Hitler's Charisma (18 page)

There was, in fact, no evidence that Stalin was operating alongside any Jewish group—but Hitler’s rhetoric was so certain, so persuasive, that it influenced many who heard it. For Hitler, one of the many advantages of claiming that there was a secret, worldwide “conspiracy” amongst the Jews was that any inconsistencies in his vision could be explained away by saying that the Jews sought to confuse and conceal “the truth.” For a young man like Johannes Hassebroek, this kind of thinking offered an easy way of understanding the world. He said he was “full of gratitude”
⁷
for “the intellectual guidance” given to him. Before joining the Nazis and then the SS he and his comrades had been “bewildered.” They “did not understand” what was happening around them as “everything was so mixed up.” But now they had been offered “a series of simple ideas” that they could understand and believe in.

Jutta Rüdiger, by 1937 leader of the Nazi League of German Girls (the BDM), says that Hitler “spoke to the young people so simply and so understandably—and I suppose that was his gift—that they could follow him perfectly and even a very simple person could understand what he was saying.”
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And in expressing himself in this easily comprehensible way, Hitler could always be relied upon to be true to his racist world view. “Once, for instance,” explains Jutta Rüdiger, “he said, ‘Well, in Africa people can just lie down underneath a banana tree’—that might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but nevertheless—‘and the bananas grow into their mouths. But here in Germany we have to make provisions for the winter. We have to make sure that we have coal and potatoes stored in the cellar and we have to work for that.’ ”

Each year that Hitler remained in power and pushed for ever-greater rearmament, he focused more and more on the goal that he had expressed in
Mein Kampf
of seizing territory from the Soviet Union to create a vast Nazi empire in the east. For those at the time who observed Hitler at work
and at leisure, like Herbert Döhring who was the SS manager of Hitler’s house, the Berghof in Bavaria, it was obvious how the Führer perceived himself. “He saw himself as the saviour of the Western world, because at that time, under Stalin, Communism was very strong. And he felt he had been called to do something to save the Western world.”
⁹

In 1936, a year before his speech at Nuremberg in which he spoke of the dangers which stemmed from the “Jewish–Bolshevik” leadership in Moscow, Hitler had laid out a similarly apocalyptic vision in a secret memo—only this time he had openly stated that he believed Germany’s destiny was to confront the Soviet Union militarily. Even in this memo he linked the Soviet leadership to a Jewish conspiracy—demonstrating, if anyone still doubted it, that he genuinely believed this crackpot idea. “Since the outbreak of the French Revolution,” he wrote, showing once again that history had been his favourite subject at school, “the world has been moving with ever increasing speed towards a new conflict,” one which would be caused by the necessity to prevent “Bolshevism” from attempting to replace the current leaders of society with members of “world-wide Jewry.”
¹⁰

This memo went much further than the speech he gave in public the following year at Nuremberg. Hitler, like Goebbels, understood that public opinion had to be manipulated slowly over time. “Propaganda is like a convoy in war,” Goebbels told his press adjutant Wilfred von Oven, “which has to make its way to the target under heavy military protection. It has to adjust its marching speed to suit the slowest of the unit.”
¹¹

During one of their increasingly rare meetings, the contents of Hitler’s memo were shared with the Cabinet on 4 September 1936. Göring, with his penchant for pugnacious summary, announced that Hitler’s memo “starts from the basic premise that the showdown with Russia is inevitable”
¹²
and that Germany must continue to prepare wholeheartedly for war. Göring’s tone was one of breezy confidence, the basis of which was a supreme faith in Hitler’s charismatic leadership. All these plans could be accomplished, Göring said, because “through the genius of the Führer things which were apparently impossible have very quickly become reality.”
¹³

This was the kind of “can-do” attitude that was typical of Göring—the archetypal adventurer. “Of all the big Nazi leaders, Hermann Göring was for me by far the most sympathetic,” wrote Sir Nevile Henderson, British ambassador to Berlin from May 1937. “In any crisis, as in war, he
would be quite ruthless. He once said to me that the British whom he really admired were those whom he described as the pirates, such as Francis Drake, and he reproached us for having become too ‘debrutalised.’ He was, in fact, himself a typical and brutal buccaneer, but he had certain attractive qualities, and I must frankly say that I had a real personal liking for him.”
¹⁴

Göring was appointed in October 1936 to head a Four Year Plan designed to ready Germany for war by increasing spending on armaments, decreasing Germany’s reliance on raw materials from abroad, and achieving all this whilst keeping the standard of living of the general population at an acceptable level. It was a task that would have been beyond the ability of the most talented economist, let alone a former fighter pilot who happily confessed that he knew nothing about economics but had an “unbridled will.”
¹⁵

Despite his obvious intellectual deficiencies, Göring was of enormous value to Hitler. From the very first moment that he met Hitler back in 1922, Göring had accepted Hitler’s charismatic leadership. As a result, he was admitted to the coterie of people around Hitler who knew that their Führer intended to provoke a future conflict. Another who was aware of the magnitude of the events ahead of them was Walther Darré—like Göring, a hard-line committed Nazi—who had announced earlier in 1936 to officials from the
Reichsnährstand
, the National Food Estate, that “The natural area for settlement by the German people is the territory to the east of the Reich’s boundaries up to the Urals, bordered in the south by the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and the watershed which divides the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic and the North Sea. We will settle this space, according to the law that a superior people always has the right to conquer and to own the land of an inferior people.”
¹⁶

Hitler knew that there were those in his government who, unlike Göring and Darré, did not share a belief in his charismatic genius—the finance minister Hjamlar Schacht, for instance, who had already seen his power shrink as a result of squabbles over jurisdiction with officials working for the Four Year Plan. He resigned as Minister of Economics in 1937 and was eventually replaced by the malleable Nazi, Walther Funk. However, in any attempt to confront his twin enemies (or as he saw it, his one single, combined enemy) of Judaism and Bolshevism, Hitler realised that the most important power group he had to deal with was the army. He
had already gained the trust and admiration of Werner von Blomberg, the Minister of Defence, in the wake of the suppression of Röhm and the SA. Indeed, Blomberg almost came to hero worship Hitler. Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, who was Blomberg’s adjutant during the 1930s, remembers how his boss would return energised from meetings with Hitler, praising all the Führer’s ideas—big and small. “For instance,”
¹⁷
recalls Boehm-Tettelbach, “Hitler was thinking of his career as a soldier in the First World War … [and how] there was a captain on a horse ahead of 100–110 people who carried a heavy rucksack. ‘That’s not the way to conduct a modern war,’ [said Hitler]. ‘He [the captain] should walk and his horse should pull a cart and the heavy rucksacks should be pulled by the horse.’ ” Blomberg was in awe of this and virtually all of Hitler’s various other suggestions.

The fundamental anti-Semitism of Hitler and the Nazis was not of much consequence to Blomberg and the rest of the army leadership. Ludwig Beck, for example, the Chief of Staff of the German Army, wrote to a friend saying that the decision whether or not Jews should be expelled from army veterans’ associations “should primarily be left to the respective member’s tact.”
¹⁸
He also remarked that “I am also aware that in several cases, former Officers of the Reserve, who are non-Aryans, have voluntarily resigned from associations in order to not expose themselves or others to any inconvenience.” Beck thus tried to turn the anti-Semitism of the Nazis into a test of good manners.

“A certain anti-Semitic feeling still exists today, in England and France and Italy and Germany,” says Johann-Adolf Kielmansegg, then a young Army officer. “But that has nothing to do with the fundamental concept of the extermination of the Jews … And these gradual tightening measures against the Jews [during the 1930s] didn’t allow one in any way to see what would come out of it.”
¹⁹
However, the actions of the army leadership in support of the Nazi regime during this period went much further than the “traditional” anti-Semitism that Kielmansegg mentions. Senior commanders like Ludwig Beck accepted that officers should receive instruction on “racial hygiene” and “racial biology”
²⁰
in line with Nazi ideological thinking.

But whilst, in principle, officers like Blomberg and Beck may have agreed with Hitler about the threat from Bolshevism, and also that Germany should strive to become more self sufficient—even to the extent that, one day, it might be necessary to try and expand east in search of an
empire—that was a long way from setting a specific timetable to accomplish such a goal. In this respect, Hitler was able to use his long-expressed desire to “right the wrongs of Versailles” as a smokescreen to conceal the timescale of his desire to fight Bolshevism on Soviet soil. For whilst the practical consequences of an invasion of the Soviet Union within the next few years might have frightened many German officers, an attempt to revoke the terms of the Versailles settlement was a good deal less terrifying. Ludwig Beck, for example, in a speech in Hitler’s presence in October 1935 at the
Kriegsakademie
, said he hoped that German officers would realise the “obligation” which they owed to the “patron of the German Wehrmacht [i.e., Adolf Hitler]” because of his efforts to break “the shackles of Versailles.”
²¹

Beck also came to the conclusion, after he had spent time with Hitler over dinner, that he felt no personal bond with the Führer. As far as he was concerned—and in sharp contrast to the feelings of his superior, Werner Blomberg—Hitler possessed no charisma at all. But that did not matter. Hitler was supporting the army in every way possible. Rearmament was proceeding apace, universal military conscription was reintroduced in March 1935 and the Rhineland had been reoccupied by the German army in 1936. For Beck, whether the man who had made all this possible possessed charisma or not was irrelevant.

But, demonstrably, there still remained much to be done to break the “shackles of Versailles” completely. One of the most glaring legacies of the treaty, for instance, remained the continued separation of East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The Poles now controlled a corridor of land between these two parts of Germany, and the port of Danzig, within the corridor, was under the sovereignty of the League of Nations. “As a young man I visited Danzig myself,” says Ulrich de Maizière, then an army officer, “because I had an aunt there, and I regarded Danzig as an absolutely German city. Everyone had hoped it could be solved through negotiations. And if Poland had been willing to negotiate in this question perhaps there would not even have been a war with Poland, I might dare to assert.” The fact that de Maizière, interviewed long after the end of the Second World War, could still believe that “negotiations” could have solved the issue of Danzig and the Polish corridor demonstrates how entrenched the belief was in some quarters that rearmament was designed simply to return Germany peacefully to its 1914 borders.

As 1937 came to an end there was thus a split in those who served Hitler. All of them knew of the power of his anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik beliefs—and many of them shared these views to a greater or lesser extent. But they divided into those—like Schacht and a number of senior figures in the army—who followed Hitler largely because of rational considerations, and those—like Göring and many other committed Nazis—who did their Führer’s bidding not just because they ideologically supported him, but because they accepted his charismatic leadership. They believed in faith rather than crude facts. And they, not surprisingly, were the people Hitler increasingly wanted to have around him.

The charismatic leader is not an ordinary politician who seeks to rule only after extensive consultation. There is an element of personal conviction, bordering on the magical, associated with the decision-making process of a person with charisma—a magic that the committee room destroys. And Hitler, who possessed a fanatical hatred of committee meetings, took this idea of only making important decisions in isolation to extremes.

It’s hard to think of another politician, for example, who could maintain that it was important
not
to read briefing notes and memos from close colleagues—but that was Hitler’s position. When, for example, in 1935 Martin Bormann sent a paper on youth issues to Hitler, he received a reply on 5 June from Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler’s adjutant, which said, “I am returning to you the enclosed memorandum. The Führer received it but then gave it back to me at once unread. He himself wishes to deal with this question in his major speech at the next Party Rally and thus does not want his thinking to be influenced in any way from any quarter.”
¹
It was this attitude that was behind Göring’s remark to the British Ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, “When a decision has to be taken,
none of us count more than the stones on which we are standing. It is the Führer alone who decides.”
²

All this was in large part an illusion, of course. Hitler obviously received intellectual input from others—for instance, he had taken a great deal in the early years of the Nazi party from the views of Dietrich Eckart and Gottfried Feder. But he never gave anyone else credit for helping to form his opinions, and instead of talking with other people in an attempt to understand different points of view Hitler preferred to work on his ideas on his own.