Hitler's Charisma (27 page)

The new Czech government under President Hácha had tried not to offend Hitler since the Munich conference and the loss of the Sudetenland, but there was nothing—short of their own destruction—that they could do that would make him happy. On 14 March, President Hácha and his Foreign Minister, František Chvalkovský, arrived in Berlin to plead with Hitler not to order a German invasion of the remaining Czech
lands. Hitler received them in the vast new Reich Chancellery designed by Albert Speer, opened two months before. Hitler had wanted this building to intimidate foreign statesmen. Visitors had to walk over slippery marble along a reception hall twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles to reach Hitler’s office. Once admitted into his presence they would notice an inlay on his desk that, as Speer recalls, showed “a sword half drawn from its sheath.” “Good, good,” Hitler had said when he saw the design, “when the diplomats sitting in front of me at this desk see that, they’ll learn to shiver and shake.”
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When Hitler finally deigned to meet Hácha at one o’clock in the morning—having finished watching a comedy film—he told him that in five hours’ time German troops would invade the remainder of the Czech lands. Hácha collapsed and had to be revived by Theodor Morell, Hitler’s doctor. At four o’clock in the morning, in order to avoid bloodshed, he agreed to hand over the remainder of Czechoslovakia into German hands.

Czechs like Anna Krautwurmowa were terrified. They remembered how Czech citizens had fled from the Sudetenland in the face of German aggression: “The Czechs who were returning from the borderlands told us how they were attacked and beaten with rifle butts. People had to flee, flee with their small children. That’s how it was, they were heartless. They were truly heartless, merciless, and they swore at our people for no reason.”
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These remaining Czech lands had no German-speaking majority within them. This was not about regaining Germans or German territory lost at the end of the First World War. This was imperialist aggression. “Why should they have the right [to invade]?” asks Anna Krautwurmowa. “This was the Czech Republic. Czechoslovakia. Why should they have any rights over another country?” In the days after the Germans moved into Prague and took the Czechs under their “protection” this was a question that many others were asking—including those in powerful positions, like Sir Alexander Cadogan of the British Foreign Office. “I’m afraid we have reached the cross roads,” he wrote in his diary on 20 March 1939. “I always said that, as long as Hitler could pretend he was incorporating Germans in the Reich, we could pretend that he had a case. If he proceeded to gobble up other nationalities, that would be the time to call ‘Halt!’ ”
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By the end of March, Britain had guaranteed to protect three countries
against any future German aggression—Greece, Romania and Poland. This was a setback for Hitler, because he was still clinging to the hope that France and Britain could somehow be persuaded to give Germany a free hand in eastern Europe. His ambition was—as it had always been—to gain land in the west of the Soviet Union. To that end he had been testing Polish reaction to some form of deal with Germany—one that would turn Poland into a country dominated by the Nazis but without the need for a German invasion, rather like the arrangement just reached with Slovakia. He had already shown “goodwill” to the Poles, Hitler thought, by allowing them to gain territory from Czechoslovakia around Teschen at the time of the Sudetenland crisis. But now, armed with the British guarantee, the Poles were not going to let the Nazis bully them.

Hitler’s foreign policy “vision” had remained the same—war with the “blood stained criminals” of the Soviet Union—but the realities of European geography had defeated him. There were too many troublesome countries between Germany and the Soviet Union to make his dream easy to achieve. War with Poland seemed inevitable, and—most likely—war with Britain and France as well. Ironically, in an effort to protect his army from a long-term war on two fronts, Hitler concluded a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, signed by Ribbentrop in Moscow in the early hours of 24 August 1939.

In many respects, for Hitler, this was all something of a mess. He was about to fight the wrong opponent—Britain—having made a pact with the wrong country, the Soviet Union. And it demonstrates in stark terms one of the great failures of his leadership. He had clarity of vision—which all charismatic leaders need—and he had the ability to react to short-term problems—which all politicians need—but he did not have the skill to link the two parts together in a coherent whole. Five years before, in a speech at the Nuremberg rally recorded in
Triumph of the Will
, Hitler had called for the Nazi party to be “unchangeable in its doctrine” but “supple and adaptable in its tactics.” But Hitler had been too “supple and adaptable in his tactics” to gain the goals that his “unchangeable” doctrine demanded.

In any case, almost certainly Hitler’s idea of an alliance with Britain had been misconceived from the first. One of the weaknesses of Hitler as a leader was that he constructed his “vision” of the way he felt Germany’s future ought to be without adequate intelligence about the views of his
potential adversaries. “His illusions and wish-dreams were a direct outgrowth of his unrealistic mode of working and thinking,”
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wrote Albert Speer. “Hitler actually knew nothing about his enemies and even refused information that was available to him. Instead, he trusted his inspirations.” And as far as Britain’s intentions went, Hitler’s “inspirations” were plain wrong. As Professor Anita Prażmowska says, the British made a straightforward “strategic evaluation” in spring 1939 and came to the conclusion that “the balance of power in Europe” was “tipping dangerously against British interests.”
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This, rather than any grand ideological or humanitarian concern, was what led them to contemplate war. Indeed, it’s hard to see how any British government would have permitted Germany to create a gigantic empire in central and eastern Europe.

Hitler had been furious when he heard that Chamberlain had issued guarantees to Poland after the German occupation of the Czech lands in March 1939, angry that Chamberlain had not continued to act true to his behaviour at the time of Munich and simply acceded to German demands. Hitler doesn’t seem to have realised the extent to which the behaviour of others changed in response to his own. Chamberlain had trusted Hitler, and Hitler had broken his word so he would not be trusted again. Hitler’s own self-obsession, his focus on his own “will,” blinded him to the fact that the people he dealt with were capable of radically changing their views about him.

Nevertheless, Hitler now had control over the only institution that could have stopped him from leading Germany to war—the army. It was a dominance which fully revealed itself at a conference at the Berghof on 22 August 1939. Hitler told his generals that “fundamentally all depends on me, on my existence … There will probably never again in the future be a man with more authority than I have.”
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Hitler ordered his military commanders in the forthcoming war to “harden” their “hearts” against the enemy.

However, even within the Nazi elite there were some—most notably Hermann Göring—who were now fighting an internal battle between their “faith” in the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler and their anxiety about the practical consequences of war. Göring was a more complex character than the bluff, bullying caricature that is often presented, and his views about the road Hitler was travelling were complex. It wasn’t that Göring was against Nazi aggression—quite the contrary. He had encouraged
Hitler to progress with the
Anschluss
and had taken some delight in describing to President Hácha just what his bombers would do if let loose on Prague. What Göring worried about—as did Hitler’s Generals—was a wide-ranging conflict that involved Britain, France and potentially America and the Soviet Union as well. Göring was happily married to the actress Emmy Sonnemann and was father to a daughter, Edda, who was just over a year old. They lived in epic splendour at his vast estate at Carinhall in the Schorfheide forest and at his grand house in Berlin. Life for Göring was good. Why would he want to help start a war that might risk all this? Göring had demonstrated this anxiety when he famously quarrelled with Joachim Ribbentrop at the time of Munich, saying to the bellicose Foreign Minister that he, Göring, understood about war, and that whilst if war came he would be in the first aircraft into battle, he would insist Ribbentrop was in the seat next to him.
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On the other hand, Göring—as we have already seen many times in this history—was an absolute believer in the charisma of Adolf Hitler. In his latest obsequious remarks in public, spoken in the Reichstag after Hitler’s speech on 30 January 1939, Göring had promised to “blindly” follow Hitler, a man he said who had “restored to us a life worth living, a life splendid and magnificent.”
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But despite this promise to “blindly” follow Hitler, Göring still wanted to avoid war. Hence the appearance on the scene, in early July 1939, of an enthusiastic amateur diplomat called Birger Dahlerus. Göring had known Dahlerus, a forty-nine-year-old Swedish businessman, for years. Now Dahlerus, appalled at the prospect of war and with influential friends in Britain, approached Göring and offered to try and work for peace between the German and British governments. Göring leapt at the opportunity to use Dahlerus and met with seven senior British businessmen at a house in the north of Germany on 7 August. Several more meetings followed, with the calm, measured Swede eventually discussing German intentions—having been briefed by Göring—with Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax and Sir Alexander Cadogan at the end of August in London.

It was a mission that was doomed from the start. The British would not countenance forcing the Poles to give up any territory to the Germans—given the German occupation of the Czech lands another Munich was inconceivable—and Hitler was set not only on taking Danzig and the Polish corridor but on gaining
Lebensraum
in the east as well.
Göring knew all this. He had even heard Hitler state baldly “There will be a war”
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at a military conference back in May. So why was Göring wasting so much time on Dahlerus? One possibility was that he felt excluded by the presence of Ribbentrop at Hitler’s side, and saw this escapade as a way of worming his way back into the centre of events. But from the account Dahlerus gives of that summer it seems more likely that Göring was actually trying to do what he could to avert a war with the British. That’s also the impression conveyed by the bizarre scene Sir Alexander Cadogan described on 30 August,
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with Dahlerus in the British Foreign Office on the phone to Göring, quizzing him about whether a compromise was possible between Germany and Britain—which, of course, it never was.

Göring owed his power, fame and riches to his position in the Nazi state—a position only made possible by his belief in the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler. Now Göring was experiencing one of the downsides of that belief—for if you follow a leader out of blind faith then you have few options if you subsequently fear the journey will take you to a place you do not want to be.

Göring arranged a meeting between Dahlerus and Hitler in the Reich Chancellery in the early hours of 27 August, at which Dahlerus hand-delivered a letter from Lord Halifax expressing the British desire for peace. That Göring thought this anodyne note could change anything showed both how desperate he was to avoid war with the British, and how anxious he was to please Hitler by demonstrating his influence with powerful figures in the British government.

Dahlerus was taken on the same grand route through the new Reich Chancellery to Hitler’s office that Hácha had followed a few months before. When Hitler met Dahlerus he stared intently at him and then launched into a monologue about German history. Dahlerus noticed how Hitler managed to work himself up into a state of excitement—seemingly without outside stimuli. “He had a seductive way of putting his own viewpoint in the most favourable light,” wrote Dahlerus, “but he suffered from lamentable incapacity to see or respect the other party’s point of view.”
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Hitler boasted about the power of the German armed forces, and when he mentioned the strength of the Luftwaffe, Göring—who had been sitting quietly thus far—“giggled contentedly.”

By now Dahlerus had formed the view that Hitler’s “mental equilibrium was patently unstable” and so, when he could get a word in, he
spoke softly in an attempt to calm the German leader. But when Dahlerus mentioned that Britain and France were also powerful military nations the reaction was instantaneous. Hitler “suddenly got up and becoming very much excited and nervous, walked up and down saying, as though to himself, that Germany was irresistible and could defeat her adversaries by means of a rapid war. Suddenly he stopped in the middle of the room and stood there staring. His voice was blurred and his behaviour that of a completely abnormal person. He spoke in staccato phrases, and it was clear that his thoughts were concentrated on the tasks that awaited him in case of war. ‘If there should be war,’ he said, ‘
dann werde ich U Boote bauen, U Boote bauen, U Boote, U Boote, U Boote
.’ [‘I will build U boats, build U boats, U boats, U boats, U boats.’] His voice became more indistinct and finally one could not follow him at all. Then he pulled himself together, raised his voice as though addressing a large audience and shrieked,
‘Ich werde Flugzeuge bauen, Flugzeuge bauen, Flugzeuge, Flugzeuge, und ich werde meine Feinde vernichten.’
[‘I will build planes, build planes, planes, planes, and I will destroy my enemies.’] He seemed more like a phantom from a story book than a real person.”
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The meeting ended with Dahlerus trying to discover just what Hitler wanted from the Poles. But, like many others before him, he found it impossible to get Hitler to articulate detailed terms. Dahlerus left, appalled both by Hitler’s behaviour and by the way Göring abased himself before his Führer.