Book Review: He Was My Chief: The Memoirs of Adolph Hitler’s Secretary (Pen and Sword Books, 2009; 208 pages; in English)
Under most circumstances, Christa Schroeder (1908-1984) should have lived out her life in anonymity. An unremarkable woman, she was born in central German to a single mother with whom she was never close. Orphaned at age 18, she studied stenography and made her way in the world on her own. Had events not intervened, she probably would have married, raised children and perhaps died or lost a husband during World War II.
When, in 1930, Christa Schroeder answered a tiny advertisement for a stenographer, however, she unwittingly ensured that she would be more than anonymous for the remainder of her life and that in her own small way; she would become a minor footnote to history. The advertisement to which Ms. Schroeder had responded had been placed by the Nazi party, and by 1933, she would be one of Adolf Hitler’s personal secretaries.
In He Was My Chief: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s Secretary (Pen and Sword Books, 2009; 208 pages), Christa Schroeder’s 1985 autobiography which has been translated and republished this year, Ms. Schroeder shares her personal reminisce of her life from 1930 to 1945 and what it was like to be witness to Hitler’s daily life and his interaction with his inner circle. Although Ms. Schroeder does offer her reflections on political and military events, such as the 1934 Röhm Purge and the 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life, it is in her retelling of the private side of her interaction with Hitler that makes He Was My Chief compelling reading.
For example, as Ms. Schroeder relates, Hitler liked to take his afternoon tea with his secretaries in a rather sparsely furnished room at the Radziwill Palace. Hitler would reminisce about his childhood and how much he used to love to go shopping before his fame made that impossible. He also shared some of the pranks that he would play on his teachers when he had been in school, as when he tricked a rather unhygienic teacher into demonstrating to the rest of the faculty his filth.
Ms. Schroeder also offers insight into Hitler’s methods of persuasion and argument. She notes that everyone thought that Hitler was a profound thinker and that he tried to make everyone believe that his thoughts were all his own. Ms. Schroeder, however, suspected otherwise and actually manage to catch him in a moment of mental plagiarism. One day, as she relates the story, Hitler launched into a philosophical dissertation on a theme that was dear to him. Ms. Schroeder, who had been reading Schopenhauer at the time, realized that Hitler was quoting an entire page from the Schopenhauer work that she was reading. She bravely noted that Hitler was actually quoting Schopenhauer and Hitler responded (in “fatherly tones”): “Do not forget, my child, that all knowledge comes from others and that every person only contributes a minute piece to the whole.”
He Was My Chief is full of such personal anecdotes about the private life of Adolph Hitler and, although such anecdotes are both intriguing and provocative, they are also interspersed with many reflections that are not nearly as compelling. Ms. Schroeder was not a gifted writer and her prose is at times very difficult to follow. One might compare it to the ramblings of an ancient spinster aunt who remembers everything that she has witnessed over the years and is convinced that her audience wants to hear all that she recalls. Excerpts such as the following are common, and demonstrate the nature of her writing style:
“Kannenberg actually came from an old Berlin family of gourmets. His father had owned a licensed restaurant of renown in the capital, and in the 1920’s his son became the proprietor of the popular and well-loved eating house on the outskirts of Berlin known as ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. I never went there myself, but Frau Magdalene Haberstock, a Berliner and widow of art-dealer Karl Haberstock, whom Hitler employed to buy antique paintings, told me once. ‘You took tram 76 to Hundekehle and then made a pilgrimage on foot . . . .” (pp 31-32)
Ms. Schroeder’s writing style notwithstanding, He Was My Chief gives its readers a remarkable personal study of Adolf Hitler and his interaction with his entourage. It is wonderful for English speaking readers to now have the opportunity to read He Was My Chief after so many years since its original publication. Students of the German high command and those interested in biographical sketches of world leaders during the Second World War will, in particular, appreciate this book, but so too will anyone who wants to know about the experiences that might have shaped Adolph Hitler’s madness. Ms. Schroeder does not ultimately portray Hitler as a sympathetic personality, but at times, it seems, she did feel that Hitler was in over his head!
Last edited by dgmitchell; July 6th, 2009 at 11:39 PM.
Reason: Apparently, the reviewer does not know how to spell Adolf so his errors have been corrected!
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