Foreign News: Attila’s Cream Buns

In an age which should be accustomed to madmen and murderers, the personality of Adolf Hitler still provokes terrified attention. Last week, an able post-mortem of that personality was published in the New York Times Magazine by Major H. R. Trevor-Roper, a British intelligence officer who had investigated the Führer’s reported death.

Hitler had fancied himself in a dual role: as an artist destined to remake the world, and as an Attila or Genghis Khan destined to destroy it. Yet in his private life he always remained a drab petty bourgeois, who chose drab Eva Braun for his mistress, and somewhat embarrassedly concealed the fact for 15 years. Wrote Roper: “There is a somewhat macabre contrast between the revolutionary nihil ism of his doctrines . . . and the back ground of coziness and triviality from which they proceeded: teacups and cream buns, cuckoo clocks and Bavarian bric-a-brac.”

Most startling fact: Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, had been a mere quack. He made a large fortune out of his job, pumped vast amounts of narcotics, stimulants, aphrodisiacs or just plain colored water into Hitler, slowly undermining his bourgeois good health.