Hitler’s part of the Führer Headquarters, known as ‘Security Zone One’, swiftly developed its own daily rhythm. The central event was the ‘situation discussion’ at noon in the bunker shared by Keitel and Jodl. This frequently ran on as long as two hours. Brauchitsch, Halder, and Colonel Adolf Heusinger, chief of the army’s Operations Department, attended once or twice a week. The briefing was followed by a lengthy lunch, beginning in these days for the most part punctually at 2p.m., Hitler confining himself as always strictly to a non-meat diet. Any audiences that he had on non-military matters were arranged for the afternoons. Around 5p.m. he would call in his secretaries for coffee. A special word of praise was bestowed on the one who could eat most cakes. The second military briefing, given by Jodl, followed at 6p.m. The evening meal took place at 7.30p.m., often lasting two hours. Afterwards there were films. The final part of the routine was the gathering of secretaries, adjutants, and guests for tea, to the accompaniment of Hitler’s late-night monologues.17 Those who could snatched a nap some time during the afternoon so they could keep their eyes open in the early hours.18 Sometimes, it was daylight by the time the nocturnal discussions came to an end.19
Hitler always sat in the same place at meals, with his back to the window, flanked by Press Chief Dietrich and Jodl, with Keitel, Bormann, and Bodenschatz opposite him. Generals, staff officers, adjutants, Hitler’s doctors, and any guests visiting the Führer Headquarters made up the rest of the complement.20 The atmosphere was good in these early days, and not too formal. The mood at this time was still generally optimistic.21 Life in the FHQ had not yet reached the stage where it could be described by Jodl as half-way ‘between a monastery and a concentration camp’.22
Two of Hitler’s secretaries, Christa Schroeder and Gerda Daranowski, had also accompanied him to his field headquarters. Christa Schroeder described their life there to a friend, one week after arriving. Their living quarters were very simple. The sleeping section of their bunker was no larger than a compartment in a railway carriage. They had a toilet, a mirror, and a radio, but not much else. There were shower rooms, but without hot water in the early weeks. They had as good as nothing to do. Sleeping, eating, drinking, and chatting filled up most of their day. Some of the men in the otherwise entirely male company of the FHQ soon started to complain that the presence of Hitler’s two under-employed secretaries in the military complex was quite superfluous.23 Much of the secretaries’ energy was spent trying to swat away a constant plague of midges. Hitler complained that his advisers who had picked the spot had chosen ‘the most swampy, midge-infested, and climatically unfavourable area for him’, and joked that he would have to send in the Luftwaffe on the midge-hunt.24 ‘The chief, as those in his daily company called him, was generally in a good mood during the first part of the Russian campaign. He enjoyed light banter with his secretaries. When Christa Schroeder could not find her torch one night, as she emerged into the dark compound, Hitler remarked that she should not think he had stolen it. ‘I’m a country
How monochrome life in the confines of the Führer Headquarters rapidly became for Hitler’s secretaries was indicated in Christa Schroeder’s comments in a letter to a friend at the end of August: ‘We are permanently cut off from the world wherever we are — in Berlin, on the Mountain [at the Berghof], or on travels. It’s always the same limited group of people, always the same routine inside the fence.’ The danger was, she went on, ‘of losing contact with the real world’. Only the common life of the Wolfsschanze’s inhabitants, revolving around ‘the Chief, held the group together, she wrote. But should Hitler be absent, things immediately fell apart.26
