by A. N. Wilson
Diana Mitford, the most beautiful and intelligent of the celebrated aristocratic sisters, by now made regular visits to Berlin to see the Leader. Hitler, like many revolutionaries, was inordinately impressed by the very things he professed to despise. He was in awe of the fact that Diana’s grandfather, the first Lord Redesdale, had translated the ur-Fascist text, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, into English. At Wagner’s grave, he once said to Diana, ‘I am unworthy to stand here. But you are worthy, because your grandfather was one of the great early Wagnerians.’ She was a dazzlingly attractive personality, as well as a beauty, and it was no wonder that he was in awe of her – not least because he believed that as an aristocrat, and a cousin of Churchill’s, she was close to the heart of the political world. ‘Lady Mitford’ – as he believed she was called – ‘and her sisters are very much in the know, thanks to their relationship with influential people’, he once told a group of friends.20 He seemed to imagine that she was ‘in the know’ about military as well as social matters, and took it very seriously when she told him airily that she did not suppose there were more than three anti-aircraft guns in the whole of London. It was absurd to imagine that this vague, delightful woman would have known one end of an anti-aircraft gun from another: his taking her word on such a matter suggested a weakness on Hitler’s part for upper class beauties.
She would stay at the Hotel Adlon and wait for the telephone in her bedroom to ring. When it did so, a voice, sometimes that of the Leader himself, but more usually an underling, would say, ‘Gracious Lady, the Leader can see you now.’ She would cross the Unter den Linden to the Chancellery and pass the evening in conversation with this remarkable man. If he was in a good humour, he could be funny, imitating Mussolini’s strutting style, or – in high camp mode – pretending to be one of the women who doted upon him. Or they would discuss the music dramas of Wagner, or the international situation. A theme to which he returned over and over again was the miraculous bloodlessness of the Nazi revolution. To establish the Soviet system had taken a civil war in which millions of Russians had died. The Nazi revolution had taken place with only a few hundred dead.
Presumably, when Hitler spoke of a bloodless revolution, he was not thinking of those killed in the organized riots in the months following the fire in the Reichstag in 1933, those beaten up for attending concerts conducted by Fritz Busch, for example, who was dragged off his podium by Brownshirts because he was a Jew. He was forgetting the 500–600 probably killed in those months when the Mayor of Düsseldorf was attacked with a whip by a Nazi, when Jewish shops were plundered, and when, apart from those killed, some 100,000 troublemakers – Communists, liberals, Christians – were bundled off to concentration camps. He was also, of course, overlooking the murder of Röhm and friends, and the elimination of political rivals. Diana Mitford, and all the others who rejoiced in the triumph of Nazism, wanted, with at least part of themselves, to overlook the essential violence of the Nazi idea. The world wanted to overlook it, which is why the world, who by now had had time to read My Struggle, with its suggestion that the First World War would have been avoided if 12–15,000 Jews had been gassed, was very happy to turn up and enjoy the Olympic Games in Berlin.
Was not modern Germany a model of everything which the men and women in the stadium wanted for their own country? While 3 million Englishmen languished on the dole, and many more lived in poverty, Adolf Hitler had demonstrated that it was possible to create full employment. More than 1.5 million Germans were employed in the motor industry alone. All over Germany, there was now a modern road system – the autobahns. There was a sense, lacking in the democratic countries, that Hitler had given a whole country the capacity to be itself. Energy had returned. As the Nazi Woman’s Movement, presided over by ‘Reich Mother-in-Chief’ Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, put it – in a slogan which perhaps seemed more inspirited at the time than it does after eighty years – ‘The German Woman is Knitting Again!’21
SEVEN
The Road to War
In January 1936, Hitler summoned all his Gauleiters and Reichsleiters to a meeting. Disputes had arisen among them. There was disgruntlement among the old Brownshirt ranks that National Socialism had caved in to the establishment. As Hitler turned his eyes abroad and began to think about ways of realizing his nationalist dreams, the last thing he wanted was any disunity among the party faithful. His speech that January was full of emotion, ending with the promise that if they did not give him what he wanted, he would commit suicide. The ever-faithful Hess, when Hitler’s extraordinary stream of self-pitying words came to a conclusion, assured the Leader that they would follow him wherever he led.
What Hitler had demanded was that the party leadership should be reorganized into a single entity, with himself as the absolute leader. He would likewise ask the leaders of the armed forces to make him their supreme war leader. The successes of the first three years in power had given him a hunger for absolute power which was inexhaustible.
He cheered up the Gauleiters and Reichsleiters by telling them that his plans for expansion could now begin. On 7 March three German battalions occupied the demilitarized Rhineland zone, that is all territory west of the Rhine and a thirty-mile strip east of the river taking in Cologne, Düsseldorf and Bonn. Far from being met by French tanks, as was feared, they were greeted by cheering crowds. Priests waving thuribles escorted the troops into their citadels.
It had been a bold gamble on Hitler’s part. At this stage, Hitler had spoken a lot about rearmament but he was not yet in a position to fight a war with France. If the French chose to retaliate, Germany would have been forced into the humiliation of admitting that they were not ready for war. The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, expressed ‘regret’ over the move. The French did not act. Hitler had called their bluff.
In his domestic policy, Hitler had achieved what he claimed to have been a ‘bloodless revolution’. It had certainly been a good deal less bloody than the French or the Russian revolutions, even if the end result was a police state in which Thomas Mann’s novels were publicly burned, neighbours were encouraged to snoop upon one another and report suspected Jews or Communists to the secret police, and more and more absolute power was being handed to the leadership of one mentally unbalanced fanatic.
The stage was now set for a period of European history in which Hitler would attempt to apply the same good luck to foreign policy. Having brought about a Nazi revolution with the loss of only a few hundred lives, he would proceed, as he hoped, to conquer Europe by means of bluff, threat, histrionic speeches and big military displays.
Historians, economists and students of Hitler’s remarkable personality debate a number of issues. One is whether the success of his economic and political revolution at home had, from the very beginning, depended upon putting Germany on a war economy – whether the economic miracle would have been possible if he had not all along been planning the war which would take millions of lives.
That is one issue. Another is whether hindsight shows us that war could have been avoided. If, at any one stage of his diplomatic master-strokes, he had been told that Britain, France and their allies would not allow what Hitler demanded, would he have retreated? Could peace in fact have been maintained had the Western Allies been braver in their resistance to Hitler?
A third question, which is of more immediate interest to his biographers, is the state of Hitler’s health, and in particular of his mental health. By 1938, Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Germany, was expressing the view that the Leader was ‘on the borderline of madness’.1
The answers to the first two sets of questions are, in the popular sense, academic, since all that matters is not what could have happened, but what did in fact happen. Hitler did, against the advice of his generals, deliberately advance Germany to a full-scale war footing by the end of the 1930s through military conscription and a covert programme of rearmament. The exact point at which he chose to do so, and whethe
r he did so as a result of a long-hatched plan, as written about in My Struggle, or whether he did so inch by inch, scarcely aware of what he was doing, is irrelevant. So, too, is it irrelevant to ask whether peace could have been preserved if the British or the French had not followed the policy known as appeasement, allowing Hitler to dismantle Czechoslovakia in 1938–9. Events unfolded as they did. To ask whether things could have happened otherwise is the task not of history but of the parlour game.
Whether Hitler’s medical condition affected events is, however, of direct relevance. Here the biographer must make a judgement. In 1944, only six years after Ambassador Henderson expressed the view that Hitler was mad, there was a famous plot to assassinate Hitler. It included many of the military top brass, and was supported by the brilliant young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The pastor’s father, Dr Karl Bonhoeffer, the psychiatric director of Berlin’s Charity Hospital, favoured a medical putsch, in which a team of doctors simply declared the Leader to be insane.
The medical profession is constantly revising what is, and is not, sanity, but there would surely be a case for suggesting that Hitler was at the very least mentally unbalanced, and that the imbalance from 1936 onwards became ever more pronounced, the temper-tantrums more extreme, the self-aggrandizement and self-pity taken to ever more operatic heights. And there is no doubt that Hitler’s rages and excessive demands were so intolerable to those who came into his presence that they were prepared to do anything to appease them. How far he manipulated his ‘madness’ to achieve his political ends it is difficult to say.
From now onwards in his life, Hitler’s medical history must be read alongside that of his political and military triumphs and disasters. His mother, Klara, had died just before Christmas 1907 aged only forty-seven. It was a death which obsessed him. Christmas was nearly always a gloomy time for him as he contemplated it.
When Hitler himself turned forty-seven, his health obsessions, which had always been acute, rose to levels of hypochondriacal paranoia. It is a paradoxical fact about human beings that they agonize about trivia and then make the big decisions on impulse – when choosing a wife or a house to live in. One would have expected so health-conscious an individual as Hitler to select a doctor of high reputation, perhaps from one of the best teaching hospitals in Berlin. But an essential ingredient in Hitler’s nature was the con man’s fear of being found out. When discussing military matters, he instinctively disliked the company of nearly all his generals. His lower-middle-class edginess made him ill at ease in the company of gentlemen – Nevile Henderson, for example, filled him with unease. One suspects that some self-protective instinct prevented him from choosing a medical adviser who might at some stage prescribe the sedative syringe or even the strait-jacket.
At Christmas 1936, after his annus mirabilis, Hitler was uncharacteristically cheerful. The woeful recollections of Klara Hitler’s pathetic demise in Linz at Christmas-time 1907 could not altogether diminish the joy he felt at the list of his triumphs: the reoccupation of the Rhineland with not one casualty; the Olympic Games; the party and the armed forces now firmly under his absolute power. Only one conqueror could not be resisted and that was death itself. In 1935, he had become hoarse. A tiny polyp was removed from his larynx and he had been terrified that it would turn out to be a malignant tumour. Now, as he reached the age which had been his mother’s when she died, he engaged a new medical adviser – one who would be with him until the end.
Dr Theo Morell was recommended not by another doctor but by the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, a friend since the early 1920s. Dr Morell was a skin specialist with a wealthy practice in Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. His client list, perhaps appropriately, included actors and film stars worried about moles, lumps, spots or warts. He was fat and unprepossessing in appearance. His large hands were hairy and the nails were often dirty. He once wiped a table with a bandage before tying it around a patient’s arm. Like Hitler himself, Morell was a fantasist and liar of advanced degree. When he was taken into American custody after the war, for example, he claimed to be the true discoverer of penicillin. The secret had been stolen by the British Secret Intelligence Service.2
Hoffmann was a procurer of more than just a doctor. It was in his photographic studio that Hitler had met Eva Braun, a seventeen-year-old convent-educated girl who would eventually become his wife. Her devotion to him became intense very early, and she found the demands of his popularity and his political life all but impossible to endure. As his career took him away from her on speaking engagements and made its meteoric swoops upwards, she had many outbursts, and made suicide attempts.
When Hitler first consulted Dr Morell, he was himself suffering from a number of nervous complaints. He had eczema on his feet and legs so sore that he was often unable to wear boots. He had an interrupted sleep pattern. He had gastric problems: pains and cramps in the epigastric region. And, an embarrassing complaint for a man who had been described in the Völkischer Beobachter as standing like a statue, beyond the measure of earthly man,3 Hitler suffered acutely from meteorism: perhaps he did not suffer so acutely as those around him, since meteorism is uncontrolled farting, a condition exacerbated by Hitler’s strictly vegetarian diet.
Dr Morell prescribed Dr Köster’s Anti-Gas pills, a formula which contained nux vomica, a tiny portion of strychnine. Morell also gave intravenous vitamin injections to supplement Hitler’s diet. The treatment appeared to increase his tendency, already pronounced, to bursts of preternatural energy. Morell was an extremely bad doctor. He can perhaps not be blamed for the next miserable nine years of European history, but his contribution did not help. It could be argued that Hitler’s medical practitioner had a duty, once Hitler’s erratic behaviour became more and more pronounced, to insist on a long period of rest, if not actually to administer a cyanide injection. It was inconceivable that Morell would adopt either course, and this was perhaps the reason Hitler – often against the entreaties of his closest associates – retained the services of this bad doctor to the end. Morell, who (accurately for once) claimed to have been Hitler’s ‘constant companion’ from 1936 to 1945, was the ideal doctor, from Hitler’s point of view: that is, he treated the host of psychosomatic symptoms, such as stomach cramps and flatulence, which plagued his distinguished patient, while tactfully overlooking what for most people, as the years went by, would seem most obvious, namely Hitler’s mental derangement. The mentally ill who do not in the least want to be cured develop cunning habits of self-protection, and the retention of bad medical advisers, and, of course, cowardly life-companions, is essential to their survival.
Hitler’s medical condition might have added to the tragedy of German life, and to the tragic farce of his day-to-day existence. It did not, however, alter his course, which was world conquest and the persecution, and eventual elimination, of the Jews.
As an inevitable European war approached, the Nazis allowed themselves to show, more and more, their truly brutal Brownshirt nature, both in the slow advance of mean-spirited anti-Jewish legislation (by 1939 Jews were banned from public libraries; they were not permitted to possess driving-licences or own domestic animals) and in the more open tolerance by the police and the authorities of thuggish Brownshirt violence against Jewish persons and properties.
In 1938, matters reached a climax of violence in the infamous Broken Glass Night (Kristallnacht) of 9–10 November. A seventeen-year-old Polish Jew named Herschel Grynszpan, who had grown up in Germany but was now living in Paris, was seething with anger because his parents had been deported from Germany, where they had settled, to Poland. He picked up a revolver, marched into the German embassy in Paris and shot the first diplomat he met, a minor embassy official named Ernst vom Rath. This was the kind of incident for which the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, had been waiting. He claimed that demonstrations against the Jews had broken out spontaneously all over Germany. Hitler decreed that there should be no official pogrom but that if acts of violence against Jews were to happen, the
authorities should not intervene to stop them.4 The nudge and the wink had been given: party officials must not be seen openly organizing the violence, but there was now open season on the Jews.
All over Germany, storm-troopers and party activists were getting drunk in memory of the 1923 Munich putsch. They changed into mufti and set out into the streets with their petrol cans. Very soon almost every synagogue in Germany was in flames. Out of a total of some 9,000 Jewish shops in the entire country, some 7,500 were destroyed. In Esslingen, Brownshirts in mufti broke into the Jewish orphanage in the small hours of the morning armed with axes and sledgehammers and destroyed everything they could find – books, religious insignia, clothes – and set light to them in a huge bonfire. In Treuchtlingen in Franconia, Jews woke to find looters breaking into their houses, smashing furniture. The intruders penetrated the cellars, where they found cowering, terrified families, and smashed wine bottles and jars of preserves. Everywhere, all over the country, there was terror and mayhem. It is impossible to estimate the numbers killed – perhaps as many as 2,000. At least 300 Jews committed suicide. Following direct orders from Hitler, Jews were set upon and humiliated. In Saarbrücken, men’s beards were set alight, while others were forced to dance in front of the smouldering remains of their synagogue. Others were drenched with hosepipes. Between 9 and 16 November, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and transported to concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen where they had to sleep on the floor on straw wearing, in that November cold, only shirts and trousers.5 Beatings were regular and by the end of the year 276 men had died in custody.