Hitler
Page 111
Hitler regarded the extended responsibilities of the Gauleiters/Reich Governors in the annexed territories as the model for a future reform of the ‘old Reich’. He justified this by noting that, during the ‘time of struggle’, he had given the ‘Gau kings’ the greatest possible freedom of action and in future wanted them to have the same freedom as far as their state functions were concerned. He envisaged a network of regional power holders, who combined Party and state responsibilities and were directly responsible to him.43 In 1939, he applied this idea by appointing fifteen of the thirty-nine Gauleiters to be Reich Defence Commissioners, giving each of them responsibility for civil defence issues in their particular military district. They were organs of the new Ministerial Committee for the Defence of the Reich established on the outbreak of war, were officially supervised by the Reich Interior Ministry, and were responsible for overseeing the work of the various branches of the administration in their military district in accordance with the directives of the ministries concerned.44 This measure contained a clear political message: ‘authority on the home front’ was to be transferred to the Party.45 Since the borders of the military districts did not coincide either with those of the Gaus or with those of the federal states and the Prussian provinces, the Reich Defence Commissioners/Gauleiters and the Reich Governors/Gauleiters of the annexed Polish territories were in effect privileged vis-à-vis the other Gauleiters, a situation which led to friction. In November 1942, all forty-two Gauleiters were appointed Reich Defence Commissioners and the borders of their jurisdictions were adjusted to correspond to those of the Gaus rather than the military districts. However, since the borders of the federal states and the Prussian provinces did not correspond to those of the Party Gaus, that is, the jurisdictions of the Reich Defence Commissioners/Gauleiters, friction between the various political and administrative bodies with their overlapping boundaries inevitably continued.
As the war went on, there was an increasing tendency for the Gauleiters to regard more and more administrative spheres as matters relating to ‘Reich defence’ and to intervene in matters hitherto controlled by the regional state authorities. They claimed that the Gauleiters should be responsible for coordinating the various branches of the cumbersome state administration, providing it with flexible leadership and, whenever necessary, using the Party apparatus to carry out certain functions. Their direct subordination to Hitler would avoid the need to go through laborious official channels.46 This shift in the balance of power towards the Gauleiters clearly showed what the political structure of the so-called ‘Third Reich’ would have looked like, had Germany won the war. Hitler intended that the Gauleiters, who had risen within the Party hierarchy and were directly subordinate to him, would provide a counterweight to the concentration of power in the hands of the few individuals whom he trusted at Reich level. They already represented an important personnel reserve for special assignments. Apart from Goebbels and Sauckel, who have already been mentioned, Josef Terboven (Essen), Hinrich Lohse (Schleswig-Holstein), Erich Koch (East Prussia), and Josef Grohé (Cologne-Aachen) all received new tasks as Reich commissars in the occupied territories. Alfred Meyer (Westphalia: North) became state secretary in the Ministry for the Eastern Territories, and a number of Gauleiters were appointed as ‘heads of the civilian administration’ in territories occupied by the Wehrmacht, in order to prepare for their annexation.47 The regular Gauleiter and Reichsleiter meetings continued during the war. They were designed not for making decisions but for the informal exchange of information and Hitler often used them for lengthy ‘tours d’horizon’.
At local level, in particular, the Party increased its supervision and monitoring of the ‘national comrades’ with the aim of nipping in the bud any form of unrest in a population that was unenthusiastic about the war and subjected to increasing burdens.48 To this end, the Party mobilized its members, whose number increased from 5.3 million at the start of the war to well over 8 million by the end, to undertake a wide range of tasks.49 It became involved in the distribution of foodstuffs and important supplies; it organized the accommodation of the homeless and evacuees from the air war; it took on responsibilities for air raid protection (such as control of the blackout), for providing immediate aid after air raids, for the provision of accommodation for, and the supervision of, foreign forced workers, who were to be separated as far as possible from the German population, and for looking after Wehrmacht soldiers and their families, including the arrangement of funeral ceremonies for those who had been killed. Thus the Party was heavily involved in all matters affecting the population’s ‘mood’, and could immediately intervene to sort things out when tricky situations arose at local level and even in people’s domestic sphere.
Thus, during the early years of the war, the system of Führer autocracy had been perfected. Hitler ruled through direct personal contact with his entourage as well as through directives issued via the increasingly competing chancelleries or liaison officials based in the Führer headquarters. He was careful to avoid the creation of new, or the revival of old, collective decision-making bodies. Direct contact with the ‘Führer’, which was so vital for securing decisions, was restricted to a few top functionaries – Bormann, Göring, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Himmler, Ley, and Speer, although the Reich Youth Leader, Baldur von Schirach, Sauckel, and Brandt, and, to a limited extent, the Gauleiters also enjoyed this privilege.50 The Party’s influence was increasing at all levels, above all with the aim of strengthening its control over the state bureaucracy, improving the latter’s performance and commitment, and concentrating Menschenführung* [lit. ‘the leadership of people’] in its own hands.
Figure 13. Full mobilization: Ten sons belonging to the Schmidt family from Köpprich in Lower Silesia gather in uniform for a group photograph on 8 April 1941. The two boys are in the Hitler Youth. The son on the front right is in the Fire Police and all seven sons in the back row are in the Wehrmacht.
Source: bpk / Joe Heydecker
Within this Führer autocracy that he had created, Hitler not only kept tight personal control of the key areas of policy, but made decisions on matters of detail, sometimes on a day-to-day basis. This applied first of all to the actual conduct of the war, which, as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht and commander-in-chief of the army, he controlled through daily situation conferences often lasting for hours. With the help of his Reich press chief, Otto Dietrich, and in close consultation with Goebbels, he also set the guidelines for propaganda, had the whole of foreign policy under his aegis (mainly through the liaison officer with the Foreign Ministry, Walter Hewel), monitored armaments production, trying to control it through detailed directives, and kept an eye on the civilian side of the war (air raid precautions, labour conscription, transport, and so on). Any alteration in the allocation of food rations required his approval. He took personal charge of all measures affecting the constitution and administrative structure not only of the Reich itself but also of the occupied territories, repeatedly intervened in the details of occupation policy, and directed the radicalization of Jewish policy at every stage to the point of mass murder, as well as reserving for himself all important decisions relating to ‘racial policy’.
However significant the damage resulting from this style of government may have been as a consequence of the friction and inefficiencies caused by the opaque lines of responsibility, the closing off of channels of information, and the internal power struggles, the fact remains that Hitler had at his disposal the kind of regime he needed in order to achieve his main goal: the establishment of a European empire on a racial basis under his virtually total control.
Hitler’s charisma in the Second World War
It has already been argued at length51 elsewhere that the basis of, and legitimation for, the ‘Führer state’ was Hitler’s ‘charisma’, in other words the allegedly total consensus between ‘people’ and ‘leadership’, finding expression through the actions of the regime. Great efforts were required in order for this to be su
stained. It was only through the apparatus of repression, local monitoring of the ‘national comrades’, and control of the public sphere by the propaganda machine that Germany’s many-voiced and multifaceted society could be subsumed into a ‘national community’ and people’s behaviour be adjusted to the norms set by the regime. This was the context within which the ‘Führer’ was continually renewing his putatively charismatic position. On the one hand, he gave expression to the alleged expectations, longings, and hopes of the German people in major speeches and with grand gestures. On the other hand, he reacted to negative shifts in the ‘national mood’ by responding to certain concerns and promising remedial action, while declaring others to be unacceptable, publicly banning critical voices from the national community and thereby silencing them. Sometimes he would then reset the domestic agenda by making a sudden dramatic move.
With his shift towards expansion and war during 1938/39, Hitler continued this constant interaction with the ‘people’, an indispensable element of ‘Führer’ charisma. He regained the initiative with his comprehensive reshuffle in February 1938. The unparalleled violence of the November pogrom, through which the regime mobilized the ‘people’s anger’, then introduced a complete reorientation of propaganda in order to prepare the German population, which was hardly ready for war, for tougher times to come. After 1 September 1939, voices opposed to, or sceptical about, the war were banned from the public sphere through increased controls and repression, while Hitler himself initially sustained people’s hopes of a short war. Even if there were no signs of enthusiasm for the war, propaganda took the line that the population was contentedly and confidently going along with the leadership’s war policies. In November 1941, the parameters for Hitler’s charisma were readjusted. In view of the difficulties on the eastern front, discussions about how long the war was going to last were banned and even presented as sabotaging the war effort. The almost simultaneous public declaration that Hitler’s 1939 ‘prophecy’ about the annihilation of the Jews was now in the process of being realized underlined the message: all bridges had been burnt and the ‘people’ had no alternative but to entrust themselves to Hitler’s purportedly superhuman leadership qualities and support his conduct of the war until victory had been achieved.
At the same time, there were now an increasing number of lengthy breaks in the interaction between ‘Führer’ and ‘people’. Hitler’s charisma was, to a certain extent and for a certain time, suspended. This occurred for the first time between 10 March and 19 July 1940, in other words between Heroes’ Memorial Day and Hitler’s peace offer to Britain. This was the period during which he was preparing and carrying on the wars in northern and western Europe. His absence may have caused concern; but, by the summer of 1940, his victories and apparent willingness to make peace, which was a response to the population’s desire for an end to the war, revived his charismatic leadership role. More serious was the fact that between May 1941 and 3 October 1941, in other words the period when he was preparing for war against the Soviet Union and engaged in the major eastern offensive, he had effectively disappeared from public view. This immediately resulted in ups and downs in the public ‘mood’, for the authoritative voice capable of allaying the widespread concerns about the course of the war was absent. At the beginning of October 1941, Hitler tried to remove this uncertainty with his public promise of imminent victory. During the following weeks, this did not occur and, instead, the advance of the armies in the East stalled. The ‘Führer’ responded by announcing on 11 December that, as the war had become a world war, an entirely new situation had arisen, in the light of which the temporary hold-up in the East was insignificant. Afterwards Hitler decided to remain silent until the end of January 1942, although the most serious crisis of the war hitherto had suggested that his whole strategic concept for the war was in serious jeopardy. Instead of making a blood, sweat, and tears speech, he left it to his Propaganda Minister to get over the critical period by organizing a collection of socks and warm underwear for the soldiers at the front. However, by patently failing to perform his leadership role at the height of the crisis, he had in fact seriously damaged the ‘charismatic’ basis of his regime.
With the gradual improvement in the military situation, Hitler spoke twice in public in March and April 1942, before becoming preoccupied with the preparations for and conduct of the summer offensive and disappearing once more from view until the end of September. In this difficult and, in the view of many, decisive phase of the war, his charisma could only have been salvaged if he had been able to return to the public stage to announce a decisive victory. It was such a victory that Hitler was pinning all his hopes during 1942 and this fixation was ultimately to shatter his charisma.
* Translators’ note: Menschenführung denoted political control in every sphere of life. Together with Betreuung [‘supervision’], Menschenführung was the term used to define the Party’s role in relation to the German people.
PaRt VII
Downfall
39
The Turning Point of the War and Radicalization
On 23 July 1942, Hitler divided the offensive in the southern sector of the eastern front into two spearheads. On the northern flank, Army Group B began advancing towards the Volga, reaching the river north of Stalingrad on 23 August.1 At the military briefing on 1 September, Hitler ordered that, on ‘entering the city the whole male population is to be got rid of because Stalingrad, with its million-strong and totally communist population, is particularly dangerous’.2
Meanwhile, by mid-August, the second spearhead, Army Group A, had advanced around 500 kilometres southwards; however, this offensive into the northern Caucasus now began to stall.3 It managed to capture Maikop, the first of the Caucasus oil fields, but the Soviets had comprehensively destroyed its installations, and it would take at least six months to restart oil production in significant quantities.4 Moreover, at the end of June, a Soviet offensive had begun in Army Group Centre’s sector of the front, compelling the German forces to yield a significant amount of territory. The situation around Rzev proved particularly critical. Hitler aggravated the crisis by refusing a request from Kluge, the army group’s commander, for reinforcements, preferring to deploy troops for a counter-offensive in the southern sector of Army Group Centre. Hitler considered the fact that the front near Rzev was then held as confirming his view that such crises could be overcome by strong nerves and by sticking to his guns, specifically in defiance of his generals.5
When Goebbels visited Hitler in Vinniza on 19 August, the ‘Führer’ appeared extremely optimistic as far as the progress of the summer offensive was concerned, but, at the same time, seemed worn out, which Goebbels attributed to an attack of dysentery from which he had only just recovered. Hitler told him that ‘recently he had been on his own a great deal’ and had ‘almost completely given up socializing in his headquarters’, in order to devote himself entirely to his duties.6 The extreme nervous tension after more than seven weeks of the offensive, the continual disputes with his generals, and his self-imposed isolation in his headquarters were taking their toll. However, Hitler had by no means given up hope of being about to achieve a success that would decide the war. He told Goebbels that in two or three days’ time he would begin the major attack on Stalingrad, and in the autumn conquer Leningrad, in order ‘to raze this city to the ground’. At the same time, he was planning to reach Krasny and Baku in the south. But that was not all, for his aim was ‘to break through to the Near East, conquer Asia Minor, and overwhelm Iraq, Iran, and Palestine, thereby cutting England off from its last oil supplies, it having already lost its East Asian ones’. In Africa Rommel would ‘sooner or later break through the El Alamein line and reach Cairo’.7
These were not simply fantasies intended to impress his propaganda minister. For on 9 September, during a military briefing, he ordered the commander-in-chief in the West to prepare eight divisions for use in the tropics, ‘to form the attack group in the Caucasus for deployment
in the Near East’.8
On 24 August, the tensions in Führer headquarters exploded in a furious row between Halder and Hitler, who accused his chief of the general staff of always approaching him with the same request – to withdraw. During the subsequent exchanges, Halder complained about the massive and senseless loss of life at the front, whereupon Hitler brought up his personal experience as a front-line soldier in the First World War, pointing out that Halder had spent the whole of that war and the present one as a staff officer!9
In the meantime, at the end of August, a Soviet counter-offensive in the northern sector of the front, south of Lake Ladoga, undermined the prospects of capturing Leningrad before the onset of winter.10 At the military briefing on 30 August, Hitler stated he was ‘very dissatisfied with the performance of Army Group A’, summoning its commander, List, to Führer headquarters for the following day.11 List was severely reprimanded and ordered to advance in three places towards the Black Sea coast. However, on his return to his headquarters List had doubts about the third of these spearheads; he was afraid his troops could be wiped out.12 Hitler refused to alter the directive,13 but List succeeded in winning over Jodl. When, however, the latter approached the ‘Führer’ about the issue on 7 September, Hitler, according to Keitel, responded with ‘an indescribable fit of rage’.14 On the following day, he dismissed List, taking over command of the army group himself.15 It was this confrontation that led to the final and irreparable breach between Hitler and his generals.16
Hitler’s army adjutant, Gerhard Engel, sensed Hitler’s ‘suppressed rage’, but also ‘his uncertainty: What now?’ The ‘Führer’ indulged in furious tirades against the officer corps, which he accused of ‘failures of judgment, lack of a sense of responsibility, of civil courage’, and also ‘of ideological conviction’. He said he was contemplating adopting the Soviet system of political commissars, in order ‘to ideologically pep up’ the military commanders.17 Keitel had the impression that he had ‘lost all credit with Hitler’.18 In fact, at this point, Hitler had almost certainly realized that he would be unable to achieve his eastern goals during 1942. This was serious; it amounted to accepting the failure of his whole strategic concept. For according to his original plans decisive success in the East would have enabled him to concentrate his forces against the western powers before the United States had had time to mobilize all its resources. But his policy of going for broke had failed. At this point, Hitler may have become aware for the first time that his war was now unwinnable.