Some contemporaries attributed Hitler’s interminably long monologues, with quivering lips, to an effort to conceal his inadequacies, rather than a proclivity to get carried away, for he could also restrain himself and come across as an amiable conversationalist. He felt most at ease at reunions of the Munich “street brawlers” from the years of Nazism’s rise, but he saw them only once a year. He confided fully in no one. (“Just as I never got close to him, I never observed anyone else doing so, either,” Joachim von Ribbentrop would recall.) Hitler enjoyed unguarded relations only with the Wagner clan in Bayreuth and the family of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, through whom Hitler had met Eva Braun (when she was then seventeen, he forty). She eventually became his de facto wife and, although blond and blue-eyed, was secretly checked for Jewish ancestry on Hitler’s orders. (She proved to be “Aryan.”)17 Hitler ate no meat, smoked no cigarettes, and rarely consumed alcohol, but he enjoyed cakes and lumping sugar into his tea (he suffered from dental problems). He exercised in order to hold his right arm upward for long stretches and, despising perspiration, took multiple baths each day. He had insomnia, eczema on his legs and feet (making it uncomfortable to wear boots), and gastric pains. A bout of stomach cramps would set him ranting about death from cancer. His mother had died at age forty-seven, and he told confidants he was fated to die young as well. (In May 1938, following the
Hitler can look like a crude and banal figure who inexplicably took over a highly industrialized, culturally advanced, politically sophisticated country, but he had proved to be an astute student of German mass sentiment. He attracted followers partly with his consummate acting skills. He cultivated an image of simplicity and humility, did not carry a wallet, and favored military uniforms, while forgoing any medals other than his Iron Cross First Class and Golden Party Emblem. He possessed a phenomenal memory. He also evinced a talent for mimicking people and situations. “In order to depict the barrage of the first day at the Battle of the Somme more vividly,” Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl would recall, “he used a large repertoire of the firing, descent, and impact noises made by French, English, and German howitzers and mortars, the general impression of which he would vividly augment by imitating the hammering tack-tack of the machine guns.”19
The Führer had commissioned an imposing new chancellor’s complex in Berlin, dismissing the existing one as “fit for a soap company.” The monumental edifice, with 400 rooms, readied in less than a year, was fronted by square columns and seventeen-foot-high double doors, which were flanked by gilded bronze and stone eagles clutching swastikas in their talons. The building’s 480-foot-long upper-floor Marble Gallery, which led to a grand hall for receptions, was twice the length of the Versailles Hall of Mirrors. “On the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Hitler boasted to his architect, Albert Speer, “they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!” Hitler, meanwhile, lived in the old “soap” building, using its modest study as his main working office. But off the new Chancellery’s Marble Gallery stood the Führer’s vast “study,” for the audiences he granted, with portraits of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Wisdom above the four doors. Hitler’s lengthy afternoon meals at the Chancellery (beginning at 2:00 or 3:00) involved up to fifty people; they merely had to telephone the adjutant to say they’d be coming—without being summoned. These were not Germany’s military brass or industrialists, but the inner court of Reichsleiters and Gauleiters and old party comrades, often from Munich. Evening suppers were more intimate still, comprising six to eight persons—Hitler’s doctor, photographer, pilot, radioman, private secretary (Martin Bormann)—where, according to Speer, “usually Hitler would tell stories about his life.”20