The original document containing the monologues was said to have been entrusted on 17 April 1945 by Martin Bormann to Walther Funk, Reich Minister for Economics, to remove from Berlin for safe keeping in a bank vault in Bad Gastein. While serving his term of imprisonment in Spandau after the Nuremberg Trials, fearing further incrimination should the document be discovered, Funk, it was claimed, commissioned a friend, Hans Rechenberg, with the destruction of the document. Rechenberg, the account continues, kept his promise in a literal sense; but he made a photocopy, and in 1951 handed it to François Genoud, a Swiss lawyer who had meanwhile acquired control over copyright matters pertaining to Bormann, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders. Funk, after release from Spandau, authorized Genoud to seek out Hugh Trevor-Roper with a view to arranging publication outside Germany of the document. After the meeting with Trevor-Roper, according to Genoud, the photocopy was handed back to Funk. It thereafter went missing. Remarkably, it seems, no copy of the copy had been made before returning it. Genoud had made a French translation (La testament politique de Hitler. Notes recueillies par Martin Bormann, Paris, 1959), and in 1958 had had a translation back into German made from the French version. According to Genoud, this was at Funk’s wish, since he wished to compare the texts. Funk then allegedly corrected the re-translation in accordance with the still existing copy of the original, ‘so that’, in Genoud’s words, ‘a practically authentic text, coming from this time, exists’. An English edition, with an introduction by Trevor-Roper, was published in 1961 (François Genoud (ed.), The Testament of Adolf Hitler. The Hitler-Bormann Documents. February-April 1945, with an Introduction by H. R. Trevor-Roper, London, 1961). This English version contains a very loose and untrustworthy translation of the German text — itself not guaranteed to be identical with any long-lost original or the lost copy of that original — which was eventually published only in 1981 (Hitlers politisches Testament. Die Bormann Diktate von Februar und April 1945, mit einem Essay von Hugh R. Trevor-Roper und einem Nachwort von André François-Poncet, Hamburg, 1981). Further examination of the text in the meantime-though this was not mentioned by the German publishers — by Professor Eduard Baumgarten had established that the translation back into German from the French (carried out by a Dutchman) contained between the lines a second German text, written in the hand of François Genoud. The available German text is, therefore, at best a construct; neither the original nor the copy of that original exists. Baumgarten tended, since the content was consonant with Hitler’s thinking and expression, to accept the authenticity of the text. There is, however, no proof and, therefore, no reliable German text whose authenticity can be placed beyond question. (Institut für Zeitgeschichte (ed.), Wissensch-aftsfreiheit und ihre rechtlichen Schranken. Ein Kolloquium, Munich/Vienna, 1978, 45–51 (comments of François Genoud, Eduard Baumgarten, and Martin Broszat).)
122. Hermann Giesler, Ein anderer Hitler. Erlebnisse, Gespräche, Reflexionen, Leoni, 1977, 478–80. For the date of the unveiling of the model, Irving, HW, 478–80, 483.
123. See Kubizek, especially 97–110. Hitler was still dreaming when he told Goebbels, following his viewing of the Linz model, that modern technology would allow for a swift rebuilding of German cities after the war, and that housing capacity would be restored within five years (TBJG, II/15, 379 (13 February 1945)).
124. TBJG, II/t5, 321 (6 February 1945). He repeated this to Goebbels a few days later, though the Propaganda Minister noted that it could not be publicized since, otherwise, every future air-raid on Berlin would be attributed to the decision (TBJG, II/15, 370 (12 February 1945)).
125. TBJG, II/15, 320 (6 February 1945), 337 (8 February 1945), 365 (12 February 1945).
126. TBJG, II/15, 323 (6 February 1945).
127. TBJG, II/15, 368 (12 February 1945).
128. See Weinberg III, 802–9.
129. TGJG, II/15, 381–2 (13 February 1945).
130. Below, 402.
131. Speer, 433.
132. Giesler, 482.
133. Semmler, 183; Reuth, Goebbels, 581–2; Irving, Goebbels, 502.
134. LB Stuttgart, 902–3 (2 March 1945).
135. Guderian, 427 (trans. slightly amended); LB Stuttgart, 905 n.2. And see TBJG, II/15, 617, 620 (28 March 1945).
