The Fuehrer

"Yes. For Frankfurter Zeitung. He’s the only journalist of the time who got on Hitler’s case from a very early date and recognised that his oratory and so forth were very powerful, and he pursued him relentlessly. So much so that when Hitler came to power Heiden had to go into exile. I think he worked as a professor of journalism in the United States. He certainly wasn’t a supporter. Rather than an academic writing about it, he did what any good journalist would do and started to look into Hitler’s finances and his relationships with women and all that sort of stuff. He delved. He got down to the grubby detail. Well, things like the fact that Hitler was living with his niece and she shot herself in the 20s under odd circumstances. Presumably his intentions or his controlling nature became too onerous. It took some guts to write about that, given that these Nazis were armed and violent people. Money was coming in from all sorts of covert directions with secret donations from businessmen. It’s a better book than all the ponderous tomes on Hitler, because Heiden was actually there – it’s of the time. I think that can be more interesting than people who write about things afterwards. I don’t think he did actually talk to Hitler, no. But he dogged his steps until 1934 when Hitler decided to murder about 80 people, the leadership of the Brown Shirts, and to dress that up as a restoration of good public morality. They were all depicted as a nest of homosexuals who needed cleaning up. He also killed anybody else who had crossed him, like General Schleicher, a previous chancellor, who was shot and, indeed, Mrs Schleicher who opened the door to the assassins. And the owner of a Munich pub who’d annoyed him. Anybody who crossed Hitler in some way got killed."