Title: Hitler's piano player
First published: 2004
Description: "He was a man who enjoyed the confidences of both the Fuhrer and FDR, a man with the world's most unique perspective on the cataclysmic events of the early twentieth century. Ernst Hanfstaengl (known to all as Putzi) was haughty court jester, soothing pianist, and savvy foreign press chief for Hitler during the Nazi leader's ascendancy and later played a lead role in Roosevelt's top-secret project to use black propaganda against the Third Reich. Filled with revelations about Hitler's personal life and descriptions of American psychological warfare, Hitler's Piano Player tells the story of a man torn apart by the most antagonistic of loyalties." "An urbane Harvard-educated German, Putzi was living in Germany in 1922 when he first heard Adolf Hitler speak in a Munich beer hall. Introducing himself after the speech, Putzi began one of the strangest relationships in twentieth-century politics." "As he tried to ingratiate Hitler with Munich high-society and polish his image in the eyes of the world, Putzi also helped finance Mein Kampf, claimed to have devised the chant of "Sieg Heil," tried desperately to get Hitler to meet with Winston Churchill, and attempted to fix Hitler up with the American ambassador's daughter. But he fell out of the future Fuhrer's graces, barely escaped Germany with his life, and fled to Britain, where he was interned and then transferred to Canada and finally to America. Once there, he worked with his old acquaintance from New York's Harvard Club, Franklin Roosevelt. The star of Roosevelt's "S-Project", Putzi provided the White House with biographical information on hundreds of leading Nazis, analyses of Hitler's speeches, and a sixty-eight-page psychological portrait of Hitler describing his education, diet, and his sex life." "Through newly declassified documents, interviews with surviving members of the Hanfstaengl family, and original writings by Putzi, historian and author Peter Conradi has crafted the story of history's missing link between Hitler and FDR."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Friends and associates, Biography, Nazis, Germany, biography
People: Ernst Hanfstaengl (1887-1975), Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
LC classification: DD247.H254 C66 2004