Hitler's Charisma (22 page)

Hitler also realised that the term “public opinion” could be misleading since it masked the fact that there were different shades of opinion throughout society. Often individual opinion was not black or white on issues like euthanasia but existed in shades of grey. He could personally play an important role in encouraging individuals to move along a graduated path until they accepted his view as their own. As a charismatic leader, Hitler in this respect acted as a legitimiser, an enabler, a giver of permissions, almost as a father figure who told his followers, “Yes, pursue these dreams—forget the conventions of so-called civilised society.” And now, either overtly or tacitly, many doctors were following Hitler’s instruction to reject “modern sentimental humanitarianism.”
¹⁷

It needed only a spark to cause the formal introduction of a policy of killing in mental hospitals. That spark came around the end of 1938 (no one is sure of the exact date) when Philipp Bouhler, who ran the office of the Chancellery of the Führer, found amongst the myriad letters and petitions addressed to Hitler a request from the father of a severely mentally and physically disabled boy that doctors be allowed to kill his son. Hitler authorised his own doctor, Karl Brandt, to investigate the case. Brandt travelled to Leipzig to consult with the child’s doctors and then told them that they could kill the boy. So began the “child euthanasia action.”

Often looked on as the classic example of what Professor Sir Ian Kershaw memorably called “Working Towards the Führer”
¹⁸
—the notion that Hitler’s followers initiated actions that they hoped he would like—it is also an instance of the power of Hitler’s charismatic leadership. For whilst it’s true that ambitious Nazi administrators acted in similar fashion to Bouhler, who seized upon this particular petition knowing it related to a subject that interested his boss, it’s hard to imagine how the father of the severely disabled boy sought anything other than a desperate way out of a terrible situation. The father was not “working towards the Führer” but seeking a solution to a seemingly intractable emotional problem—and who better to offer such a solution than the father-like head of the Nazi state? The whole thrust of Goebbels’ propaganda in the 1930s had been to create an atmosphere in which the Führer’s judgement was thought infallible, and so this father must have thought that the one person who would know what to do about his son, and could “legitimise” his death and arguably his release from suffering, would be Adolf Hitler.

After this one child had been killed at the request of his father, Hitler
authorised that other similar cases could be treated the same way. In order to administer this “will of the Führer” a whole new organisation was created—separate from the existing health administration structure—called “The Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenital Illnesses.” Midwives were ordered to report any child born with suspected congenital defects. Three different doctors then examined the forms submitted to them detailing any such defects and then separately decided if the child should live or die. Those selected to die were taken from their parents (the parents were “persuaded” to give their child over to the care of doctors at a “special clinic”) and murdered at one of around thirty different centres spread throughout Germany. For example, Aplerbeck Hospital near Dortmund was one of these killing centres, and here the children were murdered by lethal injection or by being made to swallow Luminal (phenobarbital) tablets.

Hitler ordered that the child “euthanasia action” be conducted in secret. But though individual doctors could refuse to participate—and some did—there was never any shortage of medical professionals willing to take part in the murders. And, true to his word that these actions would best be conducted in the context of war, Hitler signed an authorisation for the action only in October 1939, after the war had started—and even more significantly he predated the document to 1 September, the very day the Germans invaded Poland.

There was thus a relatively smooth progression from the introduction of sterilisation to the killings of the child euthanasia scheme. Given that, it’s often surprising to people new to this history to discover that, in stark contrast, Nazi anti-Semitic policy shows no such systematic progression. This wasn’t because there weren’t deeply anti-Semitic individuals within the Nazi party who craved to be “released” from the “shackles” of convention in order to pursue a truly radical solution to what they saw as “the Jewish problem.” Nazi stormtroopers, as we have seen, moved against many German Jews in 1933, and the hurried anti-Semitic legislation of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 was, in part, an attempt to legitimise the localised persecution of Jews that was already taking place. But, still, only a minority of German Jews had left Germany by the end of 1937. If Hitler’s policy had been to expel all German Jews then five years into his chancellorship it had demonstrably failed. And yet he knew that many
Nazi hardliners—like Julius Streicher—were only waiting for the merest sign to be let off the leash and act without restraint.

In a revealing speech he gave to Nazi party officials in April 1937, Hitler laid bare how he sought to lead the party and the nation over the Jewish question. In the process he gave valuable clues as to how he managed the effect of his own charisma. Whilst asserting that the ultimate aim of Nazi policy towards the Jews was “crystal clear to all of us” he said, “My main concern is always to avoid taking a step that I might later have to retract, and not to take a step which could damage us in any way. You must understand that I always go as far as I dare—but no further. It is vital to have a sixth sense which tells you broadly, ‘What can I still do, what can I not do?’ ”
¹⁹

Hitler thus emphasised once again the importance for any charismatic leader of projecting an aura of certainty. So much so that he said the desire not to appear weak was “all” that concerned him. He said that, “It is not that I immediately and violently intend to challenge an enemy to fight.” Instead he preferred to antagonise and goad his opponent by shouting “I want to destroy you.” Only after trapping his enemy into a “corner” did Hitler “deliver the fatal thrust.”

On analysis, this is a strange strategy. Hitler’s long-term goal might be clear enough, but there was no coherent political mechanism linking short-term issues with that long-term goal. By simply shouting at his opponent Hitler was not offering any guidance to his followers as to how to achieve their ends. But the speech does explain why Hitler wanted, for example, his generals to be like “bull terriers on chains.”
²⁰
It was immensely useful to Hitler to have a section of support that he appeared to be “restraining” from radical action. And whilst Hitler also remarked that his generals disappointed him because he had to encourage rather than restrain them, the substantive point remains.

That “restraint” against the Jews was lifted dramatically in the wake of the
Anschluss
with Austria in March 1938. Walter Kämmerling, a fifteen-year-old Jewish schoolboy at the time, remembers the catastrophe of the arrival of the Nazis—shops were smashed, Jews violently molested and Jewish businesses expropriated. “You were completely outlawed,” he says, “there was no protection from anywhere. Anyone could come up to you and do what they want and that’s it.”
²¹

The violence and persecution in Austria in spring 1938 was on a different
scale to any yet seen in Germany. There were two main reasons for this. First, there were many more Jews proportionately in Austria than Germany (about 4 per cent of the population in Austria as opposed to 0.76 per cent in Germany) and, second, Austria, though shortly to be part of the Reich, was still not quite German soil. Austria was the first example of what would become a common phenomenon in the Nazi state; the acts of greatest violence might initially take place outside the borders of the old Reich, but the consequences of the new radicalism would often then be felt in Germany.

That was certainly the case in 1938. In the wake of the violent persecution of Austrian Jews, the Nazis turned their attention back home. On 26 April, six weeks after the Nazis had entered Austria, Hermann Göring ordered that all German Jews must register their property, and that any property valued at more than 5,000 Reichmarks could only be sold or leased with the permission of the Nazi authorities. It was an obvious preliminary step towards the outright theft of Jewish assets. Other measures soon followed—Jewish doctors, lawyers, dentists and vets were prevented from working for “Aryan” clients, and Jews were forced to add certain names to their own so that they could easily be identified, like “Israel” for men and “Sarah” for women.

In the wake of the persecution of the German and Austrian Jews, the U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt decided to become more actively involved with the problem. He called for an international conference to be held to discuss what could be done, and in July 1938 representatives from more than thirty countries met at the Hotel Royal, Évian-les-Bains in France. In public, Hitler offered the delegates his cynical support: “I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals [Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships.”
²²

As it turned out, the Évian conference was the worst of all possible outcomes for the German and Austrian Jews, who had hoped that soon the rest of the world would open its doors to them. Of the thirty or so countries represented, only the Dominican Republic offered the prospect of accepting substantial numbers of Jews. The rest—for the most part—offered sympathetic words but little practical help. It seemed confirmation
of the words Chaim Weizmann had said to a British newspaper two years before: “The world seemed to be divided into two parts—those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.”
²³

Golda Meir, who would later become Prime Minister of Israel, watched the conference proceedings. “Sitting there in that magnificent hall and listening to the delegates of 32 countries rise, each in turn, to explain how much they would have liked to take in substantial numbers of refugees and how unfortunate it was that they were not able to do so, was a terrible experience. I don’t think that anyone who didn’t live through it can understand what I felt at Évian—a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror. I wanted to get up and scream at them all, ‘Don’t you know that these “numbers” are human beings, people who may spend the rest of their lives in concentration camps, or wandering around the world like lepers, if you don’t let them in?’ ”
²⁴

The Nazi view of Évian was clear. “Nobody wants to have them” was the headline in the
Völkischer Beobachter
.
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And Hitler subsequently expressed contempt for the whole approach of democratic nations to the question of Jewish emigration. In a speech at the Nuremberg rally on 12 September 1938, he ridiculed the attitude of the “democratic countries” who condemned the Germans for trying to “rid” themselves of “the Jewish element.” He remarked that “not a word is heard in these democratic countries about replacing this hypocritical lamentation with a good deed and assistance. No, to the contrary, all one hears is cold reasoning, claiming that in these states there is regretfully no space either … Alas, no help. But morals!”
²⁶

The Évian conference thus did little to deal with the practical plight of the Jews whilst feeding Hitler’s fantasies about Jewish dominance, since much of the rest of the world—including the United States—was against Nazi Germany on this crucial issue. As Professor Adam Tooze says, Hitler was “fundamentally convinced, in my view, that the world Jewish conspiracy has taken on a whole new ominous character. This starts in the summer of 1938 with the Évian Conference in which America becomes involved in European affairs around the issue of the organised emigration of eastern European Jews. And this is triggered, of course, by the incredible violence that the Germans unleash in Austria after the
Anschluss
. And this, in Hitler’s mind, shifts the focus of the world Jewish conspiracy, which in his view is Germany’s ultimate enemy, from Moscow
which has previously been aligned with Communism, to a very clear statement by early 1939 that the real centre of the world Jewish conspiracy is Washington, Wall Street and Hollywood. That, of course, fundamentally shifts your assessment of the strategic picture because behind Britain and France, as in the First World War, ultimately stands the full force of the American armaments economy.”
²⁷

On 9 November 1938, Nazi anti-Semitic thugs were well and truly released against the Jews, and committed a series of atrocities during what became known as
Reichskristallnacht
(“night of the broken glass”). Two days before the attacks, on 7 November, Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old Jew born in Germany of Polish parents, had walked into the German Embassy in Paris and shot a junior official called Ernst vom Rath. He had been driven to commit this crime by the plight of his parents, Sendel and Rivka. They had been amongst 12,000 or so Polish Jews living in Germany who had just been taken by the Nazis and dumped at the border with Poland. The Poles had refused to allow them into their country and so these Jews were sitting, stateless, between two regimes that wanted nothing to do with them. It was a powerful and practical illustration of the consequences of both Nazi persecution and the failure of the international community at Évian. The Nazis wanted to expel their Jews but “Nobody wants to have them.”

On 9 November, vom Rath finally died of his wounds. This was already a “sacred” day for the whole Nazi movement—the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch fifteen years before. Hitler and the rest of the Nazi leadership had assembled in Munich for the annual commemoration, and it was here that Joseph Goebbels, always a hard-line anti-Semite, asked Hitler to allow violent action against the German Jews in revenge for the murder of vom Rath. There had already been sporadic attacks on Jewish property earlier that night, but now atrocities were committed against German Jews on a scale that was previously unparalleled under the Nazis. More than 20,000 Jewish men were imprisoned in concentration camps and over a thousand synagogues were destroyed. Several hundred Jews lost their lives. In Nuremberg, Rudi Bamber, then eighteen years old, watched in horror as stormtroopers burst down the front door of his house and destroyed everything they could find. Then a second group arrived and beat him up. Once they moved on, Rudi found his mother crying, and water from smashed pipes flooding through the floors. As he
made his way through the debris of broken furniture, glass and china he came across his dying father. The stormtroopers had murdered him. Rudi was spared only because the leader of the stormtroopers had decided to go home because he had to get to work in the morning, and so the rest “were very irritated by this and they weren’t going to waste any more time so they gave me a swift kick and said ‘push off’ or words to that effect and they walked out and left me to it.”
²⁸
Rudi sums up his own horrific experience at the hands of the Nazis by saying, “There is no sense in the whole story, really. It is absurd.”