Hitler and Friends

Adolf Hitler, Emil Maurice, Hermann Kriebel, Rudolf Heß, Dr Friedrich Weber

An oddly louche picture here, of AH and his fellow Nazi inmates during the time of their incarceration in Spandau!

Perhaps it's just me, but Hitler does give the impression that he can't wait to be shot (and I use the expression advisedly) of the whole lot of them.

Emil Maurice, the camp-looking one next to Hitler, was a Mischling - that is, he was partly Jewish. He went on to become Hitler's driver (which for other Nazis later became practically a euphemism for bum-chum, though it probably wasn't in Maurice's case), and may quite possibly have seduced the boss's niece, Geli Raubal. (No one knows quite why Hitler dismissed Maurice, but  Geli committed suicide not long afterwards.) He ended up living to a ripe old age and died a free man in the early 1970s.

Herman Kriebel wasn't actually a Nazi. He had been the leader of the Kampfbund - the right-wing umbrella group, of which the Nazi Party was just one member amongst others, under whose auspices the Beerhall Putsch had officially taken place.

And Dr Friedrich Weber was actually a vet. Later on, during the War, he became an army vet. And yet despite being fined afterwards for "war profiteering"* he eventually died of natural causes in 1954.

*War profiteering as a vet? Really?