Hitler's Charisma (11 page)

Similarly, the decision whether or not to run for the Presidency was a finely balanced tactical one, with Hitler ultimately deciding that he had more to gain by running against Hindenburg than by avoiding the contest. It was a battle that Joseph Goebbels, in particular, relished. Goebbels had been appointed to run the Nazi propaganda machine in April 1930, and now, two years later, he was to show that he had evolved into a formidable political operator. Hitler’s campaign for the presidency was to become famous because of the use of aircraft to ferry him between meetings—the image of the Führer arriving from the skies like a quasi-God, that was later to be utilised by Leni Riefenstahl as the opening of
her own propaganda film
Triumph des Willens
(“Triumph of the Will”) in 1934, had its origins in this presidential campaign. But there was much more to Goebbels’ work in 1932 than simply the employment of air travel. The coordination of press stories across Germany; the stage management of meetings; and the use of a revolutionary poster—showing Hitler’s head, stark against a black background—were some of the other propaganda techniques which the Nazis pioneered. Virtually all of these innovations were an attempt to create a charismatic mystique around the figure of Adolf Hitler.

Johann-Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg, an army officer in his early twenties, was one of those who heard Hitler speak during the campaign. “At the time Hitler was the first and only politician to use all the modern means of transport. The other politicians, you only saw them in newsreels or read about them in the newspapers. Hitler was present everywhere, he flew from place to place, from meeting to meeting.

“And so there was a meeting in Kassel. At the time I was in the Kassel garrison, and simply out of interest and curiosity, so to speak, I drove over, with another comrade. I wanted to look at him and listen to him. And it was in a big tent, apparently there were 7,000 people there … and the thing that impressed me at first was that Hitler was absent. That was part of—you didn’t realise it [at the time], we know it today—his tactics, his method. He kept people waiting, deliberately waiting. And so we waited two or three hours, I think. Usually, though, when you have to wait like this you become impatient. Waiting for this man made people peaceful. I was impressed by that.”
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When Hitler arrived and spoke, Kielmansegg—who was standing towards the back of the audience—didn’t think he was hearing anything special. It was, he says, “what you had read in the newspaper.” But what did make a lasting impression on him was the behaviour of the enormous crowd who had waited so patiently for Hitler’s arrival. It was clear, he felt, that they “hoped for a saviour.”

Hitler’s appeal to officers of the German army was more direct than the vague promises of national redemption that he addressed to the general population. Hitler offered members of the armed forces salvation from the “shame” of defeat and the reduction in their prestige suffered in the aftermath of the First World War. “I was born in 1912,” says Ulrich de Maizière, then a young army officer, “so my consciousness developed in the Twenties, with all the economic problems of the Weimar Republic
and burdened with the Treaty of Versailles, which the whole German nation considered a disgrace. We had lost territories, we had to pay reparations, above all else we were burdened with the blame for war which the German people did not accept—the war guilt of 1914 … And now here comes a man proclaiming a national revolution.”
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It was around this same time that Theodor Eschenburg also attended his first Hitler meeting. As we have seen, back in 1929 Eschenburg had dismissed Hitler as a political threat. But he now took a different view: “I never experienced it again—how a man could dominate a mass meeting in such a captivating way—as he did at the Sportpalast [in Berlin]. It impressed me enormously and frightened me at the same time. I sat there, and left and right of me and behind me, the National Socialists were screeching enthusiastically. This happened when he [i.e., Hitler] came in, like a God. A messianic man. It was simply impressive and frightening at the same time.”
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Eschenburg felt that the audience was responding to Hitler in this passionate way for two reasons: “on the one hand it was the despair [at the economic crisis] and on the other, Hitler’s genius for mass-psychology.” Crucially, Eschenburg—a sophisticated political critic—recognised that “Hitler didn’t promise anything. It was always: ‘only for the German people.’ And ‘we have to free the people from Marxism.’ But he didn’t make any concrete promises. I could very easily see through this … I only admired the technique.”

Hitler’s decision to challenge Hindenburg for the presidency paid off. As expected, he didn’t win, but he gained 30 per cent of the popular vote in the first round of the election held on 13 March 1932, and then nearly 37 per cent of the vote in the direct run-off against Hindenburg which took place the following month. Hitler was now centre-stage in German politics—after President Hindenburg, the most important single individual in the political life of the state. But the problem he now faced was seemingly insurmountable. Hindenburg did not think that Hitler was a fit person to become Chancellor of Germany. It didn’t matter that three months after challenging for the presidency, Hitler led the Nazis to an astonishing victory in the general election of July 1932—the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag with 230 seats and a share in the vote of nearly 38 per cent. Hindenburg was not about to ask Hitler to form a government.

Hindenburg didn’t reject Hitler because as Reich President he was committed to democracy in Germany. For two years now the Reichstag had been all but an irrelevance, with Germany ruled by presidential decree under the Weimar Constitution’s Article 48. And many powerful people around Hindenburg, like the state secretary Otto Meissner, and the aristocratic Franz von Papen, who had succeeded Brüning as Chancellor at the end of May 1932, were also no friends of democracy. All favoured some kind of authoritarian solution to Germany’s current problems—one that would both deal with the economic crisis and thwart the growth of the Communist party. They weren’t against removing democracy, it was just that Hitler was not the kind of person they wanted as Chancellor of Germany.

State Secretary Otto Meissner reported that Hindenburg said to Hitler on 13 August, “He [i.e., Hindenburg] could not justify before God, before his conscience or before the Fatherland, the transfer of the whole authority of government to a single party, especially to a party that was biased against people who had different views from their own.”
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Hitler’s chances of success now seemed to have vanished. How he surmounted Hindenburg’s devastating judgement, and became Chancellor of Germany five months later, is one of the most intriguing political stories of the last hundred years.

The history of how Hitler overcame President Hindenburg’s initial rejection and became Chancellor of Germany is not, as some Nazis believed, evidence of their leader’s “destiny.” Instead, it illustrates two different perceptions of Hitler’s charisma. One shows the effect of Hitler’s charisma on his committed followers, and the other—paradoxically—reminds us once again that many other people were completely immune to his powers of attraction.

The first reason for Hitler’s success was the power of his intransigence. He refused to accept anything less than the chancellorship, even when success looked impossible. His certainty that all would come right was an inspiration to his followers. After his disastrous meeting with President Hindenburg on 13 August 1932, Hitler discussed the consequences with his Nazi colleagues. “Hitler holds his nerve,” recorded Goebbels in his diary. “He stands above the machinations. So I love him.”
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Hitler may have been calm about the knock-back from Hindenburg, but plenty around him were anything but. What had been the point, they asked, of eschewing violent revolution and embracing the ballot box if Hindenburg could still frustrate the Nazis even though they were now the
biggest single party in the Reichstag? One senior figure in the Nazi party, Gregor Strasser, in particular, wanted to find a pragmatic way around the president.

But Hitler would not compromise on his most important demand—that he himself should be appointed Chancellor of Germany. As the existing chancellor, Franz von Papen, recognised in a statement he made in Munich in October 1932, Hitler was not a “normal” politician, and the Nazi movement not a “normal” political party. He referred to the Nazi party as “a political religion”
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whose followers professed a “mystical messiah faith” in Hitler.

Whilst von Papen acknowledged that millions of Germans now recognised Hitler as a “mystical messiah,” he himself was immune to Hitler’s charisma. When he first met Hitler, in the summer of 1932, he found him “curiously unimpressive.”
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Although von Papen “had heard much about the magnetic quality” of Hitler’s eyes, they had no effect on him. Papen wrote that he “could detect no inner quality which might explain his extraordinary hold on the masses.”

Papen’s own aristocratic background and individual character made him feel superior to the shabby rabble rouser who stood in front of him in June 1932. Papen’s own writings on the subject—composed after the war—are still laced through with condescension and smugness, even though these were some of the very qualities in his own personality that helped bring Hitler to power. He writes like a headmaster giving marks to the various personalities he encountered. Here, for example, is his verdict on Mussolini: “I found the Italian dictator a man of very different calibre to Hitler. Short in stature, but with an air of great authority, his massive head conveyed an impression of great strength of character.” Unlike Hitler, Mussolini was a man of “immense charm” whilst Hitler “always had a slight air of uncertainty.” Mussolini, thought Papen, “would be a good influence on Hitler.”
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This was a monumental misjudgement about the personal and leadership qualities of Adolf Hitler—and is the second crucial reason why Hitler was able to become chancellor. Von Papen, like many in the German elite, grossly overestimated his ability to control Hitler. A former army officer and diplomat, he fancied he knew how Hitler and the Nazis could be manipulated to serve the needs of those within the German upper strata who sought to remove democracy and create a new authoritarian
regime based on popular support. Hitler and the Nazis, von Papen reasoned, had the popular support, whilst he and his friends had the intelligence to manage them. He believed that the best way of using Hitler was to get him into the government in some subordinate capacity—perhaps as vice-chancellor. Since Hitler positioned himself as a “mystical messiah” he would quickly be compromised as he did von Papen’s bidding. Unfortunately for von Papen, the Nazis were not quite as stupid as he thought.

As Hermann Göring recalled at his trial after the war, “There was some talk [when] von Papen’s name had been given to the president as a nominee for Reich Chancellor, that Hitler should become the vice-chancellor in this Cabinet. I remember that I told Herr von Papen at that time that Hitler could become any number of things, but never vice. If he were to be made anything, he would naturally have to be in the highest position and it would be completely unbearable and unthinkable to place our Führer in any sort of second position.”
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So the intriguing situation by the autumn of 1932 was that whilst Hitler was perceived as a charismatic leader by large numbers of ordinary Germans, key members of the German elite were almost scornful of him. Equally instructive is the fact that von Papen and his cronies found it easy to belittle Hitler’s qualities because he was not of their class. He was not an officer, not formally educated and seemed to von Papen to be the “complete petit bourgeois” with his “little moustache and curious hair style.”
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Equally dismissive was President Hindenburg, who referred to Hitler as a “Bohemian corporal.”
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The trouble for von Papen was that he and his Cabinet had no electoral authority from the people to continue to govern. The lack of support for his government was illustrated in dramatic terms on 12 September 1932 when Göring—now elected as President of the Reichstag (a similar role to that of speaker of the House of Commons)—helped orchestrate a successful vote of no confidence in the von Papen regime. In a breathtakingly cynical piece of tactical politics, the Nazis and the Communists—sworn enemies—voted together in order to humiliate von Papen.

New elections were called for November, and Hitler set to work once again to travel across Germany and gather votes for the Nazi cause. But it was soon apparent that the high point of Nazi support had been reached. The committed were still enthusiastic—more than 100,000 young supporters attended a rally in Potsdam—but other venues showed acres of
empty space. Part of the problem for the Nazi party was that by refusing to join the von Papen government Hitler had shown himself to be intransigent in this national crisis. And whilst that uncompromising attitude played well with the core Nazi support, it didn’t impress those who were wavering. Nor were Hitler’s attacks on the von Papen regime calculated to make the Nazis look like supporters of the middle class—and without middle-class support the Nazi vote was fragile. Nazi support before the November election, for instance, for a transport strike in Berlin, was almost certainly a tactical error.

The 6 November 1932 election was a battle lost for Hitler and the Nazis. Whilst the German Communist party gained nearly 3 per cent more share of the vote, the Nazis polled two million votes less than in the election earlier in the year and their overall share dropped by 4 per cent to 33 per cent. Yet despite the fall in the Nazi vote, the fundamental difficulty faced by the von Papen government still remained—lack of popular support. Von Papen now toyed with a straightforward, if radical, solution: replacing the Weimar constitution with some kind of dictatorship. But this was a risky way forward, not least because senior figures in the German army were concerned about civil war breaking out between the Nazis and the Communists if both these popular movements were excluded from government.