hitler hugs a little gurl wat wawt

December 29, 2007 (Saturday)
Windsor (England)

IN 1962, after my first book The Destruction of Dresden was ready for publication, my London publisher asked me what I would write next. I said that I planned to use the same methods -- direct archival research, and meeting personal sources at first-hand -- that I had used for Dresden, to discover the truth about Adolf Hitler.

Forty-five years have passed since that naive conversation. The years did not roll past without their setbacks and pain: it has been a long journey, and I still cannot claim that I have unearthed the whole story about this man who shaped the twentieth century, if not his millennium.

Back in the 1960s, when I first started using the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, I came across the records of Hitler's private chancellery -- which handled his personal correspondence after he came to power. I selected about a hundred pages for microfilming, the only way of copying in those days, and bound the resulting prints into a blue volume -- it is, or was, in one of the 170 boxes that the authorities returned to me from my archives on October 16.

I say was, because Tobias Jersak of Stuttgart university (left), the history "expert" appointed by Professor Deborah Lipstadt to evaluate my files during her later abandoned High Court claim to seize possession of them herself, reported that much of them was "extremely valuable" (his words); so valuable in fact that he was caught actually leaving the Trustee's warehouse with items he had filched from my collection. (The whole of my "extremely valuable" archive box No. 51, "Judenfrage," was certainly in the warehouse when he walked in in November 2003, and it is now, uh, missing.)

Left: Lipstadt's historican expert Dr Tobias Jersak, of the University of
Stuttgart: a thief with a degree in kicking people when he thinks they're down

TO continue: I have not located that blue volume, but I do recall over the years that the files contained a puzzling letter written to "Uncle Adolf" in a rounded, childish hand by "Bernile" -- and that Adolf had taken unusual pains to answer it in person. Normally his private chancellery sent back the kind of letter that a reader sent me last month (below) to evaluate (it was clearly genuine -- a polite refusal to supply an autograph, as the Führer and Reich Chancellor no longer did so).

I had always known that Hitler enjoyed meeting his people -- that most afternoons in peacetime, a crowd of villagers and tourists would wind its way up the hillside to his home (see the picture above), to file past him and wave: he stood in the shade of a tree planted overnight for him by Martin Bormann, and waved back as their camera shutters clicked -- just as our beloved national leaders like Bush, Blair, and Brown would no doubt stand and wave, if the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, the police, the armourplate and bullet proof glass did not get in the blasted way.

Later I kept finding a touching photo of Hitler with an infant girl -- he liked children, and not just when the camera lenses were around -- and his private staff identified her to me, with indulgent smiles, as a girl from the city, Bernile Nienau, who was always a welcome visitor with her mother at his mountainside home. Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf's court photographer, confirms the identity in his 1955 memoirs, Adolf Hitler Was My Friend.

Hitler called her his "little sweetheart". She featured in many of the photos and picture postcards that Hoffmann sold at that time.

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End of story? Not quite.

Last week I had a package from Don B., who lives in darkest Pennsylvania. I last saw him on October 3, 2000 -- I drove up from Washington DC to see his extraordinary collection of Heinrich Himmler stuff, about which readers will find more in my forthcoming biography of the Reichsführer.

Don has just acquired the papers of Bernile Nienau's mother, and it contains the most extraordinary pictures, sent by Hitler and suitably embellished, to the mother and daughter -- about whom I shall reserve the most significant fact until last. Rosa Bernile Nienau -- she did not use her first name -- and her mother visited Hitler from 1932 until 1938. Adolf and Bernile shared the same birthday, April 20.

"The first photo in the original Hoffmann folder," writes Don, "is addressed to Rosa's mother, Frau K. Nienau, Doctor's widow, of Munich, Laimer Strasse 31, ground floor". The photo was taken in 1933 and has Hitlers favorite flower the Edelweiss attached to it. It has a hand dedication by Hitler which reads: Der lieben und braven Rosa Nienau, Adolf Hitler, München, den 16/ Juni 1933 (To my darling and good Rosa Nienau, Munich, June 16, 1933. Adolf Hitler). [Click signature-area for enlargement]

Hitler glued Edelweiss, white heather, to two of the photos, and the flora are still adhering to the pictures in the frames that Don has acquired. They have the original Heinrich Hoffmann imprints on the back.

In 1936 they visited the Berghof, and Hitler gave her a photograph taken of their first visit four years earlier, to the then "Haus Wachenfeld", in 1932. It also has Edelweiss attached to it. This time Hitler's dedication reads: Der lieben Gretele, Adolf Hitler, Obersalzberg 1936 -- To the darling Gretel. Adolf Hitler, Obersalzberg, 1936, a possible reference to the Hansl and Gretl story.

The other picture acquired by Don is a large photo with no flowers attached signed in ink just "Adolf Hitler" .