HITLER AT HOME

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 June 1936, Page 5

HITLER AT HOME

“SQUIRE OF WACHENFELD.” ■Where do Adolf Hitler and his colleagues plot their successive coups which have culminated in the military re-occupation of the Rhineland? Not in Berlin, whose air and surroundings disagree with the Fuhrer; but in this lonely and lovely spot in the Bavarian Alps. Here on a hilltop amid fragrant pineb he has his "working home” (states a contributor to an English journal).

Until recently this was little more than a cottage, where his widowed sister, Frau Raubal, kept house for him and cooked his vegetable dishes. As his power increased, more and more land was bought.

At last “Hans Wachenfeld,” as bis home is called, showed as a smart hill-chalet, from whose flagstaff the Fuhrer’s self-designed standard proudly floated.

To-day he is found abroad soon after dawn striding through the ghostly pines followed by his “war dog,” a big alsatian named Blonda. Suddenly ne sits down as a daring idea strikes ' through his restless brain. And a new stroke for the Fatherland is then and there worked out.

As the “Squire of Wachenfeld” Hitler is a far happier man than when he is in town.

Looking up Io III? snows or down Io the cxqnisiti* lakes and villages on Austrian soil, he feels the "Messianic" sense of mission How upon him. "I was sent.” is a phrase that recurs in all his earnest talk.

Some say this man is a hypnotist Others consider him as a "medium.”

As an Alpine squire in pins fours I found the Fulirer a shy and simple man wholly lacking in the pose and Caesarian arrogance of his fellowdictator in Rome.

The face is lifeless until he .smiles. It. is that of a mystic who might “‘hear voices.”

I venturefl to say this to him, adding, “What is it that you hear?” And then he smiled. "Dein volk ist. alles,” he said quietly, "Du hist nichts” (“Thy people is everything —you are nothing”). Struck with a new drive for German prestige, this forceful man hurries to the telephone, well pleased and elated, to call his Ministers from Berlin. No secret meeting here is complete without Josef Goebbels, who moulds all Germany’s “thought-con-trol” for the chief. Sometimes I have seen high naval officers arrive and go up to the house through its tangle of electrified barbed wire and vigilant guards. In these simple rooms every political surprise is decided upon, and rough drafts are made of the Fuhrer’s speech in the Reichstag, which is to spring each now German move of “macht” (might) upon a nervous world.