In Europe

visiting artists. ‘It was already obsolete by the time it came out. For even for his closest companions, this Hitler, whom I had known from the early 1930s, had changed into a withdrawn despot, barely in touch with the outside world.’
    As one of the mountain's occasional residents, Speer was obliged to spend many boring afternoons and evenings with Hitler: lunch, walk, tea, nap, dinner, film. Hitler wore out his companions with his monologues, Göring with his sadistic jokes; Bormann was in the habit of molesting the secretaries during the siesta, Eva Braun was silent and miserable. Speer returned home each evening ‘tired from doing nothing’; he referred to it as ‘the mountain sickness’.
    In spring 1999 the view of the Untersberg and Berchtesgaden is as impressive as ever, but that is the sole point of reference. The mountain is awash in a profound silence. The Berghof was bombed flat in 1945, and the ruins were demolished with explosives in 1952. The ‘clear and fresh chalet’ in which Hitler – ‘a true raconteur’ – had posed for the readers of
Homes and Gardens
in November 1938, the dining room with its hearth, the conference room with the famous glass wall and ‘the most unsullied view in all of Europe’, the terrace where Eva Braun was filmed so often: all that is left are chunks of concrete and a few bunkers, plus one window of the former garage. (That famous conference room, by the way, often reeked horribly of exhaust fumes and gasoline from the garage below, a design glitch on the part of architect Hitler.) In the woods along the road I came across a strange concrete structure that looked like a sort of patio overgrown with grass and trees. ‘Yes, that was Göring's house,’ says a friendly village woman. ‘You won't find any of the rest of it, though. The only thing left is Speer's studio.’
    The Hölzls survived it all. On that early spring day in 1999, they were still living there. A few dozen walkers were sitting outside, enjoying the sunlight on the pasture of the Scharitzkehl, the snow was melting away in babbling brooks, the birds sang, a chubby little boy was learning to walk.
    The next day I drove down a narrow road into Sankt Radegund, a picturesque border village tucked away amid the Austrian hills. Two cats crossed the street. A candle was flickering in the chapel of the Virgin on the corner. An old woman wearing a brightly coloured headscarf was working in a garden. In a few days’ time the fifty-second pilgrimage of
SoldatenHeimkehrer
would be coming to town, but that was not the reason for my visit. This was one of those rare places where an individual had offered public resistance. I was looking for his grave.
    In March 1938, all Austria stood cheering along the roads as the Nazi troops rolled into the country. For years, part of the population had been dreaming of a pan-German empire, and those sentiments had only increased after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. As early as 1919, ninety per cent of the voters in Salzburg and the Tyrol had voted in favour of an
Anschluss
. When Hitler came to power that desire became even more intense. During the 1932 elections the Austrian Nazis won sixteen per cent of the votes; a year later they won forty per cent in Innsbruck's municipal elections. And they put their other weapons to good use as well: street violence, assaults, intimidation. On 25 July, 1943, the Catholic chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, was killed during a botched coup.
    The Nazi revolution in Austria took place in three stages. The first was the establishment of a pro-German popular movement. In early 1934, a British correspondent wrote that an outsider driving into Graz would think he had arrived in a German town. The streets were dominated by marching Nazis and fluttering swastika banners, and their number only increased as the years went by.
    Then a seemingly legal change of power was enacted at government level. A vote dealing with the issue of maintaining Austrian independence was announced for Sunday, 13 March, 1938. Hitler considered that far too great a risk. On 11 March, therefore, Göring organised the second stage of the coup from Berlin. In a series of phone calls, he placed huge pressure on the new chancellor, Kurt Schussnigg, who finally let himself be replaced by the Nazi lawyer Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Meanwhile, the Nazis had seized all central points in the major cities. The referendum was cancelled.
    In stage three, the coup was completed by