Yet even in late January 1933, Hitler would have been denied power if Hindenburg had granted Schleicher’s request for an order to dissolve parliament and given him what he had once agreed to for Papen: permission to postpone new Reichstag elections for more than sixty days. Hindenburg could have also ignored the parliamentary vote of no confidence and retained Schleicher in office. That option would have been akin to tacitly imposing a military dictatorship, but it would have been an opportunity to play for time, until the economic situation had likely improved.142 It is very doubtful whether Hitler would have dared to mobilise the SA for an armed battle against the Reichswehr under such circumstances. Crucially, Hindenburg allowed himself to be persuaded by Papen and his advisers that a cabinet of “national concentration,” in which Hitler would supposedly be contained and tamed by a majority of traditional conservative ministers, was the least risky way out of the crisis. A significant role in the final act of this drama was played by East Elbian aristocratic landowners, who used their access to Hindenburg to urge him to appoint Hitler chancellor. Like the traditional conservative majority in the cabinet and the clique surrounding Hindenburg, they underestimated Hitler’s determination and ability to free himself from all attempts at political control and realise his dreams of total power. All of these groups operated under the illusion that they had “engaged” or co-opted Hitler to give them the mass backing they desired for their authoritarian policies. “The history of Hitler is the history of people underestimating him,” wrote the historian Veit Valentin shortly after the end of the Second World War.143
Nonetheless, if Hitler’s rise to chancellor was by no means the inevitable result of the Weimar Republic’s crisis of state, it was also more than just a historical mishap, as some observers, most recently the historian Eberhard Jäckel, have claimed down the years.144 Without the specific social and political conditions of the post-war and hyperinflationary period, the decommissioned private would have remained an antisocial outsider. The situation in the Bavarian capital proved perfect soil for Hitler’s hateful, anti-Semitic tirades and his diatribes against the “November criminals” and the “dictates” of the Treaty of Versailles. Without the consequences of the Great Depression, which hit Germany particularly hard, the NSDAP would never have become a mass movement. And it was the chairman of the NSDAP who best understood how to articulate and exploit people’s desires for a saviour who would inject order into chaos, create an ethnic-popular community in place of party squabbling and class warfare, and lead the Reich to new greatness.
Hitler can be accused of a lot of things, but one cannot say that he was not frank about his intentions. With astonishing openness in both Mein Kampf and countless speeches, he announced exactly what he would do if he came to power. Hitler’s main domestic aims were to destroy the Weimar system, which he had ruthlessly exploited from within, to completely “root out” Marxism, by which he meant both the SPD and KPD, and to remove Jews from Germany by whatever means necessary. In terms of foreign policy, Hitler never left any doubt that he wanted to revise the Treaty of Versailles and, in the longer term, conquer “living space” in eastern Europe, which inevitably entailed war with Poland and the Soviet Union. Those who brought him to power agreed with his aims of preventing a return to parliamentary democracy, getting rid of the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles as quickly as possible, rearming Germany’s military and restoring Germany’s status as a major world power. As far as Hitler’s long-term wishes were concerned, his conservative coalition partners believed either that he was not serious or that they could exert a moderating influence on him. In any case, they were severely mistaken. Right from the beginning, Hitler thought in completely different dimensions. In December 1941, as the planned Blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union stalled before Moscow, Hitler looked back on 1933 and remarked: “When I took power it was a decisive moment for me. Should we keep the old calendar? Or should we take the new world order to be a sign for a new beginning in time? I told myself: the year 1933 is nothing less than the renewal of a millennial condition.”145
13
Hitler as Human Being
Who was the man who on 30 January 1933, at the relatively young age of 43, moved into the Chancellery, the building where his idol and founder of the German Reich, Otto von Bismarck, had once resided? This is not an easy question to answer: it is hard to penetrate behind Hitler’s public persona and get at the private person. Hitler remained a mystery even to some of his closest associates. In his memoirs, Hitler’s press spokesman, Otto Dietrich, wrote of his “non-transparent, Sphinx-like personality.”1 Likewise Hitler’s early friend Ernst Hanfstaengl, who observed the Nazi leader from close proximity for many years, admitted that he was never able to find the key to unlock the depths of Hitler’s being. “What he really thought or felt,” Hanfstaengl confessed, “remained a book with seven seals.”2 During his first interrogation at Kransberg Castle in June and July 1945, Albert Speer told his captors that for him Hitler remained “a riddle, full of contrasts and outright contradictions.”3 In 1947, the former French ambassador André François-Poncet concluded: “It seems as though there was something to him that we’ll never grasp.”4 And the head of the office of the German president, Otto Meissner, who served Hitler as loyally as he had the Führer’s predecessors, wrote in his memoirs: “Judging the essence of this strange person…will remain forever controversial…Even those who knew him for years and followed his development have difficulty drawing reliable conclusions. He was a loner, full of mistrust, who closed himself off and only occasionally permitted a glance at his inner life.”5
Previous biographers have tried to make a virtue of necessity by attributing Hitler’s seeming opacity to the “emptiness of what was left of an existence outside politics,” as Ian Kershaw put it.6 But these are hasty conclusions. As we saw with regard to Hitler’s relationships with women, we cannot strictly distinguish between the private and political spheres. Upon closer examination, we can see that the putative void was part of Hitler’s persona, a means of concealing his personal life and presenting himself as a politician who completely identified with his role as leader and who had renounced all private relationships for the sake of his historic mission. Thus, as German chancellor, Hitler repeatedly claimed that he no longer had a private life.7 If we refuse to accept this self-styled image, we need to look behind the curtain that separated Hitler’s public persona and role from the human being with his characteristic habits and behaviour.
The main reason it is so difficult to decipher “the riddle of Hitler” is the fact that his personality contained so many astonishing contrasts and contradictions. As early as 1936, Konrad Heiden described Hitler’s “dual nature.” Like a medium, Heiden argued, the human being Adolf Hitler channelled and created, through a monstrous act of will, the phenomenon Adolf Hitler: “In moments of repose, the latter lies curled up and hidden within the former, only to emerge in moments of intensity to conceal the former behind its larger-than-life puppet’s mask.” For Heiden, this split personality is what made it so difficult to reach reliable conclusions about Hitler.8
More than one of Hitler’s acquaintances confirmed this impression. Otto Dietrich pointed to Hitler’s “uncanny dual nature,” arguing that the Führer’s internal contradictions were so intense that they became “the dominant characteristic of his entire being.” On the one hand, Dietrich asserted, Hitler possessed extraordinary capabilities and gifts. On the other, and particularly in conjunction with his fanatical anti-Semitism, he could be intellectually primitive and boorish. In Hitler’s breast, Dietrich wrote, “respectable sensibilities and ice-cold heartlessness, love and horrific cruelty lived side by side.”9 Looking back, Albert Speer was also struck by the many faces Hitler had displayed. In 1965, twenty years after the end of the Third Reich, Speer noted in his Spandau cell:
I could easily say that he was cruel, unjust, unapproachable, cold, lacking restraint, self-pitying and crude, for he was indeed all those things. But he was also
the precise opposite. He could be a caring patriarch, an understanding superior, a likeable, measured, proud man who was enthusiastic about everything great and beautiful.10
Hanfstaengl painted a similar picture when he recalled Hitler. “He could be charming and then, a short time later, utter views that intimated terrible abysses,” Hanfstaengl wrote.
He could develop grandiose ideas and be primitive to the point of banality. He was able to convince millions that his iron will and strength of character alone would guarantee victory, and yet even as German chancellor he remained a bohemian whose unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair.11
There are countless statements of this kind, and they are more than just belated attempts to justify fascination with the figure of Hitler.
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As a rule, people who got a close look at the Führer for the first time were rarely impressed. After a meeting with Hitler in December 1931, the industrialist Günther Quandt deemed him the very definition of average.12 Sefton Delmer described him as an everyday person reminiscent of a travelling salesman or a junior officer.13 As we saw, the American reporter Dorothy Thompson called Hitler the exact prototype of the little man on the street.14 William Shirer, the correspondent for America’s Universal News Service, also came away disappointed after seeing Hitler in September 1934 at the Nuremberg rally. “His face,” Shirer wrote in his diary, “had no particular expression at all—I expected it to be stronger—and for the life of me I could not quite comprehend what hidden springs he undoubtedly unloosened in the hysterical mob which was greeting him so wildly.”15
Hitler’s appearance was hardly winning. Finance Minister von Krosigk, who met Hitler for the first time when the new chancellor was sworn in on 30 January 1933, recalled the Führer’s face as being unremarkable. “There was nothing harmonious about his features, nor did they have the irregularity that expresses individual human spirit,” Krosigk wrote. “A lock of hair that flopped down over his forehead and the rudiments of a moustache only two fingers wide gave his appearance something comic.”16 Hitler’s moustache was the feature that everyone noticed. Early on, Hanfstaengl had urged him to shave it off, arguing that it was fodder for caricaturists. “My moustache will be all the rage one day—you can bet on that,” Hitler replied.17 Around 1925 or 1926 he told Adelheid Klein, a friend in Munich: “Imagine my face without the moustache!…My nose is much too big. I have to soften it with the moustache!”18 Indeed, Hitler’s large, fleshy nose was rather disproportionate to the rest of his face. Klaus Mann called it the “most foul and most characteristic” aspect of Hitler’s physiognomy.19 For his part Albert Speer claimed that he only noticed how ugly and disproportionate Hitler’s face was in the final months of the Third Reich, when the Führer’s appeal was declining. “How did I not notice that in all the years?” he wondered in his Spandau prison cell in late November 1946. “Curious!”20
Almost everyone who came into contact with Hitler was struck by another feature. Upon seeing the young Hitler for the first time in 1919, Karl Alexander von Müller immediately noted his “large, light-blue, fanatically and coldly gleaming eyes.”21 Lieselotte Schmidt, an assistant and nanny to Winifred Wagner, had a different impression. Like her mistress, she admired Hitler and found that his eyes shone with goodness and warmth. “One glance from his lovely violet-blue eyes was enough to sense his gentle temperament and good heart,” Schmidt said in 1929.22 Otto Wagener, the economic adviser who entered Hitler’s service that same year and still professed his admiration of the Führer in a British POW camp in 1946, recalled:
From the first moment, his eyes captivated me. They were clear and large and calm. He stared at me full of self-confidence. But his gaze did not come from his eyeballs. On the contrary, I felt it came from somewhere far deeper, from infinity. You could read nothing in his eyes. But they spoke and wanted to say something.23
Christa Schroeder, one of Hitler’s secretaries from 1933 onwards, was somewhat more sober: “I found Hitler’s eyes very expressive. They looked interested and probing and always became more animated whenever he spoke.”24 The playwright Gerhart Hauptmann also noted Hitler’s “strange and lovely eyes” after meeting the Führer at the inauguration of the Reich Culture Chamber in November 1933.25
Whether people perceived Hitler’s gaze as cold or benevolent, impenetrable or friendly and inquisitive depended both on the given situation and their political views. “What admirers praise as the power of his eyes strikes neutral observers as a greedy stare without that hint of decency that makes a gaze truly compelling,” wrote the Hitler detractor Konrad Heiden. “His gaze repels more than it captivates.”26 But even critical observers sometimes praised his eyes. “Hitler’s eyes were startling and unforgettable,” wrote Martha Dodd, the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William Edward Dodd, after being introduced to Hitler by Hanfstaengl in 1933. “They seemed pale blue in colour, were intense, unwavering, hypnotic.”27
Alongside his eyes, Hitler’s hands attracted the most attention. “So expressive in their movements as to compete with the eyes” was how Houston Stewart Chamberlain put it in a fawning letter to Hitler in 1923.28 For Krosigk, Hitler’s hands were nervous, delicate and “almost feminine.”29 In 1933, when the philosopher Karl Jaspers voiced doubts as to whether someone as uneducated as Hitler could lead Germany, his colleague Martin Heidegger replied: “Education is irrelevant…just look at those lovely hands.”30 Many of Heidegger’s contemporaries shared his admiration for the Führer’s hands. In an article for the December 1936 edition of New Literature, the head of German radio characterised Hitler’s delicate hands as being the tools of an “artist and great creator.”31 And in October 1942, while imprisoned in a British POW camp, General Ludwig Crüwell opined: “His hands are truly striking—lovely hands…He’s got the hands of an artist. My eyes were always drawn to his hands.”32
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But more impressive than his eyes and hands was Hitler’s talent for speaking. His appearance may have made him seem average and everyday, but as soon as he took to the stage, he was transformed into a demagogue the likes of which Germany had never known. Admirers and detractors were in absolute agreement on this point. In his essay “Brother Hitler,” Thomas Mann attributed Hitler’s rise to his “eloquence, which although unspeakably base, has huge sway over the masses.”33 Heiden wrote of “an incomparable barometer of mass moods,”34 while Otto Strasser spoke of an “unusually sensitive seismograph of the soul.” Strasser also compared Hitler to a “membrane” broadcasting the most secret longings and emotions of the masses.35 Krosigk concurred. “He sensed what the masses were longing for and translated it into firebrand slogans,” the Reich finance minister wrote. “He appealed to the instincts slumbering in people’s unconsciousness and offered something to everyone.”36 The American journalist Hubert R. Knickerbocker, who had encountered Hitler as a seemingly polite, small-time politician in the NSDAP’s Munich headquarters in 1931, was astonished by a public appearance that same evening. “He was an evangelist speaking at a tent meeting, the Billy Sunday of German politics,” the Pulitzer Prize winner wrote. “Those he had converted followed him, laughed with him, felt with him. Together they mocked the French. Together they hissed off the Republic. Eight thousand people became one instrument on which Hitler played his symphony of national passion.”37 As Knickerbocker realised, the secret to Hitler’s success lay in the mutual identification between speaker and audience—in the exchange of individual and collective sensitivities and neuroses.
It was not only the faithful whom Hitler managed to put under his spell. “There won’t be anyone like him for quite some time,” Rudolf Hess wrote in 1924 while imprisoned in Landsberg, “a man who can sweep away both the most left-wing lathe operator and the right-wing government official in a single mass event.”38 Hess’s view was no exaggeration. Numerous contemporaries who rejected Hitler and his party struggled to resist the lure of Hitler’s overwhelming rhetoric—indeed, some succumbed to i
t. In his memoirs, the historian Golo Mann described the impression a Hitler speech made on him as a 19-year-old student in the autumn of 1928. “I had to steel myself against the energy and persuasive force of the speaker,” Mann wrote. “A Jewish friend of mine, whom I had brought along, was unable to resist. ‘He’s right,’ he whispered in my ear. How many times had I heard this phrase ‘He’s right’ uttered by listeners from whom I would have least expected it?”39
Hitler’s talent for persuasive oration gave him a hypnotic sway over crowds. Part of his secret was his unusually powerful and variable voice. “Those who only know Hitler from the events of later years, after he had mutated into an immoderately thundering dictator and demagogue at the microphone, have no idea what a flexible and mellifluous instrument his natural, non-amplified voice was in the early years of his political career,” noted Hanfstaengl.40 It was Hitler’s voice, at a speech in Weimar in March 1925, that won over Baldur von Schirach, later the Nazis’ Reich youth leader, at the age of 18. “It was a voice unlike any other I had heard from a public speaker,” Schirach recalled. “It was deep and rough, resonant as a cello. His accent, which we thought was Austrian but was actually Lower Bavarian, was alien to central Germany and compelled you to listen.”41
But Hitler was not only a gifted orator. He was also an extraordinarily talented actor. “Once, in a moment when he let his guard down, he called himself the greatest actor in Europe,” Krosigk recalled.42 That statement was one of the excessive flights of fancy to which the dictator became increasingly prone in his later years. Nonetheless, Hitler had an undeniable ability to don different masks to suit various occasions and to inhabit changing roles. “He could be a charming conversation partner who kissed women’s hands, a friendly uncle who gave children chocolate, or a man of the people who could shake the callused hands of farmers and artisans,” remarked Albert Krebs, the Gauleiter of Hamburg.43 When invited to the Bechstein and Bruckmann salons or to afternoon tea at the Schirachs’ in Weimar, he would play the upstanding, suit-and-tie-wearing bourgeois to fit in with such social settings. At NSDAP party conferences, he dressed in a brown shirt and cast himself as a prototypical street fighter who made no secret of his contempt for polite society.
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