by Ian Kershaw
Some of the most important matters he discussed, if at all, only with those in his close circle – the group of adjutants, chauffeurs, and longstanding cronies such as Julius Schaub (his general factotum), Heinrich Hoffmann (his photographer) and Sepp Dietrich (later head of his SS bodyguard).176 Distrust – and vanity – went hand in hand with his type of leadership, in Gregor Strasser’s view. The danger, he pointed out with reference to the dismissal of Pfeffer, was the self-selection of what Hitler wanted to hear and the negative reaction towards the bearer of bad tidings. There was something other-worldly about Hitler, thought Strasser; a lack of knowledge of human beings, and with it a lack of sound judgement of them. Hitler lived without any bonds to another human being, Strasser went on. ‘He doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t drink, he eats almost nothing but greenstuff, he doesn’t touch any woman! How are we supposed to understand him to put him across to other people?’177
Hitler contributed as good as nothing to the running and organization of the massively expanded Nazi Movement. His ‘work-style’ (if it could be called such) was unchanged from the days when the NSDAP was a tiny, insignificant völkisch sect. He was incapable of systematic work and took no interest in it.178 He was as chaotic and dilettante as ever. He had found the role where he could fully indulge the unordered, indisciplined, and indolent lifestyle that had never altered since his pampered youth in Linz and drop-out years in Vienna. He had a huge ‘work-room’ (Arbeitszimmer) in the new ‘Brown House’ – a building of tasteless grandiosity that he was singularly proud of. Pictures of Frederick the Great and a heroic scene of the List Regiment’s first battle in Flanders in 1914 adorned the walls. A monumental bust of Mussolini stood beside the outsized furniture. Smoking was forbidden.179 To call it Hitler’s ‘work-room’ was a nice euphemism. Hitler rarely did any work there. Hanfstaengl, who had his own room in the building, had few memories of Hitler’s room since he had seen the party leader there so seldom. Even the big painting of Frederick the Great, noted the former foreign press chief, could not motivate Hitler to follow the example of the Prussian king in diligent attention to duty. He had no regular working hours. Appointments were there to be broken. Hanfstaengl had often to chase through Munich looking for the party leader to make sure he kept appointments with journalists. He could invariably find him at four o’clock in the afternoon, surrounded by his admirers, holding forth in the Café Heck.180 Party workers at headquarters were no more favoured. They could never find a fixed time to see Hitler, even about extremely important business. If they managed, clutching their files, to catch him when he entered the Brown House, he would as often as not be called to the telephone and then apologize that he had to leave immediately and would be back the next day. Should they manage to have their business attended to, it was normally dispatched with little attention to detail. Hitler would in his usual manner turn the point at issue into a matter on which, pacing up and down the room, he would pontificate for an hour in a lengthy monologue.181 Often he would completely ignore something brought to his attention, deviating at a tangent into some current whim. ‘If Hitler gets a cue to something he is interested in – but that’s something different every day,’ Pfeffer is reported to have told Wagener in 1930, ‘then he takes over the conversation and the point of the discussion is shelved.’182 On matters he did not understand, or where a decision was awkward, he simply avoided discussion.183
This extraordinary way of operating was certainly built into Hitler’s personality. Masterful and domineering, but uncertain and hesitant; unwilling to take decisions, yet then prepared to take decisions bolder than anyone else could contemplate; and refusal, once made, to take back any decision: these are part of the puzzle of Hitler’s strange personality. If the domineering traits were signs of a deep inner uncertainty, the overbearing features the reflection of an underlying inferiority complex, then the hidden personality disorder must have been one of monumental proportions.184 To ascribe the problem to such a cause redescribes it rather than explains it. In any case, Hitler’s peculiar leadership style was more than just a matter of personality, or instinctive social-Darwinist inclination to let the winner emerge after a process of struggle. It reflected too the unceasing necessity to protect his position as leader. Acting out the leader’s role could never be halted. The famous handshake and steely blue eyes were part of the act. Even leading figures in the party never ceased to be impressed with the apparent sincerity and bond of loyalty and comradeship that they thought accompanied Hitler’s unusually long handshake and unblinking stare into their eyes.185 They were too much in awe of Hitler to realize what an elementary theatrical trick it was. The greater became the nimbus of the infallible leader, the less the ‘human’ Hitler, capable of mistakes and misjudgements, could be allowed on view. The ‘person’ Hitler was disappearing more and more into the ‘role’ of the almighty and omniscient Leader.
Very occasionally, the mask slipped. Albert Krebs related a scene from early 1932 that reminded him of a French comedy. From the corridor of the elegant Hotel Atlantik in Hamburg he could hear Hitler plaintively shouting: ‘My soup, [I want] my soup.’ Krebs found him minutes later hunched over a round table in his room, slurping his vegetable soup, looking anything other than a hero of the people. He appeared tired and depressed. He ignored the copy of his speech the previous night that Krebs had brought him, and to the Gauleiter’s astonishment asked him instead what he thought of a vegetarian diet. Fully in character, Hitler launched, not waiting for an answer, into a lengthy discourse on vegetarianism. It struck Krebs as a cranky outburst, aimed at overpowering, not persuading, the listener. But what imprinted the scene on Krebs’s memory was how Hitler revealed himself as an acute hypochondriac to one to whom he had presented himself up to then ‘only as the political leader, never as a human being (Mensch)’. Krebs did not presume that Hitler was suddenly regarding him as a confidant. He took it rather as a sign of the party leader’s ‘inner instability’. It was an unexpected show of human weakness which, Krebs plausibly speculated, was overcompensated by an unquenchable thirst for power and resort to violence. According to Krebs, Hitler explained that a variety of worrying symptoms – outbreaks of sweating, nervous tension, trembling of muscles, and stomach cramps – had persuaded him to become a vegetarian.186 He took the stomach cramps to be the beginnings of cancer, leaving him only a few years to complete ‘the gigantic tasks’ he had set himself. ‘I must come to power before long… I must, I must,’ Krebs has him shouting. But with this, he gained control of himself again. His body-language showed he was over his temporary depression. His attendants were suddenly called, orders were given out, telephone calls booked, meetings arranged. ‘The human being Hitler had been transformed back into the “Leader”.’187 The mask was in place again.
Hitler’s style of leadership functioned precisely because of the readiness of all his subordinates to accept his unique standing in the party, and their belief that such eccentricities of behaviour had simply to be taken on board in someone they saw as a political genius. ‘He always needs people who can translate his ideologies into reality so that they can be implemented,’ Pfeffer is reported as stating.188 Hitler’s way was, in fact, not to hand out streams of orders to shape important political decisions. Where possible, he avoided decisions. Rather, he laid outoften in his diffuse and opinionated fashion – his ideas at length and repeatedly. These provided the general guidelines and direction for policy-making. Others had to interpret from his comments how they thought he wanted them to act and ‘work towards’ his distant objectives. ‘If they could all work in this way,’ Hitler was reported as stating from time to time, ‘if they could all strive with firm, conscious tenacity towards a common, distant goal, then the ultimate goal must one day be achieved. That mistakes will be made is human. It is a pity. But that will be overcome if a common goal is constantly adopted as a guideline.’189 This instinctive way of operating, embedded in Hitler’s social-Darwinist approach, not only unleashed ferocious competition among thos
e in the party – later in the state – trying to reach the ‘correct’ interpretation of Hitler’s intentions. It also meant that Hitler, the unchallenged fount of ideological orthodoxy by this time, could always side with those who had come out on top in the relentless struggle going on below him, with those who had best proven that they were following the ‘right guidelines’. And since only Hitler could determine this, his power position was massively enhanced.
Inaccessibility, sporadic and impulsive interventions, unpredictability, lack of a regular working pattern, administrative disinterest, and ready resort to long-winded monologues instead of attention to detail were all hallmarks of Hitler’s style as party leader. They were compatible – at least in the short term – with a ‘leader party’ whose exclusive middle-range goal was getting power. After 1933, the same features would become hallmarks of Hitler’s style as dictator with supreme power over the German state. They would be incompatible with the bureaucratic regulation of a sophisticated state apparatus and would become a guarantee of escalating governmental disorder.
VII
At the beginning of 1931, a familiar, scarred face not seen for some time returned to the scene. Ernst Röhm, recalled by Hitler from his self-imposed exile as a military adviser to the Bolivian army, was back. He took up his appointment as new Chief of Staff of the S A on 5 January.190
The case of Otto Strasser had not been the only crisis that the party leadership had had to deal with during 1930. More serious, potentially, had been the crisis within the SA. It had been simmering for some time before it exploded in the summer of 1930, during the election campaign. In reality, the crisis merely brought to a head – not for the last time – the structural conflict built into the NSDAP between the party’s organization and that of the SA. This had its origins, as we have noted, in the years before the putsch. The insistence after 1925 that the SA was the party’s ‘auxiliary troop’ (Hilfstruppe), not a paramilitary formation, had never succeeded fully in quelling the separate esprit de corps which existed among the stormtroopers. The contempt of these ‘party soldiers’ for the ‘civilians’ in the Gau offices was a constant.191 Regular reminders that they were subordinate to the party organization were not always easily swallowed by storm-troopers, who felt that they were the ones who went where the going was toughest, who suffered the casualties from the street warfare with Communists and Socialists.
Matters had come to a head in 1930 over the question of the placing of three SA leaders on the list of Reichstag candidates. This was, however, the occasion rather than the underlying cause. It was coupled with the financial disadvantages that the SA felt through its lack of autonomy and dependence on Gau offices and the demands for an immediate improvement. After Walter Stennes, the S A leader in the eastern regions of Germany and impatient like many of his men at the strategy of attempting to gain power by legal – and slow – means, had travelled to Munich in August to confront Hitler, but gained no audience, his subordinates in Berlin resigned their positions and refused to carry out any propaganda or protection duties for the party. A flashpoint arose when S A men assigned to protect a big Goebbels meeting in the Sportpalast on 30 August were ordered by Stennes to appear at a parade elsewhere in Berlin. Shortly afterwards, a meeting of Berlin SA leaders ended in stormtroopers forcing their way into party headquarters – overcoming the resistance of SS men (whose organization was actually still subordinate to the SA) and seriously vandalizing the building.192 Goebbels was shocked at the extent of the demolition. Hitler rushed to Berlin. Goebbels told him that a settlement was urgently needed. Otherwise the rebellion, already spreading throughout the land, would result in a catastrophe.193 Hitler, after speaking first to some groups of the aggrieved SA men, had two meetings during the night with Stennes, without apparent success. But the next day, 1 September, he appealed to a rapidly assembled mass meeting of around 2,000 Berlin stormtroopers. Pfeffer, the supreme SA leader, had resigned three days earlier. Hitler now announced – a move received with great jubilation – that he himself was taking over the supreme leadership of the SA and SS. He outlined the achievements of the SA in the growth of the movement. He ended, his voice almost hysterical, with an appeal for loyalty. In a piece of theatre reminiscent of the party refoundation meeting in 1925, the eighty-year-old war-hero General Litzmann was brought out to offer an oath of loyalty to Hitler on behalf of all SA men. Loyalty had not been without its price. Stennes read out Hitler’s order providing for substantial financial improvements for the S A deriving from increased party dues.194 The immediate crisis was over.
A memorandum from the Deputy to the Supreme Leader in South Germany, Obergruppenführer August Schneidhuber, dated 19 September 1930, did not exempt Hitler from blame for the rebellious feeling among storm-troopers. The SA had gained little recognition for an election victory which it could claim as its own, he wrote. The Berlin events had shown that Hitler had not had sufficient contact with his S A, Schneidhuber continued. Things had been brewing for some considerable time. The demand for recognition by Hitler of the achievements of the SA had been growing: ‘The Führer unfortunately did not hear the warning voices.’195
The day-to-day running of the SA was temporarily taken over by Otto Wagener, a businessman recruited the previous year by Pfeffer, a former Freikorps comrade, as his chief of staff. Wagener had used his business contacts to persuade a cigarette firm to produce ‘Sturm’ cigarettes for SA men – a ‘sponsorship’ deal benefiting both the firm and the SA coffers. Stormtroopers were strongly encouraged to smoke only these cigarettes. A cut from the profit went to the SA – though after Pfeffer’s resignation, the Reich Party Treasurer made sure that control over the funds was exercised by the party itself, not by the SA.196 In October 1930, Wagener passed down guidelines from Hitler indicating ‘special tasks’ for the SA in the ‘struggle for power’, and offering the expectation that after a takeover of power it would become the ‘reservoir… for a future German national army’.197 The claim within the SA leadership for a high degree of autonomy from the party leadership was, however, undiminished. The scope for continued conflict was still there.
This was the situation awaiting the return of Röhm, not as supreme head but as chief of staff, which was announced by Hitler to assembled SA leaders in Munich on 30 November 1930. Röhm’s high standing from the pre-putsch era, together with his lack of involvement in any of the recent intrigues, made his appointment a sensible one. However, his notorious homosexuality was soon used by those SA subordinates who resented his leadership to try to undermine the position of the new chief of staff. Hitler was forced as early as 3 February 1931 to reject attacks on ‘things that are purely in the private sphere’, and to stress that the SA was not a ‘moral establishment’ but ‘a band of rough fighters’.198
Röhm’s moral standards were not the real point at issue. Hitler’s action the previous summer had defused the immediate crisis. But it was papering over the cracks. The tension remained. Neither the precise role nor degree of autonomy of the SA had been fully clarified. Given the character of the Nazi Movement and the way the SA had emerged within it, the structural problem was insoluble. And the putschist strain, always present in the SA, was resurfacing. Since his demands for Reichstag seats had been brusquely rejected, it could hardly be surprising that Stennes rebounded to an anti-parliamentary strategy. But his advocacy of taking power by force, advanced in articles in the Berlin party newspaper Der Angriff, was increasingly alarming to the Nazi leadership. Such noises flatly contradicted, and directly placed in question, the commitment to legality that Hitler had made, most publicly and on oath, following the Reichswehr trial in Leipzig the previous September, and had stressed on numerous occasions since then.199 Hitler was forced in February to fire a shot across the bows to Stennes in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, denouncing the ‘lie’ that the National Socialists were planning a violent coup, saying he understood the needs and feeling of anger of the SA and SS, but warning against ‘provocateurs’ in the movemen
t’s own ranks who were delivering to the government the legitimation for ‘persecuting’ the party.200 In a speech to S A men in Munich on 7 March, Hitler stated: ‘I am accused of being too cowardly to fight illegally. I am certainly not too cowardly for that. I am only too cowardly to lead the S A to face machine-gun fire. We need the S A for more important things, namely for the construction of the Third Reich. We’ll keep to the constitution and will still come to our goal. The constitution prescribes the right to come to power. What means we use is our concern.’201 The spectre of a ban on the party loomed very much larger with the promulgation of an emergency decree on 28 March, giving the Brüning government wide-ranging powers to combat political ‘excesses’.202 ‘The party, above all the SA, seems to be facing a ban,’ wrote Goebbels in his diary.203 Hitler ordered the strictest compliance with the emergency decree by all members of the party, SA and SS.204 But Stennes was not prepared to yield. ‘It is the most serious crisis the party has had to go through,’ commented Goebbels.205
It was high time to take action. Goebbels was summoned to a meeting with Hitler and other party leaders in Weimar and told on arrival that Stennes had been deposed as S A leader in eastern Germany. No sooner had Goebbels received the news than the telephone rang from Berlin to tell him that the SA had occupied the party headquarters and the offices of the Angriff. Despite putting a brave face on it to his immediate entourage, Hitler was shocked. The Berlin SA leadership published on 2 April a frontal attack on his ‘ungerman (undeutsche) and boundless party despotism and the irresponsible demagogy’.206 Hitler’s immediate reply was to renew his bestowal of plenipotentiary powers on Goebbels to undertake with whatever ruthlessness necessary the purge of all ‘subversive elements’ from the Berlin party. ‘Whatever you need to do in fulfilling [this task],’ wrote Hitler, ‘I will back you.’207