Hitler's Charisma (15 page)

This was most certainly not a view that Adolf Hitler shared. The SA was by now a divisive force and one that wasn’t helping Hitler in his attempt to leap from mere leadership of the Nazi party to capturing the hearts of all “true” Germans as the leader of the whole nation. And for Hitler there was a particular urgency to the Röhm problem, since it was clear that President Hindenburg did not have long to live. On Hindenburg’s death Hitler wanted to combine the offices of Reich Chancellor and president and so become both the political leader of Germany and the head of state, but opposition from the traditional German elite—especially the
Reichswehr
—might well prevent that transition happening smoothly.

This danger was all too apparent from a public statement in June 1934
made by Franz von Papen. In a speech at Marburg University he said that “the government must represent the people as a whole, and must on no account be the exponent only of particular groups; otherwise it would fail in its attempt to construct the national community.”
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He warned against a “second wave” of revolution and stated that “The government is well aware of the selfishness, the lack of principle, the insincerity, the unchivalrous behaviour, the arrogance which is on the increase under the guise of the German revolution.” He said that people would follow the Führer but not if “every word of criticism” was “immediately interpreted as malicious.”

Hitler’s reaction to Papen’s speech was predictable. The distribution of the speech was banned, and the co-author of Papen’s words of warning and criticism, Edgar Jung, was later arrested and killed. But Hitler knew that von Papen was also vocalising the concerns of a large segment of the German population. Almost more importantly, he was expressing the concerns of two people whose opinion mattered a great deal to Hitler—President Hindenburg and General Blomberg. They told Hitler on 21 June that he should bring “the revolutionary troublemakers … to reason”
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or else the “Hitler experiment” would cease.

Heinrich Himmler, and his ambitious subordinate Reinhard Heydrich, now seized the chance to gain more influence and power for themselves as they briefed senior figures in the army that Röhm was planning a coup. Soon a spiral of rumour upon rumour developed as German army units moved to an increased state of alert, and SA leaders did the same once they heard about the actions of the army. This culminated on 26 June, when an “order” was found by the military intelligence organisation, the
Abwehr
, which purported to come from Röhm, calling for the SA to prepare themselves for an attack on the Army.
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It was almost certainly a forgery—Röhm and his comrades had not been planning a coup. Yes, they were dissatisfied about the pace of the “revolution” and wanted a good deal more power for themselves, but they remained loyal to Hitler. Still, Röhm had made a serious misjudgement. He had grossly underestimated the scale and nature of the enemies ranged against him. From the leadership of the SS to the leadership of the German Army; from the traditional German elite to the local businessmen who were bullied by the stormtroopers: all of them would be happy to see Röhm disappear.

Hitler decided to confront the leaders of the SA at their holiday resort
in Bad Wiessee in Bavaria. It was a decision that was a long time coming. As far back as January he had asked the Gestapo to monitor the actions of the SA and report back to him examples of their bad behaviour.
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Now, in the early morning of 30 June 1934, he finally acted. He led a group of his close comrades into Röhm’s hotel room on the first floor of the Hotel Hanselbauer. Röhm, still in bed, looked up at Hitler and said “sleepily”
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“Heil, mein Führer.”
Hitler shouted that he was under arrest, turned and left. SA Obergruppenführer Heines, in a room nearby, was found in bed with an eighteen-year-old stormtrooper. Others thought to be implicated in “Röhm’s schemes” were arrested and held temporarily in the laundry room of the hotel before being taken to Stadelheim prison in Munich.

Simultaneously, in Berlin, Göring organised not just the round-up of key SA figures but also the murder of other opponents of the regime. Old scores were brutally settled. General Schleicher and his wife were shot, as was Gregor Strasser and a host of others. No one knows the exact number of dead, but the figure is at least 150—including Ernst Röhm who, having declined the opportunity to commit suicide, was shot in his cell by two SS men.

“The Night of the Long Knives,” as the episode came to be known, was a breathtaking example of the total breakdown of the rule of law in Germany. None of those who suffered was tried in court. None of the alleged evidence against them was tested. None of them was given a chance to speak in their own defence. And yet Hitler’s decision to order the murder of so many of his old comrades was widely welcomed. General Blomberg, in a statement on 1 July, said, “The Führer with military decision and outstanding courage has himself attacked and destroyed the traitors and murderers.”
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President Hindenburg said that he was grateful that the “treasonable intrigues” had been “nipped in the bud” and that Hitler had “saved the German nation from serious danger.”
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Much lower down the command structure the views of air force officer Karl Boehm-Tettelbach were typical: “It was described as a revolt against Hitler … As a young officer you read the reports and you listened to the stories written in the paper and it [the attack on the SA] sounded reasonable. If somebody starts a revolution and is killed right at the beginning, then that’s good.”
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It was the most telling example yet of a paradox at the heart of Hitler’s rule. Many people were frightened of the violence that abounded in
German society—perpetrated both by the Communists and the SA. The majority longed for peace and stability. Now Hitler appeared to be about to deliver that peace and stability—but only by the use of more violence. Thus many who decried violence, came to support it—even welcome it.

Because of his control of the media, Hitler was able to spin the events of 30 June 1934 in a way that was extremely advantageous for him. The fact that he had acted against elements of the Nazi party enabled him to position himself as the protector of all Germany, rather than the protector of just his own narrow self interests. The discovery of Heines in bed with a young stormtrooper at the time of the raid on the SA’s spa hotel, and the revelation of the “luxury” in which the SA had been enjoying themselves, also allowed him to speak in support of conventional morality and thrift. On 30 June, after the arrest of Röhm and the others, Hitler issued an order of the day to the new chief of staff of the SA, Lutze, which called on SA leaders to be “a model of modesty and not extravagance” and in a specific reference to the number of homosexuals previously at the top of the SA, said that he would “particularly want every mother to be able to give her son to the SA, to the party or the Hitler Youth without fear that he might become ethically or morally corrupt.”
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It was a piece of jaw-dropping hypocrisy. Hitler was surrounded by Nazi leaders like Hermann Göring who were scarcely an example “of modesty and not extravagance” and the existence of homosexuals in leadership roles in the SA had been well known long before Hitler arrived at Wiessee on 30 June 1934. “We knew it [already] about Obergruppenführer Heines,” says former stormtrooper Wolfgang Teubert, “his adjutant was always addressed as ‘Fräulein Schmidt.’ But that didn’t really bother us a great deal, we had other things to think about.”
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Hitler himself had previously ignored those who had brought up the subject of Röhm’s homosexuality. Emil Klein,
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a Hitler Youth leader, for instance, had—years before—accompanied one of the commanders of the Munich SA to a meeting with Hitler at which Röhm’s homosexuality had been raised, but Hitler had seemed unconcerned at the news. Yet now Hitler was posing as a model of propriety.

This all contributed to a gap opening, in the perception of many Germans, between the Nazis on the one hand and Hitler on the other. After all, they could argue, hadn’t Hitler shown his loyalty to Germany by attacking the “bad” Nazis? This warped logic—warped because Hitler
had demonstrably acted outside of the established law, having previously tolerated many of the “abuses” he now condemned—was especially found in the minds of a number of army officers, like Johann-Adolf Graf Kielmansegg. “For the army you have to make a clear distinction, and this goes for the whole of the Third Reich, between Hitler … and the behaviour and programme of the Nazis. This [the behaviour and programme of the Nazis] was rejected, even before the war … But not Hitler.”
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The practical benefits for Hitler of his action against the SA were immediate and substantial. When President Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, little more than a month after the murder of Röhm and the others, Hitler was confirmed by acclamation as both chancellor and head of state with the post of Reich President abolished. Then, on 20 August, every member of the armed forces and all public officials swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler personally as “Führer of the German Reich.”

As Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, who swore the oath as an air force officer, remembers, this was a serious business; his oath “accompanied me my whole life to the end. I mean oath is oath … I can’t break the oath, otherwise I might [have to] commit suicide.” Or, as Johann-Adolf Graf Kielmansegg put it simply, “A German officer does not break an oath sworn before God.”

Once Hitler was the undisputed supreme commander of the armed forces and head of state, a truly remarkable phenomenon occurred in Germany. Between 1934 and 1938, despite spending money on rearmament on an unprecedented scale, despite a variety of economic and political difficulties, despite the Nazi party often conducting a series of quarrelsome and distracting battles in government over who was responsible for what, despite the creation of concentration camps and the persecution of minorities, despite all of that and more, Adolf Hitler grew in power and prestige until he received a level of adulation without parallel in modern European history.

One crucial reason for this transformation was the creation of a charismatic aura around Hitler—one whose legitimacy was purportedly based both on scientific and quasi-religious sources. This mingling of an ancient justification for charismatic leadership—spiritual endorsement—and a modern justification—science—was new.
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And it was hugely successful.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, considered the conscious manufacture of Hitler’s “image” as one of his greatest achievements.
He remarked in December 1941 that via the “creation of the Führer myth Hitler had been given the halo of infallibility, with the result that many people who looked askance at the party after 1933 now had complete confidence in Hitler.”
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Goebbels certainly did not underestimate his own abilities. He told his wartime press adjutant, Wilfred von Oven, that he worked “almost 20 hours a day; he claimed that he could survive on four hours’ sleep [a night] as could Frederick the Great and other great men.”
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Goebbels also, according to von Oven, “had a huge need for recognition … But I always say there is nothing wrong with having a need for recognition, providing that you are sufficiently gifted.”

But by claiming credit for the “creation of the Führer myth,” Goebbels was exaggerating his own contribution to Hitler’s success, because Hitler himself played the most important part in the creation of his own myth. Hitler had always understood the importance of propaganda and believed he knew better than anyone else how he and the party should be portrayed—it’s significant that his first job in the German Workers’ Party was propaganda chief. It was Hitler, as much as Goebbels, who understood that as a charismatic leader he must have distance from the ordinary workaday world, that he must appear to be without the ordinary human need for close relationships and that he must present himself as “infallible.” More than all of that, Hitler realised that this portrayal of himself as outside of the normal mainstream of humanity allowed space for others to project their own needs and desires on to him. It was in this interaction that a transference occurred of great consequence. Hitler’s followers became confident and gained self-worth because of their faith in him. Their belief in Hitler gave special meaning to their own lives. That’s one explanation for the kind of fawning praise Göring spewed out in 1934: “There is something mystical, inexpressible, almost incomprehensible about this one man … We love Adolf Hitler because we believe, deeply and steadfastly, that he was sent to us by God to save Germany … There is no quality that he does not possess to the highest degree … For us the Führer is simply infallible in all matters political and all other issues concerning the national and social interest of the people.”
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Did Göring really believe that Hitler possessed every human quality “to the highest degree”? He was certainly cynical and tough enough to recognise that it was in his own interests to say that he did. But Göring—
who loathed the concept of democracy—was also deeply predisposed to believe in the value of one single “infallible” leader, and he realised that this belief absolved him from the burden of ultimate responsibility for his own actions.

This idea of the Führer as a quasi-mystical liberating force pervades the most infamous and influential propaganda film ever made about Hitler—Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph des Willens
(
Triumph of the Will
). Filmed at the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg the work purported to be a “documentary”—but in fact it was as conceived and structured as any work of fiction. Significantly,
Triumph of the Will
was not controlled by Goebbels. Unusually, Riefenstahl worked directly with Hitler on the composition of the film. It was even Hitler who suggested the title.
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