Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (116 page)

Hitler’s Alpine residence was not just a place of rest and relaxation or a private refuge from the stage of major politics. It was there that he withdrew to collect himself and plan his next steps when faced with crucial decisions. “When I go to the mountains, it’s not just because of the beauty of the landscape,” he explained in January 1942. “My imagination is much livelier there. I’m removed from all the trivia and am able to see: this or that is better, this or that is right, this or that will lead to success.”
¹³⁶
Not only did Hitler’s decisions ripen at the Berghof; his mountain manor was also where he wrote his speeches for the Nuremberg rallies every year in late August and early September and where he received his most important foreign visitors, such as former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in early September 1936. “They [the Germans] should thank God they have such a great leader,” Lloyd George is alleged to have said after his three-hour meeting with Hitler.
¹³⁷
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were likewise impressed after visiting the German dictator at the Berghof in late October 1937, and Hitler was apparently flattered that the former British monarch had paid him his respects. He had “rarely seen the Führer so relaxed and animated as during that visit,” Fritz Wiedemann later recalled.
¹³⁸
But the Obersalzberg was also the site of dramatic political confrontations in advance of Hitler’s foreign-policy coups. It was there that Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg was subjected to extortionate pressure on 12 February 1938, a few weeks before the amalgamation of Austria into the Third Reich, and it was there that Hitler invited British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain for a first visit on 15 September 1938, at the height of the Sudentenland crisis. The idea, as Below put it, was to “receive him in an environment that played to the English love of country life.”
¹³⁹

The Berghof was therefore both Hitler’s personal retreat and a second power centre alongside the Chancellery in the Third Reich. This double function was the reason that in early 1936 Hitler ordered the construction of a field office of the Chancellery north-west of Berchtesgaden, only six kilometres away from the Obersalzberg. The topping-out ceremony took place in January 1937. Once it was completed the business of government ran smoothly. Thanks to modern communications and the governmental airport in Reichenhall-Berchtesgaden, Hitler was fully connected with the outside world and reachable at any time in his seemingly remote Alpine retreat. Nonetheless, even Hans Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Chancellery, could be refused permission to speak to Hitler for days at a time when the Führer was at the Berghof.
¹⁴⁰

Precisely because the personal and the political were intermingled, the impression that the Berghof circle was apolitical cannot be accurate. In mid-July 1937, for instance, Goebbels noted that those visiting the Obersalzberg had “passionately discussed” Britain’s role in the world over lunch.
¹⁴¹
It is also known that Marion Schönmann, Eva Braun’s friend, was a frank woman who openly criticised many of the political measures taken after the
Anschluss
in Austria.
¹⁴²
The image of Braun as the apolitical, naive mistress of the Führer has also been revealed as a deliberate distortion by Speer and other members of the Berghof society in order to claim ignorance after the war about the criminal nature of Hitler’s dictatorship.
¹⁴³
Braun was by no means the dumb blonde observers long mistook her for. She was a modern young woman who knew quite well what she was getting into with Hitler and who herself helped bolster the mythic aura of the Führer with the photos she gave to Hoffmann and her home movies, which she made for posterity. Like the others who were part of the Berghof circle, she shared Hitler’s racist political beliefs and knew all too well about the exclusion and persecution of the Jews. The fact that few, if any, words were wasted on anti-Semitism does not mean that the Berghof society objected to it in any way. The same is true of the regime’s campaign against the Churches, which was initiated by none other than Hitler himself.

19

Hitler and the Churches

“The war will run its course, and then I will see it as my life’s work to sort out the problem with the Churches,” Hitler said over lunch at his main headquarters in mid-December 1941, by which point it was clear that Germany would not achieve a Blitzkrieg victory against the Soviet Union. “Only then will the German nation be safe. I do not care in the slightest about articles of faith, but I’m not having clerics sticking their noses in worldly affairs. This organised lie has to be broken in such a way that the state becomes the absolute master.” He added: “When I was young, my view was: use dynamite! Today I see that you can’t rush things. It has to rot away like a gangrenous limb. We need to get to the point where only idiots stand behind the pulpit and only old women sit in front of it, and the healthy youths are with us.”
¹

These statements were anything but exceptional. On the contrary, they expressed Hitler’s deep-seated enmity towards Christianity. The Christian Churches were the only institutions in the “Führer state” that escaped National Socialism’s claims on total ideological power. Hitler wanted to subjugate the Churches to his will, reducing them to a shadow of themselves, but he postponed the attack until after the war had been successfully concluded. “In the long term, National Socialism and the Churches won’t be able to coexist,” he proclaimed in another of his monologues.
²

At the same time, however, Hitler realised that he could not achieve this goal by using brute force. A certain tactical flexibility was needed, since the Christian Churches remained influential in German society. “It makes no sense to artificially create further difficulties,” he admitted. “The cleverer we act, the better.”
³
The dictator wanted to avoid an all-out war on the Christian faith and Christian culture at all costs. He remembered all too well Bismarck’s failed “cultural struggle”—the
Kulturkampf—
against the Catholic Church, and he thought that the time was wrong, at least in 1941, to engage in a battle against the Churches. “The best thing is to let Christianity gradually fade out,” he said in October of that year. “A long phase-out has something conciliatory. The dogma of Christianity will collapse in the face of science.”
⁴

The same ambivalence had characterised Hitler’s behaviour prior to 1933. On the one hand, he staged National Socialism as a secular religion, presenting himself as a messianic leader sent by the Almighty to deliver the German people from all evil. His own sanctification went hand in hand with the stylisation of his followers into “disciples,” who unconditionally submitted to the Führer and who were willing, if necessary, to lay down their lives for him. Hitler constantly invoked the idea that faith could move mountains, and he rarely missed an opportunity to inject Christian phrases and notions, in pseudo-liturgical fashion, into his speeches.
⁵
Particularly in his Christmas addresses, he liked to cite Jesus as a model for himself and his followers. Just as the Christian saviour, whip in hand, had driven the usurers from the temple, Hitler promised, he would expel “international Jewish finance capital” from Germany.
⁶

On the other hand, however, Hitler saw his movement as religiously neutral and equally far removed from both of the main Christian faiths. Article 24 of the party programme stipulated: “The party as such represents the standpoint of positive Christianity without declaring its allegiance to any particular confession.”
⁷
Political parties had nothing to do with religious problems, Hitler had written in
Mein Kampf
, while conversely religions should not meddle in “political party nonsense.” He added: “The mission of the movement is not that of a religious reformation, but rather the political reorganisation of our people.” Hitler was enough of a realist to see that he could never come to power without support from Christian voters. Extending a hand to them in
Mein Kampf
, he described the “two religious confessions as equally valuable pillars for the continued existence of our people.”
⁸

For that reason, when the party was reconstituted in 1925, Hitler vehemently resisted all attempts to pursue religious quarrels. Attacks on Christian communities and institutions were expressly prohibited. In 1928, the Gauleiter of Thuringia, Arthur Dinter, who violated this prohibition by promoting the formation of a new ethnic-popular religion, was fired from his post and kicked out of the NSDAP.
⁹
In 1930, Alfred Rosenberg was forced to publicly identify his book
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
—a synthesis of neopagan beliefs circulating among the Far Right—as “a personal confession” that had nothing to do with the party.
¹⁰
Even as late as 1942 in his military headquarters, Hitler distanced himself from Rosenberg’s work, which he claimed to have only read “bits of.”
¹¹

After coming to power as chancellor, Hitler initially posed as a Christian statesman who wanted nothing more than to cooperate with Germany’s two main Churches in carrying out the country’s “national rebirth.” “At no point during his rule did Hitler invoke God as often and passionately as during the first eight weeks,” the historian Klaus Scholder has correctly asserted. “Never again did he give himself over to Christian figures of speech or appropriate Christian sites and attributes as greatly as in this period.”
¹²
In his very first official declaration on 1 February 1933, he promised that Christianity “as the basis of our entire morality” would enjoy the “committed protection” of his nationalist government.
¹³
In his speech on the Enabling Act on 23 March, he took a further step towards the Churches. The new government, Hitler assured them, “considered the two Christian confessions as factors of paramount importance for preserving our identity as a people” and would leave their traditional rights untouched.
¹⁴
This declaration was directed primarily at the Catholic Centre Party, whose support he needed to get the necessary two-thirds majority for the Enabling Act in the Reichstag.

—

Prior to 1933, German Catholics had been relatively resistant to Hitler’s lures. Beginning in September 1930, Catholic bishops had constantly warned against the teachings of National Socialism in their pastoral letters, and even as late as August 1932, with Hitler on the threshold of power, the German Bishops’ Conference in Fulda reiterated their rejection of Nazi ideology and declared that Catholics were “not allowed” to be members of the NSDAP.
¹⁵
The Reichstag election of 5 March 1933 confirmed the solidity of political Catholicism, as the Centre Party and its Bavarian sister party, the BVP, only suffered small losses. Hitler considered prising apart Catholic resistance one of the most urgent tasks of the early phase of his rule.
¹⁶
He achieved an initial success on 28 March, when the Catholic bishops responded to his seemingly conciliatory attitude with an equally conciliatory declaration. “Without revoking our earlier rejection of certain religious and ethical errors,” it read, “the episcopate believes it can conclude that the general prohibitions and warnings are no longer needed.” This was followed by an appeal to “loyalty towards legitimate authority and a conscientious fulfilment of civic duty.”
¹⁷
With that, the ban on Catholics being National Socialists was lifted. Among pious Catholics too, enthusiasm for Hitler and his “national uprising” grew. “The cassock-wearers are very small and crawl before us,” Goebbels boasted.
¹⁸

Hitler, who grew up in a Catholic environment and never officially left the Catholic Church, maintained a lifelong respect for the power of the institution and its thousands of years of tradition. He coveted an agreement with the Vatican along the lines of the Lateran Accords Mussolini had concluded in 1929. Such an agreement was a way of reaching a modus vivendi with Catholic clergymen, and it was also a method of undermining political Catholicism. The traditional constituencies of the Centre Party and the BVP, Hitler told his cabinet on 7 March 1933, could only be conquered “when the Curia abandons the two parties.”
¹⁹
It only took a few months for the negotiations that Franz von Papen, at Hitler’s request, began conducting on 10 April with Cardinal State Secretary Eugenio Pacelli, the former papal nuncio in Germany, to yield concrete results. A treaty between the National Socialist government and the Holy See was drawn up on 8 July, the signing ceremony took place on 20 July, and the concordat took effect on 10 September.
²⁰
It prohibited Catholic clergymen from engaging in any kind of political activity, which essentially meant that the Catholic Church was abandoning the Centre Party and the BVP. The two parties subsequently decided to dissolve. In return, the Nazi regime agreed to guarantee Catholics’ freedom to practise their religion, to protect Catholic lay organisations and to allow Catholic schools and religious instruction.