He paused, one hand held aloft.
Beside me Katerina whispered, “What is it all about?”
I put my lips to her ear, kissed it, and then whispered back, “Maybe he wants to knock down the Berlin wall.”
“So....”
I smiled to myself. It was a good comment.
As Alois’s hand dropped, Manston spoke.
He said, “None of us here, I am sure, have any argument with what you have said. We all, too, can see the difficulties involved – unless these facts you promise are entirely beyond question. Even then, there will be attempts to discredit them.”
Alois said sharply, “The facts are incontrovertible. When they are presented at the rally – then no one in Germany will doubt them.”
Manston said, “Could we have the facts?”
I don’t think Alois liked being rushed. After all, this was his big scene. He frowned. Then without a word he went up one step of the marble platform. Somewhere the stage manager must have picked up his cue. The black marble slab at the top slid aside and slowly the draped catafalque rose from the ground. Beside me I heard Katerina’s breath sigh in surprise.
Alois said flatly, without emphasis, “I have to tell you that I am the son of Adolf Hitler.”
It knocked Katerina. I felt her grab my arm, the fingers biting home.
Nobody in the hall batted an eyelid. I would have given a lot to know Manston’s thoughts. The only reaction from him was to take his monocle out and slowly polish it on a silk handkerchief.
“By whom?” It was said in German and I didn’t need the translation, and the voice of the old boy who spoke was as unemotional as though he were making an office query. They were a tough lot and they had to be. Each of them ran a full stable of political and industrial horses and they knew all about nobbling and fixing and ringing.
“My mother was Eva Braun. Before you leave here, you will each be given a statement, drawn up by Professor Vadarci, setting out all the facts and dates, and also photostatic copies of all the relevant documents and certificates, including a statement made in writing by my father, signed by Eva Braun in the presence of two witnesses, both of whom are still alive, and whose affidavits are also attached. After our rally these facts will be made public.”
A bald-headed man wearing a black stock with a large pearl-headed pin in it said, “Votre jour et lieu de naissance?”
Alois said, “The Bergof, Obersalzberg, the 16th June, 1942. The birth was kept secret. I was named after my grandfather, Alois Hitler. I am the only child and was, of course, legitimized by the marriage of my father to Eva Braun in 1945. For reasons of state at the time of the birth, and ultimately for dynastic and political reasons at the time of the collapse of the Third Reich, clearly foreseen by my father, the birth and my existence were never made public. I was placed in the care of Professor Vadarci, and was brought up under his name.”
He went on, “All the evidence is set out incontrovertibly in the statement. If this is contested, the people involved, who are still living, are prepared to come forward. Let it not be forgotten that in our people there was and there still is a loyalty to the Third Reich and to my father which he alone commanded and which, at his death, became mine to command.”
Manston crossed one leg over the other, and said in a mild voice, “He is incontestably dead?”
“Yes.”
“And Martin Bormann?”
“I am not at liberty to answer that question.” He began to speak very deliberately now, translating after each few sentences. “There are only two pertinent facts – I am my father’s son, and my father is dead. As for my father’s death you will also be given the full facts before you leave here. I do not propose to go into them now, or to discuss the validity of the evidence of people like Guensche, Linge, Rattenhuber, Baur or Mengerhausen, names which will be familiar to you if you have taken any interest in those last days in the Chancellery Bunker. The facts are set down for you to examine and test. Much more pertinent is the importance that was placed on the identification and whereabouts of my father’s body. The Russians were the only people who were in a position, during the months of May and June 1945, to establish these. Let me remind you that, in early June, they first said that the body had been recovered and identified with fair certainty. A few days later Marshal Zhukov, in a public statement to the Press, described the last days in the Chancellery – but on the vital question of the death and the whereabouts of the body he said, ‘The circumstances are very mysterious. We have not identified the body of Hitler. I can say nothing definite about his fate’. Later, in September, they were openly accusing the British of harbouring my father and my mother somewhere in their zone of Germany. And Stalin himself assured people like the American Secretary of State at the Potsdam Conference that he believed Hitler to be alive and probably in Spain or the Argentine. From those days to these, governments and private individuals have
