Hitler
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Hitler’s need to maintain distance from others was probably less the product of inferior social skills than of his conviction that he was a messiah who should be surrounded by an aura of unapproachability. Familiarity and intimacy were anathema to him. Even in his closest circles very few people were allowed to address him informally,105 and he seems to have never had anything approaching a best friend. Hitler was afraid of “moments of uncontrolled affection and spontaneous intimacy,” claimed Otto Strasser. “For him the idea of letting himself go was a sheer horror.”106 Perhaps that helps explain Hitler’s difficult relationships with women. The Führer particularly hated the thought that people knew him before 1914 or were aware that he had been a lowly private in the First World War. Typically, when he attended a reunion of his regiment during the 1920s, he was unable to connect with his former comrades and quickly left.107
Hitler felt most comfortable with the street thugs from the Nazi Party’s “early years of struggle,” whom he regularly met up with in Munich’s Café Heck. Among them, he could let out his vulgar, petit-bourgeois side without fear of being greeted with wrinkled noses. “It’s awful to see him talking nonsense with those philistines,” Goebbels complained in March 1931.108 Yet after coming to power, Hitler largely divorced himself from such circles. The comradely tone his old acquaintances would habitually strike up did not suit his new role as Reich chancellor, so Hitler kept them at a distance, insisting that they too address him as “my Führer.”109 The only exception was the evening of 8 November, when the tradition of beer-cellar meetings was revived for a night. Then and only then did Hitler allow himself to sit down with his oldest party comrades in Café Heck.110
Beginning in 1933, the Führer also distanced himself from his earlier social patrons. On 21 April of that year, Helene Bechstein complained that the previous day she wanted to congratulate Hitler personally on his birthday but had been prevented from seeing him by his assistant Wilhelm Brückner, who told her that the Reich chancellor did not have a minute to spare.111 Hitler did repay his former patron with the occasional acknowledgement, such as having her awarded the Golden Party Emblem in December 1933, but their relationship was never again what it had been—particularly as Bechstein repeatedly criticised aspects of the Nazi regime.112 Hitler kept in somewhat closer contact with the Bruckmanns in Munich, giving them not just the Golden Party Emblem but presenting them with a car.113 Still, Elsa Bruckmann could not help but notice that her former protégé visited her much less frequently than before. In a letter written in March 1934, she griped that the Führer was “now quite hard to get hold of.”114
So did Hitler truly exist “without any inner connection to other people,” as Gregor Strasser claimed and as every one of his biographers from Heiden to Kershaw have suggested? 115 Put in such black-and-white terms, that was certainly not the case. Hitler enjoyed something like substitute families in several private circles, including the Hoffmanns. Even after becoming chancellor, he paid regular visits to his court photographer in the latter’s villa in the Bogenhausen district of Munich. “When the weather was nice, the chancellor and Führer often took off his jacket and lay down on the lawn in his shirtsleeves,” noted one eyewitness. “He felt at home with the Hoffmanns. Once he had them bring him a volume of [Bavarian satirist] Ludwig Thoma, from which he read aloud.”116
Hitler also enjoyed the status of unofficial family member with the Wagner clan in Bayreuth. Speer noticed that the Führer appeared more relaxed than usual in their company: “With the Wagner family he felt comfortable and freed from the need to represent political power.”117 He had been on informal terms with the matron of the house, Winifred Wagner, since 1926, and he was also quite relaxed with the four Wagner children, letting them photograph him, taking them for rides in his big Mercedes and telling them bedtime stories. “He was very touching with the children,” Winifred Wagner later recalled. Her assistant Lieselotte Schmidt described a private visit by Hitler to Bayreuth in early May 1936 in bathetic terms: “He looks with increasingly misty eyes from the children to their mother and back again and knows that if there is such a thing as home for him on this earth, there is none better than in the Villa Wahnfried among these people.”118
In Berlin, Hitler’s social contacts were by and large restricted to the Goebbels family. He was the best man at Magda and Joseph Goebbels’s wedding in December 1931, and before 1933 he often spent his evenings at their Berlin apartment. After taking power, he also paid frequent visits to their summer houses in Kladow and on Schwanenwerder Island in Lake Wannsee. They would go boating together, and often Hitler’s visits would stretch well into the night.119 The dictator took an intense interest in the Goebbelses’ family life. He visited Magda in hospital when she gave birth to her children, and the family and Hitler jointly celebrated their birthdays. Hitler enjoyed playing with the Goebbelses’ daughters, especially the eldest one, Helga, once even declaring that if Helga were twenty years older, and he twenty years younger, she would have been the woman of his life.120 On the Goebbelses’ fifth wedding anniversary on 19 December 1936, Hitler personally brought congratulatory flowers late in the evening. “We are very moved and honoured,” noted the propaganda minister in his diary. “He feels very at home with us.”121 In the autumn of 1938, when Goebbels was pondering a divorce to pursue an affair with the Czech actress Lida Baarova, Hitler vetoed the idea. Part of his motivation was no doubt that he did not want to lose his ersatz family.122
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When choosing his subordinates, Hitler was guided not by emotions, but by his estimation of people’s usefulness. The most important criteria were absolute loyalty, discretion and obedience. Hess, who became Hitler’s private secretary in 1925, was an ideal subordinate and enjoyed great favour in the years leading up to 1933. When Hess married his long-time fiancée Ilse Pröhl on 20 December 1927, Hitler as a matter of course assumed his place beside Hess’s old friend Karl Haushofer as a best man.123 “Wolf [Hitler’s nickname] is so attached to Hess—he’s constantly singing his praises,” Winifred Wagner wrote in June 1928.124 It was also a bonus for those who aspired to join the elite ranks of the future leadership if they were good public speakers capable of whipping up a crowd. That was the reason why Hitler stuck by an obviously corrupt functionary like Hermann Esser—and why Goebbels could launch such a meteoric career in the NSDAP and secure a special place in Hitler’s estimation.125 It is striking that Hitler tended to surround himself with men from humble origins who did not have an overabundance of formal education. He was not terribly bothered if a subordinate had a “flaw in the weave,” a dark secret in their past or family history: on the contrary, Hitler knew that such “flaws” made it easier to tie that person to him, or remove him if necessary.126
Hitler did not, however, enjoy parting with people to whom he had become accustomed. He felt a pronounced sense of solidarity with the “old street brawlers,” and it took a lot for the Führer to formally break with any of them.127 Astonishingly, he was quite skittish about reprimanding anyone face to face. Instead he tended to vent his displeasure to others over lunch or dinner. That, recalled Nazi Agriculture Minister Richard Walter Darré, “was enough since through various channels the person concerned would get word and immediately beg for forgiveness.”128
Hitler had a keen eye for others’ weaknesses and deficiencies and knew how to exploit them. He could assess someone’s personality after only a brief acquaintance, leading his first biographer, Konrad Heiden, to dub him “a good judge and captor of people.”129 In response to the question of why he and so many others had succumbed to Hitler’s spell, Speer wrote: “He not only knew how to play the masses like an instrument. He was also a master psychologist vis-à-vis individuals. He could sense the most secret hopes and fears of everyone he met.”130 Hitler instinctively knew who had submitted completely to him and who retained reservations, reacting to the latter with knee-jerk animosity.131 Anyone attempting to penetrate his carefully guarded private life was sure to earn his ever-wa
tchful mistrust, and those who had seen his moments of weakness or unsettled him would inevitably become targets for revenge.132 Hitler’s prodigious memory ensured no insult would ever be forgotten. The deeply insecure arriviste was a man who held a grudge.
Even before 1933, Hitler tended to give the same task to various subordinates, assuming that competition would yield better results. At the same time, he realised that they would neutralise one another and therefore be unable to threaten his own leadership. Divide and conquer was Hitler’s strategy, and he would perfect and personify it during his years as Germany’s dictator.133 Speer characterised Hitler style of leadership as “a carefully balanced system of mutual enmity.” No matter how significant his area of responsibility, none of Hitler’s subordinates could imagine he possessed any stable authority of his own.134
Part and parcel of this style of rule was Hitler’s tendency to inform as few people as possible about his plans—or to keep them secret altogether. Even Goebbels, who believed that he was on an intimate footing with the “boss,” occasionally got upset about Hitler’s secrecy. “We’re all left feeling around in the dark,” the propaganda minister once complained.135 Christa Schroeder bore witness to Hitler’s extraordinary capacity to keep a secret: “He was convinced that people only had to know as much as they needed to fulfil the tasks of their office.”136 Doling out small doses of powerful knowledge was one of Hitler’s preferred means of playing his subordinates against one another and encouraging them to compete for his favour.
For all the self-confidence he projected, Hitler’s shaky sense of self-worth made him overreact whenever anyone dared to contradict him. Before 1933, he may have been willing to listen to alternative views and change his own in one-to-one conversations. But as Wagener made clear, he would not tolerate anyone correcting him in public: “On those occasions, he would rage like a tiger who suddenly found himself in a cage and was now trying to break through the bars.”137 Nearly all of his subordinates had to endure fits of rage similar to the one Franz Pfeffer von Salomon was treated to in 1930. “He just started screaming, yelling at me,” the later head of the Gestapo in Kassel reported. “A thick blue vein swelled on his forehead, and his eyes bugged out. His voice broke. I feared that he was going to hurt himself.”138 The spectacle of an enraged Hitler was neither very pleasant nor all that impressive. “Spittle literally dripped from the corners of his mouth and ran over his chin,” Albert Krebs noted, although he also asked himself whether such fits of rage were genuine or play-acted, since Hitler seldom lost control of himself.139 There was a similar ambiguity to Hitler’s speeches. No matter how ecstatic Hitler seemed to get, he rarely let himself get carried away to the point where he made ill-considered statements. “His temperament appeared to get the better of him, releasing itself in cascades of bellowed sentences,” remarked Baldur von Schirach, “but in reality he had himself totally under control.”140 Schwerin von Krosigk made a similar observation. Hitler may have let himself get carried away by his emotions, but he always knew how to steer them with cold rationalism. “That was perhaps the most extraordinary gift of this born public speaker,” concluded the Reich finance minister, “this mixture of fire and ice.”141
The paradoxical phrase “fire and ice” is an apt description for the most curious aspect of Hitler’s behaviour. The more likeable, warm and considerate he could be in his private life, the colder, more unfeeling and ruthless he behaved when it came to achieving his political goals. Possibly, this was the result of the violence to which Hitler, like many men of his generation, had been exposed in the First World War. Soldiers had been trained to be hard, inured to human suffering, and that had left its mark, particularly as it was reinforced by the violent confrontations, just shy of a civil war, that followed in post-war Germany. The former Private Hitler may not have taken part himself in the street battles fought by paramilitary Freikorps, but he had begun his political career within a Munich milieu of counter-revolutionary militancy in which right-wing brawlers and neighbourhood vigilantes were the norm. From the very beginning, violence had been an acceptable means of combating one’s political adversaries, and during the November putsch, Hitler showed that he was not above risking people’s lives. At the same time, his martial speechifying in the Bürgerbräu beer cellar that day revealed that the role of the firebrand who did not shy away from violence had not come entirely naturally. Before he could act, he had to whip himself into a psychological frenzy. The same pattern would repeat itself when Hitler purged the SA leadership on the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934.
In early 1931, to deal with Stennes’s revolt, Hitler called together Berlin Brownshirts and associated groups to a meeting in the Sportpalast auditorium. There he employed an extraordinary tactic for assuring himself of their loyalty. For Speer, then a member of the Nazi Transport Corps, it was his initial first-hand experience of Hitler. “We stood there in silence for hours,” Speer recalled.
Finally he appeared with a small entourage…But instead of taking the podium as we expected, Hitler waded into the ranks. Everyone was completely still. Then he began to walk past the columns of men, one by one. All you could hear in this huge space were his footsteps. It took hours. Finally, he came to my column. His eyes were locked on the men standing at attention, as though he were trying to bind them with his gaze. When he got to me, I had the feeling that a pair of staring eyes had taken possession of me for the foreseeable future.142
Hitler also used the ritual of fixing people with a stare on lesser occasions when he wanted to test the loyalty of a subordinate. Speer reported him doing this in a tearoom on the Obersalzberg. “I had to summon up almost superhuman energy to combat the growing urge to look down,” Speer recalled. “Then suddenly Hitler closed his eyes and turned to the woman seated beside him.”143
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The suggestive, binding power Hitler exercised over others reflected the self-delusional power he had over himself. Other people found Hitler so convincing, Krosigk remarked in 1945, because he was carried away himself by the momentum of his own words and thought, and completely believed in the truth of what he said. Even intelligent, strong-willed people found it difficult not to be moved and convinced by Hitler. People sometimes approached the Führer with the intention of contradicting him, Krosigk said, only for Hitler to “turn their heads round completely—in no time and with a minimum of effort.”144 The regional Nazi leaders—the Gauleiter—may have acted like dictators in their respective districts, but in Hitler’s presence they became small and obedient. “They couldn’t summon the courage to contradict him,” wrote Speer. “They seemed to have abandoned themselves to him.”145
A portrait of Friedrich the Great hung in Hitler’s office at the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, but the Prussian king’s sense of duty and work ethic were in many respects foreign to his Austrian admirer. Hitler did not keep regular office hours, and he placed no value on punctuality. For a brief period after he assumed power, that seemed to change. “The boss seems unusually solid,” raved Hess in the first weeks of Hitler’s chancellorship. “And the punctuality!!! Always a few minutes early!!!…A new era is dawning!”146 But soon Hitler reverted to his old habits. Before 1933, Hanfstaengl would often have to comb the streets of Munich to find the party leader and drag him to foreign press interviews.147 Hitler’s unpredictability and contempt for rules constantly tried the patience of his subordinates. Schirach would later claim he had never seen Hitler work at a desk, either at his Munich apartment or at the Nazi Party headquarters. “For him, desks were mere pieces of decoration,” the Nazi youth leader wrote.148 Otto Wagener also noted that Hitler’s desk at party headquarters was always empty. Sometimes, when others were talking, Hitler would doodle with a pencil or colouring pens, but Wagener never saw his boss write anything down. “He created by speaking,” Wagener concluded. “He thought things through while he was talking.”149 It was up to his subordinates to identify the core of Hitler’s digressive flights of fancy and translate it into pr
actical instructions. That was not always easy, even for his closest associate Goebbels. In March 1932, the future propaganda minister noted in his diary: “Too erratic. Big plans, but difficult to realise and overcome opposition.”150
Nonetheless, there is little truth to the idea that Hitler’s bohemian pretensions left him incapable of doing concentrated work. When necessary, for instance when he had to prepare major speeches for the Reichstag or the Nuremberg rallies, he could devote himself to his political tasks with great diligence. Sometimes he would disappear for days. “The amount he worked was enormous,” Fritz Wiedemann reported. “He worked through half the night.”151 Even as chancellor, Hitler did not use ghost writers: he dictated his speeches himself to his secretaries. Christa Schroeder remembered how Hitler would begin by writing down some main points while standing at his desk. Then he would start dictation, at first calmly but growing ever faster. “One sentence would follow the next without pause, while he paced up and down the room,” Schroeder recalled. “Sometimes he would stop and stare silently at Lenbach’s portrait of Bismarck, lost in thought and collecting himself before he started to wander around again.” Gradually his voice would rise to maximum volume, and Hitler would gesticulate wildly, his face turning red. “Sometimes during dictation, my heart would start violently pounding—that’s how infectious Hitler’s excitement was,” Schroeder remembered. When he was finished dictating, Hitler would correct the manuscript with a fountain pen. It would then be copied, often multiple times. When he had finished with a speech, Schroeder recalled, Hitler always seemed relieved.152