“Except in cases where he had pledged his word, Hitler always meant what he said.”
—Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis of Power
Hitler assessed France and Britain differently from Beck, Halder, Weizsäcker, and other professionals. Had he been consistently wrong, the differences would be easy to account for and could be dismissed as delusions of an ignorant madman. But since Hitler often came nearer the mark than did his advisers, that will not do. One has to ask about his presumptions and about the information on which he based his assessments.
Most of Hitler’s basic beliefs were on public display in Mein Kampf (“My Battle”), the long confessional autobiography-cum-manifesto published in the mid-1920s. He had dictated the book during a ten-month stay in prison. Not long before, he had banded with General Ludendorff—by then a lunatic—in a plot to overthrow the five-year-old Weimar Republic. With their intended first step a takeover of the state of Bavaria, they marched off from a Munich beer hall. The police barred them. After exchanges of shots, the putsch attempt collapsed. Even though fourteen of Hitler’s followers and four policemen had been killed and the putschists had managed to steal several million marks, a sympathetic judge and jury exonerated Ludendorff and gave Hitler a light sentence in Landsberg Prison, a minimum-security institution. His time there, Hitler said later, served him as a “university paid for by the state.”1 Mein Kampf was the tangible product.
Three elements from Hitler’s background emerge strikingly in Mein Kampf The first is that, though he identified himself as German, he had grown up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father had been a customs collector on the Austrian-German border and every year had donned a fancy uniform to honor the birthday of the Hapsburg emperor. Though Hitler could probably have won in court had he claimed that he became German when he joined the German army in 1914, he did not formally renounce his Austrian citizenship until 1925 or take out papers as a German citizen until 1932.
To Prussians like Beck and Weizsäcker and even to a Bavarian like Halder, modern history was anchored in the period when, with Bismarck guiding, Prussia had defeated Austria and, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, proclaimed the German Empire. To Hitler, this was just one phase in the eclipse of the Austrian Empire. In Mein Kampf he criticizes the Hapsburgs for treating Hungarians as equals in their monarchy and then, as he saw it, making one concession after another to other inferior races, such as Czechs. Though he could speak admiringly of Bismarck’s tactics, he did not share the fond memories of Germans for the decades of stability after 1871.
A second noteworthy point is that Hitler had his origins not only in Austria but in that part of the upper Danube Valley called the Waldviertel, or Forest Quarter, so known to distinguish it from the Weinviertel, or Wine Quarter, farther down the Inn River, toward Vienna. From Passau on the German border, where Hitler’s father served, through Linz, where Hitler went to school after his father’s death, the Danube courses between cliffs some of which are barren rock, others covered by thin growths of pine. In the Weinviertel, loess-covered hills nourish vineyards and pastures. In the Waldviertel, however, as in parts of Scotland and the Appalachians, nature excites the eye but is not generous to the stomach, and local lore stresses blood feuds.2
The early part of Mein Kampf and later passages that hark back to Hitler’s early years, are recollections by someone who, as a youngster, lived where farm families loved the land but had a hard time making a living from it. Though Hitler used the term Lebensraum only after being instructed by his prisonmate and sometime stenographer, Rudolf Hess, who was acquainted with the geopolitics of Karl Haushofer, his background in the Waldviertel helps to explain why the concept so easily became central to his thinking.
And concern about the balance between population and food supply must have intensified for Hitler as a result of leaving home in his early teens and moving, on his own, to Vienna. Passages in Mein Kampf recalling his Vienna years are almost poignant.3 “The uncertainty of earning one’s daily bread seemed to me to be the darkest side of my new life,” he wrote. In one long section, Hitler coupled autobiographical fragments with an evocation of a type—the “farmer’s boy … accustomed to a certain security of income” who “brings a little money with him to the big city,” uses it up, and finds himself on the streets and penniless. Hitler, who had come to Vienna both with a small legacy and with a pension as the orphaned son of a civil servant, was describing his own experience when he wrote of this boy’s lot: “It is especially hard in winter.… Now he loiters about hungrily, he pawns or sells the last of his belongings, his clothes get shabbier day by day.… If then he becomes homeless, and if this happens (as is often the case) in winter, then his misery becomes acute.” Hitler himself spent at least part of one winter in a shelter for the homeless.4
In standard up-by-the-bootstraps format, Hitler included in his recollections of poverty an assertion that the school of hard knocks had its rewards. “How grateful I am today that Providence … bade me go to this school,” he wrote. “It educated me quickly and thoroughly.” It also fed contempt for well-born generals and diplomats who had never known want or mixed with the poor.
A third noteworthy point relates to Hitler’s experience in the Great War and its importance in his life. In 1913, as a twenty-four-year-old, he had moved from Vienna to Munich, possibly to evade the Austrian draft. But the 1914 declarations of war—Austria’s against Serbia, then Germany’s against Russia and France, soon to be followed by Britain’s against Germany—electrified him. He is recognizable in a photograph snapped in Munich on August 1, the first day of hostilities for Germany, which, as Lord Bullock writes in his biography of Hitler, shows “his eyes excited and exultant; it is the face of a man come home at last.”5
Volunteering immediately, Hitler was enrolled in a Bavarian regiment despite his Austrian citizenship. He then spent most of four years in the fieriest sections of the Western front. Doing duty mostly as a courier, running messages from the front-line trenches to rear-area regimental-command posts, he witnessed, among other notable moments of carnage, the artillery and machine-gun duels and bayonet charges remembered as First Ypres, the Somme, and Third Ypres. He suffered a leg wound. In the last weeks of the war, he was gassed and had to be hospitalized with temporary blindness. Though never promoted beyond the rank of private first class, he received not only the commonly awarded Iron Cross, Second Class, but the much more distinctive Iron Cross, First Class, usually reserved for heroes of higher rank. He was commended for “reckless courage.”
After the war, with his sight restored, Hitler stayed in uniform as long as he could. As he wrote in Mein Kampf and would say over and over in later years, being a soldier had been “the most unforgettable and the greatest period of my mortal life.”6 He had discovered how dread of an anonymous enemy, combined with desire to harm or kill that enemy, could bond humans together and cause them to do what few would do alone. His constant resort later to battle metaphors and his positive relish for war trace in part to his feelings of epiphany amid artillery craters and barbed wire on the blood-caked mud of the Western front.
Partly because the war had been such a glorious experience for Hitler, he reacted to the sudden capitulation of 1918 as if to a high-voltage shock. He was by no means alone. German government propaganda had so disguised reality as to make not only ordinary Germans but high-ranking officials optimistic about approaching victory. The announcement that Germany was suing for an armistice turned the world upside down. But Hitler’s reaction was extreme by any standard. “While everything went black before my eyes, stumbling, I … threw myself on my cot and buried my burning head in the covers and pillows,” he wrote.7
The shock helped to shape opinions that Hitler would carry in his mind from then on. Adopting the most radical version of the “stab-in-the-back” legend, he would contend that Jews, Marxists, and their dupes had snatched victory from Germany’s front-line fighters. Answering a later charge that Nazi activities constituted treason against the Weimar Republic, Hitler declared on the witness stand: “There is no such thing as high treason against the traitors of 1918.”8
Anti-Semitism already permeated his thinking. It had been stronger in the Vienna of Hitler’s youth than almost anywhere else in the world, and one of his early heroes had been Karl Lüder, the popular, long-serving, and hysterically anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna. As early as 1919, Hitler articulated the reasoning (if it can be called that) that led him in 1942 to order the Holocaust. In a report submitted to the army command in Munich, Hitler condemned the emotional anti-Semitism that led to pogroms. He argued for anti-Semitism “based on reason” which would gradually outlaw Jews, but he went on to assert that the “final goal must always remain the removal of the Jews as a whole.”9 In Mein Kampf, Hitler resorted repeatedly to the image of the Jew as a pest or an insect needing to be eradicated.
Before he finally shed his uniform, Hitler’s basic values had hardened. Someone who compares the language in Mein Kampf with that in later speeches might detect vacillation on some points, but not on many. Hitler defined the objectives he would pursue when and if he had power, and they included forceful conquest of endless territory and systematic murder of Jews. That his professional advisers were surprised by the program he began to lay out at the 1937 conference recorded by Hossbach and were dismayed by the measures he authorized in occupied Poland seems strong evidence that they had not paid much attention to what he had written and said. In this, they were not unique, for officials in most countries tend to ignore the public utterances of their politicians, but in Nazi Germany this was a serious mistake. As Sir John Wheeler-Bennett remarks, “Except in cases where he had pledged his word, Hitler always meant what he said.”10
In Mein Kampf and in speeches, Hitler also disclosed some of the beliefs that influenced his assessments of foreign governments and his judgments about tactics for dealing with them. Crucially important were his views on the nature of political power. Time and again, Hitler advanced the proposition that the basis of power in a modern state was emotional support from the masses:
Every movement with great aims has anxiously to watch that it may not lose connection with the great masses …
It has to examine every question primarily from this point of view.…
Further, it has to avoid everything that could diminish or even weaken its ability to influence the masses … because of the simple reason that without the enormous power of the masses of a people no great idea, no matter how sublime and lofty it may appear, is realizable.11
Hitler held the masses to be as stupid as they were powerful: “The political understanding of the great masses … is not sufficiently developed for them to arrive at … general political opinions by themselves,” he wrote; “the majority of humankind … is inert and cowardly.”12 The strength of a national leader depended, according to him, on his ability to seize and manipulate emotions. Significantly, he discounted as merely auxiliary the institutions of the state. Laws derived their force from the willingness of the people to obey them and from the comforting sense of order they attached to the idea of appealing to a statute instead of to the favoritism of a ruler. Both publicly and privately, Hitler warred in the late 1920s and early 1930s with Nazis who wanted the storm troopers to defy the laws of the Weimar Republic, insisting that the SA and SS stay within the letter of those laws. Playing on the sobriquet of the Orléans prince who joined the revolutionaries in France in the 1790s, “Philippe-Égalité,” some referred to Hitler as “Adolphe Légalité.”13 He insisted that democracy had to be defeated by democracy.14
For Hitler, even police forces and armies counted less than the masses. Of course, he respected the power of the gun. He remembered that his Munich beer-hall putsch had been put down by policemen, and this experience contributed to his determination not to risk action that could be treated as criminal. At the same time, the example illustrated for him how hard it was for political authorities to make full use of their police or military forces when public support for them was insecure. Though his coup attempt had misfired, he had come closer to success than could have been forecast by merely counting guns. The clear lesson for Hitler was that the strength of a government should be measured primarily by the level and intensity of mass support, not by its armies or its treasury.
Strongly affecting Hitler’s judgments both about the significance of events and about his own alternatives for action was the constantly rising level of his own self-confidence. Though he bragged in Mein Kampf about being a precocious public speaker, he acknowledged that those who heard him orating in Vienna “must have thought me a queer fellow.”15 Only after the war, when his commanders in Munich gave him the assignment of counteracting communist and socialist propaganda, did he begin to feel that he was affecting his hearers, an experience that decided him to make a profession of politics.16
What confirmed this decision for Hitler was his early success.17 He recalled rising before a gathering of a little more than one hundred in a Munich beer cellar:
I had been granted twenty minutes speaking time.… I spoke for thirty minutes, and what formerly I had felt in my mind, without knowing it somehow, was now proved by reality. I could speak. After thirty minutes the small room filled with people was electrified, and the enthusiasm found its expression first in the fact that my appeal to the willingness to sacrifice led the audience to donate three hundred Marks.18
The crowds grew. Within months, Hitler had tested himself in a hotel ballroom. As he recalled it, there was a throng of two thousand, many of them initially hostile. Then “applause gradually began to drown out the shouting and calling.” In the end, what he said seemed to have everyone’s support. “I was confronted by a hall filled with people united by a new conviction, a new faith, a new will.”19
By the time Mein Kampf was published, Hitler had become a masterful demagogue. He was candid in describing and appraising his skills. Two of his watchwords were “simplicity” and “consistency.”
The great masses’ receptive ability is only very limited, their understanding is small, but their forgetfulness is great. As a consequence …, all effective propaganda has to limit itself only to a very few points and to use them like slogans.… The purpose of propaganda is not continually to produce interesting changes …, but to convince; that means, to convince the masses.… A change must never alter the content.… In the end it always has to stay the same.20
Once having successfully launched the National Socialist Party, Hitler declared its twenty-five-point platform immutable. In fact, he never supported all twenty-five points, and he changed his mind about many of them. But he argued in party councils that any appearance of uncertainty or changeability would arouse doubts among the people. (Also, of course, change or even debate about change could call into question his dictatorial command of the party.) An example of how he could mask change was his invocation of his party’s socialist label. In practice, he ceased to make much of the genuinely socialist planks in the platform, which put off businessmen whose monetary contributions he wanted. Instead of dropping the label, he simply broadened its meaning, declaring in one speech that anyone who understood the country’s national anthem, “Deutschland über Alles,” was thereby a socialist.21
A third principle of Hitler’s, seemingly inconsistent with the first two, was to tailor every speech to its specific audience. Hitler could do this, while maintaining simplicity and consistency, by adopting the assumption so effectively used later in mass and segmented product marketing—namely, that only parts of a message get through to any listener or onlooker, and that the crucial parts may not lie in the words or logic. Hitler boasted that he was the one-in-a-thousand example of someone who could speak “to an auditorium composed of street sweepers, locksmiths, sewer cleaners, etc., and … on the following day … to university professors and students … in a form which is equally satisfactory to both sides.”22
Whether or not Hitler deserved his own compliments when he dictated these words in Landsberg Prison, he certainly came to earn them. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hitler campaigned in practically every town and village in Germany, visiting many of them repeatedly. His experience in face-to-face, flesh-pressing politics was probably unmatched by any other politician, not only in Germany but in the world.
With intimate groups as well as throngs, it was Hitler’s practice to begin speaking in a low key, often talking about his own experiences or experiences that he and his hearers might have shared. Though his Austrian origin was always evident, he also used specific intonations to establish rapport. His own regional accent was neither so marked nor so consistent as, say, that of Al Smith or John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter. Max Domarus, the premier collector and analyst of Hitler’s speeches, comments that, in Hamburg or Hannover, Hitler would pronounce the “s” and “t” separately in words with “st,” whereas in Bavaria he would mush them together.23 After a while, Hitler would become more declamatory, phrasing his points in tune with what he sensed in the room or among the crowd. He would then wind up with vehement words, involving many gestures, calling to an American’s mind a tent-meeting evangelist.24 Well into his chancellorship, Hitler continued to learn from experience and to improve his capacity for stirring audiences. He rehearsed before his staff and in front of mirrors, and he had his clothes specially cut to allow for flailing gestures.25
Hitler could be guided by ethical norms of a sort—as, for example, concerning the importance of protecting the German race or the German peasantry—but he had absolutely no tactical scruples. This is evident in a passage of Mein Kampf that was often cited outside Germany as extolling “the big lie.” To be sure, he claimed to be describing what Jews did, but in doing so he affirmed the validity of the theory:
In the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of a people may be more corrupt in the bottom of their hearts than they will be consciously and intentionally bad, therefore with the primitive simplicity of their minds they will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one, since they themselves perhaps also lie sometimes in little things, but would certainly still be too much ashamed of too great lies …; therefore, just for this reason some part of the impudent lie will remain and stick.26
In Mein Kampf but even more in subsequent speeches, Hitler made it evident that he believed many of his ideas to have universal applicability. He spoke of “the masses,” not “the German masses.” Hence his judgments about Austria or Czechoslovakia or France or Britain or the Soviet Union or the United States were likely to be influenced not only by his theories about the nature of power but also by his mounting self-confidence as a politician—his ability to feel mass opinion.
Though basic beliefs contributed to differences between Hitler’s assessments of foreign governments and those of his professional advisers, the differences were reinforced by the fact that he and they relied on somewhat different sources of information. Hitler, of course, had access to practically all the information available to Beck or Halder or Weizsäcker. The Chancellory routinely received copies of reports from military attachés and telegrams from German diplomats and memoranda generated within the Foreign Ministry. It also received reports not ordinarily seen at the Bendlerstrasse or the Wilhelmstrasse, as, for example, from party agents abroad and from the Gestapo and other internal-security services answering to Himmler.
How much of this reportage Hitler read is uncertain. He described his Foreign Ministry as an “intellectual garbage dump” and spoke scornfully of almost all the military attachés. The only one he trusted, he once said, was General Friedrich von Bötticher, who reported from Washington that, though the American government might be riddled with Jews and President Franklin Roosevelt sympathetic to France and Britain, the American general staff appreciated the new Germany and would never permit the United States to side with Germany’s enemies.27 Although Hitler had had to pay close attention to Nazi Party leaders in Austria and Czechoslovakia, it is not apparent that he attached any weight to communications from party representatives relating to France or Britain. From Himmler he received primarily information regarding persons in Germany. Some were foreigners, including diplomats and reporters, but little of the information could have had much bearing on Hitler’s judgments regarding foreign governments.
Hitler did assiduously read German translations of foreign newspapers and magazines. His press chief, Meissner, whom a journalist described as a caricature German, with “a fat body, a fat face, a square red neck,” given to “bobbing up and down like a weighted cork on a heavy sea,” had the duty of placing fat folders of press excerpts in front of Hitler’s bedroom door every morning.28 Hitler insisted on extracts, not summaries. He particularly demanded material on foreign leaders. Given that he did not read much or work much, tended to rise late in the day, have long lunches and dinners with party cronies, and watch one or two movies every night, it is evident that he attached much importance to these clippings. But he sometimes also referred to the movies as keys to attitudes and moods in foreign countries. His assertions about French lack of will may have owed something to his seeing pacifist films popular in France in the 1930s, such as Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion. What he said to Brauchitsch and Halder about the superior fighting qualities of the British may have been affected by images of spirited British soldiers in his favorite film, Louis Lighton’s Lives of a Bengal Lancer.29 Probably, too, he drew upon conversations with foreign admirers such as the French journalist Fernand de Brinon, and the literary sisters Nancy and Unity Mitford, who talked to him of the weaknesses of their own countries in comparison with the Third Reich.30
In his post-1938 capacity as commander in chief of the armed forces, Hitler had directly under his control the Abwehr, properly the armed-forces high command’s Amtsgruppe Ausland/Abwehr (Foreign and Defense Office Groups), which was Germany’s secret-intelligence service. Usually referred to simply as the Abwehr, the organization had been created in the 1920s in hope of consolidating all collection and analysis of secret intelligence. As everywhere else in the world, the hope had been disappointed. The armed services’ intelligence branches remained intact. The Abwehr, headed after 1934 by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, simply complemented the services by running human spies abroad and by planning and conducting secret operations.
Most reports from spies concerned specific military weapons or deployments and were of greater use to the services than to Hitler, but some had to do with politics, and parts possibly interesting for Hitler were selected for him by navy captain Leopold Bürkner, head of the Abwehr’s Ausland group. Once described by Canaris as a “true-blue seaman and a rose-red optimist,” Bürkner was especially prone to passing on statements by foreign sympathizers and other evidence suggesting awe of Germany and Hitler among people in France and Britain.31 The operational capabilities of the Abwehr may also have contributed to Hitler’s comparative optimism about dealing with foreign governments, for they made it possible to stage incidents that could possibly confuse debate abroad. Thus, for example, the trigger for the invasion of Poland was supposed to be some shooting by Abwehr men wearing Polish army uniforms, making it appear that the Poles had provoked the German attack, but the incident was staged too clumsily to deceive anyone.
Hitler had access also to communications intelligence. A large agency, the Forschungsamt, tapped telephone and telegraph lines and deciphered coded messages. Göring had created the Forschungsamt in 1933 after having become head of the Prussian government. When he became air minister as well, in 1935, he moved it to the Air Ministry. Its title meant “research office.” Its offices, occupying a whole apartment complex on the Schillerstrasse in the Charlottenburg district, west of central Berlin, had wrought-iron doors covered with gold leaf and guards in gray uniforms, just as at the main Air Ministry building on the Wilhelmstrasse, and its employees were instructed to say that they did classified research for the Luftwaffe. In reality, it was a wholly independent agency, with Göring himself its only link to any other part of the government.32
The Forschungsamt’s staff received transcripts of wire recordings from taps at central telephone exchanges all over Germany, copies of messages obtained from telegraph offices, and radio interceptions. Any message in code went to a well-manned cryptanalytic section. Another section reviewed everything, including decrypted messages. Its chiefs decided what was worth passing on to Göring. He decided what should be sent to Hitler and what should be parceled out to others.
Though the Forschungsamt tried to employ only zealous Nazis, its internal code of conduct called for complete objectivity in reportage, and this code seems to have been obeyed. (Late in the war, with Hitler still talking of victory, Forschungsamt reports told of defeats, with worse to come.) Most of these reports were in mimeograph on brown paper and were sometimes referred to as “brown friends.”33 Despite Hitler’s order that the Forschungsamt not target any high military officers or high party members, its A Section, which ran telephone taps, used a “Woman Bible” (Damenbibel), which listed women who had husbands or friends in high circles, and some of the resulting intercepts undoubtedly violated Hitler’s order.34 They may have been given special handling. Also, Hitler himself authorized exceptions, as, for example, the tracking of Goebbels’s extramarital affairs. (Magda Goebbels was a long-term member of Hitler’s retinue, and when Goebbels talked of divorcing her, Hitler ordered him to forget it.35)
Special couriers carried “brown friends” to their addressees, and the recipients had to sign for them. One month later, another courier would come to retrieve them and write out receipts. The only exception was Hitler himself, who held on to “friends” for as much as nine months.36
In peacetime, the Forschungsamt supplied Hitler with information giving him tactical advantage in negotiations with foreign governments. Since Forschungsamt cryptanalysts broke most of the codes used by most embassies, including those of France and Britain, Hitler frequently knew what French and British ambassadors and attachés were reporting and what instructions they were receiving from home.37 The Forschungsamt worked quickly enough so that, for example, at Godesberg, Hitler was able to read the British delegation’s report on his first meeting with Chamberlain before he met with Chamberlain on the morning of the next day.38
Forschungsamt interceptions may not always have benefited Hitler. They may have misled him in August 1939 as to how France and Britain would actually respond when he attacked Poland, because the French foreign minister and the British ambassador in Berlin were ardent to avoid war.39 Cumulatively, however, intercepted messages undoubtedly gave Hitler in peacetime additional insight into the thinking of other governments’ foreign offices. Reading “brown friends” also told him what foreign correspondents were phoning and wiring home. When he went through his morning piles of clippings, he could then note what their editors were selecting for publication, and this probably had some effect on his estimates of public opinion in their countries.
What Hitler absorbed from reading or listening to foreign visitors mostly supported what he already believed. This was not uniquely true of him. In some degree, it is true of everyone.40 But Hitler’s growing self-idolization gave him more than normal insulation against information and evidence at odds with his preconceptions. Hence his indignant outbursts at Beck’s figures about the French armed forces and at assertions that the Westwall would not hold France back.
This is not to say that Hitler paid no attention to evidence or argumentation at variance with his presumptions. His craziest beliefs, of course, were beyond modification. Nothing could have shaken his certainty about Lebensraum or about Jews. But he was very sensitive—at least before 1940—to specific information affecting tactical choices. However angry it made him to hear questions about the impregnability of the Westwall, he took them seriously. His practical response was to pour more money into the project and to make it a centerpiece in Goebbels’s propaganda. Also, like the news or not, he paid close attention to any evidence of weakening public support at home. His inclination in late 1937 to act against Austria and Czechoslovakia sooner rather than later was probably influenced by reports of public grumbling about shortages. He retreated from his Godesberg demands and accepted the Munich accord in September 1938 in part because of Goebbels’s warnings that Germans were unenthusiastic about war. In all likelihood, his eagerness for an offensive against France was partially driven by the strong and mounting evidence of mass antipathy to the war that had begun with the conquest of Poland. Hans Frank, head of the National Socialist Lawyers Association and a Chancellory hanger-on, later characterized the war as the most unpopular in German history. There were signs of this not only among civilians but among front-line soldiers. Army censors reported enlisted men writing home that only the generals wanted to continue the war and that the Führer would stop it if he could.41
Hitler’s assessments of France and Britain and other nations were based less on formal military and diplomatic reportage than on gleanings from the press, scraps from Ausland/Abwehr bulletins, “brown friends” from the Forschungsamt, and testimony by friendly foreign visitors. What was most important to him was almost certainly evidence on mass opinion in other countries, and on the extent to which leaders abroad seemed to have popular support comparable to his. The relative absence of open dissent in Italy surely contributed to his high opinion of Mussolini. The fact that most U.S. newspapers were editorially critical of Roosevelt must have reinforced his low evaluation of the United States (and contributed to his misplaced regard for General Bötticher).
Hitler also received information and advice from some of the Nazis at his court, particularly Goebbels and Göring. A slight, dapper Rhinelander, eight years younger than Hitler, Goebbels in the 1920s had attached himself to Gregor Strasser, a Nazi leader who took more seriously than Hitler the “Socialist” part of the party’s name. Gradually, he had shifted to supporting Hitler. His political ambitions were destined to be fulfilled, if at all, in someone’s shadow, for he was too intense and too sharp-tongued to gather a large following of his own, and he had other disabilities. Because of childhood polio, he walked with a limp. His head was too large for his thin body, and his mouth was too large for his head. Frederick Birchall, a New York Times correspondent, commented of him: “The most remarkable thing about him was his mouth, which he opened so wide that at times the rest of his face seemed a mere thin frame around it.”42 But his support of Hitler was not just opportunistic. He became a worshipper. The gossipy diary that he kept from 1924 to 1945, undoubtedly written not only for eventual publication but with an eye to its doing him no damage if it somehow fell into wrong hands (and hence, for example, saying nothing about his notoriously frequent affairs with actresses), is full of adoring comments about Hitler that seem genuine. When the Third Reich came to its end in 1945, he chose to die with Hitler rather than survive him.
In the Nazis’ climb to power, Goebbels had proved himself a talented attack-dog journalist. He had also had a large role in managing Hitler’s national campaigns. When Hitler became chancellor, he had created for Goebbels a new post as minister of public enlightenment and propaganda. In that capacity, Goebbels managed and eventually controlled almost all German newspapers and magazines, all radio broadcasting, and the film industry. Given Hitler’s views on the nature of political power, this was as important as any set of functions performed by anyone in his government. Goebbels was in and out of the Chancellory almost every day when Hitler was in Berlin and often traveled with him. He was the only member of the government to be a regular member of Hitler’s circle at lunch and dinner, and his was the only party leader’s home that Hitler regularly visited.
Goebbels brought Hitler information about mass opinion not only in Germany but abroad, for his ministry monitored foreign press-and-radio commentary about Germany and kept track of foreign films. (Goebbels selected the films that Hitler watched of an evening.) It was Goebbels’s duty also to provide official releases to foreign news media and broadcasts to foreign audiences, to court friendly foreign journalists, and both openly and covertly to subsidize articles, books, broadcasts, and films produced abroad.
What Goebbels told Hitler tended to reinforce his low evaluation of the French and British governments. In part, this effect was an inevitable result of Goebbels’s own self-advertising, for he constantly boasted to Hitler of his success in influencing foreign opinion. Because his ministry kept track of newspapers and radio broadcasts around the whole world, not just in Europe, he often called Hitler’s attention to problems in French or British colonial possessions of which the Foreign Ministry took less note. In the meeting recorded by Hossbach, some of what Hitler said about problems in the British Empire echoed what he had been told by Goebbels.43 And Goebbels’s comments on events abroad often had the same slant as Hitler’s. Thus, for example, he would describe a speech by a British politician calling for firmness against Germany as “childish,” another by a champion of conciliation as “masterful.” Both out of conviction and as a way of bolstering his own status with Hitler, Goebbels would also denigrate diplomats and military officers, deriding the former as “comical” and saying that the latter “think too much of themselves.”44
Hermann Göring was also frequently in contact with Hitler. One of the more bizarre characters in the Third Reich, he was preposterously self-indulgent and theatrical. Weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he was so fat that it was said he had to wear corsets on his thighs.45 He collected every office and medal that came within grasp. The official Prussian Yearbook for 1939 lists his titles as “Field Marshal General, Commissar for the Four-Year Plan, Minister for Air and Commander in Chief of the Air Force, Master of the Forests for the Reich and for Prussia, Master of the Hunt for the Reich, President of the Reichstag, President of the State Council, and Minister President of Prussia.” In the latter capacity, the Yearbook continued, he controlled the Archives, the State Theater, and the Prussian Secret Police. He was also patron and chief of the Hermann Göring Master School for Painting and patron of the Prussian Academy of Arts. His friend Prince Philip of Hesse joked that, in spite of his girth, he would soon have so many medals that he would have to pin some on his backside. It was also whispered that he had rubber replicas of each so that he could wear them in his swimming pool.46
Göring’s extravagant uniforms were also subjects of humor. He kept a great estate not far from Berlin, named Karin Hall after his deceased first wife. When there, he liked to dress, it was reported, “in a sleeveless leather doublet, snow-white shirt sleeves of homespun linen bulging around his arms, and medieval high boots to the middle of his thighs.” At a hunting lodge farther away, he once appeared after dinner dressed in a bearskin, carrying a spear, dragging behind him two bison, whom he encouraged to mate for the entertainment of his guests.47
But this often ridiculous tub of a man had been a genuine flying ace in the Great War. During the 1920s, he had contributed to developing Lufthansa, the dominant German commercial airline. The success of the Nazi Party owed a good deal to his organizing and disciplining its cadres in Prussia. Hitler said that he had given Göring the Prussian SA as “a disheveled rabble. In a very short time he had organized a division of eleven thousand men.”48 And after Hitler came to power, Göring collected all those offices in part because he was one of the less incompetent administrators in Hitler’s entourage.
Göring probably shared Hitler’s beliefs about Lebensraum and Jews. In any case, if he differed with Hitler on any fundamental matter, he gave no sign of doing so. As was evident during the Blood Purge, he had no more scruples than Hitler about lying and committing murder. He probably felt some institutional loyalty toward the air force, which he had helped to create and with which he was identified, but it is unlikely that this loyalty was ever stronger than his loyalty to Hitler.
The multiplicity of Göring’s functions and the knowledge that came with his varied duties put him more than once in a difficult position. In the mid-1930s, Göring knew how much the rearmament effort was straining Germany’s civilian economy. It was partly for this reason that he took such an energetic lead with regard to Austria. He wanted Austria’s resources. He may never have described to Hitler the full extent of the problems he was hoping thereby to solve.
As head of the air force, Göring had access to detailed information on how Germany compared with France and Britain in air power. Whether he sought such information or not is an open question. Johannes Steinhoff, a young air-force ace who, after the war, would come to head the West German air force, spent some time with Göring in 1939 and concluded that he understood almost nothing about modern aircraft. Paul Deichmann, an officer on the air staff, was convinced, however, that Göring knew that many of the Luftwaffe’s planes had serious shortcomings but deliberately pretended otherwise, and also exaggerated both rates of production and numbers of planes operational—building for Hitler the equivalent of the stage-scenery villages that Prince Potemkin erected in the eighteenth century to line the routes of travel of the Empress Catherine the Great so that she would have the illusion that Russia was becoming a modern European nation.49
It is even more uncertain whether Göring was or was not aware of facts concerning the French and British air forces. The chief of intelligence for the German air force, Colonel Josef (“Beppo”) Schmid, was an alcoholic roughneck with no evident qualification for his job other than unshakable certainty that German planes and pilots were superior to all others. Most officers in the air staff scorned Schmid and paid no attention to the intelligence estimates he circulated.50 Whether Göring believed them or just wanted documents that would please Hitler, no one knows. Given his intellect and shrewdness, however, it seems unlikely that he himself believed everything he said to Hitler about how the air-power balance favored Germany. Although Göring goaded Hitler in 1938 to disregard the cautions of Beck and other generals, he had worried aloud even then about the possibility of a “big mess.”
However prejudiced Hitler’s mind, however limited his background, however scattered his sources of information, however his prejudices were reinforced by courtiers such as Goebbels and Göring, Hitler had both a broader conceptual framework than his professional advisers and a broader base of knowledge. When he made predictions about France or Britain, he thought of the politicians who headed their governments and about currents of mass opinion eddying around them that would influence, possibly control, their decisions. For practical purposes, Beck and Halder knew only what attachés and military intelligence reported on the military establishments of France and Britain. Though Weizsäcker read newspapers, he depended largely on reportage from German diplomatic missions abroad and gleanings from foreigners in Berlin. These sources told him much about high politics in Paris and London, especially as it touched their foreign offices, but less about the larger environment surrounding French and British decision-making.
Hitler’s own experience as a politician, creating his interest in information about political leaders and mass politics in other countries, probably explains why, despite his disabilities, he was sometimes better able than his official advisers to foresee what the French and British governments would do. But the realities behind decisions made by those governments were far more complex and contingent than he or any of his advisers appreciated.