Hitler's Charisma (39 page)

Hitler was now in denial. When he was told, just before the Soviet offensive in December, that the Wehrmacht could not be supplied with adequate amounts of steel, he simply refused to accept that “no raw materials are available” because “he has now conquered all of Europe.”
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And on 29 November 1941, when informed by his own Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, that “the war can no longer be won militarily,” and that the only way of stopping the conflict was by some form of political solution, Hitler replied that he could see no way of ending the war in such a way.
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Many of the central components of Hitler’s charismatic appeal—his certainty, his force of will, his refusal to admit defeat, his faith in his own destiny—were beginning to be perceived as dangerous weaknesses by some of those who had put their trust in him. An idea of the inner tension a number of his most senior military figures were enduring, as they attempted to reconcile the reality they were learning from those beneath them with the intransigence of their leader, can be seen from the
catalogue of illness and dismissal that winter. Field Marshal Brauchitsch had a heart attack on 9 November 1941.
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The anxiety and stress of the eastern campaign had—both Hitler and Halder agreed—contributed to the breakdown in his health. Hitler removed Brauchitsch from command on 19 December 1941. The day before, Hitler had granted Field Marshal von Bock’s request to be replaced as commander of Army Group Centre. Bock had been outraged by the decision not to push forward earlier on Moscow; however, he wrote that his request to be relieved was motivated by a stomach illness from which he had not recovered.

The stress of the fight on the Eastern Front was breaking the spirit of those tasked with meeting impossible logistical demands. On 17 November 1941, General Ernst Udet committed suicide. As the Luftwaffe’s Head of Equipment he had endured the added pressure of working for Hermann Göring, a man who consistently made unattainable promises to Hitler. During the Battle of Britain, Udet had personally experienced how Göring’s pattern of wild promise, followed inevitably by crashing disappointment, could affect him. Having assured Hitler that the RAF would be defeated, Göring dealt with the failure of the Luftwaffe to deliver the desired result by placing large amounts of the blame on Udet.

Hitler now had a series of important personnel decisions to take, and the most important was who should replace Brauchitsch as head of the army. Hitler needed someone on whom he could utterly rely. Someone, he must have felt, given this list of sick and feeble military commanders, who was tough enough to deal with the stress of this war of annihilation. And by this point the only man who measured up to all this, in Hitler’s view, was Adolf Hitler. He appointed himself the head of the German army and added this title to his growing list—which now included Supreme Commander in Chief of all German armed forces, Chancellor, Führer of the German people, and head of state.

Hitler’s strength as a charismatic leader had always been to set the overarching vision and leave the details to his subordinates. But now the days of staying in his room until noon, and then taking a long lunch and a walk in the mountains until tea, were over. His reaction to adversity was to pile more work on himself. In the process he sent out the clear message to his military subordinates that he knew better than they did—not just in vision, but in detail.

This new reality was demonstrated during one of his first meetings as
head of the army. On 20 December 1941, Hitler met General Guderian for an epic five-hour conference. Guderian travelled to Hitler’s headquarters in the belief that “our Supreme Command would listen to sensible propositions when they were laid before it by a general who knew the front.”
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He believed that his unit should mount a tactical retreat in the face of the Soviet offensive—in fact, as Hitler learnt at this meeting, they were already retreating. Hitler vehemently disagreed, insisting that they stay where they were. He suggested they blast holes in the frozen earth to create shelters. Guderian dismissed the idea, and argued that huge numbers of his soldiers would die if they did not pull back. Hitler’s response was revealing. “Do you think Frederick the Great’s grenadiers were anxious to die?” he asked. And like Frederick the Great, Hitler argued, “I, too, am entitled to ask any German soldier to lay down his life.” Guderian replied that every soldier knew that in war time he risked his life, but that “the intentions I have heard expressed will lead to losses that are utterly disproportionate to the results that will be achieved.”

Searching for an explanation for Guderian’s behaviour, Hitler seems to have found the answer in the tank commander’s desire to protect his men. “You have been too deeply impressed by the suffering of the soldiers,” he said. “You feel too much pity for them. You should stand back more. Believe me, things appear clearer when examined at longer range.”
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Guderian, having failed to convince Hitler of the wisdom of tactical retreat, left East Prussia for the front. Less than a week later he was sacked. And he was not the only general to lose his job. Around three dozen generals would be removed in the wake of the December crisis. Then, on 17 January, Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau, who had been one of the first senior officers to support Hitler in the early 1930s, collapsed and died of a stroke.

Hitler would have seen all this as evidence of Darwinian selection; if his generals were not tough enough then so be it. He would replace them with other, tougher men. Indeed, the necessity for “toughness” was a theme of the order he sent to Army Group Centre on 20 December. “The fanatical will to defend the land on which the troops are standing must be injected into them with every possible means, even the toughest.”
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Whether or not Hitler’s decision to order the army to stand its ground that winter made good tactical sense is still open to debate. Whilst the outright crisis did ease by spring, this was in part the result of inept decisions
taken by Stalin, and because German officers did move their troops back some miles to more defendable positions when they thought it necessary. What is clear, however, is that this marks the moment when Hitler demonstrated that he could not be trusted to keep his promises to the German people. The enemy had not been destroyed as he had promised back in October.

The situation in December was made still worse for Hitler by the entry of America into the war as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December. Four days later, Hitler—and thus Germany—declared war on America. In doing so, Hitler would have felt he was doing little more than formalising a state of conflict that had existed unofficially for months. American ships were already protecting British convoys in the Atlantic and Roosevelt had made obvious his commitment to helping Churchill.
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In any case, Hitler felt, the Americans would now be involved in a war in the Pacific and it would be some time before their troops could also be fighting in Europe. Hitler’s focus thus remained on the war in the East.

But not exclusively. Because Hitler had also been making important decisions in two areas of secret Nazi policy—the adult euthanasia scheme and the persecution of the Jews. How he dealt with both of these issues during this vital period tells us a great deal not just about the cold cruelty at the heart of the Nazi state, but also how Hitler carefully managed his charismatic reputation in the face of potentially unpopular decisions.

By early summer 1941 the euthanasia action against the severely disabled had been in operation for nearly two years. Since German doctors would not participate in the scheme without some form of official backing Hitler had been forced, back in October 1939, to sign a note authorising Phillip Bouhler of the Party Chancellery and his own doctor, Karl Brandt, to conduct “mercy” killings. Hitler saw the war as ideal cover to pursue the policy; significantly he deliberately backdated the note he wrote in October 1939 to 1 September and the invasion of Poland. But despite the existence of this document he wanted to keep his own name out of this business as much as possible. Hitler subsequently refused, for example, to allow formal legislation to be passed which would associate him directly with the killings.
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By 1941 several killing centres had been established within Germany to murder selected disabled people—adults as well as children. The killing
procedure that evolved at places like Sonnenstein mental hospital near Dresden had obvious similarities with the technique used subsequently to murder Jews in the extermination camps—the patients were told to undress because they were to take a “shower” and were then gassed once the “shower” room had been sealed. Those involved in the crime did their best to keep the process secret—patients were often moved between a number of asylums before finally arriving at a killing centre—but since in many cases the victims had families who still cared about their welfare, and since the killings were conducted inside Germany, it proved hard not to let news about the action slip out. There were a number of occasions where it was obvious what had happened once the notice of the fictitious cause of death was posted to the relatives. In one case, for example, the cause of death was reported as appendicitis, but the patient’s appendix had actually been taken out years before.
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Cardinal August Count von Galen, Bishop of Münster, famously protested publicly about the euthanasia campaign on 3 August 1941. From the pulpit he declaimed that it was obvious that incurable patients were being killed, and he railed against the whole idea of “worthless life.” He also pointed out that once the idea of killing people like the mentally ill had been accepted then others could soon be at risk—like soldiers who returned severely injured from the front line. He also made reference to the British bombing raids on Germany—allowing for the possible inference that this was some kind of divine retribution on Germany.

In the wake of Galen’s actions, and after the publication and distribution of thousands of copies of his eloquent outrage, it looked like the Nazis faced a growing movement of public protest. Nazi authorities had already seen discontent develop in Catholic areas of Germany when, starting earlier in 1941, they had introduced a variety of restrictive measures—like the removal of nuns from teaching. The protests later crystallised around the decision to ban crucifixes in schools. This resulted in petitions and even street demonstrations. Significantly, many of the protestors claimed that they were completely behind Hitler, but that his underlings must be acting against his wishes whilst he was away fighting the war. “You wear brown shirts on the outside,” wrote one protestor, talking about the local Nazi party officials, “but on the inside you are Bolsheviks and Jews, otherwise you could not act behind the Führer’s back. Our Führer does not order such things. Every day he cares for his soldiers in the field and not
for taking the crucifixes out of school …”
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Another letter from Maria Aigner, who lived in a village north of Munich, read, “As a mother of eight, our Führer awarded me with the
Mutterkreuz
(mother’s cross) in gold. It is incomprehensible to me that my youngest, whom last Monday I led to school for the first time, should not see a crucifix there, after his seven siblings have grown up in the shadow of the crucifix hitherto. Of my five sons, two already fulfil their duty as soldiers and the crucifix in school has certainly not harmed them, but it was to them an example of the highest commitment. I often contemplate and cannot solve the mystery, how such a measure is possible at all, since our Führer stands by his soldiers in the East and fights against Bolshevism.”
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We’ve already seen the positive benefit that Hitler gained from the belief amongst many ordinary Germans that the everyday problems they faced at the hands of Nazi officials were not the work directly of their Führer, and that “if only he knew” what was happening then all would be put right. But here we see a more problematic side of that arrangement as far as Hitler was concerned, and one explanation of why he tried to distance himself from policies that might prove unpopular—even though he desired their implementation. If Hitler had openly supported measures like the removal of crucifixes from schools or the euthanasia killings then he knew that many of his supporters—in particular, millions of Christians—would be disillusioned.

So, despite the complete loathing Hitler expressed for Christianity in private, senior Nazis ensured that the ban on crucifixes in schools was lifted. Moreover, not only did Hitler not throw Bishop Galen into a concentration camp for so openly challenging the euthanasia policy, but on 24 August 1941 he stopped the transportation of the disabled to the killing centres. Over ninety thousand people had been murdered so far during the euthanasia action. But the killings did not completely stop. The programme of murdering selected sick prisoners from concentration camps under a procedure named 14f 13 continued, and individual asylums still carried on killing a number of patients on site. All this, however, was much easier for the Nazis to keep secret than the widespread transportation of patients to the killing centres had been.

What this all demonstrated was the latent power of the Church to mobilise popular protest. Hitler recognised this and spoke privately that autumn of wanting Christianity to die a “slow” death, whilst understanding
the obvious dangers of provoking discontent. “The main thing,” he said, “is to be clever in this matter and not to look for a struggle where it can be avoided.”
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But whilst he avoided directly challenging the Church during 1941, Hitler did increase measures against the Jews. Not only was Hitler’s hatred of Jews almost visceral in a way his dislike of Christians was not, but the Jews could not mobilise protest against their treatment in the way that millions of Christians could. They had few friends inside the Reich with the courage to stand up for them. Whilst Bishop Galen protested about the euthanasia scheme, for instance, he made no mention of the persecution of the Jews.