DZ Season 002 Part 04 How Hitler Almost Missed the Bus. 1 January 1933. Who, in the Nazi Party, called Hitler “an immigrant unemployed house painter”?

At last it was 1933. Hitler kept saying that he knew his destiny to become the Chancellor of the Third Reich would be achieved that year. If it didn’t then he would probably have ended up dead by his own hand.

Hitler isn’t universally loved. Even the man who would become the head of perhaps the most feared state security organisation that has ever existed in this world, the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, had described Hitler as “an immigrant unemployed house painter”. On another occasion he’d called him “an Austrian draft dodger”.

In 1937 (well into the future from where I am right now with Hitler still hoping that he’s going to be appointed the German Chancellor), a local Nazi Party official wrote about this head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller ‘we can hardly imagine him as a member of the Party.”

Another internal Party memo from that same year said that it could not understand how “so odious an opponent of the movement” could have become the head of the Gestapo. But that’s a fascinating story for another time.

So, is Hitler going to realise his destiny to become the Chancellor of Germany in the course of this programme? If yes, how? Keep listening.

Tag words: Joseph Goebbels; Magda Goebbels; Nazis; Nazi Party; Pepper Mill; Bonbonniere; Therese Giehse; Richard Wagner; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; Heinrich Hoffmann; Eva Braun; Reinhard Heydrich; Kurt von Schröder; Franz von Papen; Hans Johannesson; Tägliche Rundschau; Abraham Plotkin; President Hindenburg; Vossische Zeitung; Reichstag; Joachim von Ribbentrop; Gestapo; Heinrich Müller;