Letters from the War Period – Part I
The actor Eugen Rex and his wife Helene, from Berlin, wrote to thank God that Hitler had survived the assassination attempt. He died in 1943; what happened to his wife Helene is not known.
My Leader!
Together with the entire German people I would like to express my most sincere good wishes on the occasion of your miraculous salvation.
We thank God and beg him to keep you in good health and strength for us for a long time.
With a German salute
your Party comrades
Eugen Rex & wife
Hitler’s private office replied on 22 November 1939.
Dear Mr Rex!
The Leader wants to express his sincere thanks to you and your spouse for your concern and for the good wishes that you have communicated to him on the occasion of the Munich attack.
With a German salute
Albert Bormann
Good wishes for the New Year were received from the writer Hanns Johst, who on 29 December 1939 sent his congratulations.
My Leader!
The enormous gravity of this time obligates me to thank you for the determination that you have put into every heart devoted to you. Our love for you makes every task easy and makes everything done for you a song of praise. The truth is that for all of us you have become Germany, and so this is our wish and prayer at this turn of the New Year: may heaven bless your creative power, so that in 1940 you may achieve your work: the Great Reich!
I would not be your poet and visionary, my Leader, if I did not already see this.
But veneration puts the courage of prophecy before the humility of the earnest inner wish!
All the best from your obedient
Stormtrooper Hanns Johst
Adolf Hitler did read the letter from his former orderly Max Wünsche. Wünsche, who had in the meantime become a company leader in Hitler’s personal bodyguard regiment, wrote on 31 March 1939 to the then Head Adjutant Brückner to report on the real facts of the preparation for the war against France. Brückner had the letter retyped on the ‘Leader’s typewriter’ - a typewriter with oversize letters to counter Hitler’s extreme far-sightedness. Brückner then presented it to Hitler.
Esteemed: Lieutenant General [of the SS]!
Since I assumed that at Easter you would in any case be very busy dealing with the mail, I have waited until today to send you my Easter greetings. They are no less sincere on that account, and even though they are belated, I ask that you communicate them to all the gentlemen and ladies in the Adjutant’s office.
For me, Easter coincided with my recovery from a terrific cold. In the past weeks we have often travelled over and also in the Ems river, and in doing so have gotten somewhat damp, and so I also caught cold. But after Easter we merrily continued and even had to submit to several inspections. In such matters Wünsche is always the leader of the advance party (15th motorcycle company, armoured reconnaissance unit, infantry artillery unit, anti-tank unit and sapper unit, and also a mobile radio), that’s the make-up of this bunch. It is an incredible pleasure to work with such a group, and also with our young men, who are all simply splendid fellows. So we have not been asleep, but rather have been preparing everything for the attack, and we now believe we are ready for any assignment. Although we are very comfortable in our present quarters, and the local population, while very Catholic, are exceptionally helpful to us, we are nevertheless waiting with great excitement for the day when the attack will finally begin. I am particularly impatient, I never imagined it would be so long. But now I hope that the Leader gives me enough time to prove myself.
How is the Leader? I would have liked to write to him, but I know that he has so much to read every day that I did not want to burden him with my letters as well. But I may ask you to tell the Leader that I am well and that I will try, as the leader of a company of his regiment, to do my best; and therefore I ask for as much time as is necessary for the mission. We are all very confident, whether officers, non-coms, or privates, and the Leader can be sure that his regiment will never disappoint him. In the same vein I ask that you too, Lieutenant General, accept my belated Easter greetings, and remain
Your Max Wünsche
SS-First Lieutenant
Wünsche rose in the armed wing of the SS, the Waffen-SS, to become commander of the Hitler Youth tank division. When he married, Hitler gave him a cheque for over 10,000 marks.
Brückner sent his reply on 5 April 1940 to the military postal number 33 752.
Dear Wünsche!
Unfortunately, I received your letter of 31 March belatedly, also as a result of sickness. I, too, lay doubled up in bed for two weeks with a stupid case of phlebitis (a sign of old age!). Now I am hobbling about in the Chancellor’s Office part-time again, to the annoyance of others and with no great joy to me! But I also hope that I will get over this sad episode of ‘springtime’ pneumonia.
I was very happy to hear that you and your young men are well.
The Leader read your letter. He often asks about you, and that is why I ask you to report on your experiences from time to time.
Schaub had to undergo a goiter operation that was exceptionally painful. But now he is doing better, and he will show up in a fortnight.
With all good wishes for you and your comrades and
Hail Hitler!
Your Brückner
Head of the Leader’s Personal Adjutants’ Office
The Slovakian People’s Party in Bratislava (Pressburg) collected signatures. In the Party offices bureaucrats set out sheets of paper that Hitler-admirers could sign. The lists, bearing more than twenty thousand names, were bound in a book and sent to the Chancellor’s Office. This homage was highly official, and the first pages of the book were filled with organizations’ stamps. Only much further on were the lists of signatures finally found.
A large-format certificate, sumptuously produced and decorated with swastikas and oak leaves, was received from Melk in lower Austria.
For our Leader and supreme master builder’s fifty-first birthday we ask the Almighty’s eternal blessing!
May his noble life goal fully succeed to the benefit of the whole German people!
For the plant manager & the workforce
of the
[stamp] Radebeule Basalt Works
Enterprise for concrete construction and road repair, successor
Anton Kosta, Vienna
On his next birthday, 20 April 1941, Adolf Hitler received a very interesting poem of homage, though the cover letter has been lost. The unknown author sent congratulations on the occasion of ‘Our beloved Leader’s birthday! War year 1941’, and drew a large swastika in the upper corner.
If every country had such a leader,
as Providence has given us,
How nice it would be in this world,
how happy and content all would be!
Wars would no longer need to rage,
everyone would protect his land from them.
And trade and change ever gloriously bloom:
for every leader would seek that goal:
They would sit peacefully at green tables,
and with pure zeal rack their brains
to quickly solve problems, even the hardest,
not with weapons, no, with good, not evil;
and pointless blood need then no longer flow,
here everyone could enjoy his bit of life
For this life is short, comes only once, and lies
in God’s hand!
Must it be taken before its time and by force
by the enemy’s hand?
Yes, even the most pious cannot live in peace,
When it does not please the evil neighbour.
So it has always been, and so it still is today
in this otherwise so beautiful world.
But if every country had such a leader
as Providence has given us,
then there’d be no more war in this world,
we would have only the finest peace!!!
But this wish, I have to admit, seems even to me a dream,
for its fulfilment would be too beautiful, I think I could hardly
imagine it
But still I must think of the beautiful word
and hope that Providence will yet guide us
THAT THE WHOLE WORLD WILL STILL
BE HEALED BY GERMAN NATURE!!!
We thank our LORD GOD that he has given us the Leader,
stands ever at his side and guides his step himself!
Some may have already considered in a quiet moment
How the Leader might have also made his life easy!
Some would have already bent down after a short battle
and thrown in the towel, would have preferred
perhaps to work as a writer in some nice quiet place
wholly undisturbed
and lead his life there as comfortably as possible,
but our Leader set himself a higher goal, the
very highest goal,
and chose a path that was very hard and demanded
much from him:
He fought, suffered and struggled and struggles still today for
our nation!!!
For that the dear LORD himself gave him his well-deserved
reward!
Has it ever already occurred in history,
has it ever been already heard or read anywhere,
that a soldier, once nameless, almost unknown,
was named leader of a great empire?
Thus GOD crowned his fighting and his struggling
and also helps subdue the enemy today!
For dear GOD likes to help whoever helps himself:
protects, preserves, shelters him, keeps not far from him!
In fighting for us the Leader often made his life very hard,
And for that today the whole people stands behind him like a
wall:
Millions of hearts reaffirm once again today their loyalty in great
love and gratitude to the Leader!
Millions of hearts are prepared to make any sacrifice for the
Leader!
The bravest soldiers with the best leadership of all stand at his
side.
Millions of hearts hail today their beloved Leader and wish
with all their hearts that he might soon have his well-deserved
rest
after this war forced upon us by the enemy
with a victory granted us by the dear LORD!!!
So at the centre of this day today stands our great request:
May GOD protect our beloved Leader here in our midst!
Grant the brilliant general constant health,
that highest earthly good,
continue to give him
strong willpower,
decisiveness,
endurance, and courage,
fulfil his wishes for the future of Germany
for peace with nations here in this world
and help prevent the one who rejected the hand of peace, who
always wanted war, from resisting too much longer!
Telegrams were received from National-Socialist Party leaders, including this one:
Sincerest wishes for happiness and success in the New Year.
Georg Joel, deputy Regional Leader
On 21 April 1941 Joel received the standard answer:
For the good wishes you sent me on the occasion of my birthday, I offer you my sincerest thanks.
Adolf Hitler
Among the good wishes sent by artists and writers that of Hanns Johst once again stands out. He sent his greetings from Starnberg in Bavaria to the Leader’s headquarters.
With my heartfelt personal wishes for your well-being I send you, my Leader, a birthday homage from all those working on the German book. Never in the course of our history were poets and scientists, publishers, booksellers, and printers more united in loyal sentiments than they are today.
Hail Hitler,
ever your obedient and devoted
Hanns Johst
Hitler answered the state councillor and SS Group Leader on 21 April:
For the good wishes that you sent me on the occasion of my birthday, on your own behalf and on that of all those working on the German book, I offer you my sincerest thanks.
Hitler did still continue to receive some letters from individuals. One was Dagmar Dassel, a woman living in Berlin. There are no letters of reply from Hitler’s private office. It is more than probable that Dassel never received any mail from the centre of power. She sent enthusiastic, long, and verbose letters to Hitler, amounting to more than 250 pages in all.
On Sunday, 11 May 1941, she added to her letter a complementary report entitled ‘My path to the culminating splendour to the divine realm of a high and noble humanity.’ This letter is informative and is cited here in full, not because it expresses an exceptional veneration, but rather because it refers to Hitler’s speech in the Berlin Sports Palace, where he spoke to 6,000 officer candidates. On 4 May 1941, Dassel could write only ‘with an overflowing grateful, happy, and proud heart’:
My Leader - today I can only once again emphasize my steadfast - unchanging - inalterable loyalty and love: my whole life - thoughts and feelings belongs to you - my Leader - my most beloved - best – noblest - greatest - most splendid - unique most brilliant man - the prayed for and divinely sent - only to you - my Leader - only to your splendid work of salvation and peace - only to you, the chosen - anointed - crowned and beloved child of God - God’s emissary of peace - the executor of God’s will on earth - to your greater German people and Reich - now in particular to your splendid heroic Army - to you - my Leader - the first soldier and the supreme commander of this splendid Army - to the most brilliant and greatest general and strategist of all times - to the most brilliant statesman - to the greatest German - only to you - my Leader - the most sublime hero - the greatest victor in time and eternity - only to you - my Leader - to the pure and inner man - do I ceaselessly work, watch and pray in silence - with a pure heart - joyful in love for you and your great German people and Reich for God’s protection and blessing - my soul surrounds you and thanks your splendid heroes - the Army on all your victorious campaigns with the armour of divine love - and also your loyal allies until the final victory - my soul rejoices without cease.
My Leader!
Mrs Dagmar Dassel
Dassel, who was obviously seriously ill, died in April 1941. She sent her farewell letter to Hitler, telling him that she believed in him ‘in unchanging fidelity and love of the sacred future’.
Adolf Hitler also continued to receive requests, including some from the nobility. Prince Friedrich, the head of the house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringer, which was related to the former ruling house of Prussia, wrote to Hitler’s office on laid paper decorated with a stamped and gilded crown in keeping with his status. The disempowered prince sent his letter on Christmas Eve 1941 to Otto Meissner, the head of the President’s Office, probably because of some old connection. Meissner seemed to be the right man to fulfil a private wish.
Dear State Secretary!
I request that the enclosed sealed letter to the Leader be forwarded to the highest level.
On the occasion of the New Year, I ask you to accept my most sincere and heartfelt good wishes.
May the New Year be a good and happy one for you and your family, and also for your position, which involves great responsibility.
At the conclusion of the old year, I wish to express my very special gratitude for the many favours and counsels that you have been so kind as to give me.
With the assurance of my particular esteem, I remain as always, with Hail Hitler,
Your devoted
Friedrich
Prince zu Hohenzollem
Meissner forwarded the enclosure, the letter so expressly characterized as ‘sealed’, to Hitler. The latter dealt with it with surprising speed and had the notoriously underemployed Meissner answer it. His letter, with the letterhead ‘State Secretary and Head of the President’s Office of the Leader and Reich Chancellor’, is dated 29 December 1941 and clearly reflects the spiritual ancestry of this bureaucrat, who had already held office under the Republic:
Your Royal Highness!
I am honoured to confirm the reception of your letter of the 24th December as well as the letter to the Leader dated the same day. The Leader has asked me to express his sincere thanks for best wishes you sent him for the New Year.
With regard to your request that your son-in-law, Count Heinrich zu Waldburg-Wolfegg, be promoted to Reserve Officer, I have forwarded, as ordered, your letter to the Leader to the army personnel office, Berlin, for the relevant examination and processing.
For the good wishes for the New Year you have addressed to me personally, I most respectfully thank your Royal Highness; I reply with my best wishes for a good and happy new year.
Hail Hitler
Your Royal Highness’s
most respectfully devoted
Dr Meissner
In the summer of 1941 several congratulatory telegrams from high ecclesiastical officials were presented to Hitler. On 28 June, 1941, one week after the attack on the Soviet Union was launched, the bishop of Jaroslaw in occupied Poland sent the following telegram to the Leader’s headquarters.
Please inform the Leader of the German people of the following event:
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic clergy in the General Government communicates to the Leader its feeling of gratitude for the battle against the enemy of Christianity and Christian culture and asks almighty God’s heavenly blessing on him in this battle.
The Catholic bishop in Jaroslaw
Representatives from the German Evangelical Church wrote to Hitler on 30 June 1941:
To the Leader, Leader Headquarters
The ecclesiastical executive council of the German Evangelical Church, which has assembled for the first time since the beginning of the decisive battle in the East, once again assures you, my Leader, of the inalterable loyalty and devotion of the whole of evangelical Christianity in the Reich in these breathtakingly eventful times. You have, my Leader, averted the Bolshevist peril in our own land and now call upon our people and the peoples of Europe to wage the decisive battle against the mortal enemy of all order and all Western Christian culture. The German people, and with it all its Christian members, thank you for this act of yours. The fact that British policy now also openly serves Bolshevism as its accomplice finally makes it clear that it is concerned not with Christianity, but solely with the destruction of the German people.
May Almighty God stand by you and by our people, so that we can succeed against the twofold enemy with the eventual victory to which we must devote all our will and action. At this time the German Evangelical Church recalls the Baltic Evangelical martyrs of 1918. It recalls the unspeakable suffering that Bolshevism has inflicted on the people of its own sphere of power and seeks to inflict on all other nations, and, with all its prayers, it stands by you and by our incomparable soldiers, who are now engaged in eliminating the heart of the plague through such powerful blows, so that a new order might emerge under your leader [ship] throughout Europe and so that all internal subversion, all defilement of the most holy, all desecration of freedom of religion might be put to an end.
The Ecclesiastical Executive Council
of the German Evangelical Church
Maharens, Schultz, Hymmen
The Evangelical Free Church declared its approval on 12 July 1941.
To the Leader and Reich Chancellor in the Leader’s Headquarters
The union of Evangelical free Churches sends you, my Leader, its heartiest congratulations on the magnificent victory in the East, in the certainty that you, as God’s instrument, are thereby finally breaking the power of Bolshevism, which is hostile to God and to Christianity, and so ensuring not only the future of our beloved German Fatherland, but also a new order in Europe. We assure you once again of our intercession and unreserved devotion.
Director Paul Schmidt
Bishop Meile
The telegram from the Holy Ascension monastery in Pochaev (Ukraine) arrived in the Chancellor’s Office on 25 August 1941.
The bishops assembled on Mt Pochaev, in the Temple of the Ukrainian people in Volhynia, congratulate Adolf Hitler and his victorious Army on the occasion of the liberation from a world deprived of God by the Bolsheviks.
The ecclesiastical assembly of Ukraine, with its faithful population, asks in belief and love the great God to grant the creator of the great German Reich, Adolf Hitler, who has the divine gift of directing the future of peoples along good paths, a long and happy life.
We bishops once again thank our liberator Adolf Hitler and his victorious Wehrmacht.
Simon, Archbishop of Ostrog Panteleimen,
Bishop of Lemberg Benjamin,
Bishop of Vladimir in Volhynia
And on 23 September 1941 a telegram came from Chelm (Ukrainian Cholm) in the General Government that was addressed to:
The Leader of the German nation, Adolf Hitler, Berlin
My clergy and thousands of believers, assembled for the Cathedral celebration in Chelm, unite with me in sending the great Leader Adolf Hitler and his unconquerable Wehrmacht the most heartfelt thanks for the liberation of the Ukrainian capital Kiev from godless domination. We all pray most warmly that the Lord God might with his strong hand help the Leader and his army to establish peace and order all over the East.
Archbishop Herion
Although Adolf Hitler celebrated his birthday in 1942 with a large congratulatory reception, Regional Leaders and other National-Socialist officials were not invited. Hitler shunned most of his National Socialist colleagues, including only his innermost circle. German officers and politicians from subjugated or allied states were, however, invited to the Leader’s headquarters in the Wolfs Lair, Hitler’s eastern front military headquarters. It was built during the planning stages of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The Führer left for the last time in autumn 1944.
In the files of Hitler’s private office there was also a Leitz file box with the title “The Twelve Labours of Hercules - Dedicated to his Excellency Mr Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler on 20 April 1942”. An architect, Heinrich Ritter from Markgröningen in Baden- Württemberg, southern Germany, had written the poem of homage to Hitler in the ‘war year 1941’. Ritter was a convinced National Socialist who was educated in classics. The original classic poem describes a series of penitential acts undertaken by Hercules, the greatest Greek hero. He had killed his own children after being driven mad by his step-mother Hera. Hercules was compelled to perform exacting tasks, including slaying the Nemean Lion and the nine-headed Lernaean Hydra, both vicious monsters, as well as capturing the Golden Hind of Artemis, a deer so quick it could outrun an arrow.
Ritter’s re-telling takes the form of a fictitious conversation between a teacher and a pupil, condensed into a ‘heroic poem in twelve cantos’. Each of Hercules’s twelve great labours was described in turn from the teacher’s and the pupil’s perspectives, and each demonstrated the superiority of the National Socialist cause against a host of enemies. And who played Hercules? ‘There our Leader’ appeared the obvious choice to Franz, the eager German pupil. ‘That is what a hero is, he is a man who can carry out such labours.’ Franz casts England in the role of the Nemean Lion, whose neck Hitler ‘wrings’ and who he ‘strikes’ so that its ‘far flies’. England would eventually ‘grovel and writhe in blood’ at a time which only ‘the Leader can determine’. The teacher applauds Franz’s interpretation, responding that ‘If Hitler attacks England, He no longer needs to ask us. Count us in, we’re ready for the trial. We have our Hercules!’
The poem carried on in this fashion through the other eleven labours, with Soviet Russia playing the part of the giant serpent Hydra, who spews ‘poison, venom, gall, hellfire’. Hercules ‘with a quick blow’ ‘struck off their heads’. Where two regrew ‘from the wound’ ‘Hercules was not afraid. He struck twice as hard and fought until he’d done it in!’ In Ritter’s imagination ‘Soviet Russia was completely annihilated!’ Poland appeared as the Golden Hind, while Yugoslavia was a Boar, and international Jewry the Augean Stables. Augeas’ famous stables housed more cattle than any other except in Greece. The stables had never been cleaned out, until Hercules was charged with the task of doing so.
Ritter’s epic poem concluded with the following lines. Although the original rhyming scheme was impossible to preserve in translation, they encapsulate both Ritter’s views on Hitler and Germany, as well as how well Ritter copied the classical lyric style of writing:
So this ancient Greek myth
Has become a mirror-image of our time.
To be the leader of this new age of heroes
Hitler is predestined and prepared!
His whole self, the spirit, his work, his life,
He has given us, the German people!
What he is to us will never fade and be forgotten,
But his greatness will be measured by his work!
It is a heroic saga, a heroic song,
A heroic battle, from which a will radiates:
To be equal to the heroes, to this heroic time,
With heart and mind ever ready for battle!
And Adolf Hitler stands, a paragon among heroes,
High and sublime over all spirits of the world!
Grant him, who fights and creates for Germany’s peace,
O Lord in heaven: superhuman power!
Markgröningen, 20 April 1942
Heinrich Ritter
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