Hitler's Charisma (14 page)

In order to “stand up” to “global Jewry,” a Jewish boycott was organised by the Nazis to start on 1 April 1933. Significantly, Hitler chose not to put his name to the document dated 28 March that called for this action against German Jews. It was signed only “Leadership of the National
Socialist German Workers Party.” Further evidence of Hitler’s sensitivity on this issue was a report in the Nazi paper, the
Völkischer Beobachter
on 29 March, which quoted Hitler as saying that it had been necessary to organise these “defensive measures” because “otherwise it [i.e., action against the Jews] would have come from the people [
Volk
] themselves and might have taken on undesirable forms.”
¹⁴
Hitler—already revealed in
Mein Kampf
as an anti-Semite of the most venomous sort—now sought to portray himself as somehow judicious in his action against the Jews.

The boycott was called off after only one day. Hitler judged that the time was not right for such visible “official” actions against the Jewish population of Germany to be sustained over days and weeks. His attempts to balance his own violent anti-Semitism with the prevailing mood of the German public would be one of the recurring features of Nazi rule during the 1930s.

Hitler’s reticence to advertise his desire for Germany to obtain an empire in Eastern Europe—specifically at the expense of the Soviet Union—was also evident. Despite having openly acknowledged this goal in
Mein Kampf
, and despite the fact that Germany was about to embark on the biggest rearmament programme ever conducted in peacetime, Hitler stuck to the mantra, expressed in an interview with Sir John Foster Fraser of
The Daily Telegraph
, that “no one in Germany who went through the War wants to repeat the experience.”
¹⁵
However, he also said in the same interview that “the fate of Germany was dependent not on colonies or dominions, but on its Eastern borders”—a phrase which was interpreted as a desire to gain back the territory lost as a result of the peace treaties at the end of the First World War.

It was clear that it would be entirely Hitler’s decision as to how and when fundamental Nazi policy would be introduced to the German people. Goebbels wrote that there would be no more voting, and that now the “Führer’s personality” was what counted.
¹⁶
Just two days before he wrote those words Goebbels had helped organise mass public celebrations on the occasion of Hitler’s forty-fourth birthday—a physical manifestation of the way in which the personality of the new chancellor would now drive German politics. From now on, until Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday party in 1945 at the Reich Chancellery of Berlin, 20 April would be treated as a sacred date in the German calendar.

As a consequence of all the attention that had been focused on Hitler, beginning with his attempt to unseat Hindenburg as president the year before, an interesting phenomenon was taking place. Some of those who had thought Hitler was unimpressive in the past were now beginning to see him as charismatic. Fridolin von Spaun, for example, a sympathiser of the Nazis since the early 1920s, had first witnessed Hitler at a rally in 1923. “There stood Ludendorff, a mighty figure in uniform with his decorations,” he says. “And a small figure stood next to him—nowhere near as imposing, in quite a shabby coat. And I paid no attention to him. Then I asked later, ‘Who was that who stood nearby [to Ludendorff]?’ Well, that was Hitler, the leader of the National Socialists.”
¹⁷

But now nearly ten years later, von Spaun encountered Hitler once again and formed an entirely different opinion. At a dinner, attended by a large number of Nazi sympathisers, Spaun saw Hitler looking at him. He felt Hitler’s eyes bore into him and as a result became immediately convinced of his sincerity. Then Hitler got up to talk to someone and held on to the back of Spaun’s chair. “And then I felt a trembling from his fingers penetrating me. I actually felt it. But not a nervous trembling. Rather I felt: this man, this body, is only the tool for implementing a big, all-powerful will here on earth. That’s a miracle in my view.”

So, as far as von Spaun was concerned, Hitler had been transformed from an insignificant man in a shabby coat to a “tool for implementing a big, all-powerful will.” Of course, much had changed in the ten years or so between Spaun’s two encounters with Hitler. But chiefly what had altered was Spaun’s own personal perception of the man. By the time he was moved by Hitler’s touch, Spaun knew that he was in the presence of the most famous man in Germany. Moreover, Spaun had always been predisposed to believe in the Right-wing,
völkisch
politics that Hitler espoused. Hitler himself hadn’t altered that much. It was just that people like Spaun were now ready to believe in his charisma.

However, Hitler’s charisma had obvious limits. There were still those who worked closely with him—even served in his Cabinet—who remained immune to it. Von Papen, of course, was one such person, and another was the media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg. Both of them would cause Hitler problems as they gradually realised that their hope of “taming” the Nazis and using them for their own ends had been hopelessly naïve. Hugenberg in particular had anticipated that he would possess
immense power in Hitler’s government as Minister of Economics, Food and Agriculture. Unlike Hitler, Hugenberg possessed impressive academic and business qualifications—he held a doctorate in economics and had been chairman of one of the most important German industrial concerns, Krupp steel. But Hitler still out-manoeuvred him. Once the Enabling Law was passed the Cabinet ceased to have any real power. Hitler wanted it to continue to function, but only in a ceremonial way. Hugenberg finally realised how Hitler would sideline him when his subordinate, the State Secretary in the Ministry of Economics, a committed Nazi called Fritz Reinhardt, put forward a proposal to create new jobs that Hugenberg was against. Hitler chose to support Reinhardt and there was nothing that Hugenberg could do about it.
¹⁸
Dealing directly with subordinates in order to unsettle and destabilise ostensibly powerful figures in the regime was a tactic that Hitler would employ many times in the future.

Hugenberg was not prepared to endure this kind of treatment and told Hitler that he wanted to resign from the Cabinet. Hitler met Hugenberg on 27 June 1933 and attempted to persuade him to stay. Hitler realised that it would be potentially embarrassing if, just five months into his tenure as chancellor, he appeared to break the promise he had given not to change the composition of his Cabinet. But Hugenberg was impervious to Hitler’s blandishments. Even Hitler’s threats had no effect. Hitler was forced to tell President Hindenburg that Hugenberg wanted to leave the government. Hindenburg, who had never warmed to Hugenberg and was relieved to have shaken off the burden of regular involvement in government policy that Article 48 had forced on him, was relaxed about this new development.

But what is significant is what happened next to Hugenberg—which was nothing. There was no persecution, no imprisonment, no revenge. He retained his seat in the Reichstag, and though he had to relinquish control of his media empire, he struck an advantageous financial bargain that allowed him to invest heavily in German industry. He died peacefully at the age of eighty-five in 1951. Whilst Hitler undoubtedly possessed what the historian David Cesarani describes as a “murderous personality,”
¹⁹
nonetheless, as long as he believed those who chose to leave his government had not betrayed him, then they could carry on living safely in Germany after they had left his service, as Hugenberg did.

However, Ernst Röhm would not be as amenable as Hugenberg, and
he was not prepared to let himself be sidelined. “A victory on the road of the German revolution has been won,” Röhm wrote in an article in June 1933. “But not absolute victory!”
²⁰
The “goal,” he said, of “a new Germany, reborn in a spiritual revolution of nationalist and socialist spirit” was still far from being accomplished. “And as long as the real National Socialist Germany still awaits fulfilment, the fierce and passionate struggle of the SA and SS will not stop. Germany becomes national socialist or it dies. And that is why the German revolution continues, until the swastika on our flags and emblems will not be an external symbol of honest confession or of conformity, but the sacred possession of the whole people.” This was a code calling for a greater role for Röhm and his stormtroopers in the new Germany. Not just in terms of jobs and financial reward, but in retaining the spirit and comradeship of the SA in some kind of unification with—or takeover of—the German army.

These ambitions were intensified by the belief that the stormtroopers were the true revolutionaries. Wolfgang Teubert, for example, joined the SA in 1928 and he now wanted to see fundamental change in Germany. In the first place that meant the removal of the Jews: “My parents’ factory in Görlitz had already been liquidated under Jewish influence, you might say, because one of my uncles had a Jewish agent, who had cheated him of tens of thousands Marks … We wanted to stop the increasing ‘Jewification’ of Germany … I could just say to the Jews, ‘You are no longer wanted here. Please leave this country.’ ”
²¹

Wolfgang Teubert wasn’t just anti-Semitic—and prepared to condemn all German Jews for the alleged misconduct of one of them—he also had a broader desire for change in Germany. He believed passionately in the concept of the
Volksgemeinschaft
, the “people’s community,” in which all ethnically “pure” Germans treated each other as equals. More than that—and the single most important factor for him—was his conviction that the Nazis would “break the
Zinsknechtschaft
,” the “interest slavery” that Gottfried Feder had so opposed back in the earliest days of the Nazi party. Essentially it was the belief that workers who owned farms or shops had to pay disproportionate amounts of their income back in interest to the people who had loaned them the money. It was the kind of outright “socialist” policy that Hitler had backtracked from during the various election campaigns of the early 1930s.

However, it was Röhm’s desire for the SA to become the dominant
military force in the new Germany that was to cause the greatest friction. Hitler, initially at least, was careful in his treatment of his old comrade. Not only were there three times as many stormtroopers as soldiers in the German army in 1933, but he must have seen in the potential conflict between the SA and the army a means to benefit himself as a charismatic leader—as long as he handled the situation deftly.

On 1 December 1933, Röhm was appointed to the Cabinet, and from this base of institutional—if symbolic—power, two months later on 1 February 1934 he put a proposal before Blomberg, the Minster of Defence, that the SA should be recognised as the pre-eminent military force in Germany. He thus called for the German armed forces, the
Reichswehr
, to be subordinated to the SA. It was almost a declaration of war on the traditional armed forces of Germany.

Not surprisingly, officers in the German army like Johann-Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg did not take kindly to this. “One rejected the SA because of their behaviour, the way they looked, they way they were. Well, the SA were gradually, at the end they were, well, one can almost say, they were hated by most soldiers. On top of this, on top of the rejection of the SA, I would say, was the fact that it became ever more clear, not just in the army, that Röhm, the highest commander of the SA, was trying in some way to take over the Reichswehr.”
²²

Blomberg and the rest of the army leadership were equally opposed to this attempt to sideline them. And since they recognised that the final decision on this crucial question would rest with one man—Adolf Hitler—they moved to introduce changes to the
Reichswehr
that they knew would make him happy. One such change was the immediate instruction, just days after Röhm’s proposal, that the Nazi emblem of an eagle holding a swastika be incorporated on all uniforms. The fact that every member of the German armed forces would now carry a swastika on their uniform was a symbolic step towards the politicisation of the
Reichswehr
. This was coupled with the decision to enforce an “Aryan” clause which meant that members of the
Reichswehr
had to prove that they were of “Aryan” descent or risk expulsion.

Hitler made his own position clear at a conference on 28 February 1934, attended by the leaders of the SA and the
Reichswehr
, when he rejected Röhm’s proposal. The SA was not to take over the army, but be subordinate to it in matters of national defence. He also outlined in general
terms the future tasks that he wanted the new
Reichswehr
to perform. Since “living space” needed to be created and “the Western Powers would not let us do this” as a consequence “short decisive blows to the West and then to the East could be necessary.”
²³

This was an astonishing admission for Hitler to make openly at such a conference and, as Field Marshal Weichs later wrote, “it is almost miraculous that this prophecy of 1934 has never become known.”
²⁴
But Weichs believed that since “the soldier was accustomed never to take the words of politicians too seriously” these “warlike prophecies” were not taken at “face value” at the time.

There is, of course, another possible interpretation of the army’s quiescence at the 28 February conference—which is that Hitler’s coupling of his decision to curb the SA’s ambitions with the announcement of his broader military ambitions was a deliberate attempt to stifle any potential opposition within the army to his long-term goals. For the leaders of the German army would find it hard to object to Hitler’s vague future plans for expansion at the same time as they welcomed his suppression of the SA.

Röhm, predictably, was extremely unhappy with Hitler’s decision to place the SA under the control of the army in the event of future conflict. And over the next few months there were rumours that the SA might even be planning to take matters into their own hands—perhaps via a coup. After a meeting with Hitler on 7 June 1934 Röhm announced that he was taking sick leave and that the stormtroopers should take a holiday as well, ready to return to service on 1 August. He ended the missive with the words “The SA is and remains Germany’s destiny.”
²⁵