Hitler

by Ian Kershaw

  The speech was intended to demonstrate the complete solidarity of people and leader, conveying Germany’s utter determination to carry on, and even intensify, the fight until victory was attained. But the solidarity, despite the impression temporarily left by Goebbels’s publicity spectacular, was by this time shrinking fast, the belief in Hitler among the mass of the population seriously undermined. What Goebbels did, in fact, was to solicit from his audience ‘a kind of plebiscitary “Ja” to self-destruction’ in a war which Germany could by now neither win nor end through a negotiated peace.

  Goebbels’s hopes that the speech would bring him Hitler’s authorization to concentrate the direction of ‘total war’ in his own hands were swiftly dashed. The Propaganda Minister had long pressed for practical measures to radicalize the war effort. Hitler, shored up by Göring, had, however, resisted imposing increased hardship and material sacrifice on the civilian population. He was conscious as ever of the collapse of morale on the home front during the First World War, certain that this had undermined the military effort and paved the way for revolution. Nevertheless, during the Stalingrad crisis he had finally conceded the aim of the complete mobilization of all conceivable labour and resources of the home front, and some initial measures had been introduced.

  Goebbels had, however, miscalculated. Direction of the ‘total war’ effort largely bypassed him. His ambitions to take control of the home front were ignored. Unable to adjudicate in any rational or systematic fashion in the inevitable conflicts arising from overlapping and sometimes contradictory spheres of competence, but careful as always to protect his own power, Hitler never allowed Goebbels the authority the latter craved on the home front. The ‘total war’ effort juddered on to partial successes in individual areas. But the absence of strong, consistent leadership from the top on the home front produced what Goebbels lamented as ‘a complete lack of direction in German domestic policy’.

  The results of Goebbels’s big speech, therefore, in terms of his own ambitions to take control of the ‘total war’ effort, were disappointing. Goebbels was soon to learn anew that he remained only one player in the power-games to try to secure the backing of Hitler’s unqualified authority. He would also rapidly realize again that although the Dictator’s own authority was undiminished, his physical absence, preoccupation with military matters, and sporadic, semi-detached involvement in the day-to-day governance of the Reich meant that he was more than ever exposed to the influence of those in his presence – ‘the entire baggage of court-idiots and irresponsible agitators’ – incapable of reconciling or overriding the competing interests of his feuding barons. Even had he been willing, therefore, he was completely unable to impose clear strands of authority to combat the already advanced signs of disintegration in government and administration.

  For Hitler, the months after Stalingrad intensified the familiar, ingrained character-traits. The façade of often absurd optimism remained largely intact, even among his inner circle. The show of indomitable will continued. The flights of fantasy, detached from reality, took on new dimensions. But the mask slipped from time to time in remarks revealing deep depression and fatalism. It was fleeting recognition of what he already inwardly acknowledged: he had lost the initiative for ever. The recognition invariably brought new torrents of rage, lashing any who might bear the brunt of the blame – most of all, as ever, his military leaders. They were all liars, disloyal, opposed to National Socialism, reactionaries, and lacking in any cultural appreciation, he ranted. He yearned to have nothing more to do with them. Ultimately, he would blame the German people themselves, whom he would see as too weak to survive and unworthy of him in the great struggle. As setback followed setback, so the beleaguered Führer resorted ever more readily to the search for ruthless revenge and retaliation, both on his external enemies – behind whom, as always, he saw the demonic figure of the Jew – and on any within who might dare to show defeatism, let alone ‘betray’ him. There were no personal influences that might have moderated his fundamental inhumanity. The man who had been idolized by millions was friendless – apart from (as he himself commented) Eva Braun and his dog, Blondi.

  The war, and the hatreds Hitler had invested in it, consumed him ever more. Outside the war and his buildings mania, he could rouse little interest. He was by now in many respects an empty, burnt-out shell of an individual. But his resilience and strength of will remained extraordinary. And in the strangely shapeless regime over which he presided, his power was still immense, unrestricted, and uncontested.

  As the war that Hitler had unleashed ‘came home to the Reich’, the Dictator – now rapidly ageing, becoming increasingly a physical wreck, and showing pronounced signs of intense nervous strain – distanced himself ever more from his people. It was as if he could not face them now that there were no more triumphs to report, and he had to take the responsibility for the mounting losses and misery. Even before the Stalingrad calamity, in early November 1942, when his train had by chance stopped directly alongside a troop train returning from the east carrying dejected-looking, battle-weary soldiers, his only reaction had been to ask one of his manservants to pull down the blinds. As Germany’s war fortunes plummeted between 1943 and 1945, the former corporal from an earlier great war never sought to experience at first hand the feelings of ordinary soldiers.

  The number of big public speeches he delivered constituted a plain indicator of the widening gulf between Führer and people. In 1940 Hitler had given nine big public addresses, in 1941 seven, in 1942 five. In 1943 he gave only two (apart from a radio broadcast on 10 September). The bulk of his time was spent well away from the government ministries in Berlin’s Wilhelmstraße – and well away from the German people – at his field headquarters, or at his mountain eyrie above Berchtesgaden. He spent no more than a few days in Berlin during the whole of 1943. For some three months in all he was at the Berghof. During the rest of the time he was cooped up in his headquarters in East Prussia, leaving aside a number of short visits to the Ukraine.

  Goebbels lamented in July 1943 the way Hitler had cut himself off from the masses. These, commented the Propaganda Minister, had provided the acclaim on which his unique authority had rested. He had given them the belief and trust that had been the focal point of the regime’s support. But now, in Goebbels’s eyes, that relationship was seriously endangered – and with it the stability of the regime. He pointed to the large number and critical tone of the letters – half of them anonymous – arriving at the Propaganda Ministry. ‘Above all, the question is again and again raised in these letters,’ he went on, ‘why the Führer never visits the areas which have suffered from air-raids … but especially why the Führer does not even speak to the German people to explain the current situation. I regard it as most necessary that the Führer does that, despite his burden through the events in the military sector. One can’t neglect the people too long. Ultimately, they are the heart of our war effort. If the people were once to lose their strength of resistance and belief in the German leadership, then the most serious leadership crisis which ever faced us would have been created.’

  II

  The move to ‘total war’, introduced during the Stalingrad crisis, provided the final demonstration that no semblance of collective government and rational decision-making within the Reich was compatible with Hitler’s personal rule.

  The drive to mobilize all remaining reserves from the home front – what came to be proclaimed as ‘total war’ – had its roots in the need to plug the huge gap in military manpower left by the high losses suffered by the Wehrmacht during the first months of ‘Barbarossa’.

  At Christmas 1942, Hitler had given the orders for more radical measures to raise manpower for the front and the armaments industries. Martin Bormann was commissioned to undertake the coordination of the efforts, in collaboration with Head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers. Goebbels and Fritz Sauckel (Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment) were immediately informed. The aim was to close
down all businesses whose trade was in ‘luxury’ items or was otherwise not necessary for the war effort, and to redeploy the personnel in the army or in arms production. Women were to be subject to conscription for work. Releasing men for front-service was impossible, it was agreed, unless women could replace them in a variety of forms of work. According to the Propaganda Ministry, the number of women working had dropped by some 147,000 since the start of the war. And of 8.6 million women in employment at the end of 1942, only 968,000 worked in armaments.

  In the spring of 1942, Hitler had rejected outright the conscription of women to work in war industries. But by early 1943, the labour situation had worsened to the extent that he was compelled to concede that the conscription of women could no longer be avoided. Even the forced labour of, by this time, approaching 6 million foreign workers and prisoners-of-war could not compensate for the 11 million or so men who had been called up to the Wehrmacht. In an unpublished Führer Decree of 13 January 1943, women between seventeen and fifty years old were ordered to report for deployment in the war effort.

  Even before Hitler signed the decree, the wrangling over spheres of competence had begun in earnest. In order to retain a firm grip on the ‘total war’ measures and prevent the dissipation of centralized control, Lammers, backed by the leading civil servants in the Reich Chancellery, Leo Killy and Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, suggested to Hitler that all measures should be taken ‘under the authority of the Führer’, and that a special body be set up to handle them. The idea was to create a type of small ‘war cabinet’. Lammers thought the most appropriate arrangement would be for the heads of the three main executive arms of the Führer’s authority – the High Command of the Wehrmacht, the Reich Chancellery, and the Party Chancellery – to act in close collaboration, meeting frequently, keeping regular contact with Hitler himself, and standing above the particularist interests of individual ministries. Hitler agreed. He evidently saw no possible threat to his position from such an arrangement. On the contrary: the three persons involved – Keitel, Lammers, and Bormann – could be guaranteed to uphold his own interests at the expense of any possible over-mighty subjects. An indication that this was, indeed, Hitler’s thinking was the exclusion of Göring, Goebbels, and Speer from the coordinating body – soon known as the ‘Committee of Three’ (Dreierausschuß).

  From the very outset, the Committee was only empowered to issue enabling ordinances in accordance with the general guidelines Hitler had laid down. It was given no autonomy. Hitler reserved, as always, the final decision on anything of significance to himself. The ‘Committee of Three’ had, in all, eleven formal meetings between January and August 1943, but rapidly ran up against deeply ingrained vested interests both in government ministries and in party regional offices concerned to hold on to their personnel and to their spheres of competence which might have been threatened in any move to centralize and simplify the regime’s tangled lines of administration. It had little chance of breaking down the fiefdoms on which Nazi rule rested, and soon revealed that any hopes of bringing order to the Third Reich’s endemic administrative chaos were utterly illusory.

  Nevertheless, Hitler’s mightiest subjects were determined to do everything they could to sabotage a development which they saw as inimical to their own power-positions – and from which they had been excluded. The first notions of a challenge to the role of the ‘Committee of Three’ were intimated during the reception in Goebbels’s residence following his ‘total war’ speech on 18 February. Nine days later, Walther Funk (Reich Minister of Economics), Robert Ley (head of the huge German Labour Front), and Albert Speer, the powerful armaments minister, met again over cognac and tea in Goebbels’s stately apartments – gloomy now that the light-bulbs had been removed to comply with the new ‘total war’ demands – to see what could be done. Soon afterwards, at the beginning of March, Goebbels travelled from Berlin down to Berchtesgaden to plot with Göring a way of sidelining the Committee. Speer had already sounded him out. In talks lasting five hours at Göring’s palatial villa on the Obersalzberg, partly with Speer present, the Reich Marshal, dressed in ‘somewhat baroque clothes’, was quickly won over.

  The Propaganda Minister’s plan – actually it had initally been suggested by Speer – was to revive the Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich (established under Göring’s chairmanship just before the outbreak of war but long fallen into desuetude), and to give it the membership to turn it into an effective body to rule the Reich, leaving Hitler free to concentrate on the direction of military affairs. He reminded Göring of what threatened if the war were lost: ‘Above all as regards the Jewish Question, we are in it so deeply that there is no getting out any longer. And that’s good. A Movement and a people that have burnt their boats fight, from experience, with fewer constraints than those that still have a chance of retreat.’ The party needed revitalizing. And if Göring could now reactivate the Ministerial Council and put it in the hands of Hitler’s most loyal followers, argued Goebbels, the Führer would surely be in agreement. They would choose their moment to put the proposition to Hitler. This would, they knew, not be easy.

  The problem, however, especially as Goebbels saw it, went beyond the ‘Committee of Three’: it was a problem of Hitler himself. To rescue the war effort, stronger leadership at home was needed. Goebbels remained utterly loyal to the person he had for years regarded as an almost deified father-figure. But he saw in Hitler’s leadership style – his absence from Berlin, his detachment from the people, his almost total preoccupation with military matters, and, above all, his increasing reliance on Bormann for everything concerning domestic matters – a fundamental weakness in the governance of the Reich.

  In his diary, Goebbels complained of a ‘leadership crisis’. He thought the problems among the subordinate leaders were so grave that the Führer ought to sweep through them with an iron broom. The Führer carried, indeed, a crushing burden through the war. But that was because he would take no decisions to alter the personnel so that he would not need bothering with every trivial matter. Goebbels thought – though he expressed it discreetly – that Hitler was too weak to do anything. ‘When a matter is put to him from the most varied sides,’ he wrote, ‘the Führer is sometimes somewhat vacillating in his decisions. He also doesn’t always react correctly to people. A bit of help is needed there.’

  When he had spoken privately in his residence to Speer, Funk, and Ley just over a week after his ‘total war’ speech, he had gone further. According to Speer’s later account, Goebbels had said on that occasion: ‘We have not only a “leadership crisis”, but strictly speaking a “Leader crisis”!’ The others agreed with him. ‘We are sitting here in Berlin. Hitler does not hear what we have to say about the situation. I can’t influence him politically,’ Goebbels bemoaned. ‘I can’t even report to him about the most urgent measures in my area. Everything goes through Bormann. Hitler must be persuaded to come more often to Berlin.’ Goebbels added that Hitler had lost his grip on domestic politics, which Bormann controlled by conveying the impression to the Führer that he still held the reins tightly in his grasp. With Bormann given the title, on 12 April, of ‘Secretary of the Führer’, the sense, acutely felt by Goebbels, that the Party Chancellery chief was ‘managing’ Hitler was even further enhanced.

  Goebbels and Speer might lament that Hitler’s hold on domestic affairs had weakened. But when they saw him in early March, intending to put their proposition to him that Göring should head a revamped Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich to direct the home front, it was they who proved weak. Speer had flown to Hitler’s headquarters, temporarily moved back to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, on 5 March to pave the way for a visit by Goebbels. The Propaganda Minister arrived in Vinnitsa three days later. Straight away, Speer urged caution. The continued, almost unhindered, bombing raids on German towns had left Hitler in a foul mood towards Göring and the inadequacies of the Luftwaffe. It was hardly a propitious moment to broach the subject of reinstating
the Reich Marshal to the central role in the direction of domestic affairs. Goebbels thought nonetheless that they had to make the attempt.

  At their first meeting, over lunch, Hitler, looking tired but otherwise well, and more lively than of late, launched as usual into a bitter onslaught on the generals who, he claimed, were cheating him wherever they could do so. He carried on in the same vein during a private four-hour discussion alone with Goebbels that afternoon. He was furious at Göring, and at the entire Luftwaffe leadership with the exception of the Chief of the General Staff Hans Jeschonnek. Characteristically, Hitler thought the best way of preventing German cities being reduced to heaps of rubble was by responding with ‘terror from our side’. Despite his insistence to Speer that they had to go ahead with their proposal, Goebbels evidently concluded during his discussion with Hitler that it would be fruitless to do so. ‘In view of the general mood,’ he noted, ‘I regard it as inopportune to put to the Führer the question of Göring’s political leadership; it’s at present an unsuitable moment. We must defer the business until somewhat later.’ Any hope of raising the matter, even obliquely, when Goebbels and Speer sat with Hitler by the fireside until late in the night was dashed when news came in of a heavy air-raid on Nuremberg. Hitler fell into a towering rage about Göring and the Luftwaffe leadership. Speer and Goebbels, calming Hitler only with difficulty, postponed their plans. They were never resurrected.

  Goebbels and Speer had failed at the first hurdle. Face to face with Hitler, they felt unable to confront him. Hitler’s fury over Göring was enough to veto even the prospect of any rational discussion about restructuring Reich government.