Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun (11 page)

 

A German physician who treated numerous Nazi officials told this story, for which there is no other documentation.

In 1943 Heinrich Himmler went to his physician in a state of nervous exhaustion. The subsequent physical examination yielded disturbing results. His blood pressure was seriously elevated, his pulse was much too rapid, and he was running a low grade fever. When asked if something out of the ordinary was bothering him, he confided that he was supposed to exterminate "a certain segment of the Hungarian population", i.e., Jews, before the end of the year. When the doctor expressed horror and revulsion at this confidence, Himmler objected
impatiently. "You don't understand," he said. "I am swamped with work! It is impossible for me
to accomplish this by the end of the year!"

 

Adolf Eichmann was a major figure in the black-shirted S.S. during the era of the Third
Reich and was deeply involved in the Holocaust. He was put in charge of the mass deportation of
Jews from all over Nazi-occupied Europe to the death camps in
Poland
. It is estimated that between two and two and a half million men, women, and children were transported to their
deaths under his direction.

Eichmann escaped from Europe at the end of the war and lived under various pseudonyms as well as his own name for the next fifteen years until he was located and
kidnapped by the
Mossad
, the Israeli secret service. He was taken to Israel where he was tried for murder, convicted, and hanged.

When his trial began he was asked, as are all defendants in criminal trials, to identify
himself on the witness stand. He did so, and he was then asked to describe his role in the
government of Nazi Germany. Without hesitating or blinking an eye, he replied, "I was regarded
as an expert on transportation."

 

This story goes under the category of "once a Nazi, always a Nazi." (It is also one of the few anecdotes for which the author can provide an unimpeachable personal source, namely the
young French soldier mentioned at the end of the tale. He recounted this story to the author when they became acquainted in
Paris
in 1976.)

The surviving members of the leadership of the Third Reich were put on trial in
Nuremberg after the War, and most of them were condemned to death by hanging. But it was a fair trial; three of them were acquitted and several others sent to prison. Rudolf Hess was one of
the prominent Nazis spared the hangman's noose.

Hess was one of the
alte
Kämpfer
,
the old fighters, who were with Hitler in the abortive Beer Hall
Putsch
of 1923. He voluntarily joined Hitler in prison in 1924, where Hitler dictated
Mein
Kampf
to
him. He was appointed Deputy Leader
(
Vizeführer
)
of the Nazi Party, and
basically ran the Party on a day-to-day basis.

But in assessing guilt and meting out punishment at Nuremberg, the judges had a problem. Hess was a prominent Nazi, the number five man in the state after Hitler, Goring, Goebbels, and Himmler, but he was basically just a political hack. He had nothing to do with
planning, starting, or waging the Second World War, and was uninvolved in war crimes or the Holocaust. To have
hanged him would have smacked of the drum-head justice of a kangaroo court. But on the basis of the indictment, that the entire Nazi government was itself a vast conspiracy to do all those things, Hess was sentenced to life in prison. He was incarcerated in Spandau Castle on the outskirts of Berlin, where he remained until his death by suicide in 1987.

By the mid-'70s, Hess was the only inmate left in the prison. All the others (Speer, Raeder, Doenitz, von
Schirach
, etc.) had either been released or had died. But by the Allied
agreement reached in 1946, the four powers occupying Berlin served three month shifts guarding
the prison, guarding by that time one little old man.

So. Once a Nazi, always a Nazi... ?

In 1975, when the French armed forces were guarding Spandau, a young French soldier, bored by the tedium of his assignment,
left his assigned position to watch Hess as the old man took his daily walk around the courtyard. Hess looked up, noticed him, and then reported the soldier to his commanding
officer for leaving his post.

 

Hitler's grasp upon reality was always tenuous at best, as illustrated by two stories recounted by his friend August
Kubizek
.
Kubizek
and Hitler were very close friends in
Linz
,
Austria
, during their teenage years, and they both fancied themselves artists. Hitler came up with
a wonderful idea: he would buy a house, large enough for the two boys and other like-minded
young artists to live in. The house would be staffed by pretty young maids, and he and
Kubizek
would host lavish parties to be attended by beautiful women and notable men. To finance this expensive scheme, Hitler hit upon an infallible solution, certain of success.

He bought a lottery ticket.

When he (needless to say) did not win the lottery, he was outraged and almost beside
himself with anger. He blamed the Austrian government, the polyglot population of the
Hapsburg Empire, and, of course, the Jews.

Such setbacks did not stifle Hitler's normal adolescent drives (well, somewhat normal,
anyway), and in 1908 he fell in love with a beautiful girl named Stephanie
Rabatsch
. He adored her after the manner of romantic, courtly love, and he was convinced that she loved him as well
with the same degree of passionate intensity.

There was one thing that interfered with their relationship: they didn't have one. She did not know he was alive. Hitler never approached her, never spoke to her, never introduced himself. He would follow her around Linz, staring at her, watching her, and would then rhapsodize about their love to
Kubizek
. Hitler's friend remembers him composing a long, florid,
childish, melodramatic poem entitled "Hymn to the Beloved," which, of course, he did not show
her. When
Kubizek
tactfully suggested that Hitler's passion might have a better chance of
succeeding if Stephanie knew him, Hitler demurred.

In 1908, just before leaving for Vienna, he wrote her a letter confessing his love and his
intention to marry her when he graduated from Art School. As is well known, Hitler was not even accepted into Art School. He never attempted to contact Stephanie again (if it can be
fairly said that he ever attempted to contact her at all: his marriage proposal had been anonymous). In later
years an elderly Stephanie
Rabatsch
was asked about this, and she recalled that in her youth she had indeed received an unsigned marriage proposal from some oddball. She threw it out.

 

Very little is usually written about the families of the great dictators because, unlike monarchs, their office is not hereditary, and when they die their families cease to be important.
Some relatives are less obscure than others, however. It is generally known that Stalin's daughter
Svetlana
Iosifovna
Alliluyeva
defected to the United States in 1967, that Mussolini's son
Romano became a very successful jazz pianist and that his granddaughter Alessandra, an actress,
singer, model, and European Playboy centerfold, was elected to the Italian parliament in 2003. One of her campaign slogans was "Fascists are better than Faggots."

But most interesting of all is the story of the
Hitlers
.

Hitler himself had no children. Indeed, he did not marry until shortly before his suicide. His bride, Eva Braun, had been in love with him for years, but had been treated by him
dismissively. Marrying him was the high point of her life. On the marriage certificate, which has
survived, she began to sign her name "Eva B..." but then crossed out the "B" and wrote "Eva Hitler." Then she and the groom killed themselves.

But Hitler had brothers and sisters. His half-sister Angela
Raubal
and half-brother
Alois
Hitler had children, two girls for the former and two boys for the latter. Angela's daughter,
Geli
Raubal
, had a torrid and well-publicized love affair with her Uncle Adolf in the late '20s, and
committed suicide for reasons still unclear. (She may have been murdered to eliminate a public embarrassment to the Nazi Party.)

Alois
Hitler alternated his residences between Germany and England. He ran a beer hall
in Berlin in the early days of the Third Reich, an establishment that attracted a large storm
trooper clientele for obvious reasons. ("
Heil
Hitler, Herr Hitler," was the way they greeted him.)
Alois
was a bigamist and had two sons by two different wives. By his German wife Maria he had
a son named Heinz, who served in the German army during World War Two and died in a Soviet P.O.W. camp.

By his other wife, an Irish woman named Bridget whom he met and married in Liverpool, he had a son named William Patrick. Willy Hitler moved to Germany with his father and became involved in numerous unsavory and shady schemes, including an attempt to
blackmail his uncle. Eventually Willy Hitler went to the United States, where he made propaganda films for the U.S. government. Hitler's comment on this: "We were always very
disappointed in Willy."

Willy Hitler served in the U.S. Navy during the war, and then moved to Patchogue, Long
Island, where he and his wife raised four sons. He changed his name from Hitler to William
Stuart-Houston (but did name his first son Alexander Adolf), lived a long and presumably happy life, and died in 1987. He is buried in the Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Coram, Long Island, New
York.

None of his children themselves had children. The Hitler line will end with them.

 

One final comment on Hitler that, perhaps better than any other, exemplifies his cold-
bloodedness:

The Germans are a very formal people, and the proper use of the various forms of the
second person pronoun is a matter of great social significance. In most Indo-European languages there are two different ways to say the pronoun "you," namely polite and familiar. (In French, for
example, the polite form is
vous
and the familiar is
tu
;
in Spanish,
usted
and
tu
;
in English,
you
and, though rarely used today,
thou.)
In German, the polite form, both singular and plural, is
Sie
,
while the familiar singular is
du
and the familiar plural is
ihr
.
Making the social transition from
Sie
to
du
is a major step in any German relationship, outside one in the immediate family.

Ernst
Röhm
, the chief of the brown-shirted Nazi storm troopers
(
Sturmabteilung
,
or S.A.)
was the only person known to have addressed Hitler as
du,
and to be so addressed in turn. (In
public, at least, even Hitler's mistress Eva Braun addressed him as
Sie
,
and referred to him as
der
Führer
.)
Hitler and
Röhm
were close associates and, judging from pronoun use, good friends. Major
Röhm
had been Hitler's contact in the German army when the small Nazi Party was beginning its rise. He also oversaw the street battles of his brown shirts against the Communists during the 1920s, and was a powerful and dominant figure in the Party, second only to Hitler himself.

But in early 1934, the German generals made it very clear to Hitler that if he wanted their
support,
Röhm
and his private Nazi army had to go. On June 30 of that year, on Hitler's order,
Röhm
and hundreds of other people, in the Party and outside it, were murdered.
Röhm
was offered a pistol and encouraged to commit suicide. He refused, saying contemptuously, “If Adolf wants me killed, let him do it himself.”
Röhm
was shot immediately thereafter. To the best of our knowledge, no one ever again addressed Hitler as
du.

The first person we know of in History to be nicknamed "Rocky" had nothing to do with boxing. He received his nickname in a pun spoken by none other than Jesus Christ Himself. The
incident is recorded in the 16
^th
chapter of the Gospel of Matthew:

When Jesus came to the coast of Caesarea Philippi he asked his disciples
saying, Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am? And they said, Some
say you are John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the
prophets. He
saith
unto them, But who say you that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou Simon bar Jonah, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I
say also unto thee that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.