These conferences typically lasted until 2 p.m., sometimes longer, so that lunch guests had to be prepared to wait. “Hitler was sovereign and unreliable about when he would appear,” Speer recalled.
Lunch was planned for 2 p.m., but it was usually 3 p.m. or even later before Hitler arrived. He entered as casually as a private figure. He would greet his guests with a handshake, and they would gather around him as he expressed his opinion about this or that current issue. With more privileged guests, he would enquire as to the health of the wife. Then the head of press would give him excerpts of the news, and he would sit down in a chair off to the side to read them.28
His guests were left standing around with growling stomachs for another fifteen to twenty minutes until a servant announced: “Lunch is served.”29 Then Hitler led everyone into the dining room—a large square space, with a round table in the middle with room for some fifteen people. There were four other tables for four to six people in the corners. Hitler always sat with his back to the window facing a large painting that hung above the sideboard: Triumph of Music by the Munich society painter Friedrich August von Kaulbach.30
Before entering the dining room, Hitler would decide who would be sitting to his right and left: this was an eagerly awaited decision since proximity to the Führer was a sign of prestige and importance. “All of his paladins stood on their toes and tried to make themselves as tall and wide as possible in the hope that the Führer’s eye might fall upon them,” recalled Ribbentrop’s private secretary Reinhard Spitzy. “Hitler clearly enjoyed the situation and took his time. ‘Yes,’ he would say, ‘I’d like to my right…’—pause—‘…Dr. Goebbels, and to my left Herr von Ribbentrop, and then further to the right General X and to the left Gauleiter Y.’ ”31 The rest of the guests took the places that were left over, and aides and less important individuals usually sat at the side tables. The guest lists varied quite a bit. Often they contained NSDAP Gauleiter in Berlin on business, and government ministers, ambassadors and business leaders were also invited. Goebbels was there almost every day, and Speer and Otto Dietrich were also frequent guests. Göring, Hess and Himmler appeared far less frequently. Occasionally Magda Goebbels or Leni Riefenstahl were invited, but usually the company was exclusively male. The food was simple. Most days, there was soup, meat with vegetables and potatoes, and something sweet for dessert. Hitler ate his vegetarian meal and drank Fachinger mineral water. Guests were welcome to follow him in these habits, but few chose to.32
Hitler jokingly nicknamed his lunches the “Merry Chancellor Restaurant,”33 but the atmosphere was hardly one of relaxed merriment. “The people at his table did not feel free,” Dietrich remarked. “Amidst the atmosphere Hitler created, even the liveliest people became taciturn listeners…They were self-conscious and did not volunteer much of themselves, while Hitler spoke and put them under his spell with words and gestures he had practised thousandfold.”34 Since Hitler often talked about current issues, his lunches were, in Speer’s words, a “great source of information” for his guests, without which they would “lack orientation.”35 When Hitler took an uncharacteristic break from lecturing the others, an embarrassed silence would descend. At such moments, Goebbels would jump in. The propaganda minister enjoyed playing the maître de plaisir, and he was invited so often because he knew how to liven things up, entertaining the guests with jokes and anecdotes while undermining his rivals for Hitler’s favour with seemingly harmless little jibes. Not infrequently, he would make fun of one of the other guests and engage in some verbal sparring, which Hitler would follow with amusement, intervening only if things threatened to escalate into a genuine quarrel.36
After lunch, which lasted between thirty minutes and an hour, Hitler would ask individual guests to accompany him to the conservatory, where they continued this or that discussion. For the movers and shakers of the Third Reich, this was the best chance to get Hitler’s ear in hopes of influencing a decision in their favour. Speer, for instance, eagerly seized such opportunities to discuss his construction plans. Often such discussions lasted until late in the afternoon. When the weather was fine, Hitler enjoyed walking up and down the garden with his guests. He always carried some nuts in his pockets to feed the squirrels.37 Early on in his regime, Hitler would sometimes retire to the Hotel Kaiserhof, where a corner table was kept reserved for him, for late-afternoon tea. But he soon abandoned this habit because word of his presence there would quickly make the rounds and attract flocks of mostly older female admirers.38
Dinner was usually planned for 8 p.m. and was mostly restricted to a smaller circle, including Goebbels, Speer, and frequently Heinrich Hoffmann and Captain Baur. Often, not all of the seats at the main table were taken so that Hitler’s aides hastily invited guests from the world of culture, above all actresses. Unlike lunch, the table talk focused on general topics rather than political issues. “Hitler enjoyed hearing about theatrical performances and society scandals,” Speer recalled. “The pilot told flying stories, Hoffmann contributed anecdotes from Munich’s art world…but mostly Hitler repeated tales from his past and told us about how he had become what he was.”39 During the meal, Hitler’s servants would bring him a list of four to six German and foreign films. Hitler would then select one or two to be shown that evening.40
After dinner, Hitler and his guests would repair to the “music salon,” where everything had been set up for the screening. “We all sat down in comfortable armchairs,” Speer related. “Hitler unbuttoned his jacket and stretched out his legs. The light slowly dimmed while household servants and bodyguards entered though the rear door.”41 Hitler liked breezy entertainment. If a film featured one of his favourite actors—Emil Jannings, Heinz Rühmann, Henny Porten, Lil Dagover, Olga Chechova, Zarah Leander or Jenny Jugo—he would order a copy before it had premiered in the cinemas. If a film was not to his taste, he made no secret of it, bellowing, “Stop the projector! What nonsense! Put on the next one!”42 Goebbels occasionally complained to his diary about this monotonous ritual, which he considered a waste of time. On the other hand, it was important for him to get Hitler’s opinion so that he could intervene and, if necessary, have changes made to the film before its premiere.43
After the screening, everyone went into the smoking parlour. While by that point most of the guests had trouble concealing their fatigue, Hitler usually seemed astonishingly fresh, as if he had only just come to life. The company sat around the fireplace, drinks and sandwiches were brought, and there was a bit of chit-chat. It was during these hours that the dictator seemed most relaxed. The greatest fear of his aides was that late at night the conversation would turn to Hitler’s favourite topics, his experiences in the First World War and the “days of struggle.” Such reminiscing could go on until two or three in the morning. After his guests had finally left, Hitler and his aides would discuss the next day’s schedule. Karl Krause would then present him with the latest news agency report and prepare a valerian tea with a small bottle of cognac on the side. It was supposed to help Hitler fall asleep more quickly.44
On some nights, though, Hitler would withdraw earlier to his chambers to read newspapers and magazines. “Flipping through the pages of periodicals was one of his favourite activities,” Krause recalled. For relaxation, he even read through back issues. In December 1933, for example, he ordered Schaub to procure all the editions of the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (Berlin Illustrated Newspaper) published between 1914 and 1932. The directorship of the Ullstein publishing house was only too happy to oblige and wished the chancellor “several hours of pleasant leisure in a life full of strenuous work perusing an illustrated chronicle of twenty years of ever-changing German history.”45
A weekly, as well as a daily, routine also crystallised during the early years of Hitler’s regime. There was hardly a weekend when Hitler did not set off for Munich or the Obersalzberg. Since he usually left on Friday evening and returned during the course of Monday, that meant that appointments in the Chancellery were condensed i
nto four days.46 Hitler had three Junkers 52s managed by Baur at his disposal. They were supplemented in the spring of 1935 by two four-motor Condor aircraft, which could fly from Berlin to Munich in only one hour and thirty-five minutes. Until September 1937, if Hitler decided to travel by rail, an extra carriage was attached to the regular Berlin–Munich train. After that, Hitler would make use of a special train with ten to twelve carriages all for himself. The “Führer car” consisted of a mahogany-panelled salon where Hitler could congregate with his aides, a sleeping compartment with a bath, and sleeping berths for his servants. During Wehrmacht manoeuvres, his special train served as his “main headquarters.” A motorcade stood ready for him wherever he chose to alight.47
For shorter trips, Hitler preferred to travel by car. He always chose the destination and frequently kept it a secret from his entourage until the last minute. Sometimes he himself could not decide where he wanted to go and flipped a coin. “Once the decision had been reached in this way, it was set in stone, and he abided by it,” Dietrich recalled, adding that this was “Hitler’s one concession to superstition.”48 Nonetheless, even if the final destination was set, Hitler did not mind making the odd detour. He remained loyal to the same hotels: in Weimar the venerable Hotel Elephant on the central market square; in the Bavarian spa town of Berneck Bube’s Hotel; in Nuremberg the Deutscher Hof; in Augsburg the Drei Mohren; in Frankfurt the Baseler Hof (where, he once sneered, there was always a Bible on his bedside table); in Hamburg the luxurious Hotel Atlantik on Alster Lake; in the Rhineland and Ruhr Valley the Rheinhotel Dreesen in Bad Godesberg; and later in Vienna the royal suite of the Hotel Imperial.49 Led by the Führer’s black Mercedes, there was always a veritable caravan of cars containing Hitler’s bodyguards, officers of the criminal police, his aides and personal physician, his servants and one of his secretaries as well as a car full of luggage at the tail end.50
Always restless, Hitler eagerly exploited any opportunity for a change of scenery. “There were years when he could hardly stand to stay in one place or in one of his homes for more than three or four days,” Dietrich recalled. “You could almost set your watch by when his entourage would get the order to pack up and move on.”51 The constant moving around was a nightmare for his servants since fifteen to twenty suitcases had to be packed at the drop of a hat, and departures could never go fast enough for their impatient master.52
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The business of government continued while Hitler was on the go. If he was in Munich, urgent conferences were held in his private apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse or in the Brown House. If he was somewhere else, he constantly received reports and requests, in response to which he issued immediate instructions and orders. Dietrich saw this idiosyncratic “flying’ form of government” as one of the special qualities of Hitler’s style of rule.53
Even when he was working in the Chancellery, Hitler avoided writing down his orders. Instead, his commands were issued verbally and delivered on the spur of the moment. As a rule he considered his decisions carefully, but sometimes he took them on the spot, leaving his underlings with the unenviable task of translating hasty remarks into practical instructions and make sure they got where they needed to. Misunderstandings and misinterpretations were an inevitable part of this oral leadership style.54 On the other hand, it also opened up considerable room for those around Hitler to exert an influence. Here, too, Goebbels achieved a certain mastery. At lunch, Dietrich observed, “he fed Hitler with entertaining catchwords, adopted and exaggerated his tendencies and seized opportunities to elicit verbal orders in his favour in a variety of areas.”55 Not only party bigwigs used this strategy. Ministers and state secretaries, who had increasing difficulty getting access to Hitler, tried to as well. If they succeeded in gaining his attention, they immediately tried to explain their problems to Hitler one-to-one and to draw him into statements that could be interpreted as “the Führer’s will.” The “art of the ministries,” Ernst von Weizsäcker, who became state secretary in the Foreign Ministry in 1937, emphasised in his memoirs, “was to exploit the lucky hour or minute when Hitler, sometimes through a stray word, made a decision that could be passed on as ‘Führer mandate.’ ”56
Hitler’s non-bureaucratic, personalised style of rule encouraged underlings to push ahead with initiatives of their own in the hopes of anticipating the Führer’s will. “The Führer can hardly order from above everything that he may want carried out at some point,” Werner Willikens, state secretary in the Prussian Agriculture Ministry, told agricultural representatives of the German states in February 1934. Therefore, it was the duty of every individual to try to work towards the Führer.57 Ian Kershaw rightly sees this idea of “working towards the Führer” as one of the keys for understanding the specific ways in which Nazi rule functioned. Those who wanted to get ahead in this system could not wait for orders from above, but rather had to anticipate the Führer’s will and take action to prepare and promote what they thought to be Hitler’s intentions. This not only explains why the regime was so dynamic but also why it became more and more radical. In competing for the dictator’s favour, his paladins tried to trump one another with ever more extreme demands and measures.58 Small-time and medium-level NSDAP functionaries—from the block wardens to the cell, local and district leaders—were also convinced that they were “working towards the Führer” when they harassed Jews and informed on putative “parasites on the people.” They were not just the willing executioners of Hitler’s ideological postulates: they drove racist policies forward.
After the Nazification of parties and associations, the unification of the offices of president and chancellor, and the self-subordination of the Reichswehr to their new commander-in-chief, Hitler had personally concentrated more power than any German ruler in history. “Responsible to no one and unable to be replaced, his position is comparable only with that of the crowned heads of state of the absolute monarchies of the past,” read an SPD-in-exile report from July–August 1934.59 In contrast to Fascist Italy, where Il Duce had to tolerate a king at his side, Nazi Germany had no institutions that could have developed into a counterweight to Hitler’s stranglehold on power.60 In his two-pronged stroke in June 1934, the dictator had eradicated SA unrest within his own movement and got rid of his critics and detractors among the conservatives. The “Führer state” was now solidly established, and in it Hitler’s charismatic authority was the most important resource for ruling. The referendums he staged after major domestic and foreign-policy decisions confirmed his overwhelming popularity. Without Hitler as the “hub of the entire National Socialist system,”61 and without the mythology of the Führer as an integrative framework, there is no explaining the regime’s astonishing cohesive force. “Fundamental to National Socialism and its system of rule,” argued the historian Karl-Dietrich Bracher, “was the fact that from the beginning to its extreme end, it stood and fell with this one man.”62 Decisions could only be made under the regime if they were derived from and thus sanctioned by the will of the Führer.
Nonetheless, it would distort the reality of the Third Reich to imagine it as a strictly governed central system in which the Führer determined everything. Hitler’s marked aversion to bureaucratic procedures and his scattershot, impulsive style of rule made such a system impossible. He demanded of all his underlings that they spare him from unwelcome, banal, everyday details. “The best man is for me the one who burdens me the least by taking responsibility for himself ninety-five out of every one hundred decisions,” Hitler declared in October 1941. “Of course there are always cases that I ultimately have to decide.”63 In other words, Hitler claimed the solitary right to decide only on fundamental issues, not on routine matters he considered ancillary; it was then that he made determined use of his function as a coordinator. However, because he was not prepared to clarify the boundaries between state administration and party organisations, bureaucratic structures and administrative rules and procedures began to corrode from within. Hitler
gradually transferred to government the practice he had already used as party leader of blurring areas of responsibility and staffing offices doubly so as to encourage rivalries and protect his own power.64 As a seemingly paradoxical result, a polycratic network of competing offices and portfolios developed alongside Hitler’s monocratic dictatorship.65 For example, as we have seen in the area of foreign policy, three organisations besides the Foreign Ministry were active: the NSDAP Foreign-Policy Office, the Foreign Organisation of the Party and Ribbentrop’s office.66 In the area of publicity, the president of the Reich press office and head of Eher publishers, Max Amann, fiercely battled for power with Press Secretary Dietrich and Propaganda Minister Goebbels.67
One of the first victims of the unregulated parallel existence of the Führer’s absolute authority and a plurality of competing power centres was the principle of government by cabinet. In February and March 1933 the cabinet met thirty-one times, on average once every two days. After the Enabling Act emancipated Hitler as chancellor from the emergency decrees of the president, Hitler’s interest in conferring with his cabinet declined noticeably. Between June and December 1933, the cabinet met twenty times, in all of 1934 nineteen times, in 1935 twelve times, in 1936 four times and in 1937 six times. Its final meeting took place on 5 February 1938.68
As meetings declined in frequency, their character also changed. “In the beginning, there were still lively discussions, but later Hitler’s monologues took up more and more time,” recalled Schwerin von Krosigk.69 Gradually, the cabinet devolved into an organ for carrying out the Führer’s will, and in October 1934, all of Hitler’s ministers were required to swear an oath of loyalty to him personally. On the fourth anniversary of the appointment of the “cabinet of national concentration,” on 30 January 1937, Hitler made all his ministers members of the NSDAP, in so far as they were not already, and awarded them the Golden Party Badge. Paul von Eltz-Rübenach alone refused to accept the accolade, citing the regime’s hostility to the Catholic Church, which horrified the rest of the cabinet. “It was as if we were all struck lame,” Goebbels noted. “No one had expected that. Göring, Blomberg and Neurath profoundly thanked the Führer…But the mood was ruined.”70 Eltz-Rübenach was forced to submit his resignation that very day, and his ministry was divided up: Julius Dorpmüller became Reich transport minister, and Wilhelm Ohnesorge became Reich postal minister.
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