Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

He?.¹⁸⁸

Accompanied by General Ernst Udet, Goring arrived during the evening. Hitler repeated the hope that He? had crashed. He asked Goring and Udet whether it was probable that He? would manage to reach his flight-target near Glasgow. They thought it could be ruled out. In their view, He? did not have sufficient mastery of the technical equipment. Hitler disagreed. At that, Ribbentrop was dispatched to Rome to prevent any potential rift in the Axis. The news from London could break at any time. It was vital to obviate any presumption by Mussolini that Germany was attempting to arrange a separate peace with Britain.¹⁸⁹

Hitler was furious to learn that He?, despite being banned from flying, had prepared his plans in minute detail. He persuaded himself — taking his lead from what He? himself in his letter had suggested — that the Deputy Fuhrer was indeed suffering from mental delusion, and insisted on making his ‘madness’ the centre-point of the extremely awkward communique which had to be put out to the German people.¹⁹⁰ Since there was still nothing from Britain, but some sort of official announcement from Berlin was thought to be unavoidable, it was suggested that the Deputy Fuhrer had probably crashed en route. There was still no word of He?’s whereabouts when the communique was broadcast at 8p.m. that evening. The communique mentioned the letter which had been left behind, showing ‘in its confusion unfortunately the traces of a mental derangement’, giving rise to fears that he had been the ‘victim of hallucinations’. ‘Under these circumstances,’ the communique ended, it had to be presumed that ‘Party Comrade He? had somewhere on his journey crashed, that is, met with an accident’.¹⁹¹

Goebbels, overlooked in the first round of Hitler’s consultations, had by then also been summoned to the Obersalzberg. ‘The Fuhrer is completely crushed,’ the Propaganda Minister noted in his diary. ‘What a spectacle for the world: a mentally-deranged second man after the Fuhrer.’¹⁹² The following day, on reaching the Berghof, he was shown the letters left by He?. ‘A muddle-headed shambles, schoolboy dilettantism,’ was his verdict on He?’s intention to work through the Duke of Hamilton to bring down Churchill and attain peace-terms. ‘That Churchill would immediately have him arrested hadn’t, unfortunately, occurred to him.’ The letters, he claimed, were full of ‘half-baked occultism’. He pointed to He?’s belief in horoscopes. ‘A thoroughly pathological business,’ he concluded.¹⁹³ Meanwhile, early on 13 May, the BBC in London had brought the official announcement that He? indeed found himself in British captivity.

The first German communique composed by Hitler the previous day would plainly no longer suffice. The new communique of 13 May acknowledged He?’s flight to Scotland, and capture. It emphasized his physical illness — he had suffered from a gall-bladder complaint — stretching back years, which had put him in the hands of mesmerists, astrologists, and the like, bringing about ‘a mental confusion’ that had led to the present action. It also held open the possibility that he had been entrapped by the British Secret Service. Affected by delusions, he had undertaken the action of an idealist without any notion of the consequences. His action, the communique ended, would alter nothing in the struggle against Britain.¹⁹⁴

The two communiques, forced ultimately to concede that the Deputy Fuhrer had flown to the enemy, and attributing the action to his mental state, bore all the hallmarks of a hasty and ill-judged attempt to play down the enormity of the scandal. Remarkably, Goebbels had not been informed of what had happened until the evening of 12 May.¹⁹⁵ Hitler had not turned to him for propaganda advice on how to present the debacle, but had relied instead at first on Otto Dietrich, the Press Chief. Goebbels was highly critical from the outset about the ‘mental illness’ explanation. None of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter who inundated him with telephone calls about the position, he wrote, believed the ‘madness’ story. ‘It sounds so absurd that it could be taken for a mystification,’ he frankly admitted.¹⁹⁶ His own preference would have been to say nothing until forced to do so, then to suggest that He?, as had been claimed of Gregor Strasser in 1932, had ‘evidently lost his nerve’ at the last minute.¹⁹⁷ This way, weakness rather than insanity could have been blamed. It would have been an easier interpretation to defend.¹⁹⁸ As it was, a real difficulty had to be faced: how to explain that a man recognized for many years as mentally unbalanced had been left in such an important position in the running of the Reich. ‘It’s rightly asked how such an idiot could be the second man after the Fuhrer,’ Goebbels remarked.¹⁹⁹

SD reports and other soundings of popular reactions told Goebbels of the damaging impact on the morale of the people.²⁰⁰ For the Nazi Party’s standing, the fall-out from the He? affair was disastrous. Hefty and sustained criticism of the Party and its representatives had been widespread even during the victorious summer of 1940. Alongside the adulation for the Fuhrer and the eulogies for the Wehrmacht went feelings that the Party and its representatives had perhaps once served some purpose, but were by now superfluous. Many thought the Party functionaries were corrupt, interfering, and self-serving — feathering their own nest at home, shirking, and draft- dodging while the indomitable Fuhrer and his brave soldiers were at the front, facing the enemy. As before the war, the corruption, high-handedness, loose living, and other personal failings of the jumped-up ‘tin-pot gods (Nebengotter) were the subject of extensive condemnation. The popular distaste was much in evidence in the months before the He? scandal. It was, then, scarcely surprising that, alongside the deep shock and dismay felt by Party members and loyal supporters, He?’s defection now evoked a wave of massive criticism cascading down on the heads of the Party hacks.²⁰¹

A sense of the popular feeling could be grasped from the innumerable wild rumours that sprouted overnight in all parts of the Reich in what one government official dubbed ‘the month of rumours’.²⁰² It was, for instance, rumoured that Himmler and Ley had fled abroad, that the Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria, Adolf Wagner, had been caught on the border trying to export into Switzerland 22 million Reich Marks robbed from monasteries, and that Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher, Count Helldorf (the Police Chief of Berlin), and Walther Darre (the Blut und Boden guru) had been shot for their involvement in He?’s ‘treason’.²⁰³ Of course, none of the rumours was true. But their existence — and negative rumour was an important mode of criticism in the police state — graphically highlights the low popular esteem of leading Party representatives. Goebbels felt the blow to prestige so deeply that he wanted to avoid being seen in public. ‘It’s like an awful dream,’ he remarked. ‘The Party will have to chew on it for a long time.’²⁰⁴ The only solution from his point of view was to batten down the hatches and let the hurricane blow itself out. Soon he was commenting that the issue was losing its dramatic effect.²⁰⁵ It was turning into a nine-days’ wonder.

Hitler himself was occasionally caught in the line of fire of criticism. One popular joke doing the rounds at the time had He? summoned before Churchill. The British Prime Minister, bulldog expression on his face, cigar in his mouth, was supposed to have said: ‘So you’re the madman are you?’ ‘Oh, no,’ He? replied, ‘only his Deputy.’²⁰⁶ But, generally, the contrast between the scarcely diluted contempt for the Party functionaries and the massive popularity of Hitler himself, embodying all that was seen to be positive in National Socialism, was stark. Much sympathy was voiced for the Fuhrer who now had this, on top of all his other worries, to contend with. As ever, it was presumed that, while he was working tirelessly on behalf of the nation, he was kept in the dark, let down, or betrayed by some of his most trusted chieftains.²⁰⁷

This key element of the ‘Fuhrer myth’ was one that Hitler himself played to when, on 13 May, he addressed a rapidly arranged meeting of the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter at the Berghof. There was an air of tension when Goring and Bormann, both grim-faced, entered the hall before Hitler made his appearance. Bormann read out He?’s final letter to Hitler. The feeling of shock and anger among those listening was palpable. Then Hitler came into the room. Much as in the last great crisis within the Party leadership, in December 1932, he played masterfully on the theme of loyalty and betrayal.²⁰⁸ He? had betrayed him, he stated. He appealed to the loyalty of his most trusted ‘old fighters’. He declared that He? had acted without his knowledge, was mentally ill, and had put the Reich in an impossible position with regard to its Axis partners. He had sent Ribbentrop to Rome to placate the Duce. He stressed once more He?’s long-standing odd behaviour (his dealings with astrologists and the like). He castigated the former Deputy Fuhrer’s opposition to his own orders in continuing to practise flying. He?, he said, had arranged for a specially adapted Messerschmitt to be fitted out, and had had regular weather charts for the North Sea sent to him for months. A few days before He?’s defection, he went on, the Deputy Fuhrer had come to see him and asked him pointedly whether he still stood to the programme of cooperation with England that he had laid out in Mein Kampf. Hitler said he had, of course, reaffirmed this position.

When he had finished speaking, Hitler leaned against the big table near the window. According to one account, he was ‘in tears and looked ten years older’.²⁰⁹ ‘I have never seen the Fuhrer so deeply shocked,’ Hans Frank told a gathering of his subordinates in the General Government a few days later.²¹⁰ As he stood near the window, gradually all the sixty or seventy persons present rose from