Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

had little or no contact with him.³¹⁹ He was naturally also in constant touch with the Wehrmacht leadership. But while Goebbels, for instance, only learnt at second hand about military plans, leaders of the armed forces often had less than full information, or were belatedly told, about diplomatic developments. The cabinet, of course, never met. Schacht, still nominally a member of that non-functioning body as Reich Minister without Portfolio, had notions of insisting on it being summoned, since constitutionally any declaration of war had to be preceded by cabinet consultation.³²⁰ It was an empty hope, rapidly discarded. Whichever way one viewed it, and remarkable for a complex modern state, there was no government beyond Hitler and whichever individuals he chose to confer with at a particular time. Hitler was the only link of the component parts of the regime. Only in his presence could the key steps be taken. But those admitted to his presence, apart from his usual entourage of secretaries, adjutants, and the like, were for the most part officers needing operational guidelines or those like Ribbentrop or Goebbels who thought like he did and were dependent on him. Internal government of the Reich had become Fuhrer autocracy.

For those in proximity to Hitler, the personalized decision-making meant anything but consistency, clarity, and rationality. On the contrary: it brought bewildering improvisation, rapid changes of course, uncertainty. Hitler was living off his nerves. That conveyed itself to others around him. ‘He was no man of logic or reason (Raison),’ reflected Ernst von Weizsacker almost a decade later. This showed, he went on, in the ‘bizarre zigzag’ of his intentions and actions in those last days of peace: ‘On 22 August Hitler indicated in an address to his generals that he was firmly determined to start war in a few days whether or not it remained localized; the day after he reckoned with it being localized, but he could also conduct a European war.’ With the Moscow Pact, according to Weizsacker, Hitler ‘crossed the Rubicon’. ‘By the 25th at midday he took the West on board; on the 25th in the evening he withdrew the order for attack that had already been given for fear that England would march, but Italy would not. On 31 August neither matters to him any more; he orders the attack on Poland although he knows that nothing has altered, namely that Italy remains out of it and England has firmly promised assistance to the Poles. On 3 September, finally, Hitler is surprised by the British-French declaration of war and at first clueless.’³²¹ Hitler, Weizsacker went on to remark, with some insight, was the prisoner of his own actions. The wagon had begun in the spring to roll towards the abyss. In the last days of August, Hitler ‘could hardly have turned the carriage around without being thrown off himself’.³²²

External pressures of the course he had embarked upon met Hitler’s personal psychology at this point. At the age of fifty, men frequently ruminate on the ambitions they had, and how the time to fulfil them is running out. For Hitler, a man with an extraordinary ego and ambitions to go down in history as the greatest German of all time, and a hypochondriac already prepossessed with his own approaching death, the sense of ageing, of youthful vigour disappearing, of no time to lose was hugely magnified. He had more than hinted as much on 23 August, as we noted, to the British Ambassador, Nevile Henderson.³²³ To his own entourage, at the evening meal a few days later, he had said: ‘I’m now fifty years old, still in full possession of my strength. The problems must be solved by me, and I can wait no longer. In a few years I will be physically and perhaps mentally, too, no longer up to it.’³²⁴ The grandiose parades on 20 April had been held to demonstrate Germany’s military strength to the world. To Hitler the celebrations of his fiftieth birthday had merely reminded him how old he was getting.³²⁵

Between the Ho?bach meeting in November 1937 and the outbreak of war at the start of September 1939, Hitler had constantly felt time closing in on him, under pressure to act lest the conditions became more disadvantageous. He had thought of war against the West around 1943–5, against the Soviet Union — though no time-scale was ever given — at some point after that. He had never thought of avoiding war. On the contrary: reliving the lost first great war made him predicate everything on victory in the second great war to come. Germany’s future, he had never doubted and had said so on innumerable occasions, could only be determined through war. In the dualistic way in which he always thought, victory would ensure survival, defeat would mean total eradication — the end of the German people. War — the essence of the Nazi system which had developed under his leadership — was for Hitler inevitable. Only the timing and the direction were at issue. And there was no time to wait. Starting from his own strange premisses, given Germany’s strained resources and the rapid strides forward in rearmament by Britain and France, there was a certain contorted logic in what he said.³²⁶ Time was running out on the options for Hitler’s war.

This strong driving-force in Hitler’s mentality was compounded by other strands of his extraordinary psychological make-up. The years of spectacular successes — all attributed by Hitler to the ‘triumph of the will’ — and the undiluted adulation and sycophancy that surrounded him at every turn, the Fuhrer cult on which the ‘system’ was built, had by now completely erased in him what little sense of his own limitations had been present. This led him to a calamitous over-estimation of his own abilities, coupled with an extreme denigration of those — particularly in the military — who argued more rationally for greater caution. It went hand in hand with an equally disastrous refusal to contemplate compromise, let alone retreat, as other than a sign of weakness. The experience of the war and its traumatic outcome had doubtless cemented this characteristic. It was certainly there in his early political career, for instance at the time of the attempted putsch in Munich in 1923. But it must have had deeper roots. Pyschologists might have answers. At any rate the behaviour trait, increasingly dangerous as Hitler’s power expanded to threaten the peace of Europe, was redolent of the spoilt child turned into the would-be macho-man. His inability to comprehend the unwillingness of the British government to yield to his threats produced tantrums of frustrated rage.³²⁷ The certainty that he would get his way through bullying turned into blind fury whenever his bluff was called. The purchase he placed on his own image and standing was narcissistic in the extreme. The number of times he recalled the Czech mobilization of May 1938, then the Polish mobilization of March 1939, as a slight on his prestige was telling. A heightened thirst for revenge was the lasting consequence. Then the rescinding of the order to attack Poland on 26 August, much criticized as a sign of incompetence by the military, he took as a defeat in the eyes of his generals, feeling his prestige threatened.³²⁸ The result was increased impatience to remedy this by a new order at the earliest possible moment, from which there would be no retreat, without any alteration to the diplomatic situation. On a broader scale, the same applies to Hitler’s reaction to the Munich Settlement the previous year. All his actions during the Polish crisis can be seen as a response to the defeat he felt he had suffered personally in agreeing to pull back at the end of September 1938. His comment to his generals that he wanted at all costs to prevent ‘some swine’ from interceding this time; his determination to prevent Mussolini mediating; and his increase of the stakes to avoid negotiation at the last were all reflections of his ‘Munich syndrome’.

Not just external circumstances, but also his personal psyche, pushed him forwards, compelled the risk. Hitler’s reply on 29 August, when Goring suggested it was not necessary to ‘go for broke’, was, therefore, absolutely in character: ‘In my life I’ve always gone for broke.’³²⁹ There was, for him, no other choice.

The gambler has to think he will win. Hitler’s dismay on 3 September at hearing of the British ultimatum quickly gave way to the necessary optimism. Goebbels was with him that evening. Hitler went over the military situation. The Fuhrer ‘believes in a potato-war (Kartoffelkrieg) in the West,’ he wrote. Hearing that Churchill, long seen in Berlin as the leading western warmonger, had been called into the British cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, Goebbels was not so sure.³³⁰

6. LICENSING BARBARISM

‘…Extensive shootings were planned in Poland and… especially the nobility and clergy were to be exterminated.’

Admiral Canaris, seeking clarification from General Keitel, 12 September 1939, about information that had come to his attention

‘…This matter has already been decided by the Fuhrer.’

General Keitel’s reply