Hitler's Charisma (30 page)

It was thus scarcely credible to the German general staff—almost all of whom had bitter personal experience of the last “slogging match to the Channel”—that Hitler could contemplate a swift invasion of France. Senior army officers agreed amongst themselves that it simply wasn’t possible—one estimate of the earliest such an offensive could be contemplated was 1942.
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In this assessment they shared the opinion of their enemies. The French, in particular, were supremely confident of victory over the Germans, with some even thinking that the Nazi regime would soon fall apart without the need for outside intervention. One contemporary report from the military intelligence experts of the
Deuxième Bureau
(France’s external military intelligence agency) said that, “According to intelligence from good sources, the Hitler regime will continue to hold power until the spring of 1940—then be replaced by Communism.”
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The crisis deepened when Hitler, infuriated by the lack of enthusiasm shown by his generals for an attack on France, harangued them once again on 10 October. Just as he had at the infamous November 1937 meeting, he read from a lengthy prepared manuscript. Once again he was demonstrating an extraordinary style of leadership; he had decided entirely on his own what was best for Germany and the job of his generals was merely one of implementation. There had been no prior consultation with his military experts before he arrived at his decision, no logistical analysis to see if his goal was even possible.

At one level this leadership technique was effective. It served to demonstrate that Hitler believed he was a “unique genius,” a charismatic leader who did not need the input of others. It also knocked the confidence of anyone who opposed him—they were continually forced to react to Hitler’s views rather than participating in the policy decision beforehand. However, it was also high risk. At this stage of the war, Hitler relied to a large extent on the power of his own persuasive techniques to control his military high command. And so when he couldn’t persuade his audience that he was right, he encountered difficulties that other, less charismatic, dictators never had to confront.

Having failed to convince his generals that an attack on France was
sensible, Hitler now faced growing opposition. An insight into General Halder’s state of mind is provided by his diary entry for 14 October 1939. After a meeting with Brauchitsch he wrote: “Three possibilities: attack, wait, change.”
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By “change,” Halder and Brauchitsch meant a change in leadership—the sidelining, if not the complete removal, of Adolf Hitler. There was a recent precedent for this kind of action. During the First World War two senior German commanders—Ludendorff and Hindenburg—had taken control of all strategic military decisions, leaving Kaiser Wilhelm II on the periphery of power. And it had been another general—Wilhelm Groener—who had delivered the news to the Kaiser in November 1918 that he should abdicate. But Halder and Brauchitsch also recognised that none of the options they had in front of them were ideal—especially if they opted for “change,” since “it is essentially negative and tends to render us vulnerable.”
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Halder and Brauchitsch did not think that an invasion of France was out of the question on moral or legal grounds. They simply thought that the German army was not up to the task in the immediate future. They thus objected not to fighting a war of aggression in the west—merely to losing it. And they were not alone in thinking this. On 3 November Halder wrote, “None of the Higher Hq [i.e., Headquarters] thinks that the offensive ordered by OKW [i.e., the supreme command of the armed forces who worked directly with Hitler] has any prospect of success.”
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Brauchitsch and Halder now, however reluctantly, contemplated a coup against Hitler.

Meanwhile, many of the old familiar faces from the aborted coup attempt the previous year—included Ludwig Beck—also plotted to stop Hitler taking Germany into a disastrous war against the French. One idea was for units loyal to the conspirators to march on Hitler’s headquarters and arrest him after the attack in the west had been launched. Hitler would be removed and Beck would become the new head of the German state.
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When Brauchitsch saw Hitler on 5 November he attempted to persuade him that the army was not ready for an attack on France, and said that the invasion of Poland had revealed a number of problems with discipline. He even compared the attitude of the Wehrmacht in 1939 with that of the German army towards the end of the First World War. Hitler—predictably—lost his temper. He threatened to travel immediately
to the front and find out what was going on himself. Even more worrying for Brauchitsch was Hitler’s assertion that the army lacked the will to go into battle as he wished. Hitler talked about the “spirit of Zossen”
²⁶
(the army wartime headquarters was close to the village of Zossen, south of Berlin) and said he would obliterate this defeatism. Devastated by Hitler’s attack, Brauchitsch said after the meeting that he would take no active part in any coup. Halder, worried that Hitler suspected senior officers were plotting against him, also gave up the idea of leading a plot against the Führer.

It was a revealing moment. Brauchitsch had heard nothing during the 5 November meeting with Hitler to make him less anxious about the proposed Western offensive. In fact, the situation for Halder and Brauchitsch grew worse later that same day, since the order to invade France was issued by Hitler shortly after the meeting—with the attack due to start on 12 November. Yet now, even with the knowledge that Hitler had named the day for the launch of this massive campaign they felt the Germans would lose, they failed to act.

Their fundamental misjudgement had been to think that any action against Hitler would be analogous with the sidelining and eventual ejection of the Kaiser twenty-one years before. Unlike the Kaiser, Hitler was still considered a trusted leader by millions of Germans. Although the Germans were at war with the British and French, and there was uncertainty and concern about how this war would end, the Führer had also orchestrated the swift defeat of the Poles and the re-incorporation into the Reich of Danzig and the Polish corridor, as well as all the territory lost to Poland at Versailles. As a result, some—like Walter Mauth, then sixteen years old—thought, “When the war with Poland was over within three weeks … we thought we were unbeatable.”
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Further evidence of just how popular Hitler was with the general German population was on show that November as a result of events in Munich. Three days after his ill-tempered meeting with Brauchitsch, Hitler arrived in Munich for the sixteenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch. He gave a speech at the Bürgerbräukeller and then hurried back to Munich station to take the train to Berlin. Around ten minutes after he left the Bürgerbräukeller a bomb, concealed in a pillar, exploded. Over several months, Georg Elser, a carpenter, had managed to work secretly during the night at the beer cellar and had concealed the bomb just behind
the rostrum where Hitler was to speak. Elser, a former supporter of the German Communist party who was angry about the war, had decided that the only way to improve Germany’s situation was to kill Hitler and other Nazi leaders.

Elser was a lone assassin who had acted without help from others. Hitler was lucky to survive, and he put his escape down to the actions of his own personal providence once again. But what’s significant is the public reaction to news of the attempt to murder Hitler. One report compiled by the SD, the intelligence branch of the SS, revealed that, “The attempted assassination in Munich has strengthened the notion of togetherness within the German population greatly,” and that, “love for the Führer has grown even more …”
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Another report, from December 1939, said that, “Ever since the outbreak of the war and especially after the attempted assassination in Munich, many shop-owners have taken to putting up images of the Führer in their window-displays. In some cases this tribute to the Führer is still carried out in a most distasteful way. A window of a shop for spirits in Kiel for example is reported to display the Führer’s image amidst numerous bottles of spirits with the slogan, ‘We will never surrender!’ ”
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At one level this enthusiastic support for Hitler is not surprising. For more than six years Goebbels’ propaganda had been pumping out the message that Hitler was a quasi-mystical figure whose presence was essential for Germany’s future success and security. That, plus the succession of foreign policy triumphs before the outbreak of war, all cast a long shadow. It was also possible for many people to still revere Hitler yet to be anxious about the war and the effects of economic measures—like the recent War Economy Decree—which materially affected their earnings.

What is less obvious is why the various small groups of plotters didn’t fully grasp from the start that—unlike the Kaiser—Hitler still had access to this immense reservoir of trust and reverence. Charismatic leadership is strengthened and reinforced by success, and Hitler had not yet failed. This was the lesson that General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb learnt when he tried to rally support for a coup against Hitler in the wake of the crushing of Brauchitsch at the 5 November meeting. The date Hitler had fixed for the invasion, 12 November, had been postponed because of new intelligence about the weather and concerns over Allied troop movements—in fact, it was to be rescheduled and then postponed many times more before the eventual start date of 10 May 1940.

However, at the end of 1939, conflict with France still seemed imminent. Von Leeb called the planned attack in the west “mad.”
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He was also outraged at the atrocities in Poland. He protested to Halder that the German “police” actions in Poland were “unworthy of a civilised nation.”
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Von Leeb tried to enlist the help of fellow generals, Bock and Rundstedt, in preparing a coup—but neither was interested. And ultimately it was one of Leeb’s own officers, corps commander General Geyr von Schweppenburg,
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who remarked that it was possible that the ordinary soldiers and junior officers would simply refuse to move against Hitler. This was a judgement confirmed, after the war, by another senior German officer in the west, Walther Nehring, who said that it would have been “futile” to order his men to turn against the regime because “amongst the majority of the young soldiers, Hitler’s prestige was already entrenched too deeply.”
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On 23 November, Hitler spoke to about two hundred senior military leaders at the Reich Chancellery, the latest in a series of attempts to enthuse his generals about the forthcoming conflict in the west. It was an open contest between Hitler’s vision on the one hand and the people he knew were necessary to implement this vision on the other. And Hitler knew this was a battle he had to win.

Once again, all of Hitler’s familiar techniques of persuasion were evident. Crucial was the sense that he, as an individual, was the only person who really mattered. “The fate of the Reich depends only on me,”
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he said, portraying himself as the charismatic warlord sent to save Germany. And, as before, he announced he had come before his generals, “to tell” them of his decisions.

His speech contained a history lesson—designed to demonstrate how he had previously been proved right by events, even though others had doubted him—and smatterings of his own brutal philosophy: “In fighting I see the fate of all creatures. Nobody can avoid fighting if he does not want to go under.” He said his mission was clear—to obtain
Lebensraum
for a people who desperately needed it.

It was this kind of talk that led Hugh Trevor-Roper in his essay “The Mind of Adolf Hitler” to conclude that for Hitler “the purpose of human life” was “merely that Germans should be the masters of the world” and that “to him it was simply a question of more cakes for Germans and less for non-Germans.”
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But that is to underestimate Hitler’s appeal to his generals. He offered not just a practical goal—that Germans must
conquer more territory—but a philosophical justification: that life is a permanent struggle and we are all animals who must fight or die. It was a call to release the beast that lurked inside every human being. The speech is replete with the word “annihilate”—Hitler said he sought “to annihilate everyone who is opposed to me … I want to annihilate the enemy.” Long before he announced what is generally considered his “war of annihilation” against the Soviet Union, Hitler is seen here wanting to practise “annihilation” in the west. Moreover, his speech was also a call to seek sanctuary in the certainty of absolutes. “I have to choose between victory or annihilation,” he said. “I choose victory.” As we have seen, this posing of “either/or” choices was one of Hitler’s common tactics, as was his threat to kill himself if events went against him: “I shall never survive the defeat of my people.”

Hitler obviously felt this lengthy speech had not been enough to motivate Brauchitsch and Halder, and so called them to his office after the conference in order to restate his unhappiness with the attitude of the army leadership, referring once more to the “spirit of Zossen.”
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Brauchitsch “offered to resign”
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but Hitler told him to stay and do his “duty.”

Meanwhile, Halder and his colleagues had been reluctantly planning the invasion in the West—even though they believed they had no chance of success. They were right to be so negative. If the Germans had invaded following the plans as they existed at the start of November, the result would have been either immediate defeat or the kind of stalemate that bled Germany dry on the Western Front during the First World War. Gradually, however, the plans began to change. More resources started to be devoted to von Rundstedt’s Army Group A, the force which had always been charged with protecting the southern flank of Bock’s Army Group B as it moved to subdue Holland and attack Belgium. Nonetheless, by the time of Hitler’s conference on 23 November, “Case Yellow” (
“Fall Gelb”
), as the attack plan was called, was still a mishmash with neither army group designated as the priority force.