HE WAS MY CHIEF - Memoirs of Adolf Hitler's Principal Secretary

Hitler's best-known secretary to date is Traudi Junge, owing to her memoirs which inspired the film Der Untergang (Downfall) about the dictator's final days. But she did not enter his service until January 1943, whereas Christa Schroeder had been there since 1933 and would remain until 20 April 1945. For twelve years, she accompanied her "chief" on all his travels between the capital, the Berghof, and his various field headquarters.

Young and naive, Christa Schroeder meticulously recorded everything that occurred in Hitler's confined entourage, which General Jodl would describe as being "halfway between a monastery and a concentration camp". She remarkably captures the atmosphere of the "Night of the Long Knives" of 30 June 1934, which she witnessed; she is also privy to certain confidential statements by the Führer, such as that day in August 1941 when he declared that Moscow would fall within four weeks and then be razed to the ground entirely.

It is on Hitler's personality that Christa Schroeder focuses her entire attention, which makes her testimony invaluable. Not one of the characteristic traits of the master of the Reich escapes her, from his thoroughly Viennese gallantry with women to his obsessive vegetarianism, by way of his prodigious memory, his insomnia, his mood swings, his artistic talents, and his countless phobias. She also draws the portrait of a noticeably neurotic, indeed distinctly abnormal Don Juan.

Like countless German women of the era, Christa Schroeder was drawn into a dizzying whirlpool, but, unlike most, she found herself at the very centre of the maelstrom.

Her unique testimony, known in France only to specialist historians, had remained inaccessible to the French-speaking reader — an oversight that was long overdue to be remedied.