Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (75 page)

Hanfstaengl reported that when he was in a good mood, Hitler was an unusually entertaining travel companion, who would hum whole passages from Wagner operas.
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He and his entourage usually stayed up late in hotels, although Hitler often began to brood at some point. “The cheerful conversation would die down, if he no longer took part,” Wagener recalled. “One or the other person would say good night, and Hitler would ask others to keep him company. You’d still be sitting there hours later…talking about everything under the sun except matters of work and present concerns.”
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Various sources from his inner circle describe Hitler as leading an extremely simple, almost ascetic existence.
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But that is only half the story. Hitler’s supposedly modest personal needs were part of his carefully cultivated, partly fictional persona as a man of the people. His passion for fast and expensive cars, his choice of the Palais Barlow as Nazi Party headquarters and his huge apartment on Munich’s posh Prinzregentenstrasse do not conform to that image. Speer turned up his nose at the interior design:

Carved oak furniture, books in glass cases, embroidered cushions with delicate inscriptions and resolute party slogans. In one corner was a bust of Richard Wagner. The walls were full of idyllic paintings, framed in gold, by Munich School artists. Nothing betrayed the fact that this man had been the chancellor of Germany for three years. The air smelled of heated oil and sour leftovers.
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Schirach on the other hand found Hitler’s apartment too bourgeois: “A wealthy factory owner or merchant might have lived like that, or an artistically aware but old-fashioned collector.”
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“My surroundings have to make a grand impression so that they highlight my own simplicity,” Hitler once remarked, and his modesty concerning his wardrobe was similarly calculated.
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Hitler favoured unfussy uniforms made by the tailor Wilhelm Holters near the Chancellery. His suits were made by Michael Werner in Munich.
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Hitler did not like to have his tailors take his measurements, and when they were allowed to do so, the procedure could not take more than a few minutes.
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Hitler personally had little use for medals. He himself wore only the Iron Cross, First Class and the Golden Party Emblem—although he had no objections to those around him filling their chests with medals and badges: that too only increased the effect of his calculated modesty.
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Hitler had a relatively relaxed attitude towards money and seems not to have possessed a normal bank account.
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Nor did he carry a wallet. If he needed money, an assistant would give it to him, or he would carry it loosely in his pocket. His aides Julius Schaub and Wilhelm Brückner paid his bills,
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and Max Amann managed Hitler’s income, which grew rapidly thanks to royalties from the sales of
Mein Kampf
. That income allowed him to initially refuse to accept his salary as Reich chancellor. He announced that decision in February 1933 with great pomp, underscoring his desire to nourish the public legend of the ascetic Führer.
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In fact, he silently reversed that decision a year later. After Hindenburg’s death, Hitler also received the Reich president’s salary and an annual expense fund.
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Part of the legend of Hitler’s asceticism was the fact that he did not eat meat or smoke cigarettes and only rarely drank alcohol. Wagener and Hitler’s housekeeper Anni Winter reported that Hitler decided to become a vegetarian after the death of Geli Raubal in 1933.
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In fact he had already begun to cut down his consumption of meat and alcohol after being released from Landsberg in late 1924. “In my experience, meat and alcohol harm my body,” he told Hanfstaengl. “I have decided to summon the will-power necessary to do without both, as much as I enjoy them.”
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He stuck to his resolution, although aside from occasional scornful remarks about “cadaver-eaters,” he did not mind if others chose not to follow him down this path. At dinner during the wedding of Schirach and Henriette Hoffmann in late March 1932, Hitler shook his head in dismay at the gigantic roast of beef and sighed: “Oh you Venus flytraps!” He himself only had some spaghetti with tomato sauce and an apple.
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Sefton Delmer characterised meals with Hitler on the campaign trail in April 1932 as being a bit of trial. An “aura of isolation” surrounded the teetotalling vegetarian, making everyone at the table feel rather uncomfortable.
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Contrasting markedly with this sort of asceticism was Hitler’s insatiable appetite for cake and sweets. When first introduced to Hitler, Hanfstaengl immediately noticed that he could not seem to get enough of Viennese pastries with whipped cream.
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Schirach was completely dumbfounded when he first sat down with Hitler in 1928, shortly after he himself was named leader of the Nazi Students’ Association:

At tea time, I couldn’t believe my eyes. He put so many lumps of sugar in his cup that there was hardly any room for the tea, which he then slurped down noisily. He also ate three or four pieces of cream pie. Hitler noticed my surprise. He glanced down critically at himself, smiled mischievously and said, “I shouldn’t be eating this much. I’m getting fat. But I’ve got such a sweet tooth.” He said this and then ordered another slice of pie.
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Years of consuming such huge quantities of sugary food took their toll. Hitler had very bad teeth and was forced to submit to extensive dental work in late 1933.
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As Schirach’s anecdote illustrates, the Hitler of the late 1920s was indeed able to laugh at himself. He gradually lost this capacity as the Führer cult became increasingly excessive, and Hitler identified more and more with the role in which he was cast by his disciples and by Nazi propaganda. As Speer described the change: “He usually let others tell the jokes, and his laughter was loud and unconstrained. Sometimes, he would be bent over in laughter and have to wipe the tears from his eyes. He liked to laugh, but fundamentally it always came at others’ expense.”
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There was nothing liberating about Hitler’s laughter. It always contained a hint of ridicule and scorn, and Hitler habitually concealed his face with his hand whenever he laughed.
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The Führer was very mindful of his health. Indeed, his fear of illness betrayed unmistakable signs of hypochondria. Hitler was worried that he would die young and be unable to realise his plans. “ ‘When I’m no longer here’ has become his mantra,” noted Goebbels in February 1927. “What a horrible thought!”
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The following year, when he suffered a bout of severe stomach cramps, Hitler believed he had contracted cancer and was fated to die young like his mother. Initially he refused to consult a doctor, but eventually Elsa Bruckmann convinced him to see a certain Dr. Schweninger—the son of the Bismarck’s personal physician. He diagnosed a chronic irritation of Hitler’s stomach lining and put the Nazi leader on a strict diet.
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Hitler’s health improved, but he never lost his fear of dying young.

In February 1932, the morning after a speech by Hitler in Hamburg during the Reich presidential election, Albert Krebs found him hunched at his breakfast table in the Hotel Atlantic, looking tired and morose. Hitler then gave a long lecture about the advantages of vegetarianism, which incongruently revealed his fear of getting cancer. “ ‘I’ve got no time to wait!’ he said, looking at me over the edge of his plate of soup,” Krebs recalled. “ ‘If I did, I wouldn’t be running for this office…But I can’t afford to lose another year. I must come to power soon, if I’m to be able to take care of the gigantic tasks ahead in the time I have left. I must! I must!’ ” Krebs saw this “pathological mix of fear of mortality and messianic conviction” as the key to understanding why Hitler was so impatient about pursuing his political plans. “Someone who plans things beyond all normal dimensions and simultaneously fears that he won’t live to see fifty has no option to move slowly and wait for his goal to come into reach and the fruits of his labours to ripen,” Krebs concluded.
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Even after Hitler attained power, he still regularly worried that he would not live long.
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The irony was, as one of his doctors attested, that Hitler was in robust health. The symptoms of the nervous condition that he began to show over the years are hardly surprising, considering the pressure he was under.
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Hitler’s fear of assassination was only slightly less pronounced than his anxiety about dying from illness. Thus, when Hitler moved into the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin in 1932, he suspected the kitchen staff were trying to poison him, and Magda Goebbels had to deliver him food prepared in her kitchen.
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The director of household at the Reich Chancellery, Arthur Kannenberg, repeatedly complained about how difficult it was to cook for Hitler. “You would not believe how careful we have to be,” he sighed. “When my wife cooks his food, no one’s allowed to get within ten metres of the pots.” Lieselotte Schmidt also reported that when Hitler stayed in Bayreuth, one of his entourage was posted to make sure no one poisoned his food.
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One of the reasons Hitler appointed Wilhelm Brückner as his assistant was his hefty stature. Brückner, Hitler said, “offered a certain assurance that no one will dare approach me.”
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Hitler took other precautions as well. He carefully locked not only his hotel rooms, but also his bedroom at the Chancellery, and as of 1933, two commandos of police and SS bodyguards watched over his safety.
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Both Hitler and his chauffeur carried pistols when they went out for drives.
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Still the Nazi Party leader and Reich chancellor knew that there was no such thing as absolute safety. He worried that one day he would be gunned down by a sharpshooter in some auditorium. “There’s nothing you can do about it,” Hitler said in the summer of 1936. “The best protection will always be enthusiastic masses of people.”
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Hygiene was very important to the Führer. Hitler often took multiple baths a day, especially when he returned sweaty from public-speaking appearances.
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Part of his morning routine from his early days on Thierschstrasse was doing expander exercises to strengthen his arms. This allowed him to keep his right arm raised for extended periods of time as columns of SA paraded past him for inspection. “It was a matter of years of training,” Speer wrote. “None of his underlings could have matched that feat.”
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Hitler did not play any sports, but he did follow major sporting events with great interest. After car racing, his favourite was boxing. Not long after assuming power, he invited German heavyweight champion Max Schmeling to visit him at the Chancellery, and when Schmeling defeated Joe Louis in June 1936, Hitler insisted upon being given an extensive summary of the fight. Two years later he stayed up late to follow the rematch and was reportedly shocked when Louis knocked out Schmeling in the first round. “A terrible defeat,” noted Goebbels. “Our newspapers were too confident of victory. Now our entire people is depressed.”
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Even after 1933, Hitler tended to go to bed late, frequently after midnight, and get up late as well. He traced his night-owl rhythm back to his “street-fighting years”: “After the meetings I had to get together with my comrades, and anyway I was so wound up by speeches that I couldn’t sleep until morning.”
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But there was another reason for Hitler’s nocturnal habits: he hated being alone. “It was striking how he shied away from it,” Dietrich reported. “It often seemed to me that he was afraid of his own inner dialogues.”
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Goebbels offered a similar analysis: “Hitler needs to have people around him. Otherwise, he broods too much.”
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This provides another example of Hitler’s peculiar dual personality: a dictator who kept other people at a distance but sought out company to avoid being alone with himself. Hitler may have had a keen eye for others’ weak spots, but he was clearly unwilling to acknowledge his own psychological shortcomings.

In 1924, a graphologist who sympathised with the Nazis analysed Hitler’s handwriting. The results, which he communicated by letter to a local Nazi leader in Göttingen, Ludolf Haase, were anything but positive. The analyst was deeply concerned about Hitler’s downward-sloping handwriting, which “clearly indicates a personality who, despite whatever energy it possesses, will inevitably fail in the final, decisive moment.”
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The philosopher Hermann von Keyserling offered an even more damning appraisal a few months after Hitler was appointed chancellor. Having studied the Führer intensely, Keyserling wrote to Harry Kessler, he had come to the following conclusion: “The handwriting and physiognomy are of a decidedly suicidal character. He is someone longing for death and he therefore embodies a basic characteristic of the German people, who have always been enamoured by death and whose recurrent experience is the fate of the Nibelungs.” Keyserling was right, Kessler commented.
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But there were not many people in Germany who saw things this way. On the contrary, it was not long after 30 January 1933 that the new man in the Chancellery would achieve unforeseeable popularity.