a forty-five-year-old, respectably affluent, slightly paunchy businessman.
At precisely six A.M., a uniformed sergeant arrived at the door and whisked him in one of Hitler’s private cars to the airport for the two-hour flight to Munich. He was treated like royalty. By 8:30 he was having coffee and pastries at the old Barlow Palace facing Munich’s Konigsplatz, waiting to be picked up by Hitler’s personal chauffeur.
In the lobby, Ingersoll sensed Hitler’s presence everywhere. In January, the old palace had been opened as the headquarters for the Nazi party after months of renovations. It was now called the Brown House and had been redesigned by Hitler’s personal architect, Albert Speer. The cost had been staggering although nobody knew what the changes had actually cost. “Blood flags” from the Beer Hall Putsch and other early Nazi Street battles snapped in the wind over the entrance and the place seemed to be a hive of activity. Dispatch riders wheeled up on motorcycles. Officers marched briskly in and out of the building, their riding boots clacking on marble floors. There was a constant ringing of telephones. The place was antiseptically clean, smelling of cold steel, leather, and boot polish.
Hitler’s dynamic charisma dominated the place even though Ingersoll knew he was in Berchtesgaden, one hundred miles away. This was the heart of the Nazi party, the nerve center of the New Germany. One could almost hear the Fuhrer’s voice as he dictated Germany’s future from behind the walls of his vast first-floor suite of offices.
He had only to wait a few minutes before the chauffeur arrived in Hitler’s open Mercedes.
“Shall I put up the top?” the chauffeur asked. “It’s quite cold.”
Ingersoll shook his head. He knew the drive south to the Bavarian border in the Alpine foothills was one of the most beautiful in all Germany and he wanted to enjoy the scenery. A blanket and his heavy coat would suffice. The chauffeur gave him a hat with ear flaps and then raced off down the main highway toward the Fuhrer’s hideaway.
Hitler, usually a late sleeper, had awakened as first light cast long red shadows into the bedroom. He lay wide awake, staring at the ceiling for several minutes before he slipped out of the bed he shared with Eva Braun and walked through the bathroom into his sitting room.
Four days earlier, Hindenburg had named him chancellor of the German Republic.
Chancellor!
He was Chancellor of Germany.
He held out a hand and stared at it. As the new president of the Reichstag, the nation’s parliament, Hitler had the laws of Germany in the palm of that hand.
He had strutted around the room in his bathrobe laughing aloud and repeating the two words over and over again before ordering up coffee and sweet rolls and drawing his bath.
Now Hitler stood at the window of his sitting room, as he often did, gazing north toward Braunau. am Inn, his birthplace, and then east toward Vienna, remembering with rage the words which had once torn at his heart.
He tapped a forefinger on his cheek and chuckled with self-satisfaction. Ingersoll! One of the world’s most famous actors at his command, on his way to the Berghof, he thought. Now it was he who humiliated those miserable middle-class fools in the Waldviertel who had laughed at him when he was young, called him the “cemetery fool” because he sometimes sat all night on the wall surrounding the medieval graveyard staring at the stars and dreaming. They had ridiculed his dreams of becoming another Rembrandt as had the stupid masters at the Vienna Academy whose words, even after twelve years, still stung.
“Not admitted to the examination”
Twice the Academy in Vienna had rejected him, twice they had humiliated him. The bastards had refused to even let him take the examination for admittance to art school! He gazed across the foothills and forest toward the place he still hated. Waldviertel, “the wooded quarter,” that borderland of brutal soil, medieval architecture and narrow minds where he was born, that dreary and depressing corner of Austria which had rejected and humiliated him.
He had only bad memories of that hard land and its people who had once thought of him only as an argumentative, willful, arrogant and bad-tempered young man, so disliked that they ridiculed him behind his back. Even his one friend, August Kubizek—old Gustl—thought he was a bit strange.
None of them understood. Then.
But they did now.
He laughed aloud, pounding a fist into the palm of his other hand.
None of them knew his torments as a child. None of them understood his dreams.
“Imbeciles!” he said aloud as he paced the room. He frequently talked to himself in the privacy of his office.
In the dark corners of his mind, Hitler sometimes planned the most vicious kind of retaliation for the officials at the Vienna Academy who had smashed his early dreams, forcing him to sell his hand-painted postcards on the streets to earn enough to eat and pay the two kronen it cost to spend the week in the cold, filthy men’s home along the Danube. They had sentenced him to three years in the gutter, a derelict wandering Vienna in a mindless trance, cold and hungry. He still feared and hated the winter. And he hated the Jews who bought his postcards. He hated them because they had pitied him. Pity was a word that turned to ashes in his mouth.
Well, nobody,
