your Hitler Index today’s ” AR-online” again My dealings with Walter Frentz THE death

on July 6, 2004 of Walter Frentz , one of the last surviving members of Hitler’s private staff, has prompted me to rake through my surviving diaries and papers for details of my visits to him. I interviewed him on several occasions, and my notes on those interviews are now in the Sammlung Irving at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich.

At some time around 1972 he revealed to me his well-preserved secret collection of colour photographs of the Third Reich, taken while he was Hitler’s film cameraman. Frentz expressed concern about releasing them in case they were widely pirated, and in this respect he was not wrong. Eventually I purchased the right to use fifty of them in Hitler’s War and other books.

I supplied them to Ullstein Verlag for the German edition; the first disappointment was when Ullstein used them in connection with the Joachim Fest ‘s rival Hitler biography in 1975, and not in mine! The Frentz photos were used in the Stern serialization of the Fest book: when I pointed out to Ullstein that I had done the footwork to obtain the photos, and that Fest had not even known of Frentz’s existence, the publisher was unapologetic.

I finally used them for the first time in the 1991 edition of Hitler’s War, and was so pleased with the result — though we used less than fifty — that I doubled the payment made to Frentz as a bonus. I visited him once with an American television team — we were filming Hitler’s staff members for the Hard Copy series — but Frentz was not willing to be filmed at that time.

Later he did consent, and recounted to the cameras what he had told me in the 1970s, about his reluctant witnessing of a massacre of civilians outside Minsk in August 1941. “If you know what is good for you, Herr Frentz,” said Hitler’s chief Wehrmacht adjutant Generalmajor Rudolf Schmundt to him on his

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