The Daily Heil!

This was a post I never got round to publishing. It was done on 8th October but remained in draft. The Mail's flirtation with Nazism is well documented so I found it interesting to note the following story:

Hitler's correspondence revealed: Love letters to a dictator

He received more fan letters than Mick Jagger, Madonna and the Beatles combined.
Many were from women wanting to marry him, others from men wanting to be like him, still more from people wanting him to repair their drains or visit their clubs.
What Adolf Hitler thought of this mass hysteria died with him in the flames of Berlin in 1945.

But thousands of the letters survived and have now been compiled into a fascinating book called "Letters to Hitler: A People Writes to its Fuehrer."

The letters were found by the conquering Russian at his destroyed chancellery in Berlin, at his mountain home – the Berghof – in Bavaria and in his residence in Munich.

They are testament to the spell Hitler wove over a people he led to destruction and death in the bloodiest war in history. The letters go back to 1925, eight years before his Nazi party was to achieve power, and go right up to April 1945 when just 100 die-hard fanatics sent him wishes for his 56th – and last- birthday in the bunker in Berlin. Some were tortured tomes about the greatness to which the writer believed Hitler was leading Germany, others were more prosaic.

Fritz Vogel from Erfurt thought that the Bavarians were not as grateful to his idol as they should be. In a letter to "Dear Mr Hitler" he wrote: "One is generally surprised that you insist on going to unwelcoming and ungrateful Bavaria so often.
"It would be better if you held your meetings outside of Bavaria in order to make the movement large and strong.

"I advise you, above all, to acquire German nationality."

He went on to enquire if Hitler would be "able to do something about the drains in our town" but Austrian-born Hitler, who did not take kindly to being offered advice, did not answer the letter.
In 1926 lawyer Dr Reinhardt Niedermeyer wrote to Hitler: "I am charged with disposing of the estate of Frau Margarete Meindl in Munich.

"She greatly venerated your political efforts and shortly before her death asked me if you would accept her giant palm tree that she kept in her apartment."
Rudolf Hess again wrote back: "Herr Hitler would be delighted to accept the palm. Please arrange to have it collected."

Frau Troeltzsch of Berlin sent Hitler three silk handkerchiefs with pictures of Hitler sewn into them which Hess sent back saying "you do not have permission to send handkerchiefs with pictures of Herr Hitler."

Such women were later put under the monitoring of the Gestapo as Hitler feared that his cult of personality could lead to a destabilisation of home life in the Reich. As he climbed further up the ladder of power so the tempo of the letters increased.

A special department was created in the postal services in both Munich and Berlin to deal with tsunami of paper wending its way to him every day. On April 25 1932, one day after elections made the party an unstoppable force in national politics, a Peter Beck from Silesia – now part of Poland – wrote:

"We don't want to know about the government any more – we only want Adolf Hitler as leader, as dictator. "We National Socialists want to see a ban on all newspapers that inject poison into our Fuehrer, to see Jews classified as what they are, a reckoning with all local government chiefs who have cheated their citizens. "We will give our blood to Adolf Hitler! Take an iron hand and fulfill you programme with a dictatorial will. Do not negotiate but act!

"We trust our Fuehrer and donate to him our hearts with every pulse!"

There are postcards from Nazi party members holidaying in Majorca, letters from lovelorn women - "I would like to make you my little puppy my dear, my eternal, my lovely Adolf" – and from party bigwigs who crept shamelessly in print to their boss. "My desire! It is swelling across all the German countryside – a cry! A single, powerful, longing cry! Heil Hitler, you who sees off all enemy gangs, Heil Hitler and make us free again!" said Karl Leiff, leader of a Nazi party regional office in eastern Germany in December 1931.

He added: "If only all Germans could be as pure of heart and as noble of purpose as you." Hitler was said to despise this kind of blatant crawling.

But Elsa Walter was the kind of woman who epitomised his misty-eyed view of German womanhood.

She penned to him at Christmas 1930: “What ails our dear Fatherland? Above all else it is the women, and a woman means the soul of a home and a country.
"Therefore the soul of our people is sick. The biggest part of German womanhood has lost the place that God intended for it... man at his work and woman at the stove and motherhood revered once more as holy! Heil!"

Hitler had her declared the woman of the year in 1940 and made her a Nazi party functionary. The letters were discovered in the State Military Archives of Moscow by historian Dr Henrik Eberle.

He said: "The letters are a fascinating glimpse into how a people were mesmerised by Hitler and how they reacted to him."

In April of last year, new letters from Lord Rothermere to Hitler came to light. The late Anita Roddick, founder of Body Shop, refers to them here. Funny how the article in the Mail conveniently forgets to remember them.