a variety of tasks. In one of his monologues to an intimate, Hitler described the new type of man, which was partly realized in the SS, with predatory, demonic features, “fearless and cruel”—so that he himself was frightened by the image he conjured up. Ideals of this sort can scarcely be called political. A totalitarian regime does not require demonism from its human tools but discipline. What is wanted is not the fearless man but the brutal one, a type whose aggression is trained and can be used for specific purposes. The ideal, then, is essentially a literary one, derived at some remove from Nietzsche’s “blond beast.” But Hitler was always prone to translate literature into reality. The model new man was terrifying in other ways also. Distinguished by rigid obedience and narrow idealism, he was not so much cruel as mechanically unmoved and perfectionistic, ready for anything, and upheld by that sense of superiority which is based on the “instinct to annihilate others,” as Hitler put it in one of his last recorded monologues, that of February 13, 1945.
But only the outlines of this vision emerged. Aryan racial substance and superiority could not be recovered so rapidly from the racially muddied material. “All of us suffer from the sickness of mixed, corrupt blood,” Hitler once admitted. And in fact his ideal betrays how much he suffered from his own impurity and frailty. He reckoned in long spans of time. In a speech of January, 1939, to a group of higher-ranking military men he spoke of a process lasting a hundred years. It would take that long before a majority of the German people possessed those characteristics with which the world could be conquered and ruled. He did not doubt that this project would succeed. “A State,” he had long ago said in the concluding words of
He himself did not have much time left. Both the desperate state of racial decadence and the consciousness of the shortness of a human life drove him forward. In spite of his fundamentally apathetic attitude, his life was marked by feverish unrest. A letter of his written in July, 1928, makes the point that he is now thirty-nine years old, so that “even at best” he has “barely twenty years available” for his “tremendous task.” The thought of premature death incessantly tormented him. “Time is pressing,” he said in February, 1934, and continued: “I do not have long enough to live…. I must lay the foundation on which others can build after me. I will not live long enough to see it completed.” He also feared assassination; some “criminal, an idiot” might eliminate him and thus prevent the accomplishment of his mission.
Out of such anxiety complexes he developed a pedantic carefulness about himself. From the ever-widening security system built up by Himmler, which took in the entire country, to his vegetarian diet, which he adopted at the beginning of the thirties, he tried by elaborate precautions to preserve his life—odd though it might seem to safeguard the “tremendous task” by a police apparatus and gruel. He did not smoke, did not drink, avoided even coffee or black tea, and contented himself with thin infusions of herbs. In later years, with some assistance from his personal physician Dr. Morell, he became addicted to medication; he was incessantly taking some drug or other, or at least sucking on lozenges. He observed himself with hypochondriacal concern, regarding occasional stomach cramps as signs of impending cancer. In the course of the presidential campaign in the spring of 1932 one of his followers called on him in a Hamburg hotel and Hitler told him over a plate of vegetable soup that he had no time to waste, that he could not “lose a single year more. I must come to power shortly in order to be able to solve the gigantic tasks in the time remaining to me. I must! I must!” Many remarks of later years, and a number of speeches, contain similar references; in his private circle comments to the effect that he did not have “much time left,” would “soon leave here,” or would “live only a few years” became standing phrases.
Medical findings throw little light on the matter. In later years Hitler did suffer from gastric pains, and from 1935 on he occasionally complained of circulatory problems. But we now have the files of his medical examinations and these reflect no condition that would have justified his worry. We must be content with positing psychogenic causes, which are peculiar to the biographies of many historical figures with a similar sense of mission. This assumption is supported by his pathological mania for traveling, appearing as a continuous attempt at escape, and by his increasing nervous insomnia, which during the war led him to literally turn day and night upside down in the Fuhrer’s headquarters. His hectic temperament made him incapable of any regular activity or effort. Whatever he began had to be completed at once; and we may well believe the report that he scarcely ever read a book straight through to the end. He could spend days, in what seemed like a narcotic trance, “dozing like a crocodile in the Nile mud,” before he erupted without transition into impetuous activity. In his speech of April, 1937, at the Vogelsang Ordensburg, he spoke of his “damaged” nerves and declared almost imploringly: “I must restore my nerves…. That is self-evident. Worries, worries, worries, insane worries; it truly is a tremendous burden of worries.” And, standing before the model of his capital, he exclaimed with tears in his eyes: “If only my health were good.”66 Many of his actions whose abruptness seemed to spring from cold-blooded calculation were apparently partly the expression of the unrest that came from his premonitions of death. “I will no longer see it completed!” In an address to the propaganda chiefs in October, 1937, he said, according to the notes of one of the participants,
…that as far as man’s knowledge could go, he did not have long to live. People did not grow old in his family. His parents had both died young.
It was therefore necessary to solve the problems that had to be solved (
After grave inner struggles he had freed himself from what remained of his childhood religious notions. “I now feel fresh as a colt in pasture.”
But a psychological consideration also underlay this increasing insistence on Hitler’s part. From the end of 1937 on, he worried more and more that the revolution, braked by his seizure of power, might lose its dynamism and quietly fade away. The domestic moderation, the peace gestures, the everlasting holiday atmosphere, in short, the regime’s whole masquerade, might be taken at its face value. If that happened, “the leap to the great final goals might be missed.” With boundless faith in the power of propaganda, he counted on propaganda to transform the artificially constructed idyllic stage set into the idyl itself. In his important secret speech of November 10, 1938, to the top editors of the domestic press he keenly analyzed this dichotomy:
Circumstances have forced me to talk almost exclusively of peace for decades. Only by constantly stressing Germany’s desire for peace and peaceful intentions was it possible for me to win the German people their freedom bit by bit and to give the nation the arms which were always necessary as the prerequisite to the next step. It is obvious that such peace propaganda, carried on for decades, also has its dubious aspects; for it can easily lead to fixing in the brains of many persons the notion that the present regime is identical with the decision and the desire to preserve peace in all circumstances.
That, however, would lead to a false idea of the aims of this system. Above all it would also lead to the German nation’s… being imbued with a spirit which in the long run would amount to defeatism and would necessarily undo the achievements of the present regime.
The reason I spoke only of peace for so many years was because I had to. It has now become necessary to psychologically change the German people’s course in a gradual way and slowly make it realize that there are things that must, if they cannot be carried through by peaceful means, be carried through by the methods of force and violence….
This work has required months, it was begun systematically; it is being continued and reinforced.67
And in fact from the second half of 1937 on, the suppressed radical energies were once more released and the nation organized more consistently than ever to serve the violent intentions of the regime. Only now did the rise of the SS state begin. Its most visible expression was the increase in the number of concentration camps and the accelerated recruitment and equipping of armed SS formations. The Red Cross was instructed to prepare for possible mobilization. The Hitler Youth were ordered to be ready to step into the armaments plants, taking over for the labor force, who would be sent into the army. The regime launched massive attacks against the judiciary, the churches, and the bureaucracy, cowing those branches of society even more thoroughly. Hitler ranted more violently than ever against the skeptical intellectuals (“these impudent, shameless scribblers” who would be
