Hitler's Table Talk

ELECTION VAGARIES — MUSIC 283
It was necessary to have a minimum of sixty thousand votes
in a district to be entitled to a mandate. Our base was in
Bavaria. Here we had six mandates, to start with, which gave
us an equal number of delegates to the Reichstag.
There were some extraordinary parties in that Republic.
The most incredible was Häusser's. I happened to be passing
through Stuttgart. This was in 1922 or 1923. Frau Waldschmidt
suggested that I should go and see this phenomenon,
without committing myself. I'm fairly sure Hausser was an
Alsatian. If my memory is correct, he addressed his audience
more or less as follows: "You, you filthy rabble . . .". And it
went on in the same tone, consisting solely of insults. In the
Munich district, he got a greater number of votes than Stresemann.
As for us, we had all the difficulty in the world to have
Epp elected.
What scatter-brains we sometimes had opposed to us ! Let's
not complain about it too much—it mustn't be forgotten that
one day Bismarck was beaten by a cobbler.
137 Night of3rd~4th February 1942
Memories of Bayreuth—The automobile craze—Leaving
Landsberg—Reconstitution of the Party—The world will
recapture its sense of joy.
I've been lucky that I never had an accident while travelling.
You know the story of the Hound of the Baskervilles. On a
sinister, stormy night I was going to Bayreuth through the
Fichtelgebirge. I'd just been saying to Maurice: "Look out on
the bend!" I'd scarcely spoken when a huge black dog hurled
itself on our car. The collision knocked it into the distance. For
a long time we could still hear it howling in the night.
I'd settled down with the Bechsteins, within a few yards of
Wahnfried. On the morning of my arrival, Cosima Wagner
paid me a visit, which I returned in the course of the day.
Siegfried was there. Bayreuth exerted its full charm upon me.
I was thirty-six years old, and life was delightful. I had all the