Hitler's Charisma (26 page)

Hitler attempted to persuade Germans that he was not the aggressor, but that he was acting only in response to a formidable group of enemies—who were growing more dangerous by the day. In a speech to construction workers on 9 October 1938,
⁴⁹
he outlined why Germany needed to rearm: “It is my opinion that it is cheaper to arm prior to certain events than to meet these unprepared and have to pay tribute afterwards … The minute another man rises to power in England and replaces Chamberlain—someone like Mr. Duff Cooper [who had resigned from the Cabinet over the question of Munich], Mr. Eden or Mr. Churchill—that minute we know that it would be the ambition of these men to break loose yet another world war, and that immediately. They are quite open about this, they do not make a secret of it.” Hitler then made a specific reference to the Jews—his rhetoric against them increasing in the wake of the failure of the Évian conference and just one month before the atrocities of
Kristallnacht:
“Further, we know that the international Jewish fiend looms threateningly behind the scenes on stage and it does so today just as it did yesterday.”

What Hitler was doing, of course, was using his old tactic of exaggerating potential threats to Germany. He had seen the lack of desire in the German population for another war and so he now sought to overstate the possible danger from others as a reason why Germany should prepare for conflict. He would then, over the next months, couple this rhetoric with feeding the sense of indignation felt in some quarters in Germany that all of the “wrongs” of Versailles had still not been put right—specifically the return of German territory lost to the Poles at the end of the First World War. In pursuit of this policy he was helped by the enormous trust that many Germans now placed in him. “People at that time really were enthusiastic,” says Professor Norbert Frei, “and now they had the experience of a couple of very good years under Nazism—if you are not a Jew or not a political opponent of the Nazis then you had a rather good experience. And people loved Hitler, most of the Germans loved Hitler at that stage, not because he intended to go to war but just because he achieved all these things without going to war … The Germans at that time were
even talking about Hitler as ‘General Bloodless,’ a military person who was able to achieve all these things without spilling blood.”
⁵⁰

Amongst the Nazi faithful, like Bruno Hähnel, the events of the autumn of 1938 had only served to reinforce their belief in Hitler’s judgement. “People followed all these events with great interest, of course,” he says, “but in the meantime we had adopted an attitude whereby one said that the Führer would manage. The Führer would do the right thing. And people were also proud of the fact that European political leaders came to Munich. Again we saw this as an advantage and our conviction that Adolf Hitler had achieved significance in the world was strengthened.”
⁵¹

Hitler knew that this attitude of trust—that he would “do the right thing”—was based on faith in his charismatic leadership. But much of that confidence flowed from his perceived ability to increase Germany’s influence and power whilst avoiding war. So he now faced the difficult task of shifting public perception more towards the acceptance of military conflict, whilst keeping faith in his charisma intact. In a speech to top German journalists in Munich on 10 November 1938 he outlined—remarkably frankly and openly—both the problem he faced and the possible solution. He admitted that, “For decades the circumstances have forced me to talk almost exclusively of peace.” And that the trouble was that this might have led Germans to believe that the “present regime” was determined to “keep the peace at all costs”—something that he confessed would be an “incorrect assessment” of the aims of Nazism. So the challenge both for the regime and for these journalists was now to create an attitude amongst the general population that “there are things that, if they cannot be enforced by peaceful means, must be enforced by means of violence.” And the feeling had to be created amongst ordinary Germans that “if things cannot be settled amicably, force will have to be used, but in any case things cannot go on like this.” To achieve this end “it was necessary to shine light on certain foreign policy events in such a way that the inner voice of the German people naturally cried out for the application of force.”
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Hitler said he took pride in “slowly grinding down the nerves” of his opponents—specifically the authorities in Czechoslovakia. He had been able to do this, the implication was clear, because he possessed a strong inner core of belief in himself. And it thus followed that to Hitler the question of the “self-confidence” of the German people was crucial given
what was to come. The “whole German people,” he said, “must learn to believe in final victory so fanatically that even if we were occasionally defeated, the nation would regard it from an overall point of view and say, this is a temporary phase: victory will be ours in the end!” Hitler then announced how he believed this goal could be accomplished. The key was consistently to state that “the Leadership is always right!” And whilst Hitler accepted that the leaders of Germany “must be allowed to make mistakes” it was important to realise that “all of us can only survive if we do not let the world see our mistakes …” Once a decision had been made, Hitler demanded that “the whole nation closes ranks behind that decision. There must be a united front and then whatever is not quite right about the decision will be compensated for by the determination with which the nation stands behind it …”

Hitler made this revealing speech in Munich on the day after the atrocities of
Kristallnacht
—and so it is significant that he chose not to mention the attacks. Indeed, as far as the historical record shows, he never discussed them either publicly or privately. As with the Jewish boycott in 1933, Hitler intuitively realised that his authority might be damaged if those non-Jewish Germans who objected to seeing their Jewish neighbours beaten up, imprisoned in concentration camps and even murdered were able to link his name to the atrocities. Yet none of these events would have happened unless he had desired them.

But despite Hitler’s attempt to act as if the atrocities of 9–10 November 1938 had not happened,
Kristallnacht
still marked a decisive moment both in the history of the Third Reich and in the perception of Hitler as a leader—in Germany and elsewhere. Less than a week after
Kristallnacht
, on 16 November 1938, Ludwig Beck remarked in a private conversation that he now felt Hitler was a “psychopath through and through” and that “I have warned and warned [the German generals]—and at last I stood alone.”
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In London,
Kristallnacht
dramatically altered the views of Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary. Having previously gone along with Chamberlain’s actions at Munich and his announcement that the agreement represented “peace for our time,”
⁵⁴
Halifax now told a meeting of the Foreign Policy Committee that recent events demonstrated that “crazy persons” had managed to “secure control” of Germany. He felt that “the immediate objective [of the British government] should be the correction
of the false impression that we were decadent, spineless and could with impunity be kicked about.”
⁵⁵

Halifax, who later admitted privately that he was “rather anti-Semitic,”
⁵⁶
was appalled at the Nazis’ actions against the Jews. He felt a line had been crossed. Neville Chamberlain, however, did not. Whilst no doubt deploring the violence of
Kristallnacht
, he did not see these events as especially relevant to Britain’s security or German foreign policy intentions. He had invested a great deal of his own personal authority in trusting Hitler and was not about to admit he had been wrong—at least, not yet.
⁵⁷

How close Hitler was to laying bare before the German people the true measure of his ambitions is clear from the speech he gave in the Reichstag on 30 January 1939. Lasting more than two hours, the speech is infamous for the “prophecy” Hitler made about the Jews, one that echoed the views expressed in the SS magazine,
Das Schwarze Korps
, in the months before.
⁵⁸
“Should international financial Jewry succeed,” said Hitler, “both within and beyond Europe, in plunging mankind into yet another world war, then the result will not be a Bolshevisation of the earth and the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”
⁵⁹

The speech is also noteworthy for Hitler’s statement about his second obsession—
Lebensraum
. He said that Germany faced a simple choice in the face of gross over-population: either carry on exporting German manufacturing goods in order to generate money to buy food imports, or gain more territory, and he made it obvious that he favoured the latter. Just how that
Lebensraum
would be gained was not spelt out—though since Hitler also said that Germany had peaceful relations with nations to the west, south and north, by omitting “the east” from the list he pointed the way his ambitions lay.

It was a remarkable performance by Hitler, given at some risk to his charismatic leadership and his popularity. For though he dotted his speech with references to his desire for peace, the threat of war hung over his whole performance. Still, the subtext of the speech was faithful to the tactics he had suggested to German journalists on the morning after
Kristallnacht
—Hitler was indeed saying that “if things cannot be settled amicably, force will have to be used, but in any case things cannot go on like this.” And Hitler was still riding high on a wave of trust from millions of Germans in the wake of the peaceful resolution at Munich. Allied
to this emotional faith in their Führer’s judgement was still the recurring emphasis on that old familiar justification for action—the “righting of the wrongs” of Versailles. This allowed Germans, like Luftwaffe officer Karl Boehm-Tettelbach, to still maintain that Hitler “had something good in mind.”
⁶⁰
Why was it, Boehm-Tettelbach asked, that the Allies from the First World War—Britain, France and America—“after so many years still consider the Treaty of Versailles as valid? That’s impossible!”
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Another reason, sometimes overlooked, why Hitler was able to press on towards war with his charismatic leadership intact, was that his own past behaviour helped create the very dangers he now claimed motivated his current actions—much as how distaste for mental patients had been created by the sordid conditions in which they now existed as a result of the Nazis’ cuts in funding for mental hospitals.
⁶²
For example, Hitler said he wanted Germany to rearm massively because other nations were a threat, yet the scale of Germany’s rearmament caused these other nations to want to rearm themselves. He said the American press was sympathetic to Jews and yet he created that sympathy by the way German Jews were treated.

By alienating the Western powers, by stoking up a potential financial meltdown in Germany by pursuing a programme of massive rearmament, by creating an atmosphere in which war could only be stopped by Germany losing prestige—something Hitler could not contemplate—Hitler made war all but inevitable. By the time he gave his speech in the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Hitler had gained more than almost anyone had ever thought possible—he had created a Greater Germany from Carinthia in the south to Flensburg in the north. From Aachen in the west to Königsberg and Vienna in the east. But it was not enough.

There were now few obstacles inside Germany to Hitler’s desire for conflict. By January 1939 any opposition within the German army had been all but swept away. On 18 December 1938, for example, Brauchitsch wrote in instructions on how German officers should be trained that “Adolf Hitler, the resourceful Führer, who transformed the profound teaching of ‘front-line comradeship’ [
Frontkämpfertum
] into the ideology of National Socialism, has built and secured the new Greater German Reich for us … There is tremendous change in all areas. A new German man has grown up in the Third Reich, full of ideals … Across all classes a new unique national community [
Volksgemeinschaft
] has been created to
which we all belong—the people, the Wehrmacht and the party. Staunch is our loyalty, firm our trust, to the man who created all this, who caused this miracle by his faith and will.”
⁶³

Yet only four months before, in September 1938, General Alfred Jodl of the Wehrmacht High Command had written in his diary, “It is deeply sad that the Führer has the whole people behind him, but not the leading generals of the army. In my opinion, only through action can they make up for what they have sinned by lack of obedience. It’s the same problem as in 1914. There is only one disobedience in the army, that of the generals—and ultimately this results from their arrogance. They cannot believe and obey any more, because they do not recognise the genius of the Führer, in whom some of them surely still see the corporal of the world war, but not the greatest statesman since Bismarck.”
⁶⁴

From a refusal “to recognise the Führer’s genius” to “staunch” loyalty for a leader who has created a “miracle” is quite a journey in four months. And it was only made possible by the Munich agreement, combined with the power of Hitler’s charismatic leadership. Hitler had said he was certain that all would turn out well—and everything had turned out better than his generals could have hoped. All that was left now, many of these senior army figures must have felt, was to do what millions of other Germans were already doing—and to have “faith” in the Führer’s judgement.

Hitler was moving closer to war. He showed every sign of feeling aggrieved—despite having received the Sudetenland—that Czechoslovakia still existed in any form. Via Joachim Ribbentrop, Hitler put pressure on the Slovaks to declare their independence from the rest of the Czech state—and the Slovak parliament duly did on 14 March 1939. What was left of Czechoslovakia—chiefly Bohemia and Moravia—was now immensely vulnerable to Nazi aggression. Given the Slovak secession, the assurances given by Britain and France about the integrity of Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference were now all but meaningless. The Czechoslovakia they had agreed to champion no longer existed.