Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Out of such anxiety complexes he developed a pedantic carefulness about himself. From the ever-widening security system built up by Himmler, which took in the entire country, to his vegetarian diet, which he adopted at the beginning of the thirties, he tried by elaborate precautions to preserve his life—odd though it might seem to safeguard the “tremendous task” by a police apparatus and gruel. He did not smoke, did not drink, avoided even coffee or black tea, and contented himself with thin infusions of herbs. In later years, with some assistance from his personal physician Dr. Morell, he became addicted to medication; he was incessantly taking some drug or other, or at least sucking on lozenges. He observed himself with hypochondriacal concern, regarding occasional stomach cramps as signs of impending cancer. In the course of the presidential campaign in the spring of 1932 one of his followers called on him in a Hamburg hotel and Hitler told him over a plate of vegetable soup that he had no time to waste, that he could not “lose a single year more. I must come to power shortly in order to be able to solve the gigantic tasks in the time remaining to me. I must! I must!” Many remarks of later years, and a number of speeches, contain similar references; in his private circle comments to the effect that he did not have “much time left,” would “soon leave here,” or would “live only a few years” became standing phrases.

  Medical findings throw little light on the matter. In later years Hitler did suffer from gastric pains, and from 1935 on he occasionally complained of circulatory problems. But we now have the files of his medical examinations and these reflect no condition that would have justified his worry. We must be content with positing psychogenic causes, which are peculiar to the biographies of many historical figures with a similar sense of mission. This assumption is supported by his pathological mania for traveling, appearing as a continuous attempt at escape, and by his increasing nervous insomnia, which during the war led him to literally turn day and night upside down in the Führer’s headquarters. His hectic temperament made him incapable of any regular activity or effort. Whatever he began had to be completed at once; and we may well believe the report that he scarcely ever read a book straight through to the end. He could spend days, in what seemed like a narcotic trance, “dozing like a crocodile in the Nile mud,” before he erupted without transition into impetuous activity. In his speech of April, 1937, at the Vogelsang Ordensburg, he spoke of his “damaged” nerves and declared almost imploringly: “I must restore my nerves…. That is self-evident. Worries, worries, worries, insane worries; it truly is a tremendous burden of worries.” And, standing before the model of his capital, he exclaimed with tears in his eyes: “If only my health were good.”66 Many of his actions whose abruptness seemed to spring from cold-blooded calculation were apparently partly the expression of the unrest that came from his premonitions of death. “I will no longer see it completed!” In an address to the propaganda chiefs in October, 1937, he said, according to the notes of one of the participants,

  …that as far as man’s knowledge could go, he did not have long to live. People did not grow old in his family. His parents had both died young.

  It was therefore necessary to solve the problems that had to be solved (Lebensraum) as quickly as possible, so that this could still be done in his lifetime. Later generations would no longer be able to do it. Only he himself was still in a position to.

  After grave inner struggles he had freed himself from what remained of his childhood religious notions. “I now feel fresh as a colt in pasture.”

  But a psychological consideration also underlay this increasing insistence on Hitler’s part. From the end of 1937 on, he worried more and more that the revolution, braked by his seizure of power, might lose its dynamism and quietly fade away. The domestic moderation, the peace gestures, the everlasting holiday atmosphere, in short, the regime’s whole masquerade, might be taken at its face value. If that happened, “the leap to the great final goals might be missed.” With boundless faith in the power of propaganda, he counted on propaganda to transform the artificially constructed idyllic stage set into the idyl itself. In his important secret speech of November 10, 1938, to the top editors of the domestic press he keenly analyzed this dichotomy:

  Circumstances have forced me to talk almost exclusively of peace for decades. Only by constantly stressing Germany’s desire for peace and peaceful intentions was it possible for me to win the German people their freedom bit by bit and to give the nation the arms which were always necessary as the prerequisite to the next step. It is obvious that such peace propaganda, carried on for decades, also has its dubious aspects; for it can easily lead to fixing in the brains of many persons the notion that the present regime is identical with the decision and the desire to preserve peace in all circumstances.

  That, however, would lead to a false idea of the aims of this system. Above all it would also lead to the German nation’s… being imbued with a spirit which in the long run would amount to defeatism and would necessarily undo the achievements of the present regime.

  The reason I spoke only of peace for so many years was because I had to. It has now become necessary to psychologically change the German people’s course in a gradual way and slowly make it realize that there are things that must, if they cannot be carried through by peaceful means, be carried through by the methods of force and violence….

  This work has required months, it was begun systematically; it is being continued and reinforced.67

  And in fact from the second half of 1937 on, the suppressed radical energies were once more released and the nation organized more consistently than ever to serve the violent intentions of the regime. Only now did the rise of the SS state begin. Its most visible expression was the increase in the number of concentration camps and the accelerated recruitment and equipping of armed SS formations. The Red Cross was instructed to prepare for possible mobilization. The Hitler Youth were ordered to be ready to step into the armaments plants, taking over for the labor force, who would be sent into the army. The regime launched massive attacks against the judiciary, the churches, and the bureaucracy, cowing those branches of society even more thoroughly. Hitler ranted more violently than ever against the skeptical intellectuals (“these impudent, shameless scribblers” who would be “useless as building blocks for a people’s community”). The simple of heart, on the other hand, were forever being hailed. In November, 1937, the press received directives to keep silent about the preparations for “total war” being initiated in all the branches of the NSDAP.68

  The economic field as well was being regeared. Once again, the businessmen, contrary to the theory that capitalist interests were the dominant force in the Third Reich, proved willing tools who “had no more influence upon the political decisions than their day laborers.”69 Should they fail to meet the demands set for them, “it is not Germany that would be ruined, but at most a few managers,” Hitler had hinted as early as the autumn of 1936 in a memorandum concerning his economic program. As always, he was proceeding entirely from considerations of efficiency. We misread his matter-of-fact view of all practical problems if we view the regime’s economic policy in ideological terms. Basically, the economic system remained capitalist; but it was in many ways overlaid by authoritarian command structures and atypically distorted.

  In his memorandum Hitler explicitly admitted his expansionist intentions—for the first time since he had become Chancellor. He had had to speed up his plans, he indicated, because of the country’s troubling situation in raw materials and foodstuffs, thus once more evoking the old terror of a hopelessly overpopulated country with the proverbial 140 inhabitants per square kilometer. A Four-Year Plan on the Soviet Russian model was to supply the sinews for the Lebensraum policy. Hermann Göring was put in charge. He promptly proceeded to bully the businessmen into carrying out the plans for autarchy and rearmament without regard to the costs or the economic consequences. At the ministerial session devoted to Hitler’s memorandum, Göring insisted that the country must act “as if we we
re in the stage of imminent peril of war.” A few months later he told a meeting of big businessmen that producing economically no longer mattered; what counted was simply to produce at all. It was a plan for Raubbau—strip mining the economy, as it were—and its aim was a war of conquest, for only such a war could justify it. “We must always remember that if we lose, everything’s shot anyhow,” Hitler later commented, during the war itself.

  When Hjalmar Schacht criticized these methods, there was a breach which soon forced him out of the cabinet. Hitler now felt that time was running out. His memorandum had ruled that economic rearmament must be conducted “in the same tempo, with the same resolution, and if necessary with the same ruthlessness” as the political and military preparations for war. The concluding sentences were similarly dramatic: “Herewith I am setting the following task: First. The German army must be ready for commitment within four years. Second. The German economy must be ready for war within four years.”

  Reports on morale during this period speak of “a certain fatigue and apathy.”70 The overorganization of people was becoming almost unbearable. The regime’s policy toward the churches, the defamation of minorities, the racial cult, the pressure upon the arts and the sciences, and the excessive zeal of minor party functionaries engendered anxieties that could be expressed only in the most covert terms; such griping was totally ineffective. The majority tried, as far as possible, to go on living, ignoring both the regime and its injustices. The report cited above notes that “the German greeting [Heil Hitler]—which at any rate is a sensitive measure of shifts in political moods—has yielded almost entirely to the older customary salutations, or is only casually responded to, outside the circles of party members and officials.”

  Though such local reports were scarcely definitive, they fed Hitler’s sense of urgency and showed him what had to be done: he must shake the populace out of its lethargy and create a situation in which anxiety, pride, and an offended sense of self-importance combined so that “the inner voice of the people itself slowly began to scream for violence.”

  “Where Hitler draws perspectives, war is always in sight,” Konrad Heiden wrote around this time, and in the same passage asked whether the man could continue to exist “without disintegrating the world.”71

  The “Greatest German in History”

  Give me a kiss, girls! This is the greatest day of my life. I shall be known as the greatest German in history.

  Adolf Hitler on March 15, 1939, to his secretaries.

  Hitler’s real plans came to light in the secret conference of November 5, 1937, whose course we know from the record kept by one of the participants, Colonel Hossbach. To a restricted circle consisting of Foreign Minister von Neurath, War Minister von Blomberg, Commander of the Army von Fritsch, Commander in Chief of the Navy Admiral Raeder, and Air Force Commander Göring, Hitler unveiled ideas that struck some of those present as sensational at the time, and others later on when they were disclosed at the Nuremberg trial.

  The psychological importance of his statements evidently outweighs their political weight. For what Hitler produced in an exalted mood, inspired by the favorable circumstances, in the course of more than four hours of nonstop speech to the group assembled in the chancellery, was nothing more than the design he had developed years before in Mein Kampf. Now he presented it as the “result of detailed considerations and the experiences of his four and a half years as head of government,” but it was the same old concept from which he had never strayed, which had become the fixed point of all his steps and maneuvers. Only the tone of impatience was new. He would ask those present, he added portentously after his introductory words, “to regard the following statement as his testamentary bequest in case of his decease.”

  If the goal of German policy, he began, were considered as the safeguarding, preservation, and increase of the body of the nation, the “problem of space” must immediately be confronted. All economic and social difficulties, all racial dangers, could be mastered only by overcoming the scarcity of space; the future of Germany absolutely depended on that. The problem could no longer be solved by reaching out for overseas colonies, as had been possible for the powers of the liberalistic colonial age. Germany’s living space was situated on the Continent. Granted, every expansion involved considerable risks, as the history of the Roman Empire or the British Empire demonstrated: “Neither earlier nor at the present time has there ever been space without a master; the aggressor always comes up against the possessor.” But the gain, specifically a spatially coherent Greater Reich ruled by a solid “racial nucleus,” justified a high stake. “For the solution of the German question all that remains is the way of force,” he declared.

  Once that resolve had been taken, he continued, all that remained was to decide on the most favorable time and circumstances for applying that force. Six to eight years later, conditions could develop only unfavorably for Germany. If, therefore, he was “still alive, it was his unalterable resolve to solve the question of German space between 1943–1945 at the latest.” But he was also determined, if an earlier opportunity offered, to take advantage of it—whether the occasion were a severe domestic crisis in France or a military involvement of the Western powers. In any case, the subjection of Austria and of Czechoslovakia must come first, and he made it clear that he would not be content with the demand of the racial revisionists for annexation of the Sudetenland but had in mind the conquest of all Czechoslovakia as a springboard for far-reaching imperialist aims. By that conquest Germany would win not only twelve divisions but also the food supply for an additional 5 million to 6 million persons, this in the event “that a compulsory emigration of two million from Czechia, of one million persons from Austria, would be successfully carried out.” For the rest, he considered it probable that England and France had “already written off Czechia.” There was strong likelihood that some conflicts would erupt as early as the coming year, in the Mediterranean area, for example; these conflicts would involve a heavy drain on the Western powers. In that case he was determined to strike in 1938, without waiting. In view of these circumstances, from the German viewpoint a rapid and complete victory by Franco in the Spanish Civil War was undesirable. Rather, the interests of the Reich required continuance of the tensions in the Mediterranean area. In fact, it might be wise to encourage Mussolini to undertake additional expansionist moves, in order to create a casus belli between Italy and the Western powers. Anything of that sort would provide a magnificent opportunity for Germany to begin the “assault upon Czechoslovakia” with “lightning rapidity.”

  This exposition evidently stunned and disturbed some of the group, and in his description of the conference Colonel Hossbach notes that the subsequent discussion “at times took a very sharp tone.” Neurath, Blomberg, and Fritsch, in particular, opposed Hitler’s arguments and explicitly warned him against the risks of a war with the Western powers. Possibly Hitler had convoked the conference chiefly to communicate his impatience and, as he had explained to Göring before the beginning of the meeting, “to light a fire” under generals Blomberg and Fritsch “because he was by no means satisfied with the rearmament of the army.” During the heated discussion Hitler suddenly became aware of a difference of opinion that came very close to being a matter of principle. Four days later Fritsch asked him for another meeting, and Foreign Minister Neurath—“shaken to the core,” as he later declared—also tried to see him and dissuade him from his bellicose course. But Hitler had meanwhile decided to leave Berlin and had withdrawn to Berchtesgaden. Obviously ill-humored, he refused to receive the Foreign Minister before his return to Berlin in the middle of January.

  It is surely more than accidental that the men who opposed him on November 5 all fell victim to the major shuffle by which Hitler, a short time later, removed the conservatives from their last remaining strongholds, especially in the army and the Foreign Office. The conference seems to have proved to him that his sweeping plans, which required steady nerves, a readiness to tak
e risks, and a kind of brigand’s courage could not be carried out by the inhibited, cautious representatives of the old bourgeois ruling class. Their sobriety and bristly stiffness antagonized him; his old antibourgeois resentments reawakened. He hated their arrogance and their class-conscious pretensions. The ideal Nazi diplomat was, to his mind, not a proper official but a revolutionary and secret agent, an “entertainment director” who would know how “to matchmake and to forge.” A general, to his mind, should be like “a butcher’s dog who has to be held fast by the collar because otherwise he threatens to attack anyone in sight.” Neurath, Fritsch, and Blomberg scarcely fitted this conception. In this regime they were, as one of them commented, one and all “saurians.”72

  The November conference of 1937 marked a mutual disillusionment. The conservatives, especially the military leaders who had never learned to think beyond the narrow confines of their own goals and interests, found to their astonishment that Hitler meant what he had said. He was, as it were, actually being Hitler. And Hitler, for his part, found his contemptuous views of his conservative partners confirmed. For some years they had kept silent, obeyed, and served. Now they were manifesting their true pusillanimous nature. They wanted Germany’s greatness, but without taking risks. They wanted rearmament but no war, Nazi order but not Nazi ideology.