The testimony of Hitler’s butler translated into French

It is an important source on the daily life of the Führer during the Second World War. The testimony of Adolf Hitler’s butler appears Thursday in French for the first time, 43 years after the German version. “Until the Fall: Memoirs of Hitler’s Butler”, by Heinz Linge, is 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, the Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

Heinz Linge’s memoirs were published in Germany in June 1980, a few months after their author died at the age of 66. At the time, the book attracted criticism because of unnecessary digressions, but especially the blindness of the butler. This one, although SS, affirms that itself, like all the staff of the Führer, knew nothing of the extermination of the Jews of Europe undertaken by Nazi Germany.

Translated into English in 2009

This testimony is one of the main sources of the film “The Fall”, released in 2004, which shows Hitler in increasingly degraded physical and mental health in his bunker in April 1945. Some historians believe that this first-hand testimony hand paints a vivid picture of the dictator’s growing isolation. Others find it more 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 1980s was Dutch. The 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 again thrown into prison and condemned to hard labor for having served for ten years in the immediate entourage of the Führer”.

Captured by the Soviets

There he put in order memories on which he had been questioned at length by the Soviets, who had captured him in Berlin on May 2, 1945, two days after Hitler’s suicide, and convicted of war crimes. He had been released and deported to West Germany in 1955, when he had given his testimony to a multitude of Western media, before falling into oblivion.

source site