DICTATOR

IN the spring of 1938, on the eve of his greatest triumphs, Adolf Hitler entered his fiftieth year. His physical appearance was unimpressive, his bearing still awkward. The failing lock of hair and the smudge of his mustache added nothing to a coarse and curiously undistinguished face, in which the eyes alone attracted attention. In appearance at least Hitler could claim to be a man of the people, a plebeian through and through, with none of the physical characteristics of the racial superiority he was always invoking. The quality which his face possessed was that of mobility, an ability to express the most rapidly changing moods, at one moment smiling and charming, at another cold and imperious, cynical and sarcastic, or swollen and livid with rage.

Speech was the essential medium of his power, not only over his audiences but over his own temperament. Hitler talked incessantly, often using words less to communicate his thoughts than to release the hidden spring of his own and others' emotions, whipping himself and his audience into anger or exaltation by the sound of his voice. Talk had another function, too. 'Words,' he once said, 'build bridges into unexplored regions." As he talked, conviction would grow until certainty came and the problem was solved.

Hitler always showed a distrust of argument and criticism. Unable to argue coolly himself, since his early days in Vienna his one resort had been to shout his opponent down. The questioning of his assumptions or of his facts rattled him and threw him out of his stride, less because of any intellectual inferiority than because words, and even facts, were to him not a means of rational communication and logical analysis, but devices for manipulating emotion. The introduction of intellectual of criticism and analysis marked the intrusion of hostile elements which disturbed the exercise of this power. Hence Hitler's hatred of the intellectual: in the masses 'instinct is supreme and from instinct comes faith. ... While the healthy common folk instinctively close their ranks to form a community of the people, the intellectuals run this way and that, like hens in a poultry-yard. With them it is impossible to make history; they cannot be used as elements supporting a community."


For the same reason Hitler rated the spoken above the written word: 'False ideas and ignorance may be set aside by means of instruction, but emotional resistance never can. Nothing but an appeal to hidden forces will be effective here. And that appeal can scarcely be made by any writer. Only the orator can hope to make it.'

As an orator Hitler had obvious faults. The timbre of his voice was harsh, very different from the beautiful quality of Goebbels's. He spoke at too great length; was often repetitive and verbose; lacked lucidity and frequently lost himself in cloudy phrases. These shortcomings, however, mattered little beside the extraordinary impression of force, the immediacy of passion, the intensity of hatred, fury, and manace conveyed by the sound of the voice alone without regard to what he said.


One of the secrets of his mastery over a great audience was his instinctive sensitivity to the mood of a crowd, a flair for divining the hidden passions, resentments and longings in their minds. In
Mein Kampf he says of the orator: 'He will always follow the lead of the great mass in such a way that from the living emotion of his hearers the apt word which he needs will be suggested to him and in its turn this will go straight to the hearts of his hearers.


One of his most bitter critics, Otto Strasser, wrote:


Hitler responds to the vibration of the human heart with the delicacy of a seismograph, or perhaps of a wireless receiving set, enabling him, with a certainty with which no conscious gift could endow him, to act as a loudspeaker proclaiming the most secret desires, the least admissible instincts, the sufferings, and personal revolts of a whole nation.....I have been asked many times what is the secret of Hitler's extraordinary power as a speaker. I can only attribute it to his uncanny intuition, which infallibly diagnoses the ills from which his audience is suffering. If he tries to bolster up his argument with theories or quotations from books he has only imperfectly understood, he scarcely rises above a very poor mediocrity. But let him throw away his crutches and step out boldly, speaking as the spirit moves him, and he is promptly transformed into one of the greatest speakers of the century. . . . Adolf Hitler enters a hall. He sniffs the air. For a minute he gropes, feels his way, senses the atmosphere. Suddenly he bursts forth. His words go like an arrow to their target, he touches each private wound on the raw, liberating the mass unconscious, expressing its innermost aspirations, telling it what it most wants to hear."


Hitler's power to bewitch an audience has been likened to the occult arts of the African medicine-man or the Asiatic Shaman; others have compared it to the sensitivity of a medium, and the magnetism of a hypnotist.


The conversations recorded by Hermann Rauschning for the period 1932-4, and by the table talk at the Fuehrer's H.Q. for the period 1941-2, reveal Hitler in another favorite role, that of visionary and prophet. This was the mood in which Hitler indulged, talking far into the night, in his house on the Obersalzberg, surrounded by the remote peaks and silent forests of the Bavarian Alps; or in the Eyrie he had built six thousand feet up on the Kehlstein, above the Berghof, approached only by a mountain road blasted through the rock and a lift guarded by doors of bronze. There he would elaborate his fabulous schemes for a vast empire embracing the Eurasian Heartland of the geopoliticians; his plans for breeding a new e1ite biologically pre-selected; his design for reducing whole nations to slavery in the foundation of his new empire. Such dreams had fascinated Hitler since he wrote
Mein Kampf. It was easy in the late 1920s and early 1930s to dismiss them as the product of a disordered and overheated imagination soaked in the political romanticism of Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. But these were still the themes of Hitler's table talk in 1941-2 and by then, master of the greater part of Europe and on the eve (as he believed) of conquering Russia and the Ukraine, Hitler had shown that he was capable of translating his fantasies into a terrible reality. The invasion of Russia, the S.S. extermination squads, the planned elimination of the Jewish race; the treatment of the Poles and Russians, the Slav Untermenschen - these, too, were the fruits of Hitler's imagination.


All this combines to create a picture of which the best description is Hitler's own famous sentence: 'I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker." The former French Ambassador speaks of him as 'a man possessed'; Hermann Rauschning writes: 'Dostoevsky might well have invented him, with the morbid derangement and the pseudo-creativeness of his hysteria'; one of the Defence Counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, Dr Dix, quoted a passage from Goethe's
Dichtung und Wahrheit describing the Demoniac and applied this very aptly to Hitler. With Hitler indeed, one is uncomfortably aware of never being far from the realm of the irrational.


But this is only half the truth about Hitler, for the baffling problem about this strange figure is to determine the degree to which he was swept along by a genuine belief in his own inspiration and the degree to which he deliberately exploited the irrational side of human nature, both in himself and others, with a shrewd calculation. For it is salutary to recall, before accepting the Hitler Myth at anything like its face value, that it was Hitler who invented the myth, assiduously cultivating and manipulating it for his own ends. So long as he did this he was brilliantly successful: it was when he began to believe in his own magic, and accept the myth of himself as true, that his flair faltered.

So much has been made of the charismatic nature of Hitter's leadership that it is easy to forget the astute and cynical politician in him. It is this mixture of calculation and fanaticism, with the difficulty of telling where one ends and the other begins, which is the peculiar characteristic of Hitler's personality: to ignore or underestimate either element is to present a distorted picture.


II


The link between the different sides of Hitler's character was his extraordinary capacity for self-dramatization. 'This so-called
Wahnsystem, or capacity for self-delusion,' Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador, wrote, 'was a regular part of his technique. It helped him both to work up his own passion and to make his people believe anything that he might think good for them. Again and again one is struck by the way in which, having once decided rationally on a course of action, Hitler would whip himself into a passion which enabled him to bear down all opposition, and provided him with the motive power to enforce his will on others. An obvious instance of this is the synthetic fury, which he could assume or discard at will, over the treatment of German minorities abroad. When it was a question of refusing to listen to the bitter complaints of the Germans in the South Tyrol, or of uprooting the German inhabitants of the Baltic States, he sacrificed them to the needs of his Italian and Russian alliances with indifference. So long as good relations with Poland were necessary to his foreign policy he showed little interest in Poland's German minority. But when it suited his purpose to make the 'intolerable wrongs' of the Austrian Nazis, or the Germans in Czechoslovakia and Poland, a ground for action against these states, he worked himself into a frenzy of indignation, with the immediate - and calculated - result that London and Paris, in their anxiety for peace, exerted increased pressure on Prague or Warsaw to show restraint and make further concessions to the German demands.

One of Hitler's most habitual devices was to place himself on the defensive, to accuse those who opposed or obstructed him of aggression and malice, and to pass rapidly from a tone of outraged innocence to the full thunders of moral indignation. It was always the other side who were to blame, and in turn he denounced the Communists, the Jews, the Republican Government, or the Czechs, the Poles, and the Bolsheviks for their 'intolerable' behavior which forced him to take drastic action in self-defense.

Hitler in a rage appeared to lose all control of himself. His face became mottled and swollen with fury, he screamed at the top of his voice, spitting out a stream of abuse, waving his arms wildly and drumming on the table or the wall with his fists. As suddenly as he had begun he would stop, smooth down his hair, straighten his collar and resume a more normal voice.

This skillful and deliberate exploitation of his own temperament extended to other moods than anger. When he wanted to persuade or win someone over he could display great charm. Until the last days of his life he retained an uncanny gift of personal magnetism which defies analysis, but which many who met him have described. This was connected with the curious power of his eyes, which are persistently said to have had some sort of hypnotic quality. Similarly, when he wanted to frighten or shock, he showed himself a master of brutal and threatening language, as in the celebrated interviews with Schuschnigg and President Hacha.

Yet another variation in his roles was the impression of concentrated willpower and intelligence, the leader in complete command of the situation and with a knowledge of the fact which dazzled the generals or ministers summoned to receive his orders. To sustain this part he drew on his remarkable memory, which enabled him to reel off complicated orders of battle, technical specifications and long lists of names and dates without a moment's hesitation. Hitler cultivated this gift of memory assiduously. The fact that subsequently the details and figures which he cited were often found to contain inaccuracies did not matter: it was the immediate effect at which he aimed. The swiftness of the transition from one mood to another was startling: one moment his eyes would be filled with tears and pleading, the next blazing with fury, or glazed with the faraway look of the visionary.

Hitler, in fact, was a consummate actor, with the actor's and orator's facility for absorbing himself in a role and convincing himself of the truth of what he was saying at the time he said it. In his early years he was awkward and unconvincing, but with practice the part became second nature to him, and with the immense prestige of success behind him, and the resources of a powerful state at his command, there were few who could resist the impression of the piercing eyes, the Napoleon pose, and the 'historic' personality.

Hitler had the gift of all great politicians for grasping the possibilities of a situation more swiftly than his opponents. He saw, as no other politician did, how to play on the grievances and resentments of the German people, as later he was to play on French and British fear of war and fear of Communism. His insistence upon preserving the forms of legality in the struggle for power showed a brilliant understanding of the way to disarm opposition, just as the way in which he undermined the independence of the German Army showed his grasp of the weaknesses of the German Officer Corps.

A German word, Fingerspitzengefuehl - 'finger-tip feeling' - which was often applied to Hitler, well describes his sense of opportunity and timing.

No matter what you attempt [Hitler told Rauschning on one occasion], if an idea is not yet mature you will not be able to realize it. Then there is only one thing to do: have patience, wait, try again, wait again. In the subconscious, the work goes on. It matures, sometimes it dies. Unless I have the inner, incorruptible conviction: this is the solution, I do nothing. Not eves if the whole Party tries to drive me into action.'

Hitler knew how to wait in 1932, when his insistence on holding out until he could secure the Chancellorship appeared to court disaster. Foreign policy provides another instance. In 1939 he showed great patience while waiting for the situation to develop after direct negotiations with Poland had broken down and while the Western Powers were seeking to reach a settlement with Soviet Russia. Clear enough about his objectives, he contrived to keep his plans flexible. In the case of the annexation of Austria and of the occupation of Prague, he made the final decision on the spur of the moment.

Until he was convinced that the right moment had come Hitler would find a hundred excuses for procrastination. His hesitation in such cases was notorious: his refusal to-make up his mind to stand as a Presidential candidate in 1932, and his attempt to defer taking action against Roehm and the S.A. in 1934, are two obvious examples. Once he had made up his mind to move, howver, he would act boldly, taking considerable risks, as in the occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, or the invasion of Norway just before the major campaign in the west.

Surprise was a favourite gambit of Hitler's, in politics, diplomacy, and war: he gauged the psychological effect of sudden, unexpected hammer-blows in paralyzing opposition. An illustration of his appreciation of the value of surprise and quick decision, even when on the defensive, is the second presidential campaign of 1932. It had taken Gobbles weeks to persuade Hitler to stand for the Presidency at all. The defeat in the first ballot brought Goebbels to despair; but Hitler, now that he had committed himself, with great presence of mind dictated the announcement that he would stand a second time and got it on to the streets almost before the country had learned of his defeat. In war the psychological effect of the Blitzkrieg was just as important in Hitler's eyes as the strategic: it gave the impression that the German military machine was more than life-size, that it possessed some virtue of invincibility against which ordinary men could not defend themselves.

No regime in history has ever paid such careful attention to psychological factors in politics. Hitler was a master of mass emotion. To attend one of his big meetings was to go through an emotional experience, not to listen to an argument or a program. Yet nothing was left to chance on these occasions. Every device for heightening the emotional intensity, every trick of the theatre was used. The Nuremberg rallies held every year in September were masterpieces of theatrical art, with the most carefully devised effects. 'I had spent six years in St. Petersburg before the war in the best days of the old Russian ballet,' wrote Sir Nevile Henderson, 'but for grandiose beauty I have never seen a ballet to compare with it." To see the films of the Nuremberg rallies even today is to be recaptured by the hypnotic effect of thousands of men marching in perfect order, the music of the massed bands, the forest of standards and flags, the vast perspectives of the stadium, the smoking torches, the dome of searchlights. The sense of power, of force and unity was irresistible, and all converged with a mounting crescendo of excitement on the supreme moment when the Fuehrer himself made his entry. Paradoxically, the man who was most affected by such spectacles was their originator, Hitler himself, and, as Rosenberg remarks in his memoirs, they played an indispensable part in the process of self-intoxication.

Hitler grasped as none before him what could be done with a combination of propaganda and terrorism. For the complement to the attractive power of the great spectacles was the compulsive power of the Gestapo, the SS, and the concentration camp, heightened once again by skillful propaganda. Hitler was helped in this not only by his own perception of the sources of power in a modern urbanized mass-society, but also by possession of the technical means to manipulate them. This was a point well made by Albert Speer, Hitler's highly intelligent Minister for Armaments and War Production, in the final speech he made at his trial after the war.

Hitler's dictatorship [Speer told the court] differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country.

Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man....

Earlier dictators needed highly qualified assistants, even at the lowest level, men who could think and act independently. The totalitarian system in the period of modern technical development can dispense with them; the means of communication alone make it possible to mechanize the lower leadership. As a result of this there arises the new type of the uncritical recipient of orders. . . . Another result was the far-reaching supervision of the citizens of the State and the maintenance of a high degree of secrecy for criminal acts.

The nightmare of many a man that one day nations could be dominated by technical means was all but realized in Hitler's totalitarian system.

In making use of the formidable power which was thus placed in his hands Hitler had one supreme, and fortunately rare, advantage: he had neither scruples nor inhibition. He was a man without roots, with neither home nor family; a h who admitted no loyalties, was bound by no traditions, and felt respect neither for God nor man. Throughout his career Hitler showed himself prepared to seize any advantage that was to be gained by lying, cunning, treachery, and unscrupulousness. He demanded the sacrifice of millions of German lives for the sacred cause of Germany, but in the last year of the war was ready to destroy Germany rather than surrender his power or admit defeat.

Wary and secretive, he entertained a universal distrust. He admitted no one to his counsels. He never let down his guard, or gave himself away. 'He never', Schacht wrote, 'let slip an unconsidered word. He never said what he did not intend to say and he never blurted out a secret. Everything was the result of cold calculation.'

While he was in Landsberg gaol, as long ago as 1924, Hitler had preserved his position in the Party by allowing rivalries to develop among the other leaders, and he continued to apply the same principle of 'divide and rule' after he became Chancellor. There was always more than one office operating in any field. A dozen different agencies quarreled over the direction of propaganda, of economic policy, and the intelligence services. Before 1938 Hitler continually went behind the back of the Foreign Office to make use of Ribbentrop's special bureau or to get information through Party channels. The dualism of Party and State organizations, each with one or more divisions for the same function, was deliberate. In the end this reduced efficiency, but it strengthened Hitler's position by allowing him to play off one department against another. For the same reason Hitler put an end to regular cabinet meetings and insisted on dealing with ministers singly, so that they could not combine against him. 'I have an old principle,' he told Ludecke: 'only to say what must be said to him who must know it, and only when he must know it.' Only the Fuehrer kept all the threads in his hand and saw the whole design. If ever a man exercised absolute power it was Adolf Hitler.

He had a particular and inveterate distrust of experts. He refused to be impressed by the complexity of problems, insisting until it became monotonous that if only the will was there any problem could be solved. Schacht, to whose advice he refused to listen and whose admiration was reluctant, says of him: 'Hitler often did find astonishingly simple solutions for problems which had seemed to others insoluble. He had a genius for invention. . . .His solutions were often brutal, but almost always effective." In an interview with a French correspondent early in 1936 Hitler himself claimed this power of simplification as his greatest gift:

It has been said that I owe my success to the fact that I have created a
mystique ... or more simply that I have been lucky. Well, I will tell you what has carried me to the position I have reached. Our political problems appeared complicated. The German people could make nothing of them. In these circumstances they preferred to leave it to the professional politicians to get them out of this confused mess. 1, on the other hand, simplified the problems and reduced them to the simplest terms. The masses realized this and followed me.

The crudest of Hitler's simplifications was the most effective: in almost any situation, he believed, force or the threat of force would settle matters - and in an astonishingly large number of cases he proved right
.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact

At Munich in September 1938 Prime Minister Chamberlain of Britain and Premier Daladier of France consented to the partition of Czechoslovakia. They also agreed to Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland. They gave the Czechoslovaks nothing but a solemn guarantee of the integrity of the remnant. Prague felt obliged to acquiesce. The Czechs feared that accepting only Soviet aid would convert their country into another Spain, where a civil war had been raging throughout the 1930s. They dared not fight alone if the British and French washed their hands of them, which they did.

Chamberlain arrived home with the unfortunate phrase, "peace in our time," and the conviction that appeasement had succeeded. Whatever his conviction, it was deadly true that Britain and France were in no military position either to fight or to bargain effectively. Many in the West were ashamed of Munich. Many Czechoslovaks never forgot the experience of being sacrificed to their enemies by their friends. Hitler, who had received as a gift what he had been prepared to fight for, was jubilant.

The deception of Munich was soon exposed. In October and November the helpless Prague government had to cede Teschen as the result of a Polish ultimatum, yield a strip of territory holding a million people to Hungary, and grant full autonomy to Slovakia and Ruthenia, now renamed ''Carpatho-Ukraine.'' For a time Ruthenia was the scene of much real or alleged pan-Ukrainian agitation under Berlin sponsorship, which seemed to portend grave Nazi-Soviet tension.

Nevertheless, Stalin, in his report to the 18th Party Congress on March 10, 1939, brushed aside Western forecasts of trouble over the Ukraine as designed "to provoke a conflict with Germany without any visible grounds.'' Declaring that the "non-aggressive" states were ''unquestionably stronger than the Fascist states,'' he argued that their failure to resist Hitler was motivated not by weakness, but by desire to embroil the Nazis with the Soviets. He warned against "war-mongers who are accustomed to have others pull the chestnuts out of the fire for them.''

He then proclaimed the Soviet Union's intention to stay out of a "new imperialist war,'' which was ''already in its second year, as he saw it. " The
Soviet Political Dictionary of 1940 described Stalin's report as raising "the question of the good neighborly relations between the Soviet Union and Germany. This declaration of Comrade Stalin," the article added, ''was properly understood in Germany."

It is now known not only that this assertion was true but also that Stalin's declaration fell on already receptive Nazi ears. Until the end of 1938 Hitler hoped for a compact with Poland at Soviet expense, in which he would receive Danzig and the Corridor in exchange for supporting Polish gains in the Ukraine. When Poland did not respond, he was turning to the idea of a partition of Poland in concert with the Soviet Union.

II. Occupation of Czechoslovakia


On March 15 Hitler sent German troops to occupy Bohemia and Moravia, set up Slovakia as an "independent'' state, but sacrificed his tiny Ukrainian ''Piedmont'' by giving it to Hungary. Thus he made clear to the West that his ambitions exceeded the boundaries of German-speaking lands. To the Soviet Union he made clear that his much-bruited ''designs on the Ukraine" might at least temporarily be laid aside for purposes of diplomatic discussion.

Much British opinion was now clamoring for an end to ''appeasement,'' as well as an approach to the Soviet Union. After the occupation of the core of Czechoslovakia, even Chamberlain lost his illusions about Hitler. He asked the Soviets what their attitude would be if Rumania were attacked and thus launched a series of Anglo-Soviet exchanges which continued into the summer. On March 31 he guaranteed Poland against attack. After Mussolini seized Albania, on April 13, he guaranteed both Greece and Rumania. Meanwhile, Hitler had extorted Memel from Lithuania by simple ultimatum. But more important was the fact that he now began to demand Danzig and the Polish Corridor from Poland openly.

In September 1938 the Soviet Union had been isolated and ignored. Beginning in March 1939 she was ardently courted as a likely ally by both the Western powers and the Nazis. On May 3 Stalin replaced Litvinov with Molotov as foreign commissar. Thus departed the man publicly identified with the policy of ''collective security.''

Nevertheless, the British and French pushed on with negotiations for a pact to halt further Nazi aggression. In the meantime discussions about a Nazi-Soviet trade pact were proceeding. On June 15 the Soviet chargé d'affaires in Berlin passed on a message to the Nazis that the Soviet Union was trying to decide whether to conclude the pact with the British and French, drag out negotiations further, or undertake a rapprochement with Germany. He added that ''this last possibility, with which ideological considerations would not have to become involved, was closest to Soviet desires."

Thenceforth the Soviet Union was negotiating secretly with the Nazis and openly with the British and French at the same time. If it had chosen to take it, the West had ample warning of what was in store. Molotov continually raised the Soviet price for a pact, but the plainest danger signal was an article by Zhdanov in Pravda on June 29, in which he said he could not agree with his friends who thought Britain and France were sincere in the negotiations which were taking place. The British and French did not exhibit any hastiness, at any rate. When they sent a military mission to Moscow in August, it went by leisurely boat.

III. Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact


However, Hitler was in a great hurry. An attack on Poland was scheduled for late August. By the end of July the Nazis realized that they must reach agreement with the Soviets very soon if these plans were to be safely implemented. It seems fairly clear that on the night of August 3 Hitler agreed to pay the Soviet price for a pact. Mussolini was left in the dark about his plans. The Italians learned only on August 11 that Hitler was bent on war, and the news threw them into a panic.

On the night of August 19 the Nazi-Soviet trade treaty was signed. The next day Hitler telegraphed Stalin with a request that he see Ribbentrop on August 22 or 23. When he received Stalin's assent, Hitler pounded on the wall with his fists and shouted, "I have the world in my pocket!" On the night of August 23, 1939, the pact was concluded. It contained the provision which only totalitarians could insert, that it was to take effect as soon as it was signed.

The public text of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was simply an agreement of nonaggression and neutrality, referring as a precedent to the German-Soviet neutrality pact of 1926 (Berlin Treaty). The real agreement was in a secret protocol which in effect partitioned not only Poland (along the line of the Vistula), but much of Eastern Europe. To the Soviets were allotted Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Bessarabia; to the Nazis, everything to the West of these regions, including Lithuania. Each of the two signatories was to ask the other no questions about the disposition of its own ''sphere of interest." This nonaggression pact, coupled with the trade treaty and arrangements for large-scale exchange of raw materials and armaments, amounted to an alliance.

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IV. Invasion of Poland


When confronted with the public text of the pact, the Western emissaries could only creep home quietly. For the moment the Soviet obtained immunity from attack by Hitler, the opportunity for considerable expansion, and noninvolvement in the war which opened with Hitler's Blitzkrieg against Poland on September 1. Britain and France entered this war on September 3. On September 17 the Soviets announced they were entering eastern Poland.

Actually the line of the secret protocol was now shifted by mutual consent. The Nazi-Soviet boundary in Poland became the Bug River instead of the Vistula River. In exchange ...

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