Hitler's Charisma (10 page)

Speer was so affected by listening to Hitler speak that after the meeting he went for a long walk in a pine forest and thought about what he had heard. “Here, it seemed to me,” he concluded, “was hope.”
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In his autobiography, Speer emphasises that he decided to become a “follower of Hitler” rather than a member of the Nazi party (though he joined the party in 1931) and that this had been an emotional rather than an intellectual decision. “Today, in retrospect, I often have the feeling that something
swooped me up off the ground at the time, wrenched me from all my roots, and beamed a host of alien forces upon me.”
⁷

But Speer—like many of those who were moved by hearing Hitler speak—was already predisposed to be receptive to his message. His own teacher, Professor Heinrich Tessenow, whom he hero-worshipped, had previously spoken of the importance of recovering the simple “peasant” virtues of previous years in the face of rampant urbanisation, and also longed for a “simple” figure to emerge to lead Germany—words which seemed to Speer to “herald Hitler.”
⁸

Of course, Speer based his defence at Nuremberg on the notion that he was intoxicated with Hitler, rather than coldly supportive of the racist and anti-Semitic aims of the party. But whilst Speer almost certainly knew about the Holocaust and was involved with the later atrocities of the regime—something he denied after the war—this early testimony seems sincere. Not just because Speer was an architect in 1931, rather than the Minister for Armaments he subsequently became, but also because many other Germans expressed similar views, both at the time and later. For these Germans—including Speer—the key component of Hitler’s charismatic appeal in the early 1930s was a sense of connection. Hitler was speaking explicitly to their needs and they responded with gratitude.

Between 1930 and 1932 the economic crisis grew still worse—by the start of 1932 more than six million Germans were unemployed. “It was really depressing to see how many people were on the streets,” says Herbert Richter, “looking for any kind of little job to do. When you came in by the train, they would take your suitcase from your hands just to earn a few coins.”
⁹

“Six million unemployed, what did that mean?” says Johannes Zahn, then a young economist. “Six million unemployed means, with three people in one family, six times three equals 18 million without food! And when a man was unemployed at that time, then there was only one thing left: either he became a Communist or he became an SA man [i.e., a Nazi stormtrooper].”
¹⁰
By the start of 1932 there were more than a quarter of a million members of the SA—three times as many as just a year before. Wearing brown shirts and carrying Nazi banners, they were a common sight, not just marching through German towns and villages, but also fighting with Communist youth groups. Economic desperation was leading to violent confrontation on the streets. It seemed as if German society
was politically splitting apart as support not just for the Nazis but also for the Communists increased.

Alois Pfaller was one of many young Communists who took part in the fight against the Nazis. As an apprentice painter and decorator in the early 1930s, he had joined the German Communist Party in Bavaria because he both despised the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis and felt they were not concerned with the welfare of each and every German. “When they marched, you didn’t notice anything about representing the interests of the workers, of the people, that they should have work and so on, they only spoke in support of their Führer, and about what a great Reich and such that they wanted to build.”
¹¹

Just how prepared the SA were to take the fight to the Communists became clear to Pfaller when he hired a room in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich for a meeting. He arrived, early, to find that SA men already occupied two tables. “The SA all had a
stein
[a large beer glass] in front of them, practically a missile, you could already see it, how it would start, they wanted to stop the meeting … So I was gobsmacked, hell! And then I sent my people on bicycles to go and get help … reinforcements.”

Once more of his comrades had arrived, Pfaller tried to start the meeting, but as soon as the first speaker stepped forward to the rostrum the fighting began. The Nazi stormtroopers brawled with the Communist supporters, and chairs, bottles and glasses were used as weapons. Alois Pfaller was hit and retreated from the battle. “So I got into the toilets and I had a head wound, I was bleeding; [so] in order to get out of the way of the police, I got out through the toilet window and on all fours along the gutter, jumped on to a shed and then down. And then I disappeared, my face was bloody and I had to go onto the street and into the tram, but there were SA people in there as well, so I thought it was too risky, and I tried to make my way home [by walking]. Well, the battle was pretty fierce, several people were hospitalised, some SA people too, they had face wounds, and some of ours of course too, many people were wounded.”

Amidst this civil discontent—trouble which the Nazis themselves were helping to create—Hitler tried to position himself as the political messiah who would guide Germans out of the chaos. And in that context he emphasised themes of national renewal. He talked of removing a democratic system that had—he claimed—failed Germany; and the “righting” of the “wrongs” of the Versailles treaty. His obsession with anti-Semitism
—something that had pervaded the pages of
Mein Kampf
—was not highlighted. And so, whilst still maintaining that there was a “Jewish problem” in Germany that had to be resolved, he went as far as to say, on 15 October 1930, “We have nothing against decent Jews; however, as soon as they conspire with Bolshevism we look on them as an enemy.”
¹²

In July 1931 the huge German Danat-Bank crashed.
¹³
As a result, it wasn’t just the millions of unemployed who were now suffering in Germany, but swathes of the middle class as well. Jutta Rüdiger’s family was amongst those affected, with her father forced to accept a cut in his salary. She was now predisposed to be influenced by the charismatic appeal of Adolf Hitler, and when she heard him speak at an election rally in 1932 she became convinced that he was her saviour. “It was dead quiet, and then he started to speak extremely calmly, very calmly, he spoke slowly with a sonorous voice and ever so slowly got caught up in his own enthusiasm. He described how the German people could be helped, how they could be led out of this misery. And when the rally was over I myself had the feeling that here was a man who did not think about himself and his own advantage, but solely about the good of the German people.”
¹⁴

Increasingly, Hitler had been promoting a special bond of powerful idealism that had supposedly linked the German troops serving on the front line in the First World War,
¹⁵
and he called for a return to that “comradeship” of the trenches and for all “true” Germans to work together. As Jutta Rüdiger says, “I was told that this front-line soldier had said, ‘In a case of real need neither an aristocratic background nor money is going to be of any help. The only thing that matters is comradeship, the willingness to help and stand by one another. And if we find ourselves in trouble in Germany today, we have to all stand together and jointly—as the saying goes—all pull on the same rope in the same direction.’ ”
¹⁶

It served Hitler’s purposes to make a direct link between his “heroic” service during the war, the “mission” he adopted afterwards in response to the “betrayal” of these noble soldiers, and the current misery in German society which he attributed to the legacy of a Jewish-inspired democratic “talking shop” in thrall to those countries benefitting from Germany’s defeat. So it came as a considerable threat to Hitler’s developing reputation when a Hamburg newspaper,
Echo der Woche
, published an article on 29 February 1932 that said that Hitler had made up chunks of his personal history during the war.
¹⁷
The article, which was written by an
officer from Hitler’s regiment but which was published anonymously, alleged that Hitler hadn’t really been a front-line soldier at all, but had lived behind the trenches as a messenger, and that his Iron Cross had been awarded because he knew the officers who put soldiers forward for such decorations. Hitler realised how potentially damaging any such attack on his “heroism” could be. He instinctively knew—as Professor Nathaniel Shaler put it, back in 1902—that “valiant self-sacrifice for faith” is “at least to the truly civilised man, the type of highest valour.”
¹⁸
Hitler’s charismatic appeal was built on the foundation of his personal “valour” and he could not afford to have it challenged.

So Hitler quickly moved to sue
Echo der Woche
for libel. Only one officer—not the person who had written the article—came forward to give evidence in support of the newspaper, whilst the Nazis collected a host of witnesses prepared to defend Hitler’s honour. And since the article had been written anonymously and did contain one obvious mistake—alleging that Hitler had been a deserter from the Austrian army—the newspaper lost the case. Hitler thus turned this potential damage to his charismatic image into a plus. He had “proven” in court that he had been a “hero” in the First World War.

But Hitler had not just faced accusations about his wartime record. The previous year, 1931, had seen rumours about his personal life. And since Germans were deciding whether or not to vote for the Nazis in large part based on the charismatic appeal of Adolf Hitler, it followed that it mattered a great deal to the Nazis’ chances of electoral success that Hitler’s private life was as beyond reproach as his war record appeared to be in the light of the
Echo der Woche
verdict.

But the questions Hitler faced about his sexuality were a good deal less straightforward than those asked about his wartime exploits. On 19 September 1931 Hitler’s niece, Geli Raubal, had been found dead in his flat on the second floor of 16 Prinzregentenplatz in Munich. She had shot herself with Hitler’s own pistol. Newspapers, including the
Münchener Post
(Munich Post) which had been a vociferous critic of Hitler and the Nazis for years, began to ask a series of awkward questions about Hitler’s possible involvement in the affair—questions which threatened to damage the careful positioning of Hitler as a man “alone,” a charismatic bachelor hero who had sacrificed his own personal happiness for the good of Germany.

Hitler had been obsessed with Geli, the daughter of his half-sister, Angela, who acted as his housekeeper. Geli had revolted against the suffocating attentions of her uncle and formed a friendship—perhaps a sexual relationship—with Hitler’s own chauffeur, Emil Maurice. Hitler had been beside himself when he found out, and Maurice had been frightened that Hitler might even try to kill him.
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But the key question—if not directly asked, then implied—was what exactly had been Hitler’s relationship with Geli? Various second-hand sources, chiefly people with a grudge against Hitler, subsequently came forward to state that Hitler had engaged in a sexual relationship with Geli, and that it had been conducted at such a level of perversion that it contributed to her decision to end her own life.

But whilst there was no direct evidence linking Hitler to any sexually improper relationship with his niece—and had there been, it might well have destroyed Hitler’s chances in the early 1930s of attaining power—what was obvious was the devastating effect that her death had on him. In her memoirs, Leni Riefenstahl describes an encounter with Hitler in his flat in Munich at Christmas 1935 during which he opened a locked room and revealed a bust of Geli “decked out with flowers.”
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Hitler then told her that he had “loved” Geli “very much” and that “she was the only woman” he could ever have married. Immediately after Geli’s death in 1931 Hitler had been in such an emotional state that he had relied on Gregor Strasser to help him through the crisis—ironically so, since it was Strasser’s brother who was subsequently to make sexual allegations of impropriety against Hitler.

Hitler’s obsession with Geli did not demonstrate that he had suddenly become in need of a close relationship between equals. He did not seek a friendship or emotional partnership with Geli. Instead, he sought to dominate her utterly. Far from showing any tender side to Hitler’s character, the Geli episode is further evidence of his inability to connect intimately with another human being in any normal way.

Just as he had with the
Echo der Woche
case, Hitler managed to protect his image—even despite the suicide of his niece in his own flat. The rumours about a sexual relationship between Hitler and Geli remained only unproven gossip. And Hitler did recover his composure after Geli’s death, but—as Riefenstahl discovered—he turned her room in his flat into a shrine to her. He resolved to continue his very occasional flirting
with a young, empty-headed blonde woman called Eva Braun whom he had met at Heinrich Hoffmann’s photo shop, and focus most of his time—as he had for years—on political matters.

The political question Hitler now needed to answer urgently was whether or not he should challenge Paul von Hindenburg for the Presidency in 1932. It was not that there was a serious possibility that Hitler would win—even given the Nazis’ recent electoral success, Hindenburg offered the broad German population a much more unifying alternative as head of state. But a noisy, intense campaign could potentially help Hitler’s public profile—though a poor showing at the polls would be humiliating. It was a tough choice, and for weeks Hitler could not decide what to do.

Vacillation is not a quality that is normally associated with charismatic leadership; but Hitler undoubtedly possessed it. Goebbels, for example, had railed against Hitler’s delay in making up his mind about whether or not to expel Otto Strasser from the Nazi party in 1930. “That’s so typically Hitler,” he wrote in his diary on 25 June 1930, “today he pulls back again … he makes promises, and doesn’t keep them.”
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But, as we have seen, Hitler’s hesitancy was not to be confused with a lack of fundamental resolve. About the big issues and ultimate goals, Hitler was always clear. About tactics along the way he was often more equivocal. By delaying making up his own mind he could wait and see how events transpired, something that—from his perspective—made an eventual decision more likely to be the right one. That was certainly the case with the expulsion of Otto Strasser from the party in the summer of 1930. By vacillating, Hitler flushed out what other senior figures in the party thought and allowed Strasser to make his own opposition all the clearer.