On 30 January 1937 the Reichstag met for a session intended by Hitler to demonstrate to the world that the regime had consolidated its position. At the ensuing meeting of ministers in the Reich Chancellery, however, there was a scandal. Hitler thanked the members of the cabinet formally for their work and announced that he intended personally to receive all ministers who were not yet Party members into the NSDAP and confer on them the ‘Gold Medal’. Then, as Goebbels noted, the ‘unimaginable’ happened: Paul von Eltz-Rübenach, the Reich Minister for Transport and Post, flatly refused this offer, citing as his reason the regime’s policy towards the Churches and demanding that Hitler explain himself, which the latter refused to do.1
Although Hitler claimed to be affronted by this disruption of the event, he was in fact aware that Eltz-Rübenach, a Catholic, was opposed to his Church policy. At the beginning of December he had voted for the Hitler Youth Law in cabinet only on condition that no ‘religious values’ would be destroyed; a few days earlier he had asked for the same assurance in a two-and-a-half-hour personal meeting with Hitler, which he then reported to Cardinal Faulhaber.2 Hitler was extremely suspicious of his Transport Minister: ‘When he sneezes, soot comes out, he’s so black’, he told Goebbels on 4 January.3 Inevitably, Eltz-Rübenach was immediately required to resign from his posts. In the months following Hitler took the opportunity to use the cabinet circulation procedure to gain consent for a further law that had previously met with resistance from Eltz-Rübenach.4 The planned Reich Schools Law, which aimed to impose the community schools favoured by the National Socialists, was intended to complete the process, already in train, of doing away with Church schools.
Eltz-Rübenach’s public opposition to Hitler’s Church policy was a clear signal that the regime was heading for a fundamental conflict with the Churches, and not only with the Catholic Church but with the Protestant Churches too. From the end of 1936 it was becoming increasingly clear that the efforts of Reich Churches Minister Kerrl to unite the fragmented Protestant Church would fail. Then, on 12 February 1937, the Reich Churches Committee, created by Kerrl in 1935, resigned. Kerrl announced that the Churches would be subordinated to state governance,5 and Hitler, who at a lunch in January had left Kerrl in no doubt about his dissatisfaction with the latter’s Church policy,6 then summoned Kerrl, Frick, Hess, Himmler, and Goebbels, as well as the state secretaries Hermann Muhs (Churches) and Wilhelm Stuckart (Interior), at short notice to a meeting on 15 February on the Obersalzberg.
At the meeting Hitler severely criticized Kerrl; at this point, as Goebbels records, Hitler claimed he could ‘do without a conflict with the Churches. He’s expecting the great world struggle in a few years. Germany can lose only one more war, then that will be it.’ For this reason the measures Kerrl was planning, which amounted to the creation of a summus episcopus (in the shape of the Minister for Churches), were out of the question for they could only be implemented ‘with the use of force’. In the short term Hitler accepted a suggestion from Goebbels that the Party and the state should keep out of disputes within the Protestant Church and that a synod should be elected to create a constitution so that the quarrels could take place in that arena. Within a year, Goebbels claimed, ‘they’ll be begging the state for help against each other.’7 Hitler therefore decreed that a general synod be elected so that the Protestant Church could create for itself ‘a new constitution and with it a new organizational structure with complete freedom and according to the wishes of the Church members’.8 The project was immediately given a propaganda spin as ‘the Führer’s conciliatory move to aid the Protestant Church’.9
After only a few days, however, Hitler changed course. Although at a meeting of high-ranking functionaries on 22 February about the ‘Churches issue’ he again justified his policy with reference to his wide-ranging foreign policy objectives, in contrast to the previous week he no longer wanted to keep the peace with the Churches in order to be able to survive the imminent ‘great world struggle’, but rather to neutralize them beforehand. ‘Separation of Church and State, an end to the Concordat’, was Goebbels’s summary. ‘Not the Party against Christianity. Instead we must declare ourselves to be the only true Christians. Then the full power of the Party will be turned on the saboteurs. Christianity is the watchword for priests to be destroyed, just as socialism was once the call to destroy the Marxist big wigs. For the time being, though, we’ll wait and see what the other side does.’10 Even so, it was five months, the end of July, before the preparations for the Church elections were finally discontinued. The idea was never taken up again.11
In the meantime relations with the Catholic Church had also, and dramatically, deteriorated. Annoyance at the Hitler Youth Law, the threat of the Reich School Law, the prosecutions for currency and sexual abuse offences, the seemingly endless negotiations about the conditions for implementing the Concordat, also the state’s clear lack of interest in putting its policies towards the Church on a legal basis12 finally prompted the Vatican to state its position clearly. On 21 March the Pope issued the encyclical ‘Mit brennender Sorge’ (With Deep Anxiety). It had been composed by Faulhaber in consultation with Pius XI and Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli personally and was widely circulated among German Catholics. It marked the nadir of relations between the regime and Catholicism. The Pope spoke out against the harassment of the German Churches, the Nazi notion of ‘belief in God’, and racial ideology.13 Hitler demanded that the document be ‘completely ignored’ and on 23 March the Ministry for Churches banned its dissemination.14
At the beginning of April Hitler geared himself up to retaliate. In a telephone call he told Goebbels he now intended to ‘let rip against the Vatican’. In concrete terms this meant the resumption of the prosecutions of priests for sexual offences, which had been suspended in the summer of 1936. The judicial authorities were given their instructions.15 They were to start with a group of prosecutions that were already with the public prosecutor in Koblenz. As the ‘overture’ Hitler was considering ‘the gruesome sexually motivated murder of a young boy in a Belgian monastery’.16 Naturally the propaganda media responded to this prompting and used the Belgian murder (which, it transpired, had occurred in quite different circumstances and had not even been committed in a monastery) as the start of an extensive campaign against the Catholic Church, which provided an effective backdrop to the series of trials in Koblenz that began at the end of April.17 In total more than 200 members of religious orders and priests were found guilty in 1936/37 of sexual abuse. While the prosecutions (as with the case of currency offences) were instigated for political reasons, on the whole they were based on altogether credible accusations.18
A few days into the campaign Hitler professed himself to Goebbels to be satisfied with ‘the radical turn in the prosecution of priests’ and went on to make a number of fundamental statements concerning future policy towards the Churches. ‘Does not want any religious dimension to the Party. Does not want to be made into a god himself either. Gives Himmler a good roasting over this. We must bring the Churches to heel and make them serve our ends.’ Celibacy was to cease and the Church’s wealth be surrendered. Men were not be allowed to study theology before the age of twenty-four and religious orders had to be dissolved: ‘That’s the only way we’ll bring them into line within a few decades. Then they’ll be eating out of our hands.’19 Hitler also used his speech on 1 May for a broadside against the Churches: ‘As long as they stick to their religious matters the state will not trouble them. If they try by whatever means such as letters, encyclicals, and so on to claim rights that are the business of the state alone, we will force them back into the spiritual and pastoral activities appropriate to them. Nor is it their business to criticise the state’s morality when they have more than enough reasons to look to their own morals. . . . It’s up to the leaders of the German state to look after the morals of the German state and German nation . . .’20
What was meant by this was stated more precisely by Goebbels in the Sportspalast on 28 May in a speech that is generally regarded as the high point of the campaigns against the Churches.21 Hitler had in fact dictated the core statements to him. Even the Propaganda Minister was surprised at the sharp tone of the ‘declaration of hostilities’ that Hitler put in his mouth.22 In this speech, which was given great prominence in the media, Hitler announced through Goebbels that ‘perpetrators of sex offences and those behind them pulling the strings’ would be brought to book. Goebbels had no scruples about adopting the pose of the disgusted father and detailing examples of ‘hair-raising moral depravity’: ‘After confession under-age young people were forced into sexual acts in the sacristies; the victims of seduction were rewarded for their compliance with the immoral desires of these sex criminals with pictures of saints, and after being violated these young people were blessed and the sign of the cross was made over them.’ ‘This sex plague must and will be eradicated, root and branch’, Goebbels announced, and if the Church showed itself too weak to tackle the matter, the state would see to it. His appearance culminated in the threat that it might be deemed necessary ‘to force some very prominent members of the clergy to give an account of themselves under oath in court’.23
Only one day later Hitler had the German chargé d’affaires in the Vatican deliver a note in which he complained bitterly about the Chicago Cardinal George William Mundelein, who had voiced criticisms of conditions in Germany.24 In Hitler’s view his speech ‘removed the basis for normal relations between the German government and the Curia’, as the Vatican was allowing ‘those sweeping public attacks on the head of the German state by one if its most eminent officials to go unchallenged’ and was thereby supporting them.25
The Churches Ministry was prompted by this incident to suggest to Hitler that he terminate the Concordat.26 After some hesitation, at a meeting with Kerrl he gave instructions that first a law concerning the relationship of Church and state should be drafted including provisions to abolish Church Tax and also state support for the Churches; then on Reformation Day he would make a keynote speech to the Reichstag, after which he would send a note terminating the Concordat.27 Yet in the end he decided not to take such a radical step.
On 2 June Hitler gave a speech to the Gauleiters in the Air Ministry about Church policy, once again setting out some fundamental principles. He wanted ‘no Church in the Party. He had no desire to be a Church reformer to regenerate the Churches.28 Make them submit to the state’s laws. No new religions to be founded.’29 Accordingly, the propaganda campaign against the Catholic Church continued.30
Even though Hitler did not intend to found a new religion, during these months he was nevertheless more than usually preoccupied with religious matters and metaphysical problems. And in the process he appears to have concluded, independently of any religious affiliation or concrete notion of God, that he himself was the instrument of a superhuman providence. The idea that the course being followed by the NSDAP was in harmony with ‘providence’ occurs again and again in Hitler’s speeches from 1933 onwards. In August and October 1935 and in his ‘election appearances’ after the occupation of the Rhineland he had on numerous occasions expressed in public the conviction that he was the instrument of providence.31 The formulations he used on 27 June at the Gau Party Congress in Würzburg, however, are far more explicit than those in the speeches referred to above. However weak the individual may be, Hitler explained to the crowd gathered in front of the Residenz, ‘he becomes immeasurably strong the moment he acts in accordance with this providence! Then the power that has marked out every great event in the world pours down upon him.’ Hitler of course related this phenomenon to himself: ‘And when I look back on the five years that lie behind us I may surely say: “That was not merely the work of men!” If providence had not shown us the way, I would often have failed to find these vertiginous paths. . . . For deep in our hearts we National Socialists are believers too! We cannot be otherwise; no-one can make national or world history if he does not have the blessing of this providence on his intentions and actions.’32
It is possible to speculate about whether by invoking providence Hitler wanted to fill the gap he may have felt in his own inner life as a result of his rejection (reiterated so vehemently during the conflict with the Churches) of any concrete notion of religious faith. What is certain, however, is that ‘providence’ was designed to help win the political and ideological struggle against the influence of the Churches. They were not to be allowed sovereignty in metaphysical matters; on the contrary, the regime was allied to omnipotent supernatural powers!
In July, however, while still at the Bayreuth Festival, Hitler issued an order to halt the prosecutions of priests. The situation with regard to the Protestant Church had escalated at the beginning of July, when Pastor Niemöller, the main representative of the Confessing Church, was arrested. However, in the meantime Hitler had once more moved away from his idea of neutralizing the Churches before the start of the ‘great world struggle’. In fact it was his anticipation of those decisive foreign conflicts that persuaded him that it was more important to find a modus vivendi with the Churches in the interests of national unity.33 Although in August Goebbels provided him with material for more ‘priest trials’, he decided for the time being not to act on it.34 The same was true of the termination of the Concordat and the vexed question of the Schools Law.35
In August the Reich School Law was on Hitler’s desk to be signed off; after Eltz-Rübenach’s resignation every minister had signed the draft by the summer. By now, however, Hitler was dithering over whether to sign. Although by 1938 the regime had to a large extent succeeded in imposing community schools, it was crucial in the light of Hitler’s conflict with the Churches that the initiative for them did not appear to come from the Reich government but rather from the states and local authorities.36 When in November Goebbels suggested further measures against the Churches Hitler spoke in favour of ‘reticence’: ‘Let’s not disturb the Christmas season with such things.’37 At the beginning of December at lunch Hitler expatiated ‘once more on the problem of the Churches’, defending his failure to act on tactical grounds: ‘He’s getting closer and closer to a separation of Church and state. But then Protestantism will be destroyed and we’ll no longer have any counterweight to the Vatican.’38 From Hitler’s perspective, in view of the massive rearmament and preparations for war, there could be no question of upsetting the status quo regarding the Churches. As he explained to Goebbels later in December, he wanted ‘peace for the moment . . . with regard to the Churches’.39
More than that, since the temporary truce in the conflict, Hitler had considered it expedient to declare himself, to some extent, ‘positively disposed’, in his personal attitude to religion and Christianity. Opening the Winter Aid programme on 5 October 1937, for example, he claimed to believe in a ‘Christianity based on action’ that had ‘more right than other kinds to say “That is the kind of Christianity that comes from an open and honest profession of faith . . .”’40 Talking confidentially to Party associates the tone was different. As one of those present recorded, he declared to Party propaganda chiefs at the end of October that after serious inner conflict and fully conscious that his life expectancy was limited he had liberated himself from all childish religious ideas he might still hold. ‘I now feel as fresh as a foal in a meadow.’41
On 23 November he declared to the Party’s district leaders and Gau functionaries that a state was being established that ‘does not see its foundations as being in Christianity or in the idea of a state, but in a united national community’. This new state would be ‘merciless in its treatment of all opponents and any religious or party-based fragmentation’. He promised the Churches ‘absolute freedom in matters of doctrine or in their conception of God. For we are quite certain that we know nothing about that.’ One thing, however, ‘was firmly settled: the Churches might have some influence on individual Germans in the hereafter, but in the here and now these individuals were in the hands of the German nation via its leaders. In a time of rapid change only such a clear and clean separation can make life viable.’ This did not mean, however, that he wished to deny the existence of a God. Rather, humanity was confronted ‘with an immensely powerful, an omnipotent force, so strange and profound that we as human beings cannot grasp it. That’s a good thing! For it can give people consolation in difficult times. It avoids that superficiality and arrogance that leads people to assume that, although they are no more than tiny microbes on this earth and in this universe, they can rule the world and determine the laws of nature, when they can at best study them. So we want our nation to remain humble and really believe there is a God.’42
Consolation and humility for the nation: this was religion conceived in purely instrumental terms. It was clearly irrelevant for a man called by a mysterious providence to lead the nation.
It was no coincidence that during 1937, and in parallel with his bitter conflict with the Churches, Hitler endeavoured to determine the course of Nazi cultural politics. By presenting himself as a generous supporter, indeed as the creator, of a new National Socialist culture he was obviously aiming to counteract the negative responses his ‘cultural campaign’ against the Churches had provoked at home and abroad and in particular to limit the damage to his personal image. Above all, however, his efforts to inaugurate ‘true’ German art and to give a radical new face to German cities through massive building projects were linked to a desire to provide meaning. Nazi art and architecture were to herald the start of a cultural renaissance, symbolize the founding era of a great empire, and set the standard for millennia. It is hardly accidental that Hitler began his cultural offensive at the point when he was embarking on his policy of expansion. The conqueror also wanted to found a culture.
Hitler began 1937 with a significant cultural announcement: In the Reichstag session on 30 January he announced through Göring that he had created a lucrative ‘German National Prize for Art and Learning’ that henceforth would be conferred annually on ‘three worthy Germans’. The prize was a response to the conferring of the Nobel Peace Prize in November 1936 on the pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who was in a concentration camp. This gesture had prompted Hitler to issue a decree forbidding all Germans ‘at any time in the future’ to accept a Nobel Prize, the most important international recognition of achievements in scholarship, science, and the work for peace. The German National Prize was intended to be a fitting substitute.43
The first laureates were named by Hitler in September 1937 at the Party Congress.44 In addition to the Party’s ideology expert, Alfred Rosenberg, these were the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, the surgeons Ferdinand Sauerbruch and August Bier (who shared the prize), the Antarctic explorer Wilhelm Filchner, and (posthumously) the architect Paul Ludwig Troost. Hitler then presented the prizes as part of the ceremonies marking 30 January 1938.45
The opening in summer 1937 of the House of German Art with the ‘First Great German Art Exhibition’, a prestigious show of art works created under National Socialism, was designed to establish the future direction of art in the ‘Third Reich’. Since 1933 Hitler had regularly used his annual speech on culture at the Reich Party Congress to pass judgement – sarcastically, dismissively, angrily, – on any kind of modern art. Yet apart from general evocations of the artistic achievements of past epochs, in particular of the classical world, which he especially admired, he had never made any serious attempt to develop what might be called a National Socialist aesthetic. This is what he wanted to do now by making the exhibition and its opening ceremony his personal concern.
On 5 June Hitler flew to Munich accompanied by Goebbels to inspect the Führer building, designed by Troost, on Königsplatz as well as the recently completed House of German Art. He was determined to take a personal look at the selection the jury, led by the chair of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, Adolf Ziegler, had arrived at for the exhibition. He was, however, far from pleased with the jury’s work, as Goebbels records. The choice of paintings was in part ‘catastrophic’ and some of them ‘were positively horrific’. He would rather postpone the exhibition by a year than ‘exhibit such garbage’.46 In the end Hitler decided to reduce the number of exhibits, leaving the choice to his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, whose taste in art he had long known and for the most part shared.47
The difficulty of securing works for display that provided evidence of the allegedly high level of artistic achievement under Nazism gave Hitler and Goebbels the idea of mounting a parallel exhibition of the kind of art that was not wanted in the Third Reich. At the end of June Hitler gave his approval to Goebbels’s suggestion that the exhibition of ‘the art of the era of decline’ originally planned for Berlin be moved at short notice to Munich.48 Management of the exhibition was to be taken on by Ziegler and by Hans Herbert Schweitzer, the former cartoonist from Der Angriff, although Hitler expressed some reservations about the latter’s suitability.49 On the basis of ‘the Führer’s express authority’ Goebbels granted Ziegler special permission to ‘secure’ the relevant art works (‘the art of German decline since 1910’) from all the museums in public ownership in Germany.50 The commission thereupon visited thirty-two collections and requisitioned 700 works of art.51
On 11 July Hitler once again visited the Führer building and the House of German Art. He was again accompanied by Goebbels, who had been made to interrupt a holiday on the Baltic coast with his family a few days before and resume it at Hitler’s villa on the Obersalzberg.52 Hitler’s obvious purpose was to give Goebbels, who had the reputation of not being completely indifferent to modern artistic trends, a thorough lesson in the aesthetics of Nazi art. During this visit Hitler appeared much more satisfied with the works chosen for the Great German Art Exhibition.53 The same was true of the exhibits for its negative counterpart, which he inspected on 16 July in the Hofgarten arcades, very close to the House of German Art, a few days before the official opening of the exhibition, which had been given the title ‘Degenerate Art’. In the end, after Ziegler’s rapid raids on German museums, there were 600 works, including those by Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Otto Dix, Paul Klee, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lyonel Feininger, and Franz Marc. In order to reduce the impact of the pictures they were hung very close together and arbitrarily. The titles and comments were painted on the walls. By the end of November this exhibition had attracted over two million visitors, after which it went on tour to other cities.54 The fact that many visitors did not come to the exhibition to get worked up about ‘degenerate art’ but rather to say farewell to these works that met with official disapproval does not appear to have disturbed Hitler, by contrast with Goebbels.55 Hitler was pleased by the number of visitors and gave instructions for a catalogue to be issued.56 Meanwhile, Ziegler still had the task of ‘cleansing’ the public museums and in 1938 this was put on a legal basis. The requisitioned works were sold on the international art market.57
On 18 July Hitler finally opened the Great German Art Exhibition and along with it the House of German Art. A total of 1,200 works were shown, a mixture of sculpture, painting, and graphic art, predominantly historical and genre paintings, landscapes, various ‘Blood and Soil’ themes, heroicizing depictions of the Nazi movement and its rise, portraits and busts of ‘great Germans’. Hitler was the subject of no fewer than twelve.
In his speech opening the exhibition Hitler declared that National Socialism intended to provide ‘German art’ to contrast with the ‘cultural decline’ of the Weimar period. This art would be ‘eternal’. But what did ‘German’ mean in this context? ‘To be German is to be clear’, he suggested. This principle, which he had in fact stressed in his culture speech at the 1934 Party Congress,58 meant that ‘to be German is thus to be logical and above all to be genuine’. National Socialism, he said, had created the material but more particularly the ideological preconditions for a recovery of this ‘genuine German art’, for art itself had now been given ‘new and great tasks’. The opening of the exhibition marked ‘the start of putting an end to idiocy in German art and thus of the destruction of our nation’s culture. From now on we shall wage a merciless war to purge every last element responsible for corrupting our culture.’ In then expressing the wish that the new gallery might be granted the opportunity ‘of again revealing many works by great artists to the German nation in the centuries to come’, he was clearly indicating that he was deeply dissatisfied with the artistic products of the present.59 The speech that followed by Goebbels was similar in tone.60 The ceremonies in Munich were rounded off with a parade on the theme ‘2000 Years of German Culture’.
Now that he had the House of German Art at his disposal, Hitler repeatedly took the opportunity until the outbreak of war to make programmatic statements on matters of art and culture. In July 1938 and 1939 he again opened the Great German Art Exhibition in person, in September 1937 and 1938 he gave his ‘culture speech’ at the Party Congress, and on 22 January 1938 in the House of German Art he opened the first Architecture and Crafts Exhibition, which then went on to be held annually. As early as December 1938 he spoke in the run-up to the second exhibition.
Even though he repeatedly attacked modern art in these speeches, in 1938 he saw himself as particularly under pressure to justify in detail the campaign against ‘Degenerate Art’ begun the previous year. In view of the criticism levelled not only abroad but also in artistic circles in Germany at the ruthless ‘purging’ of German museums, he did not wish to appear a cultural barbarian.61 Once again he used convoluted explanations to indicate that he was in no way satisfied with the level of what was on display. His aim was rather to maintain ‘a nation’s broad artistic heritage on a solid and respectable foundation’ so that ‘true geniuses can then emerge’.62
However, one year later, as is shown by his speech at the third Great German Art Exhibition in 1939, there had been no progress beyond a ‘respectable general standard’. What was needed was ‘the application of more stringent criteria from one exhibition to the next and the selection of the outstanding work from the generally competent products’.63 In saying this Hitler was pinning his hopes on the idea that the new Nazi art would one day be capable of connecting aesthetically with the nineteenth century,64 with the art he himself particularly admired and of which he claimed to be a good judge and a connoisseur.65 If we look more closely at Hitler’s preferences in this field the biographical links and the political and ideological premises of his understanding of art become clear. In addition to the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, Hitler’s favourites included the ‘German-Romans’ Arnold Böcklin and Anselm Feuerbach as well as a whole series of later Romantic and genre painters. He thus particularly admired Moritz von Schwind (whose work he most likely knew from his days in Linz and Vienna)66 and he enjoyed Carl Spitzweg’s small-town idylls, Eduard Grützner’s carousing monks, and Franz Defregger’s scenes of peasant life. He was also very taken with the Munich landscape painter Carl Rottmann and with Rudolf von Alt, whose views of the city of Vienna had at one time served as Hitler’s models for his own watercolours.67 He also admired the great Munich portrait painters Friedrich August von Kaulbach and Franz von Lenbach, Hans Makart, whose prestige paintings had contributed to Vienna’s artistic life in the period when the Ringstrasse was built, and Adolph Menzel, above all for his historical depictions of Frederick the Great, whom Hitler revered.
It is not difficult to discern in this selection the influence of the taste predominant in Vienna and even more so in Munich at the turn of the century. In Munich, for example, the Schack Gallery, which Hitler knew well and which came to play an important role in his museum plans, housed works by Böcklin, Feuerbach, Lenbach, Rottmann, Schwind, and Spitzweg.68 In addition to these Viennese and Munich influences the great ‘Exhibition of the Century’ of 1906 in the Berlin National Gallery, in which German painting from the first half of the nineteenth century was rediscovered and made available to a wide public as an important phase in the development of German art, had left a deep impression on him. At the time popular art journals of the kind Hitler read carried extensive articles on this exhibition.69 From Hitler’s point of view the artists he favoured distinguished themselves through the fact that they had worked before or outside Modernism in art and that they had not been produced by the academies of art that he so hated (although in a number of cases he was wrong about this). Instead he assumed that for the most part the artists he admired had either pursued their own path as unrecognized geniuses in the face of opposition or had only achieved the fame they deserved after their deaths. The points of contact with his own perception of himself as a man of genius who was prevented by adverse circumstances from pursuing an artistic career but who had brought his ‘artistic’ abilities – imagination and intuition – into politics, are only too obvious.
Hitler built up a collection of paintings of his own mirroring these preferences. The way these pictures were hung in his various official and private residences betrays a strong awareness of display and effect. The pictures in his Munich flat reflected completely his personal taste in art, while any visitor was likely to imagine he was seeing the collection (which stopped at the end of the nineteenth century) of a wealthy Munich citizen. The Prinzregentenplatz was home to Böcklin’s dramatic ‘Battle of the Centaurs’, which depicts an elemental and barbaric struggle between two blond and three dark centaurs, Lenbach’s portrait of Bismarck in the uniform of a cuirassier, a portrait of Richard Wagner, Feuerbach’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’, also a Brueghel, a country scene by Defregger, two Grützners, Böcklin’s ‘Spring Dance’, several Spitwegs, and a portrait of Geli by Ziegler.70
In the imposing Great Hall at the Berghof the positioning of the paintings was based on matching prominent nineteenth-century works with their models, old Italian masters – a combination that was designed to demonstrate to visitors their host’s expert knowledge of art history.71 Feuerbach’s portrait of a woman, ‘Nanna’, was there (most likely chosen by Hitler at least in part because of the obvious similarity to Geli), also Schwind’s ‘The Arts in the Service of Religion’, ‘Venus’ by Titian’s pupil Paris Bordone, Bordone’s ‘Lady with an Apple’ (which replaced ‘Nanna’ in 1938), a number of works by Giovanni Paolo Pannini, the most important Italian painter of ruins in the eighteenth century, which pleased Hitler by showing how buildings could have ‘value as ruins’, and a Madonna tondo from the sixteenth century. Two portraits of Hitler’s parents by an amateur artist completed the display. In Hitler’s office at the Berghof there was a portrait of Field-Marshal von Moltke by Lenbach, while in the entrance halls there were two Bismarck portraits by the same painter.
In the Führer building in Munich the paintings were mainly on loan from the Schack Gallery and the Bavarian State Collection. Adolf Ziegler’s triptych ‘The Four Elements’, an attempt to find images for Nazi ideology, was one of the few contemporary pictures from Hitler’s own collection that he had put up in a significant location in the Party headquarters. The pictures in Hitler’s office offered a visual lesson in politics and history: once again a portrait of Bismarck by Lenbach, a picture by Menzel of Frederick the Great, and Defregger’s ‘From the Wars of Liberation 1809’, a scene from the Tyrol uprising, and also a Spitzweg.72
In the Reich Chancellery Hitler was keen to add dignity to his immediate working environment by adding portraits of historical figures. His office was graced by a full-length portrait from the state collection of Bismarck, an earlier incumbent; in the drawing room there was an oval, contemporary portrait of Frederick the Great in old age that Hitler had acquired and which he kept by him up to 1945, wherever he was living. In addition, in 1935 he acquired portraits by Lenbach of Kaiser Wilhelm I and Friedrich III for the office. In the function rooms in the Reich Chancellery there were three works whose somewhat obscure symbolism inevitably attracted the attention of visitors. The dining room was dominated by Friedrich August Kaulbach’s ‘Triumph of Music’ from Hitler’s private collection. For the large reception room created in 1935 Hitler chose Feuerbach’s ‘Plato’s Feast’, a painting three metres by six in size on loan from the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe. In 1936 he acquired Böcklin’s ominous painting ‘Island of the Dead’, which hung over the fireplace in the reception hall.73
In the new Reich Chancellery, inaugurated in Berlin in 1939, Speer put together a collection of paintings consisting mainly of loans from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The tapestries and paintings, ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century and predominantly based on classical themes, were designed to underline the claim of the ‘Greater German Empire’ to historical greatness.74
When the Anschluss in February 1938 brought Austria into the German Reich, Hitler was in a position to consider realizing the plans we know he had pursued since the 1920s for an important gallery of nineteenth century German painting in Linz.75 While on a journey to Italy in May 1938, he made extended visits to museums and these may well have given him the decisive impetus to turn these plans into reality. He regarded his own collection as the basis for the Linz project, which naturally called for a new building, and so he extended it significantly. He issued an instruction securing for himself first refusal on the confiscated Jewish art collections in Austria and made use of this prerogative via an expert on Hess’s staff.76
As a result of his visit on 18 June 1938 to the Dresden State Art Gallery with its superb collection of Old Masters, Hitler enlarged considerably his plans for a museum in Linz. The very same day he issued a confidential instruction reserving for himself the decision on how works confiscated from their Jewish owners would be dealt with. He used this instrument primarily to secure Old Masters for the Linz museum. The first floor of this building was now to house a collection of European Masters up to the end of the eighteenth century, while the second floor would contain German art of the nineteenth century. He reinstated Hans Posse, the longstanding director of the Dresden Gallery, who a short time before had been pensioned off after disputes with the Nazis in Saxony, in his former post and charged him with the task of setting up the ‘Führer’s Museum’, as the project was called, in Linz.77 Hitler did not envisage a large-scale, world-class museum. Instead the Linz gallery was to be regarded as an important addition to the existing range of museums in what was now the Greater German Reich and as the generous gift of a passionate and knowledgeable collector. He was confident that posterity would turn a blind eye to the fact that his passion as a collector rested on criminal impulses.
Given the fact that even he was not truly convinced by the works of the artists in his Reich, Hitler used his frequent speeches on culture (for example his addresses to the Party Rally in 1935 and 1936) to highlight Nazi achievements in the field of architecture and to emphasize how excellent and unique they were.78 ‘Never in German history were greater and nobler buildings planned, begun, and completed than in our time’, he declared at the 1937 Party Rally. They should not be ‘thought of as designed to last to 1940, not even to 2000, but rather they shall reach up like the cathedrals of our past into future millennia.’79
In fact, 1937 was the year in which he gave renewed and decisive impetus to Nazism’s great architectural projects, some of which had been initiated in 1933. In doing so, Hitler was not only emphasizing his role in cultural politics but was aiming as ‘Master Builder of the Third Reich’80 to give expression through imposing building projects to his ambitions for Germany as a great power in this decisive phase of his plans for expansion. His aesthetic model for realizing these plans was the classical world, for to his mind this era, by contrast with the gloomy mysticism of Christianity, stood out by virtue of its ‘clarity, greatness, and monumentality’.81 In his view, this approach was called for if only because of his conviction that the Greeks, Romans, and Teutons, the real ‘founders of culture’, all belonged to the same Aryan ‘original race’ and it alone was capable of ‘immortal’ achievements.82 This attitude was at the root of Hitler’s preference for classicizing architecture. Yet unlike Karl Friedrich Schinkel,83 whom he considered exemplary, Hitler pursued an idea of classicism determined solely by the desire to use architecture as an embodiment of power. The style he favoured as dictator and prescribed to his architects, such as Troost and Speer, looked out of proportion, and oversized, in other words it conveyed the impression of an impoverished and gloomy classicism that almost seemed a caricature of its classical ‘models’.
Hitler’s main building project, the large-scale remodelling of Berlin, had not, however, proceeded in the previous years on the scale and at the pace he required. Because of persistent problems with the city administration and his difficult relationship with its head, Julius Lippert, Hitler came up with the idea in 1936 of creating a new body to be responsible for the development. He had probably given the first commission by March 1936 to Albert Speer.84
In his 1937 speech to the Reichstag marking 30 January, Hitler announced that Speer had been appointed General Buildings Inspector for the Reich capital; it was to be his responsibility ‘to bring into the chaotic Berlin sprawl those magnificent clean lines that will do justice to the spirit of the National Socialist movement and the essence of the Reich capital’. Twenty years were envisaged for the execution of the plans. Speer, who was given extraordinary powers, was not subordinate to any ministry or regional authority but was answerable to Hitler alone.85 Within one year these powers were increased by law and extended to other cities also, Hitler expressly reserving the right to determine which cities should be included during what period in Speer’s redevelopment programme.86
At the end of April 1938 Hitler announced in the Munich press how he envisaged the redevelopment of the ‘Capital of the Movement’. By constructing a new railway station three kilometres to the west of its previous location, space would be created where the platforms and tracks had been for a ‘a street of truly monumental buildings’, as the official press release put it. These prestigious new buildings would lead up to a ‘monument to the Movement’ at least 175 metres high. In addition there were plans for the Party offices to be extended in the Maxvorstadt district and for a complete overhaul of the traffic arrangements.87 The memoirs of the architect Hermann Giesler reveal that since November 1938 Hitler had been discussing the plans for Munich in great detail.88 At the end of December he officially included the city in the redevelopment programme and appointed Giesler as ‘Director of Works’ with overall responsibility.89
At an early stage Hitler already had plans to redevelop Hamburg, the second largest city in the Reich.90 When visiting the city in June 1935, he appears to have ordered a viaduct to be built. In June 1936 he showed a preliminary sketch to Fritz Todt, who was responsible for planning, and in July 1939 the basic outline of the redevelopment plan had been established. Essentially it amounted to creating a north–south axis in Altona with prestigious buildings ending at the River Elbe in a tower 250 metres high that would be the Gau headquarters of the NSDAP.91
At the turn of 1938/39 Hitler charged the Munich professor Roderich Fick with taking forward the plans to redevelop Linz, thus realizing the architectural fantasies that the teenage Hitler had produced for his home town. From the autumn of 1940 onwards Fick was increasingly in competition with Giesler, whose planning for Munich had in the meantime won him Hitler’s special trust. For that reason Hitler gave him more and more responsibility for the Linz project.92
Finally, in February 1939 Hitler included the Gau capitals Augsburg, Bayreuth, Breslau, Dresden, Graz, and Würzburg in the redevelopment plans.93 At the beginning of 1941 Speer could already count twenty-seven towns and cities that Hitler had designated by decree as ‘cities to be restructured’.94 The redesigned provincial city centres adhered to a standard format; the Gau headquarters, a large hall for meetings, and a free-standing bell tower were to be grouped in the centre round a ‘Gau forum’, a parade ground. In Weimar this arrangement had been in existence since 1936 and it served as the model for planning (which usually got no further) in other cities. The new parade ground was located as a rule at the end of a broad approach road with additional monumental buildings. In this way a symbol of the new order would develop alongside the historic city centre.95 In the later 1930s NSDAP local politicians and town planners were already also beginning to apply this model (parade ground, Party offices, axis road) to county towns and smaller communities.96 Nazism’s architecture of domination was to cover the Reich. Furthermore, Hitler made the remodelling of even provincial towns a personal concern of his, intervening in the planning and contributing sketches.97
In the spring of 1937 building work began in Berlin on the first large prestige project embarked on in anticipation of the extensive redevelopment plans, namely the New Reich Chancellery, Hitler’s monumental official seat.98 Since moving into Wilhelmstrasse Hitler had been extremely unhappy with his official residence, which fell far short of his expectations of grandeur. In an article he published in 1939 in the journal Art in the Third Reich concerning the building of the New Reich Chancellery, he complained that the historic Chancellery had been in a sorry state, while the modern extension created between 1928 and 1930 looked like ‘a warehouse or a municipal fire station’.99 As early as autumn 1933 Speer had begun extensive alterations, in part based on Troost’s plans, to the various parts of the building used by Hitler for official business, for state occasions, and as his private apartments. After he also assumed the office of Reich President in 1934, an annexe was added for receptions and in 1935 a balcony on the street side, for which Hitler himself had supplied a sketch.
In July 1935 Hitler then proposed that the new building be constructed along Vossstrasse, in other words built onto the old Chancellery building on the west side.100 A preliminary sketch from that year exists with essential features of the new building, although not yet on the scale it acquired later.101 At the start of 1936 Speer, on instructions from Hitler, began to make concrete plans that in turn were approved stage by stage by Hitler personally.102 Although originally the work was scheduled not to begin until 1939, in October 1936 Hitler decided to bring it forward. It was to be completed in phases over three or four years. Hitler’s decision to provide himself with an impressive official residence was thus strikingly aligned with his decisions to implement the Four-Year Plan.103
The first phase began in the spring of 1937, Hitler giving instructions at the same time for work to be accelerated. It is significant, however, that the scale of the project as a whole was at first not made public.104 It was only when the topping out was celebrated on 2 August that Hitler was prompted to make the project public. In a speech not published verbatim and made in the Deutschland Hall to the workers involved in the project, Hitler explained the extraordinary speed of construction by referring to his wish to hold a reception for diplomats there in the coming January and to show the world how his state tackled projects of whatever kind with ‘German speed’.105 In fact the building was completed on time on 7 January 1939 and five days later the annual reception for diplomats did take place there.106 The monumental building in the Nazi classical style stretched for more than 400 metres along Vossstrasse. Official visitors were received in a grand courtyard and then had to walk more than 200 metres through a series of lavishly appointed rooms – foyer, mosaic room, circular room, marble gallery, reception room – before reaching the hub of the complex, Hitler’s office, a space 27 metres long and 14.5 metres wide and almost ten metres high.107
In the meantime Speer’s plans for the capital, begun in 1936, were far advanced. In November 1937 Hitler considered that the time had come to make an official announcement about the redevelopment of Berlin. At the ceremony on 27 November 1937 to lay the foundation stone for the new Defence Faculty at the Technical University, he made it known that it was his ‘unalterable will and decision to equip Berlin with those streets, buildings, and public squares that will make it appear fitted and worthy for all time to be the capital of the German Reich. The size of these developments and projects is not to be judged according to the needs of 1937, 1938, 1939 or 1940, but shall be determined by the knowledge that our task is to build the nation a city to last a thousand years for the incalculable future ahead of it; that nation has existed for a thousand years and has a thousand years of history and culture behind it and must have a city of commensurate stature.’ In the years following he often reiterated the claim to be building for millennia, in particular in his official speeches on art.108 The new plans for Berlin were presented in their entirety to the public in January 1938.109 In addition to the east–west axis, the expansion of which had already begun in 1937 and was inaugurated on Hitler’s birthday on 20 April 1939, a north–south axis 120 metres wide was planned and lined with the most important monumental buildings. At the intersection of these axes a domed hall 320 metres high and able to hold more than 150,000 people would be built as the new landmark of the city. The ‘Führer Palace’, planned to stand close to the domed hall and opposite the old Reichstag building, would have been considerably bigger than the New Chancellery. The ‘diplomats’ walk’ would have been more than 500 metres long, while there were plans for a dining room for 2,000 as well as its own theatre.110
In December 1938, in a speech at the opening of the second Architecture Exhibition in Munich, Hitler responded to criticism of his mania for building with reflections on power politics: ‘Another objection is to ask, “Must we build so much just at this moment?” Yes! We must build now more than ever before because in times past nothing was built or things were built depressingly badly. And secondly: . . . People will associate it with the era in which the German nation had its greatest resurrection and founded a huge, great, strong empire!’111 For, as he explained on 10 February 1939 to army officers he had invited to inspect the Reich Chancellery, it was not megalomania that prompted these building projects. Rather, he based his thinking ‘dispassionately’ on the assumption ‘that it is only through such imposing projects that a nation can be given the self-confidence’ to believe it is not ‘of second-class status’. In Hamburg, for example, he was building the ‘biggest bridge in the world’ as well as ‘skyscrapers . . . as mighty as American ones’, to show that the Germans were not lagging behind the Americans. ‘We can do just as well’.112
Hitler’s decision during the course of 1937 to place new emphasis on culture can, as already mentioned, be considered an attempt to impress on the Churches the cultural and ideological superiority of National Socialism precisely at the point when it was in conflict with them. In the process Hitler had for tactical reasons avoided making any public statement about his obviously anti-Christian attitude; instead, it seemed to him more opportune for the time being to present Nazis as the better Christians. At the same time, however, in the summer of 1937 he had appeared to be claiming the support of supernatural forces in the form of ‘providence’, and at internal Party events in the autumn he had clearly distanced himself from Christianity. By his own admission, his somewhat pessimistic estimate of his own life expectancy made him feel resentful at that time, reinforcing this anti-Christian attitude. Even so, the idea of developing Nazism into a sort of religion, a quasi-religious ‘myth’ or ‘cult’, something like a Germanic faith, did not appeal to him. He refused to be the founder of a religion, nor did he wish to be made into a god. His comments on the matter do, however, show that there were those around him who toyed with this idea.
Yet his standpoint on this subject during previous years had not been entirely consistent. From 1933 onwards, big Nazi rallies had increasingly employed quasi-religious rituals and Hitler had not only not rejected this trend but had actively promoted it. This was particularly true of the Nuremberg Party Rallies, one example being the ritual honouring of the dead, which always took place on a Sunday during the SA and SS roll call in the Luitpold Arena. Hitler, accompanied only by the SA chief of staff and by the Reichsführer SS, would cross the arena where the SA and SS formations were assembled and stand before an enormous wreath and, flanked by two lighted sacrificial bowls, pay silent homage to the dead at the city of Nuremberg’s war memorial. The ritual of touching the new Party flags with the ‘Blood Flag’ from 1923, which Hitler initiated, was clearly influenced by liturgical practice.113 Since 1935 a choric element had been integrated into the mustering of the Reich Labour Service (RAD), a so-called ‘hour of consecration’ or, as Hierl, the RAD leader called it in his speech in 1938, a ‘service’. Hitler nevertheless avoided speaking about these ritual elements in his addresses to the RAD men. From 1934 onwards, when the evening March of the Political Leadership onto Zeppelin Field took place, they were framed by a ‘cathedral of light’ created by anti-aircraft searchlights.
Robert Ley, the head of the Party organization, had been emphasizing these rituals since 1936 and Hitler’s speeches to the Party functionaries reflected this trend.114 Thus in 1936, for example, he conjured up the mythical connection between himself and his audience, speaking to them as if they were a group of disciples whom he had brought into the light: ‘In this moment, how can we not again feel conscious of the miracle that brought us together! You heard a man’s voice back then and it touched your heart. It awakened you and you followed that voice. You carried on for years without even having seen the owner of that voice; you only listened to one voice and followed it. When we meet here we are filled with the wonder of this gathering. Not every one of you can see me and I cannot see every one of you. But I sense you and you sense me! We are now one.’ In this night-time setting the mythic union of ‘Führer’ and retinue, evoked by Hitler to create a rhetorical climax, acquired positively erotic dimensions.115
In 1935 he resumed the solemn march in remembrance of 9 November 1923 and even extended the ceremony.116 This had first taken place in 1933 and had then been shortened the following year because of its proximity to the events of 30 June. After his speech in the Bürgerbräukeller on the evening of 8 November he went first to the Feldherrnhalle, where the coffins of the sixteen ‘Fallen’ of 1923 had been set out and commemorated them in silence as part of a night-time act of mourning. He then made a further speech to members of the SS who had assembled in front of the hall to be sworn in.117 The next day, as in 1933, the march of remembrance took place from the Bürgerbräukeller to the Feldhernnhalle, where the marchers were saluted with sixteen salvos fired by an army artillery detachment. Hitler then laid a wreath and the coffins were taken to Königsplatz on gun carriages and there placed in bronze sarcophagi in the two newly constructed ‘temples of honour’. In 1936 a new element in the form of a kind of gesture of reconciliation was added: The Minister for War, Blomberg, and the general in command of the Munich district, Reichenau, joined the march of remembrance from the Feldherrnhalle to Königsplatz. From then on the format for this event did not change.
It is not difficult to discern in this ritual not only features reminiscent of military and civilian ceremonial, but also essential elements of Christian liturgies of sacrifice and resurrection. The annual speech Hitler made on the evening of 8 November to the ‘old fighters’ in the Bürgerbräukeller was reminiscent of the ritualized last supper of the faithful. This was followed the next day by the march of remembrance to the city centre, a solemn procession at which a symbol of salvation (the ‘Blood Flag’) was held aloft. The reading out of the names of all the victims of the ‘time of struggle’ over loudspeakers on pylons erected for this purpose along the route recalled the Stations of the Cross, and at the end Hitler, who marched at the head of the procession, conducted the act of commemoration on the ‘altar’ of the Feldherrnhalle. Then the procession took on the character of a triumphal march ending at Königsplatz at the temples honouring the victims. On arrival, Hitler entered the sunken interior of both temples in something like a descent to the shades. The construction of the two temples, which consisted of pillars and were open to the skies, can be interpreted as deriving from the religious notion of resurrection, though with very much an earthly meaning, as Hitler showed when they were inaugurated in 1935: ‘. . . as they marched then as defenceless civilians, may they now lie exposed to the elements – winds, storms, and rain, snow and ice, and also sunshine. . . . To us they are not dead and these temples are not crypts but rather two sentry posts, for here they stand guard over Germany and our nation.’118 In the roll-call of the dead that followed a thousand voices called out ‘Here’ after each name. This was done by members of the Hitler Youth assembled on Königsplatz who had become members of the Party that day. The idea that the dead lived on in the public avowals of the young also underlay the idea of using the same day to swear in first the new army recruits and at midnight the new members of the SS in front of the Feldherrnhalle.
Yet from Hitler’s point of view this well-rehearsed ‘Cult of dead heroes’ did not primarily serve to transfigure, as it were, the events of the past. The external form of this cult of death and resurrection was designed to emphasize a political message that was central to legitimizing his position as leader of the movement and to moulding the Nazi past as a success story. The failure of the putsch, as he repeated in endless variations like a mantra, already bore the seeds of future success. In 1923 he, Hitler, had not made a serious tactical error. He had not failed, but rather his courageous actions had prepared the ground for the later rise of National Socialism. The martyrdom of the sixteen victims had not been in vain! This message, which, reinforced by the bombastic commemoration, was raised to the status of a dogma, was in the final analysis the result of an avoidance strategy on Hitler’s part. What was a debacle at the time was through exaggerated, quasi-religious veneration to be transformed in people’s memories into a myth of sacrifice and heroism.
At the 1938 Party Rally, however, Hitler did set clear boundaries with regard to this trend towards introducing quasi-religious elements into Party ceremonies, even though he had tolerated it and even promoted it in previous years. In his address on culture he attacked ‘any mysticism that goes beyond the purpose and goal of our doctrine’. National Socialism was ‘certainly a popular movement but under no circumstances a religious movement’ and represented a ‘völkisch political doctrine derived exclusively from our understanding of race’. The NSDAP had ‘no places of worship but only halls for the people’, ‘no places of worship, but rather places for people to assemble and parade grounds’, ‘no sacred groves but rather sports stadia and playing fields’. No ‘cult activities’ were put on but rather ‘only people’s rallies’. If therefore any ‘mystically inclined devotees of the occult with their eyes on the afterlife’ were to ‘insinuate themselves’ into the movement this could not be tolerated. For ‘religious activities are not our responsibility, but that of the Churches!’ It was quite a different matter, however, to preserve certain types of ceremony as belonging to Party ‘tradition’.119
Thus, however much Hitler liked to make use of quasi-religious forms, his concern was not at all with metaphysics or with the founding of a new or substitute religion. Rather, his aim was to develop something like a Party tradition that could be passed on and create a clearly defined framework for public Party events. Speer, who created the Nuremberg that served as a backdrop, recalled while a prisoner in Spandau that in 1938 Hitler had explained to him how he intended to establish the Nuremberg ceremonial practices so firmly during his lifetime that they would become ‘an unchanging ritual’. If a weaker man succeeded him he would then have at his disposal a framework that would ‘support him and give him authority’.120
Ultimately, therefore, in Hitler’s mind cultic or quasi-religious rituals were rooted in politics. Their purpose was purely functional as a means of securing and extending his own power.