Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (72 page)

As is typical for many autodidacts, Hitler believed he knew better than specialists and experts and treated them with an arrogance that was but the reverse of his own limited horizons. Speer called him “a genius of dilettantism.”
⁷⁸
Hitler was very reluctant to admit to any gaps in his education, even when filling them would have been in the interest of his political career. Hanfstaengl tried in vain to get Hitler to learn English after he was released from his imprisonment in Landsberg. Although Hanfstaengl himself offered to tutor Hitler twice a week, the party leader dismissed the idea with the words “My language is German, and that suffices.”
⁷⁹
Attempts to get him to travel abroad and see the world from a different perspective also fell on deaf ears. Sometimes Hitler would claim that he did not have any time to travel; on other occasions he argued that his party rivals would exploit his absence and challenge his supremacy.
⁸⁰
As a result, the politician who assumed power in Germany in 1933 had seen nothing of the world except for four years of military service in Belgium and France during the First World War.

—

As a parvenu, Hitler lived in constant fear of not being taken seriously or, even worse, making himself look ridiculous. He frequently stumbled in his attempts in the 1920s to adapt to new social demands. The widow of Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, one of the sixteen Nazis who died during the putsch of November 1923, remarked that Hitler always seemed “somewhat gloomy” in society.
⁸¹
Hitler had to ask his
salonnière
patroness Elsa Bruckmann to show him how to eat dishes like lobster or artichokes.
⁸²
Helene Bechstein kitted him out with a new suit, starched shirts and patent leather boots, whereupon Hanfstaengl reported: “The result was that for a while Hitler always turned up in patent leather boots, regardless of the time of day, until I took the liberty of suggesting that such footwear was hardly appropriate for daytime—not to mention for a leader of a workers’ movement.”
⁸³
Hitler’s fondness for lederhosen also clashed with the Führer cult his acolytes began to celebrate from 1922. Hess was appalled when Hitler turned up at the Obersalzberg with exposed knees and rolled-up sleeves.
⁸⁴
In late 1926 and early 1927, he posed in lederhosen and a brown shirt for a series of portraits by his official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann.
⁸⁵
After that, Hitler gradually gave up traditional southern German forms of dress because they clashed with his self-styled image as the messiah for all Germans. Nonetheless he retained his habit of commissioning a photo by Hoffmann before wearing a new article of clothing in public.
⁸⁶
He never allowed himself to be seen in a bathing suit. For one thing, Hitler could not swim and refused to learn. For another, he cited the cautionary example of a cover of the
Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung
from August 1919 that had depicted Reich President Friedrich Ebert and Reich Defence Minister Gustav Noske in swimming trunks during a visit to the Baltic Sea. That image gave the right-wing press in Germany a welcome opportunity to ridicule those leaders of the Weimar Republic.
⁸⁷

Hitler also refused to take dance lessons, something he found as contemptible as learning foreign languages. “Dancing is an occupation unworthy of a statesman,” he proclaimed. Even when Hanfstaengl pointed out that Hitler’s role model Friedrich the Great had been no stranger to the dance floor, the Nazi leader remained adamant: “All these balls are a pure waste of time, and what’s more the waltz is much too effeminate for a man.”
⁸⁸
At the Reich president’s reception for the diplomatic corps on 9 February 1933, many people noticed how uncertain the freshly appointed Chancellor Adolf Hitler was on his new terrain. Bella Fromm, the society reporter for the
Vossische Zeitung
newspaper, noted in her diary:

Everyone’s eyes were on Hitler, and the former military private, somewhat grumpy and awkward, seemed to feel ill at ease with his role. The tails of his tuxedo constrained him, and he repeatedly reached for the area where his uniform belt would be. Every time he felt the absence of this cooling and encouraging handhold, he seemed to get more uncomfortable. He constantly played with his handkerchief and betrayed all the signs of stage fright.
⁸⁹

“I believe my life is the greatest novel in world history,” Hitler wrote in late September 1934 to Adelheid Klein, a friend who some people suspected was his lover.
⁹⁰
Hitler was perhaps echoing the statement attributed to Napoleon: “What a novel my life is!” Like the French emperor, the German Führer was never completely able to escape the aura of the
arriviste
. Even after a series of domestic and foreign political triumphs had bolstered his self-confidence, he still appeared quite nervous during official receptions. He was plagued, in the words of Christa Schroeder, “by fear of making a faux pas.”
⁹¹
When he entertained, he checked every detail, casting a final eye over his table and even inspecting the flower arrangements. He seemed most relaxed when he received artists: among them he seemed at his most natural.
⁹²

Against this backdrop, it is easier to understand Hitler’s pronounced and oft-noted tendency to engage in extended monologues: it was most likely an attempt to conceal his own social inadequacies. In early 1920, Hitler reverently received Heinrich Class, the founder of the Pan-Germanic League, only to leave the older far-right agitator “dizzy” with a monologue that lasted for hours.
⁹³
After interviewing Hitler for the first time in early May 1931, Sefton Delmer described how the oral floodgates were opened: “I asked a question, and his answer swelled into a speech as new thoughts poured into his imaginative and unusually lively mind. Before you could stop him, he was yelling as if he had a huge crowd in front of him and not a single English reporter.”
⁹⁴
The diplomat Ulrich von Hassell described a similar transformation after a meeting with Hitler in Munich in early February 1932, at which the Führer “repeatedly suffered outbreaks of passion and reverted to his public-speaking voice, his lips quivering and his eyes fixed in their peculiarly intense stare.”
⁹⁵
Often a single word was enough to prompt Hitler’s manic need to talk. People at the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich dreaded such moments because every item of business that day would have to be postponed.
⁹⁶
Anyone with the temerity to interrupt Hitler would immediately attract the ire of the loquacious party leader. “Hitler was an indefatigable talker,” Otto Dietrich remarked. “Talking was an element of his very being.”
⁹⁷
Such verbal diarrhoea was a burden on those around him. Hitler’s interlocutors had to tolerate his endless monologues without contradiction, signalling their encouragement and interest while interjecting the odd word that would inspire the speaker to further flights of fancy. As a rule, Hitler was so intoxicated by his own words that he never noticed whether they were having any real effect on those who had to listen.

—

Yet Hitler could behave entirely differently in smaller, more private circles. In such situations, he was a likeable conversationalist who told entertaining stories instead of holding lectures. He enjoyed recalling his wartime experiences, the founding of the Nazi Party and the November putsch.
⁹⁸
Here, Hitler assumed the role of good-humoured patriarch who told jokes and laughed at the harmless jokes of others.
⁹⁹
It was a seductive persona. “Hitler is as touching as a father,” Goebbels noted in his diary in June 1929. “I like him very much. He’s the most likeable of men because he’s so kindly. He has a big heart.” Eighteen months later, Goebbels wrote: “With Hitler this noon…He’s very relaxing. The boss as a family father. He’s very interested in my welfare.”
¹⁰⁰

The Gauleiter of Berlin and later propaganda minister was doubtlessly the colleague with whom Hitler maintained the most intense contact and discussed the most personal matters. But Goebbels was mistaken to believe that Hitler took him into complete confidence and told him everything that was on his mind.
¹⁰¹
In fact, there was no one to whom Hitler completely opened up. Even in the early 1920s, Karl Alexander von Müller was struck by the “deep loneliness that surrounded and doubly separated him from every environment.” Nor did he reveal himself to Elsa Bruckmann and her husband despite their seeming intimacy—while they believed he did because he allowed them a tiny glimpse of himself here and there.
¹⁰²
In his memoirs, Speer wrote that he had never met a man who “so rarely showed his true feelings or concealed them again so quickly when he did.” There had been moments when Speer felt he and Hitler had grown closer, but they were illusory: “If you cautiously took up his affectionate tone, he would immediately erect an insurmountable, defensive wall.”
¹⁰³
Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, also concluded that the man worshipped by millions of Germans was essentially a loner. “Just as I never got close to him, I never observed anyone else doing so either,” Ribbentrop wrote. “There was something indescribably distancing about his very nature.”
¹⁰⁴

Hitler’s need to maintain distance from others was probably less the product of inferior social skills than of his conviction that he was a messiah who should be surrounded by an aura of unapproachability. Familiarity and intimacy were anathema to him. Even in his closest circles very few people were allowed to address him informally,
¹⁰⁵
and he seems to have never had anything approaching a best friend. Hitler was afraid of “moments of uncontrolled affection and spontaneous intimacy,” claimed Otto Strasser. “For him the idea of letting himself go was a sheer horror.”
¹⁰⁶
Perhaps that helps explain Hitler’s difficult relationships with women. The Führer particularly hated the thought that people knew him before 1914 or were aware that he had been a lowly private in the First World War. Typically, when he attended a reunion of his regiment during the 1920s, he was unable to connect with his former comrades and quickly left.
¹⁰⁷

Hitler felt most comfortable with the street thugs from the Nazi Party’s “early years of struggle,” whom he regularly met up with in Munich’s Café Heck. Among them, he could let out his vulgar, petit-bourgeois side without fear of being greeted with wrinkled noses. “It’s awful to see him talking nonsense with those philistines,” Goebbels complained in March 1931.
¹⁰⁸
Yet after coming to power, Hitler largely divorced himself from such circles. The comradely tone his old acquaintances would habitually strike up did not suit his new role as Reich chancellor, so Hitler kept them at a distance, insisting that they too address him as “my Führer.”
¹⁰⁹
The only exception was the evening of 8 November, when the tradition of beer-cellar meetings was revived for a night. Then and only then did Hitler allow himself to sit down with his oldest party comrades in Café Heck.
¹¹⁰

Beginning in 1933, the Führer also distanced himself from his earlier social patrons. On 21 April of that year, Helene Bechstein complained that the previous day she wanted to congratulate Hitler personally on his birthday but had been prevented from seeing him by his assistant Wilhelm Brückner, who told her that the Reich chancellor did not have a minute to spare.
¹¹¹
Hitler did repay his former patron with the occasional acknowledgement, such as having her awarded the Golden Party Emblem in December 1933, but their relationship was never again what it had been—particularly as Bechstein repeatedly criticised aspects of the Nazi regime.
¹¹²
Hitler kept in somewhat closer contact with the Bruckmanns in Munich, giving them not just the Golden Party Emblem but presenting them with a car.
¹¹³
Still, Elsa Bruckmann could not help but notice that her former protégé visited her much less frequently than before. In a letter written in March 1934, she griped that the Führer was “now quite hard to get hold of.”
¹¹⁴

So did Hitler truly exist “without any inner connection to other people,” as Gregor Strasser claimed and as every one of his biographers from Heiden to Kershaw have suggested?
¹¹⁵
Put in such black-and-white terms, that was certainly not the case. Hitler enjoyed something like substitute families in several private circles, including the Hoffmanns. Even after becoming chancellor, he paid regular visits to his court photographer in the latter’s villa in the Bogenhausen district of Munich. “When the weather was nice, the chancellor and Führer often took off his jacket and lay down on the lawn in his shirtsleeves,” noted one eyewitness. “He felt at home with the Hoffmanns. Once he had them bring him a volume of [Bavarian satirist] Ludwig Thoma, from which he read aloud.”
¹¹⁶