Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Among those symptoms of decline must be included the intellectual narrowing that threw him back to the viewpoint of a local party leader. From the third winter on, he could see the war in no other light than that of a “seizure of power” expanded to global dimensions. In the “period of struggle,” too, he comforted himself, he had faced overwhelmingly superior forces—“a single man with a small band of followers.” The war was nothing but a “gigantic repetition” of earlier experiences. The record of one of the table talks reads: “At lunch… the chief pointed out that this war was a faithful copy of the conditions of the period of struggle. What took place among us then as a struggle of parties in the domestic realm is taking place today as the struggle of nations in the foreign realm.”57

  In keeping with the precipitate aging of his appearance, he occasionally complained that the years were robbing him of all his gambler’s pleasure in taking risks. Intellectually, too, he more and more lived in the past. The garrulous reviews of matters long past, with which he filled his nocturnal monologues, had the sound of an old man’s nostalgias. In his military decisions he frequently referred to the experiences of the First World War, while his interest in armaments became more and more restricted to the traditional weapons systems. He neither grasped the crucial importance of radar and the splitting of the atom nor the value of a heat-seeking ground-to-air rocket or a sound-guided torpedo. He also blocked the large-scale production of the first jet plane, the Messerschmitt 262. With senile obstinacy he insisted on far-fetched objections, reversed or changed decisions, confounded his entourage with hastily reeled-off statistics, or took refuge in broad psychological generalizations. When on the basis of a newspaper report of British experiments with jet planes he was at last persuaded early in 1944 to permit the manufacture of the Me 262, he tried to hedge by ordering that the plane not be built as a fighter against the Allied air raiders. Instead, contrary to the advice of the experts, it was to be employed as a fast bomber. The physical strain on the pilots would be intolerable, he decided, and also argued that the faster planes were really slower in air combat. In fact, he snatched at anything for an argument; and while Germany’s cities were reduced to rubble, he refused even to permit a few experimental uses of the plane as a fighter. Finally he banned any further discussion of the subject.

  Naturally these struggles with his own people increased his usual abnormal suspiciousness. Often he obtained information from staff headquarters over the heads of his closest military advisers, and occasionally he sent his army adjutant, Major Engel, to the front by plane to check the actual situation. Officers who came from the battle areas were not allowed to speak on military matters with anyone, especially not with the chief of staff, before they had been received in the Führer’s bunker. With his obsession for checking up, Hitler praised his organization for one of its crucial defects. On the whole vast Eastern front, he declared, there was “not a regiment and not a battalion whose position was not followed up three times a day in the Führer’s headquarters here.” One major reason so many officers came to grief was this paralyzing paranoia, which undermined every relationship. Eventually he quarreled with all the commanders in chief of the army, all the chiefs of staff, eleven of the eighteen field marshals, twenty-one of nearly forty full generals, and nearly all the commanders of the three sectors of the Eastern front. The space around him grew increasingly emptier. As long as Hitler remained in headquarters, Goebbels declared, his dog Blondi was closer to him than any human being.

  After Stalingrad his nerves were plainly giving out. Up to then Hitler had rarely lost his stoic bearing which, he believed, was among the attributes of great commanders. Even in critical situations he had maintained an ostentatious calm. But now that pose was accompanied by signs of fatigue, and his violent fits of rage revealed the price that years of overtaxing his strength had cost. When General Staff officers delivered their situation reports, he railed at them as “idiots,” “cowards,” and “liars.” Guderian, who at this time saw him again after a long interval, noted in astonishment Hitler’s “irascibility, and the unpredictability of his words and decisions.” He was also subject to unwonted sentimental lapses. When Bormann told him of his wife’s confinement, Hitler reacted with tears in his eyes. More often than ever, he spoke of his retirement and how he would give himself up to meditating, reading, and running a museum.

  There is some evidence that from the end of 1942 on, the entire stabilization system of his nerves gave way. He concealed this only by a tremendous act of desperate self-discipline. The generals attached to the Führer’s headquarters felt the symptoms of the crisis, although the later descriptions of a Hitler continually raging, totally subject to the explosions of an unrestrained temperament, belong in the category of apologetic exaggeration. The minutes of the military conferences, some of which have been preserved, indicate instead that he made strong efforts to fit the image he had chosen for himself. On the whole, he succeeded.

  The very stringency of the daily schedule at headquarters helped. Immediately after awakening, Hitler studied the news. Toward noon the grand conference was held. Then followed more conferences, dictation, reception of guests, and discussions until the evening conference, which usually took place during the night. All this regular attention to duties did violence to his nature and was in deliberate opposition to his inveterate yearning for passivity and indolence. As late as December, 1944, he sketched, in a casual remark, the image of a genius saved by steady purpose; with difficulty and occasional deviations he was trying to conform to that image:

  Genius is something will-o-the-wispy if it is not sustained by perseverance and fanatical tenacity. That is the most important thing there is in human life. People who have only inspirations, ideas, and so on, but who do not have firmness of character, who lack tenacity and perseverance, will amount to nothing in spite of all. They are adventurers. If things go well, they climb; when things go badly, they immediately slump down and give up everything. But you can’t make world history with that kind of attitude.58

  In its functionalism and gloom the Führer’s headquarters was not unlike that “state cage” into which his father had once led him and where the people, according to young Hitler, had “sat crouching on one another close as monkeys.” The mechanism into which he forced his life was so antipathetic to his nature that it could only be maintained artificially. Medication and druglike preparations enabled him to meet the unaccustomed demands upon his nature. Until the end of 1940 the drugs do not seem to have influenced his health significantly. Ribbentrop, it is true, reported a heated dispute in the summer of 1940, in the course of which Hitler dropped into a chair and began groaning that he had a feeling of dissolution and sensed he was on the verge of a stroke.59 But the description suggests that this scene should be reckoned among those half-hysterical, half-histrionic displays that Hitler used as a method of coercive argumentation. His medical checkups at the beginning and the end of the year merely showed slightly increased blood pressure and those gastric and intestinal disturbances from which he had always suffered.60

  With hypochondriacal pedantry Hitler noted every deviation in the findings of his checkups. He was constantly observing himself, taking his pulse, reading medical books, and taking medicines “literally in quantity”: sleeping and kola pills, digestives, cold pills, vitamins. Even the eucalyptus candies that were always on hand gave him the sense of looking after his health. If a medicine were prescribed for him without an exact dosage, he took it from morning to night almost incessantly. Professor Morell, the onetime fashionable Berlin doctor for skin and venereal diseases, had advanced through the good offices of Heinrich Hoffmann to the rank of one of Hitler’s personal physicians. For all his devotion to medicine, Professor Morell was not without traces of quackery. He gave Hitler injections almost daily: sulfanilamide, glandular preparations, glucose, or hormones that were supposed to improve or regenerate his circulation, his intestinal flora, or the state of his nerves. Göring sarcastically called hi
m “Reich Injection Master.”

  As time went on, Morell naturally had to resort to stronger drugs and shorter intervals in order to maintain Hitler’s performance. On top of this, he had to prescribe sedatives to calm the jangled nerves, so that Hitler was exposed to a permanent process of physiological stress. The consequences of this constant interference with his body processes by at times as many as twenty-eight different drugs became evident during the war, when the strain of events, the loss of sleep, the monotony of the vegetarian diet, and his troglodyte’s existence in the bunker world of headquarters, intensified the effects of the medicines. In August, 1941, Hitler complained of bouts of weakness, nausea and chills and fever. Swellings formed on his leg, quite possibly a reaction against the years of artificial regulation of his body. From this time on, at any rate, spells of exhaustion appeared with greater frequency. After Stalingrad he took a drug against depressive moods every other day.61 Thereafter, he could no longer endure bright light, and for this reason had a cap with a greatly enlarged vizor made for his walks outdoors. Sometimes he complained about disturbed balance: “I always have the feeling of tipping to the right.”62

  In spite of the visible changes in his exterior, his bowed back, his rapidly graying hair, he retained to the end an unusual capacity for work. Quite rightly, he himself attributed his remarkable energy to Morell’s efforts, overlooking the extent to which he was consuming his physical reserves. After the war, Professor Karl Brandt, who was a member of Hitler’s medical staff, said that the effect of Morell’s treatment was to “draw on what one might call life for years in advance” and that it had seemed as if Hitler “every year aged not a year but four or five years.” Hence the sudden and premature graying and his shattered appearance. In the euphorias produced by his drugs he seemed to glow like a wraith.

  It would therefore be a mistake to attribute the symptoms of degeneration, the crises and fitful outbursts on Hitler’s part, to structural changes in his personality. The abuse of his physical potential and the consumption of his reserves partly covered over and partly intensified the existing elements, but did not cause—as has sometimes been asserted—the destruction of a hitherto intact personality.63 This is the qualification that must be placed on all the disputes over the effects of the strychnine contained in some of Morell’s drugs, or whether Hitler suffered from Parkinson’s disease (paralysis agitans), or whether the trembling of his left arm, the stooped posture, and his locomotive difficulties were of psychosomatic origin. However shadowy he looked outwardly, masklike in his rigidity, leaning on a cane as he moved about headquarters, he was still the man he had once been. What is so staggering in his appearance during those last years is not so much his rapid aging as the consistency—bordering on paralysis—with which he took up and carried out his early obsessions.

  He was a person who continually needed artificial charging. In a sense Morell’s drugs and medicines replaced the old stimulus of mass ovations. As noted above, Hitler shrank from the public after Stalingrad and in fact delivered only two more major speeches. Soon after the beginning of the war, he had begun this withdrawal, and all the propaganda efforts to create a mythology out of his remoteness was a poor substitute for the former sense cf his omnipresence, by which the regime had been able to tap a vein of energy, spontaneity, and spirit of sacrifice in the German people. Now this potential for affecting the masses was gone. For fear of losing his aura of invincibility, Hitler would not set foot in the shattered cities; for the same reason he would not face the masses after the defeats, although he presumably sensed that this shrinking could lose him not only power over men’s minds but also the source of his own energies. “Everything I am, I am through you alone,” he occasionally had cried to the masses. Beyond all the aspects of techniques of power, he had thereby been affirming a constitutional, almost a physiological dependency. For the rhetorical excesses in which he had indulged from the first, uncertain appearances in Munich beer halls all the way to the painful, determined efforts of the last two years, never had as their sole purpose the rousing of the energies of others. They served also to rally his own forces and were, beyond all political occasions and ends, a means of self-preservation. In one of his last great speeches he prepared the country for his coming silence by pointing to the momentousness of the events at the front: “What need is there for me to do much talking now?” But among his intimates he later complained that he no longer trusted himself to speak before 10,000 persons and declared that he probably would never again be able to deliver a major speech. The conception of the end of his career as an orator was associated with the idea of the end in general, of death.64

  Along with this retreat from the public, Hitler’s peculiar weakness as a leader became apparent for the first time. Ever since the days of his rise he had always maintained his superiority by the charisma of the demagogue and by tactical ingenuity. But in this stage of the war he had to meet other demands on leadership. The principle of rival authorities—the domestic intrigues and struggles, this whole chaos of powers that he had constructed around him in preceding years and manipulated with Machiavellian skill—was scarcely appropriate for the struggle against a resolute enemy. It turned out to be one of the fateful weaknesses of the regime. For it consumed the energies that the fight against the outside antagonist required and finally led to a condition approaching total anarchy. In the military field alone there were the theaters of war under the parallel authority of the High Command of the armed forces (OKW) and High Command of the army (OKH), the undefined special position of Göring, the authority of Hitler and the SS, which cut across all other channels of command, the confusion of all kinds of army divisions, grenadier units, air force infantry formations, the SS-in-arms, and the militia, each accessible to various official channels. On top of all this, finally, there was the relationship to the troops of allied countries, a relationship undermined by mutual distrust. The administrative structure in occupied Europe was similarly confused; new forms of domination were constantly being developed, from outright annexation through protectorate, government general, and civil administration. Hardly ever has a centering of all power in a single person ended in such total and blatant disorganization.

  It is by no means clear, however, whether Hitler ever really recognized the ruinous effects of his style of leadership. Rational classifications, structural arrangements, any kind of quiet authority, were fundamentally so alien to him that until literally the last days of the war he repeatedly encouraged his entourage to feud over positions, competences, and ridiculous questions of rank. There are indications that he had more confidence in the hunger for power and the egotism manifested in such quarrels than in all possible unselfish attitudes, because they comported with his view of the world. The very objectivity of specialists made him suspicious of them. And so he tried to wage the war as far as possible without their help, without consultation, without the relevant documentation, without logistical calculations; he tried to wage the war in the anachronistic style of the solitary commanders of antiquity—and lost it.

  Hitler’s weakness in leadership emerged most sharply in the course of 1943, when he had as yet developed no strategic conception of the further course of the war. He was uncertain, reluctant to make decisions, vacillating; and Goebbels spoke unequivocally of a “Leader crisis.” The propaganda chief repeatedly urged the hesitant Hitler to regain the initiative in the war by rigorously mobilizing all reserves. In conjunction with Albert Speer, who had been appointed Armaments Minister the previous year, and with Robert Ley and Walther Funk, Goebbels elaborated plans for an overall simplification of the administration, a drastic cutback in consumption for the privileged classes, an increase in armament production, and other similar measures. He was to notice, however, that the gauleiters and the top SA and party officials had long since lost their sacrificial devotion and veered toward becoming a parasitical ruling class. On February 18, 1943, Goebbels addressed a band of invited followers in the Sportpalast and posed his famous
ten rhetorical questions. “In an uproar of wild enthusiasm,” as he put it, he obtained their consent to “total war.” This speech was aimed chiefly at breaking resistance among the higher functionaries, whose luxurious living would be affected. But it was intended also to overcome Hitler’s indecisiveness by a radicalizing appeal to the masses.65

  Hitler’s reluctance to impose the austerities of total war on the nation was partly the result of another memory, the shock of the November revolution of 1918. But it was also colored by his deep distrust of the inert and fickle masses. It is almost as if he realized how brittle and temporary his rule was and knew how much stood in the way of his intention of “compelling to greatness,” as he once put it, a shrinking and unwilling German people. England, in its war effort, was able to lower the level of private comfort far more drastically than the Reich, and England also employed far more women in the armaments industries than did Germany.66

  But there was still another factor in Hitler’s holding back from total war: the intrigues of Martin Bormann, who scented in the effort by Goebbels and Speer all sorts of dangers to his own position. By adaptability, diligence, and craftiness Bormann had worked his way upward in the preceding years to the post of “Führer’s secretary.” And behind that unassuming title he had established one of the strongest power bases within the regime. His short, stocky figure in the ill-fitting party functionary’s uniform was a fixed feature in all pictures of the Führer’s headquarters. He was always there, keeping watch, pondering, a cunning expression on his peasant face. The undetermined sphere of his authority, which he steadily enlarged by referring to the Führer’s alleged desires, assured him powers that in fact raised him to the status of the man who “secretly ran Germany.” Hitler, for his part, seemed happy to be freed of the burden of routine administrative work by this seemingly unassertive secretary. It was soon Bormann who granted or withdrew both authority and the Führer’s favor, who pushed through appointments and promotions, who praised, pestered, or eliminated people in government, but who all the while kept well in the background and could always come up with one slander or one flattery more than even his most powerful adversaries. By means of the visitor lists he controlled Hitler’s contacts with the outside world, and according to the testimony of one observer erected “a veritable Chinese wall” around Hitler.