Hitler’s weakness in leadership emerged most sharply in the course of 1943, when he had as yet developed no strategic conception of the further course of the war. He was uncertain, reluctant to make decisions, vacillating; and Goebbels spoke unequivocally of a “Leader crisis.” The propaganda chief repeatedly urged the hesitant Hitler to regain the initiative in the war by rigorously mobilizing all reserves. In conjunction with Albert Speer, who had been appointed Armaments Minister the previous year, and with Robert Ley and Walther Funk, Goebbels elaborated plans for an overall simplification of the administration, a drastic cutback in consumption for the privileged classes, an increase in armament production, and other similar measures. He was to notice, however, that the gauleiters and the top SA and party officials had long since lost their sacrificial devotion and veered toward becoming a parasitical ruling class. On February 18, 1943, Goebbels addressed a band of invited followers in the Sportpalast and posed his famous ten rhetorical questions. “In an uproar of wild enthusiasm,” as he put it, he obtained their consent to “total war.” This speech was aimed chiefly at breaking resistance among the higher functionaries, whose luxurious living would be affected. But it was intended also to overcome Hitler’s indecisiveness by a radicalizing appeal to the masses.65
Hitler’s reluctance to impose the austerities of total war on the nation was partly the result of another memory, the shock of the November revolution of 1918. But it was also colored by his deep distrust of the inert and fickle masses. It is almost as if he realized how brittle and temporary his rule was and knew how much stood in the way of his intention of “compelling to greatness,” as he once put it, a shrinking and unwilling German people. England, in its war effort, was able to lower the level of private comfort far more drastically than the Reich, and England also employed far more women in the armaments industries than did Germany.66
But there was still another factor in Hitler’s holding back from total war: the intrigues of Martin Bormann, who scented in the effort by Goebbels and Speer all sorts of dangers to his own position. By adaptability, diligence, and craftiness Bormann had worked his way upward in the preceding years to the post of “Führer’s secretary.” And behind that unassuming title he had established one of the strongest power bases within the regime. His short, stocky figure in the ill-fitting party functionary’s uniform was a fixed feature in all pictures of the Führer’s headquarters. He was always there, keeping watch, pondering, a cunning expression on his peasant face. The undetermined sphere of his authority, which he steadily enlarged by referring to the Führer’s alleged desires, assured him powers that in fact raised him to the status of the man who “secretly ran Germany.” Hitler, for his part, seemed happy to be freed of the burden of routine administrative work by this seemingly unassertive secretary. It was soon Bormann who granted or withdrew both authority and the Führer’s favor, who pushed through appointments and promotions, who praised, pestered, or eliminated people in government, but who all the while kept well in the background and could always come up with one slander or one flattery more than even his most powerful adversaries. By means of the visitor lists he controlled Hitler’s contacts with the outside world, and according to the testimony of one observer erected “a veritable Chinese wall” around Hitler.
He was helped in this by a growing desire for isolation from reality on Hitler’s part. Just as the onetime flophouse inmate had in imagination lived in palaces, the generalissimo who was having to retreat on all fronts constructed more and more magnificent imaginary worlds that he rapturously inhabited. Hitler’s tendency to reject reality took an increasingly pathological form after the turning point of the war. This is evidenced in much of his behavior, such as his habit of traveling across the country in a curtained parlor car, and if possible by night. He would keep the windows of the conference room at the Führer’s headquarters closed, and sometimes even blacked out, even in the most beautiful weather. Significantly, he began the day by looking over the prepared excerpts from the press; only then would he examine the latest data. His entourage has reported that he accepted the event itself more calmly than its echo in the press; reality irked him less than its image.
Hitler’s conversational style, constantly degenerating into monologue, his inability to listen or to register objections, and his growing insistence on columns of figures, his rage du nombre, must be reckoned a part of this syndrome. As late as the end of 1943 he was still speaking with total scorn of a study by General Thomas that presented the Russian potential as a serious danger. He bluntly declared that he wanted to see no more memoranda of this sort. At the same time he refused to visit the front or the staff headquarters behind the front. His last visit to the headquarters of an army group took place on September 8, 1943.67 Many disastrous decisions resulted from this ignorance of the reality, for marks on maps told nothing about the climate, the degree of exhaustion of the soldiers, or the extent of their psychological reserves. And in the curiously abstract atmosphere of the conference room, realistic data on the state of equipment or supplies were hard to come by. The preserved minutes of conferences, moreover, have recorded the truckling attitude of the military chiefs, their undignified flatteries. Once Halder had departed, this tone took over completely, so that ultimately all military conferences became no more than “show sits” as the jargon of the Führer’s headquarters described those fraudulent lectures to the statesmen of Germany’s allies. An attempt by Speer to have Hitler meet some of the younger front-line officers came to nothing; neither did the effort to persuade him to visit bombed cities. Goebbels jealously pointed to the much more impressive example of Churchill. Once, when the Führer’s special train on its way to Berchtesgaden with blinds raised by mistake stopped beside a hospital train full of wounded men, Hitler became very agitated and ordered the blinds to be drawn at once.68
It is true that, in the preceding years contempt for reality had been his strength. How else could he have risen out of nothingness and put across his bold triumphs in statesmanship? His early military successes may also have been partly based on that. But now that the tide had turned, disregard of reality drastically multiplied the effects of every defeat. On those occasions when reality forced itself all too painfully on him, he once more raised his old laments that he had become a politician against his will and was sorely burdened by the necessities of office which kept him from immortalizing himself with his cultural projects. “It’s a pity,” he would say, “that I have to wage war on account of a drunken fellow [Churchill], instead of serving the works of peace, like art.” He said he was longing to go to the theater or the Wintergarten in Berlin and “be human again.” Or he spoke bitterly of deception and treachery all around him, of the way the generals were always misleading him, and gave way more and more to an unwonted tone of lachrymose misanthropy: “I meet nothing but betrayal!”
From comparable observations during the twenties one of his early followers had drawn the conclusion that Hitler needed self-deception in order to be able to act at all.69 He craved vastly overblown sham worlds, against whose background all obstacles became insignificant and all problems trivial. He was capable of acting only on the basis of false pretenses. That note of fantastical overexcitement associated with his personality derived from this disturbed relationship to reality. We might say: only unreality made him real. In his comments to his entourage, even in those weary, toneless monologues in the last phase of the war. his voice became animated only when he spoke of the “gigantic tasks,” the “enormous plans” for the future. Those were his real reality.