Hitler's Charisma (32 page)

Whilst on a number of occasions we have seen how German generals were initially appalled at the extent of the risks Hitler was prepared to run on issues of grand strategy—as shown by both the Hossbach meeting in 1937 and his decision to invade France—paradoxically, at the operational level, the German army valued the ability of the individual commander to take calculated risks in battle on his own initiative. Indeed,
Auftragstaktik
—in the sense of “mission command”—had also been a core principle of Hitler’s own leadership in the domestic field. “I never had a conference with Schacht [German minister of economics in the 1930s],” said Hitler, “to discover what means were at our disposal. I restricted myself to saying simply, ‘This is what I require, and this is what I must have.’ ”
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A core part of Hitler’s charismatic leadership was thus
his desire for his subordinates to choose the way they wanted to fulfil his grand vision—the essence of the military doctrine of
Auftragstaktik
.

All this was in stark contrast, in May 1940, to the way some of the solders in the Allied armies were led. Edward Oates, for example, was serving with the British Royal Engineers in France and he experienced at first hand the lack of
Auftragstaktik
during the retreat: “I can remember some Belgians, they’d got brass helmets and there was quite a few of them, and they said, you know, ‘We want an officer. If we can have an officer we’ll fight, but we don’t know what to do’ … I was [also] a bit surprised, I suppose, that the French army gave up so easily, but I hadn’t even thought about it. We were just ordinary soldiers and we did what we were told. We hadn’t got any strategy or thoughts about where you fought battles or anything, we were just there.”
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But whilst at the grand strategic level Hitler was keen to take risks and embrace the concept of surprise, there were signs that if events did not transpire exactly as he had expected on the battlefield he could be both timid and indecisive. Goebbels, as we have already noted, was one of a number of Nazi leaders who had identified this characteristic in Hitler before the war.
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Now his generals witnessed the same qualities. During the Norwegian operation, for example, General Walter Warlimont felt Hitler had shown “truly terrifying weakness of character”
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after events did not go to plan, and now on 17 May when Hitler announced that Army Group A was vulnerable to flank attack, Halder recorded, “The Führer is terribly nervous. Frightened by his own success, he is afraid to take any chance and so would rather pull the reins on us.”
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The next morning Hitler raged and screamed at Halder and ordered the advance west stopped, only to change his mind at six in the evening. “So the right thing is being done after all,” wrote Halder, “but in an atmosphere of bad feeling …”
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At first sight these two qualities in Hitler—risk-taking and indecision allied with apparent timidity—seem at odds with each other. That was certainly how Halder saw it. On 6 June 1940, towards the end of the campaign in France, he wrote that Hitler thought the plans of the High Command were too “hazardous” and that he wanted to play “absolutely safe.” Halder had problems reconciling this attitude with his previous experience of Hitler as the all or nothing gambler: “… there just isn’t a spark of the spirit that would dare put high stakes on a single throw.”
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But Halder was wrong. These two aspects of Hitler’s leadership were not polar opposites but both consequences of the way Hitler’s decision-making process worked. As we have seen, Hitler decided on policy in a way that would be anathema to many of those in power today. Instead of consulting with interested parties, reviewing options and then arriving at a considered decision, Hitler shut himself alone in his room and waited for inspiration. “The spirit of decision does not mean acting at all costs,” he said. “The spirit of decision consists simply in not hesitating when an inner conviction commands you to act.”
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Once his “inner conviction” had told him what to do, Hitler then used all of his powers of persuasion to convince those around him that this was the correct and logical way forward. But one of the many problems with this way of deciding what to do was that it was ill suited to structured day-to-day meetings where countless small decisions had to be taken. How could Hitler wait for his “inner conviction” to reveal itself on issues like the exact movements of one particular division of the German army? The solution, of course, would have been for Hitler to let Halder and the others at Army High Command headquarters make these decisions themselves whilst working towards the overall vision that he had set by virtue of this “inner conviction.” But he couldn’t do this. And the reason is not hard to find—his lack of trust in their decision-making capability. Had not the handful of people now trying to run this campaign at the highest level, chiefly Halder and Brauchitsch, been the ones who had been so against the invasion of France in the first place?

It’s ironic, against that background, that the greatest popular example of Hitler’s micro-management and timidity during this campaign—the decision to halt German forces in front of Dunkirk on 24 May—was not Hitler’s decision at all. As Professor Sir Ian Kershaw says, Hitler “was actually agreeing to the suggestion put forward by the commander of the German forces in the West, General—rapidly to become Field Marshal—von Rundstedt, who then wanted to preserve the tanks for what they saw as their greater need, which was to destroy the French troops by moving south against them. And Göring had promised Hitler that the British troops would be bombed to bits from the air anyway. So for 24 hours Hitler went along with that decision, realised subsequently it was a mistake and then backtracked from it, but by then it was too late and the British were on their way to getting away from Dunkirk. But it was actually
Hitler at that stage still going along with the advice of his generals, not overriding it as he came to do increasingly as the war went on.”
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As a result of the German delay in moving on Dunkirk, more than 800 civilian vessels—fishing boats, pleasure steamers, tugs—arrived to help the Royal Navy ferry the troops across the Channel to England. In all, more than 330,000 Allied soldiers were rescued. The British government had initially thought only about 40,000 could be saved. But, still, the situation looked bleak for the Allies. Not only had France fallen to the Germans within six weeks, with the armistice signed on 22 June, but the British had been forced to retreat with little more than the clothes they stood up in. “All their vehicles have been left on the beach,” says military historian Professor Geoffrey Wawro. “Most of their field artillery, antitank guns, ammunition, fuel stocks, all have been left to the Germans. So it’s going to take an awful long time to build them up, and in fact you’re going to see old, antiquated vehicles running around in the Western Desert because the good stuff was all left behind at Dunkirk.”
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In June 1940 Hitler was enjoying the high point of his entire career. The French, Norwegians, Danish, Belgians and Dutch were all under German rule—and this tremendous conquest had been achieved in a matter of weeks. More than 1.2 million prisoners of war had been captured and the Germans had suffered a loss of fewer than 50,000 casualties.
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Keitel, as a result of all this success, would now call Hitler
Grösster Feldherr aller Zeiten
—“the greatest military leader of all time.” Hitler now only faced one problem—the British. Their refusal to do what he wanted would test his charismatic leadership as never before.

On 6 July 1940 Hitler drove back into Berlin, after overseeing the capitulation of France, to scenes of joy bordering on hysteria. Hundreds of thousands of Berliners crammed the streets to cheer him. Schoolboys climbed lampposts to see their Führer. Flowers were strewn under his car. A forest of waving swastika flags lined the route. All of this elation, all of this ecstasy was focused on this one, slight, individual. If Hitler had not thought before that he was an infallible figure sent by Providence to gain greatness for Germany, then surely he must have believed it at this moment.

We can get an insight into Hitler’s mentality in the wake of the fall of France by the views he expressed a few weeks before, when he went on an early-morning tour of Paris. After visiting the most important tourist sites—including the Pantheon, the Opéra and Napoleon’s tomb—Hitler told Albert Speer that he had “often considered whether we would not have to destroy Paris” because the city was beautiful and was thus a rival to Berlin. But he had now decided not to annihilate the French capital because one day the greatness of Berlin would make Paris “only … a shadow” by comparison. Speer thought these words demonstrated that Hitler “contained a multitude of selves, from a person deeply aware of
his responsibilities all the way to a ruthless and mankind-hating nihilist.”
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But a better view might be that this incident showed Hitler wallowing in the immensity of his individual power. He—and he alone—could now decide if one of the most glorious cities on earth would continue to exist.

Hitler’s self-confidence, his self-belief was simply overweening. So much so that he felt able to announce at a meeting with his military commanders in late July 1940 that since Britain’s position was “hopeless” then “the war is won by us.”
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It’s a moment that perfectly encapsulates the advantages and disadvantages of charismatic leadership. Because the very qualities that had allowed Hitler to play such a pivotal role in the victory over France would now turn out to be the very qualities that would help ensure Germany’s slide into defeat. Hitler, over the next months, would demonstrate just where overconfidence born of charismatic leadership can lead.

The central problem the Germans now faced was that Britain did not accept that the war was lost. In a speech to the Reichstag on 9 July Hitler made an “an appeal to reason” to England (by which he meant Britain) claiming that he saw “no compelling reason”
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for the war to continue. But it was an “appeal” that the British were destined to reject. During a series of meetings of the War Cabinet held several weeks before, at the lowest point of British fortunes when it was thought that many fewer soldiers would escape from France than eventually did, Churchill had debated with his colleagues what Britain’s stance should be and then orchestrated a decision to fight on against Germany. Churchill’s persuasive logic had been that under any peace treaty signed immediately in the wake of the defeat of France, Hitler would demand the effective disarmament of Britain and as a result the country would be “completely at his mercy.” Consequently, said Churchill, “we should get no worse terms if we went on fighting, even if we were beaten, than were open to us now.”
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Hitler now had discussions
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with Grand Admiral Raeder about the possibility of a seaborne invasion on the south coast of England, but the evidence is that both men doubted that such an action was practicable. And they were right to have such doubts. As Professor Adam Tooze says, “They [the Germans] hadn’t started thinking about a war with Britain, let alone an invasion, until May 1938. The naval armaments programme doesn’t get into gear until January 1939. For the preceding five years Britain had been outspending Germany on the navy so the already enormous
gap between the German navy and the British navy in 1933 had not been shrinking but growing larger every year. So when they then also go on to lose the vast majority of their modern naval forces in the Norwegian debacle which, from a German naval point of view, is a catastrophe, they essentially do not have a surface navy with which to protect an invasion in the summer of 1940.”
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Against this background, Hitler’s “War Directive No. 16” which called for the preparation of “Operation Sea Lion” (
Unternehmen Seelöwe
)—the invasion of Britain—is a work of almost ludicrous optimism. It stated that before the attack could take place the Royal Air Force needed to be so damaged that it posed no appreciable threat to the invasion, and that the Straits of Dover had to be “sealed” by mines to prevent the Royal Navy attacking the Germans as they crossed the Channel. But, as Andrew Roberts says, “even in the event that the RAF was neutralised … I don’t think the Germans were going to be able to invade successfully in 1940. I think that the actual plans needed to get an army across the Channel were just not in place. There weren’t enough of those flat-bottom boats, they weren’t particularly seaworthy and if the Royal Navy had got amongst them there would have been a massacre.”
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None of which, of course, is to denigrate the sacrifice made by “the Few” during the Battle of Britain that summer and early autumn, but only to acknowledge that both Hitler and Grand Admiral Raeder always understood that an invasion of Britain in 1940 was a scarcely credible option. Indeed, on 22 July 1940 Hitler explicitly told Brauchitsch that he thought the crossing of the Channel was a “very hazardous” undertaking and should be undertaken only if there was “no other way” of dealing with Britain.
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This all led to a moment of immense paradox. In July 1940, on the one hand, Hitler was at the peak of his appeal to the German people as a charismatic warlord. As Walter Mauth, then seventeen years old, says, “Everywhere the war lasted three or four weeks and everything went like clockwork. German soldiers were obviously unstoppable. And given this situation we all were—to be honest—enthusiastic, even those who had previously had a different attitude towards the entire regime. All of a sudden, considering everything worked so well and nobody had been able to stop us, we were suddenly all nationalists. Wherever German soldiers were nobody else could get a foothold. It was really like that.”
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