DYSPEPTIC AND DOG-TIRED

Southland Times, Issue 24493, 22 July 1941, Page 5

DYSPEPTIC AND DOG-TIRED

HITLER’S PERSONAL APPEARANCE IMPRESSIONS OF FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR What is Hitler like? The question seems a little irrelevant considering that everyone the world over is familiar with Hitler’s appearance. But the camera can be made to lie by the art of the retoucher, and besides one often gets quite a different impression of a man by seeing him face to face from one gets merely by studying his photograph. That being so, an article written by Mr John Cudahy, former United States Ambassador to Belgium, and published in the magazine Life is of special interest. Recently Mr Cudahy had an interview with Hitler in his mountain eyrie at Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. The article is devoted mainly to an account of Hitler’s appearance and the impressions that Mr Cudahy formed of him. Describing their meeting Mr Cudahy writes:—

“Without a word, Hitler extended his hand to me and shook hands with no display of enthusiasm. I had seen Hitler at Brown Shirt meetings when I visited Berlin during my four years in Poland, and only two weeks before in the Reichstag when he addressed that body on the campaign in Greece. In these gppearances he had looked so much taller, so much more commanding that at first I could hardly identify him with the slight, frail figure before me now. Above all I was struck by the unhealthy pallor of his skin. He had the same look that prisoners have who have been denied the sun during a long period of confinement. He looked dyspeptic and dog-tired, with swollen, puffed eyes, febrile bright. Since the beginning of the war, the story went, he got less than four hours rest each night, and now he gave the impression of being utterly fatigued—one whose nervous energy is nearly spent from overstrain.” HARSH, METALLIC EYES Mr Cudahy was apparently fascinated with Hitler’s eyes which, he says, “were the arresting feature of his face, harsh, metallic eyes, indicative of an intense, indomitable will, geared to a frenzy. In colour they were so pale that at first you could not identify the pigment of the pupils. Perhaps they had been seared by the blindness which Hitler suffered after being gassed at Ypres during the last days of fighting in 1918. As our talk developed, I had a chance to examine them carefully and decided they were that pale translucent green one sees in certain moods of the sea. Above all they were hard, unyielding, fanatical eyes, harsh as the facial lineaments were harsh, without one compromising note of sympathy or kindliness.” According to Mr Cudahy Hitler seemed to regard the interview as a disagreeable ordeal which he wanted to get over as soon as possible. However, he answered Mr Cudahy’s questions readily enough, ,but “his voice was utterly lacking in any sympathetic timbre and had the harsh frayed quality one associates with political orators at the close of a hard campaign. I did not find Hitler a monologuist or given to a great volume of words. So many people had told me about his ranting and raving, yet in this conference his voice was never once raised and never did he give sign of any agitation; nor did he gesticulate, but spoke with the utmost composure, never betraying vocally the intensity indicated by the taut lineaments of his face. FACE TELLS ITS TALE “His hair was a plastered mousebrown mop, the moustache showing a few grey hairs and also there was a hint of grey commencing at the temple and back of the ears. The forehead showed a remarkable protuberance above the eyebrows, which the phrenologists call the perceptive cranial area. The upper forehead receded and did not indicate great contemplative capacity. The nose was thick and heavy, without clean-cut lines, and the lower face, although not heavily boned or projected, gave an impression of great energy and aggressiveness. When I spoke about the German menace to the Western Hemisphere, he laughed a harsh, strident laugh, disagreeable as a rasping motor-car gear. His face looked as if spontaneous mirthful laughter had taken a long holiday. It was a humourless face and a desperately hard one.”

EPILEPTIC COLLAPSE REPORTED LONDON, July 20. The Moscow radio on Saturday night quoted informed German circles in Berne for a report that several famous German doctors were summoned to Berchtesgaden as a result of Hitler having suffered an epileptic collapse during a military conference. The Berlin radio replied by announcing that Hitler today received two airmen and decorated them with the Iron Cross.