With Hitler to the End

Heinz Linge worked with Adolf Hitler for a ten-year period from 1935 until the Führer’s death in the Berlin bunker in May 1945. He was one of the last to leave the bunker and was responsible for guarding the door while Hitler killed himself. During his years of service, Linge was responsible for all aspects of Hitler’s household and was constantly by his side. He claims that only Eva Braun stood closer to Hitler over these years. Here, Linge recounts the daily routine in Hitler’s household: his eating habits, his foibles, his preferences, his sense of humor, and his private life with Eva Braun. In fact, Linge believed Hitler’s closest companion was his dog Blondi. After the war Linge said in an interview, “It was easier for him to sign a death warrant for an officer on the front than to swallow bad news about the health of his dog.”

Linge also charts the changes in Hitler’s character during their time together and his fading health during the last years of the war. During his last days, Hitler’s right eye began to hurt intensely and Linge was responsible for administering cocaine drops to kill the pain. In a number of instances—such as with the Stauffenberg bomb plot of July 1944 — Linge gives an excellent eyewitness account of events. He also gives thumbnail profiles of the prominent members of Hitler’s “court”: Hess, Speer, Bormann and Ribbentrop amongst them. Though Linge held an SS rank, he claims not to have been a Nazi Party member. His profile of one of history’s worst demons is not blindly uncritical, but it is nonetheless affectionate. The Hitler that emerges is a multi-faceted individual: unpredictable and demanding, but not of an otherwise unpleasant nature.

• Title : With Hitler to the End
• ISBN-13: 9781602398047
• Author : Heinz Linge - Roger Moorhouse
• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
• Publication date: 01/09/2009

There is something creepy yet fascinating about these two memoirs by individuals who spent years working daily with Adolf Hitler. Schroeder began her association with Hitler in 1933, serving as one of his personal secretaries, while Linge became Hitler's valet in 1939. Nearly every day for years, they saw Hitler up close and personal, observing his quirks, charms, rages, brooding silences, unpredictability, and very strange work habits, which usually consisted of staying up most of the night and then sleeping into the late morning and not being functional until later in the day. Neither seems to have known much about the darkest side of Hitler's ambitions as he set about killing millions and destroying much of Europe — Schroeder declares no interest in politics. Instead, the reader is hooked into Hitler's seeming ordinariness, as the Führer takes his daily afternoon tea while chatting with his secretaries about art, language, and movies.

Linge, who was with Hitler to the very end, supposedly helping to burn his body, also provides accounts of those who surrounded Hitler (he seems to have liked Goebbels quite a bit). For German-reading scholars of Hitler and Nazism, this is all old news, since Linge's memoirs were originally published in 1980 and Schroeder's in 1985. The rest of us can now contemplate the remarkable picture that these books offer. VERDICT The scariest thing about these books is their showing that Hitler could be quite charming—a seemingly regular guy, or at least as regular as anyone who killed millions could ever be. Of interest to anyone seeking more insight into the everyday life of one of history's monsters.— Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib.,Ames

Turns out Der Fuhrer wasn't such a bad guy. So we learn from this unrepentant stiff-armed salute of a book by Hitler's valet. Linge, who died in 1980 after having served a few postwar years in the Gulag, did more than check Hitler's jacket for dandruff and shine his jackboots. He proudly writes that all of Hitler's servants were under his command. He is just as proud that he was also a loyal SS officer and a former student of civil engineering, making him a prime audience for Hitler's military speculations and grandiose dreams of becoming a world-renowned architect-the career path, we learn, that Hitler would have chosen had destiny not taken a hand.

Linge is observant. He writes that Hitler's first country house had a garden so small that the corpulent Hermann Goring threatened to crowd out other guests, and he wonders how Martin Bormann knew that Rudolf Hess had parachuted into England, a bit of intelligence that not even Hitler, it appears, possessed. Linge is also staunchly loyal to the Fuhrer, observing without apparent irony that anyone who was not ran the constant risk of disappearing into a concentration camp. Of modest interest to historians-though not news-is Hitler's unfulfilled desire to make peace with England, the better to march into Russia unimpeded, and his detestation of Franco, as when he said, "Had I known the true state of affairs I would not have used our aircraft to return to the Spanish aristocracy and the Catholic Church their medieval rights." A slight book in defense of Hitler-a rarity outside white-supremacist circles.

Heinz Linge was born in Bremen, Germany, in March 1913. He worked as Hitler’s valet until the Führer shot himself in 1945. He was arrested by the Red Army, which interrogated him about the circumstances of Hitler’s death. Linge was released from Soviet captivity in 1955. He died in Bremen in March 1980.

Roger Moorhouse is a leading expert on the Third Reich and is the author of Killing Hitler: The Third Reich and the Plots against the Führer.