Hitler's Charisma (9 page)

The answer, surely, is that Goebbels was projecting onto the figure of Adolf Hitler what he wanted to see. Goebbels understood that he was part of a political structure that granted the leader complete authority, so the only way to change party policy was to believe that it was possible to change the mind of the party leader.

Hitler understood all this. And he was keen to repair any damage done to his relationship with Goebbels, obviously recognising the potential value to the Nazi party of this twenty-eight-year-old intellectual radical. So Hitler wrote to Goebbels and asked him to come to Munich and give a speech in April 1926. As a result, Goebbels’ attitude to Hitler completely turned around. Goebbels made no effort to convince Hitler to change his mind on the key issues of policy that had been the cause of so much upset at the Bamberg meeting. Instead, he basked in what he felt was the charisma of Adolf Hitler. “I love him,” he wrote in his diary. “He has thought through all of this. Such a sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater—the political genius.”
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Shortly afterwards he wrote, “Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are great and simple at the same time. This is what one calls a genius.”
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Goebbels’ critics
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argued that the reason that he had now changed his mind about Hitler was that he had been seduced by the sense of privilege and power that the Nazi party in Munich—and particularly Hitler—exuded compared to the Strasser group in the north. But Goebbels’ diaries and his actions at the time strongly suggest an alternative interpretation, one that focuses on his wholehearted acceptance of the
belief that the Nazi party was not a political party but a “movement,” and that Hitler was less a political leader and more a quasi-religious prophet. What Goebbels had decided to do was to abandon the Strasser debate about detail of policy, and instead put his faith in Hitler’s judgement on all matters of significance.

The importance of “faith” in understanding the actions of members of the Nazi party around this time is crucial—as Hitler himself stated. He said in 1927, “Be assured, we too put faith in the first place and not cognition. One has to believe in a cause. Only faith creates a state. What motivates people to go and do battle for religious ideas? Not cognition, but blind faith.”
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In emphasising the vital importance of “faith” Hitler was echoing the views of Benito Mussolini who had written in 1912: “We want to believe, we have to believe; mankind needs a credo. Faith moves mountains because it gives us the illusion that mountains do move. This illusion is perhaps the only real thing in life.”
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Rudolf Hess, at this time one of those closest to Hitler, also wrote about how important it was to create a sense of commitment in Nazi followers that went beyond that normally expected in a traditional political party. “The great popular leader,” he said in 1927, “is similar to the great founder of a religion. He must communicate to his listeners an apodictic faith. Only then can the mass of followers be led where they should be led. They will then also follow the leader if setbacks are encountered; but only then if they have communicated to them unconditional belief in the absolute rightness of their own people.” He also remarked that Hitler “must not weigh up the pros and cons like an academic, he must never leave his listeners the freedom to think something else is right.”
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By the time Hess voiced these views Hitler had long been acting on them. Hitler was naturally inclined to demonstrate a great number of the qualities that Hess demanded of “a great popular leader.” Chief amongst those, as Hitler had shown to Goebbels at Bamberg, was his certainty in the correctness of his own judgements. But he allied this to an equal certainty that events would one day work in the Nazis’ favour. Essentially, the single most important message he wanted to convey to his followers was the necessity of “keeping the faith.”

Demonstrably, not all of Hitler’s followers accepted this. Gregor and Otto Strasser certainly did not. And Gregor’s insistence on treating Hitler as a “normal” political leader and openly questioning his judgement
would lead to further conflict. But the majority of supporters who joined the Nazi party around this time would have had little choice but to follow the same line as Goebbels did after spending time with Hitler in the wake of the Bamberg meeting. The structure and systems of the party were now set in concrete—and they all pointed one way, to Hitler as a leader who would “never leave his listeners the freedom to think something else is right.” What Nazi supporters got in exchange for accepting Hitler’s omnipotence was—to borrow Ernest Becker’s phrase—a “secure communal ideology of redemption.”
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Hitler—largely because he seemed no longer to be a threat—had seen his speaking ban gradually lifted across Germany, starting with Saxony in January 1927, then Bavaria in March 1927 and finally Prussia in September 1928. However, even though Hitler could speak openly, and even though Nazi membership stood at around 100,000 in 1928, there seemed little objective chance of a breakthrough for the party. The lowest point was the election of May 1928 when the Nazis polled just 2.6 per cent of the vote. More than 97 per cent of the German electorate still rejected Adolf Hitler and his policies.

In the election of 1928 two of the twelve seats in the Reichstag that the Nazis won went to Goebbels and Göring. Goebbels was clear how he perceived his own parliamentary responsibilities in this democratic Germany, “We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons … If democracy is so stupid as to give us free [railway] tickets and salaries for this work, that is its affair … We flout cooperating in a stinking dung heap. We come to clear away the dung … We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.”
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Goebbels was not alone in his hatred of democracy—it was an attitude that was common on the extreme Right. Colonel von Epp, for example, also ran for the Reichstag in 1928. He had commanded one of the most notorious
Freikorps
and now announced, “I am supposed to be a parliamentarian. You will doubt that I have the requisite qualities for that position. I do not have those qualities. I will never have them; for nothing depends on those qualities.”
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After his election, he noted in his diary that the Reichstag was “an attempt of the slime to govern. Church slime, bourgeois slime, military slime.”

But, as far as the Nazis were concerned, in 1928 the evidence was that
the democratic “slime” were winning. Indeed, the Nazis were so short of money in 1928 that they had trouble financing their party rally in Nuremberg.
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However, there were stirrings in German society that offered some hope to a Nazi party that so clearly needed a crisis to be able to progress. German agricultural workers were suffering as the price of food on the world market began to drop. Since the relative prosperity of the Weimar government had been built on using loans from America to pay the British and French their reparations, this was a fragile economy, and it already showed signs of cracking.

Working hard to stabilise Germany’s position was Gustav Stresemann, the German Foreign Secretary. He had convinced the German government to sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact in August 1928 that committed Germany to a peaceful resolution of international problems. Stresemann then built on the subsequent goodwill by negotiating the Young Plan in February 1929, by which the burden of German reparations would be reduced.

Stresemann was unusual at this point in the history in that he was a senior political figure who was intensely concerned about Hitler and the Nazis. As Theodor Eschenburg recalls, “I was often together with Stresemann, the foreign minister at the time. A liberal, a Right-wing liberal. I remember very well. It was Whitsun 1929. One evening Stresemann started talking about Hitler and said, ‘He is the most dangerous man in Germany. He possesses a devilish rhetoric. He has an instinct for mass psychology like no-one else. When I retire, I will travel through Germany and get rid of this man.’ There were also a few men from the foreign office there. We didn’t understand Stresemann. We said, ‘This little party? Let the guy shout.’ ”
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Gustav Stresemann suffered a stroke and died on 3 October 1929, just days before the Wall Street Crash. And amidst this new economic crisis, millions of Germans would be responsive to Hitler’s charismatic offer of leadership for the very first time. Now when Hitler shouted, people would listen.

Between 1929 and 1933 millions of Germans turned their back on their previous party allegiances and decided to support Adolf Hitler and the Nazis—and they did this knowing that Hitler intended to destroy the German democratic system and supported acts of criminal violence.

Two events from 1932 illustrate the extraordinary nature of what was now happening in this cultured nation at the heart of Europe. In an election speech
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—one of the very first to be filmed with synchronised sound—Hitler mocked German multi-party democracy and the thirty or so parties that were standing against the Nazis. He announced that he had “one goal” which was to “drive the thirty parties out of Germany.” He proudly boasted that the Nazis were “intolerant” and that “there is more at stake [in this election] than just deciding on a new coalition.” He could scarcely have been more explicit about his intention to create a totalitarian state. Then, in August, Hitler offered his “unbounded loyalty”
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and support to five Nazi stormtroopers who had just been sentenced to death for the murder of a Communist supporter in Potempa in Silesia. Hitler did not deny that the murder had taken place, nor that these five Nazis had committed it—he simply said that the verdict against them had been
“monstrous.” Hitler, who aspired to be Chancellor of Germany, thus publicly allied himself with extrajudicial killings.

In the light of all that, how could so many Germans possibly have decided that Hitler should be voted into power, and what role did Hitler’s perceived “charisma” play in the Nazis’ undoubted electoral success?

The most important precondition for Hitler’s rise in popularity was the apparent failure of democracy in the face of economic crisis. In March 1930 the coalition of the Social Democrats and the Liberal People’s Party that had previously governed Germany collapsed when they couldn’t agree how best the crisis should be handled. For many, like Nazi supporter Bruno Hähnel, this was evidence of the need for radical change. The Reichstag was known as the “chattering circle” to Hähnel and his friends because they believed that all of the different political parties—many of whom represented particular interest groups—did little but talk. Thus “it was our aim that a strong man should have the say, and we had such a strong man … Today people talk a lot about the Weimar Republic. But that was a disaster, at least it was to us … From 1929 onwards, I was willing to bet anybody, even my own father, that we National Socialists would come to power.”
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Then there was the sense that under the rule of a “strong man” the country could unite at last. It was the belief that this “difficult [economic] situation” needed to be controlled through “solidarity” that was instrumental in leading Fritz Arlt, an eighteen-year-old student in 1930, to the Nazi party. Under the influence of his older brother he had previously flirted with the idea of Marxism, but now he felt that the “solidarity of socialism” across national boundaries, as preached by Marx, was impossible since individual countries were now pursuing their own national self-interest. “The Socialists abroad dropped us,” says Fritz Arlt. “So, I thought this other solution [i.e., Nazism] is better. What also needs to be added is that the people who represented this idea were actually more credible. They were former soldiers. They were workers. They were people of whom you said, ‘They live in accordance with their beliefs.’ It may look like propaganda now. But it isn’t propaganda. That’s how I felt about it then … In our one group there was a bricklayer. There was a factory owner. There was an aristocrat. There they were, all in it together. We were quite simply a unit and supported one another. A second feature of it was that you said, ‘We have to share with each other.’
In other words—national community. The rich man gives to the poorer. And there was a great deal of poverty in those days.”
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Fritz Arlt paints a “positive” vision of Nazism that Adolf Hitler could have spoken word for word himself. But Arlt also knew that one of the core beliefs of Nazism was the racist belief that this new “National Community” would be defined by excluding other Germans—most notably German Jews. “Racist is not the right word in my opinion,” says Arlt, who ten years later as a member of the SS was to play a leading role in the Nazis’ ethnic cleansing of Poland. He prefers to say that the Nazis held a “belief in natural orders” that was against “multi-culturalism.” “There was no theory of [racial] mingling,” he says. “That did not exist.”

By January 1930, just four months after the Wall Street crash, there were more than three million Germans unemployed—perhaps, taking into account part-time workers, as many as four million. In this atmosphere of crisis, many Germans willingly heard Hitler’s message of “solidarity” and national unity. So much so that the Nazis achieved a remarkable breakthrough in the general election of September 1930. Their share of the vote leapt from 2.6 per cent to 18.3 per cent and they were now the second largest party in the Reichstag with more than a hundred seats. Perhaps more significantly, this exceptional result was gained without putting a detailed programme of policies before the electorate. It was almost as if the German population were voting for an emotional idea, one which was physically manifested in the charismatic person of Adolf Hitler.

That’s certainly the impression which Albert Speer gained when he heard Hitler speak to a gathering of students in a beer hall. “I was carried away on the wave of the enthusiasm which, one could almost feel this physically, bore the speaker along from sentence to sentence … Finally, Hitler no longer seemed to be speaking to convince; rather, he seemed to feel that he was expressing what the audience, by now transformed into a single mass, expected of him.”
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