In Europe

coming down by the bucketful. The flakes fall on the black water, on the trees and lawns, on the pier from which Röhm's boys would dive into the lake. Did they sleep here, in this room? Did Hitler come storming in here, foaming at the mouth?
    The true sense of living history will not come. That doesn't trouble me too much. The most industrious of chambermaids, after all, have been scrubbing here for the last sixty years, and scrubbing washes away the evil, snow covers everything, stillness and silence and time do the rest.

Chapter NINETEEN
Vienna
    THERE SEEMS NO ESCAPING THIS LONG WINTER. ON MY WAY TO AUSTRIA and Italy it starts snowing again, with a vengeance. The trucks drive slower and slower, they growl and blow great clouds of exhaust fumes into the frozen air. Blue lights flash in the distance, a snow-covered policeman waves us onto a side road, the Brenner Pass is in complete chaos, not even the snowploughs can get through.
    Night falls in Innsbruck. The streets are deathly quiet, the snowflakes keep tumbling down amid the old yellow and pink houses, along the archways, against the windows of the empty
Weinstubes
– for who would send a dog out on a night like this? Some boys are playing football on the Marktgraben, a child rushes outside to catch snowflakes on his tongue, but otherwise everything is only lonely and a bit sad, this new winter in the spring.
    On my way here I had come across two intractable spirits; both of them at places where, to be honest, I had never expected them.
    The first one I met at the Obersalzberg, where the Alps begin and where Hitler's holiday residence, the Berghof, once stood. Four years ago the Americans opened the site to the public. From 1923, Hitler spent a great deal of time there, first in a little wooden holiday bungalow in the grounds of the Moritz
gasthaus
, later in a rented villa, and from 1933 in the Berghof. During the 1930s the area was transformed into a complete Nazi mountain, ruled and run by Hitler's secretary and right-hand man Martin Bormann. The whole party leadership moved into villas there. Pension Moritz became a
Volkshotel
for party members, Hotel Zum Türken was wrested from its owner for a pittance by Bormann himself. Whenthere was nothing left to do above ground, he started on the construction of the enormous Alpenfestung, a system of myriad bunkers and at least five kilometres of tunnel. Most of that fort is still there.
    The Kehlsteinhaus, also known as the Eagle's Nest, is there as well, high atop the rocks. The observation post, grim on the outside but decorated on the inside in ‘steamboat style with a rustic touch’, could be reached only by elevator. Built in 1938 through extreme hardship on the part of hundreds of workers, it was a present for Hitler's fiftieth birthday. A few hundred metres below it lies the pastureland of the Scharitzkehl and the old tourist café run by the Hölzls, a family of woodcutters. In the café's hallway I came across a framed and yellowing eviction notice, addressed to grandfather Simon Hölzl and signed M. Bormann. For security reasons, it seems, the Nazis wanted to have the café torn down, but Hölzl refused. He had no intention of giving up his lively trade in milk, coffee and beer there in that mountain pasture. The first sentence of Bormann's final reminder reads: ‘The only possible reply to your correspondence of 10-2-1940 would be to send you to the concentration camp at Dachau.’
    The Berghof's conversion into a kind of mountain fortress was characteristic of the change in Hitler's lifestyle. After 1936 he began to seek isolation with ever greater frequency. From a popular party leader he had turned into a moody king, creating around his person an increasingly larger court and living like a spider in that self-spun web, tolerating in his immediate surroundings only a few dozen individuals from his chosen coterie. From 1935 he suffered increasingly from hoarseness and intestinal complaints, which led him to seek assistance from the alternative therapist Dr Theodor Morell, who gave him injections of intestinal flora cultivated ‘from a Bulgarian farmer's best strains’. Hitler believed he did not have long to live: ‘My plans must be carried out for as long as I, with my waning health, can still achieve them.’
    In his memoirs, Albert Speer describes a book of paintings of Hitler published in 1937. Each and every image showed a jovial, relaxed, normal man, rowing a boat, lying in a field,