Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (74 page)

Nonetheless, there is little truth to the idea that Hitler’s bohemian pretensions left him incapable of doing concentrated work. When necessary, for instance when he had to prepare major speeches for the Reichstag or the Nuremberg rallies, he could devote himself to his political tasks with great diligence. Sometimes he would disappear for days. “The amount he worked was enormous,” Fritz Wiedemann reported. “He worked through half the night.”
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Even as chancellor, Hitler did not use ghost writers: he dictated his speeches himself to his secretaries. Christa Schroeder remembered how Hitler would begin by writing down some main points while standing at his desk. Then he would start dictation, at first calmly but growing ever faster. “One sentence would follow the next without pause, while he paced up and down the room,” Schroeder recalled. “Sometimes he would stop and stare silently at Lenbach’s portrait of Bismarck, lost in thought and collecting himself before he started to wander around again.” Gradually his voice would rise to maximum volume, and Hitler would gesticulate wildly, his face turning red. “Sometimes during dictation, my heart would start violently pounding—that’s how infectious Hitler’s excitement was,” Schroeder remembered. When he was finished dictating, Hitler would correct the manuscript with a fountain pen. It would then be copied, often multiple times. When he had finished with a speech, Schroeder recalled, Hitler always seemed relieved.
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As a politician, the Führer oscillated between phases of seeming lethargy—in which he actually, away from the public eye, thought intensely about his plans—and periods of feverish, almost frenetic activity.
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Hitler had a lifelong habit of postponing difficult decisions for as long as possible, once leading Goebbels to complain that his boss was a “hesitator” and “procrastinator.”
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Such was the stress Hitler felt when faced with such decisions that he started biting his fingernails.
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But when he had reached a decision, he would erupt with great energy, and no cautionary words or objections from others could deter him from taking enormous risks. Hitler often followed what he called his “intuition.” Frequently, he would greet his underlings out of the blue with the announcement: “I thought things over last night and have come to the following conclusion…”
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In his first interrogation by the Allies in the summer of 1945, Speer told them that Hitler would get “intimations,” displaying a kind of sixth sense for coming events and developments.
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Goebbels, too, credited him with “a fabulous nose, instinctual political genius.”
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What his admirers overlooked was the fact that despite his alleged infallible instincts Hitler made numerous blunders on the road to power and ultimately only achieved his goal because others opened the door to the Chancellery for him.

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Hitler’s idiosyncratic work habits and decision-making reflected his self-image as an artist who had been forced into politics. And his entourage lapped up the idea of the artist-politician. “You know Hitler,” Gregor Strasser once remarked to Otto Wagener. “He’s an artist. His ideas come to him from somewhere in the beyond. They’re intangible even to him. He develops them in front of our very eyes. He murmurs them to himself in our presence.”
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Goebbels concurred. “Hitler is himself an artist,” the future propaganda minister noted in early December 1932 after a party attended by Leni Riefenstahl and the actress Gretl Slezak. “That’s why all artists like him so much.”
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Speer also thought of Hitler as a frustrated artist who would have much rather been an architect than a politician.
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As we know from Hess’s letters during their joint incarceration in Landsberg, Hitler was obsessed with architectural plans. Among other things, he made a sketch for a “great national building” in Berlin with a “100-metre covering dome” that would be larger than St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
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After his release, Hitler continued to pursue his plans. In December 1928, Hess wrote to his parents: “As an architect he already has plans in his head for expanding Berlin into the metropolis of the new German empire, and he’s put some of them on paper in the form of marvellous sketches…We’ve often laughed, though with a serious undertone, when we’ve walked through Berlin, which he knows like the back of his hand, and he’s swept away ugly, old housing blocks with a wave of his hand so that other existing or coming ones will have more room to shine.”
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From the very beginning, the construction projects Hitler envisioned were monumental: he was enamoured of everything gigantic.
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The autodidact Hitler was keen to keep abreast of the latest publications on architecture, construction and art history. His Munich housekeeper, Anni Winter, said in 1945 that his private library consisted mainly of such works and that he read avidly in them.
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Hitler bought them at the L. Werner bookshop in Munich, which specialised in architecture, and receipts preserved from 1931 to 1933 attest that he was a very good customer.
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As he revealed in a private letter, he did not just get involved in architecture as a way of “resting and recuperating” from being Reich chancellor.
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With the help of his favourite architect Speer, he actually set about making his megalomaniacal ideas reality—something few of his pre-1933 followers would have thought possible.

After architecture, Hitler’s great passion was for the fine arts, in particular painting, although his understanding of and taste in art had hardly developed since his Vienna years. The failed artist and architect who considered himself a neglected genius felt deep-seated antipathy for avant-garde modernism, which he saw as a socially corrosive phenomenon advanced by “world Jewry.” He never tired of railing against the art of the Weimar “system.” “What has been foisted as art on the German people since 1922 is just some deformed spatters,” Hitler raged in one of his table talks. “From the rapid demise of art in the ‘system period,’ you can see how devastating the influence of the Jews has been in this area.”
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By contrast, Hitler regarded the nineteenth century as an artistic heyday in which Germans had brought forth their “greatest artistic achievements.”
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Hitler’s favourite artists—Adolph von Menzel, Anselm Feuerbach and Arnold Böcklin—all worked during that epoch, and the main rooms in a sketch Hitler made in 1925 for a new German national museum were dedicated to those three painters.
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Hitler began collecting paintings in the late 1920s. At first he hung them in his private apartment in Munich. Later he also decorated the walls of his residence in the Reich Chancellery and the Berghof. With Hoffmann at his side, he was always in search of new acquisitions, especially works by Carl Spitzweg and Eduard von Grützner.
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Even after becoming chancellor, Hitler would occasionally announce, all of a sudden, that he was going to a gallery such as Karl Haberstock’s in Berlin’s ritzy Kurfürstenstrasse. When he acquired Böcklin’s
Battle of the Centaurs
in May 1935, Goebbels wrote that Hitler was “as happy as a child.”
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Another constant from his early years in Linz and Vienna was Hitler’s passion for Richard Wagner. “The Führer told me about Richard Wagner, whom he deeply reveres and knows better than any other,” Goebbels noted in June 1937.
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On 13 February 1933, a scant two weeks after taking power, Hitler was the guest of honour at the celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of Wagner’s death at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus. Until the start of the Second World War, he travelled every year to the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, declaring it “his only chance to relax.”
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Hitler made sure that the chronically money-losing festival was given sufficient funds. He also declared that it was to be held annually and offered his opinions about which singers and musicians should be cast.
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Alongside Wagner, Hitler enjoyed operettas—he saw Franz Lehar’s
The Merry Widow
and Strauss’s
Die Fledermaus
multiple times—and he was also a ballet enthusiast.
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In addition, Hitler was an avid cinema-goer. Even in the tense months leading up to the November putsch, he regularly went to the movie theatre on Munich’s Sendlinger Torplatz. There, together with Ernst Hanfstaengl, he enjoyed the silent film
Fridericus Rex
. Hanfstaengl recounted that Hitler especially liked the scene in which the young Friedrich the Great is forced to witness the execution of his childhood friend Katte. “Off with the head of anyone who goes against the reasons of state,” Hitler exclaimed, “be it even your own son!”
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In October 1926, he and Hess went to see
Ben Hur
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and even in the hectic years before he took power, Hitler kept up with all the new releases, either in Berlin or elsewhere. In early 1932, he and Goebbels took in the erotically charged feature
Girls in Uniform
. “A fabulous, unpretentious, compelling film,” Goebbels raved. “Achieves the greatest effects by the simplest means. Charming girls. I’m completely taken in and dumbfounded. Hitler too.”
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A bit later, the two men admired Greta Garbo in
Yvonne
.
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And as 30 January 1933 approached, Hitler watched the historical film
The Rebel
not once but twice.
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Hitler remained a film buff after becoming chancellor, but instead of going to the cinema, he had films screened privately in the Chancellery or at his retreat on the Obersalzberg.

Hitler was passionate about cars in general and Mercedes-Benz in particular. “I love automobiles,” he admitted in January 1942. “I have to say that I owe the best moments of my life to the automobile.”
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He was intimately acquainted with all models of cars and, according to Schirach, was constantly reading up in magazines about valves, camshafts, suspensions, steering systems, motor specifications and handling.
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In Landsberg, Hess was struck by Hitler’s admiration for the Taylor system that allowed the Ford factory in Detroit to produce 800 cars a day. “Our industry should put in the effort and achieve similar results,” Hitler opined.
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There was no way, however, that Hitler would have bought an American car: all his life he remained true to Mercedes-Benz. The company had helped him at the start of his political career to acquire his first car, and Jakob Werlin, who ran the Mercedes dealership in Munich, was part of Hitler’s entourage. In 1931, Hitler got the latest Mercedes, the eight-cylinder 770 with 7.7 litres of cubic capacity, the largest and most expensive passenger car of the time. Racing driver Rudolf Caracciola personally delivered the vehicle to Munich.
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Hitler would have liked to see all prominent Nazis drive Mercedes, but he was never able to implement this wish.
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Conversely, in the decisive year of 1932, the southern German carmaker intensified its connections with the NSDAP leadership. “There is no reason to decrease the attention we’ve paid to Herr Hitler and his friends,” Mercedes director Wilhelm Kissel wrote to Werlin. “He will be able to count on us…just as he has in the past.”
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The carmaker made good on its word, providing the new Reich chancellor with a further luxury Mercedes for a song in June 1933. In return, Mercedes expected to be given preferential treatment in the blossoming automobile sector.
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As Hitler himself could not drive, he had himself chauffeured around by a series of drivers—Emil Maurice, Julius Schreck and Erich Kempka.
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Hitler always sat in the front seat next to his chauffeur, studying the map. Before 1933, he loved going fast, and the luxury Mercedes models easily did over 100 kilometres an hour. “He couldn’t see another car on the road in front without ordering his driver to pass it and leave it in the dust,” Otto Dietrich reported.
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After he became chancellor, Hitler set his drivers a speed limit, and for security reasons he now never went anywhere without a commando of bodyguards. But in the years before he took power, Hitler logged hundreds of thousands of kilometres, and sometimes it was inner restlessness and not business that made him take to the roads. “We lead the lives of gypsies,” Goebbels remarked in January 1929.
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Hitler often travelled the 150 miles between Munich and Berchtesgaden in an open-top car, regularly stopping at the Lambach Inn on the northern shore of Lake Chiemsee. He loved to picnic for hours by the side of the road with his entourage. It was a chance for him to briefly slip out of the role of Führer. “Picnic under the pines,” Goebbels jotted down in July 1933. “Four hours amidst nature. Hitler very happy. A normal person among normal people.”
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