Hitler's Charisma (17 page)

Fritz Hippler explains that his boss, Goebbels, believed that “articles in the papers or what was said, influenced the brain, the consciousness, the intelligence, the imagination, while the real primary forces of men are moved by the unconscious, that which he doesn’t raise into his consciousness, but which drives him on from beyond his consciousness. On these primary sources, the moving picture works in a particularly intensive manner, and this medium he therefore wanted to use in a particularly pointed way.”
⁶³
Goebbels believed that in order to work effectively propaganda had to possess two qualities—it must not look like crude propaganda and it must be entertaining. As he said to a gathering of senior figures from German radio in March 1933, “First principle: at all costs avoid being boring. I put that before everything.”
⁶⁴

All of which meant that Goebbels was predisposed to be suspicious of a propaganda effort like
Triumph of the Will
. But once he had seen the film and—more importantly—seen Hitler’s positive reaction to it, he praised it, calling
Triumph of the Will
“a magnificent cinematic vision of the Führer” and remarking that “the film has successfully avoided the danger of merely a politically slanted film … it is an epic, forging the tempo of marching formations, steel-like in its conviction and fired by passionate artistry.”
⁶⁵

Significantly, however, the experiment of portraying Hitler in a feature-length documentary was never repeated. Goebbels preferred an altogether more understated approach to embedding Hitler in the German psyche. His preference, in feature films, was not to mention Hitler explicitly at all. Instead, he wanted the audience themselves to make the connection between the film they were watching and their Führer. This led to the later commissioning of a series of historical films featuring heroes from Germany’s past, like Friedrich Schiller, Bismarck and Frederick the Great. The scripts were carefully constructed so that parallels could be drawn between these historical figures and Hitler, but the
analogies were never blatantly spelt out. Instead, history was twisted so that, for example, Bismarck was shown acting very much like Hitler in dissolving parliamentary democracy.
⁶⁶
Whilst, according to Fritz Hippler, in
Der Grosse König
(“The Great King”) about Frederick the Great, “the German who watched it was supposed to think that here was a similar situation to the present … Frederick the Great was supposed to symbolise Hitler.”
⁶⁷

Goebbels sought to demonstrate that all of these great historical figures—especially Hitler—were linked by certain key charismatic components. None of them sought legitimacy by democratic means; instead, either explicitly or implicitly, they relied on a mystical concept of “Providence” to justify their actions. None were motivated by conventional goals—in particular, none of them sought personal financial gain and all served the interest of the German people above all else. Goebbels emphasised in these films, as Max Weber had written years before, that these charismatic figures stood “outside the ties of this world.”
⁶⁸

Moreover, Goebbels wanted members of the audience to feel, after watching the films, that they themselves had independently reached the conclusion he desired. On occasion he disagreed with Hitler, who demanded a less subtle approach. “A few disagreements over the newsreel,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “The Führer wants more polemical material in the script. I would rather have the pictures speak for themselves and confine the script to explaining what the audience would not otherwise understand. I consider this to be more effective, because then the viewer does not see the art in it.”
⁶⁹

But there was no disagreement between Goebbels and Hitler about the truth of another of Weber’s theories—that “charismatic authority is specifically unstable.”
⁷⁰
They knew that there was little point in encouraging the German population to treat Hitler as a quasi-religious figure if the life of the average German did not improve under his rule. Hitler required people to have “faith” and “belief” in him. But if over a period of years all of his interventions and initiatives fell flat then, inevitably, that faith and belief would die.

It is no accident that this period in the growth in Hitler’s popularity—between 1933 and the end of 1937—coincided with a series of foreign policy triumphs, all of which Hitler took the credit for. In swift succession Germany withdrew from the League of Nations (1933), agreed to a ten-year
non-aggression pact with Poland (1934), and signed a naval agreement with Great Britain (1935). The last action by the British significantly undermined the League of Nations and the previous notion of a collective European response to German rearmament. Then, in 1936, Hitler ordered German troops to reoccupy the Rhineland, an area of Germany that the
Wehrmacht
(as the
Reichswehr
was renamed in 1935) had been forbidden to enter under the terms of the Versailles treaty. There was, as a consequence, an outpouring of national pride.

On the domestic front, alongside a vast expenditure on armaments—all built in German factories—the Nazis managed to reduce unemployment from a high of six million in January 1933 to one million in September 1936 and just 34,000 by the time of the outbreak of the war in September 1939. As recent research has shown, this achievement was less to do with much-hyped public work schemes like the autobahn building programme, and more to do with a recovery in the private sector of the economy.
⁷¹

In parallel with the fall in unemployment came the rise of
Volksgemeinschaft
(the idea of a “people’s community”) that manifested itself not just in events like the Nuremberg rally but also in movements like the
Kraft durch Freude
(“Strength through Joy”) and
Schönheit der Arbeit
(“Beauty of Labour”) initiatives instigated by Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front. The former was directed at the leisure time of workers, with the organisation of a whole range of different community activities, and the latter was an attempt to convince employers to offer better facilities in the workplace.

What this all meant, as Professor Christopher Browning puts it, is that, “Much of what Hitler brings in the 1930s in a sense can be offered as beneficial to the vast majority at extreme cost to vulnerable and isolated minorities. So if you’re an asocial, or if you’re a gypsy, or if you’re Jewish, or if you’re Communist, you’re going to suffer greatly. But the vast majority of Germans benefit and don’t feel threatened in any way by these things.”
⁷²

For someone like Erna Krantz, then a schoolgirl in Munich, this was a “positive” time in her life. “An elite race was being promoted,” she says. “Well, I have to say it was somewhat contagious. You used to say that if you tell a young person every day, ‘You are someone special,’ then in the end they will believe you.”
⁷³

But the only way that an “elite race” could be “promoted,” of course, was by the exclusion of others. And the way in which Hitler set about persecuting those Germans he did not want in his Nazi state reveals another key aspect of his charismatic leadership. Because, as Hitler understood, an enemy can be a leader’s greatest asset.

It is almost impossible to overestimate the importance of enemies to Adolf Hitler. Enemies did not just feed the hatred he had felt at much of the world since his earliest years, but provided a much-needed bonding element for the first supporters of the Nazi party. As Hitler discovered, it is much easier for charismatic leaders to define themselves by who they hate rather than by what they believe in.

Hitler also realised the value of focusing hatred on one single enemy. As he wrote in
Mein Kampf
, “It belongs to the genius of a great leader to make even adversaries far removed from one another seem to belong to a single category … a multiplicity of different adversaries must always be combined so that in the eyes of the masses of one’s own supporters the struggle is directed against only one enemy. This strengthens their faith in their own right and enhances their bitterness against those who attack it.”
¹

Deep in his psyche Hitler possessed just such a clearly defined enemy—the Jews. But a number of other political constraints prevented him from acting on this passionately held hatred as drastically as he might have wished. As a result, when legislation was passed in 1933 to “legally” exclude Jews from employment in the public sector—like the civil service
and the army—it contained a number of conditions which specifically exempted some Jews, like those who had fought in the First World War or who had lost a son in the conflict.

The advantage for Hitler of such legislation was that it was capable of receiving wider support than more extreme measures, and its success indicated a strong latent anti-Semitism in Germany (even though, when the Nazis came to power, less than 1 per cent of the German population was Jewish). For example, Johannes Zahn, an economist, admits that the “general” opinion in Germany was that the Jews were disproportionately represented in key professions like the law and medicine. (What he didn’t do was to contextualise this statistic, since the reason why this had occurred was because for centuries German Jews had been denied access to many other means of employment.)

This feeling that the Jewish population of Germany represented a kind of “danger” was even to be found amongst some devout Christians. For example, Paul Althaus, a Protestant theologian, said in a lecture in 1927 that whilst he rejected the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, he did think that Germany was under “threat” from a “demoralised and demoralising urban intellectual class which is represented primarily by the Jewish race.”
²

Diehard Nazi supporters, of course, went much further in their hatred of the Jews. They believed that these early attempts to legislate Jews out of positions of influence were ineffective against a people they described as their “World Enemy Number One.” As a result, spontaneous acts of persecution against German Jews continued to occur. Lucille Eichengreen was one of those who suffered. She grew up in a Jewish family in Hamburg during the 1930s, and as soon as Hitler came to power the other children in her apartment block stopped speaking to her and her sister. On the way to school they threw stones at them. “That was an ongoing fear,” she says. And as well as the physical threat came the psychological damage caused by ostracism and abuse. “It was very unpleasant being ridiculed, being called names; seeing the kids that used to play with us [now] in brown and white [i.e., Hitler Youth] uniforms. There was no ‘Good morning,’ there was no ‘Good night,’ there was ‘
Heil Hitler!
’ To a child it was really frightening. It was not something that you could comprehend, because you kept asking why? It didn’t make sense.”
³
Lucille’s experience was not uncommon. German Jews could even be physically or verbally
attacked by Nazi hardliners if they tried to swim in a public swimming pool or visit a public ice rink.

These uncontrolled attacks on Jews were a matter of concern for the Nazi Finance Minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and in the summer of 1935 he declared that this “drift into lawlessness” was putting “the economic basis of rearmament at risk.”
⁴
Johannes Zahn, who knew Schacht, concedes that whilst the Nazi finance minister never “exerted pressure” against the Nazis’ basic principle of removing Jewish people from public life and professions like banking, he did “exert a lot of pressure in favour of having regulated procedures and laws and regulations, not allowing wild extremes.”
⁵

At the Nuremberg party rally in September 1935 Hitler announced two pieces of hurried legislation: the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour,” which outlawed sexual contact and marriage between Jews and non-Jews, and the “Reich Citizenship Law,” which excluded Jews from German citizenship. However, Hitler neglected to specify how a “Jew” would be defined. Subsequently, since a “racial” definition of Jewishness was impossible to establish, the Nazis used a religious definition; a “full Jew” was held to be someone who had three grandparents who had belonged to the Jewish religious community.

This definition went against Hitler’s passionate belief that the Jews were a “race.” But, still, the time spent by the Nazis on defining who was a Jew and who wasn’t, which was subsequently to be vital in determining who would live and who would die, demonstrated once more the fanaticism of Hitler’s approach. It didn’t matter if a German Jew was of enormous economic value to the state—the most brilliant theoretical scientist or practical inventor—he or she would still be excluded from German citizenship and a host of other rights if “Jewishness” was established. This also illustrates how—from Hitler’s perspective—the Jews were an extremely useful enemy. The vast majority of Germans knew they were not Jews and so were relatively safe from persecution. For a charismatic leader like Hitler, the more there is one single enemy for propaganda to focus upon and the more that enemy is a clearly defined minority from which the vast bulk of the population know they are excluded, the better.

Hitler then managed to take this idea of a “single enemy” and give it a twist—he interwove his hatred of the Jews with his hatred of Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union in an attempt to create one gigantic enemy. In
a speech at Nuremberg on 13 September 1937 he explicitly said that what the world faced was an “all-encompassing general attack”
⁶
on an epic scale, one which was led by the “rulers of Jewish Bolshevism in Moscow.” These “rulers” were, according to Hitler “an uncivilised Jewish–Bolshevik international guild of criminals” who had attempted, amongst other abuses, to cause a revolution in Spain. He reminded his audience that the leaders of the revolution in Berlin and Munich after the First World War had been Jewish.