38
Hitler’s Empire
In June 1942, in other words at the moment when Hitler was launching the great eastern offensive intended to decide the outcome of the war, Himmler gave his settlement planners the task of producing an ‘overall settlement plan’ for continental Europe. He outlined the basic principles underlying it to SS functionaries in two important speeches given in his headquarters during August and September 1942. German settlement policy was to embrace not only occupied Poland, but also parts of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Estonia and Latvia, the Crimea, the ‘Ingermanland’ (in other words the region round Leningrad), but also Alsace and Lorraine, Upper Carniola and South Styria, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In his August speech, in relation to the occupied eastern territories, he referred specifically to a Führer command. However, we can naturally assume that the other settlement programmes had also been discussed with the ‘Führer’.1
These plans represented the core of the future ‘Greater Germanic Reich’. As far as the further ‘reorganization of Europe’ was concerned, Hitler himself only made extremely vague comments about the future arrangement of this extended empire, concerned not to tie himself to any commitments about the post-war order that might result in future claims or prove contradictory. However, two models can be reconstructed from his comments and from the preliminary plans of his entourage. On the one hand, there was the idea of uniting under German leadership all ‘Germanic’ European nations in a ‘Greater Germanic Reich’, which would have included Norway, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Flanders, perhaps also Switzerland, in addition to the territories involved in Himmler’s settlement policy. Hitler did not commit himself as to what form the integration of these states into the Greater Germanic Reich would have taken, whether they would have been allowed to keep some form of sovereignty or would simply have become ‘Reich Gaus’ as in the case of the Austrian, Czech, and Polish territories. The two leaders of the fascist movements in Norway and the Netherlands, Quisling and Mussert, did not get very far in their attempts to gain some kind of commitment for the post-war order. Quisling was bluntly informed that Hitler was unable to discuss his proposed peace treaty while the war was still going on,2 and Mussert’s proposal of a ‘Germanic confederation’ was given equally short shrift.3 Hitler also did not wish to make any firm decision about the future of Belgium. The question of whether Flanders was to become a ‘Reich Gau’ and the future status of Wallonia, in which Nazi racial ‘experts’ increasingly claimed to be discovering ‘Germanic elements’, remained equally unclear.4
On the other hand, the regime began using the slogan, the ‘New Europe’, in order to suggest to its allies the vague prospect of some participation in the post-war order. Thus, in November 1941, Hitler had ceremoniously admitted several countries to the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact, which he extended by five years, even though they had been unwilling to join the Tripartite Pact or enter a military pact with Germany. Apart from Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Manchukuo, and Spain, now Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Croatia, Slovakia, and the Japanese puppet government in Nanking all signed the agreement ‘against the Communist International’.5 However, the agreement did not contain any concrete arrangements for the post-war order.6 However much German propaganda bandied about the slogan ‘New Europe’, Hitler continued to insist that there should be no public discussion of the details of this European concept. In November 1942, he banned all European ‘demonstrations’, such as ‘congresses’ or inter-state associations.7 At the end of 1942, Ribbentrop presented him with a plan for a European peace settlement prepared by his ministry, according to which, among other things, Czechs and Poles would regain their independence; but Hitler rejected such efforts as superfluous.8 While Hitler gave Goebbels permission in January 1943 to prepare a ‘Programme for Europe’, he later cut a passage from a Goebbels speech dealing with the subject,9 and was equally unwilling to pursue an idea put forward by Ribbentrop in March 1943 for a ‘European confederation’.10
The relationship between the two concepts, the ‘Greater Germanic Reich’ and the ‘New Europe’, also remained completely obscure, as did that between the ‘non-Germanic’ nations and ‘Greater Germania’. Thus, for example, Hitler intentionally left the role that France would play in a future Europe unresolved; it was made clear to the French that this would depend on their behaviour towards the German occupation. Although Hitler was aware that substantial support by the Vichy regime for the Reich, ideally participation in the war against the western powers, would require reciprocation, in particular a peace treaty, he was not prepared to make any such commitment.11 At the same time, it was made clear in no uncertain terms to Germany’s ‘allies’ in south-east Europe that, when it came to the crunch, ‘Greater Germanic’ policy had priority over recognition of their sovereignty. Thus, from 1941/42 onwards, Himmler compulsorily recruited tens of thousands of so-called ethnic Germans in Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania for the Waffen SS, despite the fact that these men were citizens of the countries concerned; their governments simply had to put up with it.12
Despite Hitler’s failure to create uniformity in his empire – significantly, there was no central authority for the occupied territories, for final decisions rested with him – certain basic distinctions can be discerned. Territories that were considered to be part of the future ‘Greater Germanic Reich’ were subjected to civilian administration, that is to say the Party and SS wielded considerable influence and they were directly subordinate to Hitler via a Reich Commissioner. In the west this applied to the Reich Commissariats in the Netherlands and Norway, where an attempt was already being made during the war to begin the process of ‘Germanization’ with the aid of allied fascist movements. In the case of Denmark, which the Nazis considered ‘Germanic’, a special arrangement was made. To maintain the fiction of a ‘peaceful’ occupation of the country and to protect its resources, the German ambassador was appointed ‘Reich Plenipotentiary’, who, aided by a small staff, then informed the Danish government of his ‘wishes’. The General Government and the occupied former Soviet territories were also subjected to civilian administrations. However, here there was no interest in involving indigenous elements except at local level. These administrations acted as exploitative and repressive colonial-type regimes. Here, during the war, extensive ‘resettlement’ programmes were initiated in order to prepare for the post-war order. The territories outside the sphere of the future Greater Germanic Reich remained under military administration. Hitler’s idea of treating the various occupied territories on the basis of racial criteria was thus clearly reflected in the types of their occupation administrations. He was primarily concerned to prevent the emergence of established supranational structures, which, in the form of an occupation or alliance ‘system’, would bind him to promises, commitments, and obligations. Instead, he wanted to keep things fluid, responding to problems in the occupied territories on a case-by-case basis.
He judged the effectiveness of his occupation policy not least in terms of the considerable economic contribution that the countries he controlled made to his conduct of the war. Between 1941 and 1943, more than half the German supplies of iron ore came from annexed and occupied territories (above all from Lorraine, Luxemburg, and Norway). Through the annexations that had occurred by summer 1940, German steel producers increased their capacity from 23 million to 39 million tons per annum, in fact an amount too big to be utilized. From summer 1941 onwards, the largest manganese deposits in Europe in Nikopol in the Ukraine were able largely to supply the requirements of German industry for this rare non-ferrous metal. From 1941 onwards, chromium was provided by mines in Yugoslavia and Greece,13 while supplies of bauxite and copper came largely from France.14 The occupied territories in the Soviet Union, Poland, France, and Denmark played the most important role in supplying Germany with food during the war. During 1942/43, they provided more than 30 per cent of the grain and around a third of Germany’s meat consumption.15 By the end of 1943, the number of foreign civilian workers had reached over 5.4 million; a third were Soviet ‘eastern workers’, and more than a million came from the General Government.16 Moreover, by the end of 1943, there were more than 1.8 million POWs involved in the ‘labour mobilization’ programme, including over 564,000 from the Soviet Union and more than 664,000 from France.17 Germany also demanded heavy occupation payments from the occupied territories, which greatly outweighed the costs of their occupation forces. In fact, these payments, along with the German clearing debts that had not been paid, covered a substantial part of Germany’s war costs.18
Thus the Nazi regime’s wartime economic policy in Europe was basically a gigantic programme of plunder and exploitation. The massive intervention in the economies of the occupied countries, which were also cut off from foreign trade relations with states outside the German ‘bloc’, resulted in inflation and reduced production. Significantly, Germany only partially succeeded in utilizing the industrial capacity of the occupied countries through the distribution of orders to produce armaments for the Wehrmacht.19 In addition, the removal of food stocks worsened the supply situation, even causing famines, particularly as agricultural production in almost all the occupied countries declined during the war.20
Meanwhile, resistance was growing, particularly after the attack on the Soviet Union, and was dealt with by the German occupation authorities and police agencies with extreme brutality. In combatting partisan movements, underground organizations, strikes, or cases of civil disobedience, German forces had no compunction about involving wide sections of the population. The ruthless combatting of ‘bands’ and their alleged supporters, the so-called ‘reprisals’, in other words the shooting of hostages and the destruction of villages and urban districts, was characteristic of this approach. It also involved the large-scale deportation of local people to concentration camps, draconian sentences imposed by special courts, and, in the second half of the war, ‘counter-terror’, in other words the assassination of well-known personalities considered hostile to the German occupation.21 At the same time, local collaborators with the German occupation and its allied regimes in south-east Europe became complicit through their involvement in the criminal policies of the regime, namely the persecution and deportation of Jews. As a result, they felt compelled to remain completely and utterly loyal to Germany.
German occupation policy and its treatment of its allies, which clearly bore Hitler’s signature, had one overriding aim: to secure the Nazi regime’s total control over the whole of Europe and the racial ‘reordering’ of the continent. It was not interested in mobilizing the resources of the occupied and allied countries through incentives, rewards or binding pledges. Instead, it ruthlessly took what was required for the war: raw materials, food supplies, people. Hitler’s rule over the continent was based on military superiority vis-à-vis its foreign opponents and unlimited force against its internal ones.
The regime at home
The heterogeneity of the German occupation administrations and the lack of clarity about the organization and constitution of the future empire were basically a reflection of the internal workings of Hitler’s regime during the war.
After 1937 Hitler had effectively abolished the government as a collective body, and his attempt, on the outbreak of war, to create a kind of war cabinet in the shape of the Ministerial Council for the Defence of the Reich had also come to nothing.22 In January 1942 Lammers failed to persuade Hitler to issue a Führer edict instituting regular ministerial meetings under the former’s chairmanship; the ‘Führer’ considered that such an arrangement was ‘unnecessary’.23 Thus, the individual ministries continued to have to legislate through the ‘circulation procedure’, leading to long-winded written consultations. As a result, legislation inevitably continued to lack coherence. In any case, Hitler took the view that legislation should primarily take the form of framework laws, with the detail being filled in through decrees dealing with particular issues,24 and, in June 1940, he banned all new laws not considered important for the war effort.25 In consequence, the main emphasis shifted from governmental legislation towards a proliferation of decrees issued by the individual ministries.26
Under this system, Hitler possessed unlimited authority to create law by issuing a Führer edict. However, there were problems. This was particularly the case when edicts were not submitted to the Reich Chancellery for comments by the government departments affected prior to their being signed off by Hitler, but instead were secured through personal audiences with the ‘Führer’ arranged by powerful individuals in what Lammers termed an ‘ambush procedure’ [as distinct from the regular ‘circulation procedure’]. Hitler banned this practice, insisting that he did not wish to be approached about an edict or a decision without the Reich Chancellery and the departments affected having been asked to comment on the matter. However, as he had to repeat the injunction it was clear that the practice was continuing.27 Also, the fact that Führer edicts were not published could give rise to considerable difficulties.28
Thus Hitler’s regime increasingly departed from the forms of traditional state practice, in other words from a governmental process marked by the distribution of functions to officially responsible departments, by adherence to the law and to bureaucratic rules, and by a fixed civil service hierarchy based on qualifications and performance criteria. Instead, his regime was increasingly becoming a Führer autocracy, in which he assigned particular tasks to individuals whom he could trust, at his discretion. The result of this personal rule, which was progressively undermining the existing governmental apparatus through ad hoc assignments, was opaque lines of responsibility leading to bitter and lengthy conflicts within the power structure. The fact that Hitler often declined to get involved in such conflicts, instead leaving their resolution to the relative assertiveness of the individual disputants, further encouraged the regime’s fragmentation.
As far as this development during the war was concerned, the following factors stand out:
First: Hitler’s continuing practice of appointing ‘special representatives’, often with the title ‘Reich Commissioner/Commissar’ or ‘General Plenipotentiary’, to deal with particular political issues in a rapid and unbureaucratic fashion. The ‘Führer’ gave these special assignments to a small and easily manageable group and this small coterie of top functionaries, most of whom performed both state and Party functions, created complex power structures, whose ‘bosses’ owed their position entirely to their personal relationship to Hitler.
Göring’s power base essentially derived from his responsibilities as Prussian Prime Minister (now a largely prestige position), commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, head of the Four-Year Plan, and, from 1939 plenipotentiary for the war economy. He extended the responsibilities of the last-named position to include the occupied territories. During the winter of 1941/42, however, it became clear that his policy of ruthlessly plundering raw materials and agrarian products, particularly from eastern Europe, could not cope with the requirements of a lengthy war, and, with the rise of Speer from 1942 onwards, Göring lost his preeminent position within the economy. In addition, Hitler largely excluded him from decision-making on foreign policy issues, and the failure of the ‘Blitz’ on Britain and, above all, the increasing British air raids during 1941/42, damaged his prestige as commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. Despite his loss of power and influence, he remained Hitler’s designated successor, although from 1942 onwards he appears to have given up, increasingly withdrawing from politics to pursue his various other interests.29
During the war, the Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police, Heinrich Himmler, created an apparatus of repression encompassing the whole of Europe. He built up his own military force in the Waffen SS, as Reich Settlement Commissar pursued an elaborate settlement policy based on racial criteria, and used his various responsibilities to subject the conquered territories to a gigantic programme of deportation, resettlement, and extermination resulting in millions of victims. In the process Himmler and the SS became the decisive driving force in creating the ‘New Order’. In addition, in 1943 he took over the Interior Ministry and, in 1944, was appointed commander of the Reserve Army.30
Apart from his positions as head of the Party’s propaganda department, Propaganda Minister, President of the Reich Chamber of Culture, and Gauleiter of Berlin, during the war Goebbels acquired additional functions in the civilian sector, particularly involving critical issues on the home front. To begin with, in 1942, Hitler assigned him the task of coordinating aid for bombed cities, an activity that in 1943 was extended to organizing preventive measures. Finally, in July 1944, he was appointed Plenipotentiary for Total War with the authority to ‘overhaul’ the civilian sector.31
As successor to Todt, Speer took over the latter’s various functions (Minister of Munitions, General Inspector of the German Road Network, General Inspector of Water and Energy, General Plenipotentiary for the Regulation of the Construction Industry) and, in possession of Hitler’s full confidence, quickly brought the whole of the armaments sector under his control. In addition to these tasks, in autumn 1944, as General Inspector of Construction, Speer extended his responsibilities to include the rebuilding of war-damaged cities.32
Although other leading Nazi figures also accumulated responsibilities during these years, they were less successful in their attempts to build up independent power bases. In November 1940, Dr Robert Ley, the head of the Party’s national organization and of the German Labour Front, was appointed Reich Commissar for Social Housing and, in October 1942, given additional responsibilities, as ‘Reich Housing Commissar’. In February 1940, he had also secured a Führer edict authorizing him to prepare an ‘Old Age Welfare Plan’, which he aimed to turn into a comprehensive programme of social reform. However, Hitler ordered a halt to Ley’s project during wartime; his major house-building plan could not be implemented during the war; the Labour Front was declining in importance; and the office of head of the Party’s national organization lost out in its internal struggle with Bormann’s Party Chancellery. As a result, Ley proved unable to integrate his various responsibilities to form a coherent empire.33 The Party’s chief ideologist, Alfred Rosenberg, apart from being Minister for the Eastern Territories, continued to head the Party’s Foreign Policy Office and maintained the Bureau Rosenberg to support his work as the ‘Führer’s’ ‘Representative for the Supervision of the Intellectual and Ideological Indoctrination and Education of the NSDAP’. In summer 1940, Hitler also assigned him the task of confiscating libraries, art collections, and other cultural artefacts in the occupied territories. The Rosenberg Taskforce was established to carry out this comprehensive campaign of plunder. However, as Minister of the East, Rosenberg was unable to get his way in the face of the Reich Commissars and the various Reich agencies operating in the occupied eastern territories, and he was unsuccessful in coordinating his other activities. In addition, in March 1942 Sauckel was appointed General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization; in July 1942, Karl Brandt became Plenipotentiary (from 1943 Commissar General) for Health Services; and, in May 1942, the Hamburg Gauleiter, Karl Kaufmann, was appointed Reich Commissar for Shipping. All these appointments were special representatives ‘directly responsible to the Führer’.34
Secondly: those who were merely Reich ministers, and whose position was not underpinned by a power base in the Party or by other special assignments from Hitler, generally declined in importance. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop managed to achieve a privileged position within the leadership clique vis-à-vis Hitler on account of the regime’s foreign policy ‘successes’ during the years 1938–41, because of his total subservience to the ‘Führer’, and the fact that, by 1938, he had succeeded in excluding the usual ‘special emissaries’ from foreign policy making. However, he was unable to intervene actively in occupation policy, and, with the almost complete absence of foreign policy after 1942, his influence waned.35 Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, the ‘lawyer of the lawless state’, lost all influence in the course of the war because of his attempt to maintain legal procedures within the administration and support for a reform of the Reich’s federal structure. Hitler considered him tired and worn out, finally replacing him with Himmler in August 1943, and appointing him to the largely figurehead post of Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.36
In 1942, Hitler made significant changes at the top of three ministries without appointing new ministers. In May 1942 he transferred effective power in the Reich Agriculture Ministry from the minister, Walther Darré, to Darré’s state secretary, Herbert Backe. Backe was a confidant of Himmler’s and, like Darré, an agricultural ideologist, but, unlike him, also a pragmatic technocrat. He played a key role in imposing Nazi racial ideology in the agricultural sphere and, in particular, was responsible for the systematic starvation policy pursued in the occupied eastern territories.37 In May 1942, the portfolio of the long-serving transport minister, Julius Dorpmüller, was effectively taken over by Albert Ganzenmüller, a tough railway expert, who had been a keen Nazi in his youth, and now, at Speer’s instigation, was appointed state secretary.38 Backe and Ganzenmüller, experts in the critical areas of food supplies and transport, both enjoyed Hitler’s particular favour. The Ministers Walther Funk (Economics), Franz Seldte (Labour), Bernhard Rust (Education), and Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk (Finance) remained in office with much reduced authority. Hitler replaced state secretary Schlegelberger ( justice) by the biddable Thierack as part of his attempt to reform the judicial system, with the aim of removing the last vestiges of an independent judiciary.39
Thirdly: Hess’s chief of staff, Martin Bormann, who after Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941 took over the Staff of the ‘Führer’s’ Deputy under the new title of Party Chancellery, rapidly established himself as the leading figure within the Party. He proved more effective at exercising the Party’s control functions vis-à-vis the state bureaucracy, in particular when it came to participating in legislation, the appointment of officials, but also in relation to all ‘fundamental political issues’.40 Above all, however, his permanent proximity to Hitler, who continued to entrust him with his personal affairs, gave him a key position. Through his responsibility for Hitler’s schedule, Bormann was able, to a considerable extent, to control access to the ‘Führer’, as the latter preferred interviews to studying documents. Thus, he was able to direct the flow of information reaching Hitler, particularly in the sphere of domestic policy. He also relayed Führer assignments and Hitler’s opinions on other matters, all given orally, to leading members of the regime. Moreover, Bormann’s intermediary role was by no means limited to Party matters, which meant that the Reich Chancellery under Lammers, hitherto the main link between Hitler and the state bureaucracy, acquired a serious competitor. Bormann’s power was by no means unlimited, however. Military matters were outside his sphere of competence, and he was not permitted to intervene in matters for which those top politicians who had immediate access to Hitler, namely Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Speer, and Ribbentrop, were responsible. He was able to take the initiative in the sense of emphasizing particular opinions of Hitler only in issues involving the NSDAP and its place within the power structure, the radicalization of racial policy, and the attempt to exclude the Churches from almost all areas of life.41
During the war, the Gauleiters further increased their importance. In the two new ‘Reich Gaus’, which had been established in the annexed Polish territories on the model of the ‘Sudeten Gau’, Gauleiter Albert Forster (Danzig-West Prussia) and Gauleiter Artur Greiser (Warthegau), as Reich Governors, possessed the right to issue directives to various branches of the state administration. They took full advantage of this, establishing a virtual dictatorship in their Gaus, and invoking Hitler’s assignment to justify carrying out a ruthless ‘Germanization’ of their districts.42
Hitler regarded the extended responsibilities of the Gauleiters/Reich Governors in the annexed territories as the model for a future reform of the ‘old Reich’. He justified this by noting that, during the ‘time of struggle’, he had given the ‘Gau kings’ the greatest possible freedom of action and in future wanted them to have the same freedom as far as their state functions were concerned. He envisaged a network of regional power holders, who combined Party and state responsibilities and were directly responsible to him.43 In 1939, he applied this idea by appointing fifteen of the thirty-nine Gauleiters to be Reich Defence Commissioners, giving each of them responsibility for civil defence issues in their particular military district. They were organs of the new Ministerial Committee for the Defence of the Reich established on the outbreak of war, were officially supervised by the Reich Interior Ministry, and were responsible for overseeing the work of the various branches of the administration in their military district in accordance with the directives of the ministries concerned.44 This measure contained a clear political message: ‘authority on the home front’ was to be transferred to the Party.45 Since the borders of the military districts did not coincide either with those of the Gaus or with those of the federal states and the Prussian provinces, the Reich Defence Commissioners/Gauleiters and the Reich Governors/Gauleiters of the annexed Polish territories were in effect privileged vis-à-vis the other Gauleiters, a situation which led to friction. In November 1942, all forty-two Gauleiters were appointed Reich Defence Commissioners and the borders of their jurisdictions were adjusted to correspond to those of the Gaus rather than the military districts. However, since the borders of the federal states and the Prussian provinces did not correspond to those of the Party Gaus, that is, the jurisdictions of the Reich Defence Commissioners/Gauleiters, friction between the various political and administrative bodies with their overlapping boundaries inevitably continued.
As the war went on, there was an increasing tendency for the Gauleiters to regard more and more administrative spheres as matters relating to ‘Reich defence’ and to intervene in matters hitherto controlled by the regional state authorities. They claimed that the Gauleiters should be responsible for coordinating the various branches of the cumbersome state administration, providing it with flexible leadership and, whenever necessary, using the Party apparatus to carry out certain functions. Their direct subordination to Hitler would avoid the need to go through laborious official channels.46 This shift in the balance of power towards the Gauleiters clearly showed what the political structure of the so-called ‘Third Reich’ would have looked like, had Germany won the war. Hitler intended that the Gauleiters, who had risen within the Party hierarchy and were directly subordinate to him, would provide a counterweight to the concentration of power in the hands of the few individuals whom he trusted at Reich level. They already represented an important personnel reserve for special assignments. Apart from Goebbels and Sauckel, who have already been mentioned, Josef Terboven (Essen), Hinrich Lohse (Schleswig-Holstein), Erich Koch (East Prussia), and Josef Grohé (Cologne-Aachen) all received new tasks as Reich commissars in the occupied territories. Alfred Meyer (Westphalia: North) became state secretary in the Ministry for the Eastern Territories, and a number of Gauleiters were appointed as ‘heads of the civilian administration’ in territories occupied by the Wehrmacht, in order to prepare for their annexation.47 The regular Gauleiter and Reichsleiter meetings continued during the war. They were designed not for making decisions but for the informal exchange of information and Hitler often used them for lengthy ‘tours d’horizon’.
At local level, in particular, the Party increased its supervision and monitoring of the ‘national comrades’ with the aim of nipping in the bud any form of unrest in a population that was unenthusiastic about the war and subjected to increasing burdens.48 To this end, the Party mobilized its members, whose number increased from 5.3 million at the start of the war to well over 8 million by the end, to undertake a wide range of tasks.49 It became involved in the distribution of foodstuffs and important supplies; it organized the accommodation of the homeless and evacuees from the air war; it took on responsibilities for air raid protection (such as control of the blackout), for providing immediate aid after air raids, for the provision of accommodation for, and the supervision of, foreign forced workers, who were to be separated as far as possible from the German population, and for looking after Wehrmacht soldiers and their families, including the arrangement of funeral ceremonies for those who had been killed. Thus the Party was heavily involved in all matters affecting the population’s ‘mood’, and could immediately intervene to sort things out when tricky situations arose at local level and even in people’s domestic sphere.
Thus, during the early years of the war, the system of Führer autocracy had been perfected. Hitler ruled through direct personal contact with his entourage as well as through directives issued via the increasingly competing chancelleries or liaison officials based in the Führer headquarters. He was careful to avoid the creation of new, or the revival of old, collective decision-making bodies. Direct contact with the ‘Führer’, which was so vital for securing decisions, was restricted to a few top functionaries – Bormann, Göring, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, Himmler, Ley, and Speer, although the Reich Youth Leader, Baldur von Schirach, Sauckel, and Brandt, and, to a limited extent, the Gauleiters also enjoyed this privilege.50 The Party’s influence was increasing at all levels, above all with the aim of strengthening its control over the state bureaucracy, improving the latter’s performance and commitment, and concentrating Menschenführung* [lit. ‘the leadership of people’] in its own hands.
Figure 13. Full mobilization: Ten sons belonging to the Schmidt family from Köpprich in Lower Silesia gather in uniform for a group photograph on 8 April 1941. The two boys are in the Hitler Youth. The son on the front right is in the Fire Police and all seven sons in the back row are in the Wehrmacht.
Source: bpk / Joe Heydecker
Within this Führer autocracy that he had created, Hitler not only kept tight personal control of the key areas of policy, but made decisions on matters of detail, sometimes on a day-to-day basis. This applied first of all to the actual conduct of the war, which, as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht and commander-in-chief of the army, he controlled through daily situation conferences often lasting for hours. With the help of his Reich press chief, Otto Dietrich, and in close consultation with Goebbels, he also set the guidelines for propaganda, had the whole of foreign policy under his aegis (mainly through the liaison officer with the Foreign Ministry, Walter Hewel), monitored armaments production, trying to control it through detailed directives, and kept an eye on the civilian side of the war (air raid precautions, labour conscription, transport, and so on). Any alteration in the allocation of food rations required his approval. He took personal charge of all measures affecting the constitution and administrative structure not only of the Reich itself but also of the occupied territories, repeatedly intervened in the details of occupation policy, and directed the radicalization of Jewish policy at every stage to the point of mass murder, as well as reserving for himself all important decisions relating to ‘racial policy’.
However significant the damage resulting from this style of government may have been as a consequence of the friction and inefficiencies caused by the opaque lines of responsibility, the closing off of channels of information, and the internal power struggles, the fact remains that Hitler had at his disposal the kind of regime he needed in order to achieve his main goal: the establishment of a European empire on a racial basis under his virtually total control.
Hitler’s charisma in the Second World War
It has already been argued at length51 elsewhere that the basis of, and legitimation for, the ‘Führer state’ was Hitler’s ‘charisma’, in other words the allegedly total consensus between ‘people’ and ‘leadership’, finding expression through the actions of the regime. Great efforts were required in order for this to be sustained. It was only through the apparatus of repression, local monitoring of the ‘national comrades’, and control of the public sphere by the propaganda machine that Germany’s many-voiced and multifaceted society could be subsumed into a ‘national community’ and people’s behaviour be adjusted to the norms set by the regime. This was the context within which the ‘Führer’ was continually renewing his putatively charismatic position. On the one hand, he gave expression to the alleged expectations, longings, and hopes of the German people in major speeches and with grand gestures. On the other hand, he reacted to negative shifts in the ‘national mood’ by responding to certain concerns and promising remedial action, while declaring others to be unacceptable, publicly banning critical voices from the national community and thereby silencing them. Sometimes he would then reset the domestic agenda by making a sudden dramatic move.
With his shift towards expansion and war during 1938/39, Hitler continued this constant interaction with the ‘people’, an indispensable element of ‘Führer’ charisma. He regained the initiative with his comprehensive reshuffle in February 1938. The unparalleled violence of the November pogrom, through which the regime mobilized the ‘people’s anger’, then introduced a complete reorientation of propaganda in order to prepare the German population, which was hardly ready for war, for tougher times to come. After 1 September 1939, voices opposed to, or sceptical about, the war were banned from the public sphere through increased controls and repression, while Hitler himself initially sustained people’s hopes of a short war. Even if there were no signs of enthusiasm for the war, propaganda took the line that the population was contentedly and confidently going along with the leadership’s war policies. In November 1941, the parameters for Hitler’s charisma were readjusted. In view of the difficulties on the eastern front, discussions about how long the war was going to last were banned and even presented as sabotaging the war effort. The almost simultaneous public declaration that Hitler’s 1939 ‘prophecy’ about the annihilation of the Jews was now in the process of being realized underlined the message: all bridges had been burnt and the ‘people’ had no alternative but to entrust themselves to Hitler’s purportedly superhuman leadership qualities and support his conduct of the war until victory had been achieved.
At the same time, there were now an increasing number of lengthy breaks in the interaction between ‘Führer’ and ‘people’. Hitler’s charisma was, to a certain extent and for a certain time, suspended. This occurred for the first time between 10 March and 19 July 1940, in other words between Heroes’ Memorial Day and Hitler’s peace offer to Britain. This was the period during which he was preparing and carrying on the wars in northern and western Europe. His absence may have caused concern; but, by the summer of 1940, his victories and apparent willingness to make peace, which was a response to the population’s desire for an end to the war, revived his charismatic leadership role. More serious was the fact that between May 1941 and 3 October 1941, in other words the period when he was preparing for war against the Soviet Union and engaged in the major eastern offensive, he had effectively disappeared from public view. This immediately resulted in ups and downs in the public ‘mood’, for the authoritative voice capable of allaying the widespread concerns about the course of the war was absent. At the beginning of October 1941, Hitler tried to remove this uncertainty with his public promise of imminent victory. During the following weeks, this did not occur and, instead, the advance of the armies in the East stalled. The ‘Führer’ responded by announcing on 11 December that, as the war had become a world war, an entirely new situation had arisen, in the light of which the temporary hold-up in the East was insignificant. Afterwards Hitler decided to remain silent until the end of January 1942, although the most serious crisis of the war hitherto had suggested that his whole strategic concept for the war was in serious jeopardy. Instead of making a blood, sweat, and tears speech, he left it to his Propaganda Minister to get over the critical period by organizing a collection of socks and warm underwear for the soldiers at the front. However, by patently failing to perform his leadership role at the height of the crisis, he had in fact seriously damaged the ‘charismatic’ basis of his regime.
With the gradual improvement in the military situation, Hitler spoke twice in public in March and April 1942, before becoming preoccupied with the preparations for and conduct of the summer offensive and disappearing once more from view until the end of September. In this difficult and, in the view of many, decisive phase of the war, his charisma could only have been salvaged if he had been able to return to the public stage to announce a decisive victory. It was such a victory that Hitler was pinning all his hopes during 1942 and this fixation was ultimately to shatter his charisma.