Hitler and his God

Magnetism

“Hitler’s secretary Christa Schroeder, having observed him for fifteen years, concluded that he possessed ‘the gift of a rare magnetic power to reach people’, ‘a sixth sense and a clairvoyant intuition’. He could ‘in some mysterious way foretell the subconscious reactions of the masses and in some inexplicable manner mesmerize his interlocutors’. He possessed, she said, ‘the receptivity of a medium and at the same time the magnetism of a hypnotist’.” 853 Schroeder’s statement is confirmed by numerous testimonies. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, for instance, mentions “that compelling enchantment of Hitler”; the annotator of the “table talk” writes about “that remarkable magnetic fluid which he emanated with such mastery” and emphasizes his words; Ernst Hanfstängl is struck by “the extraordinary magnetism of his personality”; and Walter Langer too wonders at “the magnetic quality” of the subject of his inquiry.

In his Hitler biography, Fest writes: “[Hitler] possessed ‘the most terrifying persuasiveness’. Along with this he had the power of exerting a hypnotic effect upon his interlocutor. The leadership of the party, the gauleiters and Old Fighters who had shoved their way to the top alongside him, undoubtedly were ‘a band of eccentrics and egotists all going in different directions’, and certainly were not servile in the traditional sense. The same is true for at least a part of the officers’ corps. Nevertheless, Hitler imposed his will on them as he pleased. And he did so not only at the height of his power but equally well before, when he was a marginal figure on the political Right, and at the end, when he was only the burned-out husk of a once mighty man.” 854

“They were all under his spell”, Speer said of Hitler’s chief henchmen. “They obeyed him blindly, with no will of their own – whatever the medical term of this phenomenon may be.” 855 And Sereny quotes Speer as saying: “One thing is certain: every one who worked closely with him for a long time was exceptionally dependent on him. However powerful they were in their own domain, close to him they became small and timid.” 856 We saw how Himmler jumped to attention, clicking his heels, when Hitler phoned him. Goebbels “was cowed by Hitler’s magnetic powers”. Göring said to Hjalmar Schacht: “I try so hard, but every time I stand before the Führer, my heart drops into the seat of my pants.” 857

Schacht himself, “the great economic and financial wizard”, never left a conversation with Hitler without being deeply impressed and experiencing a feeling of re-invigoration”, writes Rauschning. “He always felt revitalized, and the grand perspectives drawn by Hitler gave a renewed meaning to his efforts … When even the cleverest of all economic leaders felt this way, how could I have felt otherwise?” For Rauschning too had to confess: “I often had the occasion to examine myself and I admit having come, time and again, under his spell, which afterwards I had to fight off like a spell of hypnotism.” 858 Speer uses the expression “when Hitler took possession of me” and writes in his Spandau diary: “The complicated feeling of being bound to him persists to the present day”, in November 1949. 859

The Hitler effect was equally strong on military officers, all of them trained in the curt Prussian way. Even the gallant Rommel came under Hitler’s influence every time he met him. “Hitler emanated a magnetic, perhaps hypnotic power”, he wrote to his wife. 860 Walter Blomberg, a Nazi general and for a time Minister of Defence, “used to say that a cordial handshake of the Führer’s could cure him of his colds”. 861 A former officer on the Eastern front, interviewed by Kempowski for his book Haben Sie Hitler gesehen? (did you see Hitler?), remembers: “When the nonsensical Führer orders continued to come, our division commander said: ‘I am going to give this man a piece of my mind’. I still see him standing in the ravine in which our staff buses were parked. But when he came back [from his meeting with Hitler] he said: ‘The Führer is right’.” 862

Admiral Dönitz called Hitler “a being from whom flows an influence and who has an enormous suggestive power”. “The usually cool technocrat Karl Dönitz became mesmerized in Hitler’s presence. After a few days he admitted to fleeing the Führer’s headquarters in order to regain his independence of mind.” 863 In March 1945, when the Russians were threatening Danzig, Gauleiter Forster “walked through my office, in complete despair at what was happening”, recalls one of Hitler’s secretaries. “He revealed to me that 1100 Russian tanks were closing in on Danzig, that the Wehrmacht had no more than four Tiger tanks to oppose them, and that they didn’t even have any petrol. Forster was determined not to hide his view of things and to represent to Hitler the entire disastrous reality of the situation. ‘You can rely on it, I will tell him everything, even at the risk of his throwing me out’. How great was my surprise when he came out of his interview with Hitler a totally changed man. ‘The Führer has promised me new divisions for Danzig’, he said. Seeing my sceptical smile, he added: ‘Of course, I wouldn’t know where he can find them. But he has told me he will save Danzig, and so the matter is beyond any doubt’ … Undoubtedly it was Hitler’s fatal suggestive power that had worked upon him.” 864

These men were capable and powerful warlords, commanding the best trained and equipped armies and clusters of armies in the world. Hitler’s initial successes raised them for a while to the zenith of their mastery and self-satisfaction. Yet, that in the presence of Hitler they became as obedient as his shepherd dog is a fact, intriguing and unexplained. Ulrich de Maizière, a general staff officer, testified: “A difficult to describe demonic power emanated from Hitler, and few were able not to fall under his spell. It was an influence which affected all soldiers in the same way and which is difficult to understand if one has not experienced it oneself.” Young officers at the front, whom Hitler had called and who were decided to report to him how catastrophic the situation at the front was, left his headquarters saying: “This is a terrific man.” The supreme commander of the Heeresgruppe Mitte [the middle one of the three army groups invading Russia and initially aimed at Moscow], Field Marshal von Kluge, had disagreed with Hitler on the phone using very harsh words. He was called to the Führer headquarters, where all responsible persons told him he must make clear to Hitler how bad the situation at the front was. After an hour Kluge came out from the conference room and said: “Hitler is right. I will try again.” 865

“I was not the only one to succumb to Hitler’s strange fascination”, writes Speer. “So did statesmen of importance, men like Hindenburg, [John] Simon [British Foreign Secretary], Lloyd George [British statesman], Mussolini, and many others.” 866 Famous among those others were the American aviator Charles Lindbergh; the Duke of Windsor, who could have caused serious complications if he had remained on the throne as Edward VIII; the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin; and Unity Mitford, daughter of Lord Redesdale, who had a crush on Hitler, loved to parade in Munich as a Nazi, and tried to commit suicide there in the English Garden when war erupted between her country and Germany. It should be mentioned however that Hitler’s “magnetism” had its effect not only on individuals but also on audiences and crowds of thousands, which he was able to bring to an ecstatic frenzy, and on the German nation as a whole. “The Führer has charged the entire nation as if it were a storage battery”, noted Goebbels in his diary; and Trevor-Roper writes: “It was a spell wherewith the whole German people had been bewitched.” 867

George Ball, who was one of the interrogators of the Nazi bonzes under trial at Nuremberg, said to Speer: “From the point of most of us, what is most baffling of all is the constant references to the charisma or mystique or particular charm of Hitler. From the point of view of anyone in my country, or I think in Great Britain, who had the experience of seeing motion pictures of Hitler or of hearing him on the radio, and of reading the things he wrote, it was totally incomprehensible. How could anyone find a particular charm in this man? How do you explain it? This is the ultimate mystery, I think, as far as we are concerned.”

“It is only explicable”, Speer replied, “if you agree that there are human beings who have a kind of magnetism or hypnotic quality. You try to evade this influence, get away from its effect, but you are in their … you are … you depend on him.” According to Sereny, Speer wanted to translate the word hörig, which literally means “enslaved” or “in bondage”, but did not find the English equivalent. “Ball suggested that perhaps just the effect of power could explain charisma, and Speer agreed that power exerted its own mystique. But he said that what had always puzzled him was how Hitler’s effect on his environment had functioned just as effectively before 1933, when there was [political] defeat upon defeat and crisis upon crisis and yet he succeeded, almost entirely by force of personality. “It remains a mystery”, Speer said. “But the fact is that it is impossible to explain Germany before 1933, and from 1933 to 1945, without Hitler. He was the centre of it all and always remained the centre.” 868

Hugh Trevor-Roper, serving as a military intelligence officer, had been the first to examine a mass of authentic documents in order to write his report The Last Days of Hitler. Although in the course of time he had become Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, he had in the middle 1990s the courage to admit to Ron Rosenbaum: “Hitler certainly had an extraordinary power. It didn’t work on everybody: it didn’t work – to put it crudely – on the aristocrats or people who were sensitive to the vulgarity of his behaviour or surroundings. But when he wanted to mesmerize, he did have the wherewithal.” “In the course of his research”, Rosenbaum comments, “Trevor-Roper was surprised at the extent to which the Hitler spell still held sway even after ignominious defeat.” 869

“What Trevor-Roper sought to do in The Last Days was to describe the spell as an inescapable fact of any account of Hitler’s life”, continues Rosenbaum. “He does not try to explain it so much as evoke it. And yet by invoking it so eloquently, he came to be accused of perpetrating, indeed of falling under, the spell, of giving it, giving the Hitler myth, a posthumous life.” 870 In The Last Days of Hitler, one of the first, most famous and influential post-war Hitler books, Trevor-Roper states outright: “The power of the Führer was a magic power.” 871 Similarly, in The Face of the Third Reich Fest writes: “… The character of Hitler’s compulsive power over men’s minds can only be understood in religious terms”. 872 – How could there ever be an understanding of Hitler without an explanation of his powers? But, also, which established historian would take the risk to use religious terms or concepts for the explanation of a historical phenomenon?