Putzi, the Nazi pianist who whispered in Hitler’s ear to the rhythm of Wagner


Who was behind the cult pianist and music lover interpreter of Wagnerbehind the jesteras defined by the environment Hitlerafter “the good man who did his best to tame the beast”, as he defined himself in his debatable and interested memories Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Nazi and anti-Semite of almost two meters of height, of Nickname Putzi, What in Bavarian means ‘little man’? “Neither an agent of evil nor a clown,” says the French journalist and historian Thomas Snégaroffwhich is more inclined to define this little-known character as a “shadow ideologue, a skilled puppeteer” who pulled the strings that tied the Führer until he fell from grace.

“He was the only person who personally worked for Hitler and whispered in his ear, but he also whispered in the ear of Roosevelt,” the American president during World War II, telling him what he knew of the Nazi leader, a fact that seemed to put him “in the good side of history and who saved him during denazification,” says Snégaroff. Author of various essays, he has opted for a well-documented novel, ‘Putzi. Hitler’s Confidant’ (Seix Barral), to explore the life and psychology of this man, born into a wealthy family of art dealers.

Putzi said that Hitler was asexual, that he liked to attract women but that at the same time he was disgusted by contact with the physical body of women

Putzi (Munich, 1887-1975), adds the historian, “maintained his powerful bond with Hitler until the end. He did not stop waiting for a word of affection from him despite the fact that Hitler abandoned him”. Since the 1920s he was very present in the life of the future leader of the Third Reich, since he heard one of his speeches in a Munich beer hall and was captivated by his anti-Semitic oratory. For him, son of an American mother and a German father, and a student at Harvard who ran the New York headquarters of the family business and was the lover of the writer Djuna Barnesthe relationship between the two countries was very important and he saw in Hitler “the agent of the reconciliation of Germany and the US against the common enemy: Jews and Bolsheviks”. He did not lose hope that he would end up forging an alliance with the Americans to “defend the great Nordic race” even if the Führer was not up for it. He didn’t listen to her either, by the way, when he advised her to learn English and shave off her mustache.

“Thanks to his family, he had many contacts, and he brought many things to Hitler, such as financial networks and money, with which he turned the Nazi party magazine into a war machine thanks to propaganda,” says Snégaroff, or financed the publication of Mein Kampf‘. after the failed Munich brewery putsch In 1923, he continues, it was in the Putzi family residence, where he had spent pleasant evenings, that Hitler sought refuge. There, Helene, the wife of her patron, “convinced the Nazi leader, who had a gun ready to commit suicide, that she should not do it: she told him that the world depended on him.” And while in prison for the coup, Putzi played “an important role, visited him often, was his confidante and gave him American authors to read.”

The journalist highlights that Putzi had left Hitler “in ‘shock'” when one night at a wedding he heard him play Wagner at the piano. She ended up playing for him when he asked, urgently, day or night. “He saw in him a link that led him to his admired Wagner, also an ideologue of anti-Semitism and white supremacism.”

Find a wife for Hitler

The book also echoes Putzi’s theory that considers Hitler “asexual”. “I did not believe that he was homosexual, but he and other historians said that he liked to attract women but at the same time he was disgusted by the human body, the woman’s physical body -recounts-. That would explain the somewhat conflictive relationship with women. Putzi got it into his head find him a wife and offered to English or American women, as the Mitford sisters, one of which ended up committing suicide, or Martha, daughter of the American ambassador William Dodd, because that way she would achieve her fantasy of biologically uniting Germany with the Anglo-Saxon world. But it fails, because although Hitler makes great declarations of love to women, even to Putzi’s wife, there is no carnal contact.”

Was his Hitler’s press officer to the foreign press, deciding who could approach him or not, but from 1934 he began to fall out of favor. His influence over an increasingly powerful Nazi leader was interrupted by the no less ambitious circle that surrounded the Führer, with the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbelsat the head, who perceiving him as a rival maneuvered to eliminate him by orchestrating a macabre, “dangerous and tragicomic ‘joke’ in bad taste”.

assassination threat

It is in 1937, when from the Foreign Ministry they order him to get on a plane that will take him to Spain in the Civil War to deal with the German journalists there. On board they make him believe that the pilot will launch him over the communist lines, but they end up landing in Leipzig. They tell him it was “a joke without malice” that “Hitler found hilarious.” But for him it was a serious warning that they wanted to kill him. He fled to Switzerland, then exiled to London and ended up in the United States, imprisoned but enjoying privileges, because Roosevelt, whom he had met in 1917, made him his informer.

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Snégaroff details that the book brings together three readings: “that of the amazing figure of Putzi, of fascism told in another way; that of fascism in countries like Spain, England and the United States, where there were also people so anti-Bolshevik that they believed that Hitler was the solution; and, telling how German memory is transmitted, seeing how time can do a job of forgetting in cases like this”.

For the historian, “there is a thread between the Nuremberg laws against the Jews and the racial and supremacist laws of the United States. It is in them that one must look to understand the roots of trumpismThose of the fear of the dissolution of the white race. Roosevelt already had horrible ideas about immigrants from the South, he said they were going to stain the American white race.”


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