Hitler’s local success emboldened him to dream beyond Bavaria, to project the NSDAP as a true ‘national’ party, and to think of himself as a leader of the German state. His icy character thawed a little. He lowered his defensive shield. Secure within the orbit of his personal bodyguards – the Stosstrupp – he agreed to be photographed in his habitat for the first time (hitherto, he had threatened or seized the cameras of anyone who dared try to photograph him without permission).
His adoring crowds liked what they saw. Here was their saviour, their battle-hardened war hero who had returned from the trenches to knock Bavaria into shape and avenge Versailles; here their warrior-leader, who proudly flaunted his war record where so many veterans were ashamed or never spoke of theirs.
Hitler turned thirty-two in 1921, yet he seemed possessed of the spirit of an adolescent. He swaggered around Munich in his tight-fitting suits, a revolver on his hip and a whip in his hand. He looked more like a gang leader, a streetwise youth, than an aspiring politician. His snappy gait and menacing countenance suggested a gangster, not a serious contender for high office. He even took his gun to dinner parties.
As his fame grew, he became more self-conscious of the way he dressed and tended to adapt his uniform to his audience. Around town he wore plain dark suits, unremarkable ties and perhaps a trench coat or greatcoat, depending on the season. At beer-hall rallies he often wore a military uniform and sometimes his Iron Cross. In the salons of his wealthy donors, he occasionally put on lederhosen and a feathered cap, though his knobbly white knees did not encourage him to make a habit of wearing the Bavarian leather breeches.
Even at this early stage of his political career, in appearance, habits, views and personality Hitler was already stamped with the hallmarks that he would exhibit as Führer of Germany. His complexion was pale and ‘almost girl-like’, as the German historian Percy Ernst Schramm – who, as the official diarist of the Wehrmacht during the Second World War, observed Hitler at close range – would note:
His mouth was relatively small, his chin not well developed. His lips were thin and pinched. He had a high forehead but it did not stand out because it was covered by his forelock. He had few eyelashes on his lids, but his eyebrows were thick, and above them slight bulges appeared in his forehead … The man’s head seemed to dominate his entire body; torso, arms, legs – all seemed to hang down from it.1
This unflattering portrait jarred with the image Hitler intended to convey, of the solitary predator, the ‘lone wolf’ and ruthless operator, orchestrating the events that bore his party’s name.
It was around this time that his little toothbrush moustache made its permanent and most fastidious appearance. Bavarians nicknamed it a Rotzbremse, or ‘snot brake’; in Britain and America it was chiefly associated with the comedian Charlie Chaplin. Though fairly common in Germany in the years after the war, Hitler’s facial hair was not fashionable and repelled his comrades. When Ernst Hanfstaengl advised him to shave it off, Hitler replied, ‘If it is not the fashion now, it will be later because I wear it.’2 The toothbrush moustache never caught on, despite Hitler’s confidence. Its true purpose, in his case, was to disguise his flaring nostrils, which he thought unappealing.3
In his personal habits, young Hitler was a model of ‘normality’. He lived modestly and had bland tastes. Haunted by the memory of dirt and squalor in his days on the streets, he bathed regularly and cared meticulously for his few remaining teeth. As the historian Roger Moorhouse notes, ‘Adolf Hitler had very bad teeth – catastrophically bad teeth. It is not clear precisely why – bad genes, bad diet or poor personal hygiene – but some among his entourage would later claim that his halitosis was sometimes so bad that they involuntarily took a step back when talking to him. By the last year of the war, his teeth had deteriorated to such a state that only 5 of his 32 adult teeth were his own.’4 In his domestic regime, Hitler was self-disciplined and organized, shunning alcohol and red meat, though he was yet to become a fully fledged vegetarian. He loved being near animals, pretty women and children.
A marked trait of Hitler’s personality was his childish sensitivity. He took any slight personally, reacting with extreme aggression. He never tamed his hypersensitivity to personal criticism or controlled his rages, as Kershaw observes. His resort to ‘extraordinary outbursts of un controlled temper’ and his ‘extreme aversion to any institutional anchoring’ would manifest themselves to the end of his days.5 He personalized every enemy, as Alan Bullock has observed: not only the Jews, but the ‘November Criminals’, modern artists, Slavs … all were somehow acting against him, debasing his vision of an Aryan world.6 He used anger and garrulity to political advantage, to bully, obfuscate or disorientate his opponents.
Hitler continued to ‘educate’ himself, as he had done in Vienna, by selecting information and ‘ideas’ that reinforced his ‘world view’. ‘Hitler’s thought,’ Schramm observed, ‘is rather to be understood as a huge collection of the most diverse origins, upon which he sought to impose his own order and logic.’7 He seized on whatever information helped to enhance his image and rise to power, regardless of whether it was true or factually sound. He swallowed whole Hanns Hörbiger’s absurd World Ice Theory (which promoted the idea that ice was the basic structure of the cosmos and underpinned the whole development of the universe); and, as we have seen, appropriated the essence of Social Darwinism as the basis for his ideas on ‘race’. He had little interest in literature, read neither contemporary fiction nor the classics. Even his love of opera waned as his authoritarian impulses took control.
As such, his mind resembled a junk yard of ideological clutter, packed with conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, hated enemies and methods of revenge, which he pummelled into place in his speeches. ‘Facts’ and ‘truth’ were useful to Hitler only insofar as they fed his propaganda machine. ‘Truth’ meant what he said it meant. He was the ultimate ‘populist’ politician, ‘the greatest demagogue in history,’ concluded Alan Bullock.8
Those who sought ‘reason’ or intellectual consistency in Hitler’s words would come away gravely disappointed: he would say and do anything to achieve power, and jettison any doctrine or policy in the pursuit of it. His only consistent position, from 1921 on, was his violent hatred of the Jews. He refused to be impressed by complexity, insisting that the ‘human will’ could solve any problem, no matter how difficult.9 He was, as a result, utterly, terrifyingly unpredictable.
Wilful ignorance is no barrier to self-confidence. Flush with the arrogance of a man for whom political power validated any action, however odious or criminal, Hitler barged around party offices, dispatching orders, serving judgements and issuing long sermons on the party’s ideological mission and the importance of propaganda. At other times he would do little, whiling away the hours in cafés, listlessly sipping tea and eating sweet cakes.
This was the same pattern of behaviour, of great energy interspersed with inertia and indecision, that he had displayed in Vienna. This time, however, people noticed, people listened. His followers hung on his every word. In the ingratiating company of his Nazi comrades, Hitler’s mind hardened; the parade of ‘traitors’ he sought to punish lengthened. He nursed titanic grudges.
He spent a great deal of time noting down the names of Jewish painters and writers with a view to imposing an absolute ban on ‘degenerate’ (i.e. Jewish) art and ordering the burning of ‘unGerman’ books. Disgusted by their ‘decadence’ – and embittered by his own failure as an artist – Hitler would justify any action that suppressed modern artists on the grounds that the leading lights were Jews. Once in power, he would outlaw ‘Jewish’ artists and ‘Jewish’ scientists, and ban their ‘decadent’ work. Those who failed to escape would be dispatched to death camps.
Hitler’s character, too, acquired a range of careful poses, or political personas, which he rehearsed and perfected. He was in this sense a consummate performer, and yet few knew when the ‘real’ Adolf was performing. Those close to him saw a true and loyal friend, a hard worker, a leader of destiny, who ‘could and did command respect’, as Schramm later observed.10 Schramm, who would study him at close quarters, detected an array of guises or ‘characters’ in Hitler: the brave war veteran of uncommon will and self-discipline; the puritan who neither drank nor smoked, shunned sexual intimacy and stuck to a strict vegetarian diet; the gangster and popular curiosity in the salons of the rich; the tireless party worker and ‘loyal comrade’; the prankster who loved to imitate the characters and accents of his enemies; and the brooding ideologue and political revolutionary, always on the edge of a tantrum.
Yet Schramm saw another face to Hitler that eluded Bavaria’s great and good at the start of the 1920s. Had they been able to see that face, Schramm believed, ‘even the most loyal and devoted of them would have turned to stone.’11 Writing at the time of the Führer’s ‘Table Talk’ discussions, in 1941–2 at the height of the war, Schramm was shocked to discover that Hitler could joke and laugh over lunch and then, in the afternoon, order the mass execution of civilians, contemplate the starvation of Leningrad and set in motion the systematic annihilation of the Jews.
Much of what Schramm saw also applied to Hitler in the 1920s. ‘Whenever anyone tries to understand Hitler,’ he wrote, ‘the final result never adds up correctly. His contact with children and dogs, his joy in flowers and culture, his appreciation of lovely women, his relationship to music were all quite genuine. But no less genuine was the ferocity – morally uninhibited, ruthless, “ice-cold” – with which Hitler annihilated not only real but even potential opponents.’12 Similarly, Helmuth Greiner, who would later join Hitler’s circle of dinner companions, observed, ‘I have never heard a word come over his lips, which even suggested he had a warm or compassionate heart.’13
Hitler’s sexual relations were, for much of his younger life, ‘arms-length’ or non-eventful, partly because he was afraid of contracting venereal disease and partly because the human body disgusted him. During the war, as we have seen, he shunned sleeping with Frenchwomen as contrary to the honour of a German soldier. He seems to have been a virgin at least until the Armistice. And while he later made ‘passionate declarations’ to society beauties, he rarely dared touch them beyond a furtive grope or a kiss.
Ernst Hanfstaengl, who observed him closely over fifteen years, described Hitler as ‘impotent, the repressed, masturbating type’:14 ‘I do not suppose he had orthodox sexual relations with any women.’ Hanfstaengl’s wife, Helene, agreed: for her, young Hitler inhabited a sexual no-man’s-land. That was not unusual at the time for a certain kind of ascetic who dressed up his fear and avoidance of sex as self-discipline and personal strength. Hitler later explained that he refused to marry because he was too busy and would have neglected his wife: ‘It is much better to have a lover.’15
As for his virility, Hitler had two testicles, according to a report by the family doctor, Eduard Bloch. His penis ‘was completely normal’, Bloch wrote, dismissing stories that it was outlandishly small or diseased, as his enemies liked to say.16 Nor had a goat bitten off half of it when he was a boy, as a fellow pupil, Eugen Wasen, later claimed. ‘Oh yeah, Adolf!’ Wasen told a post-war tribunal. ‘He’d made a bet that he could pee into the mouth of a goat …’ As one German doctor later noted, either the goat had very good aim or Hitler had ‘no reflexes’.17
There is no evidence that Hitler was homosexual or ‘sexually perverted’, by the standards of either Weimar Germany or today. Nothing has appeared to validate claims that, in the late 1920s, he indulged in sado-masochistic sex and ‘golden showers’ with his beloved half-niece, Angela Raubal, known as Geli, or that he urged her to urinate and defecate on his face. His enemies would circulate many such stories after he came to power. (It is heavily insinuated, however, that he engaged in a sexual relationship with her after she moved into his apartment in Munich, in 1929, as a medical student. When he discovered that she was involved with his then chauffeur, the SA leader Emil Maurice, he terminated the relationship and sacked Maurice. She then became his virtual prisoner. Jealously possessive, Hitler later forbade her to marry another suitor, from Linz – an episode that seems directly linked to her suicide. Her body was found in Hitler’s Munich apartment on 19 September 1931, shot through the lung with Hitler’s own pistol.18 She was twenty-three.)19
As for his popularity with women, Hitler certainly drew many to his rallies. He was ever-alert to feminine beauty, his well-known roving eye tending to alight on the prettiest girls in the room. As he grew into middle age, his few intimate relationships would be with women. And no doubt many thousands of women persuaded themselves that they adored him, rather as an adolescent loves a pop star. They flocked to hear him speak, lavishing him with praise and soliciting his company at any chance.
The admiration was not mutual. Hitler’s actual view of the role of women adhered to the sternest biblical precepts of the nineteenth century. ‘The world of the woman is the man,’ he would say. ‘Only now and then does she think of anything else … A man has to be able to stamp his imprint on any woman. As a matter of fact, a wife does not want anything else!’20 Women were unable to discriminate between reason and emotion, he argued, disqualifying them from politics or any serious occupation. A woman’s duty to society, he believed, was to look pretty, preferably blonde, and breed his Aryan race.
Hitler’s health has been the subject of endless speculation. As a young man he did not exhibit any obvious mental disturbances or psychological damage (crude though the diagnoses then were). For what it’s worth, Hitler’s future personal physicians, doctors Theodor Morell and Karl Brandt, thought their patient of perfectly sound mind, displaying not the slightest signs ‘of even the beginning of any form of mental illness’.21 They would say that, of course. And yet, no in dependent diagnosis of insanity has stuck:22 Hitler was not schizophrenic, depressed or bipolar.
A fascinating study of Hitler in October 1943 by Dr Henry Murray, a prominent Harvard psychologist, and other experts for the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS – the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency) draws a compelling portrait of a ‘megalomaniac’ who worshipped ‘brute strength’, ‘purity of blood’ and ‘fertility’, and felt contempt for ‘weakness, indecision, lack of energy, fear of conscience’. However, their summary of Hitler’s personality – a concatenation of ‘war neurosis’, ‘hysterical blindness’ (his blindness was caused by mustard gas), ‘bad conscience’, paranoia and sexual masochism – falls short of explaining the Führer-in-full.23 These traits were common enough, and hardly marked you out as a future tyrant. In fairness, the authors were writing before Germany’s surrender, so the full extent of the Nazis’ war crimes was not yet known.
If Hitler suffered from ‘war neurosis’, or what we call post-traumatic stress disorder, as Dr Theo Dorpat also argues, his condition was no different from that of millions of former soldiers who got on with their lives after the war without recourse to acts of violent revenge. If his mind was a textbook case of ‘narcissistic personality disorder’ or extreme sociopathy, as others have claimed,24 he was no more or less afflicted than millions of distempered individuals who crowded the post-war cities, many of whom rose to prominence and pursued relatively normal lives.
The definitive inquiry into Hitler’s health, Was Hitler Ill?, by the distinguished German medical professor Hans-Joachim Neumann and historian Henrik Eberle, published in 2012, set out to establish once and for all whether or not Hitler was mentally or physically unwell, and, if so, whether that might help to explain the Holocaust. They confirmed that, towards the end of his life, Hitler suffered from high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome and stomach cramps, as well as the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, which first appeared in 1941 and are thought to have arisen from his contraction of Encephalitis lethargica during his service on the Western Front.25
In his final years, Hitler’s doctor prescribed heavy doses of drugs to relieve stress, skin rash, cramps and ‘extreme agitation’. Yet he neither took powerful drugs nor suffered from these conditions as a young man. He was never a drug addict, as suggested in a ‘dangerously in accurate’ history of Nazi drug use published in 2016.26 Nor would he display manic, sociopathic or paranoid disorders, concluded Neumann and Eberle in their exhaustive study: ‘Hitler seethed with hatred, but he was always capable of synchronising his desire to exterminate the Jews with public opinion … He was well aware of what he was doing at all times during his political career.’27
This bears out the verdict of British historian Sir Robert Ensor, writing in his 1939 pamphlet ‘Who Hitler Is’: ‘There are psychologists who consider him a paranoiac. Certainly, when he lets himself go in anger, he raves like a madman. But he does so in order to achieve a desired result, namely terror. The baffling torrents of mere verbiage [have] their calculated utility.’28
In sum, Neumann and Eberle found ‘no scientific medical proof that Hitler suffered from a mental illness’.29 Their study demolishes the ‘psycho-historical’ explanation for the Holocaust – that to commit such a monstrous crime, Hitler must have been insane, drugged or traumatized. ‘The answer to the question “was Hitler ill”,’ they conclude, ‘is therefore as follows: the leader of the NSDAP, chancellor of the German Reich and commander-in-chief of the German Wehrmacht, was healthy and accountable.’30
Are we to conclude, then, that he was ‘normal’, a proposition from which conventional morality recoils? Perhaps we should look to Hitler himself for the clearest guide to his character. Obviously he saw himself as exceptional, in many ways. In the early 1920s he described himself as ‘ice-cold’, with a will of iron. What this meant was he had overcome ‘weakness’, suppressed within himself any trace of the voice of conscience or compassion, of basic human decency. He was desperate for the world to take him seriously (of European politicians, only Churchill would). His plans for vengeance against the ‘November Criminals’ were deadly earnest. When he spoke of massive retaliation against the Jews, the Marxists, or anyone who opposed him, he meant it. He planned to act on his threats. He regarded his coming programme as morally and politically sound, a true reflection of the will of the people.
And as he grew into the role of political leader and ideological crusader, his character became more rigid, his ego more imperious. The impact of his personality could quite overwhelm those who had not been exposed to it, as Schramm saw: ‘Such could be its strength that it sometimes seemed a kind of psychological force radiating from him like a magnetic field.’31 Others, however, experienced the opposite effect: one colonel, for example, felt ‘a steadily rising aversion’ to the very presence of Hitler. Such was his fabled ‘sixth sense’ – to detect who was with him or against him – Hitler felt this at once and had the colonel removed.32
Many were sacked for displaying the slightest whiff of disagreement; actual dissent led to their removal, imprisonment and probable death. Hitler demanded absolute loyalty. He interpreted criticism as in subordination and disobedience as treachery. He also had a particular and inveterate distrust of ‘experts’, whom he dismissed or refused to consult. He always knew better, a trait that stayed with him until the end. General Ludwig Beck, chief of the German General Staff for much of the 1930s, claimed that he never once had the chance properly to advise Hitler on defence.
He lived in a realm of violent threats and false promises. Ensor observed:
[H]is tactics have always conformed to a few plain gangster precepts. Remember the value of threats, but remember that it is conditional upon their always being executed. When you are planning to attack a man, take away his character first; overwhelm him with a ‘drum-fire of lies and calumnies’; then, when even his friends are ready to jettison him, strike him down. If you want to gain time or ground, promise the moon; only, so use what is gained that you never need redeem your promises.33
Hitler’s ‘promises of the moon’ – an expanded Reich, a society rid of Jews and other undesirables, the abrogation of Versailles – seemed realizable in a society so desperate that it was willing to suspend disbelief in the agent of their delivery. His political magic flourished in a world as debased and fractured as his own mind.
The source of his future power was already plain to him in his early days as leader of the NSDAP. ‘For to be a leader means to be able to move the masses,’ he wrote.34 And as he entered 1922 he planned to build his influence and popularity beyond his Bavarian base. His personal militia, the Brownshirts, were rapidly expanding into the state regions. Most of all, his vision of a Greater Germany ruled by a ‘Master Race’, a phrase that started to infuse his speeches, intoxicated his followers. Chief among them at this point were his personal myth-maker and ghost-writer Rudolf Hess; his media maestro Max Amann; his ideological guru Alfred Rosenberg; his private militia commander Ernst Röhm; and his favourite war hero and flying ace Hermann Göring.
In early 1922 Hitler won a new and devoted acolyte, the ferocious anti-Semite and publisher of violent pornography Julius Streicher, an all-round abomination who specialized in fabricating images of Jews degrading German women and who would later be known as ‘Jew Baiter Number One’. Streicher, whose excesses drew the condemnation even of senior Nazis, later claimed that he became a disciple of Hitler while hearing him speak in a beer hall that winter:
Thousands of men and women jumped to their feet, as if propelled by a mysterious power … they shouted, ‘Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler’ … Here was one who could wrest out of the German spirit and the German heart the power to break the chains of slavery. Yes! Yes! This man spoke as a messenger from heaven at a time when the gates of hell were opening to pull down everything. And when he finally finished, and while the crowd raised the roof with the singing of the ‘Deutschland’ song, I rushed to the stage …35
If each of these men had ‘some flaw in the weave’, as the architect and future Nazi minister Albert Speer would later observe, with calculated understatement, all were utterly devoted to the man they saw as the saviour of Deutschland. Hitler ruthlessly played them off against each other, but won their adoration and loyalty. They would act on his every instruction. Hess prophesied admiringly that Hitler would have to ‘trample’ people to achieve his goal.36 The trampling was about to begin, with a Nazi uprising in Bavaria.