Hitler's Charisma (25 page)

The attitude of Halifax to Hitler has a huge amount in common with the initial view of Hitler held by elite German politicians like von Papen and Hindenburg. They too thought Hitler an ill-educated rabble-rouser when they met him for the first time. In fact, von Papen and Lord Halifax were strikingly similar in key aspects of their character and beliefs. Both were aristocratic and possessed an intense sense of the virtues and obligations of the patrician class to which they belonged; and both were deeply religious—Halifax was nicknamed the “Holy Fox” by Churchill because of his love of fox hunting and his piety. Whilst, of course, it’s certainly not the case that every aristocratic and pious German was immune to Hitler’s charisma, it is worth noting that core members of the conspiracy against Hitler that culminated in the bomb plot of July 1944 also lived by aristocratic and religious values.

However, it should be remembered that there were a number of members of the British elite who encountered Hitler during this period who
did
feel he possessed a certain charisma. Not just dizzy members of the upper class like Unity Mitford, but experienced politicians like the former Prime Minister Lloyd George, who wrote in 1936 that he believed Hitler was “a born leader of men. A magnetic and dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will and a dauntless heart.”
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Still believing that Hitler did not want war, Chamberlain met on 18 September with a French delegation headed by the Prime Minister
Édouard Daladier. Together, the British and the French put pressure on the Czech government to give up the Sudetenland to Germany. Reluctantly, and recognising the hopelessness of their position if they did not agree, the Czechs succumbed. Chamberlain then flew back to Germany on 22 September and met Hitler once again, this time at Bad Godesberg just south of Bonn on the river Rhine. Chamberlain delivered what Hitler wanted, and believed he had prevented war.

But in response, Hitler demanded that matters be completely sorted out by 1 October—less than ten days away—and that the new border be agreed there and then. There would be no calm, international supervision of the handover as the British proposed. Chamberlain was dumbfounded. This was not “reasonable” behaviour. He returned to Britain on 24 September uncertain as to whether Hitler would moderate his demands or not.

Meanwhile, Chamberlain’s attitude towards Hitler was beginning to trouble Duff Cooper, First Lord of the Admiralty. He had listened carefully to Chamberlain’s views and had reached the conclusion that Hitler had “cast a spell”
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over the British Prime Minister. “After all,” Cooper wrote in his diary on 24 September 1938, “Hitler’s achievement is not due to his intellectual attainments nor to his oratorical powers but to the extraordinary influence which he seems able to exercise over his fellow creatures. I believe that Neville is under that influence at the present time.” And Cooper was not alone in thinking that Hitler had somehow suborned the British Prime Minister. Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, a key official who had been excluded from Chamberlain’s lightning trips to the Berghof and Bad Godesberg, wrote in his diary on 24 September: “I was completely horrified—he [i.e., Neville Chamberlain] was quite calmly for total surrender. More horrified still to find that Hitler has evidently hypnotised him to a point.”
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Had Hitler really “hypnotised” or “cast a spell” over Chamberlain? Had the British Prime Minister fallen for Hitler’s charisma? Chamberlain certainly qualified his initial negative view of Hitler, confiding to the Cabinet that “it was impossible not to be impressed with the power of the man.”
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Just as other immaculately mannered members of the German elite had discovered in the past, Chamberlain had learnt that Hitler could not be dealt with like any normal statesman, and the British Prime Minister had clearly been confused by direct exposure to Hitler’s actions
and personality. Hitler did not operate within the bounds of diplomatic propriety. Screams, tantrums, rapid changes of mood, sulks—all of these emotional techniques were uniquely at Hitler’s disposal during these encounters. As Chamberlain said of Hitler the following year, “I shouldn’t like to have him as a partner in my business.”
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So if Chamberlain was not a casualty of Hitler’s charisma, he was certainly buffeted around by Hitler’s moods as he desperately sought a way of coming to an arrangement with the German chancellor.

These days must have represented a torment for Chamberlain. How was it possible, he asked, that Hitler could be offered everything he said he wanted, and yet still sought to impose impossible conditions on the implementation of those demands? (Of course, Hitler never expected the British and French to be able to deliver the Sudetenland to Germany, and he was now confused about the best way forward himself, since his reason for war had been snatched away.) As Chamberlain said in his infamous radio broadcast on 27 September 1938, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war …”
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However, Lord Halifax was now against giving in completely to Hitler—as, naturally enough, were the Czechs. With the mood shifting, both the British and the French told the Germans that if Czechoslovakia was invaded then they would go to war. But still, Chamberlain offered to go once more to Germany to talk to Hitler and a conference to discuss the crisis was then held in Munich on 29 September. The meeting was held in Hitler’s office, just yards from the two “honour temples” containing the remains of those “martyrs” killed during the Beer Hall Putsch fifteen years before.

Here a deal was brokered between the British and French on one side and the Germans on the other. Mussolini had been asked to help facilitate a way out of the impasse—one which had been entirely caused by Hitler’s own uncertainty about whether or not he wished to keep upping his demands to a point that would cause war. In the event, Germany was granted the Sudetenland and the British and French managed to push through an attempt at face-saving by insisting on slightly less land being transferred to Germany over a slightly longer period than Hitler had intitially
demanded (but still with the process to be completed in less than two weeks). Astonishingly to modern eyes, representatives of the one nation directly affected—the Czechs—were not asked to the talks. The deal was effectively forced on them afterwards—and how could they refuse when all the great European powers were now ranged against them? It would not be the last time that the British agreed to give away territory without representatives of the country affected present at the meeting—they were to do the same thing to the Poles at the Tehran and Yalta conferences less than seven years later.

The Munich agreement was hugely welcomed in Britain. When Chamberlain landed back from Munich at Heston airport on 30 September he was greeted by the Earl of Clarendon, the Lord Chamberlain, who invited him to travel straight to Buckingham Palace for an audience with the King. There had even been a suggestion that the King should meet Chamberlain at the airport in order to congratulate him on his achievement.
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A few days later Germans in the Sudetenland, like Günther Langer, watched in wonder as the Wehrmacht arrived. “They just came out of the forest,” he says. “As they came by we all clamoured with joy, we were delighted, we invited them in, we gave them food, we gave them drink, we talked with them, yes, and we were happy. The joy at our redemption was very great and it was welcomed by all. I’ll tell you something: when you heard how well the Germans in Germany had it compared with us then it’s no wonder, is it? People said, thank God, times are changing for us now … Because we knew we were being freed at last from this Czech yoke. Everyone was jubilant. And the few who say the opposite, that isn’t true, everyone was delighted about it. But that such a thing might result, of course, in the Second World War, nobody imagined that.”
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Hitler still felt a sense of urgency. He had been making a number of remarks in recent months about his age. He was concerned, as Professor Richard Evans puts it, that he “didn’t have that long to run.”
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And as well as these personal fears about his life expectancy, he had also made it clear at meetings back in May that it was in Germany’s interest to act now, before France and Britain had completed their rearmament. However, in the course of Chamberlain’s three attempts at shuttle diplomacy Hitler had also learnt that some of his key Nazi comrades were anxious about a future conflict with Britain and France. Göring, for instance, tried to
talk Hitler out of war, and Goebbels realised that Chamberlain’s offer to give up the Sudetenland took away the propaganda reason for any conflict. Goebbels thought that it would be tough to persuade the German population to go to war on the technicality of transfer arrangements for the Sudetenland into the Reich.
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Goebbels had also—in the presence of several other leading figures in the regime—warned Hitler that there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm in the country as a whole for war.
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Nor was Hitler’s potential military ally, Italy, keen on conflict with the West, as evidenced by Mussolini’s desire to take part in the peace talks at Munich. So Hitler waited.

By stepping back from war Hitler also—knowingly or unknowingly—stopped a potential mutiny. How serious was any plot against him is a subject that has been debated amongst historians for many years.
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Perhaps surprisingly, given his past behaviour, Ludwig Beck was not the instigator of the conspiracy. He had resigned as Chief of the General Staff in the middle of August, though he had been asked by Hitler to keep this decision confidential for now. Beck was replaced by General Franz Halder, and it was Halder who had held discussions with sympathetic colleagues about the possibility of resisting Hitler’s order to invade Czechoslovakia so that a war with France and Britain could be prevented. After the Munich conference, these plans—if formal plans they were—collapsed. However, given Hitler’s hold of the SS and the rest of the Nazi infrastructure, and the number of junior soldiers in the German army who loyally supported him and trusted his judgement, it is hard to see how Halder’s desire to stop Hitler could have succeeded—short of killing him, and that in 1938 would have been a step too far for many of the conspirators.

Having emerged from the immediate prospect of war with Britain and France, Hitler was faced with what appeared to democratic Western politicians as a stark choice—to follow a road to peaceful coexistence with other European countries, or to continue to pursue a policy of expansion that could only lead to conflict. For Hitler, however, this was no choice at all—he was always moving towards war.

Yet Chamberlain showed every sign of believing that Hitler was sincere when he signed the infamous “piece of paper” on the morning of 30 September in which he stated that he was keen, alongside Chamberlain, to “assure the peace of Europe.” In part, of course, Chamberlain was simply hoping for the best. The idea that Hitler was mendacious was just
too horrible to contemplate. The notion that the German head of state would publicly agree to something that was the direct opposite of his intentions was anathema to Chamberlain. (And Chamberlain wasn’t the last British Prime Minister to be taken in by a dictator. After the conference at Yalta in February 1945, Winston Churchill returned and told his ministers, “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.”
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The subsequent history demonstrated, of course, that Churchill was as wrong about Stalin as Chamberlain had been about Hitler.)
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At a meeting on 14 October 1938 at the Air Ministry in Berlin—little more than two weeks after the Munich conference—Hitler, via his loyal servant Hermann Göring, made his real intentions abundantly clear. Göring said that because of the “situation in the world” the Führer had instructed him “to carry out a gigantic programme [of armaments building] compared to which previous achievements are meaningless.”
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It was an astonishing—almost mind-boggling—expansion plan. “Very dramatically in the autumn of 1938 they plan to establish an airforce of 20,000 aircraft,” says Professor Adam Tooze, “which is the size of the U.S. Army Airforce at the end of the Second World War, the largest air arm that anybody had seen up to that point. So it’s an extraordinarily ambitious programme for a small European state to have maintained, far bigger than anything the RAF was able to assemble by 1945. It would have consumed in terms of annual spending something like a third of German gross domestic product in peacetime before the war had even started, whereas normal military expenditure would be something like two, three, four per cent of GDP, so tenfold what NATO, for instance, was demanding of its members in the 1970s and 1980s.”
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Moreover, as Tooze calculated, in order to keep this planned new air force flying, “Germany would have needed to purchase fuel in the early 1940s at the rate of three million cubic metres per annum, twice the current level of global production.”
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Not surprisingly, the whole German economy was now almost breaking under the strain of Hitler’s rearmament targets. “The financial situation of the Reich is catastrophic,” wrote Goebbels in December 1938. “It cannot go on like this.”
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Hitler had driven Germany into an unenviable position. He intended war, regardless of what agreements he had signed. But the scale of his new armaments expansion plan was ludicrous. Göring himself came close to admitting this: “One could almost arrive at the
conclusion:
non possumus
[not possible],” he told the Defence Council. However, Göring then remarked that he had, when faced with a similar situation in the past, “never given up” and “eventually” he had “always found a way out.”
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