I Was Hitler’s Baker - Softcover

Peterson, Glenn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1796012009 ISBN 13: 9781796012002

Publisher: Xlibris US, 2019

Synopsis

“The Germany of my youth no longer existed. The land of edelweiss and the beautiful blue Danube was gone, swept away by an alien ideology represented by jackboots and the skull and crossbones,” so writes Josef Putcamer in his 1944 diary when he becomes disillusioned with the Nazi regime. Josef tells the story of his friendship with Adolf Hitler from childhood into adulthood. Blinded in one eye by a stone thrown by young Adolf, Josef is spared from the horrors of the Great War. In 1919 he opens a bakery in Munich, where he reconnects with Adolf, now a firebrand speaker in a local beerhall. Josef is an eyewitness and occasional participant in his friend’s rise from obscurity to his selection as chancellor of Germany. Josef’s Bäckerei prospers by catering to a Nazi clientele. Josef rubs shoulders with high-ranking Nazi officials, including Albert Speer, Martin Bormann, and Rudolf Hess. He is invited to Hitler’s villa in the Bavarian Alps, where he meets Eva Braun. Riding the wave of Hitler’s growing popularity, Josef opens two more bakeries. But Hitler goes too far. The war turns against Germany, putting Josef and his family in peril.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I Was Hitler's Baker

By Glenn Peterson

Xlibris

Copyright © 2019 Glenn Peterson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-79601-200-2

Contents

A Personal Note, ix, 
Chapter 1 The Facts Of Life, 1, 
Chapter 2 Extortion, 4, 
Chapter 3 The Train-Station Fire, 6, 
Chapter 4 The Evil Eye, 9, 
Chapter 5 The Practical Joker, 11, 
Chapter 6 The Showdown, 13, 
Chapter 7 The Oath, 16, 
Chapter 8 Father Schwarz Gives Advice, 18, 
Chapter 9 Der Führer, 20, 
Chapter 10 Answered Prayers, 24, 
Chapter 11 Downward Spiral, 26, 
Chapter 12 Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler, 28, 
Chapter 13 To Munich, 30, 
Chapter 14 The Hofbräuhaus, 34, 
Chapter 15 A Visitor, 41, 
Chapter 16 Hyperinflation, 51, 
Chapter 17 The Circus Comes To Town, 53, 
Chapter 18 The Seven-Layer Cake, 59, 
Chapter 19 A Lesson In Genetics, 61, 
Chapter 20 The Wilderness Years, 63, 
Chapter 21 It's An Ill Wind That Blows Nobody Good, 67, 
Chapter 22 Genetics Revisited, 70, 
Chapter 23 Geli, 71, 
Chapter 24 Uncle Adolf, 76, 
Chapter 25 The Reichstag Fire, 78, 
Chapter 26 A New Face, 80, 
Chapter 27 Uncle Adolf Redux, 84, 
Chapter 28 A Power Struggle, 86, 
Chapter 29 The Night Of The Long Knives, 89, 
Chapter 30 Return To Pension Hanselsbauer, 91, 
Chapter 31 Josef's Berlin, 95, 
Chapter 32 Moving Up In The World, 96, 
Chapter 33 A Bitter Disappointment, 99, 
Chapter 34 A Weekend At The Berghof, 100, 
Chapter 35 The Triumph Of The Will, 124, 
Chapter 36 Peace In Our Time, 127, 
Chapter 37 Kristallnacht, 128, 
Chapter 38 New Year's Eve At The Berghof, 130, 
Chapter 39 A Bridge Too Far, 142, 
Chapter 40 The Change Pouch, 147, 
Chapter 41 Schloss Hartheim, 149, 
Chapter 42 A Quarrel, 152, 
Chapter 43 A Dilemma, 155, 
Chapter 44 The Tide Turns, 158, 
Chapter 45 We're Following The Leader, 162, 
Chapter 46 A Tale Of Two Bombs, 164, 
Chapter 47 In The Wolf's Lair, 169, 
Chapter 48 Dear Josef, 176, 
Chapter 49 Settling Scores, 180, 
Chapter 50 Spandau Prison, 185, 
Chapter 51 Josef's Spandau Bakery, 193, 
Chapter 52 A Pie In The Sky, 196, 
Chapter 53 Odd Man Out, 198, 
Chapter 54 Letters From Home, 200, 
Chapter 55 An Early Release, 202, 
Chapter 56 Winding Down, 206, 
Chapter 57 A Baker Should Always Stick To His Oven, 210, 

CHAPTER 1

The Facts Of Life

He began life as others of his species: a tiny spermatozoan swimming through a maelstrom of parental lust. It was an incongruous union if ever there was one. Heads bowed over our milk and cookies, we could not help ourselves from stealing surreptitious glances at Adolf's parents. Klara, slender and demure, nearly as tall as her husband, was busily rattling cups and saucers in the kitchen. Alois Hitler, his great bulk stuffed into a worn leather armchair as he surveyed the Linz Tagespost, would periodically send up a cloud of smoke from the grimy pipe he clenched between his tobacco-stained teeth. A retired civil servant, he was twenty-three years older than his wife. He wore a big, bushy mustache reminiscent of the luxuriant facial shrubbery sported by Bismarck. We viewed the mismatched couple through our recently acquired (and not entirely accurate) knowledge of sperm and egg, supplemented by a packet of picture postcards of seminude women that we had obtained from an older boy in school for the consideration of our pooled allowances. I imagined Herr Hitler and Klara going at it in bed as I took up the last cookie from my plate, the old man's massive, hairy buttocks rising and falling as he thrust his engorged manhood between the milk-white thighs of his petite wife.

"More cookies, boys?" Smiling shyly, her pale-blue eyes flitting from face to face, Klara was still attractive enough at the age of forty to send a thirteen-year-old boy's heart racing.

By the time we had devoured our second helping of milk and cookies, our gloves, draped over the radiator in the corner of the room, were dry. We noisily scrapped back our chairs and scurried from the table, relieved to be free of Herr Hitler's baleful gaze.

"Unziemlich Junger" the old man muttered through his clenched teeth.

Outside in the cold December air, with the smoke from Herr Hitler's pipe lingering in our lungs and nostrils, we entered the small stand of evergreens behind Adolf's house and began pelting one another with pinecones that we found on the ground. (They made a more reliable missile than the jagged chunks of ice we had pried up earlier in the gutter.) Soon tiring of this simpleminded sport, we divided ourselves into teams of cowboys and Indians, with Adolf and his friends playing the role of the cowboys. For rifles, we sighted down the ends of long, pointed sticks, which saw double use as throwing spears. Some broken-off boughs served as tomahawks. By the end of the day, the cowboys claimed to have vanquished an even dozen redskins. (Which meant that each of us had to have bitten the dust four times over.)

With the arrival of the first significant snowfall a few days later, we began building snow forts in a clearing at the edge of the woods, taking advantage of two sizable drifts situated some nine or ten meters apart for the foundations. Adolf and his crew, naturally, laid claim to the larger snowdrift, giving them a tactical advantage in the upcoming battle. Substituting snowballs for the potentially dangerous spears, we manufactured a considerable stockpile of ammunition, which we pretended were hand grenades. The contest quickly evolved from an exchange between generic enemies to a more elaborate battle echoing the ongoing Boer War. Adolf declared that he and his friends, Gustav Fromm and Vigo Kessler, were German volunteers who had journeyed to South Africa to assist the beleaguered Boers in their fight against the dastardly British. We burst into war-like shouts as we took positions behind our respective snow forts, which we had spent the better part of the morning building up into waist-high strongholds topped with crenellations and watchtowers (until our half-frozen fingers had temporarily driven us indoors, where we busied ourselves fashioning some paper flags). The Boer fort was manned by Adolf and his crew. It was surmounted by a Boer flag, a German flag, and a striking flag of Adolf's own design, bearing a twisted cross (ein Hakenkreuz) that was evidently copied from the carving on the front door of the Benedictine monastery in Lambach, where Adolf had been a choirboy. I, along with Gunther Schmidt and Fritz Richter, held the British fort, which was marked with the Union Jack. Jumping the gun (we had agreed to a temporary truce while we made preparations for battle), I lobbed the first snowball, catching Adolf on the small of his back as he stood out in front of the Boer fort to reposition one of the flags atop the watchtower. He wheeled about and cast an angry glance at me before retreating to safety. We Brits kept up a steady barrage, gingerly advancing into the no-man's land that had been established between the two encampments: covered-over pits, tripwires, boards studded with upward-pointing nails. By the time we had made it halfway through the boobytraps, we had exhausted our supply of snowballs. The Germans, seeing that we were out of ammunition, now returned fire. We beat a hasty retreat, scooping up fresh handfuls of snow on the way. Our Union Jack went down. These were no ordinary snowballs that Adolf and his crew were hurling at us. I was hit smack in the middle of my forehead by an icy missile that had a rock at its core. With my gloved hand, I wiped away a drop of blood. The bombardment continued unabated, the low walls of our fort affording us scant protection. Obviously, the Germans had laid up a considerable store of their enhanced ammunition. After suffering several painful hits, we Brits were forced to abandon our untenable position. We took off down Lehnergutstrasse with the enemy in hot pursuit, pelting our backs with snowballs, their boots tramping in unison on the cobblestones as they broke into song: "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles ..."

Despite our drubbing, we would be back for a rematch the following day. Of course, my friends and I were cognizant of the fact that we hadn't been asked to Adolf's house merely for the pleasure of our company; we fully realized that the only reason we had been invited to partake in these afterschool shenanigans in the waning days of December was to serve as moving targets for Adolf and his crew. But simply having been selected to be on the periphery ofAdolf's exclusive little group was reward in itself. For who was to say that we would not one day be admitted to the inner sanctum? So we put up with the insults and the physical abuse, regarding them as a kind of initiation rite, a process through which we would eventually prove ourselves worthy.

CHAPTER 2

Extortion

My first encounter with young Adolf was in September 1900, the start of the new term in the Realschule in Linz. I was standing in the cafeteria line when the boy ahead of me suddenly turned around and punched me in the stomach. As I stood there, doubled over and trying to catch my breath, he thrust out his upturned palm and demanded my lunch money. Adolf, who sat in the back row in our mathematics class, was a skinny boy with unkempt hair. He was no taller than I, but something in his wild, piercing blue eyes told me that the most sensible course of action for me was to comply with his request. (I wondered for a moment why had he singled me out from all the others in the line, and then realized with a sharp pang of regret that he must have overheard me before class boasting to Gunther that my father had just increased my weekly allowance.) Reaching into my pocket, I dug out several coins and deposited them in Adolf's waiting hand. At lunchtime the following day, hoping to avoid another shakedown, I contrived to fall in at the back of the line, but Adolf sought me out and again punched me in the stomach. Having observed on the previous day that I still had more than half a crown left to buy lunch, he now demanded that I fork over all of my money. This I did, turning my pockets inside out to show that I was holding nothing back. The scene was repeated the following day, and, taking pity on me, Gunther and Fritz shared a portion of their own lunches with me. As I watched Adolf, sitting two tables away and munching on the tartlets he had bought with my lunch money, I came up with a plan of action. My father owned a bakery, and at the end of each day he would remove the unsold pastries from the front of the counter and put them in a special, reduced-price section. If any of these items remained unsold by the end of the week, a priest from the local monastery would collect them and distribute them to the poor. It was one of these week-old pastries — I think it was an apple turnover — that I tucked into a crisp white bag from the bakery and brought with me to school the following day. I strode boldly up to my nemesis at the front of the lunch line. (It was understood by all that if Adolf and his friends were to arrive late, they would be permitted to cut in ahead of everyone else.) Adolf appeared startled at first as I extended my offering toward him, but he promptly reached into the bag and pulled out the pastry, grunting with raw animal pleasure as he bit into it.

And so I managed to hold onto my lunch money, surprising Adolf each day with a different kind of pastry: an almond stick, a chocolate eclair, a couple of marzipan balls coated with brown sugar to make them look like little potatoes. While the pastries may have been past their prime, they were undoubtedly far superior to the stale tartlets served in the Realschule cafeteria.

Adolf cut quite an impressive figure in school, surrounded as he was with his little retinue. Gustav and Vigo, like their leader, wore beige trench coats. Walking ahead of him, they would ease his way through a crowd, shouting, "Make way! Coming through!" When we split up to form teams during recess, his toadies would rush to his side and loudly declare him to be captain, and rarely was there anyone with the courage to challenge him.

My biggest fear was that Adolf would begin demanding that I bring additional pastries to school to accommodate his friends, but he never did. As it turned out, I needn't have worried. Adolf had a weakness in addition to his sweet tooth: He was incredibly selfish. He obtained far more pleasure in making his friends desire what he had than he would have derived from sharing his bounty with them.

But Adolf had another demand to make of me. A week after I started bringing him a daily pastry, he waylaid me before mathematics class and grimly pressed a Bowie knife into my ribs. He demanded that I allow him to copy my math homework. This I did, and for the remainder of the year he would sit down before class and hastily copy my work, chastising me bitterly the few times when I came up with a wrong answer. His cheating was to no avail, however, for Adolf would receive a failing grade for the year in mathematics, and would be obliged to repeat both mathematics and French the following school year.

CHAPTER 3

The Train-Station Fire

The site of the half-century-old Leonding train station was more than a kilometer away from the new station, built in 1898. The conflagration that had consumed the stationmaster's old house (which had one room on the lower floor devoted to the sale of train tickets) was a subject of talk in the village of Leonding for many years afterward. It had been an act of arson and murder, committed by some considerably older boys than the ones who now played in the crumbling ruins. The identities of those responsible for the heinous deed had not remained a secret for long in our small, close-knit community. Rumors spread quickly. Frantz, the police chief's son, and Martin, the son of a local clergyman, ran off within a fortnight of the blaze, never to be seen again in shocked Leonding. Old enough to have known better (they were both nineteen), the perpetrators' motives could only be guessed at; their ruined lives, however, served as an object-lesson for those who might be inclined to follow in their footsteps.

The remnants of the station-house at Banhofstrasse 12, a heap of charred and fallen beams largely overgrown now with weeds and brambles, were a place of mystery and endless speculation, resembling nothing so much as a crumbling Italianate ruin pictured in one of our history books. The site was now a stage for innocent play — the current crop of actors not unaware of the fact that it was only thanks to the evil deed committed by Frantz and Martin that such play was possible. In the years since the incident, the ruins of the stationmaster's house had been treated with relative respect — no one deigning to smash the sole remaining windowpane through which the elderly widower had been wont to gaze out across the nearby railroad tracks. (Though more recently, the property had begun to see increasing use as a convenient place for people to dump their household rubbish.)

As we explored the tumbled-down house, we pictured what must have happened on that fateful night, some six years ago. Every one of us knew the story. How Frantz and Martin had started the fire, knowing that the stationmaster lay asleep in the upstairs bedroom. The fire had apparently awakened the old man, whose charred body was found the following morning at what had been the foot of the stairs.

"What a horrible way to die," opined Vigo Kessler, bowing his head respectfully over the spot where we believed the old man had breathed his last.

"He was a filthy Hapsburgian," said Adolf.

We continued to poke through the burnt-out shell of the house, shifting fallen timbers to see what potential treasures lay beneath them. It was difficult to determine where the ticket counter had been. Gunther and I deferred on this question to Fritz, whose parents had taken him on numerous train rides into Linz to visit an elderly aunt. That pile of charred rubble, he informed us, was what remained of the ticket counter. He directed our attention to another pile some distance away and said that marked the location of a counter at which one could purchase candy and flowers. Or was it over there? he wondered, indicating another mound of debris three or four meters away. It was easier to determine the location of the stairway leading up to the stationmaster's bedroom, the blackened remnants of the two or three bottom steps being unmistakable.

"Franz and Martin poured the gasoline here at the foot of the stairs," Adolf said decisively, pointing to the spot.

"How do you know that?" I asked.

"I read it in the paper. Also, you can see for yourself how the flooring here is more deeply charred than it is in the rest of the room."

The thought crossed my mind that Adolf knew more than he should about the fire. Was it possible that as a seven-year-old he had been a witness to the crime? Read it in the paper. Maybe. Adolf's father subscribed to the Linz Tagespost. Perhaps that daily had carried details about the fire that were not covered elsewhere. I watched Adolf as he resumed his search through the rubble.

"Finders, keepers," he cried suddenly, and held aloft a slag of blue glass, flat on the bottom and bearing a rounded mass on top, within which the distorted rim of what had been a vase could be made out. "This will make a fine paperweight for my desk. It's like an abstract work of art."

We wandered outside and began prying loose boards off what remained of the sides of the house, seeking to build ourselves a little lean-to that would keep us dry on a rainy day.

"That fire did one good thing," Adolf declared as we stood back and admired the result of our labors. "It gave us a great place to play and hang out."

There were surviving traces of a garden in the backyard: a clump of crocuses that continued to bloom every spring (though in steadily declining numbers), a straggly rosebush engaged in a struggle with an opportunistic vine for sunlight, and a patch of strawberries that we kids eagerly feasted on when they ripened in June — ignorant of the hands that had cultured them not so many years ago. And so we played to our hearts' content in and around the tumbled-down house, even on the railroad tracks themselves, carefully placing pfennigs on the rails and collecting them after the train had passed, leaving flattened slugs of metal whose obliterated details only a child's eye could appreciate.

"Finders keepers," I cried, having discovered a short distance away from the tracks a flattened pfennig onto which someone had scratched a rather sloppy cross with twisted arms on one side and an improved version of the same on the reverse, as if the person who had inscribed the symbol was attempting to perfect his art.

It was Adolf who discovered that if you placed several coins beneath the wheels of a train that had stopped, it would be unable to start moving until the perplexed train crew got out and removed the obstructions. But when the coins were placed on the tracks ahead of a moving train, there would be smartly flattened, albeit with a slight curvature that could be easily corrected with a couple of blows from the heel of one's shoe.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from I Was Hitler's Baker by Glenn Peterson. Copyright © 2019 Glenn Peterson. Excerpted by permission of Xlibris.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1796012009
• ISBN 13: 9781796012002
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224