When in Munich, he still goes to the quiet little Osteria-Bavaria Restaurant, which he has used for years, and occasionally he drops in for Jause at the Carlton tearoom, which is the nicest in town. When he eats a meal at the elegant Vier Jahreszeiten Hotel, it’s in the modest back room, not in its Walterspiel restaurant. The Walterspiel brothers, two of the greatest gourmets of Europe, are old friends of his, and concocted Hitler’s onion-soup recipe especially for him. When in Nürnberg, Hitler still stops at the second-rate Deutscher Hof, which was grandeur for him in the old days and which he thinks today is grand enough. He likes places he’s familiar with, where people know his habits and let him alone. With his shadows, the elegant Brückner and the lowly Schaub, he often goes in Berlin to the Kaiserhof in the afternoon for a glass of milk and his favorite Linzertorte, a walnut cake. He has a sweet tooth.
The few Chancellery palace formal dinners Hitler gives are stiff affairs with roses, candles, and the menu written out. While General Göring, when he gives a Berlin dinner, calls in Horcher’s restaurant, rival of Paris’s Larue as the finest traiteurs left in Europe, Hitler’s catering is done in the house. Guests are drawn from the Party men and their lucky wives, and from the Kulturkammern, or the Nazi so-called intellectual world; i.e., the committees on censorship, press, propaganda, and the graphic arts, in addition to folk-art organizers, opera-house functionaries, and occasional state actresses or soprani in unshakably respectable standing. Hitler still has a provincial’s naïve admiration for the Thespian and prima-donna types. As entertainment after dinner, he usually shows movies with a projection machine he’s had installed in the palace. He’s crazy about films, especially when historical, sees all the news weeklies of himself, and occasional earnest foreign films, and is apt to sit on the floor in the dark when they are being shown. When he takes a fancy to a picture, he has it repeated and invites those he thinks it should interest; he is sincere about trying to get the right films and guests together. When he discovered the Schubert “Unfinished Symphony” movie, he gave a party to bring it and Wilhelm Furtwängler together. But in spite of these occasions, Hitler, like all people who have no talent for it, has never had time for a good time.
He also has no gift for intimacy. Neither his enemies nor his best friends (who perhaps tried even harder) have been able to bring forward any mistress out of his past. Upper-class women were among his first sympathizers at a time when housemaids thought him a freak. To these same housemaids he is now a hero and der schöne Adolf, and his photo hangs over their washbowls. Like many small, dominant men, when he chooses he has a talkative charm with women; even in the parlor, he has the orator’s instinct for adapting his conversation to his listener. He loves to laugh in company, enjoys obvious jokes, and occasionally makes solemnly funny remarks. For a self-conscious man, easily flustered by memory of his early, burning deficiencies and enviously impressed by diplomas and social distinctions, he has learned in three years of power to forget himself somewhat and has gained a relative ease of manner. When in company, he long ago added to his provincial politeness the more worldly gesture of kissing the ladies’ hands as greeting, though among the non-aristocrats the custom is now usually derided as anti-Nazi. Conversation excites him. In anything approaching serious talk, his sapphire-blue eyes, which are his only good feature, brighten, glow heavily as if words fanned them. His principal gesture is a shrug of the shoulders. If he’s really interested, he is likely to walk up and down the room, and in arguments he becomes violent.
Years ago, when young and unsuccessful, his rather heavy political conversation was delivered with such complete concentration on his topic that it attracted older or intellectual women who had learned patience. He made his worldly début as a thin, neat unknown, in the famous Munich salon of Frau Katherine Heine Hanfstaengl, whose mother was a Sedgwick of New York. For the past fifteen years Hitler’s greatest woman friend has been Frau Victoria von Dirksen, formerly a fashionable hostess in her Margaretenstrasse mansion in Berlin, and now stepmother of the German ambassador at Moscow and widow of the magnate who helped to build the Berlin Untergrund. It was in her salon that the secret, Frau Hermine Hohenzollern-Hitler meeting took place when the question arose of which should be presented to which—the second wife of the ex-Kaiser of the former German Empire to the Nazi Führer of Germany’s Third Reich, or vice versa. (Hitler tactfully kissed the lady’s hand before anyone could introduce either, and then tactlessly refused her plea that her exiled husband be allowed easier terms from the land he’d once ruled.) Frau von Dirksen gave most of her late husband’s fortune to promoting Hitler’s career. Their friendship has not been interrupted by his success or by her recent quarrels with his Party. When in Berlin, he still takes tea with her every fortnight.
Hitler’s less wealthy feminine friends include a small, distinguished gallery which anyone could know about and most of upper-class Germany does. He has been photographed at official functions with Frau Winifred Wagner, widow of Richard Wagner’s son, Siegfried. Having succumbed to Wagnerism and “Lohengrin” at the age of twelve, when poor and Austrian, Hitler could not, as later leader of Germany, resist the meeting with Frau Wagner. There was talk of their marrying, but it was a canard instituted by the foreign press. Friends now feel that celibacy is part of Hitler’s natural career. Frau Wagner was an early Nazi devotee. She was not rich, but on the strength of her name she persuaded others to give fortunes to the Party. Leni Riefenstahl, former cinema star, is another well-known German woman whom Hitler knows. He confided to her the editing, and worked with her over the cutting, of his 1934 Nazi propaganda film, “Der Triumph des Willens,” which he refused to show publicly outside of Germany, since, as he himself said, “national fervor cannot be exported.” He still thinks her competent to handle enthusiasm for home consumption, and she will officially photograph the forthcoming Berlin Olympic Games, as she did last summer’s Nazi Nürnberg Congress. (The latter film was recently shown in Berlin under the title “Tag der Freiheit.”) At the tremendous, opening Shovel Parade of the Arbeitsdienst, she was not only the sole motion-picture director, she was also the only woman on the great parade field—one white linen skirt moving freely before fifty-four thousand green-woollen, mechanical men, one professional woman on her job, and so rare a sight in masculinized Germany today that among the quarter-million spectators assembled, there wasn’t a person who didn’t know who she was. She is unique, and the white-skirted figure couldn’t have been anybody else.
Other exceptional figures commented on in Hitler’s entourage are two English women, Lord Redesdale’s daughters, the Honourable Mrs. Bryan Guinness, who in London had already been converted to Sir Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirt Fascism, and her younger sister, the Honourable Unity Mitford. Both sisters are blonde, handsome, speak excellent German, and use the Nazi salute. The younger is Hitler’s favorite, because more devoted to the German cause. She and he frequently lunch together at the Osteria restaurant whenever he’s in Munich, as English, rather than German papers, point out. Another admiration of Hitler’s is Frau Viorica Ursuleac, dramatic soprano of the Unter den Linden Opera, who moved from Dresden to Berlin when the Viennese director Clemens Krauss became the more complacent successor to Furtwängler, after the latter’s insistence that Jews were also musicians.