Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  He was helped in this by a growing desire for isolation from reality on Hitler’s part. Just as the onetime flophouse inmate had in imagination lived in palaces, the generalissimo who was having to retreat on all fronts constructed more and more magnificent imaginary worlds that he rapturously inhabited. Hitler’s tendency to reject reality took an increasingly pathological form after the turning point of the war. This is evidenced in much of his behavior, such as his habit of traveling across the country in a curtained parlor car, and if possible by night. He would keep the windows of the conference room at the Führer’s headquarters closed, and sometimes even blacked out, even in the most beautiful weather. Significantly, he began the day by looking over the prepared excerpts from the press; only then would he examine the latest data. His entourage has reported that he accepted the event itself more calmly than its echo in the press; reality irked him less than its image.

  Hitler’s conversational style, constantly degenerating into monologue, his inability to listen or to register objections, and his growing insistence on columns of figures, his rage du nombre, must be reckoned a part of this syndrome. As late as the end of 1943 he was still speaking with total scorn of a study by General Thomas that presented the Russian potential as a serious danger. He bluntly declared that he wanted to see no more memoranda of this sort. At the same time he refused to visit the front or the staff headquarters behind the front. His last visit to the headquarters of an army group took place on September 8, 1943.67 Many disastrous decisions resulted from this ignorance of the reality, for marks on maps told nothing about the climate, the degree of exhaustion of the soldiers, or the extent of their psychological reserves. And in the curiously abstract atmosphere of the conference room, realistic data on the state of equipment or supplies were hard to come by. The preserved minutes of conferences, moreover, have recorded the truckling attitude of the military chiefs, their undignified flatteries. Once Halder had departed, this tone took over completely, so that ultimately all military conferences became no more than “show sits” as the jargon of the Führer’s headquarters described those fraudulent lectures to the statesmen of Germany’s allies. An attempt by Speer to have Hitler meet some of the younger front-line officers came to nothing; neither did the effort to persuade him to visit bombed cities. Goebbels jealously pointed to the much more impressive example of Churchill. Once, when the Führer’s special train on its way to Berchtesgaden with blinds raised by mistake stopped beside a hospital train full of wounded men, Hitler became very agitated and ordered the blinds to be drawn at once.68

  It is true that, in the preceding years contempt for reality had been his strength. How else could he have risen out of nothingness and put across his bold triumphs in statesmanship? His early military successes may also have been partly based on that. But now that the tide had turned, disregard of reality drastically multiplied the effects of every defeat. On those occasions when reality forced itself all too painfully on him, he once more raised his old laments that he had become a politician against his will and was sorely burdened by the necessities of office which kept him from immortalizing himself with his cultural projects. “It’s a pity,” he would say, “that I have to wage war on account of a drunken fellow [Churchill], instead of serving the works of peace, like art.” He said he was longing to go to the theater or the Wintergarten in Berlin and “be human again.” Or he spoke bitterly of deception and treachery all around him, of the way the generals were always misleading him, and gave way more and more to an unwonted tone of lachrymose misanthropy: “I meet nothing but betrayal!”

  From comparable observations during the twenties one of his early followers had drawn the conclusion that Hitler needed self-deception in order to be able to act at all.69 He craved vastly overblown sham worlds, against whose background all obstacles became insignificant and all problems trivial. He was capable of acting only on the basis of false pretenses. That note of fantastical overexcitement associated with his personality derived from this disturbed relationship to reality. We might say: only unreality made him real. In his comments to his entourage, even in those weary, toneless monologues in the last phase of the war. his voice became animated only when he spoke of the “gigantic tasks,” the “enormous plans” for the future. Those were his real reality.

  It was a monstrous prospect that opened before the favored group who sat deep into the night about the Führer’s table whenever he vouchsafed it “insights through the side door into paradise.” An entire continent was to be transformed by mass annihilation, extensive resettlements, assimilations and redistribution of the vacated areas. The program called for the conscious destruction of the past and the reshaping of all structures according to a plan without regard for historical tradition. True to his intellectual tendency, Hitler moved in spheres of vast proportions. Centuries shrank before his eyes, which saw only eternity; the world was reduced, and nothing was left of the Mediterranean but a mere, as he put it, “briny puddle.” The innocent age was approaching its end, and the millennium of a new way of thinking was dawning, a way founded upon science and artistic prophecy, and demanding gigantic projects. Its central idea was the salvation of the world from centuries-old infection in an eschatological struggle between pure and inferior blood.

  His mission was to provide the good blood with an imperial basis: an empire dominated by Germany, comprising the greater part of Europe as well as vast areas in Asia, which a century hence would be “the most compact and the most colossal power bloc” that had ever existed. Unlike Himmler and the SS, Hitler was free of all romanticism about the East. “I’d rather tramp on foot to Flanders,” he commented, and bewailed the need to conquer territory in an easterly direction. Russia, he said, was “a dreadful country… the end of the world.” He associated Russia with images of Dante’s inferno. “Only reason bids us go to the East.”

  Presiding over this power bloc would be a racially homogeneous master race described by Hitler as “creatively Aryan humanity of the Atalantine-Aryan-Nordic type.” It would be divided into a social hierarchy of three strata: the National Socialist “high nobility,” veterans of the struggle; the party members, who would form a kind of “new middle class”; and “the great anonymous masses… the collective of those who serve, those who never come of age,” as Hitler explained it. But these would still be called to rule over the “class of subject alien nationals… let us not flinch at calling them the modern slave class.” And however repellent this picture may seem to us, it had the sound of an ideal order, at least for the ideological vanguard of National Socialism. As Communism preached the utopia of a consistently egalitarian society, this was the utopia of a consistently hierarchic society. The difference was that the historically determined destiny of a class to rule was replaced by the “natural” destiny of a race to rule.

  The prewar years had seen a host of measures to purify the race, such as the SS marriage regulations and the genetic point system introduced by the Race and Settlement Bureau of the SS. Now, in the conquered regions of the East, a new, far more comprehensive and radical campaign was launched. Once again Hitler and the executives of the new order proceeded with a combination of positive and negative measures, linking endeavors to select good blood with extermination of those of inferior race. “They will fall like flies,” the SS announced in one of its widely disseminated propaganda releases. And from Hitler’s monologues there emerged a picture of, as he phrased it, a biological “process of mucking out” all contaminants of alien races, with subsequent Germanization.

  As always he displayed extraordinary energy for destruction. On October 7, 1939, in a secret decree he had appointed the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to the new post of Reich Commissioner for Consolidation of German Racialism, commissioned to undertake a racial “clean-up” in the East and prepare the region for an extensive resettlement program. Nevertheless, in this field, too, there soon developed that confusion of authorities and intentions that the regime engendered wherever it took action. T
he conquered Eastern territories became the testing ground for a multiplicity of genetic theories, which never progressed beyond their amateurish beginnings; and similarly, no more than a few confused outlines of the new order ever came into being.

  In annihilation, on the other hand, the regime displayed the greatest effectiveness. The special vocabulary surrounding the extermination program was a good indication of how closely the regime identified its nature and its destiny with these activities. For this was the “world-historical task,” the “glorious page in our history,” the “supreme stress test,” in the course of which the followers were being trained to a new kind of heroism and toughness. “It is considerably easier in many cases,” Himmler declared, “to go into battle with a company than with the same company in some area to hold down an antagonistic population of culturally lower type, to carry out executions, transport people out of the area, take away howling and weeping women… this quiet compulsion to act, this quiet activity, this standing guard over our Weltanschauung, this need to be consistent, to be uncompromising—in many ways that is much, much harder.”70 He defined his task: What was above all involved was “a perfectly clear solution” of the Jewish question. What was involved was the decision “to make this race disappear from the earth.” But since the majority of the German people were still not sufficiently enlightened about racial matters, the SS “has borne that for our people; we have taken the responsibility upon ourselves… and will then take the secret with us to our graves.”71

  We still do not know when Hitler made the decision on the “final solution” of the Jewish question, for no document on the matter exists. Much earlier than his closest followers, evidently, he understood such words as “elimination” or “extermination” not merely metaphorically, but as acts of physical annihilation, because such thoughts held no terrors for him. “Here too,” Goebbels wrote with an undertone of admiration, “the Führer has been the fearless vanguard and spokesman of a radical solution.” Even at the beginning of the thirties Hitler had, among his intimates, called for the development of a “technique of depopulation” and explicitly added that by that he meant the elimination of entire races. “Nature is cruel; therefore we also are entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the coming war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin.”72

  Even the procedure of killing the victims by poison gas, first applied in an old, remote castle in the forest near Kulmhof, in December, 1941, can be traced back to Hitler’s own experiences in the First World War. At any rate, a passage in Mein Kampf expresses the wish that “twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas” as happened to hundreds of thousands of German soldiers at the front.73 In any case, whenever the decision for the final solution was made, it had nothing to do with the deteriorating military situation. It would be a crude misunderstanding of Hitler’s fundamental intentions to represent the massacre in the East as the expression of growing bitterness at the development of the war, as an act of revenge upon the ancient symbolic enemy. Rather, that act was fully consistent with Hitler’s thinking and was, given his premises, absolutely inevitable. On the other hand, the plan, temporarily considered in the Race and Settlement Bureau of the SS and in the Foreign Office as well, to establish the island of Madagascar as a kind of great ghetto for some 15 million Jews, negated Hitler’s intentions on a crucial point. For if Jewry really was, as he had repeatedly stated and written, the infectious agent of the great world disease, then to his apocalyptic mind there could be no thought of providing a homeland for that agent, no course but to destroy its biological substance.

  As early as the end of 1939 the first deportations to the ghettos of the Government General (Poland) began. But Hitler’s specific decision for mass extermination apparently was made during the period of active preparation for the Russian campaign. The speech of March 31, 1941, which informed a sizable group of higher-ranking officers about Himmler’s “special tasks” in the rear area, represents the first concrete reference to plans for mass killings. Two days later Alfred Rosenberg, after a two-hour talk with Hitler, confided with a shudder to his diary. “Which I do not want to write down today, but will never forget.” Finally, on July 31, 1941, Göring issued to SD Chief Reinhard Heydrich the directive concerning the “desired final solution of the Jewish question.”74

  Efforts at concealment characterized the operation from the start. Beginning in January, 1942, the Jews were systematically rounded up throughout Europe, but the endless stream of trains that transported them started off toward unknown destinations. Deliberately spread rumors spoke of newly built, beautiful cities in the conquered East. The killer squads were given ever-changing reasons as justifications for their activities, the Jews being alternately presented as ringleaders of resistance and carriers of plagues. Even the ideological vanguards of National Socialism seemed to be unable to face the consequences of their own doctrines.

  Hitler’s own striking silence lends some support to this conjecture. For in the table talk, the speeches, the documents or the recollections of participants from all those years not a single concrete reference of his to the practice of annihilation has come down to us. No one can say how Hitler reacted to the reports of the Einsatzgruppen, whether he asked for or saw films or photos of their work, and whether he intervened with suggestions, praise, or blame. When we consider that he ordinarily transformed everything that preoccupied him into rampant speechmaking, that he never concealed his radicalism, his vulgarity, his readiness to go to extremes, this silence about the central concern of his life—involving, as it did in his mind, the salvation of the world—seems all the stranger. We can only guess about his motives: his characteristic mania for secrecy, a remnant of bourgeois morality, the desire to keep what was happening abstract and not weaken his own passion by letting himself see what it led to. Nevertheless, we are left with the disturbing picture of a savior who buries his great redeeming act deep in the charnel house of his heart. Of the entire top leadership, only Heinrich Himmler once attended a mass execution, at the end of August, 1942. He nearly fainted, and subsequently suffered a hysterical fit.75

  The SS bureaucracy ultimately invented a special terminology, full of words like “emigration,” “special treatment,” “sanitary measures,” “change of residence,” or “natural diminution.” Translated back into reality, such terms meant the following:

  Moennikes and I went directly to the pits. We were not stopped. Then I heard rifle shots in quick succession behind a mound of earth. The people who had got off the trucks, men, women and children of every age, had to undress on orders from an SS man who held a riding whip or dog whip in his hand. They had to deposit their clothing, shoes, upper and underclothes separately, at certain places. I saw a heap of shoes containing at a guess eight hundred to a thousand shoes, and huge piles of underclothing and clothing. Without an outcry or weeping these people undressed, stood together in family groups, kissed and said goodbye to each other, and waited for the beckoning gesture of another SS man who stood at the pit and likewise held a whip in his hand. During a quarter of an hour that I stood by the pits I heard no laments or pleas for mercy. I observed a family of some eight persons…. An old woman with snow-white hair held a year-old baby in her arms and sang something to it and tickled it. The child crowed with pleasure. The couple looked on with tears in their eyes. The father held a boy of about ten by the hand, and spoke comfortingly to him in a low voice. The boy was fighting back his tears. The father pointed his finger up at the sky, caressed his head, and seemed to be explaining something to him. At this point the SS man by the pit called out something to his fellow. The other man divided off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the mound of earth. The family I have been speaking of was among them. I still remember very clearly how a girl,
black-haired and slender, as she passed close by me gestured at herself and said: “Twenty-three years!” I walked around the mound of earth and stood in front of the huge grave. The people lay pressed so closely together on top of one another that only the heads could be seen. Blood was running from almost all the heads down over the shoulders. Some of those who had been shot were still moving. A few raised their arms and turned their heads to show they were still alive…. I looked around to see who was doing the shooting. It was an SS man, sitting on the ground at the rim of the narrow side of the pit, a submachine gun on his knees, and smoking a cigarette. The completely naked people walked down a flight of steps that had been cut into the earthen wall of the pit, stumbled over the heads of those who were already lying there, to the place that the SS man indicated. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded; some stroked those who were still living and murmured what seemed to be words of comfort. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw the bodies twitching, or the heads already lying still on the bodies in front. Blood ran from the back of their necks.76

  That was the reality. Gradually, however, by the establishment of a string of highly organized murder factories the work of annihilation was removed from the eyes of the populace, rationalized, and changed over to poison gas. On March 17, 1942, the camp of Belzec, with a daily kill capacity of 15,000 persons, began functioning. It was followed in April by Sobinor, close to the Ukrainian border, capacity 20,000; then Treblinka and Maidanek, with approximately 25,000, and above all Auschwitz, which became “the greatest institution for human annihilation of all times,” as its commandant, Rudolf Höss, boasted at his trial with a note of crazed pride. Here the entire killing process, from the selection of the new arrivals and the gassing of them to the elimination of the corpses and the exploitation of whatever remained, had been elaborated into a smooth system of interlocking procedures. The annihilation was carried out hastily, with increasing acceleration “so that we don’t find ourselves stuck in the middle of it some day,” as the SS chief of Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, explained. Many eyewitnesses have described the resignation with which people went to their deaths: in Kulmhof more than 152,000 Jews; in Belzec 600,000; in Sobinor 250,000; in Treblinka 700,000; in Maidanek 200,000; and in Auschwitz more than 1 million. And the shootings continued alongside the mass gassings. According to the exaggerated estimate of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt,[16] annihilation was to be extended to approximately 11 million Jews.77 More than 5 million were murdered.