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April 1945: Germany is in agony. Under the furious assaults of the Allies, the area of the Third Reich is reduced to an evernarrower strip of territory. It is an unprecedented example of a nation which, under the leadership of its leader, has allowed its last energies to be crushed and spends its final resources fighting the pressure from the two cylinders of a gigantic rolling mill: the invading armies. Until the last minute, until the last cartridge, the fighting continued and the blood flowed. Flames of destruction rose to the sky until the last light of the twilight of a great country … and a despicable regime! It took the occupation of the capital to put an end to this titanic struggle, where the fallen colossus had continued to fight until the last convulsions of its ravaged body. From this tumult and din emerged, enigmatically, the pale mask of Hitler. Who was this man who had been, for twelve years, the central figure of European history? Volumes have been devoted to him, but they focus more on events where he was the driving force, or on the results of his actions and policies, rather than describing or examining the man himself. Satirists have taken up this pathological case, almost unique in history, less to explain it than to give free rein to a simple fantasy and to satisfy the curiosity of a gullible public. The real actors in Hitler’s drama, those who gravitated in his demonic orbit, are dead or … silent. I had the opportunity to meet them at length in my capacity as an interrogation officer, attached to the 7th Army Interrogation Center of the United States Armed Forces. One of Hitler’s secretaries, whom I met in the Augsburg Camp in May 1945, where she was lost in a motley gathering of Wehrmacht, Party and government bigwigs, later brought her old master back to life before me, as she had observed him, as she had heard him speak. I had a long discussion with Göring at the Augsburg Camp about the Hitler problem; with Funk, Schacht’s successor; with Frick, the man who had given Hitler German citizenship; with von Warlimont, the head of the Führer’s headquarters; with Dr Morell, his trusted physician; with Schaub, his adjutant, etc., etc. In none of these men did I find a power of analysis comparable to that of this young girl, who was able to evoke Hitler with such perceptiveness, with such a gift of observation and precision of feelings that give her story a feeling of absolute sincerity. Following the dissolution of the 7th Army Interrogation Center in December 1945, she was transferred to Nuremberg as a witness and I lost track of her. She was then sentenced to two years in an internment camp by a German denazification tribunal. When she was released, a religious congregation took her in and employed her in heavy kitchen work. That is where I found her. By mutual agreement, we decided to write this book for the sole purpose of establishing the character and studying the psychology of Hitler, a neurotic of international crime. Surprisingly, the leader of the Third Reich was in the habit of confiding in people, of delivering his intimate thoughts and visionary rants to his secretaries, with whom he took his meals and whose presence he required at the nocturnal teas with which he ended his working days, and at the breaking dawn of the next day. In the pages that follow, the reader will discover an unknown Hitler. Behind the opaque curtain woven around him by propaganda and his prestige, you will see him live, act, struggle and collapse. You will find yourself in the presence of a man whose life, far from the crowds, unfolded in a double-sided and extraordinary atmosphere of stiff petty bourgeoisie and hallucinatory drama. I cede the floor to the person who was, for many years, his closest collaborator. In terms of perfect objectivity, she presents the man whose tragic personality, to a superhuman degree, evokes the famous phrase: ‘laugh or cry’.