Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  When Hitler met Mussolini in Venice in June, 1934, he contrived to combine “dignity with friendliness and candor” in his manner, according to a diplomatic eyewitness, and left a “strong impression” behind among the initially skeptical Italians. Arnold Toynbee was surprised to hear him discourse on Germany’s guardian role in the East; his remarks, moreover, made excellent sense. In his relations with foreign visitors Hitler showed himself quick-witted, well prepared, often charming; and as François-Poncet noted after one meeting with him, he also contrived to give the impression of “fullest sincerity.”35

  Like the Germans who had once come to gape at Hitler as if he were an acrobat in a circus, the foreigners came in growing numbers, and in so doing extended the aura of greatness and admiration that surrounded him. They listened all too eagerly to his words about the people’s longing for order and work, to his assurances of his love of peace, which he was fond of connecting with his personal experiences as a soldier at the front. The foreigners showed understanding for his sensitive sense of honor. It was already beginning to be customary, especially within Germany itself, to distinguish between the fanatical partisan politician of the past and the responsible realist of the present. For the first time since the days of the Kaiser a majority of the German people had the feeling that they could identify with their own government without feelings of pity, anxiety, or shame. Papen, who otherwise was certainly no spokesman for the general mood, was probably expressing a widely held view when he paid tribute, at a cabinet meeting of November 14, 1933, to the “genius of the Chancellor.”

  Meanwhile, the decibel level of propaganda was stepped up, and more was made of Hitler as the leader and savior than ever. On the morning of May 1 Goebbels prolonged his introductory speech until the sun, which had been battling with the clouds, began to break through and Hitler could step before the masses in a blaze of light. Such clever symbolism conferred upon the image of the Führer the sacredness of a supernatural principle. And the concept of the “leader” was made to permeate the entire social system down to the very smallest units. The rector was described as the “leader of the university,” the businessman as the “factory leader.” Everyone was fitted into some leader-follower relationship, and all these relationships culminated in the archleader Hitler. An ecstatic Thuringian churchwarden went so far as to declare: “Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler.”

  The personality and the destiny of the great, lonely, chosen man, who had turned away the country’s miseries or taken them upon himself, became the subject of a multitude of Führer poems, Führer films, Führer pictures, or Führer dramas. In Richard Euringer’s Thingspiel,[12] Deutsche Passion (German Passion), performed with great success in the summer of 1933 and subsequently hailed as the model of National Socialist drama, Hitler appeared as a resurrected Unknown Soldier, a crown of thorns made of barbed wire upon his head, entering a world of profiteers, stockholders, intellectuals, and proletarians—the representatives of the “November Republic.” He has come because, in the words of the play, which continually sounds Christian motifs, he “had mercy on the people.” When the mob wants to scourge and crucify him, he checks them by a miracle and leads the nation “to warfare and workfare” (zu Gewehr und Gewerk). He reconciles the living with the war dead in the great people’s community of the Third Reich. Then “a glory breaks” from his wounds and he ascends into heaven with the words: “It is finished!” The stage directions for the final scene read: “Organ tone from the skies. Nostalgia. Sacral. Rhythmically and harmoniously mingled with the secular marching song.”

  Closely akin to such literary rubbish was the broad and polluted stream of kitsch culture. Everyone jumped in, trying to cash in on the mood of the moment. A brand of canned herring was called “Good Adolf.” Coin banks were made in the form of SA caps. Pictures of Hitler appeared on ties, handkerchiefs, hand mirrors, and the swastika decorated ash trays and beer mugs. Some Nazi officials warned that the Führer’s picture was being exploited and profaned by a money-grubbing band of pseudoartists.

  It is clear that the excessive tributes had their effect upon Hitler himself. He was aware that the whole thing was artificially manufactured in line with his program: “The masses need an idol,” he declared. Nevertheless, the lineaments of the “leader-pope” began coming to the fore again, after having been suppressed somewhat just after the seizure of power. Now, however, this kind of leadership was extended from the party to the entire nation. As early as February 25, 1934, Rudolf Hess, speaking at the Königsplatz in Munich amid the roar of cannon and addressing by radio nearly a million political bosses, leaders of the Hitler Youth and the Labor Service, had made them take the oath: “Adolf Hitler is Germany and Germany is Adolf Hitler. He who pledges himself to Hitler pledges himself to Germany.”

  Reinforced by his band of disciples, Hitler became more and more at home with this equation, which meanwhile was being given a theoretical foundation in an extensive literature on political science. Sample: “The new and decisive aspect of the Führer Constitution is that it goes beyond the democratic distinction between rulers and ruled to create a unity in which the Leader and the following have merged.” All selfish interests and all social antagonisms were abolished within him; a total unity of the German people corresponded to the total enemy on the outside. The Führer had the power to bind and to loose; he knew the way, the mission, the law of history.

  Hitler’s speeches show him in full agreement with all this; he reckoned in centuries and occasionally suggested that he was on special terms with Providence. And just as he had overruled the many Old Fighters who had believed the party program, so he made his Danzig followers hew to the new line on Poland. He insisted on discipline, with no allowance made for local interests. “Everything in Germany begins with this man and ends with him,” his adjutant Wilhelm Brückner wrote.

  The surer Hitler felt in the possession of power, the more conspicuously his old bohemian traits came to the fore, his lapses into torpor, his moodiness. For the present he still kept regular office hours, entered his office punctually at ten o’clock in the morning, and to evening visitors displayed the mountains of documents he had worked through. But he had always hated routine. “A single idea of genius,” he used to say, “is more valuable than a whole lifetime of conscientious office work.” Scarcely, therefore, had the excitement of being a Chancellor faded, with the glamour of the historical decor and the thrill of sitting at Bismarck’s desk, than he began discarding it all—just as in his youth he had dropped the piano, school, painting. Sooner or later, in fact, he would drop everything—at the end even the political game and his love of oratory. Ultimately, all he held on to were his obsessive ideas, those products of anxiety and ambition.

  Significantly, his manner soon reverted to the Schwabing condottiere style of the twenties. Constantly trailing behind him a motley caravan of demiartists, strong-arm men, and adjutants, he would always be traveling between the chancellery, the Brown House, Obersalzberg, Bayreuth, parade grounds, and meeting halls. As the years went on, his need to be in motion increased. On the morning of July 26, for example, he delivered an address in Munich to a delegation of 470 Italian Young Fascists; at 2 P.M. he attended the funeral of Admiral von Schroeder in Berlin; and by 5 P.M. he was at a concert in Bayreuth. On July 29, still in Bayreuth, he was the guest of honor at a reception given by Winifred Wagner, and the following day laid a wreath on the composer’s grave. In the afternoon he spoke at the German Gymnastic Festival in Stuttgart, then went to Berlin, then to a meeting with high party officials at Obersalzberg. On August 12 he took part in a Richard Wagner Festival in Neuschwanstein, where in the course of his speech he referred to himself as completing the plans of King Ludwig II. From there he returned to Obersalzberg for a week. On August 18 he left for Nuremberg to see to preparations for the party rally, and a day later went to Bad Godesberg for a discussion with SA and SS leaders. It would appear that, now, having achieved success, he was once more prey to the fluctuating
desires and interests of his earlier years. Often, he would let himself drift irresolutely for a long while, then he would suddenly display an explosive energy—especially in questions concerning power. In the political realm he manifested a peculiar and surely rare combination of indolence and genius. Soon he was shirking the many burdensome routine duties of his office and brazenly going to the opera or the movies instead. During those early months as Chancellor he once more read through all of Karl May’s nearly seventy volumes of adventure stories—of which he later said that they had opened his eyes to the world. It was this unusual style of undisguised laziness that prompted Oswald Spengler to remark sarcastically that the Third Reich was “the organization of the jobless by the job-shirkers.”36 Rosenberg, for example, was highly indignant that Hitler preferred an ice revue to a demonstration Rosenberg had organized. In years past, Gottfried Feder had wanted to assign an army officer to Hitler to help him handle a proper day’s agenda. But Goebbels explained his master’s working methods in characteristically high-flown terms. “What we… are constantly endeavoring to bring to bear has become for him a system in world-wide dimensions. His creativity is that of the genuine artist, no matter in what field he may be working.”

  If we look at the matter in retrospect, Hitler accomplished an amazing amount in the first year of his chancellorship. He had eliminated the Weimar Republic, taken the decisive steps toward building a government dependent upon him personally as leader, had centralized the nation, politically regimented it, and had brought it to the point of becoming the weapon he considered it to be, as indeed he considered everything to be a weapon. He had initiated an economic turnaround, had thrown off the fetters of the League of Nations, and had won the respect of the outside world. Within a short time, a pluralistic free society with its many centers of power and influence had been burned down to “pure, uniform, obedient ashes.” As he himself put it, he had “got rid of a world of opinions and institutions and installed another in its place.” Only disorganized groups without political weight were left of the shattered opposition.

  Granted, what Goebbels called the “process of resmelting the nation” had not taken place without the use of violence. But we should not overestimate the part played by brute force in the course of the seizure of power. Hitler spoke of the “least bloody revolution in world history.” This soon became one of the rhetorical slogans of the regime. And it certainly contained a kernel of truth. And yet—consider a decree such as Gôring’s of June 22, 1933, “For Combating Griping and Defeatism.” The mere expression of discontent was viewed as a “continuation of Marxist agitation,” and hence a punishable offence. Such a decree made plain what methods were used to heat the smelting crucible.

  Similarly, when we contemplate the “miracle” of the folk community, we cannot overlook its illusory character. It was an impressive façade, but for the most part it only covered over and did not eliminate social conflicts. One episode from the first few days of the regime throws light on the way the national “reconciliation” was compounded of coercion and deception. The episode is as grotesque as it is illuminating: on Hitler’s order the notorious leader of “Killer Storm Troop 33,” Hans (“Firebug”) Maikowski, was honored with a state funeral. He had been assassinated on the night of January 30, 1933, returning from the historic torchlight parade. A policeman named Zauritz who had been killed that same night was likewise granted a state funeral. In the name of the “folk community” and over the protests of the church officials, the policeman, who had been a Catholic and a leftist, was without more ado placed on a bier in the Lutheran cathedral alongside the storm trooper, who had been a gangster and a freethinker. To complete the missing element in this forcible reconciliation, the former Crown Prince was sent to lay wreaths on these coffins.

  Nevertheless, the second phase of the seizure of power had proceeded more swiftly and more smoothly than anticipated. The necessary measures to organize government and party into a leader state were taken in the course of that legalistic game, which simultaneously prepared the next steps even as it was sanctioning the present one. In the provinces Reichs-tatthalter—federal governors—acted as party bosses, deposing ministers, appointing officials, participating in cabinet meetings, and exercising virtually unlimited authority as soon as the autonomy of the states was abrogated by law and the Reichsrat, the upper house, abolished. The federal government also stripped the states of their judiciary independence. A new organizational scheme for the party divided the country into thirty-two gaus, the gaus into sections, local groups, cells and blocks.

  A statute of December 1, 1933, proclaimed the unity of party and state, but in fact Hitler was bent on separating the two. He had his reasons for leaving the national headquarters of the NSDAP in Munich. It was evident that he meant to keep the party from directly affecting government affairs. Hence his appointment of feeble, submissive Rudolf Hess, who lacked any power base of his own, to the post of FUhrer’s deputy. Certainly no political primacy of the National Socialist Party existed. Unity was present only in the person of Hitler, who continued to foster a multiplicity of divided authorities and who allowed the party only in a few special cases to assume governmental functions and carry through its totalitarian claims.

  Almost all the powerful institutions in Germany were overwhelmed. Hindenburg no longer counted. He was, as his friend and Neudeck neighbor von Oldenburg-Januschau pungently remarked, “the President we no longer have.” Significantly, the leadership of the party, in taking that mass oath of February 25, swore allegiance to Hitler, not to the President, as should have been the case under the statute promulgating the unity of party and state. The old man still figured in a good many schemes as the supposed embodiment of justice and tradition; but in the meantime he had not only capitulated to Hitler, but allowed Hitler to corrupt him. His willingness to support the Nazi conquest of all power in the state with his moral authority certainly contrasted remarkably with the dour reserve with which he had left the Weimar Republic to its fate. On the anniversary of the Battle of Tannenberg the new rulers made him a gift of the Domain of Langenau, which bordered on Neudeck Estate, and the woodlands of Preussenwald, free and clear. He reciprocated with a gesture almost unprecedented in German military history, conferring upon retired Captain Hermann Göring “in recognition of his preeminent services in war and peace” the honorary rank of an infantry general.

  The army remained the single institution that had escaped “co-ordination.” The SA was clearly seething with impatience to carry out that final Gleichschaltung. “The gray rock must be drowned by the brown tide,” Ernst Röhm was in the habit of remarking. Röhm and Hitler were now increasingly at odds, with Röhm suspecting that Hitler might abandon the revolution for reasons of tactics and opportunism. From Hitler’s point of view, the army and the SA constituted the only remaining still independent power factors whose self-assurance had not been shattered. The manner in which he used each to smash the other, thus solving the existential problem of every revolutionary leader is still another example of his tactical genius. He arranged for the revolution to devour first and foremost its most loyal children, and represented his perfidious act as a great service to history.

  As always in the decisive situations of his life, he continued to hesitate, to answer those who pressed him to act with “We must let the situation ripen.” But from the spring of 1934 on, forces entered into play that, operating along different paths, accelerated matters. On June 30, 1934, many different interests and impulses coincided, and all met before the rifle barrels of the execution squads.

  The Röhm Affair