Hitler's Charisma (46 page)

For Hitler—and for millions of other Germans—what happened at Nemmersdorf symbolised the reason to keep on fighting. “They’re animals from the steppes of Asia,” Hitler said when he learnt about Nemmersdorf, “and the war I am waging against them is a war for the dignity of European mankind.”
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There is no record that Hitler felt any irony in this suggestion, given that the war of “annihilation” he had instigated against the Soviet Union had already cost the lives of many millions; and one of the main reasons for the atrocities committed against German civilians was the desire of Red Army soldiers for vengeance.

Nonetheless, the suffering of the Germans at the hands of the Soviets—even if it can in part be understood—cannot be excused. Anna Seddig was just one of hundreds of thousands of German women fleeing west who was abused. She was carrying her one-year-old son Siegfried with her. “Nothing to eat. Siegfried was thirsty and although I was pregnant again I still breastfed him. I also let snow melt in my mouth so that he could drink it. We had the snow after all.” One night, seeking shelter for herself and her baby, she encountered a group of Red Army soldiers. “The Russians came and shone their torches on me. And one said ‘Now, woman, you will get a place to stay.’ And the place to stay was an airraid shelter. There was a table in it. And in that night one Russian after another raped me there on the table. It’s like being dead. Your whole body is gripped by cramp. You feel repulsion. Repulsion, I can’t express it any other way. It was all against our will. They considered us fair game. I can’t tell how many men there were—ten, fifteen. It just went on and on. There were so many, one after the other. One of them, I remember, also wanted me, but then he said, ‘How many comrades have already been here? Put your clothes on.’ ”
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The broader picture was bleaker than ever for the Germans. The scale of the resources the Allies could now produce dwarfed anything
the Germans could manage. In the year 1944, for instance, the Germans made fewer than 35,000 fighters and bombers—whilst together, Britain, America and the Soviet Union produced nearly 130,000.
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And despite the desperate dreams of “wonder weapons” in development or of a split occurring between the Western Allies and Stalin, Germany’s fate by the end of 1944 was obvious. Starved of raw materials—the Soviet capture of Romanian oil wells in April 1944 had been a devastating blow—the German war machine could last for only a few months more. But the cost, in human terms, of carrying on the war would be tremendous. Just under two million Germans had died during 1944, and those numbers would increase proportionately in 1945 with more than 400,000 killed in January alone.
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Hitler still tried to project certainty that all would eventually come well, and this was an important factor in maintaining the will to fight amongst the leaders of the Nazi movement. In the presence of a select group of Nazi believers, his optimism could still be infectious. In early December, just before the launch of the doomed German offensive in the Ardennes, Hitler so enthused Joseph Goebbels about the wonderful future ahead that the Propaganda Minister had trouble sleeping.
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However, even Hitler, whose ability never to demonstrate self-pity born of “neediness” had been a core part of his charismatic appeal, was now finding it hard to conceal his own belief that Germany would lose the war. After the failure of the German attack in the Ardennes, Nicolaus von Below heard Hitler confess that he believed the end was near, and he could only promise that he would never “capitulate” but “would take a world down with us.”
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Increasingly, there was a sense of defeatism amongst sections of the German population, and the Gestapo was charged with the task of shooting “looters, deserters and other rabble.”
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It also seemed that the belief that “the Führer knows best” was collapsing amongst those who had fought for the regime. In March 1945, only one in five German prisoners of war held in the West had faith in Hitler—at the start of the year three times as many had expressed confidence in their Führer.
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Ulrich de Maizière, then a lieutenant colonel, offers a vivid portrait of the fast declining leader of the Third Reich: “By that time Hitler was already a sick man, with a severe shaking paralysis in his right arm, a shuffling gait, blue glasses, poor eyesight, so that everything had to be put
before him in large letters. But he had lost none of his demonic charisma. In this final phase I perhaps had to make night-time presentations 10 to 15 times as 1A [i.e., Chief of Operations] in the Operations Department and I had the following two experiences. On the one hand he was a man, I am now talking of the human effect that he exuded, a man of indescribable, demonic effect on other people, whom only very, very few people were able to resist. And those who were constantly in his environment were totally subject to him. I know only very few people who succeeded in resisting the personal charisma of this man, no matter how ugly he was to look at. The second thing, however, which was much more dangerous, was that he was a man with a mental illness, to the extent that he had a hypertrophic self-identification with the German people, that he lived in such self-identification with the German people. He was subjectively convinced, and I heard this from his own mouth, that the German nation would not survive his end and the end of National Socialism. It would be destined to collapse. That was sick.”
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That Hitler did not want to see Germany handed over to the victors intact is certainly true. He told Albert Speer in March 1945, “If the war is lost, the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things. For the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation. In any case only those who are inferior will remain after this struggle, for the good have already been killed.”
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It was a view that ought not to have surprised Speer or any member of the Nazi elite or, indeed, anyone who had ever read
Mein Kampf
. The logic was inescapable in Hitler’s mind. Life was a permanent struggle and the “weaker”
deserve
to die. It was a vision of strength, power and conquest that had been attractive when the Nazis were the ones winning—but which now had wholly nihilistic consequences in defeat. Speer professed to have been horrified at Hitler’s desire to leave Germany in ruins, but it was wholly predictable. Hitler was simply being consistent with the world view he had first expressed in print in 1924.

It’s a moment that symbolises the calamitous consequences of believing in Hitler’s charismatic leadership. Hitler had always talked of never allowing a “repeat” of 1918 when the German army had surrendered whilst still on foreign soil. But the way in which the First World War had ended
now seemed to be a model of compassion compared with the finale Hitler contemplated.

There were Germans—particularly those who directly faced the Red Army—who subscribed to Hitler’s view that they should die rather than survive defeat. Rudolf Escherich was one of them. He was a member of a Luftwaffe squadron near the river Oder in the East of Germany. “We were all young, enthusiastic pilots, and were burning to do something to fight for the salvation of our Fatherland—even if it was practically hopeless.”
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He and twelve of his colleagues agreed to participate in a kamikaze-style operation called “Special Mission Freedom.” Before taking part they all signed a letter saying, “We sacrifice ourselves voluntarily for our Führer, our homeland and for Germany.” The plan was to crash their planes, loaded down with 500kg bombs, into the bridges over the river Oder. But the mission was a failure—Escherich lost his way in thick fog and then the operation was abandoned once the Red Army swiftly crossed the river.

What remains intriguing is the motivation of these pilots. Escherich says he would “certainly not” have flown such a suicide mission against the Western Allies. “In the West, they were civilised, they treated their prisoners of war in a half humane fashion and you could expect them to treat the defeated German population more or less decently. But the Russians were not like this.” When reminded of the appalling atrocities the Germans had committed on Soviet territory, and how this must have been part of the motivation for the Soviets behaving as they did, Escherich says, “In such a situation, you don’t ask yourself these questions. We were now confronted by the Russians overwhelming us, our whole population. And then you don’t ask yourself about what had gone on before and whether we had once done injustice to them.”

But, as Rudolf Escherich might have predicted, on the Western Front there were many Germans who were not prepared to “sacrifice” themselves “for our Führer, our homeland and for Germany.” In March 1945, the month before Escherich’s attempted suicide mission, Hitler expressed his outrage at the numbers of German soldiers who were allowing themselves to be captured in the West. “In some places,” said Hitler, “no resistance at all—immediate and easy surrender to the Americans. It’s a disgrace.”
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True to his ultra-Darwinian beliefs, Hitler blamed the existence of the Geneva convention for the willingness of Germans to surrender, arguing that if he made it “clear to everyone” that he treated “enemy prisoners
ruthlessly, without consideration for reprisals” then Germans would be less willing to be captured as a consequence.

Meanwhile the Allied bombing campaign had intensified still further—most famously with the attack on Dresden on 13 February 1945. “The air war is still the great tale of woe in the present situation,” wrote Goebbels in his diary on 2 March 1945. “The Anglo–Americans have again made very heavy raids on western and south-eastern Germany with damage wholly impossible to set out in detail. The situation becomes daily more intolerable and we have no means of defending ourselves against this catastrophe.”
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Goebbels wrote these words exactly two weeks before the Allies launched a devastating attack on the medieval German city of Würzburg in Franconia. On 16 March 1945, 226 RAF Lancaster bombers dropped almost 1,000 tons of bombs—mostly incendiaries designed to create a firestorm—on Würzburg. More than 80 per cent of the city’s centre was destroyed—proportionately greater destruction than at Dresden. “The whole town was on fire,” says Christl Dehm, who experienced the attack, “and time-delay bombs were exploding everywhere. And everywhere fear, and the screams of the wounded, and people burning alive who couldn’t save themselves. Dreadful images.”
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But terrible as the effects of the bombing were, it’s worth remembering one of the conclusions of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted after the war: “The mental reaction of the German people to air attack is significant. Under ruthless Nazi control they showed surprising resistance to the terror and hardships of repeated air attack, to the destruction of their homes and belongings, and to the conditions under which they were reduced to live. Their morale, their belief in ultimate victory or satisfactory compromise, and their confidence in their leaders declined, but they continued to work efficiently as long as the physical means of production remained.”
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The conclusion of the Americans was that this “resistance” demonstrated that “the power of a police state over its people cannot be underestimated.” No doubt fear of reprisals by the regime was a factor in ensuring the bombing campaign did not lead to open civil disobedience. But the feeling of hopelessness and lack of alternative options in the face of the Soviet advance also played a part.

Even his gauleiters—some of his most dedicated followers—were
no longer all in thrall to Hitler by the time of their last meeting on 24 February. Nicolaus von Below, who witnessed the encounter, said that Hitler “attempted to convince his listeners that he alone could correctly judge the situation. But the powers of suggestion he had employed in the past to mesmerise this circle were gone.”
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Still, unnoticed by von Below, amongst one or two of these core believers there lingered the remnants of belief. After his speech Hitler sat down to eat with the gauleiters and launched into a monologue. Listening to him, Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan, of Magdeburg-Anhalt, felt the depressed mood “evaporate.” It was the “old Hitler” on show.
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However, as the Soviets closed on Berlin, the number of those who continued to have faith in Adolf Hitler declined still further. Even many of those closest to him did not share his belief that it was necessary to extinguish one’s own life as the flame of the Third Reich died. Heinrich Himmler—“loyal Heinrich” as Hitler called him—had certainly imagined a world beyond Allied victory. This man who had helped implement the extermination of the Jews now sought to save some of them. On 5 February 1945 a train left for Switzerland containing 1,200 Jews from Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Himmler had agreed a deal with the American Union of Orthodox Rabbis to exchange Jews for cash—and a different train was planned to leave every two weeks.
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Hitler was furious when he heard the news and ordered Himmler not to proceed with any more such ventures. But this didn’t stop Himmler personally meeting Norbert Masur, an emissary of the World Jewish Congress, on 21 April and discussing handing over 1,000 women from Ravensbrück concentration camp. The meeting took place at the home of Himmler’s masseur, Felix Kersten, and according to Kersten, Himmler told him just before the encounter, “I want to bury the hatchet between us and the Jews. If I had my own way, many things would have been done differently.”
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The day before—Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday—Himmler, along with a number of other leading figures in the Third Reich, including Hermann Göring, had taken their leave of Hitler at the Führerbunker in Berlin. For years they and the other prominent Nazis had been rivals, divided amongst each other as they sought to please their Führer. Now they were united only in their desire to escape from him. It was a rare case, as Professor Sir Ian Kershaw memorably remarked, “of the sinking ship leaving the rat.”
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