Hitler's Charisma (23 page)

The violence of
Kristallnacht
was instigated both by initiatives from below and orchestration from above. Like the initiatives that led to the child euthanasia scheme, there was evidence of leading Nazis suggesting and then developing actions that they thought would please their boss. Philipp Bouhler wanted to grow his own power and that of the office of the Chancellery of the Führer, and Joseph Goebbels was anxious to redeem himself in Hitler’s eyes after the embarrassment of his affair with the Czech actress Lida Baarová and his consequent marital difficulties.

Nazis lived in a world where, in the words of Dr. Günter Lohse of the German Foreign Office, “Everybody wanted to be close to him [i.e., Hitler]. Just to live in his favour, to be in his presence, whether for lunch or for a discussion, didn’t matter. To be near him just once. That was the big event for the individual … I dare say that every proposal, from whatever side, that went to the Reich Chancellery, had behind it the desire to prove that one was a faithful supporter of Adolf Hitler’s.”
²⁹

But whilst that is true, it doesn’t completely explain the actions of the stormtroopers who smashed their way into Rudi Bamber’s house in Nuremberg and murdered his father. They were also keen to beat up and kill Jews and destroy their property out of their own deeply held beliefs. Over time these beliefs might have been supported and grown by Nazi propaganda and the structure of the Nazi state, but fundamentally they were beliefs which a number of vicious anti-Semities had held before Hitler even came on the scene. What Hitler offered them was release, and the power to act without restraint.

Even before the
Kristallnacht
violence,
Das Schwarze Korps
—the official magazine of the SS, had published articles that voiced extreme hatred against the Jews. And a week after the horrors of 9–10 November, an article entitled “This bunch is worse!” openly called for collective reprisals
against the Jews, and is revealing of a mentality that would later help create the death camps: “Woe betide the Jews, if even one of them or one of their accomplices, hired and filled with hatred by them, ever lifts up their murderous hand against one German! Not one [Jew] will be held responsible for a dead or wounded German, but they all will. This is what those should know, who didn’t get the message from our first moderate warning [i.e.,
Kristallnacht
]. Neither will we engage in nitpicky stunts of arithmetic about the guilt or innocence of individuals. Because we are not engaged in a war according to international law with the Jews … Jews and Germans are not equal partners in this; we will not be mentioned in the same breath as them. There is only one right, our right, our self-defence, and we alone will decide how and when it will be redeemed.”
³⁰
Another article in December 1938 was even more explicit about the potential fate of the Jews: “The day a murder weapon that is Jewish or bought by Jews rises against one of the leading men of Germany, there will be no more Jews in Germany! We hope we made ourselves clear!”
³¹

Das Schwarze Korps
also insisted that persecution should be immediately intensified against German Jews. “Because it is necessary, because we no longer hear the world’s clamour, and because no power on earth can stop us we will take the Jewish question to its total solution. The programme is clear: total expulsion, complete separation! What does this mean? This means not only the elimination of Jews from the German economy, which they have forfeited by their murderous attack and by their incitement to war and murder. The Jews must be removed from our homes and neighbourhoods, and be located in streets or blocks where they are amongst themselves and can be in contact with Germans as little as possible.”
³²

Hitler’s obsessions were now openly claimed as the shared passions of the SS. This was radical stuff, and revealed not only a powerful cocktail of hate and ambition, but demonstrated how ready the SS was for war. The bull terriers were off the leash.

On 31 August 1939, the day before soldiers of the Wehrmacht marched into Poland and precipitated the Second World War, the American journalist William L. Shirer wrote about the mood in Germany: “Everybody against the war. People talking openly [about it]. How can a country go into a major war with a population so dead against it?”
¹
Shirer’s opinion, about the depth of anti-war sentiment in Germany, was shared by officials in the SD, the intelligence division of the SS. They had written in a confidential report the previous year that the mood in Germany was “often gloomy, because of the future” and that “there exists in the broadest sections of the population the most serious concern that sooner or later a war will kill off the economic prosperity and have a terrible end for Germany.”
²
Another SD report stated that in the German countryside, “There was a major feeling of tension and disquiet everywhere, and one all-encompassing wish, ‘Please, no war!’ ”
³

Yet war was on the way nonetheless. And although, as with any major historical event, there were a myriad of causal factors, the fundamental reason why this war was about to happen was because Adolf Hitler willed it so—and his charismatic leadership helped turn that will into a reality.

Indeed, it’s the presence of Hitler in this history that makes the period from the start of 1938 until the outbreak of war such an extraordinary one. Conventional politicians like the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, were working on the basis that nobody actually
wanted
war. Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, realised that in order to get what he desired war was all but inevitable. Ernst von Weizäcker, State Secretary at the German Foreign Office, tried to explain the strangeness of this situation to the British ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson: “I have said to Henderson once again that this is not a game of chess but a rising sea. One cannot make the same kinds of assumptions as in normal times with normal reasons and normal people.”
⁴

But it wasn’t only the British who had problems in understanding that Hitler was not a “normal” statesman. Powerful Germans were also making the mistake of thinking that their Führer would listen to reasoned argument as well. Ludwig Beck, for instance, was still clinging to the mistaken belief that Hitler could be persuaded to be sober and pragmatic in the context of his foreign policy timing and aims. Beck continued to want the “good” things that he felt Hitler’s charisma and political instinct had brought Germany—in particular a resurgence of national pride and an ever-growing Army—without the “bad” things, like violent persecution of those who did not fit the Nazi image of the ideal German and the reckless pursuit of a new Nazi Empire. But Beck, like so many intelligent members of the German elite, had ultimately only himself to blame for his misjudgement. For, as Frederick Douglass, the American abolitionist, said in another context, he was the type of man who wanted “the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
⁵

Beck, and a number of his colleagues in the senior ranks of the German army, would soon discover the extent of their error as Hitler turned his sights on the neighbouring country of Czechoslovakia. Since Czechoslovakia was both a democracy and a creation of the settlements at the end of the First World War, Hitler was already predisposed to hate it. But there were also practical reasons why Czechoslovakia was a problem for Germany. It was impossible for Hitler to contemplate moving east without somehow neutralising the Czechs—they were geographically in the way of any expansion. Moreover, within Czechoslovakia lived just over three million ethnic Germans, mostly in the border region known as the Sudetenland.

Günther Langer, twenty-four years old in 1938, was one of the Sudeten Germans who felt persecuted in Czechoslovakia: “German businesses were boycotted and that’s why we actually ended up in a really dreadful state …” In his village, where the majority were of German ethnic origin, “we had a Czech postmaster, we had a Czech teacher, we had a Czech [local authority] chairman, and Czech street cleaners—so these posts were all lost to Germans. The Germans had all those jobs before, you see … That’s not all they [i.e., the Czech authorities] did, because they also exploited the Germans’ dire need and tempted the German children into the Czech school with promises. That was the so-called ‘entrapment of German souls.’ ”
⁶

The Nazis had for some years been supporting the Sudeten Germans in their call for greater independence within Czechoslovakia, and just days after the
Anschluss
Hitler met with Karl Frank and Konrad Henlein of the Sudeten German Party. He told them to make a series of demands on the Czech government that he knew would be unacceptable.

Initially it seemed that Hitler was in no hurry to force the Sudeten issue to a crisis. But after the British and French warned the German government not to take military action against the Czechs (ironically following a mistaken report about German intentions) Hitler called a meeting in Berlin on 28 May 1938 at which he announced that resolving this issue had become a priority. “I am utterly determined,” said Hitler, “that Czechoslovakia should disappear from the map.”
⁷
Hitler’s own adjutant, Fritz Wiedemann, said he was “very shocked”
⁸
by these words. But it was as nothing to the effect they had on Ludwig Beck.

Beck had already sent one memo to Brauchitsch, head of the army, on 5 May, pointing out that “there is no hope of solving the Czech question by military means and not involving England and France.”
⁹
And now, straight after Hitler revealed his intentions on 28 May, Beck returned to his desk to compose yet another warning memo. Once again he emphasised that Germany risked a “European, maybe even a world war” as a consequence of invading Czechoslovakia and that this war “will be lost by Germany.”
¹⁰
But Beck’s opposition to Hitler’s plan was weakened by two crucial factors. In the first place Beck agreed that the very existence of Czechoslovakia was a massive problem for any future plans for German expansion. The previous September he had remarked, “As long as the Czech appendix protrudes into Germany, she will be unable to
wage war.”
¹¹
The other problem Beck faced has intriguing echoes of the Strasser crisis back in 1932. Just like Gregor Srasser, Ludwig Beck professed to be immune to the charisma of Adolf Hitler. Yet—also just like Strasser—Beck now emphasised that he was upset that he could not gain access to Hitler directly. In the memo composed after the Hitler meeting on 28 May (sent to Brauchitsch on 30 May) Beck still acted as if—as he said in a memo six weeks later—“this fight is being fought for the Führer.”
¹²
As Manfred von Schröder, who was then a diplomat in the German Foreign Office, says, “Even Weizsäcker [then Secretary of State at the Foreign Office] believed that talking alone with Hitler one could have reasonable results … Everybody thought that one could go on with Hitler far better if all these governors and other party people were not always around, but reasonable people, you know.”
¹³

Thus, despite hearing on 28 May that Hitler intended in the near future to make Czechoslovakia “disappear from the map,” Beck continued to think that the solution was not the swift removal of Adolf Hitler but administrative change which would create “a clear demarcation of, and adherence to, respective responsibilities.”
¹⁴
And even though Beck was not overtly affected by Hitler’s charisma, one interpretation of this behaviour is that—just like Strasser—he was implicitly affected. The fact that Beck was pleased with so much that Hitler had achieved, and that he agreed with the overall objectives of Hitler’s plans for future expansion, blinded him to the reality that there was no “struggle” to be had “on behalf of the Führer” at all. He was not yet ready to admit openly that the problem was not access to Hitler, but Hitler himself.

Like Strasser, Schacht and Fritsch before him, Beck couldn’t fully grasp that Hitler was not susceptible to intelligent, reasoned criticism of his plans. The idea that someone could be head of the mighty and sophisticated German state—could have achieved so much already in just five years in power—and yet not be prepared to take advice from experts who were sympathetic to his goals simply did not make sense.

Then there was the question of the political and military atmosphere into which Beck launched his concerns. It was easy for someone like Beck, near the top of the military hierarchy, to underestimate the effect of five years of Nazi propaganda on the opinions of less senior officers. As Hitler himself had famously said in November 1933, “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child
belongs to us already … What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’ ”
¹⁵

These younger officers had all graduated from schools and a system of military training that not only emphasised the close relationship between the army and the Nazi state but trumpeted the genius of Adolf Hitler. Moreover, all these junior and middle-ranking officers knew that their own careers depended less on old-fashioned officers like Beck and more on the judgement of a new breed of politically aware military leaders who were more susceptible to Hitler’s vision.

That, in part, explains the mixed reaction to Beck’s attempt, at a military conference in June 1938, to explain the risks of an invasion of Czechoslovakia to his fellow officers. Edgar Röhricht, then a lieutenant colonel, later wrote that Beck simply came across as “speaking out against war amidst his own staff.” He also recorded that when his comrades gathered at the Hotel Esplanade in Berlin and mulled over what they’d heard, Major Rudolf Schmundt said that Beck clearly didn’t understand “the dynamism of the new regime” and if his advice had been followed “one would most likely still be a ridiculed petitioner sitting at the conference table of Geneva.” Hans Jeschonnek, a Luftwaffe officer still just in his thirties, went further, saying Beck had given no credence to the power of the new German air force: “Schlieffen [the architect of Germany’s invasion plan in the First World War] was [also] 20 years behind technological development—at the [battle of the] Marne we got our comeuppance. And for Beck our squadrons are nothing but an interfering add-on. But you will all get the shock of your life!”
¹⁶