opposite this mountain a significant sign. “That is no accident. I recognize a summons in it.” More and more frequently he withdrew to his eyrie, especially when he wanted to escape the “corrosive” Berliners or the “crude” folk of Munich. He preferred the Rhineland temperament, and years later happily recalled how when he visited Cologne the crowd had begun to rock back and forth out of sheer enthusiasm. “The greatest ovation of my life.”46 The conviction that he was the instrument of some higher power prompted him regularly to apostrophize Providence whenever he was describing the nature of his historical mission:
I am well aware of what a man can do and where his limits lie, but I hold to the conviction that men who have been created by God ought also to live in accordance with the will of the Almighty. God did not create the races of this earth in order for them to give themselves up, to bastardize and ruin themselves…. Ultimately the individual man is weak in all his nature and actions when he goes contrary to almighty Providence and its will, but he becomes immeasurably strong the moment he acts in harmony with this Providence! Then there pours down upon him that force which has distinguished all the great men of the world.47
This conviction sustained his ideological notions and lent them the weight of a religious principle. It gave him hardness, resolution, and unmerciful drive. This conviction also kindled the cult surrounding his person, which amounted to pure idolatry. Robert Ley called him the only human being who never erred. Hans Frank declared that he was as solitary as the Lord God. And an SS group leader stated that he was even greater than that god who had had only twelve faithless disciples, whereas Hitler stood at the head of a great people vowed to loyalty to him. As long as Hitler coolly received such tributes and merely exploited the testimonials to his genius for psychological purposes, to increase his power, they were an important supplement to his energy. But when the sense of his historical mission was no longer held in check by Machiavellian calculations, when he himself succumbed to the notion that he was indeed superhuman, the descent began.
His lack of social contact was only the reverse of this mythologizing view of himself. The higher he rose, the more the area of emptiness around him widened. Increasingly, he shrank from the Old Fighters, who continued to press their unbearable claims to close personal contact. He had scarcely any but staged relationships, within the framework of which everyone was either an extra or an instrument. People had never really roused his interest and his concern. He made it a maxim that “one could not do enough to cultivate ties with the common people”; but the very phraseology betrayed the artificiality of this thought. Significantly, even his passion for architecture was limited to the building of gigantic backdrops; he would listen with utter boredom to plans for residential areas.
The fact that no conversation was possible in his presence was only another aspect of the same process of social impoverishment. Either Hitler himself talked, and all others listened, or all the others talked and Hitler sat lost in thought, apathetic, locked away from the world around him, not raising his eyes, “picking at his teeth in a frightful way,” as one participant described it. “Or else he paced restlessly. He did not give one a chance to speak; he interrupted one constantly; he jumped with incredible flights of fancy from one subject to another.”48 His inability to listen went so far that he could not even follow the speeches of foreign statesmen on the radio; having lost the habit of being contradicted, he was either absent-minded or indulged in monologues. Since he scarcely read any longer and tolerated only yes men or admirers in his entourage, he plunged into an intellectual isolation that deepened steadily. Once and for all his mind became fixed on his early convictions, which had hardened into theses he neither expanded nor modified, but merely gave a sharper cutting edge.
He spoke incessantly of these, as if intoxicated by his own voice. The conversations recorded by Hermann Rauschning, from the early thirties, have preserved something of the self-important intonation of a man wonder- struck by his own tirades. There is a similar note, though with considerably diminished concentration, in the table talk recorded in the Fuhrer’s headquarters. “The word,” Hitler declared, could build “bridges into unexplored regions.” When Mussolini was in Germany on a state visit, Hitler regaled him with a one-and-a-half-hour monologue after a meal, without once giving his impatient guest the opportunity for a reply. Almost all visitors and associates had similar experiences, especially during the war, when the torrent of words stretched on into the depths of the night, growing more excessive as the hour advanced. The headquarters generals, desperately struggling with their sleepiness, found themselves exposed to “solemn cosmic blather” about art, philosophy, race, technology, or history, and had to listen with defenseless respect. He always needed listeners, although they, too, were only extras, so to speak, in whose presence he could whip up the excitement that fueled his thoughts. A keen observer commented that he would dismiss his visitors in the manner of “a person who has just given himself a morphine injection.”49 If his interlocutor managed an occasional objection, that served only as a stimulus to further, boundlessly wild associations, without limit, without order, without end.
The inability to relate, which isolated him humanly, benefited him politically, for he recognized only pieces in a game. No one could cross the belt of remoteness, and those who approached most closely to him were merely at a somewhat reduced distance. Characteristically, his strongest emotions were reserved for a few dead persons. In his private room at Obersalzberg there hung a portrait of his mother, and one of Julius Schreck, his chauffeur, who died in 1936. None of his father. Geli Raubal dead was apparently closer to him than the living girl had ever been. “In a sense Hitler is simply not human—unreachable and untouchable,” Magda Goebbels had already said in the early thirties. While still at the peak of his power, the cynosure of millions, he yet had something about him that belonged to the forgotten young man of the Vienna or early Munich years; he was a stranger even to his closest relatives. Albert Speer, whom for a time he regarded with some sentimentality as the embodiment of his youthful dream of brilliance and distinction, told the Nuremberg tribunal: “If Hitler had had any friends, I would have been his friend.” But he, too, did not cross the gulf. In spite of many days and nights of joint planning, when both men would lose themselves in their colossal projects, Speer was never more than Hitler’s preferred architect. It is true that Hitler, in an unusual tribute, spoke of his “genius,” but the dictator did not trust him in matters that went beyond technical problems.
What was lacking from this one relationship with traces of an erotic element was also lacking in the other: in contrast to Geli Raubal, Eva Braun was merely Hitler’s mistress, with all the anxieties, secrecies, and humiliations involved in such a position. She related that at a dinner in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich Hitler sat beside her for three hours, not allowing her to address him; shortly before everyone rose from the table he thrust into her hand “an envelope with money.” He had met her at the end of the twenties in Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographic studio, and possibly this acquaintanceship was one of the factors that drove Geli Raubal to suicide. Some time after his niece’s death Hitler made Eva his mistress. She was a simple, moderately attractive girl with unpretentious dreams and thoughts that were dominated by love, fashion, movies, and gossip, by the constant fear of being thrown over, and by Hitler’s egocentric whims and his manner of a petty domestic tyrant. With his craving for regimentation he had forbidden her sun-bathing, dancing, and smoking. (“If I were ever to see Eva smoking, I’d break off at once.”) He was quite jealous, and yet he neglected her in an offensive way. In order “not to be so alone” she had several times asked him for a dog (“that would be lovely”), but Hitler had simply passed over the request without comment. For a long time he kept her in almost insultingly mean circumstances. Her diary has been found, and the notes illuminate her unhappy situation. A characteristic passage runs:
There’s only one thing I wish, to get very sick and know no more about him for at least a week. Why is nothing happening to me, why must I go through all this? If only I’d never seen him. I’m in despair. Now I’ll buy sleeping powder again, then I’ll be in a half trance and stop thinking so much about it.
Why doesn’t the devil come and take me. It’s certainly better with him than it is here.
For three hours I waited in front of the Carlton and had to watch him buying flowers for Ondra [Annie Ondra, a film actress] and inviting her to dinner. He needs me only for certain purposes, it isn’t possible otherwise.
When he says he’s fond of me he means it only at that moment. Just like his promises which he never keeps. Why does he torment me so and not put an end to it right away?
In the middle of 1935 Hitler said “not a kind word” to her for three months, and in addition she learned that recently a “Valkyrie” had been his constant female companion (“he’s fond of such dimensions”). She obtained an overdose of sleeping pills and wrote a letter demanding some word from Hitler, even if it came through some
