Holidays with Hitler

We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic turn, but the diary of Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, a former chief of British Naval Intelligence and fanatical admirer of Nazi Germany, proves otherwise.

Domvile’s description of his visit to Himmler’s ‘hunting box’ high in the Bavarian Alps in 1935, reproduced in Julia Boyd’s fascinating book, is a treasury of thigh-slapping humour, including hearing Himmler wake him at 3.20 a.m. with his rendition of ‘God Save the King’; complaints about the Reichsführer’s primitive ‘bog’ — a deep hole in the ground; and finishing with a ‘regular Bavarian evening… much leaping, crying and slapping of bums, soles of feet, thighs etc. and a pretence of lifting the girls’ skirts, reminiscent of Highland reels’. ‘HH’, Domvile concludes, was ‘very charming’.

No less droll is the eyewitness account by Kay Smith, an American diplomat’s wife, who saw that inveterate show-off Hermann Goering — second only to Hitler in the Reich’s heirarchy — demonstrate his affinity with his pet lion Augie by letting the animal lick his face before an audience of visiting VIPs.