Dear Mr Hitler...letters to the Nazi leader reveal a nation in love with a monster

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Dear Mr Hitler...letters to the Nazi leader reveal a nation in love with a monster

 

By TONY RENNELL - More by this author » Last updated at 00:32am on 13th October 2007 Comments (2)

The violin maker's address to his Fuhrer was embarrassingly obsequious.

But Ernst Selbac, a lowly hotel worker and Nazi Party member from the Ruhr valley, was in deadly earnest as he proffered his gift, the product of all his spare time, to the leader he idolised.

"To mein Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, Reichs Chancellor!" he wrote. "After many long hours, I succeeded in making this violin for you — work that mirrored the rebuilding of the nation under your leadership.

"I built it by hand and decorated it with ivory and ebony.

"The inlaid swastikas alone have 245 pieces of ivory. If God wills it, I would like to hear my Fuhrer play it just once in this life!"

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A myth that Germans grudgingly allowed Hitler to rule is debunked by thousands of fan letters

 

The sounds of Adolf coaxing his beloved Beethoven or Wagner from this faux-Stradivarius were never to be heard.

The Fuhrer was no musician. But he sent the loyal and industrious Herr Selbac his "sincere thanks".

The thank-you note was rare in being hand-written, unlike the responses to the majority of the tens of thousands of personal letters sent to "Dear Mr Hitler" and "Mein Fuhrer" between 1925 and 1945.

As he grew from an insignificant local politician in Munich to an unrivalled figure of national power, the post-bag grew too. The letters came by the sackful, then by the cartload and finally, they filled vans and even a railway car.

After being sifted by a four-man team in his post room, most were lucky to get a curt acknowledgement from the deputy Nazi leader Rudolf Hess or the party secretary Martin Bormann.

But each and every one of them was date-stamped and filed away — the love letters, the marriage proposals, the awful patriotic poems, the postcards from Nazis on holiday in fascist Spain, the pleas to open this sporting club or repair that small town's sewers.

Most of this passionate idolatry took place during the years between 1933 when Hitler became Chancellor and 1939 when war broke out.

One woman wrote 200 letters of adoration, and carried on writing though not a single one of them received a reply.

They piled up in the Chancellery in Berlin and remained there remarkably undamaged as the battle for the German capital raged in April 1945.

Soldiers of the Red Army found the hoard and scooped it up along with everything else they could lay their hands on among the rubble of the Third Reich for dispatching back to Moscow.

More than 60 years later, they have come to light in the Russian military archives and are being published this week for the first time.

Pathetic, poignant, drooling, funny and sometimes just plain bonkers, they are an intimate insight into a nation that sold its collective soul to a madman.

Modern Germans often try to soften their history, to argue that they were a people misled and terrorised by a government of gangsters.

These letters of adulation add to the weight of recent research showing just how complicit the German people as a whole were in the Nazi regime.

For us today, brought up in a culture that rightly demonises Hitler, the coquettish love he inspired is so incongruous as to be almost shocking.

"My dear, my eternal, my lovely Adolf," shrieked one female admirer, "I would like to make you my little puppy."

Puppy? Wolf, perhaps — and not just for the aptness of the animal's rapacious nature but because that was the cover name Hitler went by in his early, underground political career and was a nickname used by his inner circle thereafter.

A young Berlin girl pleaded: "Dear Fuhrer! I really want to see you. I love you so much. Write to me. Really. Heartfelt greetings, Gina."

Nor was he the focus of just schoolgirl crushes. A mature woman threw herself at him.

"Everything in my life is lit by a great love, love for my Fuhrer, my teacher, that I sometimes want to die with your picture in front of me, so I will not ever see again anything which is not you."

And a little old lady from Munich thought so tenderly of him she left him a giant potted palm tree in her will.

Hess wrote back to her lawyer: "Herr Hitler would be delighted to accept the palm. Please arrange to have it collected."

Other gifts were less bulky. An aristocratic land owner sent pots of honey from Pomerania to boost the Fuhrer's energy intake, and a master barber offered to walk the 400 miles from his home town to Berlin to cut the Great Leader's hair.

Ambitious parents encouraged their children in these acts of adulation.

Little Heinz Hartmann wrote that he wanted "to give uncle Hitler something on his birthday but I don't have anything. Mummy had to write this as I am only four. Keep well, Hitler!"

Proud fathers like Rolf Menger announced the birth of "a small, strong Hitler youth. We have named him Adolf!"

A guard in a concentration camp was one of many inviting the Fuhrer to be godfather to a new-born Nazi.

An aide wrote that Hitler was so swamped with such requests that he would perform such a function for only the seventh and ninth sons of any family.

The stories told in these letters are more than amusing footnotes in the history of the last century.

They reflect the Fuhrer cult that was the emotional fuel powering Nazi Germany.

"A great man, a genius, a person sent to us from heaven," was how one teenager described Hitler, her idol, and her unequivocal admiration expressed the feelings of the vast majority of her compatriots.

There was a religious fervour for many.

"I have no God but you and no gospel but your teachings," a woman wrote.

A hotel porter expressed the same thought. "I believe in God, protector of heaven and earth, and that he has chosen Adolf Hitler as his son to relieve his people of the brood of Jews, the Holy Joes and their dynasties. Amen."

The Fuhrer cult reached its height at his 50th birthday celebrations in 1939 as he led a cavalcade of 50 limousines through the torch-lit, banner-decked streets of Berlin.

His presents, 1,000 in all, including marble statues, Meissen porcelain and oil paintings, were laid out on tables in a massive hall. Cakes arrived in the shape of tanks, along with chocolate tarts in the shape of swastikas.

Not surprisingly, the fan mail was onesided. It would be a brave or foolish person who wrote a letter of complaint. Once in power, the Nazis were ruthless in stamping out any whiff of dissent.

Communists and liberals alike quickly disappeared into labour camps.

When students in Munich dared to form an infant opposition group known grandly as "the White Rose", they got only as far as handing out a few protest leaflets before they were arrested and sent to the guillotine.

But, as in all totalitarian states, it was possible to stray over the line without knowing it.

A woman who sent silk handkerchiefs with the Fuhrer's face sewn into them was warned off.

Was Herr Hitler's likeness to be used for wiping noses?

Over-enthusiasm could also get you into trouble.

Several mothers wrote enclosing new lyrics for the Horst Wessel Song, the marching tune that was the Nazi anthem and rallying cry.

The song immortalised a stormtrooper shot dead by communist agitators in 1930.

Berlin housewife Olga Piennig turned it into a hymn to Hitler himself but Wessel was such an untouchable Nazi icon, her suggestion got an icy response from Hess.

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In one letter a four year old wrote he 'wanted to buy Uncle Hitler a present'

 

Her new verses were "not authorised" and were not to be used.

Frau Kaete Ilse von Korn revealed that she, too, had put new words to Horst Wessel, in which she had girls of the League of German Maidens singing instead of the original.

"I recommend you to refrain from further use of the text written by you," Bormann wrote to her in chilling bureaucratic tones.

But some took their courage in their hands and made almost cheeky requests.

Corporal Ernst Feit wanted a loan from Hitler. He was 26, recently married and eager to set up his own business.

"Could you be so kind as to give me a loan of 3,000 Reichsmarks as soon as possible?"

Surprisingly, Hitler did not dismiss the appeal out of hand.

The man was a Nazi Party stormtrooper, and he had credentials.

Dr Henrick Eberle, the German historian who found the letters in Moscow and has compiled the best of them into a book, believes that the money may have been found for the young man.

The most poignant letters in the collection come from Jews.

An optimistic Heinrich Herz thought he could reason with the dictator and begged him to stop the terror campaign against them.

"Very dear Reich Chancellor," he wrote, "the storm has broken over me like a lightning bolt from a clear sky.

"My customers have vanished. No authorities will deal with me, not even a private citizen will place an order with me."

It was 1934 and Hitler's thugs were beating Jews and smashing up their shops and businesses.

Herz asked Hitler to rein in the violence. "I call on you to speak a word calling for order, for without that we have no chance of life. If you can do this I will thank you a thousand times and a hundred thousand times."

But not even a thousand million thanks would change anything.

The round-ups and the arrests, the torture and massacres, were only just beginning. The letter was filed without answer.

Herz is believed to have died in a concentration camp.

Agonisingly, others begged the Fuhrer's forgiveness for being Jewish.

"Remove the undeserved stain of my wife's Jewish descent"' pleaded one Aryan male.

"I throw myself at your feet."

Another, a Nazi Party member, discovered to his horror that he had a Jewish grandmother.

"I knew nothing about this. Must I resign from the party? Must I give up everything?" he wrote, as if to an agony aunt.

Hitler's office instructed the local Nazi Party to help him research his background — which may have meant covering up the traces of a single Jewish relative.

Hitler's own background, however, was strictly off limits.

He ordered his secret policemen to seize any letters inquiring about his family in general or his niece Geli Raubal in particular.

Geli, before Eva Braun, was the only woman he loved and he took every measure to ensure that no one found find out about their affair, which ended in her pre-war suicide.

The Fuhrer cult exposed in these letters was to be crucial in the history of the Third Reich.

Hitler believed he had the utter devotion of the German people and by and large he did.

Knowing this turned a dictator into a megalomaniac. He went for broke, believing himself invincible. His armies mopped up Western Europe, then turned east at his command to take on the Soviet Union — a terrible error of judgment.

He over-reached himself.

The problem was, as Professor Ian Kershaw, his biographer, says, that Hitler lost any sense of his own limitations.

"The undiluted admiration and sycophancy that surrounded him at every turn led him to a calamitous over-estimation of his own abilities."

Each one of those fan letters would turn out to be a nail in his and his nation's coffin. His admirers might have imagined he was leading them "to undreamed of heights of greatness, towards the total triumph and final victory, to world peace and the benediction of all mankind", as one of them put it, but his ambitions were doomed as the world took sides against him.

But even as British and American bombers devastated Germany's cities and the Allies prepared the invasion to recapture Europe from him, the sycophancy went on.

In March 1944, though they knew the military realities, his field marshals, among them Rommel, sent Hitler a letter declaring their "unswerving loyalty to you, mein Fuhrer — we stand by all your works".

Right to the very end, there were those who clung to this misplaced faith. On his 56th birthday, celebrated in Berlin ten days before his suicide, 100 cards made it through to the besieged bunker.

But with his death — a gun to his own head rather than leading his troops, as he had promised — his hold on the German nation suddenly gave way.

The party zealots and Hitler Youth who had sworn to become "werewolves", to carry on a guerilla fight against the Allies, melted away into nothing.

The Fuhrer cult was over, and the archive of adoration, swept up by the victorious Russian army as it rampaged through the remains of the Reich, just a dead letter.

EXTRACTED from The Hitler Book, edited by Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, is published by John Murray on November 7 at £20.

[RICK8]

Yeah i read that in the national newspaper,it was rather shocking how people actually looked to the man as an idol as such...:o