HITLER CRITICISED

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21160, 9 July 1940, Page 9

HITLER CRITICISED

I HYPNOTIC INFLUENCE ! GERMAN GIRL’S VIEWS Miss’ Friedlind Wagner, 23-year-old granddaughter of the great composer and daughter of Winifred Wagner, Hitler’s great friend, arrived during the first week of May in London from the Wagner home in Switzerland, states an exchange. She has known Hitler intimately since she was a child of five, when he began to be a constant visitor to her home, and she intends shortly to publish her personal memoirs of him. She has kept a diary and notes of every time that Hitler visited the Wagner family whom he adored and almost reverenced. To him they were the Royal Family of Germany. “I want to devote myself to exposing the truth about this man,” says Miss Wagner. She ascribes Hitler’s power to hypnosis. She herself never fell under his hypnotic influence. Since childhood she has regarded him with sceptical detachment, and as she grew up she began to argue with him, contradict him, and point out his errors in outspoken terms. He used jokingly to call her “Old England.” After visiting England in 1937, she told Hitler, over a tete-a-tete luncheon of Ribbentrop’s failure as an ambassador. But he preferred to believe RibbentroD’s own version of his success. Qualities of a Spinster j Miss Wagner says that Hitler, in ' personality, displayed qualities more like those of a spinster than a man. j She has a dispassionate outlook, ! and does not see only the black side ; of him. She maintains, for instance, that he has a remarkable sense of humour, and that much of his power over his visitors is due to his sense of the ridiculous in them. She has heard him do brilliant imitations of Sir Eric Phipps, M. Francois Poncet. and other ambassadors. Once when Hitler had tea with her family, her sister was slimming, and Hitler teased her for refusing to eat a cake. She was wearing the uniform of the Hitler Youth, so he ordered her to eat the cake, and, when she still refused, he accused her of breaking the oath of allegiance to her Fuhrer. | Miss Wagner prophesied both the j pact with Russia and the invasion of Scandinavia. She now prophesises that Hitler will fall in 1941. Before she left her Swiss home to I come to England she was subjected 1 to every threat by messengers whom Hitler sent to Switzerland to see her. She was in constant fear of being kidnapped by Gestapo agents. At last she escaped.