Word: hanfstaengls
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...Ernst Hanfstaengl '09, once Hitler's foreign press chief, is planning to return here for the fiftieth anniversary of his class next year...
Nicknamed "Putzi," Hanfstaengl has described himself as Hitler's "court jester." He fled Germany in 1937 when, as he said in a recent interview, Hitler stopped listening to his advice...
Hitler was also a tremendous orator with a droning voice whose hypnotic effect "has never been equaled," and Putzi Hanfstaengl dreamed of becoming the power behind the drone. With a quality of mind that Germans call dummschlau-a combination of cunning and stupidity-he thought he could use the Nazi barbarians to defeat the domestic Communists and Socialists, and then craftily make sure that Hitler's "revolution" would be orderly and beneficial...
...Hindsight. In 1937, a badly-scared Hanfstaengl fled Germany, convinced that the Nazi "wild men" were about to kill him. He spent World War II shuttling between British detention camps and the U.S., now lives in Munich...
...value for future historians will lie mostly in the gossipy anecdotes that show Hitler in his moments of off-platform relaxation-some of them very comic, as when Adolf, after the failure of the beer hall Putsch, threatens to commit suicide, but allows himself to be easily disarmed by Hanfstaengl's pregnant wife...