CORY
ADOLF HITLER'S HOUSE.
Maurice Rowdon,
Via délle AlpyApuane 15,
Monte Sacros
Rome, ITALY. C


we were looking for Adolf Hitler's house. It was mid-
afternoon on a bare and cold day, with the clouds touching the
trees, though it was June.
At the very top of the hill we called out to a passing
woman and asked her the way. We knew it must be somewhere
near. Behind us there were the ruins of what must have been
a pill-box
white blocks of concrete flung together.
She
came towards our car slowly, half-bending, her eyes narrowed as
X if she couldhpt see us properly.
Then she said, I Ya, ya, def
r/ruhrers Haus --
She used the word Fuhrer without any hesitat-
ion. -- there, by Goering's house, just under the road.'
And she pointed downwards, to where the road looked over the side
of the hill, across a sheer drop.
Yet her directions did not
seem quite convincing. It would be a strange place for a house,
there on the steepest part of the hill.
She was a pale woman,
bent and a little timid, with thin lips and lost eyes, as if
somewhere she had lost her way in the years, though she was not
old.
There were many other cars about, German, American,
English and French. It was like the scene of a great, but
somehow casual and untidy, pilgrimage.
There were no signposts,
people did not seem to know exactly what to look for, and
everything lay in a strange hush, perhaps only because we were
at the top of a very high hill, almost a mountain.
From here
the vast, long valleys below began to look like ditches covered
with /moss and the mountains on either side like boulders that could
be found in a field, of an indeterminate greatness and height,
so that one could not tell whether there were two kilometres
or twenty between them.
we drove down to the end of the tarmac road, where she had
pointed, and stopped.
We walked to the edge and looked down,
but there was only a grassy slope, as we had thought, and trees
beyond.
Below us, to the left, we could see the hotel now
used by American troops as a rest camp. We had passed it on
the way up, and we knew that the gutted and half-ruined building


at its side, looking like a long-neglected stable, with grooms'
quarters overhead, had once been a hotel for Hitler's guests,
for diplomats and friends when they came to visit him at the
house. The American hotel was built straight on to it, a new,
bright thing growing out of a ruin, with a terrace overlooking
Berchtesgaden.
It seemed oda to me that the two should be so
close together, indeed tauching.
The gutted windows of Hitber's
hotel were shuttered up, and the roof was still unrepaired.
But perhaps a contrast had been intended.
Cars were parked in front of it, and I could see people
strolling about in the courtyard taking photographs.
another hill to its right there were more people: it seemed to
me they were examining something -- an aerial or beacon perhaps--
but it was impossible to say what irom this distance.
Near us, on our own hill, were other groups of people
staring below just as we were, their cars parked behind them.
Now and then one group would glance at the other, as if for a
sign as to why we had all come. The hill itself offered us no
explanation: it was a few roads, a ruimed pill-box and a gutted
hotel, and for the rest trees with a slight wind going through
them. If there had been signposts - - 'To Goering' S house',
'To Hitler's house', 'To the Personal Bodyguards' house', 'To
thé Bunker', our reasons for coming would have seemed clearer.
But all we had was our curiosity, and that curiosity was itself
mysterious to us. Our coming had turned the place into a kind
of shrine, but the shrine was altarless and unblessed.
And I noticed that when we passea these other people on
our way back to the car we did not hear them speak. Like us
they were talking in hushed voices. I was an Englishman with
American people, the others were French and German! it was as
if Hitler was a mystery, and perhaps a guilt, common to all of
Just before I got back into the car I noticed behind us
a dark, gravelled space which did not rise gradually with the
hill but in three tiers of equal size. i I began to wonder what
this could be.
Perhaps it was the foundation of some future
building. Then I said, 'This might have been Hitler's house'.
I had heard that it was now in complete ruin, and it struck me
that perhaps the invading troops - - or SS troops before them -
had taken away every stone, tile and brick. But there was no


one to ask. And it seemed an absurd place for a house, after
all, immediately on the road like that, and cut off from a direct
view of the Bavarian hills.
The tiers could as easily be the
site of a new cafe: for over ten years had passed since the end
of the War, though it was very difficult to realise that, because
of the look of the gutted hotel and the pill-box. I had seen
other places with just that look of disorder, lying under the
same hush, a few days after a battle.
So we drove down to the lower road again, where the hotel
was, and once more we asked the way. This time it was a man,
dressed in the traditional lederhosen and green felt hat of
Bavaria. He too used the word Fuhrer without any hesitation,
and he spoke rather casually, hardly glancing down at us as we
sat in the car. He told us how to get there, crisply and slowly,
as if he had heard the same question asked many times before' and
in the same hushed, rather forbidden tone. Perhaps he was one
of the workers whom Hitler had specially transported from other
parts of Germany for work on the hill. Or perhaps he had been
a waiter at Hitler's hotel, even a servant in the house itself.
Certainly on his face thére was a kind of dedicated Iook; and
also the casualness of his answer seemed to accuse us
not us
as foreigners, for we were in a German car, but as sight-seers.
He seemed to say, 'Oh, yes, you all come and visit his shrine,
but he died in your name. You can't have hime back...'
There
was an absolutely assured and calm pride in his voice when he
said, I Dey Fuhrer...'
And this time, following his directions, we found what
remained of the house. We drove up the hill again to where the
road turned suddenly, just short of where we had been standing
before. Above us, on a little crest, we saw an inn, still
half ruined, - this must be the Personal Bodyguards' Quarters'.
And in front of us lay a black pile, simply a rise in the ground
with grass beginning to grow over it TT nothing more. This was
Hitler's house.
Really there was nothing to see. We climbed
up over the mass of bricks, chipped stone, piping and rotten wood,
worn smooth now and very hard to the feet, until we reached the
top. Not one of the walls was standing.
There was only this
hard, black platform of rubble.
I noticed we had come up by
a winding path between the weeds, trodden there by so many
visitors year after year.
Two young men dressed in wind-suits
and crash-helmets were standing on the edge of the platform, in


silence, a few yards apart, gazing out acfoss the mountains.
Behind us rose a green slope with fir-trees and bushes, very
quiet and undisturbed, and the back windows of the house must
have opened straight on to this view. I wandered about among
the bricks, kicking at the rubbish in the hope of finding
something interesting.
But there was only earth and brick-
dust. I thought 1 might take a piece of brick and keep it on
the desk in my room, but then I forgot all about it.
There was
a piece of matted, burnt straw at the edge of the platform, and
it struck me that this might have been part of a thatched roof.
And I came across a sudden hole which may once have led to a
cellar, even to the bunker itself, but when I peered down I
could only see empty cigarette cartons, paper bags and orange
peel.
Standing near us there were two young couples, and I
noticed that one of the men was talking in a very animated way,
but almost in a whisper, while the others leaned forward close
to him, concentrating.
Now and then they glanced cautiously
about them as they listened, nodding as if to say, 'keally?
So that was how it was? That was how they arranged things
here?' I imagined to myself that he had been one of Hitler's
personal troops and that he was telling them how he had opened
his window on to just this green slope behind them on so many
occasions.
He spoke as if he had a special knowledge of the
place and they were ignorant. He kept pointing, and the others
would follow his hand slowly, a little hesitantly, as if they
thought that someone might suddenly rush across and expose them
for seditious thinking.
It was strange, how everyone hure
looked as though they were aware of being watched and overheard.
There was nothing else to see, so we decided to go up to
the 'Personal Bodyguards' Quarters', on the crest.
Clearly
it had once been bombed: the walls and roof were intact, but
everything looked ramshackle, with piles of cement and sand in
the cobbled yard outside, as if repairs were only just beginning.
One of the workers was standing on the roof, tall and claar
against the sky, and at this moment, as we climbed up from
Hitler's house, he was gazing out across the mountains into
Austria, altogether lost, his tools forgotten in his hands.
All the time we climbed he did not move.
The place was now an inn, and through one of the windows
I saw a cosy room, with a scrubbed wooden farmhouse floor and
a stove.
Wewalked round to the stables and here We saw the


first signpost
- THE BUNKER'
with an arrow pointing to the
back of the house, where there was a kind of kiosk, like the
pavilion on a cricket goound. At first it was difficult to
see where the entrance to the bomb shelter could be, but then
we realised that it must actually be inside this pavilion. A
young man dressed in a bright check shirt and lederhosen was
leaning against the counter quietly attending to some accounts,
pencil in hand.
He did not glance up as we came nearer.
On a stand at his side there were photographs of Hitler's
house as it had been befbrethe War, an expensive mountain chalet
with the typical overlapping roof of the Bavarian country,
looking very white and tidy in the sunlight. we began glancing
thraught them. They were all the same - just the house, its
windows and main door closed, on a still summer's day. Then
we found others, taken from precisely the same position, which
showed it in a ruined state, its windows blasted out but the walls
and part of the roof intact. ' These confused us even more, and
we wanted to ask the young man questions.
None of us knew how
the house had become a mere black pile of rubble, but we thought
the demolition had been done by Allied troops.
First we asked him where the entrance to the Bunker was,
and he raised his eyes slowly. He had a sharp face, ruddy from
the mountain winds, and round, rather staring eyes. He did not
speak at once but pointed behind him to a concrete opening like
the top of a well, almost hidden in the shadows.
'Can we go down?'
'Certainly.
The price is one Mark.'
Then we asked about the photographs and, pointing to the
first ones, he told us that Hitler had not built the house himself
but bought it from a private owner soon after he came to power.
He spoke to us casually, giving us the information in a flat
tone, as if he had been asked the same question many times before
and had his answer pat. We asked which of the Allied troops
had done the damage and he replied, glancing down at his accounts
again, 'None'. No Allied troops had done it, they had only
seen it in its demolished state just as we had seen it a few
minutes before.
The house had first been bombed from the air 1
hence the second photographs - and then, when the War was nearly
over, it was rased to the ground by the last SS troops, so that
not a sign should remain.


'But we thought Allied troops had done it!'
And he added with quiet pride, 'They did it
themselves.'
He spoke with unmistakeable pride, yet he was too young
to have fought in the war. And it struck me that what I had
sensed in the other man, when he had told us the way up here,
was perhaps no devoutness for the memory of Hitler at all
the
name may have become meaningless to him - - but simply the pride
of one who had been elected high priest by so many awed faces
day after day all enquiring the same thing - 'Hitler's house?
the bodyguards? the Bunker?'
He may even have come to that
road day after day in the tourist season just to enjoy a
moment's power...
Perhaps we had brought the mystery with us,
and these inhabitants were doing no more than bowing to our
need.
And there was money to be made...
Then, after we had peid the entrance fee, the young man
gave us each a typewritten, sheet on which the lay-out of the
underground rooms was. described: '1. Entrance to the
administration and Bormann-Bunker. 2. Machine gun position.
3. Entrance to the heating and fresh-air-system. 4. Dog
And at the bottom were written the words:
'Further there are the state archives, telephone-central,
kitchen, bat th-room and toilets of the body-guard unit, which
can not be visited due to the lack of lighting.'
Each sheet
bore a circular stamp in blue ink: 1 HOTEL TURKEN. Neben
Hither-Haus.'
we descended the concrete well, down a narrow, spiral
staircase, and we could hear a man's voice echoing in one of
the corridors below as heexplained something loudly in German.
At the bottom the first thing we came to was a machine gun
emplacement - two square holes in the wall, and firing steps.
I peered through these holes, hpping to see across the mountains,
but they were closed, perhaps immovably now.
We were not yet in the shelter itself.
Before us there
was another staircase, steep and long, with electric bulbs fixed
in the ceiling at intervals and a gutter for water to drain
along, under planks. Everything was silent now, apart from
the trickling of mountain water.
The bottom looked very far
below.
It was like the staircase leading down to an underground
railway, but without advertisements or any ornament, only bare
concrete walls.


Our footsteps echoed as if we were wearing heavy military
boots.
The first word that came into my head as we walked down,
staring at the foot of the stairs below, was evil. I imagined
Hitler being shown the shleter for the first time and the clear,
rasping tones of his staff, their heels sounding out on the
concrete steps as ours were now. At the bottom there was
another machine gun emplacement.
Then the living quarters began,
on either side of a long corridor.
One room was much like another, its walls doorless and bare,
with light-brackets and piping hanging down and at floor level
little air-vents which led from the fresh-air-system at the end
of the corridor, clogged now with cigarette' cartons and waste
paper. On the right we passed the two dog kennels - low, dark
tunnels cut into the wall, like lions' dens, with cage doors.
In the first room we came to, that belonging to a bodyguard unit,
someone had emptied a magazine. of bullets into the ceiling and
walls, hardly chipping them.
Hitler's room was neither bigger nor more elaborate than the
others.
The water-pipes and sockets were twisted and smashed,
and the walls dividing the innder rooms were in ruins. Clearly
the shelter had never been lived in, for there was no trace
of a bath or wash-basin anywhere, only the pipes necessary for
them, and tiles on the floor.
I began to wonder what truth this typewritten plan in our
hands could have: perhaps it had never been decided which room
should be allotted to whom and the list had been drawn up by the
owners of the hotel above us in the interests of toursim.
But
at the foot of the list there were the words 'Eva Braun's Bath- 9
Dressing- 9 Bed- and Livingroom'.
This promised to be the most
exciting thing of all. So we hurried down to the end of the
corridor, the safest and most secluded part, where her quarters
lay. we were not alone in the shelter.
Yet there was hardly
a sound, only the shuffling of feet as people walked from one
room to another, seldom talking.
And here, in Eva Braun's room, things were a little
different.
For one thing the quarters were larger and the bathroom
more leaborate than the others.
One could actually see the lay-
out of the bur rooms as they would have, been. Of all the inner
walls dividing the dressing- 9 living- * and bedroom fron each
ather


other, only that belonging to the bathroom was still standing;
and a large hole had been kicked or machine gunned into that.
The damage was wilder here than anywhere else in the shelter.
More people had come here.
They had crowded into the bathroom
just as we were crowding now, waiting for the others to come out.
In all the other rooms we had been alone; but here there was a
concentration of people.
The piping which would have led to the bath was savagely
twisted, the tiles on the wall had been ripped or kicked away,
and the light sockets had been torn again and again out of their
beds so that they hung now EX from limp, dusty wires.
The walls
were covered with wiiting in pencil.
Hitherto we had only seen
names scrawled here and there, those rather sad messages written
by American tourists to posterity - 'Ada and Jack S-- Westport, wineton, LLA
Conn.' But here all the walls were covered. Above where Eva
Braun's bath would have been someone had written in German,
ADOLF AND
STar
THE
EVA,
DEVIL-PAIR, and on another wall, under a /Davidt l
there were the words, again in German, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS
TO THOSE WHQ OPPOSE THE JEWS.
Under a Nazi swastika there were
six names, in block capitals. Day after,day for ten years people
had come here and spent their fury, muffled under the earth.
And
no doubt when they had emerged from the concrete well back again
into the quiet stable-yard tney had looked ordinary and safe,
spectators like ourselves.
Most of the scrawled messages were obliterated now by fresh
coats of whitewash. Perhaps atthe end of every day the custodian
came along the corridor with a brush and a pale of whitewash, to
wipe out the worst obscenities and curses, especially in Eva
faun's bathroum.
There was nothing else to see, and the air was chilling us.
we went back down the corridor, past the 1 state archives, telephone-
l. C. central, kitchen, bathroom AND TOILETS of the Body-guard unit',
which could not be shown because of the lack of lighting - - a mere
dark corridor, its floor covered with rubbish and the rooms no
Hule ul hat s2in.
different from anytert-else,
We walked back up the long staircase and I lifted one of the
planks covering the gutter: it ran like a hidden mountain stream
underneath, the water very clear, its concrete bed worn after the
passage of nearly twenty years into the colour and smoothness of
a damp cave floor. It seemed quite unbelievable - a twenty years
since it had all begun, yet we were still awed and hushed and


moved to anger by the memory. Twenty years had passed,
yet this was still our lifetime, the key to our lifetime.
And as I walked up the echoing staircase it seemed
clear to me for the first time that Hitler had succeeded
with us all, not only with the Germans. I suddenly
remembered the years before the ware They seemed so lacking
in mystery to me now---only shops filled with goods, and
occasiona strikes, and the churches empty, and a kind of
heaviness in the air, as if we had all ceased to believe in
anything. I remembered feeling in 1938, 'But a war can't
happen to us!' as if we were the everlasting suburbans of
life, whom fate would spare. 'War' was a word'much like
'God': one had heard ithat it was awesome, but somehow
no longer applied, it belonged vaguely to the people of the
past, who had shed blood just as they had believed in God,
because they lacked our special, modern insight. Perhaps
we would even be spared death!
'They' were so clever
nowadays!
It was the epoch of race-records and daring
flights and endless arguments about security and power and
wage-packets and industrial welfare, as if there were nothing
in the world beyond me,n, and the stomachs of menoe.
least, that was the world I felt I had grown up in.
Is- this whywe come here, I wondered, to stare into
the dead face of a man who woke us up from that bloated,
ruminating sleep? who said again and again that the blood
had drained out of our bodies, that we were all brain and
mental calculation, and that only murder would make' the blood
flow again? who wanted war and only war as his price? who
all
menaced us again and again until hardly a sane person in the
world could say his name with calm feelings?
Our most active
faculties seemed to be our brains (was not the whole epoch
like a marvellous brain-wave, quite cut off from the past?),
so he took our brains and incited them to fury. He made


pacifism ridiculous, not many years after there had been
wholesale massacres of soldiers in trench-warfare.
You
had to choose, for or against. If you were sqeamish about
killing people all you had to do was to turn them into an
idea---a 'Fascist', a 'Trotskyite', a 'Communist', a 'Jew'
and finally a 'German'.
The intellect then drove the rest
of the creature into action. Men fighting in Spain actually
could not believe sometimes that the other side---the
'Falangists'.or the 'Reds'---were really men like them-
selves; they thought they were a kind of other species,
naturally base.
Xhakxxan
That was why Hitler invented propaganda'.
Propaganda
meant the deliberate incitement of the brain.
Within a
few years all we had to do in order to contemplate the
murder of thousands upon thousands of human creatures, by
bombing raid (if we were Angl-Saxon) or by, furnace (ir we.
were German) was to enrage outselves withan idea like 'The
Germans are the monsters of the concentration camps' or
'The Jews are an inferior race'. For our intellects wefe
our last remaining springs of action, sincex church, and
class, and family, and even patriotism in the old sense,
were dead as springs of action...
It was just as if we needed new gifts of murd er to
bring all this down in ruins and renew the feeling of
mystery in the world. No wonder we kept on saying after-
wards, 'The Germans are guilty! Only the Germans are
guilty', as if we had nothing to forgive ourselves, and the
moral death in Enrope at that time was not our moral death
too. No wonder we all come back here, French, English,
German and American (forgetting who was guilty) and tread
about this hill with the same hushed steps, the same
thoughts in our minds, of awe and puzzlement and fascination,
as if Hitler had been the leader of us all, and as if there


been no issues in the last war, only the fact of war, an
end in itself. No wonder we are drawn to the shrine of
a: man who woke in us infinite gifts of murder, whichwe
had thought were not there. For months after the war
was délbared in 1939 we were unable to believe that it
was our name that had been called.
But then he took us
to the edge of the valley of the shadow of death, which had
begun to seem a little unreal to us, if not a bit of a joke.
No wonder we all pushed forward with fascination to the
bunker room where he was to instal his mistress. What was
his voice like as it echoed through these corridors?
What
was it like to gaze into his eyes? He really had a mistress,
this deathly guide,of ours? It was a morbid pilgrimage,
like the pilgrimage to a battlefield, where the trees and
farmhouses have been invested with an endless mys stery for us
by so much dying...
We came up into the pavilion again, past the.young man
in a bright check shirt and round to the front of the inn,
where we had planned to take tea. The clouds were still
very low and dark, and the air motionless.
The entrance
woman.
hall of the inn, with its full-length portrait of a manx
in a. trailing evening gown, perhaps the owner, must have
looked like the hall of a great country house in the old
days, when it. had been furnished and carpeted.
The face
in the portrait had style; it was not a peasant woman's
face.
We sat by a window overlooking the mountains beyond
Berchtesgaden, and one of the girls came with strawberry
cake and cream. There were two rooms, and in the other
one, behind us, an old man was talking to a group of German
Bightseers. He had a healthy, flushed, lean face and he
was telling them hoe life had been in this same inn when it
had been occupied by members of the bodyguard. He told how
haxhaaxARRaXthRixxhnirxhank


he had been, their host, how they had enjoyed many a party t
in these same rooms during the winter nights, and how well
they had all eaten. They would come in, from a conference,
say, and they would order coffee perhaps, or take a snack'
of ham and eggs. Then, strangely, a moment after he had said
these words, one of the German men to whom he was talking
burst out with---but in English, 'Ja? Ja?
Ham and eggs
(hem und ex)?' He cried out with that encouraging, polite
wonder of. the tourist being told anecdotes by a guide, as
if all this, the house of the bodyguards and the Bunker,
were very far from him, as far at: least as the English and
Americans with their ham-and-eggs, legendary and a little
unreal.
And it struck me again and again on that mountain how
quiet we had all become, we Europeans, how much spectators
of the past and even of ourselves, as,if our heads could
not grasp what our hands had done.
Zunch, 1955
AATAA