THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER
by ROBERT PAYNE
623 pages. Praeger. $12.95.
The Third Reich, Adolf Hitler promised, would last a thousand years. Those who deal in historical ironies have long enjoyed pointing out that it lasted only twelve. Or did it? Once again, a spate of new books on Hitler and his era are setting bookstore shelves abloom with the inevitable swastikas and Chaplinesque mustaches. The 1,000-book Reich—recollected in tranquillity—must surely be near at hand.
The most ballyhooed of the new arrivals is Robert Payne's pop biography, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler. Farrar, Straus & Giroux has reissued Hitler's Secret Conversations ($19), the Führer's wartime table talk (from Volkswagens to the Virgin Birth) that all Hitler biographers have acknowledged as an invaluable source. Among the others, just published or to come, are books ranging from the thoughtful to the frivolous. Helmut von Moltke (St. Martin's Press; $16.95) introduces a Roman Catholic nobleman who triples as an international lawyer and anti-Hitler leader, and who, like Protestant Dietrich Bonhoeffer, paid for his resistance with his life. Without overplaying their hand, Authors Michael Balfour and Julian Frisby make Von Moltke something of a prophet, so concerned with disturbing trends toward materialism and impersonal technocracy that he remains a relevant critic today.
Slothful. There is also more in the endless procession of campaign histories, represented this season by a capable but rather specialized volume, Nazi Victory: Crete 1941. And of course, one genuine clunker, priced at $6.95, from Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. Called Hitler's Last Days, it is the brief but mesmerizingly dull memoir of a minor staff officer named Gerhard Boldt, who, as it turns out, constructs Hitler's very last days from already published sources—since he was not there.
Payne, to his credit, does something more than that. A relentless biographer (Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Gandhi), he tackled his present subject without benefit of any fresh interviewing, but with the kind of wide-eyed zest that produces a sort of Boy's Life of Genghis Khan. There goes the youthful, effervescent Adolf trotting off to school at the local Benedictine Abbey at Lambach and passing by an old abbot's pet insignia, the swastika.* Here he comes, voraciously reading the latest sauerkraut western by Bavarian Author Karl May, whose genocidal hero Old Shatterhand was busy exterminating the insidious "Ogellelah" Indians. From Payne's researches in the New York Public Library come telling excerpts from the unpublished memoirs of Hitler's sister-in-law, Bridget Elizabeth Hitler, especially tantalizing glimpses of the impoverished, slothful future Führer in his early 20s, frittering away six months in Bridget's Liverpool home.