Hitler's Charisma (41 page)

Toivi Blatt defied the statistics and survived Sobibor because he managed to escape in a mass breakout in October 1943. The killings he bears witness to were to become—rightly so—symbolic of the rule of Adolf Hitler. But the decision-making process which led to the gas chambers of Sobibor and the other death camps was neither simple nor straightforward. There was not one moment of absolute decision, but rather a series of points of escalation: at the time of the invasion of the Soviet Union; the autumn 1941 deportation of the Jews; the December meetings between key Nazi leaders in the wake of Pearl Harbor; the move during 1942 to extend the killing to Jews across the whole Nazi empire.

It is almost as if the Nazis were finding out—step by step—just how radical they could be in their treatment of the Jews. No one else in history had travelled this road before. No one had ever tried to comb Europe in order to exterminate an entire people—men, women and children. As Professor David Ceserani says, “what makes the ‘Final Solution,’ as it becomes, so extraordinary, is that finding it impossible to simply remove
the Jews and dump them and then ignore them whatever happens to them, the decision is made to remove them to places where they will be killed for sure and that great efforts will be made to murder them. Not all of them all at once necessarily, because some will be preserved for labour, but they would ultimately all be killed. They wouldn’t just die on an island off the coast of Africa, in Siberia, on a reservation, of typhus, starvation, whatever. They would be killed. That is radical. It is unprecedented.”
⁶¹

Hitler was responsible for all this not just because he wanted it to happen. He was responsible because his charismatic leadership played a vital part in legitimising the whole murderous scheme to his subordinates. Throughout the speeches, diary entries and other documents of the time one finds reference to the ultimate legitimising source—the Führer. At times of anxiety, at moments when doubt crept into the strongest resolve, always there was the comfort that this was all done “in accordance with the wishes of the Führer.”
⁶²
As Goebbels wrote in his diary in March 1942 in the context of the “barbaric” penalty to be “exacted” on the Jews, “The Führer is the untiring pioneer and spokesman for a radical solution that is demanded by the very nature of things and which is inevitable.”
⁶³

Once Hitler’s followers embraced his vision and were reassured that he would support them in the quest to kill Jews, this released a rush of initiatives from below. Hitler thus created a much more dynamic system of destruction than one which called on him to authorise every detail. What was happening here was more than just the application to the “Final Solution” of the German army’s concept of
Auftragstaktik
⁶⁴
—“mission command.” The German army permitted
Auftragstaktik
only within a strict hierarchy of command, whereas in the context of the killing of the Jews there was competition between various agencies in the Nazi state to solve the “Jewish question.” Indeed, the Wannsee conference was convened by Reinhard Heydrich partly in an attempt to put an end to this conflict and assert SS control. Nor were those involved in key roles of the killing process merely coming up with different ideas to implement a clearly defined vision—as would be the case with the application of
Auftragstaktik
. The evolution of the “Final Solution” was a genuine two-way process, with substantive initiatives from below subsequently approved or discouraged by decisions at the highest level. It was a system that even permitted a relatively low-level functionary like
Sturmbannführer
(Major) Rolf-Heinz
Höppner of the SS to suggest to his boss Adolf Eichmann in July 1941 that “the most humane” solution to a forthcoming food shortage in the Łódź ghetto might be to “finish off those of the Jews who are not fit for work by some quick-working device.”
⁶⁵

Nazis like Höppner felt able to use their initiative and come up with their own “solutions” to their self-created Jewish “problem.” This, plus their own anti-Semitic beliefs, led to one of the most significant consequences of Hitler’s charismatic leadership—the internalisation of responsibility. Far from many of these individuals subsequently claiming that they had merely “acted under orders” when they had participated in the extermination process, they thought what they had done was “right” at the time. Adolf Eichmann, for instance, said to his colleagues in 1945 that the knowledge that he had played a part in the death of millions of Jews “gave him such extraordinary satisfaction that he would leap into his grave laughing.”
⁶⁶
Even much further down the chain of command, Hans Friedrich, a soldier with the 1st SS Infantry Brigade who personally shot Jews in the autumn of 1941, felt able to say more than sixty years later that he had “no” feelings for the Jews he killed because his “hatred towards the Jews is too great.”
⁶⁷

Behind all of this was the figure of Adolf Hitler—authorising, supporting, and endorsing the killing process. During 1942, Hitler showed he was prepared to compromise and act pragmatically in relation to forced workers from the east—in April, after representations from Albert Speer, Hitler agreed that their conditions could be made less onerous
⁶⁸
—but not in relation to the Jews. They were all destined to be murdered—regardless of any other wartime consideration. Indeed, it is not going too far to assert that by this time Hitler saw one
point
of the war, that the Jews should die.

PART FOUR
 
BLOOD AND DEATH

December 1941 marked a fundamental turning point in the war: from that moment onwards defeat seemed by far the most likely outcome for the Nazis. The failure of the German Blitzkrieg to secure victory in the Soviet Union; the entry of America into the war; the huge logistical difficulties the Nazis faced in trying to rule an empire in the east whilst simultaneously murdering millions of the inhabitants—all were compelling reasons why this was the beginning of the end.

Albert Schneider, then in a German unit in front of Moscow, was one of the soldiers who thought at the time that “the war had already been lost—that was actually the end of it all … even though at the time the retreat had not even begun.” And he didn’t just feel this because of the military setbacks the Germans had suffered, but because of the behaviour of German forces in these occupied lands. “People [i.e., Soviet citizens] were systematically robbed of everything … everybody who lived in this village [nearby] was robbed, the cellars were searched to see if there were potatoes [in them] and so on, without any consideration, as to whether the people might starve to death themselves … I am of the opinion that if the people had been decently treated, we might even have won the war.”
¹

Typically, Hitler, with the help of Goebbels, blamed other people for the failure to defeat the Soviets, chiefly his generals. Hitler described Brauchitsch, for instance, in March 1942 as a “vain, cowardly wretch who could not even appraise the situation, much less master it.” Goebbels, who recorded Hitler’s views in his diary, then wrote, apparently without irony, “By his [i.e., Brauchitsch’s] constant interference and consistent disobedience he completely spoiled the entire plan for the eastern campaign as it was designed with crystal clarity by the Führer.”
²

Hitler was also helped by the inept way that Stalin was now acting as supreme commander of the Soviet forces. On 5 January 1942 Stalin called for a series of near simultaneous offensives along the entire front. It was a ridiculously ambitious idea and he pushed it through despite objections from his military experts. The failure of the Red Army to exploit the gains of December 1941 outside Moscow was epitomised by the disastrous Kharkov offensive in May 1942, when several Soviet armies were encircled and more than 200,000 Red Army soldiers taken prisoner.

But, nonetheless, the fundamental difficulties the Germans faced still remained. In particular, Britain’s position had been immeasurably strengthened by America’s entry into the war. “No American will think it wrong of me,” wrote Churchill when he heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, “if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but at this very moment to know the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!”
³

Churchill was right. Hitler had been unable to cross the Channel in 1940 to invade Britain, and invading America was out of the question. So how
could
Germany win? Hitler still clung to the view that if the Soviet Union could be defeated then somehow the Western Allies could be contained. And in a remarkable example of the faith that still remained in his charismatic leadership, many of those who served in the German army continued to believe in him. Carlheinz Behnke of the Waffen SS, for example, was certain that all would come well: “At the time we were unconditionally prepared to pledge ourselves to the Führer … There was still fascination, you see, when we saw him in Berlin [in the autumn of 1942]. That was the only time that I saw him close up during the war, the speech to the officer cadets at the Sportpalast. And at the time we were
still impressed, he was wearing a field grey uniform, the Iron Cross first class was the only decoration. Even in retrospect, I have to say, when I hear his speech again, I’m fascinated, not that I would want [that time] back again, but that’s what it was like then. And it’s difficult to convey it to the children, the grandchildren, if you weren’t part of it yourself at the time.”
⁴

A key part of his continued support for Hitler during 1942 was his belief that his leader’s goals were not just correct but inspiring. “He developed a vision which was inconceivable. It was a utopian view. We were fascinated … The fact that
Lebensraum
was being moved towards the East in a common Great Europe. At the time I thought that was right. Without giving a thought to all the things associated with it, killing people and so on and so forth … And nowadays we sometimes say in jest, we can be glad that we lost the war, because otherwise I would be a regional commander, a gauleiter, somewhere and be performing my duties somewhere far away from home … I think we simply felt superior somehow, you see. Superior to the Slavonic peoples. It seems naïve today when you think about it. This huge empire!”
⁵

Joachim Stempel, then an officer with the 14th Panzer Division, was also full of confidence in 1942. “I can only say that we were all inspired by the belief and the conviction that we would succeed in whatever we did.” He and his comrades thought “there is nothing that we cannot achieve, albeit with difficulty, with a lack of equipment, and there was always the belief and the conviction that the leadership would take care of everything.”
⁶

In 1942 Wilhelm Roes desperately wanted to serve with the Waffen SS. He had been inspired by a recruiting poster of a blonde SS man with “this sort of look coming from his eyes.” But because he wanted to join before he was eighteen he needed the approval of his father. “I told him [that approval was needed], and he beamed, that his oldest son was going to become a real soldier, in the Waffen SS! Of course he signed it … 1 June 1942 I turned 17, and on 8 June I was called up.”

Roes joined the SS Leibstandarte—a unit his father proudly told him was “the most elite unit of the Waffen SS.” He still remembers the “honour code” of the SS: “We were not allowed to lock our lockers because people do not steal in the Leibstandarte.” Roes also received ideological instruction that built on an education that had already been spent—since
he was seven years old—under the control of the Nazis. ‘What else did we have as propaganda? We had political courses … the story of Adolf Hitler’s life. I could recite that to you today, the development of the Nazi Party, of the SS. At that time we were told the Second World War which we were now fighting wouldn’t be possible without the First World War. Adolf Hitler had been a soldier in the First World War himself, and his party cannot tolerate that such large territories are being taken away, and the colonies, that we have to get it back to the way it was before. That was our motivation. We were fed with that, and we swallowed it. I was very proud, extremely proud.”
⁷

When on leave, Roes flaunted his membership of the Leibstandarte. “When we came to a place, to a pub or some place, in our uniform—with Adolf Hitler written there [on the sleeve], our uniforms were fabulous—I could see a girl and say I’m going to go out with her. We come from the Liebstandarte—ooh! We were in Italy, I will never forget that, we came to a hairdresser’s, in Milan, a twenties place, everything in chrome—we’d never seen anything like it. We walked in there, every seat was occupied. The Italian hairdressers screamed something, everybody got up, and we all got their seats. We weren’t normal soldiers, we were the vision of something very special. Of course that impressed us.”