Hitler's Charisma (21 page)

Fritsch and many of the other senior officers who had just been forcibly retired paid the penalty for having embraced the rule of Hitler. They had collaborated with Hitler’s regime to a considerable extent—they had sworn an oath to their Führer, adopted the swastika on their uniforms, removed their Jewish colleagues from their ranks, attended lectures on “racial hygiene,” but it was not enough to protect them.

The single most important precondition for the creation of Hitler’s charisma was his ability to connect with the feelings, hopes and desires of millions of his fellow Germans. It was in the nature of this connection that the power of his charisma resided. And after several years in office Hitler was increasingly able, through this link, to offer his followers a powerful sense of release. Not just release from the traumatic loss of the First World War and the humiliation of Versailles, as he had in the early years of his chancellorship, but release from the limitation of all conventional restraint.

Hitler, for example, said to Albert Speer’s wife in the 1930s, “Your husband is going to erect buildings for me such as have not been created for four thousand years.”
¹
It’s not hard to imagine the sense of liberation that this kind of remark must have created in Speer—already a ferociously ambitious architect. Hitler offered Speer a chance not just to become famous in Germany, not just famous throughout the world, but famous in history. Just as the Pyramids had been remembered, so would Speer’s buildings. Speer even later remarked, contemptuous of the suffering of Jews made to work as forced labourers in concentration camps, “After all, the Jews were already making bricks under the Pharaohs.”
²

But it was the German medical profession in the 1930s that most experienced a sense of release because of the presence of Adolf Hitler. Nearly half of all German doctors were members of the Nazi party and so, not surprisingly, many of them approved of Hitler’s racial policies. In particular, they supported his desire to introduce compulsory sterilisation of those the Nazis considered “undesirable.” Germany was not the first country to introduce such legislation. Switzerland had passed a law permitting forced sterilisation in 1928
³
and by the mid-1930s around thirty American States allowed compulsory sterilisation of some categories of the mentally ill. But it was to be the Nazis who were to embrace forced sterilisation on a scale that dwarfed everyone else.

In July 1933, just five months after becoming chancellor, Hitler pushed through the “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.” This allowed “Genetic Health Courts” to order the forcible sterilisation of those suffering not only from a variety of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, but also people who were deaf or blind as a result of a hereditary gene and even those who were chronic alcoholics.

The fundamental inhumanity of this practice is demonstrated by the case of Paul Eggert of Dortmund. He was the eldest of twelve children born to a father who had served in the First World War and was now “hitting the bottle … and well, he used to beat my mother, and there was nothing to eat.”
⁴
As the eldest he was sent out to beg for food from the local farmers. “And if I brought something back then it was OK, if not I would get beaten.” Eventually, “people had enough of it … so they told the social services and they sent us away. One in one direction, others in another direction.”

Paul was sent to a children’s hospital in Bielefeld where, unbeknownst to him at the time, he was classed as “delinquent.” Then, at the age of eleven, he was told that he had to have a hernia operation. It was only years later that he discovered that he had not been operated on for a hernia, but sterilised. The sense of personal violation he felt when he first heard the news remains as strong as ever: “I experience the same thing, every year, Christmas, Christmas Eve, my sister-in-law … they all have children, they run about downstairs, and I sit upstairs with my wife, I have no children running about, that’s not a nice thing.”

German doctors were not forced to sterilise children like Paul Eggert. They didn’t need to be since many medical professionals embraced the
opportunities the Nazi state offered them. As Professor Richard Evans says, “In German culture as a whole medicine had achieved enormous fame and prestige in the late 19th century with men like Robert Koch discovering the cause of tuberculosis, cholera and a whole range of other diseases. He was the Louis Pasteur of Germany, not as well known as Pasteur but I think he probably should be. Medicine had made huge strides in Germany and the prestige of the medical profession was just vast. Added to that there’s the Nazi racist notion of racial hygiene, that medicine had to take a lead in purging the German race of its degenerate elements and so medicine becomes by far the leading profession in the 1930s. More than half of all German university students by 1939 are studying medicine. It’s extraordinary. There are vast numbers of jobs in the army, the armed forces, in the SS, for medical people. Institutes of racial hygiene are set up everywhere and there’s a kind of arrogance about the belief that they can experiment on what they view as racially sub-human people or people who are inferior in some way or another, like criminals or concentration camp inmates. They believe that they’re entitled to do that for the future of the German race.”
⁵

It was against this background that more than 200,000 people were forcibly sterilised in the Nazi state (some estimates say as many as 350,000).
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This huge number was only possible because of the interaction between willing—often enthusiastic—members of the medical profession and the well-publicised views of a head of state who embraced racial selection and brutal social control as the cornerstones of existence. In
Mein Kampf
Hitler had said explicitly that “a state which in this age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements must some day become lord of the earth.”
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As a consequence doctors realised that their profession—always important—had become still more vital. Racism was an ersatz religion for Hitler, and so doctors were almost priests.

Because of the central place that race held in his world view, gaining the enthusiastic support of the medical profession was almost as much of a priority to Hitler as ensuring the backing of the army. And it is significant that Hitler had none of the problems with senior members of the medical profession that he had with prominent army officers like Fritsch or Beck. There were, of course, a number of individual doctors who objected to this Nazi interpretation of medical ethics, but the majority certainly went along with the introduction of forced sterilisation
⁸
and the supervision of
their profession by the “Reich Physicians Chamber.” It was, of course, in the economic interest of “Aryan” German doctors to embrace Nazi ideology, in part because further opportunities for advancement opened up for them as the Nazis progressively banned Jewish doctors from practising in Germany, a process that was finally completed in 1939 after a string of restrictive measures had been imposed from 1933 onwards.

This is not to say that the majority of German doctors necessarily supported the move from preventing racial “undesirables” from having children to eliminating them altogether. However, this was the policy that Hitler wanted to pursue. Astonishingly, he had made no secret of his commitment—in theory—to the idea of destroying the less productive members of German society. “If every year Germany had one million children,” he said in a speech at the Nuremberg rally in 1929, “and eliminated 700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest, the end result would probably be an increase in national strength.”
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But Hitler knew that racial reordering on this scale was currently impractical—not least because of the massive potential opposition from the families affected and the church.

However, the basic idea that it might be legitimate to kill some people for the overall benefit of the rest of society was not new—nor was the idea of killing the mentally disabled dreamt up by the Nazis. In 1920, a book called
Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens
(“Allowing the Destruction of Worthless Life”) was published, a collaboration between one of Germany’s leading jurists, Professor Karl Binding, and one of Germany’s most prominent psychiatrists, Professor Alfred Hoche. They were concerned that in the wake of the First World War large numbers of so-called “useless” people were living in Germany who were a “burden” to the state; they called such people
Ballastexistenzen
, literally those who exist only as “ballast.” Both Binding and Hoche rejected the idea of killing anyone who could consciously and rationally express the desire not to be killed. But those who were in a vegetative state or who were severely mentally ill could certainly be killed without consent. “We will never cease to treat to the utmost the physically and mentally ill,” wrote Professor Hoche, “as long as there is any prospect of changing their condition for the better; but we may one day mature into the view that the elimination of those who are mentally completely dead is not a crime, nor an immoral act, nor emotional cruelty, but a permissible and beneficial act.”
¹⁰

Behind this discussion about who could or could not be killed in a
“beneficial act” lies a notion central to Hitler’s world view—the primacy of the racial nation, or
Volk
, over the individual. As Franz Jagemann, who grew up in Germany in the 1930s, remembers, “It was hammered into us in the Hitler Youth, ‘Germany must live, even if we have to die.’ ”
¹¹
Thus the severely mentally ill
ought
to be killed not because they would, if they could, choose to die, but because they were useless to the nation.

The first step along this road had already been taken by the large numbers of doctors who had chosen to perform operations like forcible sterilisation that were not necessary for the medical welfare of the individual. At this point they had crossed a clear line of medical ethics. And the way they could rationalise their actions was for them to shift their responsibility of care from the individual to the nation. Just like Hitler, they now acted as if the health of the
Volk
—the racially pure German people as a whole—was of much greater importance than the health of the individual.
¹²

Nonetheless, Hitler realised that he had to proceed carefully towards a policy of murdering selected disabled Germans. He needed the proactive consent of at least some doctors, and—ideally—an element of support within the general public as well. To that end, a documentary film called
Opfer der Vergangenheit
(Victims of the Past) was released in German cinemas in 1937. The film showed images of chronically sick and disabled children whilst the commentary detailed how much it cost to keep them alive. It ended by stating, “By humanely terminating their wretched and helpless lives, we shall be observing our Creator’s law of natural selection and order.”
¹³

The Nazis had already been systematically reducing the amount of money that could be spent on disabled patients, and as a result conditions in mental hospitals grew worse and worse.
¹⁴
Local opinion-formers were now encouraged to visit the hospitals and see the disabled at close quarters—deliberately displayed in ways to make them look as much like
Ballastexistenzen
as possible. Bruno Hähnel, a committed Nazi, visited the mental hospital at Aplerbeck near Dortmund and formed this opinion: “The most shocking thing, that never left me, and which I saw in front of my eyes again and again, was the ward with the schizophrenics. It was a room in which there were, let’s say, forty cots, not really beds, but simply wooden planks. And on these forty beds lay naked emaciated people … and the professor said that this was the final stage of schizophrenia
and that the disease could attack any of us tomorrow, through some kind of mutation in the brain. This really worried me terribly, that this could really happen, and more than anything else I came away from this room with the understanding that the right thing to do was to kill people who are in such a state, not keep them alive, not like the way that the Christian Church teaches that each person is valuable … in my view the lives of such people were no longer worth living. That’s what I took away from this ward.”
¹⁵

The Nazis, of course, had themselves created the shocking conditions in which these patients were now forced to exist. As a result, it is no surprise that many visitors found their appearance appalling. It was the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy that was a common Nazi trick. The Nazis would subsequently use a similar technique in the context of the Polish Jews. By creating crowded, dirty and disease-ridden conditions in the Polish ghettos, the Nazis were then able to point to the distressing way the Jews lived as evidence to support their own prejudice against them.

Meanwhile, despite the support of Nazis like Bruno Hähnel for the idea of killing the severely mentally ill, Hitler was wary of introducing the policy in peacetime—though he could see a way ahead. In 1935 he remarked to Dr. Gerhard Wagner, the “Reich Health Leader,” that he would adopt such a policy once war began because in the context of a life and death struggle for the future of the nation such an action would be more readily accepted.
¹⁶

It is a revealing comment, because it demonstrates how Hitler understood that there are no absolutes in politics. It was never correct to say that one particular policy was impossible to implement, merely that a policy might be impossible to implement at this moment. As the circumstances changed, so did the potential receptiveness of the population to any new measure, and radical policies could best be introduced in radical times. This understanding was further allied to two related insights that Hitler possessed. The first was that he—chiefly through the work of Joseph Goebbels—had the power to try and systematically alter the views of the German population about the acceptability of any “euthanasia” programme. The ground prepared by
Opfer der Vergangenheit
, for example, would be further developed four years later with the film
Ich klage an
(I accuse) which examined the actions of a husband who killed his wife who was suffering from incurable multiple sclerosis.