Q. What impression does he make when you meet him?
A. The first impression he makes upon any non-German is that he looks silly. Not to a German, mind you, and I suppose he did not look silly to any of those heads of European states who crawled to Berchtesgaden to get their orders. But to a foreigner not subject to his commands he certainly looks silly. I know that is a strong word to use about a man who has already conquered a continent but it fits.
I remember well the first time I ever laid eyes on him, in August 1923, when he was speaking at the Zirkus Krone in Munich—I broke out laughing. Even if you had never heard of him you would be bound to say, “He looks like a caricature of himself.” The moustache and the lock of hair over the forehead help this look, but chiefly it is the expression of his face, and especially the blank stare of his eyes, and the foolish set of his mouth in repose. Sometimes he looks like a man who ought to go around with his mouth open, chin hanging in the style of a surprised farm hand. Other times he clamps his lips together so tightly and juts out his jaw with such determination that again he looks silly, as though he were putting on an act.
Indeed Hitler is, more than anything else, an actor. He will go on being one the rest of his life, a great actor who in his role as tyrant conqueror will have affected the destinies of more millions of people than any other human being in history, but an actor to the last, a tragedian whom no one would take seriously until he began shooting at his audience. Even in the midst of his triumphs he manages to look silly to any outsider capable for the moment of detaching himself from horrified contemplation of the fate inflicted upon his victims.
I remember watching him roll down the Ringstrasse in Vienna standing beside the chauffeur in a cream-colored Mercedes car, with his arm outstretched in the stiff salute he affects on such occasions, the hand rigidly held at a slight angle downward. It was the moment of his conquest of Austria. The streets were crowded with half a million people, a few cheering sincerely, many cheering out of fear, and hundreds of thousands grim-faced, weeping inwardly.
At that moment when I, too, felt like weeping at the abasement of the city where I had worked and danced and studied and played when I first came to Europe fifteen years before, even at such a moment I found myself smiling and saying to friends looking out the window of my room in the Hotel Bristol, “Doesn’t he look silly?” That oversized cap of his, the military cap with the too-large crown and the visor which completely hides his low forehead!
There is something absurd even about his stance as he rides his victorious chariot through freshly conquered cities. He is softly fat about the hips and this gives his figure a curiously female appearance. A scientist friend of mine watching him once remarked that Hitler seemed afflicted by steatopygia, which he defined as “an excessive development of fat on the buttocks, especially in females.” It is possible that the strongly feminine element in Hitler’s character is one of the reasons for his violence. He realizes his femininity, is ashamed of it, wishes to be a man, and overcompensates by brutal behavior. This little fatty-hipped, slope-shouldered, lonely figure, standing so inflexibly, his arm outstretched so tautly, his eyes staring over the heads of his subjects, is incredible. “No,” you say to yourself, “this can’t be true.”
If this odd creature finally conquers the world, his last victims, we once proud Americans, would still be saying as we filed into concentration camp, “It’s impossible. He looks too silly.” But he is not silly. My friend, Captain Philippe Barres of the French Army, one of those who did not surrender, remarked to another Frenchman: “You say Hitler is merely a madman, an idiot. I suppose you must be one of those Frenchmen who prefer to have been conquered by an idiot than by a clever man.”
Oh no, he certainly is not an idiot; but is it not incredible that this mighty conqueror, now master over two hundred and fifty million Europeans—more civilized white human beings than ever before came under the tyranny of a single despot—and now reaching out to drive another thousand million under his yoke, that this man usually looks completely insignificant? I am sure that was the first impression Mussolini had of him. I saw the two dictators when they first met and Hitler never looked sillier in his life than at that time.
Q. How did the two behave toward each other? Did they seem to like each other?