Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  In the Circus Krone, Hitler spoke. He was an evangelist speaking to a camp meeting, the Billy Sunday of German politics. His converts moved with him, laughed with him, felt with him. They booed with him the French. They hissed with him the Republic…. The 8,000 were an instrument on which Hitler played a symphony of national passion.36

  At such moments Hitler made “the collective neurosis the echo of his own obsession.” He had to have applause to bring out his full oratorical powers. Even a reluctant mood in the hall irritated him, and the SA—which he had had surrounding him at all public appearances right from the beginning—served not so much to keep order as to silence all opposition, all feelings of resistance, and to whip up enthusiasm by sheer menace. There were a number of occasions when Hitler, faced with an unfriendly audience, would abruptly lose the thread, break off his speech, and turning on his heel sulkily leave the room.

  His whole being needed the mass acclaim. For this sort of cheering had once aroused him; now it maintained his states of tension and propelled him onward. He himself said that in the midst of the tumult he became “another person.” The historian Karl Alexander von Müller had long ago observed that Hitler communicated to his listeners an excitement that in turn provided fresh impetus to his voice. Certainly Hitler was a superior tactician, a capable organizer, a canny psychologist, and, despite all his deficiencies, one of the most remarkable phenomena of the period. But his invincible genius came to him only in the course of mass meetings, when he exalted platitudes into the resounding words of a prophet and seemed truly to transform himself into the leader; for in his everyday state he seemed only to be posing as der Führer with considerable effort. His basic condition was lethargy punctuated by “Austrian” spells of weariness. Left to himself, he seemed ready to fall back on dull movies, endless performances of the Meistersinger, the Carlton Tearoom’s luscious chocolate confections called Mohrenköpfe, or going on and on about architecture. He needed hubbub around him to be fired for action. He drew his dynamism from the crowd. Its worship also gave him the stamina to carry out those terribly strenuous campaigns and flights over Germany; it was the drug his strained, driven existence constantly needed. When in October, 1931, he met Brüning for his first private talk with the Chancellor, he launched into a one-hour speech, in the course of which he worked himself up to a frenzy—lashed on by the singing of his SA unit, which he had ordered to march up and down past the windows. Obviously he had done this partly to intimidate Brüning, partly to recharge himself.37

  It was this deep pathological link with the masses that made Hitler more than an effective demagogue and gave him his undeniable advantage over Goebbels, whose speeches were more pointed and clever. Hitler lifted the crowds out of their apathy and despair to, as he himself called it, “forward-driving hysteria.” Goebbels called these demonstrations “the divine services of our political work,” and a Hamburg schoolmistress wrote in April, 1932, after an election meeting attended by 120,000 persons, that she had witnessed scenes of “moving faith” which showed Hitler “as the helper, rescuer, redeemer from overwhelming need.” Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister, drew similar conclusions after Hitler paid a visit to her in Weimar. He “struck her as a religious rather than political leader.”38

  In this phase of his career Hitler operated more on the metaphysical than on the ideological plane. His success with the masses was above all a phenomenon of the psychology of religion. He spoke less to people’s political convictions than to their spiritual state. Of course Hitler could link up with an extensive system of traditional thought and conduct: with the German bent for authoritarianism and unrealistic intellectual constructs; with profound needs to follow a leader, and with a peculiar disorientation in politics. But, beyond this, agreement for the most part ended. His anti-Jewish slogans derived their force not so much from any especially violent German anti-Semitism as from the old demagogic trick of presenting people with a visible enemy. Nor was it the unique bellicose character of the Germans that Hitler mobilized; rather, he appealed to their long-ignored feelings of self-respect and national pride. The masses were not seduced by his images of land in the Ukraine; rather, they followed Hitler for the sake of their lost dignity, because they wanted once more to be participants in history. While Mein Kampf was issued in numerous editions, it was read by hardly anyone; this testifies to the general lack of interest all along in Hitler’s specific programs.

  Hence, the rise of the National Socialist Party and its coming to power was not—as has often been argued in hindsight—a great conspiracy of the Germans against the world aimed at carrying out imperialistic and anti-Semitic ends. Hitler’s speeches during the years he was attracting mass audiences in the greatest numbers contain very little in the way of specific statements of intentions, and even scant his ideological obsessions, anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. Their salient characteristic, in fact, is their vague, general subject matter and the frequent resort to philosophical metaphors acceptable to all. As for spelling out aims, they are a far cry from the candor of Mein Kampf. A few months before the outbreak of the Second World War, in the midst of one of the crises he had unleashed, Hitler himself admitted that for years he had put on a show of harmlessness. Circumstances, he declared, had forced him to masquerade as peaceable.

  With the bravura of a great orator, however, he was freeing himself more and more from specific content and concrete ideas. His continuous triumphs were proof that Nazism was a charismatic rather than an ideological movement, not looking to a progam but looking up to a leader. His personality gave outline and consistency to the loose jumble of ideas in the foreground. What people followed was merely the tone, a hypnotic voice; and although Hitler could draw upon unfulfilled nostalgias and dreams of hegemony, most of those who wildly cheered him were longing to forget, beneath his speaker’s platform, their exhaustion and their panic. They were certainly not thinking of Minsk or Kiev, or of Auschwitz, either. They wanted, above all, things to change. Their political faith scarcely went beyond blind negation of the status quo.

  Hitler recognized what could be done with these negativistic complexes more keenly than did any of his rivals on the Left or the Right. His agitational technique really consisted in defamation and vision, in indicting the present and promising a potent future. All he did was ring the changes on his praise of a strong state, his glorification of the nation, his call for racial and national rebirth and for a free hand on the domestic and the foreign fronts. He appealed to the German longing for unity, decried the nation’s “self-laceration,” called class struggle the “religion of the inferior,” hailed the movement as the “bridge building of the nation,” and conjured up the fear that the Germans might once more become the world’s “cultural manure.”

  But his major theme, which he found as harrowing as did the masses, was the “ruin of the Reich.” He cited the vast numbers who were reduced to wretchedness, the danger of Marxism, the “unnatural incest of party government,” the “tragedy of the small savers,” hunger, unemployment, suicides. His descriptions were deliberately generalized, first, because that assured him the maximum following, and secondly because he had recognized that within parties the precise statements of policy led to dissension and the impetus of a movement increased with the vagueness of its goals. Whoever succeeded in combining the most thorough negation of the present with the most indefinite promises for the future would capture the masses and ultimately win power. Thus, in one of his typical dualities of image and counterimage, of damnation and utopia, he demanded: “Is it by any chance German when our people is torn apart into thirty parties, when not one can get along with the others? But I tell all these sorry politicians: ‘Germany will become one single party, the party of a heroic great nation!’ ”

  By turning all his propaganda against the status quo, he achieved the simplicity that he himself saw as one of the requirements for success. “All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limi
ted intelligence among those it is addressed to.” To illustrate his approach, here is a passage from a speech of March, 1932, in which he upbraids the government for having had thirteen years to prove its worth yet having produced nothing but a “series of disasters”:

  Starting with the day of the Revolution up to the epoch of subjugation and enslavement, up to the time of treaties and emergency decrees, we see failure upon failure, collapse upon collapse, misery upon misery. Timidity, lethargy and hopelessness are everywhere the milestones of these disasters…. The peasantry today is ground down, industry is collapsing, millions have lost their saved pennies, millions of others are unemployed. Everything that formerly stood firm has changed, everything that formerly seemed great has been overthrown. Only one thing has remained preserved for us: The men and the parties who are responsible for the misfortunes. They are still here to this day.39

  With such accusatory formulas, varied and repeated a thousand times over, with vague invocations of fatherland, honor, greatness, power, and revenge, he mobilized the masses. He saw to it that their stormy emotions furthered the chaos he so scathingly described. He placed his hope in everything that could destroy existing conditions, or could at least create disturbance, because any movement would have to be movement away from the existing system and would ultimately accrue to his profit. For nobody else was formulating in so credible, decisive, and mass-effective a manner the agonizing craving for change. People in Germany were so desperate, Harold Nicolson noted in his diary during his visit to Berlin at the beginning of 1932, that they would “accept, anything that looks like an alternative.”40

  The vagueness of his terms also enabled him to brush aside social conflicts and veil social contradictions in a cloud of verbosity. After one midnight speech by Hitler in the Berlin Friedrichshain district, Goebbels noted: “That is where the very little people are. They are deeply moved after the Führer’s speech.” But the very big people were no less moved, and those in between as well. A Professor Burmeister proposed Hitler as the “candidate of the German artists” and spoke of the “humanly gripping heartwarming tones of his oratory.” After Hitler had given a two-hour talk to leaders of the Agrarian League and the Brandenburg nobility, one of the landowners stood up and “in the name of everyone present” called for omitting the customary discussion: “We would not want our sense of solemn dedication to be disturbed by anything distracting.” Hitler continually exacted such an unquestioning response from his audiences on the ground that with skeptics one “of course could not conquer the world; with them one cannot storm either a kingdom of heaven or a State.” Out of the curious hodgepodge of his slogans, bits of eclectic philosophy, and cleverly played-on emotions, everyone could take what he had put in. The frightened bourgeoisie could find the promise of order and recovered social status; the revolutionary-minded youth the outline for a new, romantic society; the demoralized workers security and bread; the members of the 100,000-man army the prospect for careers and fine uniforms; the intellectuals a bold and vital creed in line with the fashionable attitude of contempt for reason and idolization of “life.” Underneath all this ambiguity was not so much deception as the gift of striking the fundamental note of an unpolitical attitude. Like Napoleon, Hitler could say of himself that everyone had run into his net and that when he came to power there was not a single group which in some way did not place its hopes in him.

  On the whole, 1932 was undoubtedly the year of Hitler’s greatest oratorical triumphs. To be sure, some members of his entourage would recall that he had spoken more richly and persuasively in earlier years, and in the perfectly ritualized mass meetings of his years as Chancellor he reached larger, almost unbelievably large crowds. But never again did the longing for redemption, consciousness of his charismatic powers, utter concentration upon a goal, and faith in his own chosenness, against the highly emotional background of misery, all enter into such an “alchemical” combination. For Hitler himself that period of his life was one of his key experiences, and the examples he drew from it served again and again to influence his decisions. In the myth of the “time of struggle,” this period was glorified as “heroic epic,” a “hell fought through,” a “titanic battle of character.”

  Just as the ritual of opening a mass meeting was carefully orchestrated, so was the conclusion. Amid the din and the cheering the band burst out with “Deutschland, Deutschland iiber Alles,” or else one of the party anthems. The music created an impression of closed ranks and high pledges. But it was also intended to hold the audience until Hitler, still dazed and soaked in sweat, had left the room and entered the waiting car. Sometimes he stood for a few moments beside the chauffeur, saluting, mechanically smiling, while the crowd surged up or SA and SS units formed into broad columns for a torchlight parade. He, however, went back to his hotel room, totally drained; and this bears out the erotic quality of these mass meetings. One follower, who came upon Hitler at such a moment, staring silently into space with a glazed look, started toward him but was blocked by his adjutant Bruckner, who said: “Leave him be; the man is done in!” And the morning after one speech a gauleiter found him in the remotest room of a hotel suite occupied by him and his retinue. Hitler, “alone, back bent, looking tired and morose, sat at a round table slowly sipping his vegetable soup.”

  The uproar unleashed by Hitler would, however, never have led to power by itself. The elections to the Prussian Landtag had given the NSDAP 36.3 per cent of the vote and eliminated the preponderance hitherto enjoyed by the coalition of Social Democrats and Center parties. But the hoped-for absolute majority had not been attained, nor was it reached three months later in the Reichstag elections of July 31, 1932. Nevertheless, the party had more than doubled its previous number of seats, to 230, and was by far the strongest party in the Reichstag. There were many indications that Hitler had expanded as far as he could go. True, he had decimated or entirely absorbed the bourgeois parties of the Center and the Right. But he had not been able to make significant inroads on the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party. All that tremendous propaganda effort, the incessant mass meetings, parades, poster and leaflet distributions, the party speakers pushing their strength to the limit, and even Hitler’s third “flight over Germany,” in the course of which he spoke in fifty cities within fifteen days—all of it had brought the party an increase of only 1 per cent compared with the vote for the Prussian Landtag. Goebbels remarked on the results: “Now something must happen. We must come to power in the near future. Otherwise we’ll drop dead from winning elections.”41

  Alarmingly, the first signs of this sinister prospect began to appear. With the switch to governing purely by emergency decree, and especially since his re-election, Hindenburg had given his office an increasingly personal touch and had more and more obstinately equated his wishes with the welfare of the state. In this opinionated behavior he was supported by a small group of irresponsible advisers. One of these was his son Oskar, whose role in the government, to quote a popular sarcasm, “was not provided for in the Constitution.” Others were State Secretary Meissner, General Schleicher, the young conservative deputy Dr. Gereke, Hindenburg’s neighboring estate owner, von Oldenburg-Januschau (who had long enjoyed the reputation of being a “reactionary brute” and who, for example, outraged public opinion by asserting that it should always be possible to dissolve Parliament by sending a lieutenant and ten enlisted men to do the job). In addition there were some other Prussian magnates, and later the group was joined by Franz von Papen.

  The following months were filled with the background maneuvers of these men. Their various motives and interests are hard to determine. Hitler had appeared on the political scene as a tremendous and troublesome force, and their general intention was to integrate him, to bind him, and also to use him as a threat against the Left. This was the last attempt, springing from the deluded arrogance of a traditional leadership, by old Germany to regain a forfeited role in history.

  The first victim of this group was,
ironically, Brüning himself. The Chancellor, trusting that he would be backed by the President, had incurred the enmity of some of those “mighty institutions” that his opponent Hitler was trying so persistently and successfully to cultivate. He had too often refused to consider the demands of industry. Now he antagonized Hindenburg’s peers in the landowning class. They expected subsidies from the state, but Brüning wanted to make such financial aid conditional on an examination of the profitability of the estate in question. Hopelessly indebted properties were to be used for resettling some of the unemployed upon the land.

  The landowners were appalled. Their fierce attacks on the proposal culminated in the charge that the Chancellor had Bolshevistic tendencies. Given the President’s age and weak judgment, one cannot say how much he was swayed by such pressure. But there is no doubt that it at least contributed to his decision to drop Brüning. Moreover, Hindenburg bore a grudge against the Chancellor for leading him to fight on the wrong front for reelection. Nor did his entourage let him forget that painful affair. Brüning’s hour struck when he lost thé confidence of Schleicher, who alleged that he spoke in the name of the army.

  The beginning of Brüning’s overthrow was marked by what looked like an act of governmental vigor, but actually exposed the hidden contradictions within the leadership of the Reich, thereby hastening the death of the republic. The government banned the SA and the SS. Since the discovery of the Boxheim Papers, fresh evidence had accumulated of the real intentions of the Nazis. The party’s army was becoming more impatient and brash than ever. And Hitler kept up his pretense of legality by off and on publicly worrying how long he would be able to keep his brown storm troops in check. Testily, Ludendorff referred to Germany as territory “occupied by the SA.”