Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  ‘ But if all his thoughts were bent on war, the one that began on September 3, 1939, with the declarations of war by the Western powers, the one marked by absurdly reversed fronts, was not the war he had sought. Shortly before he became Chancellor, he had told his entourage that he would begin the war that had to come free of all romantic emotions, guided only by tactical considerations. He would not play at war and would not be tricked into a trial at arms. “I shall wage the war. I shall determine the suitable time for attack. There is only one most favorable moment. I will wait for it. With iron resolution. And I will not miss it. I will employ all my energy to compelling it to come. That is my task. If I succeed in forcing that, I have the right to send the young to their deaths.”3

  Apparently he had failed in this self-imposed task. But had he really failed? The question cannot be why or even whether Hitler began the Second World War of his own free will. It can only be why he, who up to this point had almost alone determined the course of events, stumbled into war at this time contrary to all his plans.

  Certainly he misread England’s attitude and once more gambled in defiance to all common sense. He had too frequently emerged triumphant from similar situations not to have been misled; he had come to think of the possibility of the impossible as a kind of law of his life. Hence, too, the many vain hopes he harbored in the following months. First he told himself that England would come around after the rapid subjugation of Poland. Then he expected the intervention of the Soviet Union on the German side. For a while he counted on the effects of reduced military activity against Great Britain, later on the effects of heavy bombing, and then expected the turning point to come from victory over England’s continental vassal: “The war will be decided in France,” he told Mussolini in March, 1940. “If France were finished… England would have to make peace.”4 After all, he argued, England had entered the war without any strong motive, chiefly because of Italy’s indecisive attitude. Any of these factors, he thought, might prompt England to withdraw from the conflict. He simply did not see what else might actuate the enemy. So sure was he of his reasoning that in the so-called Z Plan he treated the U-boat building program, which had already been cut back, with noticeable neglect; instead of twenty-nine monthly launchings the plan called for only two.

  But illusions about England’s determination to fight cannot sufficiently explain Hitler’s decision to go to war. He was after all conscious of the high degree of risk. When the British government made its intentions clearer by signing the pact of assistance with the Poles on August 25, Hitler rescinded an order to attack already issued. Nor did the following week give him any reason to reassess the situation. When, therefore, he renewed the order to attack on August 31, there must have been some special feeling that overrode his sense of risk.

  One of the striking aspects of his behavior is the stubborn, peculiarly blind impatience with which he pressed forward into the conflict. That impatience was curiously at odds with the hesitancy and vacillations that had preceded earlier decisions of his. When, in the last days of August, Göring pleaded with him not to push the gamble too far, he replied heatedly that throughout his life he had always played vabanque. And though this metaphor was accurate for the matter at hand, it hardly described the wary, circumspect style with which he had proceeded in the past. We must go further back, almost to the early, prepolitical phase of his career, to find the link with the abruptness of his conduct during the summer of 1939, with its reminders of old provocations and daredevil risks.

  There is, in fact, every indication that during these months Hitler was throwing aside more than tried and tested tactics, that he was giving up a policy in which he had excelled for fifteen years and in which for a while he had outstripped all antagonists. It was as if he were at last tired of having to adapt himself to circumstances, tired of the eternal talking, dissimulation, and diplomatic wirepulling, and were again seeking “a great, universally understandable, liberating action.”

  The November putsch of 1923, one of the great caesuras that so strikingly divide up his life, was also an example of such a liberating action. As we have noted earlier, it marked Hitler’s specific entry into politics. Until that point, he had made a name for himself by the boldness of his agitation, by the radical alternatives of either/or that he announced the night before the march to the Feldherrnhalle: “When the decisive struggle for to be or not to be calls us, then all we want to know is this: heaven above us, the ground under us, the enemy before us.” Until that time he had recognized only frontal relationships, both inwardly and outwardly. His thrusting, offensive style as an orator was matched by his rude tone of command as party chairman. Orders were issued in a brusque, categorical tone. Only after the collapse of November 9, 1923, did Hitler realize the possibilities of the political game, the use that might be made of tactical devices, coalitions, and sham compromises. That insight had transformed the rude putschist into a politician who played his cards with deliberation. But even though he had learned to play his new part with sovereign skill, he had never been able entirely to conceal how much it had gone against the grain and that his innate tendency continued to be against detours, rules of the game, legality, and in fact against politics in general.

  Now he was returning to his earlier self. He was going to slash through the web of dependencies and false concessions, to recover the putschist’s freedom to call any politician a swine for presenting him with a proposal for mediation. Hitler had behaved “like a force of nature,” Rumanian Foreign Minister Gafencu reported in April, 1939, after a visit to Berlin. That phrase would also describe the demagogue and rebel of the early twenties. Significantly, along with his decision for war, his old apolitical alternatives about victory or annihilation, world power or doom, cropped up once more. In his heart of hearts he had always preferred them; now they regularly recurred, sometimes several times in the same speech. “All hope for compromise is childish: victory or defeat,” he told his generals on November 23, 1939. And later: “I have led the German people to a great height even though the world now hates us. I am risking this war. I have to choose between victory or annihilation. I choose victory.” And then a few sentences further: “It is not a single problem that is at stake, but whether the nation is to be or not to be.”

  It was wholly in keeping with this retreat from the game of politics that he increasingly lapsed, in terminology and in the tenor of his statements, back into the plane of irrationality. “Only he who struggles with fate can have Providence on his side,” he remarked in the above-mentioned speech. A member of his entourage noted, during the last days in August, a striking “tendency toward a Nibelungentod.” Hitler again defined the war as a “fateful struggle which cannot be dispensed with or negotiated away by any clever political or tactical skill, but really represents a kind of struggle with the Huns [as in the Nibelungenlied]… in which one either stands or falls and dies; either/or.”5

  The following years were to show that Hitler’s defection from politics did not spring from a passing mood. Strictly speaking, he never again returned to politics. All efforts on the part of his entourage, the urgent pleas of Goebbels, the proposals of Ribbentrop or Rosenberg, even the occasional recommendations of such foreign statesmen as Mussolini, Horthy, and Laval, were in vain. His consultations with chiefs of the satellite states (which took place more and more rarely as the war went on) finally became the last vestige of former maneuverings. But they had nothing to do with political activity. Hitler himself accurately called them “hypnotic treatments.” His attitude may be summed up in the reply he gave to Ambassador Havel, the Foreign Office’s liaison man at headquarters, when in the spring of 1945 Havel urged him to seize the last opportunity for a political initiative: “Politics? I don’t engage in politics any more. All that disgusts me so.” In a totally contradictory way, he justified his political inaction on grounds of changing circumstances. While the war was going well, he held that time was working for him; in periods of setbacks he feared that his
negotiating position would be unfavorable. “I see myself as a sort of spider,” he declared during the second phase of the war, “lying in wait for a run of luck. The thing is only to be alert and ready to pounce at the right moment.” In fact, such images concealed his continuing distaste for politics, whose stakes seemed to him too small, whose points too insipid, and which offered none of the excitement that transformed successes into triumphs. Many a time during the war years he commented that one must oneself “cut off possible lines of retreat… for then one fights more easily and resolutely.”6 Politics, according to his later viewpoint, was merely a possible line of retreat.

  In renouncing politics, Hitler also returned to the principled ideological positions he had formerly held. The intellectual rigidity that had so long been hidden by his boundless tactical and methodical adroitness emerged again, becoming increasingly marked as time went on. The war brought on a process of petrifaction which soon gripped his whole personality. An alarming sign of the dehumanizing process came right at the start in Hitler’s casual order of September 1, 1939, the day the war began, that incurably ill persons be granted a “mercy death.”7 The phenomenon assumed most tangible form in Hitler’s insanely mounting anti-Semitism, which itself was a form of mythologizing atrophy of consciousness. Early in 1943 he told a foreign chief of state: “The Jews are the natural allies of Bolshevism and the candidates for the positions now held by those intellectuals who would be assassinated in case of Bolshevization. Therefore… the more radically one proceeds against the Jews, the better.” He said he preferred a naval battle like Salamis to an ambiguous skirmish and would rather smash all bridges behind him, since Jewish hatred was in any case gigantic. In Germany there was “no turning back on the course once taken.” His sense of entering upon the final conflict was obviously deepening. And the figure of the diplomat had no place in eschatology, he thought.

  In our search for the specific impulse that set these processes in motion we cannot pretend that Hitler’s boredom with politics and his impatience are the whole explanation. Some writers have posited a shattering of his personality structure caused by illness. But evidence is lacking for this thesis. And often this sort of argument represents the effort of a disillusioned partisan of the regime to explain the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful phases in Hitler’s life. What comes to the fore during this second phase is the totally unchanged, rigid character of his ideas and ideologies. What stands revealed is not so much a break as the immutable core in Hitler’s nature.

  But certainly his impatience was operative in all of it: the craving for dramatic intensifications, the rapid satiation with successes, the dynamism, whose author he was and whose victim he now became, and, finally, the phenomenon of temporal anxiety, which from 1937 on stamped his style of action, and was now reinforced by a sense that time was not only running out on him but working against him. Through sleepless nights, he told Mussolini, he had brooded over the advisability of postponing the war for two years. But then, considering the inevitability of the conflict and the growing strength of the enemy, he had “abruptly attacked Poland in the autumn.” On September 27, 1939, he said something similar to von Brauchitsch and Halder, and in a memorandum composed two weeks later he affirmed: “Given the situation… time can more probably be regarded as an ally of the Western powers than as our ally.” He was forever rationalizing his decision, speaking of “the good fortune of being permitted to lead this war in person” and even of his jealousy at the idea that someone after him might begin this war. Again, with a withering glance at any possible successor, he declared that he did not want “stupid wars” Coming after his death. His address to his generals on November 23, 1939, sums up his reasons for timing the war when he did. After an analysis of the situation he commented:

  As the final factor I must in all modesty mention my own person as irreplaceable. Neither a military nor a civilian personality could replace me. The attempts at assassination [like that of Nobember 8, 1939, in the Bürgerbraukeller] may be repeated. I am convinced of the strength of my brain and of my resolution. Wars will always be ended only by the annihilation of the opponent. Anyone who thinks differently is irresponsible. Time is working for the enemy. The present balance of forces can no longer improve for us; it can only deteriorate. If the enemy will not make peace, then our own position worsens. No compromises. Hardness toward ourselves. I shall attack and not capitulate. The fate of the Reich depends upon me alone. I shall act accordingly.

  It is clear that Hitler was no longer speaking in political terms. The mood is visionary. And he found his new approach vindicated by his sensational successes in the initial phase of the war. Against Poland he had played the role of generalissimo[15] with some restraint. But he fell more and more in love with the part; and something of the infantilism that made him seek to perpetuate all pleasant experiences could be recognized in his total devotion to the map table at the Führer’s headquarters. Playing general brought new stimuli, new excitements to his nerves, but also posed a dangerous challenge. Here was the supreme test of his “strength of brain,” of his hardness and resolution, and of his theatrical temperament. He faced decisions of the “most gigantic sort” and of the most deadly seriousness. His remark that only artistic people have the qualities for great generalship underlines this aspect. The effortless victories of the early period strengthened his conviction that after the fame of demagogue and politician he would also win glory as the supreme commander. And when, as the war went on and on, this glory failed to come his way, he began to pursue it—breathlessly, defiantly, until he attained doom.

  Hitler’s urge for war was so compelling that he not only conceded to reverse his fundamental design but went into the conflict in spite of inadequate preparation. The downcast mood in the streets, the ostentatious refusals to cheer on various occasions in the preceding months, testified to inadequate psychological preparation of the people; and in his impatience Hitler did little to improve it. After the Reichstag speech of April 28, 1938, he avoided going before the masses. Presumably he acted on the assumption that the drama of events would in itself generate sufficient mobilizing energies. But the satisfaction the people had obviously felt upon the reoccupation of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, and the entry into the Sudetenland had evaporated by the time Prague was occupied. Such gratifications were no longer to be had. Neither Danzig nor the Polish Corridor seemed of great importance to the prestige of the nation that had recovered from its long humiliation. Granted, the war against Poland was more popular than any of the other engagements of the Second World War; but it lacked the magnetic element. Neither the atrocity stories about murdered, tortured, or raped Germans nor the actual number of some 7,000 victims of Polish persecution could fire the popular mind. A few months after the beginning of the war expressions of discontent increased; the SD noted that the mood of the population was “that’s what comes when a war is started without sufficient preparation.” Between Christmas and New Year’s Day police power had to be used for the first time against crowds of discontented people.8

  Hitler had obviously hastened the war for fear that the population’s preparedness might sink to a still lower level. He must have thought that it would be wise to begin the struggle while he could still draw on the abating momentum of former years. “Those who avoid battles,” he had once remarked, “will never acquire the strength to fight battles.” And in one of his last speeches, in which he justified his timing of the war (“there could not have been… a more fortunate moment than that of 1939”), he acknowledged that his decision had also been influenced by the psychological consideration that “enthusiasm and readiness to sacrifice… cannot be bottled and preserved. Such spirit arises once in the course of a revolution and will gradually fade away. Dull routine and the comforts of life will once more exert their spell on people and make them philistines again. It would have been wrong to let slip away all we had been able to achieve by National Socialist education, by the tremendous w
ave of enthusiasm that lifted our people.” On the contrary, he continued, war offered the chance to kindle that spirit anew.9

  In the psychological realm, then, the war was supposed to partly create the spirit necessary to wage it. And in a certin sense this was Hitler’s basic idea for the entire conflict—which once again revealed his gambler’s temperament. In a speech delivered at the beginning of July, 1944, he publicly admitted this principle when he conceded that the war was “a prefinancing of the future achievements, the future work, the future raw materials, the future nutritional base; but it is also tremendous training for mastering the tasks which will face us in the future.”

  Preparations in the fields of economics and armaments were actually far sketchier than the psychological preparations. To be sure, official propaganda repeatedly referred to enormous defensive efforts; and the whole world believed this, as it believed the speeches of leading members of the regime who boasted that the German economy had been geared for war for years. Thus Göring, when appointed commissioner of the Four-Year Plan, averred that Germany was already at war, though not yet a shooting war. The reality, however, was quite different. The country was, it is true, ahead of its enemies in steel production. Its coal supplies were also larger and its industries in many cases capable of greater production than those of the Allies. But in spite of all the efforts at autarchy Germany was still heavily dependent on foreign sources for crucial war materials. For example, she imported 90 per cent of her tin, 70 per cent of her copper, 80 per cent of her rubber, 75 per cent of her oil, and 99 per cent of her bauxite. She had stockpiled sufficient raw materials for approximately a year; but supplies of copper, rubber, and tin had been almost consumed by the spring of 1939. Without the vigorous economic support of the Soviet Union Germany would probably have succumbed to a British economic blockade within a short time. Molotov himself pointed this out in a conversation with Hitler.