Hitler's Charisma (16 page)

Riefenstahl was no neutral observer of Hitler—in fact, she was captivated by him. “I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget,” she wrote after she had seen him speak at an election rally a few years before. “It seemed as if the Earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.”
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Riefenstahl now attempted to transmit this same “apocalyptic vision” to a mass audience. And from the opening shots of the film, showing Hitler’s plane flying above Nuremberg and his arrival as a quasi messiah from the sky, the intention of the work is obvious—to demonstrate the Führer’s perceived special nature. He is portrayed as a man alone, separate from the crowds of his supporters. The images of the swastika, the use of fire in rituals, the repeated incantations—all are designed to trigger associations with a religious service. But the images of
Triumph of the Will
were not simply pseudo-religious, they carried a powerful modern appeal as well. This wasn’t a religious service that admitted everyone to worship—the sick and the old were absent—but a demonstration of the raw power of nature, with only vigorous adults and youths on view. Nazism was thus presented here as rooted in a combination of pseudo-religion and pseudo-Darwinian science.

Events like the party rally featured in
Triumph of the Will
allowed thousands to bask in Hitler’s presence. As the American journalist William Shirer, who attended the 1934 rally, wrote, “And there, in the floodlit night, jammed together like sardines, in one mass formation, the little
men of Germany who have made Nazism possible achieved the highest state of being the Germanic man knows: the shedding of their individual souls and mind—with the personal responsibilities and doubts and problems—until under the mystic lights and at the sound of the magic words of the Austrian they were merged completely in the Germanic herd.”
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Shirer’s belief that “the highest state of being the Germanic man knows” was to shed “their individual souls and mind” was a commonplace belief at the time (and is not unknown today). That there were historical and cultural reasons why Germans at that time were perhaps particularly susceptible to the idea of leadership by an individual “hero” has already been discussed. But the danger with pursuing this notion too far is that it minimises the unique personality of Hitler. Yes, the stage management and direction of the 1934 rally played a part, but most important was the personality of the leader. This was a point that George Orwell—a dedicated anti-Nazi—recognised better than anyone. In his brilliant review of
Mein Kampf
, he wrote of the “attraction” of Hitler’s personality, which he felt was “no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches.”
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Orwell maintained, “The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—it is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself.”

Orwell rightly emphasised this aspect of the “suffering” Hitler portrayed, for an important part of Hitler’s appeal was his claim that Germany had “suffered” and that he was destined to right this terrible wrong. Moreover, rallies like the one at Nuremberg in 1934 appealed to large numbers of Germans because they went against many of the comfortable assumptions of the time, as Orwell explains: “Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.”
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Above all, what Hitler offered to his audience was redemption. In his speeches he talked less about policy and more about destiny. It was a
privilege, he said, to live at such a decisive time in history. The Nazis were on a “splendid crusade” that would “go down as one of the most miraculous and remarkable phenomena in world history.”
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There might be a tough road ahead, Hitler implied, but the forthcoming journey offered every German a chance to find meaning in their lives. Thus, Hitler suggested, Germans were special not just because they were racially superior but because they had been born at such a time and had great tasks before them.

“How deeply we feel once more in this hour the miracle that has brought us together!”
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Hitler said to a gathering of National Socialist leaders in Nuremberg in September 1936. “You have come to this city from your small village, from your market towns, from your cities, from mines and factories, from behind the plough. You have come from your daily routine and from your labours for Germany to share this feeling: We are together … and we are now Germany!” Earlier that day, in an extraordinary speech to a gathering of women of the
NS Frauenschaft
(the Nazis’ “Women’s League”), Hitler had claimed that not only did German children “belong to their mothers” they also belonged “to me.” There was an almost mystical connection, implied Hitler, between him and these German children.

Jutta Rüdiger, who was to become Reich Leader of the League of German Girls just a year after Hitler gave this speech, says that she is “still utterly amazed” by Hitler’s achievement in drawing Germans (or at least those Germans the Nazis considered “Aryan”) into one community: “If you look at the German people throughout the ages—how they quarrelled with one another and are quarrelling again—the fact is that Hitler managed to get all of them, almost all of them, under the one roof, so to speak, to pull them together. People said that Hitler had the effect of a magnet that was being passed over the heads of the German people.” And that “magnet” seemed to have a particular effect on women, as William Shirer observed in Nuremberg in 1934 when he came across a group of women outside Hitler’s hotel. He thought that, “They looked up at him as if he were a messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman.”
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Hitler had always used religious terms in his speeches, talking of the “resurrection” of the German people and, as we have seen, emphasising his commitment to the Christian church in Germany to the Centre party
in 1933. He had also ensured that the original Nazi programme of 1920, in point 24, stated that the party “represents the standpoint of positive Christianity.” And, as discussed earlier, he had made positive comments about Jesus as a “fighter” against the Jews.
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But the most persuasive explanation of these statements is that Hitler, as a politician, simply recognised the practical reality of the world he inhabited. In conversation with Ludendorff years before he had said, “I need Bavarian Catholics as well as Prussian Protestants to build up a great political movement. The rest comes later.”
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Had Hitler distanced himself or his movement too much from Christianity it is all but impossible to see how he could ever have been successful in a free election. Thus his relationship in public to Christianity—indeed his relationship to “religion” in general—was opportunistic.

There is no evidence that Hitler himself, in his personal life, ever expressed any individual belief in the basic tenets of the Christian church. He once said to Albert Speer, “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”
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All of which makes the increasingly quasi-religious role of Hitler in the Nazi state particularly intriguing. The hordes of Germans who travelled—almost as pilgrims—to pay homage to Hitler at his home above Berchtesgaden; the thousands of personal petitions sent to Hitler at the Reich Chancellery; the pseudo-religious iconography of the Nuremberg rallies; the fact that German children were taught that Hitler was “sent from God” and was their “faith” and “light”
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; all this spoke to the fact that Hitler was seen less as a normal politician and more as a prophet touched by the divine. For Wilhelm Roes, growing up in the early years of Nazi rule, Hitler “was God himself. All the media sort of glorified him. And we young people believed all of that; you know we were stupid. If I look at my grandchildren, we were so stupid.”
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Adolf Hitler became an object of veneration for millions. And the evidence is that in his public pronouncements during these first few years in power he gradually shifted the emphasis he placed on traditional notions of Christianity towards a less precise idea of “Providence.” Memorably,
in a speech in 1936, he remarked that “Neither threats nor warnings will prevent me from going my way. I follow the path assigned to me by Providence with the instinctive sureness of a sleepwalker.”
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Just who or what did Hitler think was this “Providence” who had “assigned” him his “path”? Almost certainly not the Christian God. As Hitler said to a group of Nazi leaders in 1937, “there is no universal agreement as to the specific nature of God”
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but “belief in God is one of the most ingenious and noblest presentiments of man which lifts us above the animals.” So, most likely, Hitler was using what he saw as the “ingenious” device of a supernatural being in order to justify his own actions. If he was following “Providence” then his actions could only be questioned by that “Providence”—certainly never by mere mortals. And since he was the only route to this “Providence” then he could do whatever he liked and claim divine support. Moreover, the increasing ambiguity in Hitler’s public speeches about whether or not his idea of “Providence” bore any relationship to Christianity prevented any Catholic or Protestant clergy claiming that they had any special ability to interpret his claim of a direct link to a supernatural being.

The result was that the established Christian church in Germany did not know quite what to make of Adolf Hitler, or how exactly to respond to his government. The Nazis never banned the church—indeed, a number of key Nazis were Christian believers. For example, Erich Koch, the hard-line Nazi Gauleiter of East Prussia, said after the war, “I held the view that the Nazi idea had to develop from a basic Prussian–Protestant attitude and from Luther’s unfinished Reformation.”
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On gaining power, Hitler, whilst most certainly not sharing Koch’s belief, seems to have been concerned most of all about the potential power of the church in Germany—Catholic and Protestant—as an oppositional power-bloc to his ambitions rather than as a spiritual force. For some years Hitler encouraged the placement of clergy who were out-and-out Nazis in senior positions within the Protestant church in Germany. But by 1937 it was obvious to Hitler that the German Protestant church would never be as acquiescent as he desired, and his rhetoric—in private—grew more overtly anti-Christian. And whilst in public Hitler was still ambiguous about where he stood in his relationship to a Christian God, a number of other leading Nazis were outspoken in their dislike of Christianity. Martin Bormann, who would become Hitler’s secretary,
Alfred Rosenberg, a leading party ideologue, and Heinrich Himmler, would all openly condemn Christianity. Members of Himmler’s SS were not allowed to say they did not believe in God, but equally they were not encouraged to say they worshipped a Christian God. The preferred option was for them to proclaim that they were
“gottgläubig”
or “God believers”—without the need to specify the exact nature of the God they believed in.

As time went on, Hitler’s true feelings about Christianity became ever more apparent within the Nazi elite. “The Führer is a man totally attuned to antiquity,” wrote Goebbels in his diary on 8 April 1941. “He hates Christianity, because it has crippled all that is noble in humanity.”
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That same year, chatting to five of his cronies—including Ribbentrop and Rosenberg—Hitler said, “The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life’s final task will be to solve the religious problem.” Declaring that “Christianity is an invention of sick brains,” he said that “the concrete image of the Beyond that religion forces on me does not stand up to examination.” Instead Hitler said, he dreamt “of a state of affairs in which every man would know that he lives and dies for the preservation of the species.”
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However, since Hitler knew that if he openly expressed such anti-religious views his own popularity might suffer, what he did was to mingle two justifications for his authority—a religious one and a scientific one—together. On the one hand Hitler claimed legitimacy from “Providence,” which millions of German Christians could take to be their God, but on the other he also claimed that the fundamental laws of nature supported his beliefs—hence the dual views presented in
Triumph of the Will
of pseudo-religious iconography and the raw animal power of healthy young Nazis.

Revealingly, Goebbels had anxieties about the commissioning of
Triumph of the Will
. In part this concern was motivated by jealousy of the director, Leni Riefenstahl. As Fritz Hippler, who worked closely with Goebbels, puts it, “Riefenstahl angered Goebbels because it was made possible for her to be creative in films by Hitler personally, and Goebbels had no say over her whatsoever.”
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But there was more to his reluctance to embrace the idea of
Triumph of the Will
than simple resentment. Goebbels was always concerned about the effect of overtly National Socialist propaganda on film. Wilfred von Oven recalls that Goebbels thought
films like
Hitlerjunge Quex
, about a heroic Hitler Youth boy who sees a vision of Nazi banners flying in heaven as he lies dying, were “dreadful.”
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As Goebbels announced in the
Völkischer Beobachter
in February 1934, “If I believe that there is an honest artistic attitude behind a film, then I will protect it … I do not demand that a film begins and ends with National Socialist parades. The Nazi parades should be left to us, we better understand them.”
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