Before his death in 1975 at the age of 88, the name of Ernst Hanfstaengl was known to a few historians of the Nazi era but to almost nobody else. However, this could change as Hollywood discovers the extraordinary story of Hitler's personal pianist who became the Nazi liaison officer with the foreign press but spent much of the second World War as adviser to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
A German producer is planning a film about Hanfstaengl, who was known as Putzi, and a new book draws on hitherto secret files to reveal the extent of Putzi's work for the US intelligence services during the war.
Early in Hitler's political career, Putzi's piano-playing was among the future dictator's few delights. "I've never had a love nest. I'll never have such a home. For me there is only one loved one, Germany," Hitler told his piano-player in 1923. Hitler's musical taste was narrow and predictable, almost entirely confined to the works of Richard Wagner, with the Tristan finale as his absolute favourite. "You're the purest orchestra, Hanfstaengl," the Nazi leader would gush.
A tall, powerfully built Bavarian and the son of a prominent art dealer, Putzi left Germany to study at Harvard in 1905 and stayed in the US for more than a decade and a half. He opened a branch of the family business on New York's Fifth Avenue, ran an art school in Greenwich Village and hobnobbed with leading politicians, including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
In November 1922, after Putzi had returned to Germany, he was invited by the US military attache in Berlin, Capt Truman Smith, to attend a political meeting Hitler was addressing in a beer cellar. "This guy has just the right melody on his tongue that the hungry Germans want to hear today, national and social," Capt Smith told him. Putzi fell under the spell of the Fuhrer within minutes of hearing him speak, but it is clear from the pianist's description of Hitler's style that the appeal was as much aesthetic as political.
"Anyone who knows Hitler only as the wild dictator degenerating into grossness at the microphone has no idea of the richly registered, full-toned instrument of the early years, the natural, not artificially amplified voice," he wrote later. Putzi not only became Hitler's piano-player, he also took charge of relations with the foreign press. The Harvard graduate's easy, cosmopolitan manner helped to persuade many foreign correspondents that the Nazis could not be as thuggish and brutal as they appeared.
Soon after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, however, he tired of Putzi, not least because of the pianist's constant urgings towards moderation for the sake of Germany's image abroad. Putzi fled to Britain in 1937 after the Nazi leadership threatened to parachute him behind enemy lines in the Spanish Civil War; a harmless, practical joke.