Hitler (101 page)

The inability to relate, which isolated him humanly, benefited him politically, for he recognized only pieces in a game. No one could cross the belt of remoteness, and those who approached most closely to him were merely at a somewhat reduced distance. Characteristically, his strongest emotions were reserved for a few dead persons. In his private room at Obersalzberg there hung a portrait of his mother, and one of Julius Schreck, his chauffeur, who died in 1936. None of his father. Geli Raubal dead was apparently closer to him than the living girl had ever been. “In a sense Hitler is simply not human—unreachable and untouchable,” Magda Goebbels had already said in the early thirties. While still at the peak of his power, the cynosure of millions, he yet had something about him that belonged to the forgotten young man of the Vienna or early Munich years; he was a stranger even to his closest relatives. Albert Speer, whom for a time he regarded with some sentimentality as the embodiment of his youthful dream of brilliance and distinction, told the Nuremberg tribunal: “If Hitler had had any friends, I would have been his friend.” But he, too, did not cross the gulf. In spite of many days and nights of joint planning, when both men would lose themselves in their colossal projects, Speer was never more than Hitler's preferred architect. It is true that Hitler, in an unusual tribute, spoke of his “genius,” but the dictator did not trust him in matters that went beyond technical problems.

What was lacking from this one relationship with traces of an erotic element was also lacking in the other: in contrast to Geli Raubal, Eva Braun was merely Hitler's mistress, with all the anxieties, secrecies, and humiliations involved in such a position. She related that at a dinner in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich Hitler sat beside her for three hours, not allowing her to address him; shortly before everyone rose from the table he thrust into her hand “an envelope with money.” He had met her at the end of the twenties in Heinrich Hoffmann's photographic studio, and possibly this acquaintanceship was one of the factors that drove Geli Raubal to suicide. Some time after his niece's death Hitler made Eva his mistress. She was a simple, moderately attractive girl with unpretentious dreams and thoughts that were dominated by love, fashion, movies, and gossip, by the constant fear of being thrown over, and by Hitler's egocentric whims and his manner of a petty domestic tyrant. With his craving for regimentation he had forbidden her sun-bathing, dancing, and smoking. (“If I were ever to see Eva smoking, I'd break off at once.”) He was quite jealous, and yet he neglected her in an offensive way. In order “not to be so alone” she had several times asked him for a dog (“that would be lovely”), but Hitler had simply passed over the request without comment. For a long time he kept her in almost insultingly mean circumstances. Her diary has been found, and the notes illuminate her unhappy situation. A characteristic passage runs:

 

There's only one thing I wish, to get very sick and know no more about him for at least a week. Why is nothing happening to me, why must I go through all this? If only I'd never seen him. I'm in despair. Now I'll buy sleeping powder again, then I'll be in a half trance and stop thinking so much about it.

Why doesn't the devil come and take me. It's certainly better with him than it is here.

For three hours I waited in front of the Carlton and had to watch him buying flowers for Ondra [Annie Ondra, a film actress] and inviting her to dinner. He needs me only for certain purposes, it isn't possible otherwise.

When he says he's fond of me he means it only at that moment. Just like his promises which he never keeps. Why does he torment me so and not put an end to it right away?

 

In the middle of 1935 Hitler said “not a kind word” to her for three months, and in addition she learned that recently a “Valkyrie” had been his constant female companion (“he's fond of such dimensions”). She obtained an overdose of sleeping pills and wrote a letter demanding some word from Hitler, even if it came through some outsider. “God, I'm afraid he won't answer today,” the last entry of this period reads. “I've decided on 35 pills this time it's going to really be a ‘dead certain' business. If only he would have somebody call.”

Eva Braun made two attempts at suicide, the first as early as November, 1932, by shooting herself in the neck, the second on the night of May 28, 1935. Evidently Hitler was considerably irritated by these attempts, all the more so since he had not forgotten Geli's fate. In 1936 Hitler's half-sister, Frau Raubal (Geli's mother), at last left the Berghof, and Hitler let Eva Braun take her place. Only after that did the tension between the two relax. Eva continued to be kept in semiconcealment, stealing in by side entrances and using rear staircases, contenting herself with a photograph of Hitler when he left her alone at mealtimes. She was hardly ever permitted to appear in Berlin, and as soon as guests arrived, Hitler almost invariably banished her to her room. But as she felt more secure, Hitler also lost some of his apprehensions, and soon she became a member of that innermost circle of persons before whom he dropped the airs of the great man and at teatime fell asleep in his armchair, or in the evening, with unbuttoned coat, invited his guests to watch movies or chat by the fireplace. But this more relaxed atmosphere also brought out his crude, unfeeling traits. Thus he said to Albert Speer in his mistress's presence: “A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman. Imagine if on top of everything else I had a woman who interfered with my work! In my leisure time I want to have peace.”
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There are some amateur 8-millimeter film shots showing Eva Braun in Hitler's company on the Berghof terrace, always in that mood of high spirits that is somewhat too ebullient to be believed.

The course of one of Hitler's ordinary days has been described by a number of persons. He would open the door of his bedroom, which he regularly locked, a crack in the morning, and his hand would mechanically reach out for the newspapers that were lying ready at hand on a hassock beside the door; then he vanished again. Walks, traveling, conferences on building, receptions, automobile rides did not give the day an exterior framework but merely split it up into a series of distractions. Though Hitler knew so well how to impose an unmistakable style upon public display, he could not shape the little actions and whims of a day into a personal style. He had no private life.

The entourage continued to consist of adjutants, secretaries, chauffeurs, and orderlies. “Part of his circle consisted of ephebes,” one observer wrote, “men with curled hair, vulgar, square-set, with effeminate gestures.” As in the past he preferred the uncritical, dull milieu of simple people to which he had been accustomed from childhood. Whenever he was at Obersalzberg he spent the long evenings in their company in an unchangingly monotonous pattern. One of the participants has declared: “What remains in my memory of social life at Obersalzberg is a curious vacuity.”
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The evening would begin with three or four hours of movies. Hitler preferred social comedies with insipid wit and sentimental endings. He also liked many foreign films, some of which were not allowed to be shown in the public cinema houses; Hitler saw a number of his favorites as many as ten times and even more frequently. Wearily, with leaden limbs, the circle then gathered in front of the fireplace. As at the big dining table, the huge pieces of furniture, set far apart for purposes of display, hindered any exchange of ideas. Hitler himself had a paralyzing effect upon the company. “Very few people ever felt comfortable in his presence,” one of his old companions had remarked years before. For one or two hours the conversation dragged tediously along, repeatedly trickling away in banalities. Sometimes Hitler sat silently staring into space, or brooding into the fire, while the circle remained mute out of a mixture of respect and ennui. “It cost great selfcontrol to attend these endless sessions in front of the unvarying setting of the leaping flames.”
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Between two and three in the morning Hitler would literally dismiss Eva Braun, and shortly afterward leave the room. Only then did the company, as if liberated, revive to brief, hectic gaiety. The evenings in Berlin followed a similar course, except that the group was larger, the atmosphere less intimate. All efforts to introduce some variation in the routine broke down against Hitler's resistance. For in the trivial emptiness of these hours he tried to compensate for the pressure of the day, when he was prisoner of his own image.

How sharp the contrast of these evenings was with the classic totalitarian myth of the solitary lighted window. As Goebbels told it, “Every night, until six or seven in the morning, light can be seen streaming from his window.” And a recitation for a youth-group program ran:

 

Full many a night it is no novelty
That we may sleep while you are full of cares.
For many a night you wake untiringly,
And there is no one who your brooding shares
Until, clear-eyed at dawn, the light you see.

 

In the summer of 1935 Hitler had decided to enlarge his modest weekend house at Obersalzberg into a rather pretentious residence, and he himself had sketched to scale the ground plan, the renderings, and crosssections of the new building. The sketches have been preserved and are clear evidence of Hitler's fixation on any idea he had once had; he was simply incapable of attacking a task from a new point of view. The original idea always remained preserved in his sketches, with only minor changes. No less striking, however, is the loss of proportion—as, for example, in the sketch of the oversized window with the view of Berchtesgaden, the Untersberg, and Salzburg, which Hitler later liked to show to his guests as the largest lowerable window in the world. Here was the “basic infantile trait in Hitler's nature,” which Ernst Nolte attributed chiefly to his greed to appropriate, his obstinate and uncontrollable determination to possess.

This lifelong mania for record size, speed, and numbers was characteristic of a man who had never managed to overcome his youth with its dreams, injuries, and resentments. Even at sixteen he had wanted to extend the 360-foot-long frieze on the Linz museum by another 300 feet, so that the city would have the “biggest sculptural frieze on the Continent.” And years later he wanted to provide Linz with a bridge 270 feet high above the river, a bridge “unequaled anywhere in the world.” Later on, the same urge would make him compete on the highways, preferably against heavy American cars. And years afterward he would still gloat over these races, remembering how his supercharged Mercedes would outdistance every other car on the road. The biggest lowerable window had its counterpart in the biggest marble table top made of one piece (18 feet long), the biggest domes, the vastest grandstands, the most gigantic triumphal arches, in short, in an indiscriminate elevation of gigantic abnormality. Whenever one of his architects told him that in his sketch of a building he had “beaten” the size of a historically important edifice, he was filled with enthusiasm. The megalomaniacal architectural works of the Third Reich combined this infantile mania for beating records with the traditional pharaonic complex of ambitious dictators who were trying to offset the frailty of a dominion based exclusively on themselves as individuals by building on a grand scale. This ambition sounds repeatedly in Hitler's statements—as, for example, at the party rally of 1937:

 

Because we believe in the eternity of this Reich, its works must also be eternal ones, that is... not conceived for the year 1940 and not for the year 2000; rather, they must tower like the cathedrals of our past into the millennia of the future.

And if God perhaps makes the poets and singers of today into fighters, he has at any rate given to the fighters the architects who will see to it that the success of this struggle finds its imperishable corroboration in the documents of a great and unique art. This country must not be a power without culture and must not have strength without beauty.

 

Through these enormous architectural works Hitler was also trying to satisfy his onetime dreams of being an artist. In a speech of the same period he declared that if the First World War “had not come he would... perhaps, yes even probably, have become one of the foremost architects, if not the foremost architect of Germany.” Now he became the foremost patron of architecture. Aided by a number of select architects, he conceived the reconstruction of many German cities with vast buildings and avenues, whose oppressive size, lack of grass, and archaizing elements of form added up to an impression of solemn and deadly vacuity. In 1936 he conceived the plan of converting Berlin into a world capital, “comparable only to ancient Egypt, Babylon, or Rome.” Within some fifteen years he wanted to transform the entire inner city into a single showy monument of imperial grandeur, with vast boulevards, gleaming gigantic blocks of buildings, the whole dominated by a domed assembly hall that was to be the highest in the world, almost 900 feet, with a capacity of 180,000 people. From the Führer's platform in the interior, under a gilded eagle big as a house, he intended to address the nationalities of the Greater Germanic Reich, and to prescribe laws to a world prostrate before him. A grand avenue over three miles long was to link the building to a triumphal arch 240 feet high, the symbol of victories in battles and empire-building wars. And, year after year, Hitler raved at the height of the war, “a troop of Kirghizes will be led through the capital of the Reich so that they may fill their imaginations with the power and grandeur of its stone monuments.”

The so-called Führer's Building was planned on a similar scale. It was to be a fortresslike palace in the heart of Berlin, covering 6 million square feet and containing, along with Hitler's residence and offices, many reception rooms, colonnades, roof gardens, fountains and a theater. It is hardly surprising that when his favorite architect in later life came upon the old sketches again, he “was struck by the resemblance to a Cecil B. De Mille set.”
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In conceiving such architecture Hitler was in accord with the spirit of the age, from which otherwise he seemed so distant.