The Hunt

through the city. And in the Waldviertel they pointed to the place where he was born, now a cheap, pink-plastered inn, and bragged that the life of the new savior of Germany had begun in that very house. Perhaps that was retribution enough.

He stood at the window, smiling, his groin throbbing with excitement, and incanted softly to himself:

“Heil Hitler, Hell Hitler, Heil Hitler.” And giggled.

The 150-kilometer drive to Berchtesgaden had taken two hours and by midmorning they were on the way up the dirt road toward the mountain stronghold. As they drove through the eight-foot wire fence with its top strands of electrified wire, past the guard dogs and the sentries, and up the dirt road that led to Hitler’s retreat, Ingersoll could see the Berghof, Hitler’s mountainside chalet, etched against a thick forest of pine trees. The house itself was smaller and simpler than he expected, but the setting, perched as it was 3,300 feet above the village in the Bavarian Alps, was stunning.

Staring at the chalet, Ingersoll recalled a recurring theme from Hitler’s speeches:

“Absolute authority comes from God, absolute obedience comes from the Devil.”

It was one of Hitler’s favorite aphorisms for it justified what he called Machtergreifung, his seizure of power in Germany.

Was this the hideaway of God or the Devil, Ingersoll wondered? Was Hitler’s vision for Germany ordained or Mephistophelian?

Not that it made any difference. For Germany now had a leader who scoffed at the Allies and trampled the miserable Versailles treaty underfoot. His was a divine vision, regardless of its roots.

Ingersoll was an avid student of neo-German history, knew that much was based on lies or, rather, “propaganda.” He knew that the “Horst Wessel” song was named after a miserable pimp who had been elevated to martyrdom by Nazi lies, that even the Machtergreifung was a lie. Hitler had not seized power, he had bought and bartered it. But Ingersoll accepted Hitler’s manipulations as the actions of a political genius who had to resort to sordid intrigues to win; to sellouts in smoke-filled rooms, to millions of marks in graft from the Ruhr’s wealthy industrialists like Krupp and bankers like von Schroeder, to his use of the brownshirt storm troopers who terrorized the population, to lies about the power the Jews never had. Hitler wove fantasies around them, blamed them for the rise of Marxism and Communism in Germany and for the desperate depression that by now had twenty million Germans unemployed and near starvation.

Ingersoll accepted that, too, since his hatred of Jews was as virulent as was Hitler’s, just as he recognized that misery and destitution had become Hitler’s strongest allies. The more helplessly the Germans were mired in poverty, the more they turned to this strange political agitator who sometimes made five or six speeches in a single day, orchestrated by goose-stepping storm troopers waving swastikas, and who proclaimed that he would single- handedly rid Germany of her debts and her enemies, grant land to farmers, socialism to workers and anticommunism to the wealthy, although he never explained how he planned to accomplish any of this. And while he had never actually won an election, he had won enough votes to manipulate the aging and senile Hindenburg into naming him chancellor of Germany, the new head of the Reichstag.

Hitler was a mere step away from becoming dictator.

Ingersoll accepted that inevitability as a small price to pay. If chicanery and lies were the road to success, Ingersoll earnestly believed that in Hitler Germany had found the perfect leader to exploit them. And he felt a kindred link to him since Ingersoll’s own good fortune had paralleled Hitler’s.

Now he was to be the personal guest of Germany’s new chancellor. His nerves hummed with the electricity of expectation as they approached the chalet.

Professor Vierhaus knocked softly on the door to the sitting room, usually a forbidden place to everyone but Eva Braun. But on this morning he had been invited to have coffee with the Fuhrer and talk about der Schauspieler—the Actor—which is how Hitler referred to Ingersoll. Vierhaus was flattered. Hitler, a late sleeper, usually arose around eleven A.M. looked over the morning reports, and didn’t appear until noon.

“Come, come,” was the impatient response.

He had only been in Hitler’s private sitting room once before. Entering it now, he remembered how surprised he had been the first time he had seen it. The sitting room was small and rather bleak with high ceilings, a simple chandelier and thick double doors. Two French windows overlooked the valley, their heavy drapes and cotton curtains pulled back. His desk was angled in one corner near the windows. T1iere was an easy chair, a bookcase and a sofa with three hand-sewn throw pillows. That was it. Two expensive but worn Oriental rugs partially covered the brilliantly waxed dark oak floors. There was a rather dreary landscape over the sofa. A wolf painting near the desk. A photograph of Hitler addressing a meeting somewhere hung on the wall beside the desk. A coffee service was set on the corner of the desk. Nothing more.

Hitler was seated at his desk writing.

“I’m working on my acceptance speech,” Hitler said without looking up. “Give me just a moment, I don’t want to lose the thought.”

“Shall I leave and come back later?”

“No. Just a moment.”

Vierhaus stood as straight as possible, lifting one shoulder to balance the hump on the other side of his back, trying to minimize the grotesque posture caused by his deformity. Hitler looked over at him.

“Sit, sit, Willie.”

“Yes sir.”

Vierhaus sat down. Hitler continued writing, his scratching pen the only sound in the room except for the wind which moaned through the eaves outside. He stopped, the pen poised at his lips, then scribbled out another sentence.

“This will be the most important speech of my life,” he said, staring at the paper. “I must challenge them as never before.”

“Yes, mein Fuhrer”