When Adolf Hitler met Orson Welles and left no impression whatsoever on him
Orson Welles was a cultural titan, an actor and director known for his work across various mediums such as film, radio and television. Given that he is considered one of the most influential cinematic artists of all time, it’s unsurprising that Welles rubbed shoulders with several of the world’s most high-profile people. However, it may be a shock to learn that he once sat with Adolf Hitler at an early Nazi Party meeting.
“The world leader that really came to nothing as far as my memory is concerned was Hitler,” Welles once told Dick Cavett. “I was being escorted – I went twice through the Austrian-German hiking country, once with one teacher and once with another, and one of the two teachers, as it turned out, was a budding Nazi, and there was a big Nazi rally near Innsbruck.”
Welles explained that he encountered the Nazi Party before they had any semblance of a grip on power. “In the days when the Nazis were just a very comical minority party of nuts that nobody took seriously at all except my hiking companion,” he said.
It was through Welles’ hiking instructor that he came across the party’s future leader. “He wangled a place at the table with the great men of this tiny little party of cranks,” Welles explained. “The man sitting next to me was Hitler, and he made so little impression on me that I can’t remember a second of it.”
How peculiar that someone with the historical impetus that Hitler did, known for his public speaking and charisma, left no discernible impression on someone like Welles. “He had no personality whatsoever,” Welles added. “He was invisible. There was nothing there that anyone would remember.”
However, as for a genuinely remarkable man that Welles met, he claimed that the Chief of Staff of the US Army, George C Marshall, was “the greatest man I ever met”. He said, “[He was] a human being. I think he’s the greatest human being who was also a great man that I was ever privileged to meet.”
Explaining a touching story about Marshall, Welles said, “We’d be campaigning for Roosevelt, and one of our rewards when he got in again, one of the many times that he did, was to go to a big party of very big brass and be treated as though we were part of the High Command just for one night. It was in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, and a GI more innocent looking than anything you could imagine and younger than anything you could dream of stuck his head in at the moment when General Marshall happened to look toward the door.”
He continued, “The boy looked at him and said, ‘Gee, General Marshall, can I come in and say hello to you.’ Marshall said, ‘yeah, come in’. And Marshall didn’t know anybody was watching, and he took the boy away from everybody and sat down with him. This was the Grand Commander of the Allied forces, and he sat down with this boy without any grandstanding, just put him at ease, making him feel at home again for half an hour and leaving all the rest of us. He was that kind of fellow.”
