Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (104 page)

17

Dictatorship by Division, Architecture of Intimidation

“What does it feel like, Herr Reichskanzler, being a Reichskanzler?” Sefton Delmer asked Hitler in February 1933, shortly after he was named German chancellor. “Do you know, Mr. Delmer,” Hitler answered. “I’ve made a great discovery. There’s nothing to this business of governing. Absolutely nothing. It is all done for you…you just simply sign your name to what is put before you, and that is that.”
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If Hitler did in fact say what the British journalist wrote in his memoirs, it was one of his typical poses. The truth is that in the early months of his government, the new man in charge was very diligent about performing his duties as chancellor.

He would arrive in his office punctually at 10 a.m., consult with his most important aides and force himself to read documents.
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He carefully prepared himself for cabinet meetings in an attempt to impress his conservative coalition partners with his knowledge of details.
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Hitler had no experience whatsoever in administration, so especially at the start he depended on ministerial civil servants. On the evening of 29 January 1933, in the Hotel Kaiserhof, he allegedly offered the ministerial counsel of the Interior Ministry, Hans Heinrich Lammers, the post of state secretary in the Chancellery with the words that he himself “was no politician and did not know anything of this administration business.” Hitler did not intend to change, but he also did not want to embarrass himself, so he felt he needed “a civil servant who knows his way around.”
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The more invulnerable Hitler thought his power was, however, and the less heed he had to pay Hindenburg and his conservative coalition partners, the more he tried to duck the routine duties of his office. With visible pleasure he told those around him again and again how people had “tried to get him used to how civil servants worked” and how he had been “so occupied reading through files and going through current issues” that he had no time “to take a calm look at larger problems.”
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Albert Speer quoted Hitler once saying over lunch: “In the first few weeks, every minute detail was laid before me to decide. I found piles of files on my desk every day, and no matter how hard I worked, they never got any fewer. Until I radically put an end to such senselessness.”
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When the ailing Hindenburg retreated to his East Prussian estate in the spring of 1934, Hitler’s self-imposed discipline concerning work dissipated noticeably, and he no longer bothered to maintain regular office routines. When he hired his assistant Fritz Wiedemann a few days before Christmas in 1933, he told him that he initially had had “great respect” for ministerial civil servants, but had since come to see that “they only put on their pants one leg at a time.”
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In a remarkably brief time, Hitler had learned how to use the bureaucratic apparatus for his own ends so that he no longer had to be constantly present in the Chancellery. That gave him the space to pursue his personal interests and proclivities. Once again he was beset by the restlessness that had driven him from one campaign event to the next during his “days of battle.” One manifestation was an insatiable desire to travel. “I cannot imagine anything more terrible than to sit in an office day in, day out, and to spend my whole life poring over files,” one of his domestic servants overheard him saying on one of his car journeys. “I am afraid of getting old and not being able to travel as I like.”
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One of his favourite destinations was Munich. Speer, who had become part of his entourage of close associates over the course of 1933 and 1934, noticed that Hitler always reverted to his bohemian ways when he visited the Bavarian capital: “Most of his time is spent strolling around aimlessly, visiting construction sites, artists’ studios, cafés and restaurants.”
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During the first year of his reign, Hitler lived in Berlin in the official state secretary’s apartment on the fourth floor of the extension to the Chancellery in Wilhelmstrasse 78, which had been opened in 1930. He was unable to move immediately into the old Chancellery at Wilhelmstrasse 77, the former Radziwill family mansion in which Bismarck, his successors and the chancellors of the Weimar Republic had lived, because Hindenburg had been using it since the autumn of 1932 while the Reich president’s palace was being renovated.
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After Hindenburg moved out in the autumn of 1933 Hitler turned to his Munich architect, Paul Ludwig Troost, who had renovated the Brown House, and commissioned him to modernise and refurnish the apartment in the Chancellery. But Troost died suddenly on 21 January of the following year. “Irreplaceable loss,” noted Goebbels. “The Führer crushed. No one can replace him.”
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But a new favourite architect was waiting in the wings: 28-year-old Albert Speer. Himself the son of an architect from the southern German city of Mannheim, Speer grew up in an affluent family and followed in his father’s footsteps, studying in Karlsruhe, Munich and Berlin. He joined the NSDAP in March 1931 after attending a Hitler speech in Berlin’s Hasenheide Park. Shortly thereafter, he met Karl Hanke, the organisational director of the Berlin Gau, who gave him his first commissions, including the renovation of the new Gau headquarters on Vossstrasse. Speer demonstrated his talent for improvisation and theatricality when he designed the backdrop, bordered by gigantic swastika banners, for Hitler’s inaugural 1 May address on Tempelhof Field.
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He attracted Hitler’s personal attention in the summer of 1933, when he renovated, in record time, the official apartment Goebbels had taken over from Alfred Hugenberg. Hitler now asked Speer to supervise the construction work at Wilhelmstrasse 77. The Führer visited the site almost daily to check on progress, insisting that the work be carried out quickly since the small state secretary’s apartment on the top floor of the extension was unsuited to hosting official events.
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Renovations were complete in May 1934, and Hitler was finally able to move in.

On the ground floor were the public rooms: an expansive foyer that hosted official receptions, a small salon looking out on the garden, leading to the left to a “music salon” that was also used to screen films in the evening, and to the right to the so-called Bismarck room, also called the smokers’ salon, where Hitler’s lunch and dinner guests congregated before meals. It was connected to the dining room, which in turn gave out onto a conservatory with a long row of windows, also looking out over the garden. Hitler’s private quarters were on the first floor and consisted of a living room with library, an office, a bedroom and a bathroom. A portrait of Hitler’s mother hung over the spartan iron bed. Next to the chancellor’s suite, a guest room was set up for Eva Braun, but it was rarely used before 1939. The servants lived next to that. The so-called “stairway room” in front of the Führer’s apartment served as a reception for Hitler’s secretaries. This led via a corridor to the wing of the building that housed the offices of Hitler’s assistants, Reich Press Spokesman Otto Dietrich and the commander of Hitler’s bodyguard, SS Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich.
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Hitler had four personal assistants: his main assistant, Wilhelm Brückner, who had commanded the Munich SA regiment during the Beer Hall Putsch and who had begun serving Hitler personally in August 1930; Julius Schaub, who had also taken part in the putsch and who had shadowed Hitler like a second skin since 1925; Fritz Wiedemann, the retired sergeant who had been Hitler’s commanding officer in the List Regiment in 1916 and 1917 and who began working in the chancellery in 1934; and Albert Bormann, Martin Bormann’s younger brother, who ran Adolf Hitler’s “private chancellery.” Hitler also had three military aides who served as go-betweens with the armed forces: Colonel Friedrich Hossbach for the army (as of 1934), Lieutenant Captain Karl Jesko von Puttkamer for the navy (as of 1935) and Captain Nicolaus von Below for the air force (as of 1937). Three secretaries were also members of Hitler’s personal staff: Johanna Wolf (since 1929), Christa Schroeder (since 1933) and Gerda Daranowski (since 1937). Hitler also had two manservants, Able Seaman Karl Krause (as of 1934) and the bricklayer and member of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, Heinz Linge (as of 1935), both of whom were trained at Munich’s Hotel College before entering Hitler’s service. Building manager Arthur Kannenberg and his wife Frieda were responsible for running the Führer’s household. Aeroplane captain Hans Baur and Hitler’s chauffeur Julius Schreck (as of 1936 Erich Kempka) took care of travel security on journeys.
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As Heinz Linge later testified, Hitler was “difficult to predict” in his dealings with his servants.
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Sometimes he was charming, enquiring about their personal welfare and pausing for chats, especially with his secretaries in the reception area. He rarely neglected to give Christmas and birthday gifts to members of his staff and friends and acquaintances from the “battle days.”
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If someone was ill, Hitler sent flowers or sometimes even delivered them in person. And if we believe Goebbels’s diaries, Hitler was deeply affected by the death of his long-time chauffeur Schreck in 1936: “The Führer very depressed. It’s hit him the hardest. He stayed at home all day.”
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But these seeming gestures of caring were not necessarily motivated by pure altruism. In general, Hitler’s treatment of his underlings was based on cold calculations of usefulness. Friedrich Hossbach related how every time he thought he saw “signs of true human intimacy,” Hitler’s behaviour would swing around radically the following day: “Then you thought that you were standing in front of an alien and completely changed person.”
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Karl Krause also recalled after the war that it became increasingly difficult to talk to Hitler on a personal level: “It was as though he were cut off. A high wall of isolation was erected.”
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Hitler’s scattershot working habits put a great deal of pressure on his staff. He kept no regular hours, so his aides and his secretaries were practically on call around the clock. His servants also suffered from his notorious impatience. Knotting Hitler’s tie when he wore a dinner jacket was always a challenge. “It had to be done very quickly, in about twenty-five seconds, and it had to be done properly,” Krause recalled. “Otherwise, he grew ill-tempered and started shifting his weight from one foot to the other.”
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Hitler surrounded himself with people he knew and whose loyalty he trusted, which is why he disliked personnel changes in his entourage. If he had tired of an underling, however, the slightest excuse was enough to fire or banish him. Fritz Wiedemann, for instance, was sent off to San Francisco in January 1939 as a consul general.
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And Hitler’s long-time friend and foreign press secretary Ernst Hanfstaengl was shunted off in particularly brusque fashion in February 1937 after his falling from grace.

Hanfstaengl’s crime—if we believe the accounts by Albert Speer and others—was that he once opined over a meal that he had shown just as much bravery as a civilian wartime internee in the United States as front-line soldiers had during the war. Hitler and Goebbels decided to teach him a lesson. Hanfstaengl was issued sealed orders, which he was only to open after the plane he was ordered to board had taken off. It contained instructions to fly to Spain and to parachute into republican territory to work there as an agent for Franco. Hanfstaengl frantically tried to convince the pilot to turn the plane around, but the latter calmly kept flying on. When the plane finally touched down, Hanfstaengl recognised that he was in Leipzig, not Spain, and realised that he had been the victim of a cruel practical joke. He soon left Germany for Switzerland before heading on to London.
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Despite Hitler’s aversion to schedules in his work and private life, something akin to a routine in the Chancellery was established in the years prior to 1939. In the morning, before Hitler got up, one of his servants had to place the latest newspapers and press agency reports on a stool in front of his bedroom door. Waking Hitler was a strange procedure. The servant would ring a bell three times, whereupon Hitler would ring back three times by pressing a button on his bedside table. Only then was the servant allowed to knock on the door and tell Hitler what time it was. Karl Krause would always know by the sound of his master’s voice what sort of mood he was in. While the servant prepared Hitler’s breakfast, which consisted of two cups of warm milk, as many as ten biscuits and half a bar of broken-up, dark chocolate, Hitler would take a bath, shave and get dressed. Hitler breakfasted standing up, scanning through the latest reports of the German News Agency. He would then also discuss the lunch menu and choose from three vegetarian meals on offer.
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After breakfast, Hitler went to his official office in the Chancellery extension, which Speer had moved from the front to the back of the building overlooking the garden to avoid the noise of the crowds who gathered every day on Wilhelmstrasse and chanted their desire to see the Führer. He did have Speer put a balcony on the front façade, upon which he would show himself to his admirers when he felt like it. “The window was too uncomfortable,” he told Speer. “I could not be seen from all sides. After all, I could not lean out.”
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On the way from his private chambers to the chancellor’s office, he would discuss whom he would receive that day with his anxiously waiting aides. The decision as to who would be admitted and who would be turned away was his alone, but it is scarcely credible that his decisions depended solely on “his mood and his feelings about the individuals in question,” as Otto Dietrich contended.
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One of his most impressive talents as an actor was his ability when receiving others to conceal his personal antipathies behind solicitous gestures. Once he had arrived at his office, Dietrich would give Hitler a summary of the morning papers, and Hans Heinrich Lammers would brief him about ongoing business. After Hitler had unified the offices of chancellor and president, Otto Meissner would also be summoned to give a report, as was Goebbels’s deputy at the Propaganda Ministry, Walther Funk. Following that Hitler usually held discussions with ministers, diplomats and other figures.
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