The Hitler I Knew by Otto Dietrich

Author:Otto Dietrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

Hitler’s official quarters in Berlin were in the Chancellery. His private residence was in Munich, on the second floor of No. 1 Prinzregentenplatz. In Berchtesgaden he had the Berghof, situated on the Obersalzberg at an altitude of 3,300 feet. During the war he lived in his various headquarters, to which the OKW followed him as it did when he went to any of his three residences. In addition to the special train, where he spent much of his time, he also had seven different field headquarters in the course of the war—five in the West and two in the East.

Until the outbreak of the war Hitler spent the greater part of every year traveling. His habit of being almost constantly on the go had developed out of his incessant activity as a speaker at political meetings during the early years. There was no real need for him to move about so. Rather, it was due to his inner restlessness, so that he constantly sought pretexts for moving from place to place. Up to 1939 Hitler was everywhere, and nowhere at home. His adjutants, in addition to working out the itineraries of his official trips and electoral campaigns, were kept constantly busy planning his private journeys. He covered hundreds of thousands of miles by automobile. It may be said that he felt a certain link with highways which later resulted in his vast program of road construction.

During the early years, when Hitler was not so well known in Germany, he often stopped his car on the highway to hand out small sums of money or packs of cigarettes—although later he became a fanatical opponent of smoking—to young hikers. On one of these trips, he encountered a man who was walking along in pouring rain, and stopped his car to give the stranger his own raincoat. Longish stops for picnic lunches amid the beauties of the landscape were a part of the enchantment of travel for Hitler. As his entourage grew in size, he would take along the steward of his Berlin household, who would have a special car equipped as a mobile kitchen. After his assumption of power Hitler’s cavalcade would be greeted by the well-known demonstrations of mass enthusiasm. In a Swabian village a butcher’s apprentice jumped square in front of the car, crying, “Over my dead body.” Hitler’s car was barely brought to a halt in front of the boy, whereupon the entire village swarmed around the Führer. In Heilbronn a girl jumped on the running board of the open car to give him a kiss in front of a crowd numbering thousands—a feat, incidentally, that an American girl almost duplicated during the Berlin Olympics.

In his tours through the Reich, Hitler touched at many places. Munich, Berchtesgaden, Berlin, Nuremberg, Weimar, Bayreuth, and Godesberg, and later Linz and Vienna, were his favorite cities, to rank them according to the frequency of his visits. There were years in which he did not remain at any one place or at any one

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