Hitler and his God

Waiting for Godot

The coming of the Great Man who would redress the German Volk in its hour of humiliation and inner confusion, and lead it to glory, was an essential part of the German aspiration. “It was a time of prophets”, writes George Mosse, “of poetic seers; it was a time when only a charismatic seer seemed capable of ending the malaise of the intellectuals. Thus the intelligentsia looked to a heroic leader for release.” Once again “the most vivid image of this leader” was exemplified by Dürer’s knight, who “in the forbidding company of death and the devil, but tranquil and full of hope, rides toward the Holy Grail of Germany’s future”. 675

We know about “the Strong One from Above”, a term Guido von List had borrowed from the Voluspa Edda and which became popular in völkisch-oriented milieus. The coming Strong One was generally associated with the legend of Frederick Barbarossa, who lay asleep in the Kyffhäuser mountain and would wake up in Germany’s destined hour. “The Strong One from Above became a stock phrase in all List’s subsequent references to the millennium. An ostensibly superhuman individual would end all human factions and confusion with the establishment of an eternal order. This divine dictator possessed particular appeal for those who lamented the uncertain nature of the industrial society. List eagerly anticipated the advent of this leader, whose monolithic world of certainties would fulfil the socio-political conditions of his national millennium.” 676

“Many people in the postwar years were yearning for a Führer who would be hard and at the same time clever, who would establish order, impose discipline on the people, put a stop to the multi-party system, take the reins of the leadership in his own hands and know how to keep them there”, writes Sebastian Haffner, adding: “Hitler was indeed the fulfilment of the dreams of many Germans.” 677

The Leader for whom the Germans were waiting did not yet have a face. Heinrich Class, the chairman of the Pan-Germans, had already written a chapter entitled “Waiting for the Leader” in his influential book If I Were the Emperor, published shortly before the war. There he wrote that an elite troop of eager combatants stood at the ready “to follow a decided leader with enthusiasm. But he keeps us waiting!” Yet he admonishes his readers: “Patience! Patience! He will not stay away much longer … The leader, when he appears, will be amazed how many loyal followers he has and how these valuable, selfless men stand by him. Are there people who have not yet heard the call of the leader? Then it must reverberate still louder, so that it may not remain unheard any longer!” 678

“The whole of Germany waits only for one man.” (Karl Schworm) To most this man was not Adolf Hitler, and he was to many either the deposed Emperor William II, or one of the princes who had abdicated in November 1918. The Bavarian coup in November 1923 prepared by “the three vons”, representing the constitutional government, and which Hitler tried to hijack, was intended to restore the monarchy and put Crown Prince Rupprecht on the throne. Class himself was a candidate for the dictatorial leadership of the nation, as were Hugenberg and von Seeckt, although the most serious candidate, especially in the years 1924-25 when Hitler remained sidelined, was Erich Ludendorff, pushed on by his ambitious wife-to-be, Mathilde von Kemnitz. To all of them an imperial restoration was the chief aim. Even the Berlin “Club of the Barons”, who practically put Hitler in the saddle, hoped to be able to bring William back from Holland in due time, and it was because of this expectation that Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg was called the “Ersatz Kaiser”, which might be translated as “emperor-ad-interim”. Hitler, then, was one among many men of destiny, at times well-nigh forgotten or written off, and always underestimated.

When at the beginning of 1920 Rudolf Hess heard Hitler speak for the first time, he was carried away. He would smilingly stare into the void and murmur “der Mann! der Mann!” (the man, the man). His wife would later say: “He was like a new person, alive, radiating, no longer silent and depressed. Something totally new, something tremendous must have happened to him.” Shortly afterwards a wealthy South American endowed a prize at Munich University for a thesis entitled “What must the man be like who will lead Germany back to its greatness?”. To Hess the expected Leader was no longer unknown, he had a face and a name: Adolf Hitler. He had heard “the man” with the thundering, mesmerizing voice; he had talked with him and knew that this was “the Strong One from Above”.

Hess participated in the competition and won. Among other things he wrote: “For the sake of national salvation the dictator does not shun to use the weapons of his enemy, demagogy, slogans, street parades, etc. Where all authority has vanished, only a man of the people can establish authority. This was shown in the case of Mussolini. The deeper the dictator was originally rooted in the broad masses, the better he understands how to treat them psychologically, the less the workers will distrust him, the more supporters he will win among these most energetic ranks of the people. He himself has nothing in common with the mass; like every great man, he is all personality … When necessity commands, he does not shrink before bloodshed. Great questions are always decided by blood and iron. And the question at stake is: shall we rise again or be destroyed … In order to reach his goal, he is prepared to trample on his closest friends … The law-giver proceeds with terrible hardness … One day we shall have our new, Greater Germany, embracing all those who are of German blood …” 679

The man who actually proclaimed Hitler “the Führer” was Dietrich Eckart. After having become acquainted with Hitler, he published on 5 December 1919 in his magazine In Plain German a poem entitled Geduld (patience). In this poem he stated that the unknown, expected Leader was to some people not unknown anymore, although he was still “a nameless one, whom everybody feels but none has seen”. He bade his time, “the hero on whom we build”. Patience, patience, “he” was there and would soon make himself known. Significantly, Eckart would publish this poem a second time on 25 August 1921 in the Völkischer Beobachter, the NSDAP paper of which he was the editor, after Hitler had demanded and been assigned dictatorial powers in the Party thanks to the intervention of Eckart.

Heinrich Himmler would later say: “[Hitler] came to us in our deepest need, when there was no longer a future for the German people. He belongs to the great Beings of Light who always arise among the Germans when they find themselves in the deepest physical, mental and spiritual need. Goethe was such a being in the realm of the mind and Bismarck in the political field, but the Führer is such a being in all fields: political, cultural and military. He is predestined by the karma of Germanhood to wage the war against the East in order to save the Germanhood in the world. One of the greatest Beings of Light has found its incarnation in him.” 680 Himmler had the term “Being of Light” from Houston Chamberlain, who had proclaimed Hitler to be such a being after meeting him in 1923.

Another of the Führer’s paladins, Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, described his Leader still on 31 December 1944 as follows: “He is the greatest among the personalities who are making history today, and he stands far ahead of them in the prevision of things to come. [By then the Russians were already deep in Germany and their Allies stood on its Western border.] He surpasses them not only in genius and political instinct, but also in knowledge, character and will power … He passes his days and a great part of his sleepless nights in the circle of his closer and closest collaborators, but stands nevertheless, even among them, in the icy loneliness of the genius, soaring triumphantly above all and everything. Never a word of falsehood or baseness crosses his lips. He is Truth itself. One only has to be in his vicinity to feel physically how much power he irradiates, how strong he is and how much strength he communicates to others. From him an uninterrupted flow of faith and emphatic will power carries us to greatness.” 681

These are expressions of the full-blown Führer myth. A Great Man had once more been given to Germany at a time of direst need and was leading the Volk to its destined glory as masters of the world. This great man was a genius, seer, hero and modern dragon slayer, achiever of age-old dreams, prophet, and the mystic saviour of the Volk in possession of magic powers for the consummation of his mission. “Words of the Führer replace the prayers, the National Socialist morning drill replaces the mass. The picture of the Führer with the swastika replaces Christ on his cross. Instead of the Old and New Testament there is Mein Kampf and The Myth of the Twentieth Century; instead of processions there are marches with the swastika as mystic symbol; instead of the Christian caritas as a private initiative there is the state-organized Winterhilfe [assistance to poor people, especially in winter] as ‘Church of the deed’. The ‘divine mission’ of the Führer seems to have been more than a gimmick for the supernatural glorification of the regime and the unbridled expansion of its power, for there are unmistakable indications that Hitler took himself for the Messiah.” 682

Hitler was considered the intermediary between the Volk and God, writes Scholdt. “Solemnly he strides / in silence through his brown army / as a priest who blesses / the germinating seeds.” However, Hitler was much more than the high priest of Germany: he was the Saviour sent by God, the instrument and executor of the divine intervention. “The Führer commands: it is God’s will.” A poem addressed to Hitler’s (late) mother has the line: “It is the Saviour you have borne for our people.” 683 Altars with Hitler as the deity could be seen in many homes; people whose hand he had touched did not wash it for weeks and were treated as saints in their villages; pilgrims to the Obersalzberg treasured a pebble on which his foot had stood; roses, streets, squares, church bells, villages and children were named or re-named after him, and the Chancellery in Berlin had often to intervene in order to separate the reverential from the ridiculous.

Hitler himself stimulated the crescendo of his popularity into adulation, veneration and deification. “Especially in speeches to his old followers, after a period of silence in memory of the dead, he frequently fell into a tone of total rapture; in strange phrases he held a kind of mystic communion until the searchlights were lowered to strike the middle of the arena and flags, uniforms, and band instruments flashed red, silver and gold. ‘I have always felt’, he cried in 1937, ‘that a man, as long as life is given to him, ought to yearn for those with whom he shaped his life. For what would my life be without all of you! That you found me long ago and that you believed in me has given our lives a new meaning, posed a new task. That I have found you is what has made my life and my struggle possible!’

“A year before he had cried to the same assemblage: ‘At this hour do we not again feel the miracle that has brought us together! Long ago you heard the voice of a man, and it struck your hearts, it awakened you and you followed this voice. You followed it for years without so much as having seen him whose voice it was; you heard only a voice, and you followed. When we meet here we are all filled with the wondrousness of this coming together. Not every one of you can see me, and I cannot see every one of you. But I feel you and you feel me! It is faith in our nation that has made us small people great, that has made us poor people rich, that has made us vacillating, dispirited, anxious people brave and courageous; that has made us who had gone astray able to see, and that has joined us together.’” 684

And so it came to happen that little German children prayed, kneeling by the side of their beds: “I fold my hands and bow my head / and think of Adolf Hitler / who gives us work and bread / and saves us from every need.” The star in the top of the Christmas tree was replaced by an illumined swastika. And the most intimate of the Christmas songs was nazified into: “Silent night, holy night / All are asleep, but one stands guard / Adolf Hitler over Germany’s fate / He leads us to greatness, glory and happiness.” 685