All About Eva

The book’s authorship—the two German historians are editors—is unique. Soviet secret service agents “wrote” the book. Its original publishing history is unique too. Stalin ordered two of Hitler’s aides, his adjutant, Otto Gunsche, and his personal valet, Heinz Linge, be interrogated — whatever that term means in the context of NKVD (Soviet secret police) methods — and the results were to be given to Stalin. Not too many copies were made, which is not surprising. What is, is that one copy survived Stalin’s and decades later his police state’s demise.

A dossier on Hitler prepared for Stalin’s eyes only—there’s enough drama in that to make blurb writers employed by publishers drool. But for critics, that poses the danger of missing the wood of new insights for the trees of details.

Adolf’s and Eva’s often tortuous love life, Adolf’s personal hygiene, his mood swings, his technical interest in how best to construct gas chambers, Eva’s loneliness, bagfuls of trivia about the inner circle around the Fuhrer, the fact that Hitler thought Goering was incompetent, the exact, frankly mind-numbing details of Hitler’s death, these and many other information are packed into this finely edited and annotated book.

At the end of it, though, the reader isn’t left with any thing newly discovered about the most studied man of our times. One can see why an obsessive, neurotic Stalin would find table talk—Adolf apparently had a great deal to say about how the female staff dressed—at Hitler’s mountain retreat worthy of lengthy description. But one can’t see why it should be equally compelling or, indeed, important for the relatively well-informed Hitler Studies enthusiast.

Hitler scholars may find some nuggets in The Hitler Book. For the rest of us, the book’s most telling message is about Stalin, not Hitler. Knowing that the General Secretary was not exactly heartbroken about what the Fuhrer die to the Jews, NKVD “writers” kind of glossed over the whole business of the Holocaust—the greatest crime ever perpetrated. On noticing this omission, we understand once again—and we are reminded of those who will not understand—that while the USSR fought the Nazis bravely, there was little to distinguish Stalin from Hitler when it came to using genocide as state policy.

No doubt, had SS interrogators “written” a book on Stalin for Hitler’s exclusive perusal, they would have glossed over the trifling matter of gulags and labour camps.