Among those symptoms of decline must be included the intellectual narrowing that threw him back to the viewpoint of a local party leader. From the third winter on, he could see the war in no other light than that of a “seizure of power” expanded to global dimensions. In the “period of struggle,” too, he comforted himself, he had faced overwhelmingly superior forces—“a single man with a small band of followers.” The war was nothing but a “gigantic repetition” of earlier experiences. The record of one of the table talks reads: “At lunch… the chief pointed out that this war was a faithful copy of the conditions of the period of struggle. What took place among us then as a struggle of parties in the domestic realm is taking place today as the struggle of nations in the foreign realm.”57
In keeping with the precipitate aging of his appearance, he occasionally complained that the years were robbing him of all his gambler’s pleasure in taking risks. Intellectually, too, he more and more lived in the past. The garrulous reviews of matters long past, with which he filled his nocturnal monologues, had the sound of an old man’s nostalgias. In his military decisions he frequently referred to the experiences of the First World War, while his interest in armaments became more and more restricted to the traditional weapons systems. He neither grasped the crucial importance of radar and the splitting of the atom nor the value of a heat-seeking ground-to-air rocket or a sound-guided torpedo. He also blocked the large-scale production of the first jet plane, the Messerschmitt 262. With senile obstinacy he insisted on far-fetched objections, reversed or changed decisions, confounded his entourage with hastily reeled-off statistics, or took refuge in broad psychological generalizations. When on the basis of a newspaper report of British experiments with jet planes he was at last persuaded early in 1944 to permit the manufacture of the Me 262, he tried to hedge by ordering that the plane not be built as a fighter against the Allied air raiders. Instead, contrary to the advice of the experts, it was to be employed as a fast bomber. The physical strain on the pilots would be intolerable, he decided, and also argued that the faster planes were really slower in air combat. In fact, he snatched at anything for an argument; and while Germany’s cities were reduced to rubble, he refused even to permit a few experimental uses of the plane as a fighter. Finally he banned any further discussion of the subject.
Naturally these struggles with his own people increased his usual abnormal suspiciousness. Often he obtained information from staff headquarters over the heads of his closest military advisers, and occasionally he sent his army adjutant, Major Engel, to the front by plane to check the actual situation. Officers who came from the battle areas were not allowed to speak on military matters with anyone, especially not with the chief of staff, before they had been received in the Führer’s bunker. With his obsession for checking up, Hitler praised his organization for one of its crucial defects. On the whole vast Eastern front, he declared, there was “not a regiment and not a battalion whose position was not followed up three times a day in the Führer’s headquarters here.” One major reason so many officers came to grief was this paralyzing paranoia, which undermined every relationship. Eventually he quarreled with all the commanders in chief of the army, all the chiefs of staff, eleven of the eighteen field marshals, twenty-one of nearly forty full generals, and nearly all the commanders of the three sectors of the Eastern front. The space around him grew increasingly emptier. As long as Hitler remained in headquarters, Goebbels declared, his dog Blondi was closer to him than any human being.
After Stalingrad his nerves were plainly giving out. Up to then Hitler had rarely lost his stoic bearing which, he believed, was among the attributes of great commanders. Even in critical situations he had maintained an ostentatious calm. But now that pose was accompanied by signs of fatigue, and his violent fits of rage revealed the price that years of overtaxing his strength had cost. When General Staff officers delivered their situation reports, he railed at them as “idiots,” “cowards,” and “liars.” Guderian, who at this time saw him again after a long interval, noted in astonishment Hitler’s “irascibility, and the unpredictability of his words and decisions.” He was also subject to unwonted sentimental lapses. When Bormann told him of his wife’s confinement, Hitler reacted with tears in his eyes. More often than ever, he spoke of his retirement and how he would give himself up to meditating, reading, and running a museum.
There is some evidence that from the end of 1942 on, the entire stabilization system of his nerves gave way. He concealed this only by a tremendous act of desperate self-discipline. The generals attached to the Führer’s headquarters felt the symptoms of the crisis, although the later descriptions of a Hitler continually raging, totally subject to the explosions of an unrestrained temperament, belong in the category of apologetic exaggeration. The minutes of the military conferences, some of which have been preserved, indicate instead that he made strong efforts to fit the image he had chosen for himself. On the whole, he succeeded.
The very stringency of the daily schedule at headquarters helped. Immediately after awakening, Hitler studied the news. Toward noon the grand conference was held. Then followed more conferences, dictation, reception of guests, and discussions until the evening conference, which usually took place during the night. All this regular attention to duties did violence to his nature and was in deliberate opposition to his inveterate yearning for passivity and indolence. As late as December, 1944, he sketched, in a casual remark, the image of a genius saved by steady purpose; with difficulty and occasional deviations he was trying to conform to that image:
Genius is something will-o-the-wispy if it is not sustained by perseverance and fanatical tenacity. That is the most important thing there is in human life. People who have only inspirations, ideas, and so on, but who do not have firmness of character, who lack tenacity and perseverance, will amount to nothing in spite of all. They are adventurers. If things go well, they climb; when things go badly, they immediately slump down and give up everything. But you can’t make world history with that kind of attitude.58
In its functionalism and gloom the Führer’s headquarters was not unlike that “state cage” into which his father had once led him and where the people, according to young Hitler, had “sat crouching on one another close as monkeys.” The mechanism into which he forced his life was so antipathetic to his nature that it could only be maintained artificially. Medication and druglike preparations enabled him to meet the unaccustomed demands upon his nature. Until the end of 1940 the drugs do not seem to have influenced his health significantly. Ribbentrop, it is true, reported a heated dispute in the summer of 1940, in the course of which Hitler dropped into a chair and began groaning that he had a feeling of dissolution and sensed he was on the verge of a stroke.59 But the description suggests that this scene should be reckoned among those half-hysterical, half-histrionic displays that Hitler used as a method of coercive argumentation. His medical checkups at the beginning and the end of the year merely showed slightly increased blood pressure and those gastric and intestinal disturbances from which he had always suffered.60
With hypochondriacal pedantry Hitler noted every deviation in the findings of his checkups. He was constantly observing himself, taking his pulse, reading medical books, and taking medicines “literally in quantity”: sleeping and kola pills, digestives, cold pills, vitamins. Even the eucalyptus candies that were always on hand gave him the sense of looking after his health. If a medicine were prescribed for him without an exact dosage, he took it from morning to night almost incessantly. Professor Morell, the onetime fashionable Berlin doctor for skin and venereal diseases, had advanced through the good offices of Heinrich Hoffmann to the rank of one of Hitler’s personal physicians. For all his devotion to medicine, Professor Morell was not without traces of quackery. He gave Hitler injections almost daily: sulfanilamide, glandular preparations, glucose, or hormones that were supposed to improve or regenerate his circulation, his intestinal flora, or the state of his nerves. Göring sarcastically called him “Reich Injection Master.”