Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (94 page)

Hitler had taken a huge gamble and won. The diplomats and military leaders who had warned him about the risks looked like timorous naysayers, and Hitler’s immediate circle now registered a change in the way the Führer appeared and behaved. More than ever before, Otto Dietrich recalled, Hitler considered himself infallible and began to perceive objections and doubts as attacks upon the “sovereignty of his will.”
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Martha Dodd, the daughter of the American ambassador in Berlin, also noticed the transformation. Whereas Hitler had previously seemed modest, even shy, on social occasions, he now behaved as if he were the creator of the world and mankind.
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Hitler’s increasing overestimation of himself went hand in hand with his growing impatience to achieve his foreign-policy goals. In 1934, he had assumed that Germany would need ten years of peace to arm the Reichswehr so it would be combat-ready. Now he set much shorter deadlines.
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His coup in the Rhineland reinforced his tendency to go for broke. “Neither threats nor warnings will make me stray from my path,” he had announced in Munich on 14 March. “With the certainty of a sleepwalker, I am travelling the road Providence has sent me down.”
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Hitler’s popularity was so great by this point that the majority of Germans did not bat an eyelid at such hubris.

16

Cult and Community

“It is the miracle of our age that you found me…among so many millions,” Hitler proclaimed at the Nuremberg Party Conference on 3 September 1936. “And that I found you is Germany’s great fortune.” With these words Hitler sought to suggest a mystical unity between himself as Führer and his followers. In a speech to NSDAP political directors two days earlier, he had already struck a pseudo-religious tone: “Once in the days of yore, you heard the voice of a man, and it touched your hearts, it awakened you, and you followed it…When we meet here, we are suffused with wonder at our coming together. Not all of you can see me, and I cannot see all of you. But I can feel you, and you can feel me.”
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Such messianic rhetoric appealed to the desire of Hitler’s followers who looked up to him as their supposed saviour with an unprecedented willingness to believe. Much of the evidence suggests that the dictator also saw himself as such and believed what he told his vassals. Hitler quickly forgot that he owed his rise to power not to some miracle but to a unique constellation of political crises, and that at the precise moment when his bid for power was about to fail he had been heaved into the Chancellery by a sinister plot.

The suggestion of unity of
Volk und Führer
—the people and its leader—had an effect on Hitler’s detractors as well as his supporters. By March 1937, Victor Klemperer had given up any hope for change, confiding to his diary: “Hitler does indeed seem to be his people’s chosen one. Gradually I have come to believe that his regime will last for decades.”
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On the other hand, there were some dissenting voices who warned contemporaries not to be blinded by spectacles staged by the regime. The “impossibility of free speech” and the fear of being informed upon, wrote one of the SPD in exile’s informants, led “the average observer to overestimate the extent and above all the solidity of the government’s support.”
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So how much support did Hitler really enjoy? How great was the consensus between the government and the people? Is it correct to describe the first years of the Third Reich as one of those rare historical moments when, to quote the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “the leader’s rule and popular opinion were in complete agreement”?
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Even during his meteoric rise, Hitler had profited from his image as a charismatic leader ascribed to him by his true-believing apostles Hess and Goebbels. He promised to overcome the very crisis that had borne him aloft, to restore domestic order after years of latent civil war, to establish an ethnic-popular community (
Volksgemeinschaft
) beyond political quarrels and class conflicts, and to lead Germany to a new era of national greatness. Hitler became a beacon of hope to millions of people disappointed by the Weimar Republic and embittered by the “dictates” of the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler knew that he would lose the aura of a saviour if he disappointed the expectations people had of him. Thus he did everything he could to encourage the belief that the new cabinet, in contrast to its predecessors, was decisively tackling Germany’s most pressing problems, above all mass unemployment. Under the slogan of “national renewal,” a mood of optimism was created, and a social dynamic set in motion, which gave the impression that “under this government things are looking up for Germany.”
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The first signs of economic recovery in the spring of 1933 seemed to confirm this impression. Hitler was credited for his tireless energy in the “labour battle,” and bourgeois circles also appreciated the fact that, at the same time, he brutally suppressed the political Left. “The thoughts and feelings of most Germans are completely dominated by Hitler,” remarked Luise Solmitz a few days before the Reichstag election of 5 March. “His fame is shooting to the stars. He is the saviour in an evil, sad, German world.” When she asked an acquaintance who had previously rejected National Socialism which party she intended to vote for, the woman answered: “Hitler of course!…We now have to support his cause with all means at our disposal!”
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This semi-legitimate election, which yielded a major success, if not an absolute majority, further boosted Hitler’s status. “A powerful national enthusiasm” was how Elisabeth Gebensleben described the mood in a letter to her daughter, adding: “There has hardly been an emperor who was celebrated as greatly as Hitler is loved, honoured and admired.” After the announcement that made 1 May a national holiday, Gebensleben asked herself how Hitler had succeeded in “welding together a people that was divided and miserable.” Only a few days later, she enthused: “What people can boast of a man even vaguely comparable to him?”
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In November 1933, the Swiss envoy in Berlin, Paul Dinichert, concluded: “Unlimited trust in the Führer has undoubtedly spread to broad segments of the people in the preceding few months. Everywhere, in all strata of the populace, you meet people who are completely subordinate and look up to him with the most profound admiration.”
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No one could have foreseen how widespread the cultish worship of Hitler would become after only six months of his regime. Cities and communities made him an honorary citizen,
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and streets and squares were named after him. In April 1933, Hamburg’s Rathausplatz was rechristened Adolf Hitler Square. The intent was to symbolically commandeer public space and erase representatives of democratic traditions from Germany’s collective memory.
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Whole postal sacks full of fan mail arrived every day at the Chancellery, and Hitler’s private office, which was directed by Martin Bormann’s brother Albert, had to take on four additional employees. Ordinary people expressed their adulation of Hitler in countless poems. “O leader you, the tool / In God’s hands to reverse our fate / Press boldly on / Behind you a cohesive front / Solidly one as if cast in ore / Man for man,” wrote a Hitler admirer from the southern German town of Schöneich, who also thanked the “most honourable Reich chancellor” for the pleasure he derived from “studying your
Mein Kampf
.”
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The Chancellery was swamped by requests for Hitler to serve as godfather to newborn children. In November 1933, Hitler’s chief assistant, Wilhelm Brückner, was forced to put a stop to it, writing to one applicant: “As much as the Führer welcomes the loyalty and affection expressed in such requests, he is incapable of satisfying all of them given their sheer number. He has therefore decided only to assume the role of godfather in very exceptional cases such as a family’s seventh son or ninth child in total.”
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The cultish worship of the Führer took on some fairly bizarre forms. The East Prussian village of Sutzken, for instance, requested permission to rename itself “Hitler Heights,” and a Düsseldorf Nazi Party member tried to name his daughter “Hitlerine.” (The authorities suggested Adolfine as an alternative.) “Hitler oaks” were planted, “Hitler cakes” baked, and “Hitler roses” were bred. The Reich Association of Dog Owners applied for permission to mint a commemorative coin with the image of “our beloved Führer, who is himself a breeder and lover of pure-bred dogs.” The senate of the Eberswalde Academy of Forestry awarded Hitler an honorary doctorate in recognition of his support “for the culture of our native soil, the promotion of the agricultural classes and the encouragement of timber cultivation and the timber industry”; Hitler refused to accept the honour as a matter of “principle.”
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A lively trade in Hitler busts developed, and the image of the Führer adorned beer steins, porcelain tiles, ashtrays, playing cards, fountain pens and other banal everyday objects. The selling of Hitler kitsch and devotional trifles grew so quickly that as early as April 1933 the government announced it was taking measures to rein in the commercial exploitation of the Führer’s likeness.
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Such excesses of cultish worship, as laughable as they may appear today, were serious expressions of the intense, erotically charged connection between large segments of the German population and Hitler. The cultish worship of the Führer was by no means just the product of a clever campaign of manipulation. On the contrary, “ethnic comrades,” male and female, fell over themselves to exalt Hitler, projecting all their hopes and desires onto the figure of the Führer and thereby divorcing their image of him even further from reality. The propagandistic staging of the Hitler myth and the eagerness of the masses to endorse and subjugate themselves to it encouraged one another.

Enthusiasm for Hitler reached an initial zenith on the occasion of his forty-fourth birthday on 20 April 1933. “In a unison of hearts scarcely imaginable a few weeks ago, the people declared its allegiance to Adolf Hitler as leader of the new Germany,” wrote the
Münchener Neueste Nachrichten
newspaper. The countless messages of congratulation preserved in the files of the Führer’s office suggest that the paper was not exaggerating. Goebbels captured the sentiment of the day in a congratulatory article in which he celebrated Hitler as “a man of very great stature” who exercised a “mysterious magic” over everyone who came in contact with him. Hitler, the propaganda minister claimed, had not changed through all the highs and lows of his career. “The longer one knows him,” Goebbels wrote, “the more one learns to appreciate and love him, and the more unreservedly one is prepared to devote oneself to his great cause.”
¹⁵
Such encomia reflected a shift in public attitudes. Hitler was no longer the polarising leader of a political party, but a figure of integration who embodied national unity and a “people’s chancellor” who stood above all quarrelling. Victor Klemperer, who carefully monitored the language used by the Third Reich, noted: “To be added next to
protective custody
in my lexicon is
people’s chancellor.
”
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Birthday gifts were piled high in the Great Hall of the Chancellery, where Bismarck had chaired the Berlin Congress of 1878, reminding Hitler’s assistant Fritz Wiedemann of a “department store.” “There was a bit of everything,” Wiedemann recalled,

from a valuable oil painting some industrialist had given him to a pair of woollen socks from some old lady…In total it was a collection of a few nice things and a whole lot of kitsch. But whether they were valuable or not, they were moving expressions of the admiration and love the broad masses of the people felt for this man.
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Popular Hitler worship was in evidence throughout the Third Reich. In cinemas, there would be cascades of applause whenever the weekly newsreels showed the Führer’s image, as the Polish journalist Count Antoni Sobanski observed to his amazement in the spring of 1933.
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Most people voluntarily adopted the “Heil Hitler” greeting, with increasing numbers meaning it sincerely, rather than simply going along with the crowd. In April 1933, Annemarie Köhler, the doctor from the town of Pirna to whom Klemperer entrusted his diary, wrote of how “fanatical” the staff at her hospital had become. “They sit around the radio,” Köhler related. “When the ‘Horst Wessel Song’ is played…they all stand up and perform the raised-arm Nazi salute.”
¹⁹
The salute became an inviolable custom in many National Socialist families. A letter to the “honorable Führer” from a family in Mannheim in March 1933 read: “Our little Rita would like to send her regards to the Führer with a Heil Hitler! For that reason, we have taken the liberty of enclosing a photo of her performing the German salute. She is ten months old and is the youngest of five. Whenever we show her a picture of Uncle Adolf, she immediately salutes.”
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