As a politician, the Führer oscillated between phases of seeming lethargy—in which he actually, away from the public eye, thought intensely about his plans—and periods of feverish, almost frenetic activity.153 Hitler had a lifelong habit of postponing difficult decisions for as long as possible, once leading Goebbels to complain that his boss was a “hesitator” and “procrastinator.”154 Such was the stress Hitler felt when faced with such decisions that he started biting his fingernails.155 But when he had reached a decision, he would erupt with great energy, and no cautionary words or objections from others could deter him from taking enormous risks. Hitler often followed what he called his “intuition.” Frequently, he would greet his underlings out of the blue with the announcement: “I thought things over last night and have come to the following conclusion…”156 In his first interrogation by the Allies in the summer of 1945, Speer told them that Hitler would get “intimations,” displaying a kind of sixth sense for coming events and developments.157 Goebbels, too, credited him with “a fabulous nose, instinctual political genius.”158 What his admirers overlooked was the fact that despite his alleged infallible instincts Hitler made numerous blunders on the road to power and ultimately only achieved his goal because others opened the door to the Chancellery for him.
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Hitler’s idiosyncratic work habits and decision-making reflected his self-image as an artist who had been forced into politics. And his entourage lapped up the idea of the artist-politician. “You know Hitler,” Gregor Strasser once remarked to Otto Wagener. “He’s an artist. His ideas come to him from somewhere in the beyond. They’re intangible even to him. He develops them in front of our very eyes. He murmurs them to himself in our presence.”159 Goebbels concurred. “Hitler is himself an artist,” the future propaganda minister noted in early December 1932 after a party attended by Leni Riefenstahl and the actress Gretl Slezak. “That’s why all artists like him so much.”160 Speer also thought of Hitler as a frustrated artist who would have much rather been an architect than a politician.161
As we know from Hess’s letters during their joint incarceration in Landsberg, Hitler was obsessed with architectural plans. Among other things, he made a sketch for a “great national building” in Berlin with a “100-metre covering dome” that would be larger than St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.162 After his release, Hitler continued to pursue his plans. In December 1928, Hess wrote to his parents: “As an architect he already has plans in his head for expanding Berlin into the metropolis of the new German empire, and he’s put some of them on paper in the form of marvellous sketches…We’ve often laughed, though with a serious undertone, when we’ve walked through Berlin, which he knows like the back of his hand, and he’s swept away ugly, old housing blocks with a wave of his hand so that other existing or coming ones will have more room to shine.”163 From the very beginning, the construction projects Hitler envisioned were monumental: he was enamoured of everything gigantic.164 The autodidact Hitler was keen to keep abreast of the latest publications on architecture, construction and art history. His Munich housekeeper, Anni Winter, said in 1945 that his private library consisted mainly of such works and that he read avidly in them.165 Hitler bought them at the L. Werner bookshop in Munich, which specialised in architecture, and receipts preserved from 1931 to 1933 attest that he was a very good customer.166 As he revealed in a private letter, he did not just get involved in architecture as a way of “resting and recuperating” from being Reich chancellor.167 With the help of his favourite architect Speer, he actually set about making his megalomaniacal ideas reality—something few of his pre-1933 followers would have thought possible.
After architecture, Hitler’s great passion was for the fine arts, in particular painting, although his understanding of and taste in art had hardly developed since his Vienna years. The failed artist and architect who considered himself a neglected genius felt deep-seated antipathy for avant-garde modernism, which he saw as a socially corrosive phenomenon advanced by “world Jewry.” He never tired of railing against the art of the Weimar “system.” “What has been foisted as art on the German people since 1922 is just some deformed spatters,” Hitler raged in one of his table talks. “From the rapid demise of art in the ‘system period,’ you can see how devastating the influence of the Jews has been in this area.”168 By contrast, Hitler regarded the nineteenth century as an artistic heyday in which Germans had brought forth their “greatest artistic achievements.”169 Hitler’s favourite artists—Adolph von Menzel, Anselm Feuerbach and Arnold Böcklin—all worked during that epoch, and the main rooms in a sketch Hitler made in 1925 for a new German national museum were dedicated to those three painters.170 Hitler began collecting paintings in the late 1920s. At first he hung them in his private apartment in Munich. Later he also decorated the walls of his residence in the Reich Chancellery and the Berghof. With Hoffmann at his side, he was always in search of new acquisitions, especially works by Carl Spitzweg and Eduard von Grützner.171 Even after becoming chancellor, Hitler would occasionally announce, all of a sudden, that he was going to a gallery such as Karl Haberstock’s in Berlin’s ritzy Kurfürstenstrasse. When he acquired Böcklin’s Battle of the Centaurs in May 1935, Goebbels wrote that Hitler was “as happy as a child.”172
Another constant from his early years in Linz and Vienna was Hitler’s passion for Richard Wagner. “The Führer told me about Richard Wagner, whom he deeply reveres and knows better than any other,” Goebbels noted in June 1937.173 On 13 February 1933, a scant two weeks after taking power, Hitler was the guest of honour at the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of Wagner’s death at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus. Until the start of the Second World War, he travelled every year to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, declaring it “his only chance to relax.”174 Hitler made sure that the chronically money-losing festival was given sufficient funds. He also declared that it was to be held annually and offered his opinions about which singers and musicians should be cast.175 Alongside Wagner, Hitler enjoyed operettas—he saw Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow and Strauss’s Die Fledermaus multiple times—and he was also a ballet enthusiast.176
In addition, Hitler was an avid cinema-goer. Even in the tense months leading up to the November putsch, he regularly went to the movie theatre on Munich’s Sendlinger Torplatz. There, together with Ernst Hanfstaengl, he enjoyed the silent film Fridericus Rex. Hanfstaengl recounted that Hitler especially liked the scene in which the young Friedrich the Great is forced to witness the execution of his childhood friend Katte. “Off with the head of anyone who goes against the reasons of state,” Hitler exclaimed, “be it even your own son!”177 In October 1926, he and Hess went to see Ben Hur 178 and even in the hectic years before he took power, Hitler kept up with all the new releases, either in Berlin or elsewhere. In early 1932, he and Goebbels took in the erotically charged feature Girls in Uniform. “A fabulous, unpretentious, compelling film,” Goebbels raved. “Achieves the greatest effects by the simplest means. Charming girls. I’m completely taken in and dumbfounded. Hitler too.”179 A bit later, the two men admired Greta Garbo in Yvonne.180 And as 30 January 1933 approached, Hitler watched the historical film The Rebel not once but twice.181 Hitler remained a film buff after becoming chancellor, but instead of going to the cinema, he had films screened privately in the Chancellery or at his retreat on the Obersalzberg.
Hitler was passionate about cars in general and Mercedes-Benz in particular. “I love automobiles,” he admitted in January 1942. “I have to say that I owe the best moments of my life to the automobile.”182 He was intimately acquainted with all models of cars and, according to Schirach, was constantly reading up in magazines about valves, camshafts, suspensions, steering systems, motor specifications and handling.183 In Landsberg, Hess was struck by Hitler’s admiration for the Taylor system that allowed the Ford factory in Detroit to produce 800 cars a day. “Our industry should put in the effort and achieve similar results,” Hitler opined.184 There was no way, however, that Hitler
would have bought an American car: all his life he remained true to Mercedes-Benz. The company had helped him at the start of his political career to acquire his first car, and Jakob Werlin, who ran the Mercedes dealership in Munich, was part of Hitler’s entourage. In 1931, Hitler got the latest Mercedes, the eight-cylinder 770 with 7.7 litres of cubic capacity, the largest and most expensive passenger car of the time. Racing driver Rudolf Caracciola personally delivered the vehicle to Munich.185 Hitler would have liked to see all prominent Nazis drive Mercedes, but he was never able to implement this wish.186 Conversely, in the decisive year of 1932, the southern German carmaker intensified its connections with the NSDAP leadership. “There is no reason to decrease the attention we’ve paid to Herr Hitler and his friends,” Mercedes director Wilhelm Kissel wrote to Werlin. “He will be able to count on us…just as he has in the past.”187 The carmaker made good on its word, providing the new Reich chancellor with a further luxury Mercedes for a song in June 1933. In return, Mercedes expected to be given preferential treatment in the blossoming automobile sector.188
As Hitler himself could not drive, he had himself chauffeured around by a series of drivers—Emil Maurice, Julius Schreck and Erich Kempka.189 Hitler always sat in the front seat next to his chauffeur, studying the map. Before 1933, he loved going fast, and the luxury Mercedes models easily did over 100 kilometres an hour. “He couldn’t see another car on the road in front without ordering his driver to pass it and leave it in the dust,” Otto Dietrich reported.190 After he became chancellor, Hitler set his drivers a speed limit, and for security reasons he now never went anywhere without a commando of bodyguards. But in the years before he took power, Hitler logged hundreds of thousands of kilometres, and sometimes it was inner restlessness and not business that made him take to the roads. “We lead the lives of gypsies,” Goebbels remarked in January 1929.191 Hitler often travelled the 150 miles between Munich and Berchtesgaden in an open-top car, regularly stopping at the Lambach Inn on the northern shore of Lake Chiemsee. He loved to picnic for hours by the side of the road with his entourage. It was a chance for him to briefly slip out of the role of Führer. “Picnic under the pines,” Goebbels jotted down in July 1933. “Four hours amidst nature. Hitler very happy. A normal person among normal people.”192
Hanfstaengl reported that when he was in a good mood, Hitler was an unusually entertaining travel companion, who would hum whole passages from Wagner operas.193 He and his entourage usually stayed up late in hotels, although Hitler often began to brood at some point. “The cheerful conversation would die down, if he no longer took part,” Wagener recalled. “One or the other person would say good night, and Hitler would ask others to keep him company. You’d still be sitting there hours later…talking about everything under the sun except matters of work and present concerns.”194
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Various sources from his inner circle describe Hitler as leading an extremely simple, almost ascetic existence.195 But that is only half the story. Hitler’s supposedly modest personal needs were part of his carefully cultivated, partly fictional persona as a man of the people. His passion for fast and expensive cars, his choice of the Palais Barlow as Nazi Party headquarters and his huge apartment on Munich’s posh Prinzregentenstrasse do not conform to that image. Speer turned up his nose at the interior design:
Carved oak furniture, books in glass cases, embroidered cushions with delicate inscriptions and resolute party slogans. In one corner was a bust of Richard Wagner. The walls were full of idyllic paintings, framed in gold, by Munich School artists. Nothing betrayed the fact that this man had been the chancellor of Germany for three years. The air smelled of heated oil and sour leftovers.196
Schirach on the other hand found Hitler’s apartment too bourgeois: “A wealthy factory owner or merchant might have lived like that, or an artistically aware but old-fashioned collector.”197
“My surroundings have to make a grand impression so that they highlight my own simplicity,” Hitler once remarked, and his modesty concerning his wardrobe was similarly calculated.198 Hitler favoured unfussy uniforms made by the tailor Wilhelm Holters near the Chancellery. His suits were made by Michael Werner in Munich.199 Hitler did not like to have his tailors take his measurements, and when they were allowed to do so, the procedure could not take more than a few minutes.200 Hitler personally had little use for medals. He himself wore only the Iron Cross, First Class and the Golden Party Emblem—although he had no objections to those around him filling their chests with medals and badges: that too only increased the effect of his calculated modesty.201
Hitler had a relatively relaxed attitude towards money and seems not to have possessed a normal bank account.202 Nor did he carry a wallet. If he needed money, an assistant would give it to him, or he would carry it loosely in his pocket. His aides Julius Schaub and Wilhelm Brückner paid his bills,203 and Max Amann managed Hitler’s income, which grew rapidly thanks to royalties from the sales of Mein Kampf. That income allowed him to initially refuse to accept his salary as Reich chancellor. He announced that decision in February 1933 with great pomp, underscoring his desire to nourish the public legend of the ascetic Führer.204 In fact, he silently reversed that decision a year later. After Hindenburg’s death, Hitler also received the Reich president’s salary and an annual expense fund.205
Part of the legend of Hitler’s asceticism was the fact that he did not eat meat or smoke cigarettes and only rarely drank alcohol. Wagener and Hitler’s housekeeper Anni Winter reported that Hitler decided to become a vegetarian after the death of Geli Raubal in 1933.206 In fact he had already begun to cut down his consumption of meat and alcohol after being released from Landsberg in late 1924. “In my experience, meat and alcohol harm my body,” he told Hanfstaengl. “I have decided to summon the will-power necessary to do without both, as much as I enjoy them.”207 He stuck to his resolution, although aside from occasional scornful remarks about “cadaver-eaters,” he did not mind if others chose not to follow him down this path. At dinner during the wedding of Schirach and Henriette Hoffmann in late March 1932, Hitler shook his head in dismay at the gigantic roast of beef and sighed: “Oh you Venus flytraps!” He himself only had some spaghetti with tomato sauce and an apple.208 Sefton Delmer characterised meals with Hitler on the campaign trail in April 1932 as being a bit of trial. An “aura of isolation” surrounded the teetotalling vegetarian, making everyone at the table feel rather uncomfortable.209
Contrasting markedly with this sort of asceticism was Hitler’s insatiable appetite for cake and sweets. When first introduced to Hitler, Hanfstaengl immediately noticed that he could not seem to get enough of Viennese pastries with whipped cream.210 Schirach was completely dumbfounded when he first sat down with Hitler in 1928, shortly after he himself was named leader of the Nazi Students’ Association:
At tea time, I couldn’t believe my eyes. He put so many lumps of sugar in his cup that there was hardly any room for the tea, which he then slurped down noisily. He also ate three or four pieces of cream pie. Hitler noticed my surprise. He glanced down critically at himself, smiled mischievously and said, “I shouldn’t be eating this much. I’m getting fat. But I’ve got such a sweet tooth.” He said this and then ordered another slice of pie.211
Years of consuming such huge quantities of sugary food took their toll. Hitler had very bad teeth and was forced to submit to extensive dental work in late 1933.212
As Schirach’s anecdote illustrates, the Hitler of the late 1920s was indeed able to laugh at himself. He gradually lost this capacity as the Führer cult became increasingly excessive, and Hitler identified more and more with the role in which he was cast by his disciples and by Nazi propaganda. As Speer described the change: “He usually let others tell the jokes, and his laughter was loud and unconstrained. Sometimes, he would be bent over in laughter and have to wipe the tears from his eyes. He liked to laugh, but fundamentally it always came at others’ expense.”213 There was nothing liberating about Hitler’s laughter.
It always contained a hint of ridicule and scorn, and Hitler habitually concealed his face with his hand whenever he laughed.214
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The Führer was very mindful of his health. Indeed, his fear of illness betrayed unmistakable signs of hypochondria. Hitler was worried that he would die young and be unable to realise his plans. “ ‘When I’m no longer here’ has become his mantra,” noted Goebbels in February 1927. “What a horrible thought!”215 The following year, when he suffered a bout of severe stomach cramps, Hitler believed he had contracted cancer and was fated to die young like his mother. Initially he refused to consult a doctor, but eventually Elsa Bruckmann convinced him to see a certain Dr. Schweninger—the son of the Bismarck’s personal physician. He diagnosed a chronic irritation of Hitler’s stomach lining and put the Nazi leader on a strict diet.216 Hitler’s health improved, but he never lost his fear of dying young.
In February 1932, the morning after a speech by Hitler in Hamburg during the Reich presidential election, Albert Krebs found him hunched at his breakfast table in the Hotel Atlantic, looking tired and morose. Hitler then gave a long lecture about the advantages of vegetarianism, which incongruently revealed his fear of getting cancer. “ ‘I’ve got no time to wait!’ he said, looking at me over the edge of his plate of soup,” Krebs recalled. “ ‘If I did, I wouldn’t be running for this office…But I can’t afford to lose another year. I must come to power soon, if I’m to be able to take care of the gigantic tasks ahead in the time I have left. I must! I must!’ ” Krebs saw this “pathological mix of fear of mortality and messianic conviction” as the key to understanding why Hitler was so impatient about pursuing his political plans. “Someone who plans things beyond all normal dimensions and simultaneously fears that he won’t live to see fifty has no option to move slowly and wait for his goal to come into reach and the fruits of his labours to ripen,” Krebs concluded.217 Even after Hitler attained power, he still regularly worried that he would not live long.218 The irony was, as one of his doctors attested, that Hitler was in robust health. The symptoms of the nervous condition that he began to show over the years are hardly surprising, considering the pressure he was under.219
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