Quotes from Heinz Linge

What people do in their beds', Hitler used to say, 'does not interest me so long as relationships do not prejudice the State and its leadership.' And he kept to that. Rumours

Scarcely a general can be found amongst them who admits that he lost a battle by his own bad leadership.

How should those of us of no great education challenge him at table when he compared the efficiency of lions and camels and arrived at the conclusion that the carnivorous lion was far less efficient than the camel in the desert, which ate plants and grass.

Wine tasted to him 'so sour' that he thought it could be improved 'with a spoonful of sugar'. Beer, as he often informed us, he had liked very much when he was young, but now he found it 'too bitter'.

Hitler's ability to keep a secret was unparalleled.

twenty pfennigs per pound. Hitler

laurig, shy of making decisions and happy to procrastinate.

His incredible memory did not desert him in this phase of his life. Mentally he was still a giant who overshadowed all around him.

Yet how could I not have believed Hitler a genius and unique when every day I saw and heard how the major personalities of the Reich fawned over him and worshipped him with total devotion.

I often noticed that the surrounding mountains inspired Hitler. He once joked that here he stood 'above the world' in an environment comparable to Olympius, legendary mount of the gods, but that alone can never have been the motivation for himto put down his private roots on Obersalzberg.

It was difficult to understand him. On the one hand he pandered even to the most unimportant things while on the other he was excessive and unfeeling. He might show the most fatherly concern for a female secretary who had stabbed her toe but be utterly ice-cold when issuing orders which set thousands to their deaths.

Before the war I often had the impression of being in the household of a busy architect and building tycoon rather than the Führer and Reich Chancellor.

Whether we like it or not, Linge's Hitler comes across as a rounded human being, and he is arguably all the more terrifying for that. Linge

Thirty-seven years later I found out for whom he had been searching: Charlotte Lobjoie, a woman who had born him a son, Jean Marie, in March 1918.40