From the beginning of the Russian campaign on, Hitler led a retired life. His headquarters, which also housed the High Command of the armed forces, was once again located in the extensive woods beyond Rastenburg in East Prussia. A system of walls, barbed wire, and mines protected the grouping of bunkers and buildings. The prevailing atmosphere was peculiarly gloomy and monotonous. Visitors have described the place as a blending of monastery and concentration camp. The small, unadorned rooms with their plain deal furniture formed a striking contrast to the pomp of past years, the spacious halls, the grand perspectives and all the theatrical lavishness of Berlin, Munich, and Berchtesgaden. Sometimes it seemed as if Hitler had retreated back to the cave. Italian Foreign Minister Ciano compared the inhabitants of the headquarters with troglodytes, and found the atmosphere depressing: “One does not see a single colorful spot, not a single lively touch. The anterooms are full of people smoking, eating and chatting. Smell of kitchens, uniforms, heavy boots.”53
During the early months of the war Hitler had taken occasional trips to the front, and visited battlefields, headquarters, or military hospitals. But after the first failures he began to shun reality and withdraw into the abstract world of map tables and military conferences. From that time on, his experience of the war was almost exclusively as lines and figures on paper landscapes. He faced the public less and less often; he shrank from the onetime grand appearances. With the defeats he lost the energy he needed for striking poses. Once he had dropped his monumental attitudes, the changes in him showed all too plainly: he moved through the scenery of headquarters wearily, with hunched shoulders, one foot dragging, eyes staring dully out of a pasty face. His left hand had a slight tremble. Here was a man obviously on the physical downgrade, a bitter man, who admitted that he was plagued by melancholia. And he plunged ever deeper into the complexes and hatreds of his early years. To be sure, Hitler’s personality had always been marked by rigid, static features. But with this phase it is clear we are witnessing a galloping process of regression. At the same time it seems as if this regression were once more revealing his true, unvarnished nature.
The isolation into which Hitler had retreated after the quarrel with the generals increased after Stalingrad. He often sat brooding, sunk in deep depression. Or else, with inward turned gaze, he would take a few aimless steps at the side of his Alsatian through the headquarters terrain. A tense awkwardness hung over all relationships: “Faces froze into masks,” one of the participants wrote. “Often we stood about in silence.” Goebbels noted in his diary:
It is tragic that the Fuhrer has so cut himself off from life and is leading an excessively unhealthy life. He no longer gets out in the fresh air, no longer has any relaxation; he sits in his bunker, acts, and broods…. The solitude in the Fuhrer’s headquarters and the whole method of work there naturally have a depressing effect on the Fuhrer.54
In fact Hitler began more and more palpably to suffer from his selfchosen isolation. In contrast to his youth, he complained, he could “no longer stand being alone.” His life style, already marked by a spartan note during the first years of the war, became plainer and plainer. The meals at the Fuhrer’s table were notorious for their simplicity. Only once more did he attend a performance of
The tensions he underwent were discharged, more powerfully than ever before, in an unquenchable urge to launch into tirades. He found a new audience in his secretaries, for whom he tried in vain to provide a “congenial atmosphere” by offerings of cake and a fireplace fire. Sometimes he had his adjutants, his doctors, Bormann, or some chance guest join them. As his insomnia grew worse, he steadily extended his monologues. By 1944 the members of the circle would be desperately forcing their eyes to stay open until the graying dawn. Only then, as Guderian reports, would Hitler “lie down for a brief slumber, from which the pushing brooms of the scrubwomen at his bedroom door would awaken him by nine o’clock at the latest.”
He continued to stick to the themes which had been part of the repertory of earlier years, and which are recorded in the table talk: his youth in Vienna, the First World War and the years of struggle, history, prehistory, nutrition, women, art, the fight for survival. He grew exercised over the “hopping around” of the dancer Gret Palucca, over the “stunted smears” of modern art, over Conductor Knappertsbusch’s fortissimi, which forced opera singers to shriek so that they “looked like tadpoles.” He spoke of his disgust with the “idiotic bourgeoisie,” with the “herd of swine” in the Vatican or with the “insipid Christian heaven.” Along with ruminations about the imperial racial state, Hannibal’s elephants, Ice Age catastrophes, Caesar’s wife, or “the gang of jurists” came recommendations for a vegetarian diet, a prospectus for a popular Sunday newspaper that would carry “lots of pictures,” and serialized fiction “so that the gals can get something ou of it.”55 Stunned by the unending torrent of words, the Italian Foreign Minister commented that Hitler was probably very happy to be Hitler because it permitted him to talk eternally.
More striking than the endless flow of his monologues was, at least in the recorded material, the crudity of expression, in which he unmistakably relapsed back to his origins. The ideas themselves, the anxieties, wishes and aims, were unchanged from his early days. What is more, he now laid aside all the disguises and statesmanlike poses, and fell back on the vehement and vulgar phrases of the beer-hall demagogue, not to say the denizen of the flophouse. With a good deal of zest he discussed cannibalism among the partisans or in besieged Leningrad. He called Roosevelt a “cracked fool,” Churchill’s speeches “a souse’s bullshit,” and irritably denounced von Manstein as a “pisspot strategist.” He praised the Soviet system for forgoing all the “humanitarian blather,” and imagined how he would meet a mutiny in Germany by “shooting a batch of a few hundred thousand people.” One of his favorite, “constantly repeated” maxims was the sentence: “A dead man can no longer put up a fight.”56
Among those symptoms of decline must be included the intellectual narrowing that threw him back to the viewpoint of a local party leader. From the third winter on, he could see the war in no other light than that of a “seizure of power” expanded to global dimensions. In the “period of struggle,” too, he comforted himself, he had faced overwhelmingly superior forces—“a single man with a small band of followers.” The war was nothing but a “gigantic repetition” of earlier experiences. The record of one of the table talks reads: “At lunch… the chief pointed out that this war was a faithful copy of the conditions of the period of struggle. What took place among us then as a struggle of parties in the domestic realm is taking place today as the struggle of nations in the foreign realm.”57
In keeping with the precipitate aging of his appearance, he occasionally complained that the years were robbing him of all his gambler’s pleasure in taking risks. Intellectually, too, he more and more lived in the past. The garrulous reviews of matters long past, with which he filled his nocturnal monologues, had the sound of an old man’s nostalgias. In his military decisions he frequently referred to the experiences of the First World War, while his interest in armaments became more and more restricted to the traditional weapons systems. He neither grasped the crucial importance of radar and the splitting of the atom nor the value of a heat-seeking ground-to-air rocket or a sound-guided torpedo. He also blocked the large-scale production of the first jet plane, the Messerschmitt 262. With senile obstinacy he insisted on far-fetched objections, reversed or changed decisions, confounded his entourage with hastily reeled-off statistics, or took refuge in broad psychological generalizations. When on the basis of a newspaper report of British experiments with jet planes he was at last persuaded early in 1944 to permit the manufacture of the Me 262, he tried to hedge by ordering that the plane not be built as a fighter against the Allied air raiders. Instead, contrary to the advice of the experts, it was to be employed as a fast bomber. The physical strain on the pilots would be intolerable, he decided, and also argued that the faster planes were really slower in air combat. In fact, he snatched at anything for an argument; and while Germany’s cities were reduced to rubble, he refused even to permit a few experimental uses of the plane as a fighter. Finally he banned any further discussion of the subject.
Naturally these struggles with his own people increased his usual abnormal suspiciousness. Often he
