Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader
226
Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader
226eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780897339056 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 05/24/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 226 |
| Sales rank: | 983,071 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Percy Ernst Schramm (1894-1970), one of Germany’s most distinguished historians, was author of over two dozen books and scores of articles. He became a professor at Goettingen University in 1929, the year of publication of his Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio, a landmark study in the interpretation of medieval political symbolism and ideology, a field on which he concentrated throughout the 1930s. An English translation of one of his works from this period, A History of the English Coronation, was published in 1937 by Oxford University Press. During the Second World War, Schramm was ordered to Hitler’s headquarters as War Diary Officer of the High Command of the German Armed Forces, a position that afforded him unique insight into the dictator’s military leadership and his frequently bitter conflicts with his generals. Having disobeyed the order to destroy the war diary at the end of the war, he was able to publish it in four volumes in the 1960s, together with a detailed introductory essay on Hitler as a military leader. In 1963 he also published a scholarly edition of Hitler’s table talks with an extensive introductory essay on Hitler the man. English translations of these two essays appeared in 1971 in a volume entitled Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader that was reprinted in 1999.Donald S. Detwiler, professor of history at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, received his doctorate cum laude at Goettingen. He is chairman of the World War Two Studies Association and a council member and past president of the Association for the Bibliography of History. Detwiler's publications include Hitler, Franco und Gibraltar, an annotated translation of Percy E. Schramm's Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader, the documentary collection World War II German Military Studies (24 volumes), and, with Ilse E. Detwiler, an annotated bibliography, West Germany: The Federal Republic of Germany.
Read an Excerpt
Hitler
The Man & the Military Leader
By Percy Ernst Schramm, Donald S. Detwiler
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 1981 Donald S. DetwilerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89733-905-6
CHAPTER 1
The Anatomy of a Dictator
1. Hitler the Man
He fascinated people with his deep blue, slightly protruding, almost radiant eyes. Many who met him were unable to stand up to his gaze; knowing this, Hitler looked people straight in the eye without blinking. Although he had always had good vision, he became increasingly farsighted during the war and was forced to use glasses, particularly while working over situation maps. Care was taken to conceal this fact, but some pictures show Hitler wearing glasses. To facilitate his reading written material that demanded his personal attention, it was transcribed on special typewriters in so-called "Führer script," which had letters about twice normal size.
Hitler had his eyes so well under control that in jest he was able to cross them. He also had keen hearing, and could recognize people by the sound of their footsteps. His nose was ugly, having something of the shape of a pyramid. The unpleasant impression of the large, broad nostrils was minimized, however, by his closely trimmed moustache. His mouth was relatively small, his chin not well developed. His lips were thin and pinched. He had a high forehead but it did not stand out because it was covered by his forelock. He had few lashes on his eyelids, but his eyebrows were thick, and above them slight bulges appeared in his forehead. His cheeks were relatively broad, his ears well formed. Hitler's complexion and coloring could be described as almost girl-like. He was sensitive to light and to the sun and would probably have found sunglasses a help, though he chose not to wear them. When a bright light bothered him, he would shade his eyes with his hand. Heat also disturbed him, as did the Fohn, that warm, dry Alpine wind often felt in parts of southern Germany.
Toward the end of his life Hitler was evenly grey-haired, though he showed no tendency toward baldness. His beard was not heavy. He did his own shaving, cutting himself only rarely. He cared for his teeth meticulously, but they were poor and a number of them had been replaced by permanent bridges. Hitler must have been instinctively self-conscious about this; when he laughed he held his hand in front of his mouth.
The man's head seemed to dominate his entire body; torso, arms, legs — all seemed to hang down from it. Hitler generally let his arms dangle carelessly, putting his hands in his pockets only when he was in the most intimate circles. His legs were not strong. He strode on his heels and, keeping his knees straight, walked quickly. His other movements were quite deliberate. If something caught his attention, he would stop to investigate whatever it was. When he discovered that he had a tendency toward obesity, he found it sufficiently embarrassing to cut down his eating.
Hitler kept himself very clean. He washed his hands often. He changed underclothes frequently and made sarcastic remarks about visitors with dirty underwear. He bathed daily, sometimes more than once. After eating, he rinsed out his mouth. Having a good haircut was an important matter to him. He took care to wear gloves outdoors. Yet he never achieved elegance. His jacket hung about him like a sack; his trousers did not sit well; and his coat, which he could not bear to have constrict him in any way, was completely shapeless. He wore his cap pulled down over his eyes. In the matter of caps, he preferred the older fashions, but his entourage discreetly provided him with caps in the new "sharper" style.
In civilian clothes, Hitler always chose double-breasted suits of the same cut. His neckties were selected by Eva Braun, but they had to be inconspicuous, so they were invariably of a subdued, rather dull color. Whenever Hitler wore the National Socialist uniform, he dispensed with the belt. His high double-soled boots, which were made of thick though soft leather, were inelegantly buckled at the top. His riding breeches were cut quite loose at the knees. As far as his uniform was concerned, even his admirers must have felt that their "Leader" — the literal meaning of the word Führer — suffered by comparison with many of them.
Hitler required only a minimum of sleep. He attributed this to the fact that when he was a courier in the First World War, the difference between day and night had been gradually lost for him. During the years of his rise to power, he would eat only after making his speeches in the evening and would then go to bed quite late. During the Second World War he would stay up to look at the first reports coming in after midnight and finally retire. Actually this was of no great consequence, for the situation usually was not clarified before noon. Since there would normally be no decisions for him to make until then, he would sleep late in the morning. A midday nap was out of the question.
With his excellent memory, Hitler had an uncommon ability to recognize people. He could react quickly under all sorts of circumstances, and thus adjusted himself fairly easily to unexpected situations. He considered himself to be rational, yet able to rely upon his instincts.
Hitler generally weighed important decisions at length, consciously turning them over and over in his mind in rational terms. In the last analysis, however, he invariably depended upon what he called "instinct" — a word synonymous in his mind with political shrewdness. In unimportant matters, when his reason led him to no clear decision, he fell back on the old device of flipping a coin. Yet he was not at all superstitious.
Hitler saw his particular strength in an ability to simplify complex problems and to think consistently. Once he had made a decision, it was difficult to bring him to change it, as he feared that his authority might thereby be compromised. Yet occasionally he could change his course with startling swiftness, without showing the slightest concern about doing something that directly contradicted his previous position.
In conversation, Hitler, especially when talking in private, retained a surprisingly large number of words from his youth. This comes through clearly in the transcripts of the Table Conversations, where he speaks of lads and lasses, of fops and churls, and uses any number of similarly old-fashioned expressions. In military situations, however, as we know from the stenographic transcripts of his secret conferences, this style of diction was replaced by a more casual military and party jargon. Hitler did not hesitate to use foreign words to lend a certain coloring to his speech, and he used them correctly. Contrived Germanizations he ridiculed, having no sympathy for this sort of linguistic chauvinism. "Just imagine," he remarked early in July 1942, "what would happen if we tried to eliminate foreign words! Where would we stop?"
Hitler regarded Schopenhauer as a linguistic model; he mentions him in the Table Conversations as the only German capable of making changes in the language. Yet Hitler, who was oblivious to belles lettres, was largely devoid of a genuine feeling for language. In his public speeches he used homely vernacular expressions only for oratorical effect, remaining first and last the propagandist who knew exactly what the masses wanted to hear and who understood how to move them with stirring slogans. But he never succeeded — as Bismarck, on the basis of his literary culture, was often able to do — in fashioning an enduring phrase or a memorable epigram.
According to the testimony of Dr. Hans Karl von Hasselbach, one of his personal physicians, Hitler regularly had English, American, and French magazines delivered to him. "Apart from some French he had learned in school, he had picked up on his own a working knowledge of the languages. Primarily for this purpose, before the war he often had French and English films shown to him in the original version." This knowledge was naturally far too slight to penetrate the spirit and structure of the foreign languages. But it did not deter Hitler from claiming that the English language was incapable of expressing thoughts which went beyond generally proven ideas and matters of fact — a cliché once popular with the ideologists of German nationalism.
As he explains in one of the Conversations, in his youth Hitler was a lonely outsider with no desire for company: "But now I simply cannot stand to be alone...." Even in Munich he had preferred to go to an inn he liked, rather than eat at home alone. During the war he had a particular need for companionship as a means of relaxing, and generally took a full hour for lunch. His evening meal occasionally lasted more than two hours.
Hitler loved jokes. Since he had a phenomenal memory, he was able to tell a great many of them, revealing a striking ability to imitate expressions, voices, and dialects. But he never told off-color stories, let alone dirty jokes. His personal photographer, the south German Heinrich Hoffmann, who occasionally did tell such stories and jokes, was quite an exception in Hitler's circle. Apart from Hoffmann, the restaurateur Kannenberg, who had been brought to the Führer Headquarters on account of his organizational ability, sparkled with native Berlin wit. Hitler also enjoyed the practical jokes that his table companions occasionally played on each other; he would slap himself on the thigh as he laughed or hold his hand in front of his eyes or mouth.
Company at meals was the sole "luxury" Hitler allowed himself during the war years, for his style of living was otherwise quite Spartan. In peacetime he had enjoyed visiting the Skala and the Wintergarten, though he had never had any use for the circus. The cinema had been his chief means of relaxation. After the beginning of the war, he never again visited a theater except for one production of Die Götterdämmerung at Bayreuth. As for films, he looked only at newsreels, since he regarded them as an important medium of propaganda and would often give instructions for revising them before distribution. But after the newsreels he would leave the room, preferring not to watch the screenplays shown for the entertainment of his staff. He did not want to be better off than German soldiers on the front. Since he did not smoke, avoided both coffee and alcohol, and subsisted solely on vegetarian fare, he felt he could certainly look any soldier in the eye in respect to diet as well. To this extent Hitler even outdid William II, who in his wartime headquarters at Pless had strictly limited his eating and drinking.
Throughout his life Hitler remained an inland-oriented German, his imagination untouched by the sea. He had never been exposed to the uncanny power of the storm, the pulsing rhythm of the rolling waves with their foam and spray, the shimmering sunlight on the placid surface, or the sun descending into the deep; nor had the struggle of mankind against the primeval element water and the dauntless courage of the mariner ever penetrated the deeper levels of his consciousness. But Hitler was not only inland oriented; he was completely rooted within the cultural boundaries of the old Roman Empire. He clung to the civilization of the Mediterranean world and took no part in his followers' grotesque glorification of the Teutons. He had no use for pine forests, and once even declared, "I would rather walk to Flanders than bicycle to the East. It is only the force of reason which dictates our moving eastward."
Hitler had great plans for Berlin, which, as capital of the "Greater German Empire of the German People," he was planning to rename "Germania." But his heart was not in the idea. He thought Berlin unsuited to be a center of the arts: "For this purpose it simply lacks the atmosphere." A grotesque judgment if one thinks of the Reich capital in the twenties — Berlin was the first city of Europe in theater and music, and set the tone for all Germany in every branch of the arts.
Hitler had skied when he was younger, and he continued to love the mountains. But in his mature years he lost the desire to climb them and to be rewarded for his effort by the view. In fact, he ceased to participate actively in any sport, and walking became his sole exercise.
2. Hitler's Ambivalence
Hitler's associates were impressed by how concerned the "Chief" — as they referred to him — was about their welfare and what an active interest he took in their individual joys and sorrows. He would, for example, devote serious thought to what sort of birthday gifts would be particularly appreciated. In this regard, the summaries of Hitler's Table Conversations by Dr. Henry Picker, the young lawyer responsible for transcribing them, are quite revealing. Picker, who previously had known Hitler only as a distant political figure, was greatly impressed by the human qualities Hitler revealed in the inner circle of his associates: by the good will he showed the younger among them, by his readiness to laugh, and by the magnanimity he demonstrated when someone committed a faux pas in his presence. Within this circle, in fact, Hitler, the man without family or friends, was a good "comrade." He had learned the meaning of comradeship in the First World War and had never forgotten it.
Hitler's associates also knew how strongly he reacted to beautiful and cultivated women. They knew of his affection for children and for his German shepherds, Blondi and Bella, and what pleasure he got out of watching the animals. In the Wolfsschanze, or "Wolf's Lair," as his headquarters near Rastenburg in central East Prussia was called, he had an obstacle course constructed, similar to those used in the training of infantrymen, where the dogs had to demonstrate whether they had intelligence as well as courage.
The friend of women, children, and animals — this was one face of Hitler, neither acted nor feigned, but entirely genuine. There was, however, a second face which he did not show to his table companions, though it was no less genuine.
In his Table Conversations Hitler said that he would personally shoot down whoever dared to commit certain offenses. Knowing that he had never personally fired a shot at a political enemy, his guests did not take his warning at face value. At times Hitler would get carried away and make terrible threats. But he rarely spoke of the hideous orders he was giving precisely during the months when the Table Conversations were being recorded, and which in the end cost millions their lives. To point out only a few examples from the months in question:
September 16, 1941: Stopping General Hoepner's armored column short of Leningrad, with a view toward eliminating the population of the city by starvation; similar thoughts about the fate of Moscow.
October 21, 1941: Execution of fifty French hostages by firing squad because of the killing of a German officer; thenceforth, in all theaters of war, strictest application of the policy of breaking terror with terror.
January 20, 1942: Wannsee conference, initiating the deportation of the Jews to the East and beginning their systematic annihilation.
February 1942: Integration of the steadily burgeoning concentration camps into the German war economy.
March 21, 1942: Authorization for Gauleiter Sauckel to incorporate foreign slave workers into the Germany economy.
April 26, 1942: By special act of the Reichstag, Hitler invested with unlimited judicial powers, making him supreme judge of the Reich with no limitations or controls whatsoever.
June 10, 1942: Destruction of the Czech village of Lidice, where, without knowledge of the population, Heydrich's assassins had temporarily hidden.
August 23,1942: Orders to Field Marshal von Manstein: "Phase 1: Cut off Leningrad and seek contact with the Finns. Phase 2: Occupy Leningrad and level it to the ground."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hitler by Percy Ernst Schramm, Donald S. Detwiler. Copyright © 1981 Donald S. Detwiler. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,I. The Anatomy of a Dictator,
II. The Military Leader,
Appendix I. Excerpts from a 1945 Study by Major Percy E. Schramm on the Conflict in Leadership Between Hitler and the General Staff,
Appendix II. Memorandum Dictated in 1946 by General Alfred Jodl on Hitler's Military Leadership,
Index,