Hitler's Charisma (19 page)

Herbert Döhring, as manager of the Berghof, was familiar with Hitler’s routine. “Hitler was a night owl, a night worker,”
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he says. “He would go to bed very late. If at all possible he would read a fat book in one night … [In the morning] he would get the newspapers brought to his room, but he would remain there until 12:30, 1:00, 1:30 … He would never relax. He always had plans for something, and then he would read the whole night through.”

The staff at the Berghof came to recognise the signs of how well or how badly Hitler’s solitary musing in his bedroom had gone. “When he came downstairs,” says Döhring, “if you heard him whistle to himself, that was the most serious alarm signal, don’t talk to him, let him go, hardly say hello, let him pass … But if he came downstairs humming a tune, and going from painting to painting, looking at them, if you were clever you would just busy yourself with one of the paintings, and when he saw this he wouldn’t be unhappy about it at all, and he would get into a conversation with you.”

Karl Wilhelm Krause,
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Hitler’s valet from 1934 to 1939, confirms that Hitler liked to spend large amounts of each day alone in his bedroom, and that he would not leave his room in the Reich Chancellery much before lunchtime. Indeed, Krause paints a portrait of a man obsessive about privacy. Hitler demanded that Krause not enter his bedroom in the morning, but leave newspapers and a summary of world news prepared by Otto Dietrich, his press officer, on a chair immediately outside his bedroom door. When Hitler awoke he would open his door, snatch up the material left on the chair and then shut himself back in the room for several hours more. But, notwithstanding this strange routine, Krause, like Döhring, was not scared of his boss. “I got on well with him. He wasn’t a tyrant. He was angry sometimes, but who isn’t?”

Hitler’s desire to work through problems in his own mind and then simply present the results to an audience was an aspect of his character that had been present since his youth. But this particular trait was most dramatically on show at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin on 5 November 1937, in one of the most important meetings held during the Third Reich. The meeting had originally been called to sort out the allocation of resources between the three military services. Admiral Raeder, head of the German Navy, felt his battleship building programme was under threat because of a lack of steel. There was also tension caused by Göring’s conflicting roles within the Nazi state, since he was in charge of both the Four Year Plan and the German air force. But, in the event, the 5 November meeting took on far greater significance, because Hitler decided to use it as an opportunity to present what he called “the fruit of thorough deliberation and the experiences of his four and a half years of power” to an audience of Hermann Göring, Konstantin von Neurath (Foreign Minister), Werner Blomberg (Minister of War), Erich Raeder (head of the navy) and Werner von Fritsch (head of the army).

Whilst the participants in the meeting all supported Nazi policy in general terms, they were by no means all committed believers in the charisma of Adolf Hitler. Göring and Blomberg certainly did have faith in the “special” powers of the Führer, as—to a lesser extent—did Raeder, a career naval officer. But Neurath was still at root a traditional Foreign Office official, and Fritsch was an archetypical Prussian officer, not predisposed to falling emotionally for a former ordinary soldier like Hitler.

Hitler began the meeting by reading out a long memorandum he had written. This was an unusual way for a statesman to announce important policy, not least because there had been no prior consultation with any of those present about the issues he was about to raise. Hitler emphasised both the vital nature of his role in the German state and the importance of this meeting, and said that “in the interest of a long-term German policy, his exposition should be regarded, in the event of his death, as his last will and testament.” He then reiterated his familiar view that Germany’s problem was how to “solve the need for space.” What was new—and shocking to a number of those present—was Hitler’s opinion on how and when this “problem” should be solved. In his exploration of a number of possible “contingencies” which might occur in the future, Hitler made it clear that he was resolved to force a union with Austria and eliminate
Czechoslovakia at the latest by 1943–45. This would also involve, of course, potential conflict not just with France but with Great Britain as well.

The response, particularly from Fritsch, the head of the Army, was not the one Hitler had desired. Fritsch made a series of objections to Hitler’s plan—chiefly that Germany could not win a war against both Britain and France. Blomberg agreed, and also mentioned the strength and power of Czech defences along the border with Germany. Neurath, for his part, openly disagreed with Hitler’s assumption that war would break out in the future between Italy on the one hand and Britain and France on the other, and that this conflict would be to Germany’s advantage.
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It was obvious, as Hossbach, Hitler’s military adjutant later put it, that the Führer’s grand political vision had not gained “applause and approval” from his military leaders but “sober criticism.”
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Hitler argued with them, and in doing so demonstrated a side to his charismatic leadership that differentiated him from a fellow dictator like Stalin—for it would have been potentially fatal to have dared to argue so overtly and so vociferously with the Soviet leader. But despite the objections from those present at the meeting, Hitler remained resolved to stick to the timetable he had announced—perhaps to act even more quickly if circumstances allowed. What was believed by some to be a strength of his leadership—his certainty—was here perceived as a weakness. Any facts that were inconvenient to his analysis Hitler simply disputed or denied. He had decided that any advantage the Germans possessed in armaments would shortly be lost as other European powers stepped up their own rearmament programmes. So the time to act was now. It was immaterial to him what any other person thought.

Less than three months after the November meeting, two of the key military participants—Blomberg and Fritsch—were no longer in office. But this was not as a result of some master plan devised by Hitler, but instead a consequence of circumstance. On 12 January 1938, Blomberg married Margarethe Gruhn, a woman more than thirty years his junior. But a few days later police discovered that Ms. Gruhn had a colourful past—six years before she had posed for pornographic pictures. Blomberg had known nothing of this—in fact, he had not known his new bride long at all. She worked as a typist and he had only recently become infatuated with her. He had been a widower since 1932 and now, demonstrating perhaps the same type of impetuous emotional enthusiasm which was
behind his attachment to the charisma of Hitler, he had fallen for the charms of Fräulein Gruhn.

In the light of Blomberg’s controversial marriage, Hitler asked Heinrich Himmler to reopen an investigation into Fritsch, Head of the Army. Himmler had previously presented evidence to Hitler that Fritsch was homosexual—evidence Hitler had dismissed. But after Blomberg’s actions, Hitler wanted to be reassured that there was no substance to the allegation.

Events now moved quickly. Blomberg was prevailed on to resign and Fritsch was confronted with a witness in the presence of Hitler who claimed to have had homosexual relations with him. Fritsch said, on his word of honour, that the charges were false. But he was still subsequently removed from office, though Hitler agreed that the evidence against him could, in due course, be tested in a military court.

Then something surprising happened. Blomberg, in his final meeting to say farewell to Hitler, suggested that Hitler himself—rather than one of Blomberg’s own colleagues—should become Minister of War. It was an idea that was calculated to appeal to the Führer. Hitler had always understood the value of holding multiple jobs in the hierarchy of power. For example, he was not only Führer of the German people and Chancellor of Germany, but also remained head of the SA. But this new proposed appointment would create a strange hierarchical structure in which Hitler as war minister was responsible to himself as Chancellor. Hitler subsequently amended Blomberg’s suggestion and became commander-in-chief of the armed forces rather than War Minister, a post that disappeared. The consequences of Hitler taking this role were far reaching, especially when the weak-willed Wilhelm Keitel—an officer Blomberg did not rate—was appointed head of the staff of the combined armed forces reporting directly to Hitler. At a stroke, Hitler no longer needed to act—as he saw it—through a maze of restrictive senior figures in the military in order to get what he wanted done.

Why did Blomberg suggest Hitler should become head of the armed forces and then not protest about the appointment of the toadying Keitel to assist him? One scholar who has closely studied the history suggests that Blomberg was full of “rancour against his colleagues”
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for believing he had disgraced the honour of the officer corps by his recent marriage, but perhaps more likely, Blomberg wanted to ensure that Göring did not
get the job. For Hitler still remained the “acceptable” face of Nazism to many in the elite of the armed forces.

Hitler also took advantage of the departure of Fritsch. Not just because he could now consider appointing a more amenable head of the army, but also because Hitler coupled this change with the retirement of more than a dozen other senior officers and the removal of Neurath as Foreign Minister. Neurath was made the president of a committee of the Privy Council that never met, and was replaced as Foreign Minister by Joachim von Ribbentrop—a man whose chief objective was to please Adolf Hitler in any way he could.

At first sight, this swift reorganisation appears similar to Stalin’s purging of army officers in the Soviet Union during the 1930s—both involve dictators removing obstructive influences within the army hierarchy—but there are significant differences. Unlike Stalin, Hitler did not move proactively to change these personnel. Instead he reacted to Blomberg’s predicament. Stalin, on the other hand, instigated the Great Terror of the 1930s himself—a series of mass killings in which around 700,000 people died. The fate of the generals that the dictators removed from office was also very different. When Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, for example, was arrested by the Soviet Secret Police in 1937, he was the most brilliant military thinker in the Red Army, responsible for the innovative theory of “deep operations” whereby armoured units would strike far into enemy territory. But Stalin was suspicious of him—based on no coherent evidence—and had him tortured and then shot in the head. In contrast, when Field Marshal Blomberg fell from grace in February 1938, he wasn’t tortured or arrested, but given a 50,000 Mark golden “goodbye”
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plus a munificent pension. Then Blomberg and his wife left for a tour around the world. After their luxurious year-long vacation they settled peacefully in Blomberg’s home in the holiday resort of Bad Wiessee.

Of course, both leaders—ultimately—were mass murderers, but Hitler employed techniques of charismatic leadership that Stalin did not. Hitler, as the 5 November meeting demonstrates, felt compelled to try and persuade his military leaders to accept his vision, whilst Stalin preferred to terrify his generals into acquiescence. Hitler knew that within a few years he needed his armed forces to act aggressively in wars of conquest, whereas Stalin had no such grandiose plan. His prime objective was to keep his generals from plotting against him and attempting to overthrow
him in revolution. And Stalin, like Hitler a keen reader of history, always remembered how Napoleon, a French general, had supplanted the leaders of the French Revolution (he even referred to Tukhachevsky as “Napoleonchik”
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). More recently he had been surprised how simple it had been for General Franco to foment an uprising against the Spanish Republic in 1936.
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In Germany, fearing neither torture nor murder at the hands of the Nazi state, Ludwig Beck, the chief of staff of the army, had been adding his voice to those protesting at the ideas Hitler had put forward at the 5 November meeting. Beck, who unlike Hitler was fond of putting his thoughts on paper, penned a devastating critique of his supreme commander’s thinking, even going so far as to question the core policy which underpinned everything else—
Lebensraum
. Whilst acknowledging that nations which were integrated into a network of foreign trade were not “independent,” he argued that “to conclude from this fact that the only way forward is the production of a larger living space [
Lebensraum
] seems to me to be little thought through.”
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However, when the crisis engulfing Blomberg and Fritsch broke, Beck still found it hard to believe that Hitler was not a man of honour. General Keitel had deliberately kept Beck in the dark about Hitler’s plan to appoint a new head of the army to replace Fritsch—even though the case against Fritsch had not yet been tested in an army court. Keitel confidentially asked General Walther von Brauchitsch if he would be prepared to become head of the army—but only on condition that he endorsed the structural changes Hitler was making and made the army even more sympathetic to the Nazi state.

When he found out, Beck enlisted the help of the distinguished General Gerd von Rundstedt in an attempt to intervene with Hitler and modify the proposed changes, but it was useless. Hitler had made up his mind. The whole of the organisation at the top of the Wehrmacht would be restructured. Hitler would be commander-in-chief of all the armed forces with General Keitel as his slavish assistant. General Brauchitsch—a much more amenable figure to the Nazis than Fritsch had ever been—would become head of the army. So Hitler got what he wanted. But in their own way Generals Keitel and Brauchitsch got what they wanted too. Keitel was elevated to a position of power that he could not otherwise have expected to gain (Blomberg had spoken to Hitler in derogatory terms about Keitel,
saying that he merely “ran his office” for him
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) and Brauchitsch leapfrogged over several rivals to replace Fritsch. Personal ambition, rather than deep commitment to Hitler, was the most important motivation for them. Hitler, however, would have been aware that both of these German generals were more susceptible to his charismatic leadership than Fritsch had been. Brauchitsch, in particular, was in awe of Hitler and often tongue-tied in his presence. “Please do not hold it against me,” he was later to say to General Halder. “I know you are dissatisfied with me. When I confront this man, I feel as if someone was choking me and I cannot find another word.”
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Brauchitsch would also—literally—be in Hitler’s debt as he was given 250,000 Reichsmarks shortly after his appointment as head of the army to enable him to get a divorce from his wife and marry his mistress, a fanatical Nazi.