Picking Out Furniture with Adolf Hitler

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1972-025-10 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5482661

When it came to picking out furniture, Eva Braun was a real Nazi. She had grand plans for the decoration of Dolfie’s office and workspaces. Curtains and carpets, Persian rugs and throw pillows danced in her head like an afternoon matinee.

As their car drove past the Tiergarten on the way to one of Berlin’s most distinguished furniture stores, Adolf could have only wondered how he got roped into this weekend shopping excursion. Hermann and Joe had straight out told their wives ‘no’, they were far too busy with important work for something so silly as furniture shopping. But not Adolf. Despite being the uncontested Fuehrer of the Third Reich, one of the most feared men alive, when Eva informed him they’d be picking out some furniture for his bunker that morning, he silently got his ass in the car.

The trip to the store drug on and on.

Mrs. Goebell’s, Mrs. Göring, and Eva were having a splendid time. Despite their intermittent rebukes of Dolfie for his impatience, they were smiling and looking at each piece of furniture three times over. Adolf, for his part, was no passive participant. Eva wanted to know his deepest emotional reaction to each piece of furniture, she wanted to know what he thought about each one – only to brush aside his feedback and pick out what she had in her mind from the beginning.

Adolf was dying to get out of there. He pleaded with Eva to let him pop down the street for a coffee for a few minutes. She eventually relented, but asked for his thoughts on a final piece of furniture – a huge oak table for his Wolf’s Lair bunker.

“Dolfie dear, what do you think of this table? I think it’d be splendid for the meeting room in the bunker!”

“Ja, es ist gut, Eva…” he said, barely looking up.

So, she purchased the huge oak table, unknowingly sealing the failure of one of the greatest conspiracies of all time.

***

To read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is to read history with a sassy bias. Shirer lived in Germany during the Reich years and actively hated Adolf and his pack of goons. One can tell that this book is written from a place of anger. Like a vindictive ex-wife, his wordy one thousand-plus page tome is an effort to set the record straight in minute detail.

Shirer’s petty jabs at Adolf dot the pages of this book. He really works himself into a fine lather at points. Not that Adolf wasn’t imminently hateable. Pretty much everybody hated Adolf and lots of people were trying to kill him.

For years, stand-up comedians have been traveling backwards in time in mostly unsuccessful attempts to kill baby Hitler. Aside from that, Hitler was almost killed several times in World War I. And when World War II rolled around, nearly the entire world was out to kill Hitler. Even pretty boy theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer got in on the action.

His own Nazis were trying to kill Hitler. There were plots and conspiracies. The most well-know of which is the July 20th, 1944 assassination attempt led by colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, on which the Tom Cruise film Valkerie is based.

Reading through the list of who was involved in this conspiracy, it is astounding that no one ever ratted out the group. There were multiple attempts made by this group of high ranking Nazi officers to kill Hitler, before the July 20th attempt. Yet no one talking was a key ingredient for a successful conspiracy.

This conspiracy had a clear goal and was organized by a group of highly trained officers. On July 20th, von Stauffenberg was attending a meeting with Hitler and other officers at bunker called The Wolf’s Lair in eastern Prussia. He had a time bomb in his brief case under the table.

Dolfie probably droned on and on during the meeting. (He loved to hear himself talk). At some point von-Stauffenberg got up from the meeting and walked outside. An explosion occurred, smoke and debris were flying everywhere. He mistakenly concluded that the Fuhrer was dead, got in his car and drove off.

Inside the bunker, all was chaos. Several officers lay dead from the bomb going off. Among the confusion of the scene, they pulled Adolf Hitler from the wreckage. He was stunned, but very much alive. von-Stauffenberg’s briefcase bomb had been placed outside the thick legs of the meeting room table. The sheer girth of the table had shielded Adolf from a direct bomb blast, thereby saving his life.

And so it was that one of the greatest and most well-thought out conspiracies in modern history was undone by Eva’s oak table.

***

As a people, we are still obsessed with conspiracies.

And while conspiracies do occur at times, their prevalence is vastly overestimated. There is a proliferation of conspiracy theories on every topic right now from the government, sports, aliens and religion, to the virus and vaccines.

Just the other day a person was telling me how paranoid she was about getting vaccinated, as she sucked on her strawberry vape pen. “It’s too rushed.” (puff, puff) “Untested science.” (puff, puff) “Don’t know what’s in it.” (Puff, puff).

You also don’t know what’s in that 20-piece chicken McNuggets you just ate either. (We do know what’s NOT in it though – chicken).

The whole thing is a Bill Gates conspiracy. Or a clandestine operation to kill off the population. Or the government’s maniacal plan to put a tracking device in you, to track your steps from the couch to the beer fridge. (As if Apple and Google hadn’t done it already).

Conspiracy theories feel good for several reasons. One, even though the supposed perpetrators have evil intentions, at least someone is still in charge. A devilish puppet master behind the scenes making the world turn toward his will. Conspiracy theories are also cathartic. They provide a target for our negative emotions, whether those be unfulfilled curiosity or boiling anger.

Conspiracy theories also make us feel smart, like we invested early in Google stock or predicted the world would end in 2012. Like we have some piece of insider knowledge that others don’t have access to.

Yet often there is no cabal of shadowy masked men, the powers-that-be behind events are none other than the powers of raw human stupidity in all its profundity. There is no mastermind behind the wheel; our leaders are just as human and clueless as we are.  

There is an element of randomness to our world. That God-only-knows-why unfolding of events that requires us to have some humility about our place in the universe.

Conspiracy theories offer deliciously simple explanations to situations we struggle to understand. They offer relief when we’d rather not sit with the uncertainty of not knowing why.

When even the greatest and most well-organized of conspiracies can be undone by a thick oak table, I tend to think they are fairly rare. Not saying they don’t happen, but much like the Lions secondary, they normally end up getting exposed and their chances for success are minimal.