In mid-July Hitler had reduced the tempo of the Nazi conquest of power and introduced a kind of summer break in domestic policy. But, from the beginning of September, he once again became actively and visibly engaged in politics. However, during the following months, coordination measures reinforced by violence were replaced by propaganda campaigns and major events, underlining his central role as ‘Führer’. The image of a nation united behind Hitler was designed not least to underpin his next foreign policy moves: in October the Geneva disarmament negotiations were restarted.
On 1 September, the NSDAP held a Party Rally for the first time since 1929. Whereas in the 1920s controversial issues were at least debated, now it was all about demonstrating the strength of the Nazi movement and the complete unanimity between members and ‘Führer’. To this end Hitler spent five days as the focus of parades, marches, and displays of adulation attended by tens of thousands of his devoted followers. His various appearances created a standard set of ceremonies that was hardly altered during the five Party Rallies that followed until 1938. It began with his speech at the reception in Nuremberg town hall on the evening before the Rally, followed by his proclamation opening the event, which was always read by Gauleiter Adolf Wagner. At the Party’s cultural session he projected himself as a connoisseur of art and an expert in cultural policy, and to the various Party sections (political leaders, women’s organization, Hitler Youth, SA, SS, and Labour Service) as the supreme leader of every Party unit. The introduction in 1933 of the dedication of flags ceremony at the SA and SS parade was a particular high point. This involved his touching the new SA and SS flags and standards with the ‘blood flag’, which had been carried at the march to the Feldherrnhalle in November 1923. From 1934 onwards, these Party parades were supplemented by military demonstrations by the Wehrmacht, giving Hitler the opportunity to pose as commander-in-chief. In his speech to the diplomatic corps he presented himself as a statesman, while his speech at the final congress brought the Rally to a conclusion. The Party Rally provided the opportunity to display the variety of roles Hitler attached to the office of ‘Führer’.
On 13 September, only a week after the end of the Party Rally, Hitler presented himself in the role of the caring ‘Führer’, who was close to his people. At the opening of the Winterhilfswerk [Winter Aid Programme, WHW] he celebrated the new institution as an expression of ‘solidarity, which [is] eternally in our blood’ and as embodying a ‘national community’, which represented ‘something really vital’.1 The Winter Aid Programme was designed to supplement the state welfare system through a whole series of measures that the individual citizen could hardly escape (street collections, lotteries, donations from wages, and various services). In the winter of 1933, more than 358 million RM was collected. From now onwards, the regime portrayed the annual increases in the sums collected for the WHW as important evidence of the growing support for the regime. In fact, these figures merely indicated the regime’s growing skill at extracting larger and larger contributions through various forms of pressure.2 The Winter Aid Programme was carried out by the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt [NS-Welfare Organization, NSV], which had been founded in Gau Berlin in 1931 mainly to provide welfare services for Party members. After 1933, the NSV radically changed its role. Following an order from Hitler dated 3 May 1933, it developed into the main Party organization responsible ‘for all matters concerning the people’s welfare’. Under its new leader, Erich Hilgenfeldt, it spread throughout the Reich, becoming the second largest mass organization after the German Labour Front (DAF ).3 It acquired a complex structure modelled on the Party organization, reaching down to local branch level with separate sections for welfare, youth care, health, propaganda, and indoctrination. By the end of 1933, it had acquired a membership of 112,000, which increased to more than 3.7 million by the end of 1934.4
The main aim of the NSV was the ‘improvement of the people’s welfare’. The focus was not on supporting individuals through welfare and charitable activities, but entirely on strengthening the ‘national community’, in other words essentially on supporting ‘hereditarily healthy’ and socially efficient families. To this end, the NSV provided a primarily ideologically determined framework for care and support, in addition to the state welfare benefits; it did not regard caring for ‘inferiors’ and ‘the weak’ as part of its responsibilities. Far from being an organization designed to support the needy, the NSV was a political and ideologically charged mass movement concerned with fundamentally improving the fitness of the ‘national body’.5 Following its official recognition in summer 1933 as the leading organization within the charitable welfare sector, the NSV gradually took control of all the other organizations operating in the welfare field; it increasingly claimed the state subsidies, on which the whole charitable welfare system depended, for itself. This affected above all the extensive Church welfare organizations, which continued to exist until 1945. The other charitable welfare associations were dissolved, coordinated or lost their privileged status.6
The Party Rally and the establishment of the Winter Aid Programme marked the start of a whole series of major events and propaganda initiatives that aimed to produce a good ‘mood’ in the German population and to cement the relationship between ‘Führer’ and ‘people’. Thus, on 23 September, Hitler broke the ground to initiate the construction of the first phase of the Frankfurt–Heidelberg autobahn, celebrated by Nazi propaganda as a great national achievement.7 The building of the autobahns, the biggest Nazi construction project, provided its most senior master builder with the opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of his regime and his determination to create employment through regular ground breaking ceremonies, section openings, and the like. At the same time, the particular aesthetic of the ‘Führer’s roads’, with their stone-clad bridges, functional buildings adapted to regional styles, and the sweeping panorama of stretches of road hugging the landscape, enabled the construction of this road system to be portrayed as a major cultural achievement.8
At the end of September came the new ‘Harvest Festival Day’. Hitler opened the celebrations with a reception in the Reich Chancellery for peasant delegations from all over the Reich, who were served a stew for lunch. This was Hitler’s personal contribution towards launching a broader propaganda campaign. In future, all citizens were expected to dispense with the normal Sunday roast in favour of a stew, giving the money saved to the Winter Aid Programme. Party members ensured that this was carried out by stationing themselves on Sundays in the vestibules of blocks of flats sniffing for the smell of roast meat and, if necessary, demanding that ‘one pot Sunday’ should be observed. The Party was literally spying on people’s cooking pots. As far as Hitler was concerned, having to eat a stew on Sundays did not represent a sacrifice; it was what he normally ate. After the reception, Hitler, together with members of his government, went to the Bückeberg near Hamelin, where the main celebrations of the Harvest Festival took place. Half a million people had assembled on a festival ground on the side of a hill.9 Hitler then confidently announced in his speech that the event was ‘the greatest demonstration . . . of this kind that has ever been held on earth’.10
A few weeks later, on 26 November, and this time without Hitler’s personal involvement, the DAF’s new leisure organization was launched in Berlin, and given the title Kraft durch Freude [Strength through Joy, KdF]; Ley, Goebbels, and Hess gave the ceremonial addresses.11 The KdF took over not only the organization of leisure activities and holidays (including the planning of a huge seaside resort on the island of Rügen and the construction of its own fleet of cruise ships), but also got involved in welfare at work. For example, it demanded improvements in work facilities and organized ‘factory performance competitions’ to raise standards. Like the Party, its organization was Reich-wide and went down to local branch level.12
Thus, the Nazis attempted to provide a form of compensation for the wage freeze and the reduction in workers’ rights and privileges (or their freezing at the low crisis levels).13 From 1 May to the ‘Harvest Festival’, ‘working people’ were the focus of large-scale celebrations and propaganda campaigns, and the ambition to create a ‘national community’ was expressed through the establishment of uniformly structured, mass organizations led by Nazis. All these organizations – the Hitler Youth with the League of German Girls, the National Socialist Welfare Organization, the German Labour Front, and KdF, but also other organizations such as the NS Frauenschaft [NS Women’s Organization] or the NS Kraftfahrkorps [NS Motor Corps], which unified the various automobile associations – provided the Party with a variety of ways of ensuring a varied and intensive ‘supervision’* of the ‘national comrades’, offering a wide range of activities and providing armies of full-time functionaries and volunteer helpers with new tasks. During the first year of the regime these big Nazi organizations were to a large extent taking over the functions of the great variety of clubs and associations that had existed in the Weimar Republic, but had been divided by social, political, and confessional differences. Now, people were offered the opportunity to pursue their professional/specialist interests, leisure activities, hobbies, and other interests within uniform official organizations.
These Nazi organizations owed their rapid expansion in part to the fact that, faced with a huge increase in membership after the seizure of power, the NSDAP imposed a ban on new members on 1 May; by then, membership had grown from over 800,000 at the beginning of 1933 to around 2.5 million.14 Now those who wanted to secure their own future by demonstrating their loyalty to the new state could do so only in one of these mass organizations. The sheer variety of what was on offer indicates that the Nazis were aiming to achieve a total organization of German society. Every sphere of life was to be covered by at least one organization; people were to be integrated into a hierarchical command structure, which, following the example of the Party, went from the local level up to a Reich leadership. This total penetration and structuring of society was the logical counterpart to the Führer principle.
At the same time, Hitler’s regime, and indeed the ‘Führer’ himself, had taken decisive steps towards the final and complete coordination of the whole of cultural life and the media. This was a process that, in contrast to the conquest of power phase during the first six months, took place, at least overtly, with relatively little fuss. After Hitler had initially concentrated on supporting his propaganda minister, Goebbels, in turning the regional broadcasting authorities into ‘Reich radio stations’, in the second half of 1933 he moved to extend and complete control over the press. To begin with, the regime had used newspaper bans and the intimidation of critical journalists, but now it established a proper system of press control. On 1 July 1933, the Propaganda Ministry took over the Berlin Press Conference, hitherto an institution organized by the journalists themselves, using it in future to issue the press with binding instructions. These ‘oral press directives’ were then confirmed by written instructions to the whole of the press; the news agencies were also coordinated. In addition, in August Goebbels persuaded Hitler to agree to an Editors’ Law. Issued at the beginning of October, it secured the ‘transformation of the press into a public institution and its legal and intellectual integration into the state’. The profession of ‘editor’ was now a ‘public office’. Hitler could also give direct instructions to the press through the ‘Reich government’s press chief’, the former economic journalist, Walther Funk, whom he had imposed on Goebbels as state secretary and who was directly subordinate to the Führer.15
In summer 1933, after extensive discussions with Goebbels,16 Hitler also approved the latter’s idea of creating, in addition to the Propaganda Ministry with its variety of control mechanisms, an additional supervisory agency. This was the Reich Chamber of Culture, established in September 1933 and ceremonially opened in Hitler’s presence in November.17 The establishment of the Chamber of Culture, another mammoth organization taken over by Goebbels, was designed to bring together the members of the professions supervised by the Propaganda Ministry in separate ‘chambers’ for film, literature, press, radio, theatre, music, and fine art. Membership of a chamber was a prerequisite for exercising a profession and the chambers were authorized to regulate the economic relations in their particular sphere.18 However, Hitler also left significant cultural responsibilities in the hands of the Prussian Prime Minister, Göring, Reichsleiter Rosenberg, and the Reich Education Minister, Bernhard Rust. Thus Nazi coordination did not exclude the possibility of several potentates intervening in cultural life. Indeed, Hitler frequently used the competition among these politicians involved in the cultural field to exercise influence and assert his authority. In addition, his ‘cultural speeches’ at the Party Rallies served to assert his claim to preeminence in cultural affairs. In 1933 he used this opportunity to claim that all cultural activity was ‘racially determined’, announce ‘a new Aryan cultural renaissance’, and mount an abusive attack on the whole of modern art.19 On 15 October, he presented himself in Munich as Germany’s leading artistic Maecenas, celebrating German Art Day and laying the foundation stone for the House of German Art. This was designed by his favourite architect, Paul Ludwig Troost, who had supervised the alterations to the Brown House and whose furniture designs he admired. It was to replace the Glass Palace, which had burnt down in 1931, as the exhibition hall for German contemporary art.20 This new building, whose location Hitler determined was to be on the southern edge of the Englischer Garten, represented in several respects a programme in itself. Architecturally, with its massive Neoclassicism, it set the standards for future architecture in the Third Reich. Above all, however, it was intended to be the visual expression of Hitler’s aim of making Munich ‘for all time the centre of a new form of artistic creation and artistic life’.21
During these months, Hitler was heavily preoccupied with buildings and plans for new buildings intended to demonstrate Nazism’s claim to power, its efficiency and dynamism; he used sketches and ideas he had been developing since the 1920s.22 In addition to the autobahns, this involved the construction of show-piece buildings in Munich, Berlin, and Nuremberg. When Hitler laid the foundation stone for the House of German Art, planning was already far advanced for turning the neo-classical Königsplatz into a major Nazi forum, composed of a new ‘Führer building’, an equally massive administrative building, and two ‘Ceremonial Temples’ on the eastern side of the square to honour the dead of the Munich putsch of 1923. The simultaneous transformation of the Königsplatz itself increased the monumental effect of the new Führer building, for it was covered with large granite flagstones to within a few metres of the new buildings, so that it could be used it as a parade ground. The integration of the new building complex on the ‘old’ Königsplatz into the surrounding area underlined the new political system’s claim to power, while at the same time symbolizing a link between the new regime and ‘classical’ Munich, the artistic city of the nineteenth century. Munich, as the ‘Capital of the Movement’ (as the city was officially known from 1935 onwards), was, in Hitler’s view, necessary as a counterweight to the state’s power centre in the Reich capital.
Hitler had already criticized Berlin’s public buildings as extraordinarily inadequate in Mein Kampf.23 On 19 September 1933, during a meeting with representatives of the Reich railways and the city of Berlin to discuss a north–south railway line through the city, Hitler told them that Berlin was basically an ‘arbitrary agglomeration’ of buildings, just a ‘series of shops and blocks of flats’; the city must be ‘architecturally and culturally improved to such an extent that it can compete with all the world’s capitals’.24 After he had repeatedly indicated to the city fathers his great interest in practical aspects of the city’s development,25 on 29 March 1934 a plan that he had initiated for a north–south axis through Berlin was discussed at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery with representatives of the city and the Reich railways. Hitler had very precise proposals for how the axis should be built and made many decisions concerning future monumental buildings.26 The meetings were continued on 5 July 1934, with Hitler once more leading the discussion.27
The granting in 1931 of the 1936 Olympic Games to Berlin proved a stroke of luck for Hitler’s craze for building. He took personal charge of the project and, right from the start, ensured that the whole Games took on a much more representative character than originally envisaged by the last Weimar governments. Immediately after viewing the building site on 5 October 1933, and at two further meetings on 10 October and 14 December in the Reich Chancellery, he decided not to stick to the original plan to transform the already existing ‘German Stadium’ and instead to replace it with a much larger new building by the architect Werner March. Moreover, in front of the stadium he also wanted a large parade ground big enough for half a million people. The later so-called Maifeld, together with other buildings, was integrated into a sports complex that was given the name ‘Reich Sports Field’. Hitler also intervened in the planning process for the first major post-January 1933 construction in Berlin, the extension to the Reichsbank begun in 1934 (in which the German Foreign Ministry has been housed since 1999), backing Heinrich Wolff’s design, which was then implemented.28
Nuremberg was the third city in which, early on, Hitler wished the Nazis’ claim to power to be immortalized through architecture. At a meeting in Bayreuth on 22 July 1933 he promised representatives of the city that the Reich Party Rallies would always be held in Nuremberg and agreed with them a ‘radical alteration to the Luitpoldhain’ on the basis of a sketch that he provided.29 Hitler’s continuing involvement in the planning can be documented for the following months; he produced ideas, expressed wishes, approved plans.30 The increasingly gigantomaniacal plans for a parade ground that could contain hundreds of thousands of people were realized from 1935 onwards.
It is remarkable how single-mindedly Hitler set about consolidating his position as ‘Führer’ given that, in the summer of 1933, he had only just concluded a series of campaigns against his opponents and political rivals. This was the point of his constant presentation of himself, as already described; he secured even more tight control over this by closing any remaining gaps in his command of the media. While Hitler presented himself as the benevolent supporter of culture and its authoritative mentor, and also as the greatest and most liberal promoter of buildings, to workers and peasants he was the ‘people’s chancellor’, showing the way towards the creation of the much invoked ‘national community’. This underpinning and furnishing of his position as ‘Führer’ through propaganda, culture, and (with the help of newly-created large-scale organizations such as the DAF and the NSV) social policy should be borne in mind when we come to consider Hitler’s further ‘successes’ in foreign and domestic policy.
The comprehensive creation of a Führer aura resulted in Hitler’s inner distance from his immediate entourage increasing still further. Personal friendships and close human ties were, as far as he was concerned, incompatible with his position as ‘Führer’. In any case, being emotionally distant from people was part of his character. According to Albert Speer, in retrospect, he had become a cold, friendless dictator.31
In getting to know Eva Braun in 1932, an employee in Hoffmann’s photographic studio, he had once again found a much younger woman who was soon being regarded as his girlfriend.32 During his first years as Chancellor, however, his relationship with her was limited to occasional meetings; she visited him in his Munich flat or on the Obersalzberg. Hitler defended her when her presence on the speakers’ podium at the 1934 Party Rally led to gossip. He banned his half-sister, Angela Raubal, whom he blamed for the gossip among the women of his entourage, from the Berghof, where she had hitherto presided. Eva Braun now increasingly took on the role of his lady companion at his Berchtesgaden residence; after its renovation in 1936 she moved into a small flat with direct access to his private quarters. Apart from that, Hitler was careful to keep her away from Berlin and avoided attending official occasions with her; at most, she was permitted to take part as a member of his wider entourage.
Given the lack of evidence, one can only speculate about the relationship between the dictator and this woman. From what we know, Eva Braun, who was twenty-three years younger than him, was not an advisor, muse, or inspiration, nor did he give any indication of needing to develop a private life with her away from politics. There were differing opinions among his close circle as to whether or not it was an intimate relationship. The previous history of his relationships with young girls and women would suggest not. The gossip about the ‘Führer’ having a secret lover at least spared him from speculation among his immediate circle about any personal reasons for his not having a woman in his official life. This appears to have been Eva Braun’s function.
This was particularly the case, given that Joseph and Magda Goebbels continued to provide Hitler with a kind of substitute family. He often appeared in the evening – he liked to surprise them – in their official Berlin flat or at the weekend at his propaganda minister’s summer residence on Schwanenwerder, an island in the Wannsee; here the Goebbelses had a guest house built for Hitler in the hope that he would treat it as home. During these visits, Hitler appeared relaxed, happy to chat, and played with the children. Goebbels was not only a permanent guest at Hitler’s lunch table, but also regularly attended Hitler’s evening film shows in his private cinema in the Reich Chancellery. The family often spent their holidays on the Obersalzberg, with Hitler’s ‘invitations’ sometimes being more like commands. Magda also frequently travelled to Berchtesgaden on her own or saw Hitler in Berlin. When, for example, she gave birth to her second child, Hilde, in April 1934, and her husband visited her two days later, he noted laconically in his diary: ‘Clinic: Führer just arrived.’33 Although Goebbels may sometimes have found Hitler’s presence in his family life a burden, in his view this was outweighed by its advantages: Hitler provided him with special bonuses and preferential treatment from the Party’s publishing house, the Eher Verlag. All this enabled the Goebbels family to enjoy an exclusive life style. Above all, however, he hoped that the privileged relationship he and his wife had with the ‘Führer’ would increase his prestige and political influence. Hitler encouraged this notion in his numerous conversations with Goebbels, in which he conveyed the impression that he was putting his trust in him, without in fact allowing Goebbels to influence his key policy areas.34
Hitler had a relatively close relationship with Albert Speer, who also established a base on the Obersalzberg and, with his wife Margarete, soon became a member of the so-called Berghof society.35 Speer was sixteen years younger than Hitler and, after Troost’s death, became his favourite architect; they shared a common interest in architecture, town planning, and architectural history. Hitler made a habit of summoning Speer, dropping in on him in his studios in Berchtesgaden or Berlin, viewing his latest plans and discussing building projects with him. It seems that in his many meetings with Speer he had someone with whom he was on the same wavelength to an unusual degree. Being together with Speer diverted, relaxed, and energized him. Hitler evidently saw in Speer his alter ego, someone who was able to have the career as an eminent architect that had been closed to him, someone with whom he could share the architectural fantasies which had preoccupied him since his youth. There are many similarities with his relationship with his adolescent friend Kubizek; but while Kubizek had simply patiently listened to him, Speer could realize Hitler’s megalomaniacal fantasies, or at least present him with plans and models based on his sketches. Thus, for Hitler Speer was his most important link to what he considered his true calling as artist and architect. While Hitler praised Speer as a ‘brilliant architect’36 and told his entourage that he was a ‘soulmate’,37 in retrospect Speer hesitated to call this relationship a friendship. He had rarely met anybody in his life ‘who so seldom revealed his feelings and, when he did so, immediately suppressed them’.38 Speer never clearly described his own feelings. He mainly saw in Hitler ‘my catalyst’, who infused him with exceptional energy and enabled him to have a dazzling career, or, in Speer’s own words ‘an enhanced identity’.39
The Brandts were also welcome guests on the Obersalzberg, moving into a flat close to the Berghof. Anni Brandt, née Rehborn, a German swimming champion, was a famous sportswoman and had known Hitler before the take-over of power. In 1933 she was a guest on the Obersalzberg with her fiancé, a young doctor, Karl Brandt, and in March 1934 Hitler attended their wedding. Shortly afterwards, he appointed Brandt his ‘personal physician’, whose task was to provide him with emergency medical assistance in the event of accidents or assassination attempts during his numerous trips. In addition, he gave advice on medical matters. During the war, this position of special trust led to Brandt receiving special assignments with serious consequences.40
Among the other members of the Obersalzberg circle were Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach and his wife Henriette, like the Speers and the Brandts members of the younger generation, as well as Henriette’s father the ‘Reich Photo Journalist’, Heinrich Hoffmann with his second wife. Hoffmann was regarded as the entertainer and joker of the group; he was a heavy drinker, although Hitler, who was teetotal, overlooked this. Hitler valued Hoffmann above all as a connoisseur of art, whose taste coincided with his own and whose advice he valued. As Eva Braun’s former employer, Hoffmann also discreetly arranged the renting of a flat, later the purchase of a house, in Munich for her.41 In 1935, Unity Mitford, a young Englishwoman living in Munich, joined the circle. Mitford, a fanatical Nazi, whose sister, Diana, married the British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, in 1936, remained a member of Hitler’s intimate circle until 1939.42 In despair when Britain declared war on Germany, she attempted suicide, which she survived albeit severely wounded. In the end her family brought her home.
Unlike in Berlin, where the distinction between the two was more clear-cut, in Hitler’s refuge on the Obersalzberg private guests mixed with his personal entourage. The most important of the latter was Martin Bormann, who, apart from his role as chief of staff in the office of the ‘Führer’s’ Deputy, increasingly dealt with Hitler’s personal affairs. Thus, on the Obersalzberg, where he had his own house built, he operated as a kind of major domo and head of construction. In addition, there were Hitler’s personal adjutants, Wilhelm Brückner and Julius Schaub (in later years also the various military adjutants), and his secretaries.
The situation at the Berghof clearly demonstrates that, even after 1933, Hitler showed no inclination to create a private sphere separate from his official position. On the contrary, the people around him were linked to him in such a way that it is impossible to discern any kind of privacy. Hitler’s perception of himself as above all a public figure left no room for that. A private Hitler outside his public role simply did not exist.