Hitler's Charisma (28 page)

Whilst as a piece of political history this remarkable encounter is not hard to explain—Hitler must have felt that he should exploit even the slightest chance that Britain could be persuaded to stay out of any conflict over Poland, though he knew how unlikely such an outcome was—as an insight into Hitler the charismatic leader it is a good deal more intriguing. Dahlerus, never having met Hitler before, did not find Hitler “charismatic”: indeed, he wrote that he “had not seen a trace of the extraordinary fascination which he was popularly supposed to exercise upon everyone.”
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In fact, Dahlerus thought Hitler was not of sound mind.

Hitler, of course, lost his temper on a regular basis and had never had the ability to conduct normal negotiations over a long period, politely and in detail. Equally, he had before used his ability to self-generate his anger as a tactic in diplomatic discussions—most notably when the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg visited the Berghof on 12 February
1938. Hitler ranted and raved at Schuschnigg in the morning and then switched in an instant into a convivial host when he sat down to lunch with the Austrian delegation. Dr. Otto Pirkham, an Austrian diplomat present that day, noticed that Schuschnigg was “very depressed”
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at lunch after being lambasted by Hitler—almost in a state of shock.

But Hitler did not appear to be using his ranting as a conscious negotiating ploy with Dahlerus. In this instance Dahlerus appears to have encountered an important aspect of the real Hitler. We have already seen how a central part of Hitler’s personality was his limitless capacity to hate, and here that was allied to an emotionality that was given such free rein as to appear out of control. The ability to feel events emotionally and to demonstrate that emotion to others was a crucial part of his charismatic appeal, and before Hitler’s audience felt emotion, he had to feel it first.

But, increasingly, Hitler’s displays of raw emotion were resulting in other European statesmen and diplomats thinking that he was—as Dahlerus did—“patently unstable.” By this time Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Berlin, for example, thought Hitler was “quite mad” and had “crossed the borderline of insanity.”
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Yet, still, Hitler was the unchallenged leader of Germany. Indeed, Göring had witnessed Hitler’s tirade in front of Dahlerus with equanimity.

The reasons why Göring—along with countless other Germans—carried on backing Hitler during this decisive period offer insights into the way they experienced his leadership. In the first place, Göring had witnessed Hitler’s passionate harangues for years. And whilst foreigners might think Hitler “mad,” Göring and the rest of the Nazi elite were not predisposed to notice when the line between passion and dangerous instability was crossed. Manfred Schröder, for instance, was a young German diplomat and Nazi party member who witnessed Hitler’s behaviour at first hand in the Reich Chancellery immediately after President Hácha had been forced to agree to give up the Czech lands. Hitler was “talking the whole time”
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and “dictating to two secretaries” at once. At the time Schröder took this hyperactive behaviour as the sign of a “genius at work” but “when I look back today and I have the clear picture of him standing up and then sitting down again I think he was behaving like an absolute maniac.” From charismatic “genius” to “absolute maniac”—this was the same person’s judgement about Hitler, altered only by time and experience.

Another familiar belief that many who supported Hitler could fall back on in times of anxiety was the notion that Hitler was unduly influenced by wild and radical advisers. Just as Goebbels had decided at the Bamberg conference back in 1926 that Hitler was criticising Gregor Strasser’s plans because he had fallen into the clutches of the unsavoury Nazi leaders in Bavaria, so a number of people now blamed Ribbentrop, the war-mongering Foreign Secretary, for Germany’s rush to war. The question in the German Foreign Office, according to Manfred von Schröder, was now, “How can we get rid of Ribbentrop and get a direct contact with Hitler?” Paradoxically, this view that Hitler was somehow being led astray could co-exist with the overwhelming feeling that Hitler—deep down—knew what was best for Germany. Once again, this belief relied both upon the vast and seemingly unshakeable certainty that Hitler constantly demonstrated in his own judgement, and the fact that his recent adventures in foreign policy had all come right for Germany in the end. “Any doubts I might have had were quelled by the self-assurance Hitler showed,” wrote Albert Speer. “In those days he seemed to me like a hero of ancient myth who unhesitantly, in full consciousness of his strength, could enter and masterfully meet the test of the wildest undertakings.”
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Nevile Henderson also suspected that the key to Adolf Hitler’s success might be to do with his boundless self-confidence, backed up by his intuitive sense of what to do next. Henderson, like Dahlerus, never found Hitler charismatic and puzzled throughout his time in Berlin “wherein the greatness of Hitler lay, by what means he had succeeded as the undisputed Leader of a great people, and what was—to me—the hidden source of his influence over his followers and of their complete subservience to him.”
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One answer, Henderson discovered, was the Führer’s followers’ confidence in his intuition. “I constantly asked those in closest touch with Hitler in what his chief quality consisted. I was told almost unanimously, in his
Fingerspitzengefuehl
[tip of the finger feeling].”
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Closely allied to this faith in Hitler was a sense that the Führer was somehow “destined” to lead Germany to wherever he chose. “This man—Hitler—is Germany’s fate for good or evil,” said Werner von Fritsch, after he’d been forced to resign as head of the German army. And Fritsch was in little doubt where Hitler was taking Germany, warning that he would now “drag us all” into “the abyss.”
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However, in the summer of 1939, many Germans still believed that
Hitler could prevent the war against Poland becoming a wider conflict. “We had had many examples of the Western powers leaving Hitler alone, including Munich, including the occupation of Prague,”
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says Ulrich de Maizière, then a young army officer. And when news came of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact on 24 August 1939 it seemed as if Hitler had, once again, achieved a foreign policy triumph from nowhere. Now, whatever else happened, it appeared the Germans would not face the same two-front war, trapped between Britain and France in the West and Russia in the East, as they had twenty-five years before.

The Wehrmacht invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany. All that Ulrich de Maizière could now envisage was that, “Predicting with certainty [what would now happen] was by no means obvious.”
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PART THREE
 
RISK AND REWARD

Despite decades of historical research, a number of myths about Hitler and Nazism still persist in the popular consciousness. One of the most pervasive is that the German victory over the French in 1940 was made possible because of the superiority of German equipment—crucially, that the Wehrmacht had more tanks to enable them to pioneer Blitzkrieg tactics. But this is not the case. In fact, the Germans had
fewer
tanks than the Allies on the Western Front, and a study of the decisive period from the start of the war through to the defeat of the French—from September 1939 to the summer of 1940—reveals a much more complex matrix of reasons for Hitler’s success, one in which his charisma played a vital role. Hitler’s vision, his certainty, his oratory, his ability to release the limitless ambitions of his followers and create an atmosphere of intense excitement at the possibility of making history—all of this played a part in ensuring German victory.

Above all, this is the period of the great gamble. And here, too, we confront another popular myth—that the greatest risk Hitler ever took was thought at the time to be his decision to invade the Soviet Union. But, in reality, his decision to attack the French was considered much
more risky—so much so that the German offensive on the Western Front in the spring of 1940 was looked on as one of the greatest military gambles in history. According to conventional wisdom at the time, the German attack ought not to have succeeded.
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Moreover, during this period Hitler not only had to persuade his generals to do his bidding and attack west, but also decide on the nature of the war against Poland and the form that the Nazi occupation would take.

However, there is nothing mysterious about the military destruction of Poland, which the Germans accomplished within weeks. Warsaw may have fallen only on 28 September, but the fate of Poland had been clear eleven days before when the Red Army, acting in consultation with the Germans, marched into eastern Poland to seize their share of Polish territory. Trapped between Hitler and Stalin—who were acting as Allies in the dismemberment of Poland under the secret protocol of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact—the Poles never had a chance.

But if the military action was straightforward, Nazi policy within occupied Poland was anything but. A senior German military officer like General Johannes Blaskowitz could still maintain during interrogation in 1947 that he had felt at the time that, “A war to wipe out the political and economic loss resulting from the creation of the Polish Corridor and to lessen the threat to separated East Prussia surrounded by Poland and Lithuania was regarded as a sacred duty though a sad necessity.”
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In effect, he claimed that he was fighting a war to “right the wrongs of Versailles.”

A war for these ends also had the wholehearted support of ethnic Germans who had been left trapped at the end of the First World War when territory that had been German for generations had been handed over to Poland. “Well, the Treaty of Versailles to us, who were living there, was a difficult and hard experience, because it meant that we were cut off from the Reich,” says Charles Bleeker Kohlsaat, a member of a prominent ethnic German family in western Poland. He hoped that Hitler would create a new Germany and include all ethnic Germans within it. “When there were broadcasts of the Führer’s speeches, Hitler’s speeches, we were glued to the radio and listened with interest to what he was saying. Listening to the Führer’s speeches, we believed that it was a miracle that Hitler was performing, and we thought that he would bring the Reich to a new greatness and we were full of enthusiasm about this man’s achievements … And everybody was fascinated, as long as you did not
look behind the scenes—and the average person did not look behind the scenes—you thought, gosh, this man is really achieving something, that is a proper German.”
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Thus for Germans like Blaskowitz, Kohlsaat and millions of others, this was not an “ideological” war but part of Hitler’s promise to restore German territory and honour after the humiliation of Versailles. In so far as they were influenced by Hitler’s charisma, their support was based to a large extent on this shared goal. But it soon became clear that they were mistaken. This was not a conventional war to reclaim lost territory at all. As Professor Mary Fulbrook, who has made a special study of this period, puts it, “If you look at the invasion of Poland in September 1939 you see in the very first week of the war the first mass atrocities against civilians, against Jewish women and children and old people … If you take just the first week of the war and you look at Eastern Upper Silesia you get burnings of synagogues with people inside the synagogue dying in the flames. You get atrocities with the killing of men, women, children and old people in all the houses surrounding the synagogue in Be¸dzin [on 8 September 1939]; this is a massive atrocity … we’re talking about several hundred civilians being burnt alive or shot while they were trying to escape, or jumping into the river to put the flames out and being shot if they popped their heads out of the water for air.”
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Though these attacks were smaller in scale than the mass murders that would accompany the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, they were, as Fulbrook says, “nevertheless an outrage which is not normal warfare and is not like the kinds of things that we saw with atrocities in the First World War, where there were atrocities but there was some kind of legitimation in military terms for them, in a way that there wasn’t here. This was racial.”

German soldiers like Wilhelm Moses, who was a member of a Wehrmacht transport unit, were shocked at what they saw. He witnessed the SS Germania hanging seven or eight Poles in a public square whilst a brass band played. This, plus the other horrors he saw, led him to be “ashamed about everything … And I no longer felt German … I had already got to the point where I said, ‘If a bullet were to hit me, I would no longer have to be ashamed to say that I’m German, later, once the war is over.’ ”
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