“In the midst of the deafening cacophony of exploding Soviet artillery shells, a pistol shot rang out in Adolf Hitler’s bunker complex,” writes Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge. “I did not hear it myself, but as the odour of the gun discharge drifted through the door frame, I knew that Hitler had shot himself.”
Linge started service as Hitler’s valet in 1935, only a couple years after the Austrian ideologue became Chancellor of Germany. Note that valet here doesn’t have the modern American meaning of a guy who parks your car at the hotel, but the older meaning of a personal attendant or manservant. Traditionally it is pronounced to rhyme with pallet.
There’s an old saying that “no man is a hero to his valet.” While others might see a prominent person as a grand and glorious figure, a personal servant gets to see all his mundane human weaknesses. To the masses he’s a hero, to his valet he’s the guy who sleeps in late, has an allergy to carrots, and passed out drunk in his study last Wednesday.
Something like this might apply to monsters as well as to heroes. In With Hitler to the End: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s Valet, Linge often describes the dictator in surprisingly human and mundane terms. The person the rest of us think of as a conqueror and exterminator Linge describes as something more like a talented but eccentric and temperamental boss.
Hitler’s Charisma
Hitler was a charismatic authority, in sociologist Max Weber’s sense of a leader who people follow because of a belief in his special character and abilities. Clearly one doesn’t rise from being a penniless nobody to supreme leader of a country without some sort of ability to inspire and sway other people. But it can be hard for many of us nowadays to perceive how this charisma worked. This is partly because we have a conditioned revulsion to Nazi terms and symbols, and partly because the charisma might be something only visible to a German living in the decades around the First World War.
(The late comedian Norm MacDonald had a bit about it.)
Linge’s narrative doesn’t necessarily communicate this charisma, but it does mention some aspects of Hitler he found impressive or admirable. For instance, Hitler appeared to be quite bright and very knowledgeable. The appearance was partly due to his extreme self-confidence: The force of his personality was such that even experts allowed themselves to be persuaded that Hitler was correct in matters on which they were better informed. But Hitler had also read a lot and had a keen memory. He would routinely expound on various topics in detail, and impressed Linge with his ability to recall specific facts and exactly where he had read them (often sending Linge to pull a volume from his library so he could recite the exact quotation to a houseguest). Linge himself had been a trainee civil engineer, and Hitler would talk with him about construction work in a way that left him “surprised at the depth of his knowledge in the details of artisan’s work.”