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Pierre J. Huss: The Foe we face.1942.    

We walked along to an inconspicuous little cabaret doing pretty good
business in nudes and wisecracks next door to the big Metropole Theater... 
This place specialized in an interior of private booths looking out on 
the floor show ....

.... Two men sat alone there, nearly hidden by the semi-darkness. They 
had on light raincoats, with the collars drawn up to their eyes. They 
both wore large horn-rimmed glasses. The booths on either side were also 
taken up by men in dark clothes, men with nondescript faces. They were 
carefully watching the crowd and especially anyone who walked near to the 
corner booth .....

.... It was not the first time Hitler and Goebbels had come here before 
the war -- the place closed a year later -- but I never would have looked 
for them in the cabaret, on that night of all nights .....

.... The fact is he handed his memorandum over to Henderson at 
seven-fifteen that evening and his armies had orders to roll into Poland 
before dawn on September 1, regardless of the outcome of negotiations,
for Hitler was convinced that at the worst the British and possibly the 
French would carry on a shadow war for a few weeks and then make a deal. 
So he played his cards with cool self-assurance. That night he celebrated 
war, not peace.

He probably liked the floor show, for he sat there in the dark booth 
with Goebbels for another half-hour before vanishing as discreetly as he 
had come.

P.J .Hues The Foe we face pp. 81, 82, 83

P.J Huss:The Foe we face

Hitler takes himself seriously and will flare up in a temperamental rage 
at the least impingement by act or attitude on the dignity holiness of 
State and Fuehrer. I incurred his momentary displeasure some years ago 
when I offered him a pencil instead of a fountain pen to sign his name 
to a photo held out to him. He threw the pencil down without comment and 
reached for somebody's else [sic] proffered fountain pen. That's Hitler.

P.J. Hues: The Foe we face.p.104.

P.J.Huss: The Foe we face 1942.

Slowly the Mercedes car with its six uniformed men moved toward the 
German officer standing at rigid attention in the main yard back of the 
dome. There was no other living soul in sight.  The first car was 
followed by three others...similar in appearance. They, too, were filled 
with square-jawed men from the Rhine. ..who jumped out before the first 
car stopped and rushed up to form a sort of half circle around the one 
up ahead.

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Pierre J.Huss: The Foe we face. 1942.

A six-foot adjutant in the first car had sprung to the ground .... and 
yanked open the door opposite the driver. Adolf Hitler, wearing a white 
coat of dustproof gabardine, pushed his right leg slowly to the ground, 
a little stiff from the long drive into Paris and perhaps again bothered 
a bit by a twinge rheumatism, and stood up to stare at the suntopped 
edifice above. He preferred to look up at things, like the stars, rather 
than down into the depths where men work and struggle below the surface... 
Hitler, the mighty Fuehrer of the Third Reich and master of armies 
swooping over Europe had come to visit Napoleon.

To Hitler it was a pilgrimage,  a dream come true, and a miraculous 
milestone in a passion which guided at least part of his life. He came 
here to look at the Napoleon he had followed over the battlefields of 
Europe step by step... he came here to look at the hallowed spot where 
rests the man whose political ideas for Europe gave Hitler a basic 
pattern to follow. And here... lay the man by whose military mistakes 
Hitler swore to profit.

The German officer who greeted Hitler received a perfunctory salute
.... he led the way up the ... steps to a nail-studded wooden door and 
pushed it open. Hitler stepped inside, walked quickly through the 
ante-chamber into the great rotunda under the dome, as if he knew his 
way in the dark... His men ... were scarcely able to follow him ... 
Hitler stood [unreadable] the marble balustrade and looked down into 
the pit at the sarcophagus inside of which Napoleon I sleeps.

He didn't salute; his cap with the golden swastika eagle stayed on his 
head; he just stood there with hands on the balustrade and mouth slightly 
open... His men keenly aware of his mood and temper tiptoed... to the 
balustrade and also looked down, saying nothing and most of them far 
from impressed by what they saw below... To them...sworn to the daily 
task of guarding the Nazi Fuehrer with their very lives, this was just 
another tomb... Their job at the moment was to keep from sneezing,
coughing, or breathing too hard... They made sure the guns were easy to 
reach... They neveropened [sic] their mouths or talked to the Fuehrer, 
unless perchance he threw a word... at the nearest one... a command to 
bring him a glass of water or perhaps to call this or that adjutant.

I guess it was a full minute before the Fuehrer broke that strange 
silence which laid a cold hand on your heart there under the Dome des 
Invalides that dying day in July...  We had been taken there a little bit 
earlier on our pledged word of silence on what we would see... So 
forestalling a leak to the outside world about an incident... they were 
not anxious to have published at that time... Hitler was to make his 
formal visit to Paris some days later, when the Nazi propaganda machine 
intended to go to work and make the most of it. On this day the Fuehrer 
had come in his own right and on a pilgrimage dear to his heart.

We stood opposite the tomb and waited, keenly watching... him. He was 
lost in thought, with that faraway expression again creeping over his 
face. He folded his arms and murmured something we could not hear; his 
lips moved, as if he were talking to himself, and once or twice he 
shook his head. Then he came out of the trance as suddenly as it had 
begun, and he leaned forward on the balustrade to stare more fixedly 
into the pit.
 
"Napoleon, mein lieber, they have made a bad mistake," the guttural 
voice of the Fuehrer said suddenly out of the void. It startled me, 
standing there across from a live war lord and above a dead emperor... 
He had sounded a bit cynical and slightly amused .... turning to his 
Press Chief, Otto Dietrich, to tap him on the arm. But he was talking 
to all before him.                   .

"Ja, it is a big mistake they have made," Hitler repeated and into the 
pit . ''They have put him down into a hole.People must look down

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Pierre J. Huss: The Foe we face. 1942. 

at a coffin far below them. They eyes [sic] cannot come close and 
really grasp what they are looking for.
       
"They should look up at Napoleon, feeling small by the very size of the 
monument or sarcophagus above their heads. You do not impress people if 
you walk in a street and they are on top of a building. They must look 
at something above them; you must be the stage and the center of 
attraction above the level of all eyes. Then the mind reaches out and 
fastens itself upon the object or the person. It is all a matter of 
common psychology. The effect of Napoleon and his hold on the nation 
would have been much greater if people could come and actually touch 
the stone he sleeps in by reaching their arms up and perhaps by standing 
on tiptoe. This way, I must assume that the thousands who have come 
here before me look into their guidebook and go away without 
remembering more about it than about the next place. Their minds failed 
to grasp the greatness of Napoleon, and Napoleon down there in that pit 
failed to touch their hearts and affect his mission after death of 
keeping alive the spirit and tradition of a great epoch.

Hitler began to walk slowly around the balustrade, pausing once more 
at the glass door leading into the church with its tattered flags of 
Napoleon's wars in Europe, to look almost carelessly into the pit from 
the opposite side of where he had stood before. I could not help but 
feel that a sort of disdain had replaced the man's former intentness.
"I shall never make such a mistake." Hitler said suddenly." I know how to 
keep my hold on people after I have passed on. I shall be the Fuehrer 
they look up to and go home to talk of and remember. My life shall not 
end in the mere form of death. It will, on the contrary, begin then.

Hitler left the Dome des Invalides, as I later found out, determined 
to carry out among the first things after the war the great plan for his 
life after death. I knew that in years gone by he had gone on the 
assumption that death not find him a very old man; he used to wrok [sic] 
out blueprints for terrific construction projects in Germany by the 
mile, throwing millions of men into the jobs and billions of marks. He 
was in a hurry then, racing his monuments against the Reaper and always 
saying to people that the great things he would leave undone would never 
be finished by those coming after him. He was firmly convinced that the 
furious pace and the epochal age in which he lived and moved (he really 
is convinced he is the motivating force and the molder of that age) would 
terminate soon after his death, swinging the world by nature and 
inclination into a long span of digestive process marked by a sort of 
quiet inactivity.  People in his "thousand-year Reich" would build 
monuments to him and go around to touch and look at the things he had 
built, he thought. He said as much on that glorified visit of his to 
Rome in 1938, adding that a thousand years hence the greatness and the 
the [sic] ruin of his own time must intrigue the people of those
faraway days. For, believe it or not, that is how the mind of this man 
Hitler projects itself without a blush over the centuries.

P.J.Huss, The Foe we face.pp.207.208.209.210.211.212.213.

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_Pierre J. Huss: The Foe we face. 1942_

So it comes about that Hitler, if his Third Reich should outlast the 
war, might reach the point where he can prepare on this earth the 
material means of keeping  his grip after death on the hearts and the 
minds of men. The plans are all made, and the blueprint lies in the 
vault of the Fuehrer House in Munich. In fact, the plans are a change 
of those from some years back, when they bored and drilled up through 
the throat of an Alpine peak to build the solitary Eagle's Nest for 
Hitler high above the clouds of his mountain chalet at Berchtesgaden.

I was up there once, in this fantastic engineer's feat of stone, steel, 
and glass. The idea back of it was to have a mausoleum here for Hitler 
after death,  [unreadable] in the clouds above, over beyond the reach of 
the ordinary man but always there to look at from the valley far below.
 
They say it was built without Hitler's knowledge by a favorite architect 
who later died. It was intended as a great surprise to the Fuehrer from 
those close devotees and from that grotesque circle of Nazis clinging 
around him like blindfolded apostles. They believed and preached his 
divine inspiration and mission, convinced that his hold on the German 
people after death would grow to enormous proportions, drawing them to 
him as Mohammed draws the pilgrimages to Mecca. So they built the Eagle's 
Nest atop the highest peak in Berchtesgaden and presented it to him in 
the initial form of a teahouse and secluded place to get away from the 
world for a few hours....
 
....I happen to know that he was pleased as a child when he first 
[unreadable] up to that lair of the gods.

P.J.Huss,The Foe we face.pp. 215, 216

Perhaps I found out by chance on that day at Napoleon's tomb why Hitler 
has abandoned the idea of using the Eagle's nest as his last resting 
place after death. The Fuehrer felt that up at the Eagle's Nest he was 
far removed from the personal touch essential to the success of his 
plan; up at the Eagle's Nest there could be no crowds coming in future 
pilgrimage from the far corners of the earth to stare at him in silent 
awe and perhaps touch the crypt before them. His plan needs constant 
emotion and a play on hysteric mass minds, and the more he can arrange 
the means and ways of achieving this after he dies, the more surely he 
is assured of his goal. At least that is how he looks at it, and that 
is the line he is working on.

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