Hitler and his God

A Charmed Life

Hitler regularly visited the widow of his first favourite architect, Paul Troost. She asked him one day why he cared so little about his personal security. His answer was that he was following “his inner voice” which had told him that he was destined to remain alive “as long as he was needed by the German people”. When Germany did not need him any longer, he would be “called back to his maker”. 991 Albert Speer writes: “The more events drove him into a corner, the more obstinately he opposed to them his certainty about the intentions of Fate. Naturally, he also soberly understood the military facts. But he transmuted them by his own faith and regarded even defeat as a secret guarantee, offered by Providence, of the coming victory. Sometimes he could realize the hopelessness of a situation, but he would not be shaken in his expectation that at the last moment Fate would suddenly turn the tide in his favour. If there was a fundamental insanity in Hitler, it was this unshakeable belief in his lucky star.” 992

It is a fact that Hitler’s eventful life seemed to be protected on numerous occasions and in amazing ways. In the preface to his book about Die 42 Attentate auf Adolf Hitler Will Berthold writes: “It is difficult to say exactly how many attempts on Hitler’s life there have actually been; the documentation remains incomplete, and the lines between wishful thinking and factual action in the eyewitnesses and executors have become blurred in the meantime.” The 42 attempts he narrates are the ones he could satisfactorily document, but “if one took all cases into account of what conspirators have plotted, agreed upon, tried out, started and initiated, the number of attempts would be considerably higher”. 993 Some of these attempts are well known, like the one by Johann Elser in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller on 8 November 1939, when Hitler left early, and the Stauffenberg attempt on 20 July 1944 at the Rastenburg headquarters, when in the conference room the briefcase with the bomb was displaced behind a support of the oak table, away from Hitler, by an unsuspecting general.

During the four years of the First World War, Hitler performed the dangerous job of Meldegänger, a runner who had to carry messages from headquarters to the outposts and was, when zigzagging through the rubble and the bomb craters, the favourite target of enemy snipers. “That he always returned unhurt, although he tempted his luck rather brashly, increased his self-confidence immensely. After the ordeals of the first years and several sensational escapes from death, he felt himself more than ever an exceptional figure, one who is protected by the Lord himself – a conviction strengthened by the fact that his apparent invulnerability provided him with a kind of halo among his comrades: “If Hitler is present nothing will happen.” 994

When the police opened fire on the marchers during the 1923 putsch, Hitler was lucky again. “He escaped by a whisker the deadly bullet which killed the man who marched at his right side, Erwin von Scheubner-Richter.” 995 This, however, is an incomplete statement of Hitler’s luck. For his bodyguard, Ulrich Graf (the burly moustached man one always sees with his Führer’s shepherd dog in photos from the first Nazi years) was marching to his left. When the shots rang out, Graf threw himself upon Hitler, who had been pulled down by the weight of Scheubner-Richter, and was hit no less than eleven times. (He survived.)

Ernst Hanfstängl narrates how, during one of his propaganda tours, Hitler’s plane, on its way from Königsberg to Kiel, nearly crashed in the Baltic. “The weather was very bad and overcast, but Bauer [Hitler’s pilot] got above the clouds and we flew along in bright sunshine. What had not been taken into account was the increasing headwind and when we finally came down again we could see nothing but rain-lashed water. Bauer had the direction finding apparatus on, but for some reason the Berlin station had failed and Bremen and Lübeck were badly interrupted and kept giving us different readings. Fuel was starting to run low and the atmosphere got very tense … I remembered that [Hitler] could not swim … In the end he could stand it no longer and yelled at Bauer: ‘You must turn south, it is the only way to hit land!’ … The situation was now really serious. The petrol tanks were as good as empty, but at the last moment we hit the coast over a small medieval town which none of us could recognize.” The town was Wismar, and Bauer could land at a nearby airport with “literally no more than a few pints of fuel to spare. Hitler was quite groggy, and it was one of the few occasions when I saw him in a physical fright.” 996

After the Stauffenberg attempt on his life in July 1944, “Hitler displayed his tattered trousers like a trophy and did the same with his jacket, which had a square hole ripped out of the back. His calm derived principally from the sense of a ‘miraculous rescue’. It was as if he owned to this treacherous act his reinforced sense of his own mission. That, at any rate, was his interpretation of the event when Mussolini arrived in Rastenburg in the afternoon for a previously announced visit. As they looked at the devastated conference room, Hitler said: “When I call it all to mind again, I conclude that nothing is fated to happen to me, all the more so since this isn’t the first time I’ve miraculously escaped death … After my rescue from the peril of death today I am more than ever convinced that I am destined to carry on our great common cause to a happy conclusion.” 997

And then there is the peculiar phenomenon that took place in the Führerbunker, at the unhappy conclusion when Hitler had taken leave of his entourage and everybody knew that his suicide was imminent. “An unexpected thing happened”, tells Trevor-Roper. “A great and heavy cloud seemed to roll away from the spirits of the bunker-dwellers. The terrible sorcerer, the tyrant who had charged their days with intolerable melodramatic tension, would soon be gone, and for a brief twilight moment they could play. In the canteen of the Chancellery, where the soldiers and orderlies took their meals, there was a dance. The news [of the imminent suicide] was brought, but no one allowed that to interfere with the business of pleasure. A message from the Führerbunker told them to be quieter, but the dance went on. A tailor who had been employed in the Führer’s headquarters … was surprised when Brigadeführer Rattenhuber, the head of the police guard and head of the SS, slapped him cordially on the back and greeted him with democratic cordiality … “I noticed that the mood had completely changed”, he said. Then, from one of his equals, he learned the reason of this sudden and irregular affability. Hitler had said good-bye, and was going to commit suicide.” 998 The instrument stopped functioning; the spell dropped off; the asuric influence vanished.