Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

one success after another in foreign policy had undermined the scepticism of many waverers. The result was that, although there was much fear of war, belief in the Fuhrer was extensive.⁶ ‘A great man, a genius, a person sent to us from heaven,’ was one seventeen-year-old girl’s naive impression.⁷ She spoke for many.

Whatever the criticisms ordinary people had about everyday life in the Third Reich, its irritations and vexations, the cult constructed around the Fuhrer represented an enormous force for integration. The daily reality of Nazi rule spawned much antagonism. Grandiose Party buildings, erected at vast cost, greatly affronted a hard- pressed and poorly housed working population in the big cities. Massive criticism continued to be heaped on the self-evident corruption, scandalous high-living, and arrogance of Party functionaries. And, though the ‘Church struggle’ had died down somewhat, compared with intensity of the years 1936 and 1937, the attritional conflict between Party anti-Church fanatics and the churchgoing population remained a source of repeated friction.⁸ But Hitler’s ‘successes’ offered a counter — a set of ‘achievements’, put forward as those of a national, not party, leader, in which almost any German could take pride. ‘I have overcome the chaos in Germany,’ claimed Hitler in his speech to the Reichstag on 28 April, ‘restored order, massively raised production in all areas of our national economy.’ His litany of what were advanced as his own, personal accomplishments, continued: ‘I have succeeded in completely bringing back into useful production the seven [!] million unemployed who were so dear to all our own hearts, in keeping the German peasant on his soil despite all difficulties and in rescuing it for him, in attaining the renewed flourishing of German trade, and in tremendously promoting transportation. I have not only politically united the German people, but also militarily rearmed them, and I have further attempted to tear up page for page that Treaty, which contained in its 448 articles the most base violations ever accorded to nations and human beings. I have given back to the Reich the provinces stolen from us in 1919. I have led back into the homeland the millions of deeply unhappy Germans who had been torn away from us. I have recreated the thousand-year historic unity of the German living-space, and I have attempted to do all this without spilling blood and without inflicting on my people or on others the suffering of war. I have managed this from my own strength, as one who twenty-one years ago was an unknown worker and soldier of my people.’⁹

People worried how long it could all last. But the contrast with the dark days of economic depression and national humiliation was scarcely credible. What had been achieved seemed staggering. Most people did not want to see it put at risk through external conflict. For those who did not dwell too long on the causes and consequences, one man alone appeared to have masterminded it all. For that man, what had been achieved so far was no more than a preparation for what was to come.

As what was to prove the last peacetime spring and summer wore on, Hitler’s subordinates were in no doubt about the difficulties at home, and their impact on large sections of the population. The SD had spoken of a ‘mood close to complete despair’ among the peasantry at the end of 1938 owing to the ‘flight from the land’ and ensuing massive labour shortage. The feeling of being crushed, the SD claimed, was partly reflected in resignation, partly in outright revolt against the farmers’ leaders.¹⁰ In the first months of 1939, the peasants’ mood was said to have deteriorated still further.¹¹ In Bavaria, it had reportedly reached ‘boilingpoint’ (‘Siedehitze’).¹² The SD concluded that the ‘production battle’ had passed its peak, and was now facing decline, with the extensification of agriculture, and threat to the ‘volkisch substance’.¹³ In fact, the whole economic expansion, the SD suggested, had now reached its limits. Further pressure on the work-force would result only in declining performance and production.¹⁴

‘Growing unrest and discontent’ as a consequence of living, working, and housing conditions was reported among the working class of one of the most industrialized regions, the Ruhr District, in early 1939.¹⁵ By summer, reports from the same area were pointing to the sharp rise in the cases of sickness among industrial workers in armaments factories and coal-mines — whether, as some claimed, from ‘lack of discipline’, or, more likely, from genuine overwork, or from a combination of both can only be surmised.¹⁶ By then, the labour situation was described as ‘catastrophic’.¹⁷ Yet sullen apathy, not rebelliousness, characterized a work-force worn down by intensified production demands.¹⁸ Even so, if the industrial working class was politically neutralized, its productive capacity had by all accounts reached its peak. This in itself posed an evident threat to any long-term preparations for war.

Hitler showed no interest in the details of economic difficulties pouring in from every part of the Reich. He was sensitive, as he had been in the mid 1930s, to the impact on morale, refusing in 1938 to entertain any rise in food prices.¹⁹ But he had become increasingly preoccupied with foreign policy. Domestic issues were largely pushed to one side. Decisions were left untaken; much business was postponed or neglected; access to him was difficult. Even Lammers, in the absence of cabinet meetings now the sole link with the various government ministers, had been forced to plead with the Fuhrer’s chief adjutant, Wilhelm Bruckner, on 21 October 1938 for a brief audience with Hitler to discuss urgent business since, because of the demands of foreign policy, he had managed only one short meeting with him since 4 September.²⁰ The reports of the ‘Trustees of Labour’ (Treuhander der Arbeit) had normally been passed to Lammers and often brought directly to Hitler’s attention in 1937. But in 1938–9, as the labour crisis became acute, Hitler was verbally informed of the content, emphasizing the seriousness of the mounting labour problems, on only one occasion (at the meeting with Lammers in early September 1938) and most of the reports, regarded as highly repetitive, were by now not even reaching Lammers.²¹

With regard to agriculture, Hitler’s disinterest was even more marked. He simply refused to accede to Darre’s repeated requests for an audience and did not respond to the Agriculture Minister’s bombardment of the Reich Chancellery with memoranda about the critical situation. Only in October 1940 was Hitler finally persuaded to comment on the intense bitterness in the farming community about the labour shortage. He replied that their complaints would be attended to after the war.²²

This reflected a key feature of Hitler’s thinking: war as panacea. Whatever the difficulties, they would be — and could only be — resolved by war. He was certainly alert to the dangers of a collapse in his popularity, and the likely domestic crisis which would then occur.²³ The fears of a repeat of 1918 were never far away.²⁴ He even seemed to sense that his own massive popularity had shaky foundations. ‘Since I’ve been politically active, and especially since I’ve been leading the Reich,’ he told his audience of newspaper editors in November 1938, ‘I have had only successes… What would then happen if we were some time to experience failure? That, too, could happen, gentlemen.’²⁵ But he was speaking here of the ‘intellectual strata’, for whom he felt in any case nothing but contempt. If he took cognizance at all of the reports of poor mood among industrial workers and farmers, they must merely have confirmed his view that he had been correct all along: only war and expansion could provide the answer to Germany’s problems.

It is, in fact, doubtful whether he would have believed the accounts of poor morale, even if he had read them. Even three years or so earlier, when his adjutant at the time, Fritz Wiedemann, had tried to summarize the content of negative opinion reports, Hitler had refused to listen, shouting: ‘The mood in the people is not bad, but good. I know that better. It’s made bad through such reports. I forbid such things in future.’²⁶ On the day Poland was invaded he would say to members of the Reichstag: ‘Don’t anyone tell me that in his Gau or his district, or his constituency (Gruppe), or his cell the mood could at some point be bad. You are responsible for the mood.’²⁷ In April 1939, he took the adulation of the crowds at his fiftieth birthday celebrations, which, he claimed, had given him new strength, as the true indication of the mood of the people.²⁸ Following one extraordinary triumph upon another, his self- belief had by this time been magnified into full-blown megalomania. Even among his private guests at the Berghof, he frequently compared himself with Napoleon, Bismarck, and other great historical figures.²⁹ The rebuilding programmes that constantly preoccupied him were envisaged as his own lasting monument — a testament of greatness like the buildings of the Pharaohs or Caesars.³⁰ He felt he was walking with destiny. Such a mentality allowed little space for the daily worries and concerns of ordinary people. It was much the same when Schacht or Goring brought the deteriorating economic situation to his attention. Such problems were, in his view, a mere passing phenomemon, a temporary irritant of no significance compared with the grandeur of his vision and the magnitude of the struggle ahead. Conventional economics — however limited his understanding — would, he was certain, never solve the problems. The sword alone, as he had repeatedly advocated since the 1920s, would produce the solution: the conquest of the ‘living space’ needed for survival. The lands of the East would one day provide for Germany. There would be no economic problems then. The opportunities awaited. But they had to be grasped quickly. His enemies — he had said so after Munich — were puny. But they were gathering