, he repeatedly said, the great
institution of the Christian church would collapse. These dogmas
clashed with his intelligence, but he also recognized that it
was hard for the human mind to encompass all the problems of
creation, its limitless scope and breathtaking beauty. He
acknowledged that every human being has spiritual needs.
The song of the nightingale, the pattern and color of a flower,
continually brought him back to the great problems of creation.
No one in the world has spoken to me so eloquently about the
existence of God. He held this view not because he was brought
up as a Christian, but because his analytical mind bound him to
the concept of God. Hitler's
faith transcended formulas and contingencies. God was for him
the basis of everything, the ordainer of all things, of his
Destiny and that of all others. |
