Hitler's Charisma (44 page)

Just before the Hamburg firestorm, on 25 July, the Italians had demonstrated how they were prepared to deal with their own charismatic leader, Benito Mussolini, who had so inspired Adolf Hitler and the Nazis back in the early 1920s. Seeing which way the war was going, the Grand Fascist Council voted to remove him from power and Mussolini was arrested as he left an audience with the king. Shortly afterwards the Italians broke off their alliance with Germany and tried to exit the war. “Not very honourable, certainly, whenever you betray a friend, an ally, but it happens, it happens,” says Mario Mondello, an Italian diplomat at the time and a member of the Italian National Fascist Party. “We are more realistic, sometimes, than the Germans are. Of course, being realistic we are not faithful to the present chief and so on. I don’t say it is a noble thing, but it is our character.”
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However, it was much more than any perceived variation in “character” between Germans and Italians that enabled Hitler to stay on in power nearly two years longer than Mussolini. An important difference between the two countries was structural. Mussolini had not dismantled, as Hitler had, all of the various institutions that could hold him to account. The Italian king was head of state—not Mussolini—and it was still possible
for members of a Fascist Council to meet and declare their lack of confidence in Mussolini via a vote. None of that could happen in Nazi Germany. Hitler had always been more alert to any possible challenge to his authority—becoming head of state himself in 1934 and letting the Cabinet wither and die as a political forum before the outbreak of war.

Meanwhile, Hitler continued to rely on personal appeals to motivate his generals. Some months after Mussolini had been deposed, Peter von der Groeben, then chief of operations for German Army Group Centre, attended a meeting with other senior commanders at Hitler’s headquarters at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia. Von der Groeben watched as Hitler and the generals “discussed for two hours whether the one and only tank division we had, had been deployed correctly … So one was standing in the background and getting more and more desperate … And at the end of every meeting he [i.e., Hitler] would always personally turn to the field marshal in charge and say, ‘But you’re not going to abandon me,’ and he took both his hands and shook them … He had an immense ability to manipulate and influence people.”
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The aristocratic von der Groeben also reveals that Hitler’s conduct during these encounters was most certainly not that of a madman. “I can only judge all this from these meetings which I attended, but he was always above reproach in all respects. I never experienced any kind of abusive behaviour or anything of the kind.”

Johann-Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg, an officer on the German General Staff, witnessed the motivating effect Hitler continued to possess. He and his friends called it “the Wehrmacht high command bug” and whenever a new officer arrived they would ask themselves, “How long will it be before he catches it?” Kielmansegg believed that one could only become infected with this “bug” when in close contact with Hitler. “The only time when I was under the spell, so to speak, was when Hitler gave me a very personal order for Marshal Antonescu, the Romanian leader at the time. There were only three of us. The head of the general staff on the left, Hitler in the middle and me on the right. And I stood there. And the head of the general staff said [to Hitler], ‘You want to give Count Johann-Adolf Kielmansegg a personal order.’ I was his emissary you might say. So Hitler turned around and looked at me. And at that moment I had the strong feeling, ‘This man knows exactly what you are thinking.’ That’s the feeling I had.”
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Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, recalls that Hitler
“never betrayed a sign of weakness nor indicated that he saw any situation as hopeless … It fascinated me to see how he contrived to put a positive value on setbacks and even succeeded in convincing those who worked closely with him.”
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In part, Hitler achieved this effect by using the same methods he had for years—staring longer into someone’s eyes than normal, a sense of stillness in the moment, an absolute lack of doubt, and a direct and personal appeal for loyalty. But by now every officer who stood in front of Hitler also knew that they were in the presence of a man who had over the last three years led Germany to great victories—and these successes had not been forgotten, even now, in the face of recent defeats. Maybe, just maybe, the Führer did still know “best.”

Senior officers like Karl Dönitz, who were also committed followers of Hitler, were particularly susceptible to this aspect of his appeal. Jürgen Oesten, for example, remembers accompanying Dönitz to a wartime meeting with Hitler. Before he entered the room to meet the Führer, Dönitz had told Oesten how he was going to express his doubts about the ability of the Navy to achieve what Hitler wanted. Dönitz then went into the room to see Hitler. But when he emerged, Dönitz was transformed. He was now full of confidence about the way ahead, and says Oesten, “floating on a sea of emotion.”
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“I experienced examples of it,” confirms Ulrich de Maizière, who as an officer of the General Staff was present at meetings with Hitler towards the end of the war, “of men who came to tell him it could not go on any longer—and even said that to him. And then he talked for an hour and then they went and said, ‘I want to give it another try’ … Well, he had an enormously strong will, you know, and he had powers of persuasion that could gloss over any rational arguments … if he ordered the attack on the Caucasus and the logistics expert told him that there wasn’t enough fuel then he would say, ‘then just seize the petrol. I don’t care, it will be done.’ ”
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Just as before, Hitler’s powers of persuasion only worked on those who were predisposed to succumb to them. For example, Günther von Below, a colonel who was captured at Stalingrad, was not susceptible. “For me, Hitler was never a superior or some overwhelming leadership personality. I never had that feeling. He never made much of an impression on me. You may think now that this is my attitude 50 years after the event, but I know for certain that I never felt like that about him. He never fascinated me.”
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But the reason why von Below did not succumb
to Hitler’s personal appeal is not hard to find—he was never that bowled over by anyone he ever met. “I have always been very matter of fact myself, for my entire life,” he admits. “And my wife once said, ‘You are always so damned matter of fact.’ ”

For those who were inclined to be carried away on a “sea of emotion” after meeting Hitler, the consequences were comforting—but often short term. For though there were obvious reasons why Hitler’s charisma still had an effect—after all, who in the German High Command
wanted
to believe that the war was lost?—one needed to possess considerable powers of self-deception to pretend that Hitler’s promises of a brighter future could still be met. In June 1944, for example, General Kurt Zeitzler, who had long been looked on as a man who shared Hitler’s optimism, simply could not take the pressure any more. He had a nervous breakdown and walked away from his job as Chief of Staff of the German army.

But Hitler’s undoubted ability to persuade many of those he met to “give it another try” has to be set against other powerful reasons to continue the fight that had little to do with any charismatic powers he might still have possessed. First was the knowledge of the crimes that had been committed since the war began, particularly since the invasion of the Soviet Union. This could be a powerful motivating factor, as Heinrich Himmler well knew. So much so that he deliberately spelled out just what the SS had been up to when he spoke in Posen on 6 October 1943 to a gathering of senior Nazis. He told them explicitly that the extermination of the Jews was taking place and that by the end of the year the “Jewish question” would be “solved.” Moreover, he said, it had been necessary to kill Jewish women and children as well as men to prevent a race of “avengers” growing up and seeking retribution in the future. Significantly, as he neared the end of his speech, Himmler told his audience, “You now know about it.”
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Sharing knowledge of the mass murder of millions of people across the Nazi elite was an effective way of creating a communal sense of responsibility to fight to the bitter end. Just how potent this was can be gauged by the difficulties Albert Speer’s presence at this 6 October meeting caused him in later life. After all, how could he portray himself as a “good Nazi,” someone who had sought to mitigate Hitler’s call for the destruction of German infrastructure in the last days of the war, when in the autumn of 1943 he had been told all about the extermination of the
Jews? Not surprisingly, Speer fiercely—if unconvincingly—persisted to his last breath that he had left the meeting early and never heard Himmler’s words at Posen.

Knowledge of the atrocities committed in the east was not, of course, confined to the Nazi elite. Peter von der Groeben, for instance, learnt exactly what had been taking place when he was coordinating a tactical retreat as a commander with Army Group Centre. An SS officer approached him and said, “I hear you want to evacuate the territory over there.” Von der Groeben said that was correct, only to hear the SS man reply, “No, that is not possible.” And when von der Groeben asked why, he was told because “that’s where the mass graves are.” The SS man then pulled a series of photographs from his pocket, showing what looked like “turnip pits,” but which were in fact where the SS had buried their victims. “Under no circumstances must this fall into the hands of the Russians,” said the SS officer. “Well, my dear chap,” said von der Groeben, “you see to it that this will be removed.”

“That was the first time,” says von der Groeben, “that I heard about what those people had been up to … There was no reason for me to give him a sermon there and then, you know. I was in no position to do so. Yes, I was horrified, horrified—as far as I can remember. Let us assume that I was really deeply horrified and shaken by it, which I don’t remember. What should I have done? What could I have done?

“So could I have gone to my field marshal and reported what I had just found out? I don’t remember what I actually told him. Or else I could go home and say ‘well, I won’t go along with this any more.’ But that was entirely out of the question. What would you have done? You tell me.”
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Von der Groeben also reveals another reason why, despite learning about these mass killings, he felt he should carry on serving Hitler as best he could: “Those [Germans] fighting in Russia, they still had the idea that under all circumstances they had to prevent the Russians from getting into Germany—also into East Prussia, where I came from. And for that reason, of course, in spite of all fundamental doubts and rejections, one did try for as long as possible to do one’s best and to prevent it by military means.” Anxieties such as these were all set against the background of increased coercion and use of terror by Nazi authorities; and in that context it was no accident that Heinrich Himmler was appointed Minister of the Interior in August 1943.

But no amount of threat, guilt, or fear, could alter the fact that Germany was losing the war. The failure of
Unternehmen Zitadelle
(Operation Citadel), the German summer offensive around Kursk in 1943, marked the end of any pretence that the Wehrmacht could mount a successful major counter-attack on the Eastern Front. But still officers close to Hitler, like Nicolaus von Below, retained faith in their Führer. “For some time I had not believed in victory,” said von Below, “but neither did I foresee defeat. At the end of 1943 I was convinced that Hitler could still find a political and military solution. In this paradoxical belief I was not alone.”
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Nonetheless, in early 1944, Fritz Darges, Hitler’s SS Adjutant, describes the mood at the Führer’s headquarters as “subdued.” “We were worried every time another general staff officer arrived. What bad news would he bring us this time?” But it remained obvious to Darges and his comrades that their Führer would fight to the very end regardless of any possible consideration. “Hitler used to say, ‘I don’t give up at five minutes before midnight. I give up at five minutes after midnight.’ And who would have asked him to give up anyway? ‘
Mein Führer
, do you think it’s still possible to win the war?’ Can you tell me who would have dared to ask him that?”
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Darges expresses the reason why he felt it was impossible to give up by way of a metaphor—one cannot “get off a moving train.” Others compared their predicament to sailors trapped on a boat in a storm.

However, there were also German officers who had formed a very different view—who had decided that not only was the war lost, but that the only way to avoid further suffering was to kill Hitler. The core conspirators were a group of army officers of noble birth. One of the leaders, for example, Henning von Tresckow, a major general and chief of operations for Army Group Centre, came from an aristocratic family in East Germany. Like Ludwig Beck, he had initially seen Hitler as a useful political leader who would strengthen the German army and attempt to “right the wrongs” of Versailles. And despite playing a part in the dramatic German victory over France in 1940, he was politically sophisticated enough to recognise that if the British ever gained the Americans as allies then Germany would inevitably be defeated.
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Once in a senior position, Tresckow appointed other officers sympathetic to his views to positions around him. This led directly to a plan to shoot Hitler on his visit to Army Group Centre on 13 March 1943. It was called off only because of lack of support at the last minute from Field
Marshal Kluge—the overall commander of Army Group Centre who had previously expressed support for the conspiracy. “Again and again he [Kluge] brought up various arguments,” wrote Fabian von Schlabrendorff, another of the conspirators, “claiming that neither the world nor the German people nor the German soldier would understand such an act at this time.”
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