Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Hitler who talks!’ he recalled her saying. ‘He can be Fuhrer as much as he likes, but he always repeats himself and bores his guests.’⁸⁹

If less so than in Berlin, strict formalities were still observed. The atmosphere was stuffy, especially in Hitler’s presence. Only Eva Braun’s sister, Gretl, lightened it somewhat, even smoking (which was much frowned upon), flirting with the orderlies, and determined to have fun whatever dampening effect the Fuhrer might have on things. What little humour otherwise surfaced was often in dubious taste in the male-dominated household, where the women in attendance, including Eva Braun, served mainly as decoration. But in general, the tone was one of extreme politeness, with much kissing of hands, and expressions of ‘Gnadige Frau’.⁹⁰ Despite Nazi mockery of the bourgeoisie, life at the Berghof was imbued with the intensely bourgeois manners and fashions of the arriviste Dictator.

Hitler’s lengthy absence from Berlin, while European peace hung by a thread, illustrates how far the disintegration of anything resembling a conventional central government had gone. Few ministers were permitted to see Hitler. Even the usual privileged few had dwindled in number. Goebbels — the most hated man in Germany according to Rosenberg (who, as the Party’s self-professed ideological ‘expert’ was himself detested so much for his radical attacks on the Christian Churches, and ought to have been a good judge) — was still out of favour following his affair with Lida Baarova.⁹¹ Goring had not recovered the ground he had lost since Munich.⁹² Speer enjoyed the special status of the protege. He spent much of the summer at Berchtesgaden.⁹³ But most of the time he was indulging Hitler’s passion for architecture, not discussing details of foreign policy. Hitler’s ‘advisers’ on the only issue of real consequence, the question of war and peace, were now largely confined to Ribbentrop, even more hawkish, if anything, than he had been the previous summer, and the military leaders. On the crucial matters of foreign policy, Ribbentrop — when not represented through the head of his personal staff, Walther Hewel, far more liked by the Dictator and everyone else than the preening Foreign Minister himself — largely had the field to himself. The second man at the Foreign Ministry, Weizsacker, left to mind the shop while his boss absented himself from Berlin, claimed not to have seen Hitler, even from a distance, between May and the middle of August. What the Dictator was up to on the Obersalzberg was difficult to fathom in Berlin, Weizsacker added.⁹⁴

The personalization of government in the hands of one man — amounting in this case to concentration of power to determine over war or peace — was as good as complete.

IV

Danzig, allegedly the issue dragging Europe towards war, was in reality no more than a pawn in the German game being played from Berchtesgaden. Gauleiter Albert Forster — a thirty-seven-year-old former Franconian bank clerk who had learnt some of his early political lessons under Julius Streicher and had been leader of the NSDAP in Danzig since 1930 — had received detailed instructions from Hitler on a number of occasions throughout the summer on how to keep tension simmering without allowing it to boil over. As had been the case in the Sudetenland the previous year, it was important not to force the issue too soon.⁹⁵ Local issues had to chime exactly with the timing determined by Hitler. Incidents were to be manufactured to display to the population in the Reich, and to the world outside, the alleged injustices perpetrated by the Poles against the Germans in Danzig. Instances of mistreatment — most of them contrived, some genuine — of the German minority in other parts of Poland, too, provided regular fodder for an orchestrated propaganda campaign which, again analogous to that against the Czechs in 1938, had been screaming its banner headlines about the iniquities of the Poles since May.

The propaganda certainly had its effect. The fear of war with the western powers, while still widespread among the German population, was — at least until August — nowhere near as acute as it had been during the Sudeten crisis. People reasoned, with some justification (and backed up by the German press), that despite the guarantees for Poland, the West was hardly likely to fight for Danzig when it had given in over the Sudetenland.⁹⁶ Many thought that Hitler had always pulled it off without bloodshed before, and would do so again.⁹⁷ Some had a naive belief in Hitler. One seventeen-year-old girl recalled much later how she and her friends had felt: ‘Rumours of an impending war were spreading steadily but we did not worry unduly. We were convinced that Hitler was a man of peace and would do everything he could to settle things peacefully.’⁹⁸ Fears of war were nevertheless pervasive. The more general feeling was probably better summed up in the report from a small town in Upper Franconia at the end of July 1939: ‘The answer to the question of how the problem “Danzig and the Corridor” is to be solved is still the same among the general public: incorporation in the Reich? Yes. Through war? No.’⁹⁹

But the anxiety about a general war over Danzig did not mean that there was reluctance to see military action against Poland undertaken — as long as the West could be kept out of it. Inciting hatred of the Poles through propaganda was pushing at an open door. ‘The mood of the people can be much more quickly whipped up against the Poles than against any other neighbouring people,’ commented the exiled Social Democratic organization, the Sopade. Many thought ‘it would serve the Poles right if they get it in the neck’.¹⁰⁰ Other reports from the Sopade’s observers, whose anti-Nazi attitude needs no underlining, emphasize the impact the propaganda was having even among those hostile to the regime. Existing anti-Polish feelings were being massively sharpened. ‘An action against Poland would be greeted by the overwhelming mass of the German people,’ ran one report. ‘The Poles are enormously hated among the masses for what they did at the end of the War.’¹⁰¹ ‘If Hitler strikes out against the Poles, he will have a majority of the population behind him,’ commented another.¹⁰² In Danzig, too, where, not surprisingly, fear of a war was especially pronounced, the daily reports about ‘Polish terror’ were manufacturing antagonism among those who had never been ‘Pole haters’. Above all, no one, it was claimed, whatever their political standpoint, wanted a Polish Danzig; the conviction that Danzig was German was universal.¹⁰³

The issue which the Danzig Nazis exploited to heighten the tension was the supervision of the Customs Office by Polish customs inspectors. These had indeed sometimes abused their position in the interests of increased Polish control over shipping. But there had been nothing serious, and matters could quite easily have been amicably resolved, or at least a modus vivendi reached, if that had been the intention. As it was, the customs officers were increasingly subjected to violent attacks.¹⁰⁴ This had the desired effect of keeping the tension in the Free City at fever pitch. When the customs inspectors were informed on 4 August — in what turned out to be an initiative of an over-zealous German official — that they would not be allowed to carry out their duties and responded with a threat to close the port to foodstuffs, the local crisis threatened to boil over, and too soon. The Germans reluctantly backed down — as the international press noted.¹⁰⁵ Forster was summoned to Berchtesgaden on 7 August and returned to announce that the Fuhrer had reached the limits of his patience with the Poles, who were probably acting under pressure from London and Pans.¹⁰⁶

This allegation was transmitted by Forster to Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig. Overlooking no possibility of trying to keep the West out of his war with Poland, Hitler was ready to use the representative of the detested League of Nations as his intermediary.¹⁰⁷ On 10 August, during a dinner in honour of the departing Deputy Representative of Poland in Danzig, Tadeusz Perkowski, Burckhardt was summoned to the telephone to be told by Gauleiter Forster that Hitler wanted to see him on the Obersalzberg at 4p.m. next day and was sending his personal plane ready for departure early the following morning.¹⁰⁸ Following a flight in which he was regaled by a euphoric Albert Forster with tales of beerhall fights with Communists during the ‘time of struggle’, Burckhardt landed in Salzburg and, after a quick snack, was driven up the spiralling road beyond the Berghof itself and up to the Eagle’s Nest (Adlerhorst), the recently built spectacular Tea House in the dizzy heights of the mountain peaks.¹⁰⁹

Hitler was not fond of the Eagle’s Nest and seldom went up there. He complained that the air was too thin at that height, and bad for his blood pressure.¹¹⁰ He worried about an accident on the roads Bormann had had constructed up the sheer mountainside, and about a failure of the lift that had to carry its passengers from the huge, marble-faced hall cut inside the rock to the summit of the mountain, more than 150 feet above.¹¹¹ But this was an important visit. Hitler wanted to impress Burckhardt with the dramatic view over the mountain tops, invoking the image of distant majesty, of the dictator of Germany as lord of all he