Hitler's Last Witness by Rochus Misch Read Free Book Online

had excellent social manners.
    Hitler was ‘zabel-ing’ again. We invented the verb for the local Zabel Sanatorium, named after Professor Werner Zabel, which prepared Hitler’s diet. He stuck to his regimen with an iron will. Nothing and nobody could deflect him from his oatmeal gruel and the repellent rest, which he himself decreed for his stomach problems. I myself – no stranger to such problems – did not have this discipline. I just needed a proper diet.
    Apart from the special Zabel cures, Hitler’s dietary plan was not very varied. He employed his own diet-cook. In 1944, there was a lot of interest in Marlene von Exner, a rather austere-looking but attractive young woman of my age. Hitler had got her from Antonescu after he told Hitler on a visit that only this Viennese woman had been able control his own stomach problems. Frau von Exner then replaced Hitler’s former female cook, Scharfitzel, whom house administrator Kannenberg had dismissed one day on suspicion of misappropriating food supplies. Because food had long been on ration, Scharfitzel’s target had been the butter. Well yes, even I helped myself now and again from the large tub with iced water in which many small lumps of butter floated, but it equalled itself out, because I supplied Hitler with apples. One day I had received a basket of apples from my Aunt Sofia, but had to go back to the Reich Chancellery. Aunt Sofia was working at that time in a tree-improvement business. When I left the apples briefly in the kitchen, the cook Herr Lange came running up delighted: ‘Just leave them here.’ From then until late in the war, I was therefore Hitler’s apple supplier. At the end of the war there was no fresh fruit to be had anywhere.
    Shortly after the dismissal of Frau Scharfitzel, Hitler ordered that at every meal only two pats of butter were to be distributed at each place. Herr Lange later ran his own restaurant – the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. When I visited him long after the war with my wife, he remembered immediately: ‘Liver with onions!’ Yes, that was my favourite dish, and Lange prepared it for me that evening in celebration of our reunion.
    The diet-cook Frau von Exner was, as mentioned, a very beautiful woman. That had not escaped Martin Bormann. The nickname ‘The Buck Bormann’ had not come about by chance. Anyway, Bormann went all out for Frau von Exner, but failed utterly. When she left in 1944, we of the bodyguard thought it must have had something to do with these attempts to woo her. It was said that Frau von Exner had requested permission to leave and that could only have been caused by the pressure. She did not have proof of Aryan ancestry, but her departure had nothing to do with that. [2] In any case, after the termination of her employment as cook, she lived for several months at the Reich Chancellery. I often reflected later on whether I had ever noticed that Hitler hated Jews. Then I remembered Frau von Exner – and did not know the right answer.
    1 The Führerbau in Arcis-Strasse was built between 1933 and 1937 by Paul Ludwig Troost and served as Adolf Hitler’s reception building. Among other things, the 1938 Munich Agreement was signed there. Today, it is a music school.
    2 According to Traudl Junge, the racial origin of Frau von Exner’s grandmother could not be established because she had been a foundling. Hitler knew this when he employed her. Finally, it had come to light that she had Jewish ancestry. Traudl Junge remembered that Hitler had then had a talk with Marlene von Exner in which he expressed his regret at having to release her, and in which he promised to Aryanise her whole family. Junge went onto say that Martin Bormann received instructions to deal with it and he accepted this only reluctantly ‘for he had had no luck in his attempts to win the charming Viennese girl and could never forgive her for it.’ See Traudl Junge,