preoccupation with grandiose architectural schemes, generous allocation of time for relaxation, listening to music, watching films, indulging in the indolence which had been a characteristic since his youth, had indeed given way to a punishing work-schedule in which Hitler brooded incessantly over the most detailed matters of military tactics, leaving little or no space for anything unconnected with the conduct of war in a routine essentially unchanged day in and day out. Nights with little sleep; rising late in the mornings; lengthy midday and early evening conferences, often extremely stressful, with his military leaders; a strict, spartan diet, and meals often taken alone in his room; no exercise beyond a brief daily walk with his Alsatian bitch, Blondi; the same surroundings, the same entourage; late-night monologues to try to wind down (at the expense of his bored entourage), reminiscing about his youth, the First World War, and the ‘good old times’ of the Nazi Party’s rise to power; then, finally, another attempt to find sleep: such a routine — only marginally more relaxed when he was at the Berghof — could not but be in the long run harmful to health and was scarcely conducive to calm and considered, rational reflection.
All who saw him pointed out how Hitler had aged during the war.8 He had once appeared vigorous, full of energy, to those around him. Now, his hair was greying fast, his eyes were bloodshot, he walked with a stoop, he had difficulty controlling a trembling left arm; for a man in his mid-fifties, he looked old.9 Despite his mounting hypochondria, Hitler had in fact enjoyed extremely robust health during the 1930s. But his health had started to suffer notably from 1941 onwards. Even then he spent scarcely a day bedridden through illness. But the increased numbers of pills and injections provided every day by Dr Morell — ninety varieties in all during the war and twenty-eight different pills each day — could not prevent the physical deterioration.10
By 1944, Hitler was a sick man — at times during the year extremely unwell. Cardiograms, the first taken in 1941, had revealed a worsening heart condition.11 And beyond the chronic stomach and intestinal problems that had increasingly come to plague him, Hitler had since 1942 developed symptoms, becoming more pronounced in 1944, which point with some medical certainty to the onset of Parkinson’s Syndrome. Most notably, an uncontrollable trembling of the left arm, jerking in his left leg, and a shuffling gait, were unmistakable to those who saw him at close quarters.12 But although the strains of the last phase of the war took their toll on him, there is no convincing evidence that his mental capacity was impaired.13 Hitler’s rages and violent mood-swings were inbuilt features of his character, their frequency in the final phase of the war a reflection of the stress from the rapidly deteriorating military conditions and his own inability to change them, bringing, as usual, wild lashings at his generals and any others on whom he could lay the blame that properly began at his own door.
In looking to the loss of ‘genius’ through pressures of overwork inappropriate to Hitler’s alleged natural talent for improvisation, Speer was offering a naive and misleading explanation of Germany’s fate, ultimately personalizing it in the ‘demonic’ figure of Hitler.14 The adoption of such a harmfully over-burdensome style of working was no chance development. It was the direct outcome of an extreme form of personalized rule which had already by the time war began seriously eroded the more formal and regular structures of government and military command that are essential in modern states. No other war leader — not Churchill, Roosevelt, or even Stalin — was so consumed by the task of running military affairs, so unable to delegate authority. The breakdown of governmental structures in Germany had gone yet further than their erosion in the Soviet state under Stalin’s despotism. The reins of power were entirely held in Hitler’s hands. He was still backed by major power bases. None existed — whatever the growing anxieties among the military, some leading industrialists, and a number of senior figures in the state bureaucracy about the road down which he was taking them — that could bypass the Fuhrer. All vital measures, both in military and in domestic affairs, needed his authorization. There were no overriding coordinating bodies — no war cabinet, no politburo. But Hitler, forced entirely on to the defensive in running the war, was now often almost paralysed in his thinking, and often in his actions. And in matters relating to the ‘home front’, while refusing to concede an inch of his authority he was, as Goebbels interminably bemoaned, nevertheless incapable of more than sporadic, unsystematic intervention or prevaricating inaction.
Far more gifted individuals than Hitler would have been overstretched and incapable of coping with the scale and nature of the administrative problems involved in the conduct of a world war. Hitler’s triumphs in foreign policy in the 1930s, then as war leader until 1941, had not arisen from his ‘artistic genius’ (as Speer saw it), but in the main from his unerring skill in exploiting the weaknesses and divisions of his opponents, and through the timing of actions carried out at breakneck speed. Not ‘artistic genius’, but the gambler’s instinct when playing for high stakes with a good hand against weak opponents had served Hitler well in those earlier times. Those aggressive instincts worked as long as the initiative could be retained. But once the gamble had failed, and he was playing a losing hand in a long-drawn-out match with the odds becoming increasingly more hopeless, the instincts lost their effectiveness. Hitler’s individual characteristics now fatefully merged, in conditions of mounting disaster, into the structural weaknesses of the dictatorship. His ever-increasing distrust of those around him, especially his generals, was one side of the coin. The other was his unbounded egomania which cholerically expressed itself — all the more pronounced as disasters started to accumulate — in the belief that no one else was competent or trustworthy, and that he alone could ensure victory. His takeover of the operational command of the army in the winter crisis of 1941 had been the most obvious manifestation of this disastrous syndrome.
Speer’s explanation was even more deficient in ignoring the fact that Germany’s catastrophic situation in 1944 was the direct consequence of the steps which Hitler — overwhelmingly supported by the most powerful forces within the country, and widely acclaimed by the masses — had taken in the years when his ‘genius’ (in Speer’s perception) had been less constrained. Not changes in his work-style, but the direct result of a war he — and much of the military leadership — had wanted meant that Hitler could find no ‘elegant’ solution to the stranglehold increasingly imposed by the mighty coalition which German aggression had called into being. He was left, therefore, with no choice but to face the reality that the war was lost, or to hold fast to illusions.
Ever fewer Germans shared Hitler’s undiminished fatalism about the outcome of the war. The dictator’s rhetoric, so powerful in ‘sunnier’ periods, had lost its ability to sway the masses. Either they believed what he said; or they believed their own eyes and ears — gazing out over devastated cities, reading the ever-longer lists of fallen soldiers in the death-columns of the newspapers, hearing the sombre radio announcements (however they were dressed up) of further Soviet advances, seeing no sign that the fortunes of war were turning. Hitler sensed that he had lost the confidence of his people. The great orator no longer had his audience. With no triumphs to proclaim, he did not even want to speak to the German people any longer. The bonds between the Fuhrer and the people had been a vital basis of the regime in earlier times. But now, the gulf between ruler and ruled had widened to a chasm.
During 1944 Hitler would distance himself from the German people still further than he had done in the previous two years. He was physically detached — cocooned for the most part in his field headquarters in East Prussia or in his mountain eyrie in Bavaria — and scarcely now visible, even in newsreels, for ordinary Germans.15
On not a single occasion during 1944 did he appear in public to deliver a speech. When, on 24 February, the anniversary of the proclamation of the Party Programme of 1920, he spoke in the Hofbrauhaus in Munich to the closed circle of the Party’s ‘Old Guard’, he expressly refused Goebbels’s exhortations to have the speech broadcast and no mention was made of the speech in the newspapers.16 Twice, on 30 January 1944 and early on 21 July, he addressed the nation on the radio. Otherwise the German people did not hear directly from their Leader throughout 1944. Even his traditional address to the ‘Old Fighters’ of the Party on 8 November was read out by Himmler. For the masses, Hitler had become a largely invisible leader. He was out of sight and for most, probably, increasingly out of mind — except as an obstacle to the ending of the war.
The intensified level of repression during the last years of the war, along with the negative unity forged by fear of the victory of Bolshevism, went a long way towards ensuring that the threat of internal revolt, as had happened in 1918, never materialized. But, for all the continuing (and in some ways astonishing) reserves of strength of the Fuhrer cult among outright Nazi supporters, Hitler had become for the overwhelming majority of Germans the chief hindrance to the ending of the war. Ordinary people might prefer, as they were reported to be saying, ‘an end with horror’ to ‘a horror without end’.17 But they had no obvious way of altering their fate. Only those who moved in the corridors of power had any possibility of removing Hitler. Some groups of officers, through conspiratorial links with certain highly-placed civil servants, were plotting precisely that. After a number of abortive attempts, their strike would come in July 1944. It would prove the last chance the Germans themselves had to put an end to the Nazi regime. The bitter rivalries of the subordinate leaders, the absence of any centralized forum (equivalent to the Fascist Grand Council in Italy) from which an internal coup could be launched, the
