Hitler in Hell

  Hitler in Hell

  Martin van Creveld

  Copyright

  Hitler in Hell

  Martin van Creveld

  Castalia House

  Kouvola, Finland

  www.castaliahouse.com

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Finnish copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental

  Copyright © 2017 by Martin van Creveld

  All rights reserved

  Editor: Vox Day

  Version: 002

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I. The Road to Power

  1. In the Home of My Parents

  2. Vienna

  3. Munich

  4. The World War

  5. Revolution and Collapse

  6. Entering Politics

  7. The Putsch and Its Aftermath

  8. My Happiest Years

  9. Into the Storm

  10. Reaching for Power

  Part II. The Years of Peace

  11. Gleichschaltung

  12. It’s the Economy, Stupid

  13. A New Kind of State

  14. The Racial Question

  15. The German Woman

  16. My Private Life

  17. Rearming the Reich

  18. Foreign Policy

  19. The Road to War

  Part III. The War Years

  20. Baptism by Fire

  21. Victory in the West

  22. From West to East

  23. “The World Will Hold Its Breath!”

  24. My New Order

  25. The Final Solution

  26. The Hinge of Fate

  27. Holding On

  28. Götterdämmerung

  Looking Backward

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  I, Adolf Hitler, am in Hell, the place to which the victors assign their dead opponents. Not just the dead ones either, but that is a separate topic. Hell, let me tell you, is neither “a dungeon horrible” nor “torture without end” as John Milton, whom I read in German translation after my death, imagined. Far from it! In some ways it reminds me of Landsberg Prison, where I spent almost all of 1924. The main difference is that here I have no visitors and can receive no presents. That apart, conditions are quite similar. Not luxurious, but for a person like me, one whose material demands are moderate and who has always lived in a fairly austere manner, adequate.

  There are no windows, and my spirit, or whatever it is, is not free to leave the compound, if it is one. As a result, I have no idea where it is located or what it looks like from the outside. If, indeed, it has an “outside.” The light, which is artificial and on all the time, never varies. It seems to come from all directions at once, so there are no shadows. And there are no sounds, except for the few we handful of inmates make as, ghost-like, we flutter about. Even those seem to be muffled in a strange, unearthly way. For eight hours out of every twenty-four I am locked in my cell by guardian devils. They never—never—answer any questions, but they never do me any harm either. That is more than one can say for many people on Earth. At other times I can do much as I please. Who cares? I have no needs, I have no worries, and I have no one to fight. I suppose that accounts for my relatively mellow mood.

  The souls I miss the most are those of my shepherd bitch, Blondi, and Frau Eva Braun. As to the former, there seem to be no dogs in Hell. That depresses me, for I have always liked them very much. The scene in a certain film I will not name, where I am shown thoughtlessly shooting a little dog just because it was bothering, is pure invention. My first dog was a white terrier. I found him in the trenches, where he was chasing a rat. Originally, he had belonged to an English officer and did not understand a word of German. I called him Fuchsl, and he was with me for about a year and a half until someone stole him, causing me much grief. Several others followed. I was proud of them and taught them all sorts of tricks; when asked what young girls do, Blondi, who was the last of the lot, would roll on her back and lift her legs in the air.

  As to the latter, Eva’s most ardent wish had long been for me to marry her. Unfortunately, my duty to my people did not permit us to spend as much time together as I—and even more so she—would have liked. But what if I had done as she wanted? Throughout the war, I lived mainly at my various military headquarters. There, she would have been badly out of place with nothing to do all day long. All around were hundreds of males, many of them starved for sex, who would have stared at her. And gossiped. And sniggered.

  I kept in touch with her by a daily telephone call as well as letters. But I saw to it that our correspondence should not fall into the wrong hands. As, for example, Napoleon’s letters to Josephine and the telephone conversations of Prince Charles with his lover Camilla did, thereby revealing their intimate secrets for everyone to slaver over. My chief adjutant Julius Schaub, whose loyalty to me dated back to the very first days of the Party, and Eva’s sister Gretl, were a great help in this respect. Shortly before the end of the war Eva defied my wishes for the first and only time. She had her car covered with camouflage paint, left Berchtesgaden, and took us all by surprise by unexpectedly turning up in Berlin, specifically in order to die with me. Doing so was an act of courage and love. At the time, just thinking of her made me happy; it does so still. Poor woman, with my modest needs she never knew what to give me as a present! Where she is, if she is, I have not the faintest clue.

  All of us here seem to be staying the same age. We are indestructible. No one ever gets sick; no one ever dies. Nothing ever happens. To understand what a horrible torment that is, one must either have experienced it or have been with Gulliver on his trip to the land of the immortals. I am alive, yet I am dead; I am dead, yet I am alive. The main problem is what to do with my time. That is one very important reason why I decided to write this book. Now as in 1924, the faithful and artless, if sometimes moody, Rudolf Hess is helping me with my work. But there are a couple of differences. When I wrote Mein Kampf, I was still a comparative newcomer to the political scene. Imprisoned, I possessed very few personal documents. That is why much of what I wrote in volume I, which, unlike volume II, is largely autobiographical, had to be based mainly on my memory. Which, let me say, is excellent indeed.

  Here in Hell things are very different. To help me keep up with what is happening, I have with me a couple of the world’s leading experts on the Internetz, the so-called “Black Internetz” included. Germans and faithful followers, of course. They are better than those two mavericks, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, combined! They provide me with access to everything. Meaning absolutely everything that has ever been written, filmed, recorded, videotaped, or whatever, right down to the present time. With the result that they can help me document my life and times much more thoroughly and much more faithfully than I could then.

  So vast is the inflow of material that mastering it all might actually fill the unlimited time I have stretching out in front of me. More, much more, keeps being added day by day. There are books about my youth, books about my women, books about my alleged mental and physical diseases, books about the movies I did and did not like, books about the medicines I took, books about my attitude to the Jews, and books about my headquarters and my performance as a military commander. There is even a book about how hard it is to write anything new about me! Not to mention an
avalanche of books (and TV programs) about my alleged escape to South America after the war. I am told that, when I started working on this project in the spring of 2015, on Google I had about a hundred million “hits.” Stalin only had thirty-three million; Mao Zedong, a paltry million.

  But there is also another more important reason why I write. History, Schopenhauer said, is as riddled with lies as the body of a prostitute with syphilis. In this volume I am determined to tell my side of the story, set the record straight, and get even with my enemies—both my contemporaries and those who fed on my legend later on. And, on the way, I will put that bunch of feckless liars, meaning the countless “historians” who have done their best to present me as the worst monster in the whole of human memory, to shame. I shall beat them into a pudding, as Goebbels used to say. Doing so is my duty and my right. After all, isn’t that what people occupying positions similar to mine have always done? Think of Julius Caesar, whose memoirs schoolchildren are being made to study right down to the present day. Or of that lying drunk, Winston Churchill. He even got a Nobel Prize for his efforts.

  Finally, all my life I have believed in the “unconquerable will” (Milton again). Though I may be in Hell, “to bow and sue for grace, with suppliant knee”—that glory my enemies will never extort from me. “For the mind and spirit remains invincible.” Down to the last breath I took, I gave my all fighting on behalf of the German people. Since then, I am told, there has come into being something called Godwin’s Law. Meaning that, the longer two people argue, the more inevitable it is that at least one of them should call the other “Hitler.” Countless lesser folks apart, those to whom my name has been (miss)applied include Egypt’s President Gamal Abdul Nasser, Soviet President Nikolai Bulganin, Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (known, in his own country, as “The Monkey”), Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, America’s President Donald Trump… Reductio ad Hitlerum, one might say. The Israelis, who always claim to have a corner on suffering, especially like to play this game. I am, however, gratified that their enemies have caught on and are using the same tactics against them, as, for example, when someone calls a chatterbox like Prime Minister Netanyahu “Hitler.” They wish they had just one percent of my stature. Each and every one of them.

  Unfortunately, there is no way we here in Hell can contact those we have left behind. Thus pushing the latter in the right direction appears out of the question for the time being. But I am not about to throw in the towel. Not me! Ever since the first humans started walking the earth, they have always tried the most varied methods to get in touch with the dead and to learn what they have to say. There now exists a whole branch of science, if that is the word, whose aim is to do just that. You may be certain that, if and when the time comes, my voice will be heard.

  Loud and clear.

  Part I. The Road to Power

  1. In the Home of My Parents

  I was born in Braunau-on-the-Inn on 20 April 1889. During the 1930s my birthday used to be celebrated with flags, ceremonies, and parades as if I were some saint. No more, of course: but neither has it been forgotten. My father, Alois, did not clearly know who his father had been. The outcome has been endless speculation. Decades after my death, it is still going on. Some have even claimed that he was the son of a Jew by the name of Frankenberger, or Frankenreiter, or whatever! As the fact that no person bearing those names could ever be found indicates, all these are simply lies. Originally, they were spread by my political opponents, who would have liked nothing better than to tar me with this particular brush.

  That fact, and not any worry I felt about the matter, was why, no sooner had I become Chancellor than I sent my former attorney, Hans Frank, to gather and secure all possible information about my Ahnen (ancestors.) After all, didn’t someone say that knowledge is power? Frank was an able if sometimes petty-minded lawyer who had often represented the Party in the courts. After our Machtergreifung, seizure of power, in 1933 I made him Bavarian minister of justice as well as head of the National Socialist Jurists’ Association and the Academy of German Law. He carried out his task well enough, as he also did in occupied Poland, where he served as governor-general. Later, sitting in his Nuremberg cell as one of the so-called major war criminals, he wrote a book called Im Angesicht des Galgens (facing the scaffold), in which he repeated some of the rumors. Perhaps he was trying to curry favor with his captors.

  The alleged Jewish connection apart, it did not really matter. Some historians have claimed that my father was the son, not of Johann Georg Hiedler but of his brother Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. This reminds me of the story about a certain philologist. A German one, needless to say. He spent his life trying to find out who wrote the Homeric poems. After thirty years, he concluded that it had not been Homer but another bard whose name was also Homer. Who cares? We all know that not even the strictest measures and worst punishments have ever been able to prevent the females of the species from having occasional fun. Not least the ones married to those effete snobs, the bluebloods. Recently, I read that even the British royal family has some interesting breaks in its DNA. The same applies to the Jews. Throughout history, no other people has tried as hard to keep their people free of foreign blood. Seen from this point of view, not a few of them were more “racist” than I! But Jewish women appear to be no better than the rest. That is why, as recent scientific advances have shown, a single gene all Jews have in common does not exist.

  Let the professors, who are always so full of themselves, chatter away to their hearts’ contents. What mattered was the fact that, unlike so many other rulers, most German ones included, I was not born in a palace. I did not have a “von,” “zu,” or “und” to my surname. “Hitler,” sometimes spelled Hietler or Hütler, means “cottager.” My ancestors came from the Waldviertel, far from Vienna and well known for being Austria’s poorest district. Nor was I a Herr Doktor. I was a man of the people. And so, to the end of my earthly life and to the extent that my official duties permitted, I remained. I was “Unser Hitler,” our Hitler, as Goebbels liked to put it. As to my first name, it is a composite made up of two ancient Germanic words: “Adal” and “Wulf.” Noble Wolf. I liked wolves and often doodled them. During the period of struggle I sometimes used the cover name Wolf; one of those who first got to know me under that name was Eva Braun. Later, I named several of my field headquarters after them.

  My father met my mother, Klara Pölzl, in 1876 when she entered his household as a servant. Nine years later, after he had been widowed for the second time, they married. He was thirty-nine, she twenty-five. Of their six children only my sister Paula, who was seven years younger than me, and I survived to adulthood. All the rest died very young. The household also included two older offspring from my father’s previous marriages, my half-brother and sister Alois Jr. and Angela. Finally, there was my mother’s spinster sister, Johanna. In the family she was known as Hanitante.

  Some psychiatrists—in my time they used to be called “mad-doctors”—have engaged in the most cock-eyed speculations about my mental makeup. One, an American Jew named David Luck, wrote that I was possessed by a “malignant orality”—whatever that may be—and a sexuality “either completely narcissistic or pre-genitally perverse.” Another, Robert Waite, claimed that I had witnessed my parents having sexual intercourse, which turned me into a “psychopathic god.” All that, and much more, is pure invention whose purpose is to present me as some sort of maniac. Much of the rubbish can be traced back to my opponent, Otto Strasser, as well as to that big idiot, my one-time foreign press secretary Ernst (“Putzi”) Hanfstängl. Mr. Cannabis-Stalk came from a highly artistic family and had been educated in America at Harvard. A snob, Putzi strongly resented my attachment to some people in my entourage, the chauffeureska, as he called them, who were not as sophisticated as he considered himself to be. So pompous was he that, in 1937, I decided to play an elaborate practical joke on him. It proved him a coward as well as an ass. Shortly after, Putzi le
ft Germany and published a book in which he spread all kinds of lurid stories about me in the hope of making money at my expense.

  The theory behind the speculations originated in the sick brain of that typical Jew, Sigmund Freud, who came up with the equally Jewish invention psychoanalysis, which he had the effrontery to call a science. A claim incidentally, which was denied by his fellow Jews at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who refused to include psychoanalysis in the curriculum. Freud claimed that most, if not all, mental disturbances originated in sexual problems. It was he who came up with the idea that witnessing one’s parents during their “primal act” led to all kinds of mental disturbances. Judging by his published works, it is quite possibly his own personal experience he was speaking about here! Next, he and his clique, almost all of whom were also Jewish, foisted it on his unfortunate patients, presumably making many of them even crazier than they already were.

  What the self-styled “analysts” overlooked was the plain fact that not everyone was a good bourgeois as they were. Nor did most people spend their lives in a spacious Viennese flat. Throughout history, most children have always lived with their parents in a single room or hut. Quite a large number of them grew up in tents. Like it or not, they witnessed everything—everything—practically from the day they could walk. And let’s not mention what they could see happening all around them both in nature and on the farm! Yet nearly all of them grew up perfectly normal, Indeed, it is often the doctors, not their patients, who are as crazy as bats.

  Others too spent their time obsessively looking for all kinds of anomalies in my body, mind, family, and what not. Working for the OSS, the CIA’s parent organization, the American psychologist Walter Langer criticized my strict hygienic habits and fastidious taste in dress. As if walking about unwashed, with a dirty coat and a soiled collar, were a virtue; and as if I, having been poor and homeless, did not know the meaning of being unable to wash and change one’s clothes much better than he did. This is a topic on which I could go on and on. But let the psychologists, past, present, and no doubt future, wallow in their morbid fantasies.