Hitler's Charisma (42 page)

As for the mission of the SS to conquer an eastern empire, and in the process confront an “inferior” people, Roes says he “simply believed what the propaganda said. So if the propaganda said this is a Russian subhuman, we’re more valuable, we have to beat them, defeat them, to get the land we need in order to live [then we believed it]. And at the age of seventeen I had no ideas of whether we had too much land or not enough land. I couldn’t understand this ‘subhuman.’ That was said and I believed it, not just me but everybody almost. The few who didn’t [believe it] didn’t dare say anything. It’s a generation problem. You will not be able to understand the mentality of people [at the time]. We were seventeen, we were used to obeying. We were used to believing what we were told. At the beginning it had been right what we were told. That’s what it was, that Hitler’s a superman.”

Yet there were already signs that a growing number of German soldiers—and their relatives—were beginning to doubt Hitler’s superhuman qualities. One indication of this trend was the wording of death notices in the German press—specifically, how often relatives mentioned
that their sons had died “for the Führer” rather than “for Germany.” In the
Fränkischer Kurier
⁸
(Frankish Courier), for instance, a newspaper from the south of Germany, Hitler had been mentioned in more than 40 per cent of the death notices in the summer of 1940, but this dropped to just 12 per cent in the second half of 1942. In addition, starting in the spring of 1942, records show there was an increase in the volume of people brought before the court in Munich charged with making derogatory remarks about the Nazis.
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This same shift in the attitude of the general German population can also be seen in the reaction to Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on 26 April 1942—the last time the Reichstag would meet. Hitler’s attempt to put a gloss on events in this speech would have cheered only diehard Nazis. He blamed the unexpected bad weather for the problems on the Eastern Front—weather, he said, which “even in these areas occurs only once every hundred years”
¹⁰
—and the Allies for starting the war. Crucially, what Hitler
didn’t
say was exactly how the war would be won. In fact, there was a worrying hint, for the German population, of nihilism within the speech. “We Germans have everything to win in this struggle of ‘to be or not to be’ because losing the war would anyway be our end.”
¹¹
What’s more, the ostensible reason Hitler had said he wanted to address the Reichstag—in order to get parliament to vote to confirm his total authority over the legal system—seemed irrelevant. Hadn’t Hitler already got total authority over the state?

Meeting with Hitler straight after his speech, Goebbels felt that “He was very happy to have got it all off his chest.”
¹²
But just two days later Goebbels wrote, “The conclusion arrived at [in the Foreign Press] is that the Führer’s speech represents, as it were, the cry of a drowning man.” A negative response was even to be found amongst German listeners. A secret report Goebbels received said that the German people registered “some scepticism about the military situation. Above all, since the Führer spoke of a second winter campaign in the east, people believe that he, too, is not convinced that the war against the Soviet Union can be finished this summer.”
¹³
The consequence was that the speech had “spread a feeling of insecurity.”

This sense that Hitler’s charismatic appeal was waning was further intensified by the visit of Mussolini on 29 April, just three days after Hitler’s speech. The atmosphere of the encounter was memorably captured by
the diaries of the Italian Foreign Minister—and Mussolini’s son-in-law—the resolutely cynical Count Galeazzo Ciano. “There is much cordiality,” he wrote on their arrival at Salzburg, “which puts me on my guard. The courtesy of the Germans is always in inverse ratio to their good fortune.”
¹⁴
The next day, describing the Italian delegation’s meeting with the Führer, he says, “Hitler talks, talks, talks. Mussolini suffers—he, who is in the habit of talking himself, and who, instead, practically has to keep quiet. On the second day, after lunch, when everything has been said, Hitler talked uninterruptedly for an hour and 40 minutes … Those, however, who dreaded the ordeal less than we did were the Germans. Poor people. They have to take it every day, and I am certain there isn’t a gesture, a word, or a pause which they don’t know by heart. General Jodl, after an epic struggle, finally went to sleep on the sofa.”
¹⁵

Hitler, of course, had always behaved in this way—even, as we have seen, boring on at length to his flatmate in Vienna before the First World War. What was new was the sense that the charismatic link between him and his audience that had first appeared in the beer halls of Munich just over twenty years ago was deteriorating. And the reasons for this aren’t as simple as one might think. It isn’t necessarily the case that charismatic authority is weakened by a leader’s lack of success—Hitler and the Nazis were dramatically unsuccessful at the time of the Beer Hall Putsch, for example, but the perception of Hitler’s charisma amongst his supporters actually increased after his trial for treason. It’s rather that the problem for a charismatic leader comes when a pattern of failure develops—especially once a perception grows that the promises of the leader cannot be trusted.

In Hitler’s case, the difficulties he faced in April 1942 can be traced back to his speech the previous October, when he all but promised that the war against the Soviet Union was won. By now the German population knew that their leader had been spectacularly wrong. Not only that, but he was beginning to seem at the mercy of events rather than their master. How, for example, Germany could defeat America was a topic that Hitler shied away from—and people noticed. It was certainly spotted by Ciano, who wrote on 30 April 1942, “In my opinion, the thought of what the Americans can and will do disturbs them all, and the Germans shut their eyes in order not to see. But this does not keep the more intelligent and the more honest from thinking about what America can do, and they feel shivers running down their spines.”
¹⁶

However, the testimony of former soldiers like Wilhelm Roes and Carlheinz Behnke, as well as the reaction of many other Germans at the time, does demonstrate that there was still significant support for Hitler as a charismatic leader in 1942. It all remained a question of faith, and different people would have their faith questioned at different times. For the absolute believers, it was possible—as events became bleaker—for their faith to remain undiminished. After all, as Göring said back in September 1936, “through the genius of the Führer things which were apparently impossible have very quickly become reality.”
¹⁷

But the tendency for this faith in Hitler to create a sense of unreality about the war was immense. And that sense of unreality spread to Hitler himself who would believe only what he wanted to believe about the strength of the Red Army. This led General Halder to write in despair, “This chronic tendency to underrate enemy capabilities is gradually assuming grotesque proportions and develops into a positive danger. The situation is getting more and more intolerable. There is no room for any serious work.”
¹⁸

But as spring turned to summer in 1942 it seemed that, superficially at least, things were going better for Hitler after the setbacks of the winter. In the Far East the Japanese were engaging the Americans, even if they had just lost crucial aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway in June 1942; in the Western Desert, Erwin Rommel was fast making himself a German hero, most especially when the Afrika Korps seized Tobruk on 20 June and took 30,000 Allied prisoners; in the Arctic sea, in early July, German submarines and planes laid waste to the Allied convoy PQ 17 and destroyed 24 of 39 ships en route with supplies to the Soviet Union—a disaster for the Allies which led to the temporary suspension of all Arctic convoys; and on the steppes of southern Russia the German army’s new offensive,
Fall Blau
(Operation Blue), was making swift progress south-east towards Stalingrad and the Russian oil fields of the Caucasus. Indeed, Hitler was so confident that in late July he ordered the forces of Operation Blue to be split. Army Group A would move south towards the oil fields and Army Group B would continue east towards Stalingrad. It demonstrated over-confidence on a massive scale—though over-confidence born of a desperation to finish the war in the East quickly—and carried within it the seeds of the calamity that would befall the German 6th Army in Stalingrad in six months’ time.

A similar, almost bizarre level of over-confidence was also being demonstrated by one of Hitler’s longest-serving followers, Hermann Göring. By now Göring had so appropriated to himself Hitler’s refusal to listen to practical objections that he felt able, in August 1942, to harangue a gathering of senior Nazis—including Reich Commissioners—as if he was a brutal headmaster talking to children who needed a good thrashing. “God knows,” he said, “you are not sent out there [to countries occupied by the Nazis] to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them, so that the German people can live. That is what I expect of your exertions. This everlasting concern about foreign peoples must cease now, once and for all. I have here before me reports on what you are expected to deliver. It is nothing at all when I consider your territories. It makes no difference to me in this connection if you say that your people will starve. Let them do so, as long as no German collapses from hunger.”
¹⁹
Göring then demanded a huge increase in food deliveries to the German homeland—seemingly upping the quotas as if on a whim. “Last year France delivered 550,000 tons of grain,” said Göring, “and now I demand 1.2 million tons. Two weeks from now a plan will be submitted how it can be handled. There will be no more discussion about it.”

However, an appeal to the “will” of the individual only stood a chance of working when there was a possibility of success. It was no use demanding raw materials when there were simply none to give. But this straightforward reality did not prevent Göring, Himmler or indeed Hitler from demanding the impossible. On 11 August 1942, just five days after Göring’s meeting, Hitler met Paul Pleiger, a talented industrialist who was now responsible for ensuring that sufficient coal was available for Germany’s wartime needs. Pleiger explained to Hitler that coal output was declining—he needed experienced miners to be allocated to him, but was only promised malnourished labour from the east. Hitler listened to him and then replied that if there was a shortage of coal then the output of steel could not be increased, and if the output of steel could not be increased then the war would be lost. How could Pleiger answer such a statement? He simply replied that he would do all that was “humanly possible” to meet the targets that Hitler desired.
²⁰

Whilst Hitler’s behaviour at the meeting with Pleiger was illustrative of the immense dangers of charismatic leadership, it at least demonstrated that he was still trying to act as a charismatic leader. But other decisions
around the same time show that Hitler must also have had inner doubts as to whether he really was still that kind of leader at all. On 9 September 1942 Hitler removed Field Marshal List from command of Army Group A. Increasingly desperate for swift success, Hitler believed that List had been dragging his feet. This action in itself was not surprising—Hitler had removed other military commanders before. It was Hitler’s choice of replacement that was so significant—because Hitler chose himself.

This was Hitler’s strangest appointment yet. Even leaving aside the new ludicrous chain of command that meant Hitler now reported to himself many times over,
²¹
it was impossible for him to exercise effective command over soldiers more than a thousand miles away. This decision, coupled with the removal that same month of General Halder as army chief of staff—whose last diary entry states “my nerves are worn out”
²²
—and his replacement with Kurt Zeitzler, an officer known for his sycophancy, demonstrated a growing air of desperation at the Führer’s headquarters.

Hitler certainly had good reason by now to doubt the practical ability of the German army to win this war. By the autumn of 1942 the supply situation for the army was so bad that General Fromm, head of the Army Armament Supply, wrote in a report that Hitler should find an immediate political solution and end the war.
²³
This was the background against which Hitler started to become fixated on one city on the Eastern Front—Stalingrad. Units of the 6th Army, part of Army Group B, reached the river Volga in August 1942 and by the start of September the Germans were fighting in the city. “[Hitler] was not achieving what he wanted from the Caucasus,” says Antony Beevor, who has made a particular study of this battle, “and so the 6th Army was ordered to capture Stalingrad, and this was where his obsession with the city that bore Stalin’s name became a trap. It was the bait, and it’s always a great disaster in war when a commander becomes obsessed with a particular objective and he loses sight of the wider picture.”
²⁴

Stalingrad marked the turning point in perceptions of Hitler’s charismatic leadership. For soldiers of the 6th Army, like Joachim Stempel, this was the moment when their faith was destroyed. As a young officer with 14th Panzer Division he had advanced across the Russian steppes that summer full of optimism. When he reached Stalingrad, a city that lay in a narrow strip along the western bank of the Volga, the wide river
that divided European Russia from Asia, he and his comrades thought “it would be simply a matter of time before we were able to push the enemy back to the eastern shore.”
²⁵
They had been buoyed by the success of the Germans at the Battle of Kharkov four months before, and the relative ease with which they had begun their advance in Operation Blue.