Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  The walks were always downhill, with a car stationed at the bottom to ferry Hitler and his accompaniment back up again. Hitler’s detestation of physical exercise and fear of embarrassment through lack of athleticism remained acute. The whole area was cordoned off during the afternoon walk, to keep away the crowds of sightseers eager for a glimpse of the Führer. Instead, the tradition set in of the visitors’ ‘march-past’. Up to 2,000 people of all ages and from all parts of Germany, whose devotion had persuaded them to follow the steep paths up to the Obersalzberg and often wait hours, marched, at a signal from one of the adjutants, in a silent column past Hitler. For Wiedemann, the adulation had quasi-religious overtones.

  Hitler rarely missed his evening film. The adjutants had to see to it that a fresh film was on offer each day. Hitler invariably preferred light entertainment to serious documentaries, and, according to Wiedemann, probably gleaned some of his strong prejudices about the culture of other nations from such films.

  In the Reich Chancellery, the company was almost exclusively male – the atmosphere part way between that of a men’s club and an officers’ mess (with a whiff of the gangsters’ den thrown in). On the Obersalzberg, the presence of women (Eva Braun and wives or lady-friends of members of Hitler’s entourage) helped to lighten the atmosphere, and political talk was banned as long as they were there. Hitler was courteous, even charming in a somewhat awkwardly stiff and formal fashion, to his guests, especially towards women. He was invariably correct and attentive in dealings with the secretaries, adjutants, and other attendants on his personal staff, who for the most part liked as well as respected him. He could be kind and thoughtful, as well as generous, in his choice of birthday and Christmas presents for his entourage. Even so, whether at the Reich Chancellery or on the Obersalzberg, the constrictions and tedium of living in close proximity to Hitler were considerable. Genuine informality and relaxation were difficult when he was present. Wherever he was, he dominated. In conversation, he would brook no contradiction. Guests at meals were often nervous or hesitant lest a false word incur his displeasure. His adjutants were more concerned late at night lest a guest unwittingly lead on to one of Hitler’s favourite topics – notably the First World War, or the navy – where he would launch into yet another endless monologue which they would be forced to sit through until the early hours.

  Hitler’s unmethodical, even casual, approach to the flood of often serious matters of government brought to his attention was a guarantee of administrative disorder. ‘He disliked reading files,’ recalled Wiedemann. ‘I got decisions out of him, even on very important matters, without him ever asking me for the relevant papers. He took the view that many things sorted themselves out if they were left alone.’

  Hitler’s lethargy regarding paperwork knew one major exception. When it came to preparing his speeches, which he composed himself, he would withdraw into his room and could work deep into the night several evenings running, occupying three secretaries taking dictation straight into the typewriter before carefully correcting the drafts. The public image was vital. He remained, above all, the propagandist par excellence.

  Even had Hitler been far more conscientious and less idiosyncratic and haphazard in his style of leadership, he would have found the highly personalized direction of the complex and varied issues of a modern state beyond him. As it was, the doors were opened wide to mismanagement and corruption on a massive scale. Hitler coupled financial incompetence and disinterest with an entirely exploitative and cavalier usage of public funds. Posts were found for ‘old fighters’. Vast amounts of money were poured into the construction of imposing representative buildings. Architects and builders were lavishly rewarded. For favoured building or artistic projects, money was no object. Leading figures in the regime could draw upon enormous salaries, enjoy tax relief, and benefit further from gifts, donations, and bribes to accommodate their extravagant tastes in palatial homes, fine trappings, works of art, and other material luxuries – including, of course, the inevitable showy limousines. Corruption was rife at all levels of the regime. Hitler was happy to indulge the infinite craving for the material trappings of power and success of his underlings, aware that corruption on a massive scale ensured loyalty as the Third Reich developed into a modern variant of a feudal system resting on personal allegiance rewarded by private fiefdoms. He himself, by now a millionaire on the proceeds of sales of Mein Kampf, led his publicly acclaimed spartan lifestyle (as regards his food and clothing) in a context of untold luxury. Alongside his magnificent apartments – his official one in Berlin and his private one in Munich – the initially somewhat modest alpine residence, Haus Wachenfeld on the Obersalzberg, was now converted at vast expense into the grandiose Berghof, suitable for state visits of foreign dignitaries. His restless energy demanded that he and his sizeable entourage were almost constantly on the move within Germany. For that, a special train with eleven coaches containing sleeping compartments, a fleet of limousines, and three aeroplanes stood at his disposal.

  Even more serious than the way corrupt party despots profited from the bonanza of a seemingly unlimited free-for-all with public funds was the corruption of the political system itself. In the increasing absence of any formal procedures for arriving at political decisions, favoured party bosses with access to Hitler were often able, over lunch or at coffee, to put forward some initiative and manipulate a comment of approval to their own advantage. Hitler’s sparse involvement in initiating domestic policy during the mid- and later 1930s and the disintegration of any centralized body for policy formulation meant that there was wide scope for those able to exert pressure for action in areas broadly echoing the aims of nationalization of the masses and exclusion of those deemed not to belong to the ‘national community’. The pressure came above all from two sources: the party (both its central office and its provincial bosses, the Gauleiter) and the élite organization, the SS (now merging into the police to become an ideologically driven state security force of immense power). Using Hitler’s professed (and unlimited) goals of national rebirth and strength through racial purity to legitimate their demands and actions, they ensured that the dynamic unleashed by the takeover of power would not subside.

  Once power had been attained in 1933, the NSDAP, its numbers now rapidly swelling through the intake of hundreds of thousands of opportunists, became in essence a loosely coordinated vehicle of propaganda and social control. After becoming Chancellor, Hitler had taken little interest in the party as an institution. The weak and ineffectual, but devotedly loyal Rudolf Heß was in April made Hitler’s deputy in charge of the party. Since Robert Ley was left running the party’s organizational matters, Heß’s authority was from the outset far from complete. Nor was Heß in a strong position in his dealings with the Gauleiter, most of whom could rely on their long-standing personal bonds with Hitler to uphold their power-base in the provinces. Neither a genuine, hierarchical structure of command at the top of the party, nor a collective body for determining party policy was ever instituted. The ‘Reich Leadership’ of the party remained a group of individuals who never met as a type of Politburo; Gauleiter conferences only took place at Hitler’s own behest, to hear a speech from the Führer, not to discuss policy; while a party senate was never called into existence. The party acquired, therefore, neither a coherent structure nor a systematic policy which it could enforce upon the state administration. Its essential nature – that of a ‘Führer party’ tied to emotively powerful but loosely-defined general aims embodied in the person of the Führer and held together by the Führer cult – ruled out both. Even so, once Heß was given in 1934 what amounted to veto rights over draft legislation by government ministers and, the following year, over the appointment of higher civil servants, the party had indeed made significant inroads into the purely governmental arena. The possibilities of intervention, however unsystematic, did now increase the party’s influence, above all in what it saw as crucial ideological spheres. Race policy and the ‘Church struggle’ we
re among the most important of these. In both areas, the party had no difficulty in mobilizing its activists, whose radicalism in turn forced the government into legislative action. In fact, the party leadership often found itself compelled to respond to pressures from below, stirred up by Gauleiter playing their own game, or emanating sometimes from radical activists at local level. Whatever the derivation, in this way, the continuum of radicalization in issues associated with the Führer’s aims was sustained.

  By the mid-1930s, Hitler paid little attention to the workings of the party. The dualism of party and state was never resolved – and was not resolvable. Hitler himself welcomed the overlaps in competence and lack of clarity. Sensitive as always to any organizational framework which might have constrained his own power, he undermined all attempts at ‘Reich reform’ by Frick, aimed at producing a more rational authoritarian state structure.

  Hitler’s approach to the state, as to all power-relations, was purely exploitative and opportunistic. It was for him, as he had expressly stated in Mein Kampf, simply a means to an end – the vague notion of ‘upholding and advancing a community of physically and mentally similar beings’, the ‘sustaining of those racial basic elements which, as bestowers of culture, create the beauty and dignity of a higher type of human being’. It followed that he gave no consideration to forms and structures, only to effect. His crude notion was that if a specific sphere of policy could not be best served by a government ministry, weighed down by bureaucracy, then another organization, run as unbureaucratically as possible, should manage it. The new bodies were usually set up as directly responsible to Hitler himself, and straddled party and state without belonging to either. In reality, of course, this process merely erected new, competing, sometimes overlapping bureaucracies and led to unending demarcation disputes. These did not trouble Hitler. But their effect was at one and the same time to undermine still further any coherence of government and administration, and to promote the growing autonomy within the regime of Hitler’s own position as Führer.

  The most important, and ideologically radical, new plenipotentiary institution, directly dependent on Hitler, was the combined SS-police apparatus which had fully emerged by mid-1936. Already before the ‘Röhm-Putsch’, Himmler had extended his initial power-base in Bavaria to gain control over the police in one state after another. After the SS had played such a key part in breaking the power of the SA leadership at the end of June, Himmler had been able to push home his advantage until Göring conceded full control over the security police in the largest of the states, Prussia. Attempts by Reich Minister of the Interior Frick and Justice Minister Gürtner to curb autonomous police power, expanding through the unrestricted use of ‘protective custody’ and control of the growing domain of the concentration camps, also ended in predictable failure. Where legal restrictions on the power of the police were mooted, Himmler could invariably reckon with Hitler’s backing. On 17 June, Hitler’s decree created a unified Reich police under Himmler’s command. The most powerful agency of repression thus merged with the most dynamic ideological force in the Nazi Movement. Himmler’s subordination to Frick through the office he had just taken up as Chief of the German Police existed only on paper. As head of the SS, Himmler was personally subordinate only to Hitler himself. With the politicization of conventional ‘criminal’ actions through the blending of the criminal and political police in the newly-formed ‘security police’ a week later, the ideological power-house of the Third Reich and executive organ of the ‘Führer will’ had essentially taken shape.

  The instrument had been forged which saw the realization of the Führer’s Weltanschauung as its central aim. Intensification of radicalism was built into the nature of such a police force which combined ruthlessness and efficiency of persecution with ideological purpose and dynamism. Directions and dictates from Hitler were not needed. The SS and police had individuals and departments more than capable of ensuring that the discrimination kept spiralling. The rise of Adolf Eichmann from an insignificant figure collecting information on Zionism, but located in what would rapidly emerge as a key department – the SD’s ‘Jewish Desk’ in Berlin – to ‘manager’ of the ‘Final Solution’ showed how initiative and readiness to grasp opportunities not only brought its rewards in power and aggrandizement to the individual concerned, but also pushed on the process of radicalization precisely in those areas most closely connected with Hitler’s own ideological fixations.

  In the mid-1930s this process was still in its early stages. But pressures for action from the party in ideological concerns regarded as central to National Socialism, and the instrumentalization of those concerns through the expanding repressive apparatus of the police, meant that there was no sagging ideological momentum once power had been consolidated. And as initiatives formulated at different levels and by different agencies of the regime attempted to accommodate the ideological drive, the ‘idea’ of National Socialism, located in the person of the Führer, thus gradually became translated from utopian ‘vision’ into realizable policy objectives.

  II

  The beginnings of this process were also visible in Germany’s foreign relations. Hitler’s own greatest contribution to events with such momentous consequences lay in his gambling instinct, his use of bluff, and his sharp antennae for the weak spots of his opponents. He took the key decisions; he alone determined the timing. But little else was Hitler’s own work. The broad aims of rearmament and revision of Versailles – though each notion hid a variety of interpretations – united policy-makers and power-groups, whatever the differences in emphasis, in the military and the Foreign Office.

  Once Germany’s diplomatic isolation was sealed by its withdrawal from the League of Nations, any opportunity of bilateral agreements in eastern Europe which would prevent German ambitions being contained by the multilateral pacts strived for by the French was to be seized. The first indicator of such a move – marking a notable shift in German foreign policy – was the startling ten-year non-aggression pact with Poland, signed on 26 January 1934. Germany’s departure from the League of Nations had intensified the mutual interest in an improved relationship. The pact benefited Germany in undermining French influence in eastern Europe (thereby removing the possibility of any combined Franco-Polish military action against Germany). For the Poles, it provided at least the temporary security felt necessary in the light of diminished protection afforded through the League of Nations, weakened by the German withdrawal.

  Hitler was prepared to appear generous in his dealings with the Poles. There was a new urgency in negotiations. Neurath and the Foreign Office, initially set for a different course, swiftly trimmed their sails to the new wind. ‘As if by orders from the top, a change of front toward us is taking place all along the line. In Hitlerite spheres they talk about the new Polish-German friendship,’ noted Józef Lipski, Polish minister to Berlin, on 3 December 1933. In conditions of great secrecy, a ten-year non-aggression treaty was prepared and sprung on an astonished Europe on 26 January 1934. This early shift in German foreign policy plainly bore Hitler’s imprint. ‘No parliamentary minister between 1920 and 1933 could have gone so far,’ noted Ernst von Weizsäcker, at that time German ambassador in Bern.

  The rapprochement with Poland meant, inevitably, a new course towards the Soviet Union. Initially, little or nothing had altered the modus vivendi based on mutual advantage, which, despite deteriorating relations during the last years of the Weimar Republic, and despite ideological antipathy, had existed since the treaties of Rapallo in 1922, and Berlin in 1926. From summer onwards, however, contrary to the wishes of the Foreign Office and (despite mounting concern) of its Soviet equivalent though in line with the clamour of the Nazi movement, diplomatic relations worsened significantly. In autumn 1933, Hitler himself ruled out any repair of relations. During 1934, despite the efforts of the German ambassador Rudolf Nadolny and Soviet overtures for better relations, the deterioration continued. Hitler himself blocked any improvement, leading to Nad
olny’s resignation. The inevitable consequence was to push the Soviet Union closer to France, thus enlarging the spectre of encirclement on which Nazi propaganda so readily played.

  In early 1935, the Soviet Union was still little more than a side issue in German foreign policy. Relations with the western powers were the chief concern. The divisions, weakness, and need to carry domestic opinion of the western democracies would soon play into Hitler’s hands. In the meantime, a rich propaganda gift was about to fall into Hitler’s lap with the return of the Saar territory to Germany through the plebiscite of 13 January 1935. The Versailles Treaty had removed the Saarland from Germany, placing it under League of Nations control for fifteen years, and affording France the right to its resources. After fifteen years it was foreseen that the Saar inhabitants – roughly half a million voters – should decide whether they would prefer to return to Germany, become part of France, or retain the status quo. It was always likely that the majority of the largely German-speaking population, where resentment at the treatment meted out in 1919 still smouldered fiercely, would want to return to Germany. A good deal of work by the German government prepared the ground, and as the plebiscite day approached Goebbels unleashed a massive barrage of propaganda directed at the Saar inhabitants and raising consciousness of the issue at home.

  The Saar territory was overwhelmingly Catholic, with a large industrial working-class segment of the population – the two social groups which had proved least enthusiastic about Nazism within Germany itself. In the light of the ferocious repression of the Left and the threatening, if still largely sporadic, persecution of the Catholic Church that had followed the Nazi takeover in Germany, opponents of the Hitler regime in the Saar could still harbour illusions of a substantial anti-Nazi vote. But the Catholic authorities put their weight behind a return to Germany. And many Saar Catholics already looked to Hitler as the leader who would rescue them from Bolshevism. On the Left, the massive erosion of party loyalties had set in long before the plebiscite. For all their propaganda efforts, the message of the dwindling number of Social Democrat and Communist functionaries fell largely on stony ground. Nazi propaganda had little difficulty in trumpeting the alternative to a return to Germany: continued massive unemployment, economic exploitation by France, and lack of any political voice. Some concerted intimidation, as in the Reich itself during the ‘time of struggle’, did the rest.