Hitler at Home
▻https://placesjournal.org/article/hitler-at-home
The Invention of the Private Hitler
The coming out of the Führer’s personal life marked a distinct departure from earlier National Socialist publicity, which had focused on Hitler’s role as agitator of the masses and leader of a militant political movement. In the runoff election, the need to cast a wider net pushed Nazi Party propaganda toward a celebration of their candidate’s personal attributes. Hitler’s youth and dynamism, epitomized by his much-advertised campaign flights across Germany, became a selling point. Against the aura of aristocratic dignity that clung to the remote, eighty-four-year-old Hindenburg, the Nazis offered the modernity and glamour of a candidate who took to the skies to meet face-to-face with the German people. More daringly, Nazi publicists brought Hitler’s private life into the limelight to emphasize his moral and human character and thereby win over the bourgeois voters and women who earlier had overwhelmingly supported Hindenburg.
In those same years, the New York Times Magazine grappled repeatedly with the topic of Hitler’s domesticity, returning time and again to the Obersalzberg. In October 1935 it ran a short but admiring article, “Hitler His Own Architect: He Practices His Art on a Simple Chalet.” Noting Hitler’s early aspirations to become a professional architect, the magazine credited him with the renovations to the house (still minor at that point), which it lauded for its modesty and tastefulness: “Haus Wachenfeld … differs in no way from thousands of other Bavarian chalets except for the enlargements and the fact that it is furnished more simply and in rather better taste than the average home of the Bavarian peasant.” 50
A year and a half later, in May 1937, the magazine featured on its cover a stunning photograph of Berchtesgaden with the tagline: “Where Hitler Dreams and Plans.” Otto Tolischus, the Berlin correspondent who contributed the three-page report, began with a clear-eyed assessment of the significance of Hitler’s mountain residence:
Germany is administered from Berlin, capital of the Third Reich. It is inspired and spurred onward from Munich, capital of the National Socialist movement. But it is ruled from a mountain top — the mountain on which Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler has built himself a lofty country residence where he spends the larger part of his time and to which he always retires to ponder events and to make those fateful decisions that so often startle the world.
Der Berghof, as this residence is now called, is rapidly becoming a place of German destiny.
