The testimony of Adolf Hitler’s butler, an important source on the Führer’s everyday life during World War II, will be published in French for the first time on Thursday, 43 years after the German version.
“Until the Fall: Memoirs of Hitler’s Butler” by Heinz Linge, published by Editions Perrin, translated by Denis-Armand Canal, with a brief presentation by historian Thierry Lentz.
The latter had translated the first two volumes of the diary of another Nazi, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.
The memoirs of Heinz Linge were published in Germany in June 1980, a few months after their author died at the age of 66.
The book was criticized at the time for unnecessary digressions, but above all for the blindness of the butler. The latter, although an SS, claims that he himself, like all of the Führer’s employees, knew nothing about the extermination of the Jews of Europe by Nazi Germany.
This testimony is one of the main sources of the 2004 film “Der Fall”, which shows Hitler in his bunker in April 1945 in an increasingly deteriorating physical and mental condition.
Some historians believe these first-hand testimonies paint a stark picture of the dictator’s growing isolation. Others find it rather anecdotal, with little new information compared to what had been reported before Linge by others close to Hitler.
The only foreign publisher interested in the 80s is the Dutchman. English translation will wait until 2009.
Heinz Linge had written this book in the last years of his life, at a time when he said he “no longer had to fear being thrown into prison again and sentenced to hard labor for having served ten years in the immediate vicinity of the Führer”.
There he arranged reminiscences about which he had been interrogated at length by the Soviets, who arrested him in Berlin on May 2, 1945, two days after Hitler’s suicide, and convicted him of war crimes.
He had been released and deported to West Germany in 1955, testifying to a variety of Western media outlets before falling into oblivion.